“And what is their state of readiness?” Tong Jie asked.
“Generally, quite poor. They have one full-strength division, one at two-thirds, and the rest are hardly better than cadre-strength. Their new Far East commander, a General-Colonel Bondarenko, despairs of making things better, our sources tell us.”
“Wait,” Fang objected. “Are we discussing the possibility of war with Russia here?”
“Yes,” Zhang Han San replied. “We have done this before.”
“That is true, but on the first such occasion, we would have had Japan as an ally, and America neutralized. On the second, we assumed that Russia would have been broken up beforehand along religious lines. Who are our allies in this case? How has Russia been crippled?”
“We’ve been a little unlucky,” Tan answered. “The chief minister—well, the chief adviser to their President Grushavoy is still alive.”
“What do you mean?” Fang asked.
“I mean that our attempt to kill him misfired.” Tan explained on for two minutes. The reaction around the table was one of mild shock.
“Tan had my approval,” Xu told them calmly.
Fang looked over at Zhang Han San. That’s where the idea must have originated. His old friend might have hated capitalists, but that didn’t stop him from acting like the worst pirate when it suited his goals. And he had Xu’s ear, and Tan as his strong right arm. Fang thought he knew all of these men, but now he saw that his assumption had been in error. In each was something hidden, and sinister. They were far more ruthless than he, Fang saw.
“That is an act of war,” Fang objected.
“Our operational security was excellent. Our Russian agent, one Klementi Suvorov, is a former KGB officer we recruited ages ago when he was stationed here in Beijing. He’s performed various functions for us for a long time and he has superb contacts within both their intelligence and military communities—that is, those segments of it that are now in the new Russian underworld. In fact he’s a common criminal— a lot of the old KGB people have turned into that—but it works for us. He likes money, and for enough of it, he will do anything. Unfortunately in this case, a pure happenstance prevented the elimination of this Golovko person,” Tan concluded.
“And now?” Fang asked. Then he cautioned himself. He was asking too many questions, taking too much of a personal position here. Even in this room, even with these old comrades, it didn’t pay to stand out too far.
“And now, that is for the Politburo to decide,” Tan replied blandly. It had to be affected, but was well acted in any case.
Fang nodded and leaned back, keeping his peace for the moment.
“Luo?” Xu asked. “Is this feasible?”
The Marshal had to guard his words as well, not to appear too confident. You could get in trouble around this table by promising more than you could deliver, though Luo was in the unique position—somewhat shared by Interior Minister Tong—of having guns behind him and his position.
“Comrades, we have long examined the strategic issue here. When Russia was the Soviet Union, this operation was not possible. Their military was much larger and better supported, and they had numerous intercontinental and theater ballistic missiles tipped with thermonuclear warheads. Now they have none, thanks to their bilateral agreement with America. Today, the Russian military is a shadow of what it was only ten or twelve years ago. Fully half of their draftees do not even report when called for service—if that happened here, we all know what would happen to the miscreants, do we not? They squandered much of their remaining combat power with their Chechen religious minority—and so, you might say that Russia is already splitting up along religious lines. In practical terms, the task is straightforward, if not entirely easy. The real difficulty facing us is distance and space, not actual military opposition. It’s many kilometers from our border to their new oil field on the Arctic Ocean—much fewer to the new gold field. The best news of all is that the Russian army is itself building the roads we need to make the approach. It reduces our problems by two thirds right there. Their air force is a joke. We should be able to cope with it—they sell us their best aircraft, after all, and deny them to their own flyers. To make our task easier, we would do well to disrupt their command and control, their political stability and so forth. Tan, can you accomplish that?”
“That depends on what, exactly, is the task,” Tan Deshi replied.
“To eliminate Grushavoy, perhaps,” Zhang speculated. “He is the only person of strength in Russia at the moment. Remove him, and their country would collapse politically.”
“Comrades,” Fang had to say, taking the risk, “what we discuss here is bold and daring, but also fraught with danger. What if we fail?”
“Then, my friend, we are no worse off than we appear to be already,” Zhang replied. “But if we succeed, as appears likely, we achieve the position for which we have striven since our youth. The People’s Republic will become the foremost power in all the world.” As is our right, he didn’t have to add. “Chairman Mao never considered failing to destroy Chiang, did he?”
There was no arguing with that, and Fang didn’t attempt it. The switchover from fear to adventurousness had been as abrupt as it was now becoming contagious. Where was the caution these men exercised so often? They were men on a floundering ship, and they saw a means of saving themselves, and having accepted the former proposition, they were catapulted into the latter. All he could do was lean back and watch the talk evolve, waiting—hoping—that reason would break out and prevail.
But from whom would it come?
C H A P T E R – 41
Plots of State
“Yes, Minister?” Ming said, looking up from her almost-completed notes. “You are careful with these notes, aren’t you?”
“Certainly, Comrade Minister,” she replied at once. “I never even print these documents up, as you well know. Is there a concern?”
Fang shrugged. The stresses of today’s meeting were gradually bleeding off. He was a practical man of the world, and he was an elderly man. If there was a way to deal with the current problem, he would find it. If there wasn’t, then he would endure. He always had. He was not the one taking the lead here, and his notes would show that he was one of the few cautious skeptics at the meeting. One of the others, of course, was Qian Kun, who’d walked out of the room shaking his head and muttering to his senior aide. Fang then wondered if Qian was keeping notes. It would have been a good move. If things went badly, those could be his only defense. At this level of risk, the hazard wasn’t relegation to a menial job, but rather having one’s ashes scattered in the river.
“Ming?”
“Yes, Minister?”
“What did you think of the students in the square all those years ago?”
“I was only in school then myself, Minister, as you know.”
“Yes, but what did you think?”
“I thought they were reckless. The tallest tree is always the first to be cut down.” It was an ancient Chinese adage, and therefore a safe thing to say. Theirs was a culture that discouraged taking such action—but perversely, their culture also lionized those who’d had the courage to do so. As with every human tribe, the criterion was simple. If you succeeded, then you were a hero, to be remembered and admired. If you failed, nobody would remember you anyway, except, perhaps, as a negative example. And so safety lay always in the middle course, and in safety was life.
The students had been too young to know all that. Too young to accept the idea of death. The bravest soldiers were always the young ones, those spirits of great passions and beliefs, those who had not lived long enough to reflect on what shape the world took when it turned against you, those too foolish to know fear. For children, the unknown was something you spent almost all your time exploring and finding out. Somewhere along the line, you discovered that you’d learned all that was safe to learn, and that’s where most men stopped, except for the very few upon whom progress depended, the brave ones and the bold ones who walked with open eyes into the unknown, and humanity remembered those few who came back alive . . .
. . . and soon enough forgot those who did not.
But it was the substance of history to remember those who did, and the substance of Fang’s society to remind them of those who didn’t. Such a strange dichotomy. What societies, he wondered, encourage people to seek out the unknown? How did they do? Did they thrive, or did they blunder about in the darkness and lose their substance in aimless, undirected wanderings? In China, everyone followed the words and thoughts of Marx, as modified by Mao, because he had boldly walked into the darkness and returned with revolution, and changed the path of his nation. But there things had stopped, because no one was willing to proceed beyond the regions Mao had explored and illuminated—and proclaimed to be all that China and the world in general needed to know about. Mao was like some sort of religious prophet, wasn’t he? Fang reflected.