“Ming!” he called on the way to his inner office.
“Yes, Comrade Minister,” she said, on going through the still-open door.
“What items have you pulled off the foreign media?”
“One moment.” She disappeared and then reappeared with a sheaf of papers in her hand. “London Times, London Daily Telegraph, Observer, New York Times, Washington Post, Miami Herald, Boston Globe. The Western American papers are not yet available.” She hadn’t included Italian or other European papers because she couldn’t speak or read those languages well enough, and for some reason Fang only seemed interested in the opinions of English-speaking foreign devils. She handed over the translations. Again, he didn’t thank her even peremptorily, which was unusual for him. Her minister was exercised about something.
“What time is it in Washington?” Fang asked next.
“Twenty-one hours, Comrade Minister,” she answered.
“So, they are watching television and preparing for bed?”
“Yes, Comrade Minister.”
“But their newspaper articles and editorials are already prepared.”
“That is the schedule they work, Minister. Most of their stories are done by the end of a normal working day. At the latest, news stories— aside from the truly unusual or unexpected ones—are completely done before the reporters go home for their dinner.”
Fang looked up at that analysis. Ming was a clever girl, giving him information on something he’d never really thought about. With that realization, he nodded for her to go back to her desk.
For their part, the American trade delegation was just boarding their plane. They were seen off by a minor consular official who spoke plastic words from plastic lips, received by the Americans through plastic ears. Then they boarded their USAF aircraft, which started up at once and began rolling toward the runway.
“So, how do we evaluate this adventure, Cliff?” Mark Gant asked.
“Can you spell ‘disaster’?” Rutledge asked in return.
“That bad?”
The Assistant Secretary of State for Policy nodded soberly. Well, it wasn’t his fault, was it? That stupid Italian clergyman gets in the way of a bullet, and then the widow of that other minister-person had to pray for him in public, knowing that the local government would object. And, of course, CNN had to be there for both events to stir the pot at home . . . How was a diplomat supposed to make peace happen if people kept making things worse instead of better?
“That bad, Mark. China may never get a decent trade agreement if this crap keeps going on.”
“All they have to do is change their own policies a little,” Gant offered.
“You sound like the President.”
“Cliffy, if you want to join a club, you have to abide by the club rules. Is that so hard to understand?”
“You don’t treat great nations like the dentist nobody likes who wants to join the country club.”
“Why is the principle different?”
“Do you really think the United States can govern its foreign policy by principle?” Rutledge asked in exasperation. So much so, in fact, that he’d let his mind slip a gear.
“The President does, Cliff, and so does your Secretary of State,” Gant pointed out.
“Well, if we want a trade agreement with China, we have to consider their point of view.”
“You know, Cliff, if you’d been in the State Department back in 1938, maybe Hitler could have killed all the Jews without all that much of a fuss,” Gant observed lightly.
It had the desired effect. Rutledge turned and started to object:
“Wait a minute—”
“It was just his internal policy, Cliff, wasn’t it? So what, they go to a different church—gas ’em. Who cares?”
“Now look, Mark—”
“You look, Cliff. A country has to stand for certain things, because if you don’t, who the fuck are you, okay? We’re in the club—hell, we pretty much run the club. Why, Cliff? Because people know what we stand for. We’re not perfect. You know it. I know it. They all know it. But they also know what we will and won’t do, and so, we can be trusted by our friends, and by our enemies, too, and so the world makes a little sense, at least in our parts of it. And that is why we’re respected, Cliff.”
“And all the weapons don’t matter, and all the commercial power we have, what about them?” the diplomat demanded.
“How do you think we got them, Cliffy?” Gant demanded, using the diminutive of Rutledge’s name again, just to bait him. “We are what we are because people from all over the world came to America to work and live out their dreams. They worked hard. My grandfather came over from Russia because he didn’t like getting fucked over by the czar, and he worked, and he got his kids educated, and they got their kids educated, and so now I’m pretty damned rich, but I haven’t forgotten what Grandpa told me when I was little either. He told me this was the best place the world ever saw to be a Jew. Why, Cliff? Because the dead white European men who broke us away from England and wrote the Constitution had some good ideas and they lived up to them, for the most part. That’s who we are, Cliff. And that means we have to be what we are, and that means we have to stand for certain things, and the world has to see us do it.”
“But we have so many flaws ourselves,” Rutledge protested.
“Of course we do! Cliff, we don’t have to be perfect to be the best around, and we never stop trying to be better. My dad, when he was in college, he marched in Mississippi, and got his ass kicked a couple of times, but you know, it all worked out, and so now we have a black guy in the Vice Presidency. From what I hear, maybe he’s good enough to take one more step up someday. Jesus, Cliff, how can you represent America to other nations if you don’t get it?”
Diplomacy is business, Rutledge wanted to reply. And I know how to do the business. But why bother trying to explain things to this Chicago Jew? So, he rocked his seat back and tried to look dozy. Gant took the cue and stood for a seventy-foot walk. The Air Force sergeants who pretended to be stewardesses aboard served breakfast, and the coffee was pretty decent. He found himself in the rear of the aircraft looking at all the reporters, and that felt a little bit like enemy territory, but not, on reflection, as much as it did sitting next to that diplo-jerk.
The morning sun that lit up Beijing had done the same to Siberia even earlier in the day.
“I see our engineers are as good as ever,” Bondarenko observed. As he watched, earthmoving machines were carving a path over a hundred meters wide through the primeval forests of pine and spruce. This road would serve both the gold strike and the oil fields. And this wasn’t the only one. Two additional routes were being worked by a total of twelve crews. Over a third of the Russian Army’s available engineers were on these projects, and that was a lot of troops, along with more than half of the heavy equipment in the olive-green paint the Russian army had used for seventy years.
“This is a ‘Hero Project,’ ” Colonel Aliyev said. And he was right.
The “Hero Project” idea had been created by the Soviet Union to indicate something of such great national importance that it would draw the youth of the nation in patriotic zeal—and besides, it was a good way to meet girls and see a little more of the world. This one was moving even faster than that, because Moscow had assigned the military to it, and the military was no longer worrying itself about an invasion from (or into) NATO. For all its faults, the Russian army still had access to a lot of human and material resources. Plus, there was real money in this project. Wages were very high for the civilians. Moscow wanted both of these resource areas brought on line—and quickly. And so the gold-field workers had been helicoptered in with light equipment, with which they’d built a larger landing area, which allowed still heavier equipment to be air-dropped, and with that a small, rough airstrip had been built. That had allowed Russian air force cargo aircraft to lift in truly heavy equipment, which was now roughing in a proper air-landing strip for when the crew extending the railroad got close enough to deliver the cement and rebar to create a real commercial-quality airport. Buildings were going up. Some of the first things that had been sent in were the components of a sawmill, and one thing you didn’t have to import into this region was wood. Large swaths were being cleared, and the trees cut down to clear them were almost instantly transformed into lumber for building. First, the sawmill workers set up their own rough cabins. Now, administrative buildings were going up, and in four months, they expected to have dormitories for over a thousand of the miners who were already lining up for the highly paid job of digging this gold out of the ground. The Russian government had decided that the workers here would have the option of being paid in gold coin at world-price, and that was something few Russian citizens wanted to walk away from. And so expert miners were filling out their application forms in anticipation of the flights into the new strike. Bondarenko wished them luck. There were enough mosquitoes there to carry off a small child and suck him dry of blood like mini-vampires. Even for gold coin, it was not a place he’d want to work.