“The President calls them Klingons,” Adler told the ambassador.
Hitch smiled. “I wouldn’t go that far, but there is logic in the observation.” Then Adler’s intercom buzzed.
“Call from William Kilmer in Beijing on the STU, Mr. Secretary,” the secretary’s voice said.
“This is Scott Adler,” SecState said when he lifted the phone. “Ambassador Hitch is here with me. You’re on speaker.”
“Sir, I made the delivery. Minister Shen hardly blinked. He said he’d get back to us soon, but not exactly when, after he talked it over with his Politburo colleagues. Aside from that, not much of a reaction at all. I can fax you the transcript in about half an hour. The meeting didn’t last ten minutes.”
Adler looked over at Hitch, who shook his head and didn’t look happy at the news.
“Bill, how was his body language?” Hitch asked.
“Like he was on Prozac, Carl. No physical reaction at all.”
“Shen tends to be a little hyperactive,” Hitch explained. “Sometimes he has trouble sitting still. Conclusions, Bill?”
“I’m worried,” Kilmer replied at once. “I think we have a problem here.”
“Thank you, Mr. Kilmer. Send the fax quick as you can.” Adler punched the phone button and looked at his guest. “Oh, shit.”
“Yeah. How soon will we know how they’re going to react to this?”
“Tomorrow morning, I hope, we—”
“We have a source inside their government?” Hitch asked. The blank look he got in reply was answer enough.
“Thanks, Scott,” Ryan said, hanging up the phone. He was back in the Oval Office now, sitting in his personally-fitted swivel chair, which was about as comfortable as any artifact could make him. It didn’t help much at the moment, but he supposed it was one less thing to worry about.
“So?”
“So, we wait to see if SORGE tells us anything.”
“SORGE?” Professor Weaver asked.
“Dr. Weaver, we have a sensitive source of information that sometimes gives us information on what their Politburo is thinking,” Ed Foley told the academic. “And that information does not leave this room.”
“Understood.” Academic or not, Weaver played by the rules. “That’s the name for the special stuff you’ve been showing me?”
“Correct.”
“It’s a hell of a source, whoever it is. It reads like a tape of their meetings, captures their personalities, especially Zhang. He’s the real bad actor here. He’s got Premier Xu pretty well wrapped around his little finger.”
“Adler’s met him, during the shuttle talks after the Airbus shoot-down at Taipei,” Ryan said.
“And?” Weaver asked. He knew the name and the words, but not the man.
“And he’s powerful and not a terribly nice chap,” the President answered. “He had a role in our conflict with Japan, and also the fracas with the UIR last year.”
“Machiavelli?”
“That’s pretty close, more a theoretician than a lead actor, the man-behind-the-throne sort of guy. Not an ideologue per se, but a guy who likes to play in the real world—patriot, Ed?” Ryan asked the DCI.
“We’ve had our pshrink profile him.” Foley shrugged. “Part sociopath, part political operator. A guy who enjoys the exercise of power. No known personal weaknesses. Sexually active, but a lot of their Politburo members are. Maybe it’s a cultural thing, eh, Weaver?”
“Mao was like that, as we all know. The emperors used to have rather large stables of concubines.”
“That’s what people did before TV, I suppose,” Arnie van Damm observed.
“Actually that’s not far from the truth,” Weaver agreed. “The carryover to today is cultural, and it’s a fundamental form of personal power that some people like to exercise. Women’s lib hasn’t made it into the PRC yet.”
“I must be too Catholic,” the President thought aloud. “The idea of Mao popping little girls makes my skin crawl.”
“They didn’t mind, Mr. President,” Weaver told him. “Some would bring their little sisters over after they got in bed with the Great Leader. It’s a different culture, and it has different rules from ours.”
“Yeah, just a little different,” observed the father of two daughters, one just starting to date. What would the fathers of those barely nubile little girls have thought? Honored to have their daughters deflowered by the great Mao Zedong? Ryan had a minor chill from the thought, and dismissed it. “Do they care about human life at all? What about their soldiers?”
“Mr. President, the Judeo-Christian Bible wasn’t drafted in China, and efforts by missionaries to get Christianity going over there were not terribly successful—and when Mao came along, he suppressed it fairly effectively, as we saw again recently. Their view of man’s place in nature is different from ours, and, no, they do not value a single human life as we do. We’re talking here about communists who view everything through a political lens, and that is over and above a culture in which a human life had little import. So, you could say it’s a very infelicitous confluence of belief systems from our point of view.”
Infelicitous, Ryan thought, there’s a delicate turn of phrase. We’re talking about a government that killed off twenty million-plus of its own people along the way, just in a few months, in pursuit of political perfection. “Dr. Weaver, best guess: What’s their Politburo going to say?”
“They will continue on the path they’re on,” Weaver answered quickly. He was surprised at the reaction.
“God damn it, doesn’t anybody think common sense is going to break out?” Ryan snarled. He looked around the room, to see people suddenly looking down at the royal-blue rug.
“Mr. President, they fear war less than they fear the alternatives to war,” Weaver answered, rather courageously, Arnie van Damm thought. “To repeat, if they don’t enrich their country in oil and gold, they fear an economic collapse that will destroy their entire political order, and that, to them, is more frightening than the prospect of losing a hundred thousand soldiers in a war of conquest.”
“And I can stop it only by dropping a nuclear bomb on their capital—which will, by the way, kill a couple of million ordinary people. God damn it!” Ryan swore again.
“More like five million, maybe as many as ten,” General Moore pointed out, earning him a withering look from his Commander in Chief. “Yes, sir, that would work, but I agree the price of doing it’s a little high.”
“Robby?” Jack turned to his Vice President in hope of hearing something encouraging.
“What do you want me to say, Jack? We can hope they realize that this is going to cost them more than they expect, but it would appear the odds are against it.”
“One other thing we need to do is prepare the people for this,” Arnie said. “Tomorrow we should alert the press, and then you’ll have to go on TV and tell everybody what’s happening and why.”
“You know, I really don’t like this job very much—excuse me. That’s rather a puerile thing to say, isn’t it?” SWORDSMAN apologized.
“Ain’t supposed to be fun, Jack,” van Damm observed. “You’ve played the game okay to this point, but you can’t always control the other people at the card table.”
The President’s phone rang. Jack answered it. “Yes? Okay.” He looked up. “Ed, it’s for you.”
Foley stood and walked to take the phone. “Foley . . . Okay, good, thanks.” He replaced the phone. “Weather’s clearing over Northeast China. We’ll have some visual imagery in half an hour.”
“Mickey, how fast can we get aerial recon assets in place?” Jackson asked.
“We have to fly them in. We have things we can stage out of California, but it’s a lot more efficient to fly them over in a C-17 and lift them off from a Siberian airfield. We can do that in, oh … thirty-six hours from your order.”
“The order is given,” Ryan said. “What sort of aircraft are they?”
“They’re UAVs, sir. Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, used to call them drones. They’re stealthy and they stay up a long time. We can download real-time video from them. They’re fabulous for battlefield reconnaissance, the best new toys the Air Force has fielded, so far as the Army is concerned. I can get them going right now.”
“Do it,” Ryan told him.
“Assuming we have a place to land them. But we could stage them out of Elmendorf in Alaska if we have to.” Moore lifted the phone and made his call to the National Military Command Center, the NMCC, in the Pentagon.
For General Peng, things were getting busy. The operation order was topped with the ideographs Long Chun, SPRING DRAGON. The “dragon” part sounded auspicious, since for thousands of years the dragon had been the symbol of imperial rule and also good fortune. There was still plenty of daylight. That suited Peng, and he hoped it would suit his soldiers. Daylight made for good hunting, and made it harder for large bodies of men to hide or move unseen, and that suited his mission.
He was not without misgivings. He was a general officer with orders to fight a war, and nothing makes such a man reflective like instructions to perform the things he’d claimed the ability to do. He would have preferred more artillery and air support, but he had a good deal of the former, and probably enough of the latter. At the moment, he was going over intelligence estimates and maps. He’d studied the Russian defenses on the far side of the border for years, to the point of occasionally putting reconnaissance specialists across the river to scout out the bunkers that had faced south for fifty years. The Russians were good military engineers, and those fixed defenses would take some dealing with.