By this time, the other cops were moving in on the remainder of the crowd, swinging their own nightsticks at people who cringed but didn’t run. Yu Chun was the first of them. Not a tall woman even by Chinese standards, she took the full force of a blow squarely in the face, which broke her nose and shot blood out as though from a garden sprinkler.
It didn’t take long. There were thirty-four parishioners and twelve cops, and the Christians didn’t resist effectively, not so much because of their religious beliefs as because of their societal conditioning not to resist the forces of order in their culture. And so, uniformly they stood, and uniformly they took the blows with no more defense than a cringe, and uniformly they collapsed to the street with bleeding faces. The policemen withdrew almost immediately, as though to display their work to the CNN camera, which duly took the shots and transmitted them around the world in a matter of seconds.
“You getting this?” Wise asked Atlanta.
“Blood and all, Barry,” the director replied, from his swivel chair at CNN headquarters. “Tell Nichols I owe him a beer.”
“Roger that.”
“It seems that the local police had orders to break up this religious meeting, which they regard as something of a political nature, and politically threatening to their government. As you can see, none of these people are armed, and none resisted the attack by the police in any way. Now—” He paused on seeing another bicycle speed its way up the street to where they were. A uniformed cop jumped off and handed something to Lieutenant Rong. This the lieutenant carried to Barry Wise.
“Here order. Turn camera off!” he demanded.
“Please, allow me to look at the order,” Wise replied, so angry at what he’d just seen that he was willing to risk a cracked head of his own, just so Pete got it up to the satellite. He scanned the page and handed it back. “I cannot read this. Please excuse me,” he went on, deliberately baiting the man and wondering exactly where the limits were, “but I cannot read your language.”
It looked as though Rong’s eyes would pop out of his head. “It say here, turn camera off!”
“But I can’t read it, and neither can my company,” Wise responded, keeping his voice entirely reasonable.
Rong saw the camera and microphone were both pointed his way, and now he realized that he was being had, and had badly. But he also knew he had to play the game. “It say here, must turn camera off now.” Rong’s fingers traced the page from one symbol to another.
“Okay, I guess you’re telling me the truth.” Wise stood erect and turned to face the camera. “Well, as you have just seen, we’ve been ordered by the local police to cease transmission from this place. To summarize, the widow of the Reverend Yu Fa An and members of his congregation came here today to pray for their departed pastor. It turns out that Reverend Yu’s body was cremated and his ashes scattered. His widow, Yu Chun, was denied access to her home by the police because of alleged improper ‘political’ activity, by which I guess they mean religious worship, and as you just saw, the local police attacked and clubbed members of the congregation. And now we’re being chased away, too. Atlanta, this is Barry Wise, reporting live from Beijing.” Five seconds later, Nichols dropped the camera off his shoulder and turned to stow it in the truck. Wise looked back down at the police lieutenant and smiled politely, thinking, You can shove this up your skinny little ass, Gomer! But he’d done his job, getting the story out. The rest was in the hands of the world.
C H A P T E R – 31
The Protection of Rights
CNN transmits its news coverage twenty-four hours a day to satellite dishes all over the world, and so the report from the streets of Beijing was noted not only by the American intelligence services, but by accountants, housewives, and insomniacs. Of the last group, a goodly number had access to personal computers, and being insomniacs, many of them also knew the e-mail address for the White House. E-mail had almost overnight replaced telegrams as the method of choice for telling the U.S. government what you thought, and was a medium which they appeared to heed, or at least to read, count, and catalog. The latter was done in a basement office in the Old Executive Office Building, the OEOB, the Victorian monstrosity immediately to the west of The House. The people who ran this particular office reported directly to Arnold van Damm, and it was actually rather a thorough and well-organized measure of American public opinion, since they also had electronic access to every polling organization in the country—and, indeed, the entire world. It saved money for the White House not to conduct its own polling, which was useful, since this White House didn’t really have a political office per se, somewhat to the despair of the Chief of Staff. Nevertheless, he ran that part of White House operations himself, and largely uncompensated. Arnie didn’t mind. For him, politics was as natural as breathing, and he’d decided to serve this President faithfully long before, especially since serving him so often meant protecting him from himself and his frequently stunning political ineptitude.
The data which started arriving just after midnight, however, didn’t require a political genius to understand it. Quite a few of the e-mails had actual names attached—not mere electronic “handles”—and a lot of them were demanding!!! action. Arnie would remark later in the day that he hadn’t known that so many Baptists were computer-literate, something he reproached himself for even thinking.
In the same building, the White House Office of Signals duly made a high-quality tape of the report and had it walked to the Oval Office. Elsewhere in the world, the CNN report from Beijing arrived at breakfast time, causing more than a few people to set their coffee (or tea) cups down immediately before a groan of anger. That occasioned brief dispatches from American embassies around the world, informing the Department of State that various foreign governments had reacted adversely to the story on CNN, and that various PRC embassies had found demonstrators outside their gates, some of them quite vociferous. This information rapidly found its way to the Diplomatic Protection Service, the State Department agency tasked with the job of securing foreign diplomats and their embassies. Calls went out from there to the D.C. police to increase the uniformed presence near the PRC’s various missions to America, and to arrange a rapid backup should any similar problems develop right here in Washington.
By the time Ben Goodley awoke and drove over to Langley for his morning briefing, the American intelligence community had pretty well diagnosed the problem. As Ryan had so colorfully said it himself, the PRC had stepped very hard on the old crank with the golf shoes, and even they would soon feel the pain. This would prove to be a gross understatement.
The good news for Goodley, if you could call it that, was that Ryan invariably had his breakfast-room TV tuned to CNN, and was fully aware of the new crisis before putting on his starched white button-down shirt and striped tie. Even kissing his wife and kids on their way out of The House that morning couldn’t do much to assuage his anger at the incomprehensible stupidity of those people on the other side of the world. “God damn it, Ben!” POTUS snarled when Goodley came into the Oval Office.
“Hey, Boss, I didn’t do it!” the National Security Adviser protested, surprised at the President’s vehemence.
“What do we know?”
“Essentially, you’ve seen it all. The widow of the poor bastard who got his brains blown out the other day came to Beijing hoping to bring his body back to Taiwan for burial. She found out that the body had been cremated, and the ashes disposed of. The local cops would not let her back into her house, and when some members of the parish came by to hold a prayer service, the local cops decided to break it up.” He didn’t have to say that the attack on the widow had been caught with particular excellence by the CNN cameraman, to the point that Cathy Ryan had commented upstairs that the woman definitely had a broken nose, and possibly worse, and would probably need a good maxillary SURGEON to put her face back together. Then she’d asked her husband why the cops would hate anyone so much.
“She believes in God, I suppose,” Ryan had replied in the breakfast room.
“Jack, this is like something out of Nazi Germany, something from that History Channel stuff you like to watch.” And doctor or not, she’d cringed at the tape of the attacks on Chinese citizens armed only with Bibles.