“You cannot talk to us in that way.”
Again with the broken record! The doors were opening. It was time to head back inside for the next round of confrontational diplo-speak.
“And if you persist in attacking our national sovereignty, we will buy elsewhere,” Xue told him with some satisfaction.
“Fine, and we can do the same. And you need our cash a lot more than we need your trade goods, Mr. Xue.” He must have finally understood, Gant thought. His face actually showed some emotion now. So did his words:
“We will never kowtow to American attacks on our country.”
“We’re not attacking your country, Xue.”
“But you threaten our economy,” Xue said, as they got to the door.
“We threaten nothing. I am telling you that my fellow citizens will not buy goods from a country that commits barbarities. That is not a threat. It is a statement of fact.” Which was an even greater insult, Gant did not fully appreciate.
“If America punishes us, we will punish America.”
Enough was goddamned enough. Gant pulled the door open halfway and stopped to face the diplomat/spook:
“Xue, your dicks aren’t big enough to get in a pissing contest with us.” And with that, he walked on inside. A half-hour later, he was on his way out again. The words had been sharp and heated, and neither side had seen any purpose in continuing that day—though Gant strongly suspected that once Washington heard about that morning’s exchanges, there wouldn’t be any other day.
In two days, he’d be totally jet-lagged but back at his office on 15th Street. He was surprised that he was looking forward to that.
Anything from WestPac?” Mancuso asked. “They just put three submarines to sea, a Song and two of the Kilos the Russians sold them,” BG Lahr answered. “We’re keeping an eye on them. La Jolla and Helena are close by. Tennessee is heading back to Pearl as of midday.” The former boomer had been on patrol for fifty days, and that was about enough. “Our surface assets are all back to sea. Nobody’s scheduled to get back into Taipei for twelve days.”
“So, the Taipei hookers get two weeks off?” CINCPAC asked with a chuckle.
“And the bartenders. If your sailors are like my soldiers, they may need the relaxation,” the J-2 replied, with a smile of his own.
“Oh, to be young and single again,” Bart observed. “Anything else out there?”
“Routine training on their side, some combined air and ground stuff, but that’s up north by the Russian border.”
“How good do they look?”
Lahr shrugged. “Good enough to give the Russians something to think about, sir. On the whole, the PLA is trained up as good as I’ve ever known them to be, but they’ve been working hard for the past three or four years.”
“How many of them?” Bart asked, looking at his wall map, which was a lot more useful for a sailor than a soldier. China was just a beige shape on the left border.
“Depends on where. Like, if they go north into Russia, it’d be like cockroaches in some ghetto apartment in New York. You’d need a lot o’ Raid to deal with it.”
“And you said the Russians are thin in their East?”
Lahr nodded. “Yep. Admiral, if I was that Bondarenko guy, I’d sweat it some. I mean, it’s all theoretical as a threat and all, but as theoretical threats go, that’s one that might keep me awake at night.”
“And what about reports of gold and oil in eastern Siberia?”
Lahr nodded. “Makes the threat less theoretical. China’s a net importer of oil, and they’re going to need a lot more to expand their economy the way they plan to—and on the gold side, hell, everybody’s wanted that for the last three thousand years. It’s negotiable and fungible.”
“Fungible?” That was a new word for Mancuso.
“Your wedding band might have been part of Pharaoh Ramses II’s double-crown once,” Lahr explained. “Or Caligula’s necklace, or Napoleon’s royal scepter. You take it, hammer it, and it’s just raw material again, and it’s valuable raw material. If the Russian strike’s as big as our intel says, it’ll be sold all over the world. Everybody’ll use it for all sorts of purposes, from jewelry to electronics.”
“How big’s the strike supposed to be?”
Lahr shrugged. “Enough to buy you a new Pacific Fleet, and then some.”
Mancuso whistled. That was real money.
It was late in Washington, and Adler was up late, again, working in his office. SecState was usually a busy post, and lately it had been busier than usual, and Scott Adler was getting accustomed to fourteen-hour days. He was reading over post reports at the moment, waiting for the other shoe to drop in Beijing. On his desk was a STU-6 secure telephone. The “secure telephone unit” was a sophisticated encryption device grafted onto an AT&T-made digital telephone. This one worked on a satellite-communications channel, and though its signal therefore sprinkled down all over the world from its Defense Department communications satellite, all the casual listener would get was raspy static, like the sound of water running out of a bathroom faucet. It had a randomized 512-bit scrambling system that the best computers at Fort Meade could break about a third of the time after several days of directed effort. And that was about as secure as things got. They were trying to make the tapdance encryption system link into the STU units to generate a totally random and hence unbreakable signal, but that was proving difficult, for technical reasons that nobody had explained to the Secretary of State, and that was just as well. He was a diplomat, not a mathematician. Finally, the STU rang in its odd trilling warble. It took eleven seconds for the two STU units on opposite sides of the world to synchronize.
“Adler.”
“Rutledge here, Scott,” the voice said on the other side of the world. “It didn’t go well,” he informed SecState at once. “And they’re canceling the 777 order with Boeing, as we thought they would.”
Adler frowned powerfully into the phone. “Super. No concessions at all on the shootings?”
“Zip.”
“Anything to be optimistic about?”
“Nothing, Scott, not a damned thing. They’re stonewalling like we’re the Mongols and they’re the Chin Dynasty.”
Somebody needs to remind them that the Great Wall ultimately turned out to be a waste of bricks, EAGLE didn’t bother saying aloud. “Okay, I need to discuss this with the President, but you’re probably going to be flying home soon. Maybe Carl Hitch, too.”
“I’ll tell him. Any chance that we can make some concession, just to get things going?”
“Cliff, the likelihood that Congress will roll over on the trade issue is right up there with Tufts making the Final Four. Maybe less.” Tufts University did have a basketball team, after all. “There’s nothing we can give them that they would accept. If there’s going to be a break, they’re the ones who’ll have to bend this time. Any chance of that?”
“Zero” was the reply from Beijing.
“Well, then, they’ll just have to learn the hard way.” The good news, Adler thought, was that the hard lessons were the ones that really did teach you something. Maybe even the Chinese.
What did that capitalist diao ren say?” Zhang asked. Shen told him what Xue had relayed, word-for-word. “And what does he represent?”
“He is personal assistant to the American Treasury Minister. Therefore we think he has the ear of both his minister and the American president,” Shen explained. “He has not taken an active part in the talks, but after every session he speaks privately with Vice Minister Rutledge. Exactly what their relationship is, we do not know for certain, and clearly he is not an experienced diplomat. He talks like an arrogant capitalist, to insult us in so crude a way, but I fear he represents the American position more forthrightly than Rutledge does. I think he gives Rutledge the policy he must follow. Rutledge is an experienced diplomat, and the positions he takes are not his own, obviously. He wants to give us some concessions. I am sure of that, but Washington is dictating his words, and this Gant fellow is probably the conduit to Washington.”
“Then you were right to adjourn the talks. We will give them a chance to reconsider their position. If they think they can dictate to us, then they are mistaken. You canceled the airplane order?”
“Of course, as we agreed last week.”
“Then that will give them something to think about,” Zhang observed smugly.
“If they do not walk out of the talks.”
“They wouldn’t dare.” Walk away from the Middle Kingdom? Absurd.
“There is one other thing that Gant man said. He said, not in so many words, that we need them—their money, that is—more than they need us. And he is not entirely wrong in that, is he?”
“We do not need their dollars more than we need our sovereignty. Do they really think they can dictate our domestic laws to us?”