The naval officer looked at his colleague in green. “Just what they’d be thinking if they wanted to head north.”
“Concur.”
“Better call this one in, Norm.”
“Yep.” And both uniformed officers headed to the phones.
“When’s the weather clear?” the lingering civilian asked the tech.
“Call it thirty-six hours. It’ll start to clear tomorrow night, and we have the taskings already programmed in.” He didn’t have to say that the nighttime capabilities on the KH-11 satellites weren’t all that different from in the daylight—you just didn’t get much in the way of color.
C H A P T E R 4 7
Outlooks and All-Nighters
Westbound jet lag, or travel-shock, as President Ryan preferred to call it, is always easier than eastbound’s, and he’d gotten sleep on the airplane. Jack and Cathy walked off Air Force One and to the waiting helicopter, which got them to the landing pad on the South Lawn in the usual ten minutes. This time FLOTUS walked directly into the White House while POTUS walked left toward the West Wing, but to the Situation Room rather than the Oval Office.
Vice President Jackson was waiting for him there, along with the usual suspects.
“Hey, Robby.”
“How was the flight, Jack?”
“Long.” Ryan stretched to get his muscles back under control. “Okay, what’s happening?”
“Ain’t good, buddy. We have Chinese mechanized troops heading for the Russian border. Here’s what we got in from NRO.” Jackson personally spread out the printouts from the photo-intelligence troops. “We got mechanized forces here, here, and here, and these are engineers with bridging equipment.”
“How long before they’re ready?” Ryan asked.
“Potentially as little as three days,” Mickey Moore answered. “More likely five to seven.”
“What are we doing?”
“We have a lot of warning orders out, but nobody’s moving yet.”
“Do they know we’re onto this?” the President asked next.
“Probably not, but they must know we’re keeping an eye on things, and they must know our reconnaissance capabilities. It’s been in the open media for twenty-some years,” Moore answered.
“Nothing from them to us over diplomatic channels?”
“Bupkis,” Ed Foley said.
“Don’t tell me they don’t care. They have to care.”
“Maybe they care, Jack,” the DCI responded. “But they’re not losing as much sleep over it as they are over internal political problems.”
“Anything new from SORGE?”
Foley shook his head. “Not since this morning.”
“Okay, who’s our senior diplomat in Beijing?”
“The DCM at the embassy, but he’s actually fairly junior, new in the post,” the DCI said.
“Okay, well, the note we’re going to send won’t be,” Ryan said. “What time is it over there?”
“Eight-twelve in the morning,” Jackson said, pointing to a wall clock set on Chinese time.
“So, SORGE didn’t report anything from their working day yesterday?”
“No. That happens two or three days per week. It’s not unusual,” Mary Pat pointed out. “Sometimes that means the next one will be extra meaty.”
Everyone looked up when Secretary Adler came in; he had driven instead of helicoptered in from Andrews. He quickly came up to speed.
“That bad?”
“They look serious, man,” Jackson told SecState.
“Sounds like we have to send them that note.”
“They’re too far gone down this road to stop,” another person said. “It’s not likely that any note will work.”
“Who are you?” Ryan asked.
“George Weaver, sir, from Brown. I consult to the Agency on China.”
“Oh, okay. I’ve read some of your work. Pretty good stuff, Dr. Weaver. So, you say they won’t turn back. Tell us why,” the President commanded.
“It’s not because they fear revelation of what they’re up to. Their people don’t know, and won’t find out until Beijing tells them. The problem, as you know, is that they fear a potential economic collapse.
If their economy goes south, sir, then you get a revolt of the masses, and that’s the one thing they really fear. They don’t see a way to avoid that other than getting rich, and the way for them to get rich is to seize the newly discovered Russian assets.”
“Kuwait writ large?” Ryan asked.
“Larger and more complex, but, yes, Mr. President, the situation is fundamentally similar. They regard oil both as a commodity and as an entry card into international legitimacy. They figure that if they have it, the rest of the world will have to do business with them. The gold angle is even more obvious. It’s the quintessential trading commodity. If you have it, you can sell it for anything you care to purchase. With those assets and the cash they can buy with them, they figure to bootstrap their national economy to the next level, and they just assume that the rest of the world will play along with them because they’re going to be rich, and capitalists are only interested in money.”
“They’re really that cynical, that shallow?” Adler asked, somewhat shocked at the thought, even after all he’d already been through.
“Their reading of history justifies that outlook, Mr. Secretary. Their analysis of our past actions, and those of the rest of the world, lead them to this conclusion. I grant you that they fail to appreciate what we call our reasons for the actions we took, but in strictly and narrowly factual terms, that’s how the world looks to them.”
“Only if they’re idiots,” Ryan observed tiredly. “We’re dealing with idiots.”
“Mr. President, you’re dealing with highly sophisticated political animals. Their outlook on the world is different from ours, and, true, they do not understand us very well, but that does not make them fools,” Weaver told the assembly.
Fine, Ryan thought for what seemed the hundredth time, but then they’re Klingons. There was no sense saying that to Weaver. He’d simply launch into a long-winded rebuttal that wouldn’t take the discussion anywhere. And Weaver would be right. Fools or geniuses, you only had to understand what they were doing, not why. The what might not make sense, but if you knew it, you also knew what had to be stopped.
“Well, let’s see if they understand this,” Ryan said. “Scott, tell the PRC that if they attack into Russia, America will come to Russia’s aid, as required by the North Atlantic Treaty, and—”
“The NATO Treaty doesn’t actually say that,” Adler warned.
“I say it does, Scott, and more to the point, I told the Russians it does. If the Chinese realize we’re not kidding, will it make a difference?”
“That opens up a huge can of worms, Jack,” Adler warned. “We have thousands of Americans in China, thousands. Businessmen, tourists, a lot of people.”
“Dr. Weaver, how will the Chinese treat foreign nationals in time of war?”
“I would not want to be there to find out. The Chinese can be fine hosts, but in time of war, if, for example, they think you’re a spy or something, it could get very difficult. The way they treat their own citizens—well, we’ve seen that on TV, haven’t we?”
“Scott, we also tell them that we hold their government leaders personally responsible for the safety and well-being of American citizens in their country. I mean that, Scott. If I have to, I’ll sign the orders to track them down and bury their asses. Remind them of Tehran and our old friend Daryaei. That Zhang guy met him once, according to the former Indian Prime Minister, and I had him taken all the way out,” Ryan announced coldly. “Zhang would do well to consider that.”
“They will not respond well to such threats,” Weaver warned. “It’s just as easy to say we have a lot of their citizens here, and—”
“We can’t do that, and they know it,” Ryan shot back.
“Mr. President, I just told you, our concept of laws is alien to them. That sort of threat is one they will understand, and they will take it seriously. The question then is how valuable they regard the lives of their own citizens.”
“And that is?”
“Less than we do,” Weaver answered.
Ryan considered that. “Scott, make sure they know what the Ryan Doctrine means,” he ordered. “If necessary, I will put a smart bomb through their bedroom windows, even if it takes us ten years to find them.”
“The DCM will make that clear. We can also alert our citizens to get the next bird out.”
“Yeah, I’d want to get the hell out of Dodge City,” Robby Jackson observed. “And you can get that warning out over CNN.”
“Depending on how they respond to our note. It’s eight-thirty in the morning over there. Scott, that note has to be in their hands before lunch.”
SecState nodded. “Right.”
“General Moore, we have warning orders cut to the forces we can deploy?”
“Yes, sir. We can have Air Force units in Siberia in less than twenty-four hours. Twelve hours after that, they’ll be ready to launch missions.”
“What about bases, Mickey?” Jackson asked.
“Tons of ’em, from when they worried about splashing B-52s. Their northern coast is lousy with airstrips. We have our Air Attache in Moscow sitting down with their people right now,” General Moore said. The colonel in question was pulling a serious all-nighter. “The Russians, he says, are being very cooperative.”