“Mr. President, they say he’s out of the office,” Mrs. Sumter said.
“Oh?” Ryan took a long puff. “Tell State to confirm his location.”
“Yes, Mr. President.” Then forty seconds of silence. “Mr. President, the embassy says he’s in his office, as far as they can tell.”
“And his people said . . . ?”
“They said he’s out, sir.”
“When will he be back?”
“I asked. They said they didn’t know.”
“Shit,” Ryan breathed. “Please get me Secretary Adler.”
“Yeah, Jack,” SecState said a few seconds later.
“He’s dodging my call, Scott.”
“Xu?”
“Yeah.”
“Not surprising. They—the Chinese Politburo—don’t trust him to talk on his own without a script.”
Like Arnie and me, Ryan thought with a mixture of anger and humor. “Okay, what’s it mean, Scott?”
“Nothing good, Jack,” Adler replied. “Nothing good.”
“So, what do we do now?” “Diplomatically, there’s not much we can do. We’ve sent them a stiff note, and they haven’t answered. Your position vis-a-vis them and the Russian situation is as clear as we can make it. They know what we’re thinking. If they don’t want to talk to us, it means they don’t care anymore.”
“Shit.”
“That’s right,” the Secretary of State agreed. “You’re telling me we can’t stop it?” “Correct.” Adler’s tone was matter-of-fact. “Okay, what else?”
“We tell our civilians to get the hell out of China. We’re set up to do that here.”
“Okay, do it,” Ryan ordered, with a sudden flip of his stomach.
“Right.”
“I’ll get back to you.” Ryan switched lines and punched the button for the Secretary of Defense.
“Yeah,” Tony Bretano answered.
“It looks like it’s going to happen,” Ryan told him.
“Okay, I’ll alert all the CINCs.”
In a matter of minutes, FLASH traffic was dispatched to each of the commanders-in-chief of independent commands. There were many of them, but at the moment the most important was CINCPAC, Admiral Bart Mancuso in Pearl Harbor. It was just after three in the morning when the STU next to his bed started chirping.
“This is Admiral Mancuso,” he said, more than half asleep.
“Sir, this is the watch officer. We have a war warning from Washington. China. ‘Expect the commencement of hostilities between the PRC and the Russian Federation to commence within the next twenty-four hours. You are directed to take all measures consistent with the safety of your command.’ Signed Bretano, SecDef, sir,” the lieutenant commander told him.
Mancuso already had both feet on the floor of the bedroom. “Okay, get my staff together. I’ll be in the office in ten minutes.”
“Aye, aye, sir.”
The chief petty officer assigned to drive him was already outside the front door, and Mancuso noted the presence of four armed Marines in plain sight. The senior of them saluted while the others studiously looked outward at a threat that probably wasn’t there . . . but might be. Minutes later, he walked into his hilltop headquarters overlooking the naval base. Brigadier General Lahr was there, waiting for him.
“How’d you get in so fast?” CINCPAC asked him.
“Just happened to be in the neighborhood, Admiral,” the J-2 told him. He followed Mancuso into the inner office.
“What’s happening?”
“The President tried to phone Premier Xu, but he didn’t take the call. Not a good sign from our Chinese brethren,” the theater intelligence officer observed.
“Okay, what’s John Chinaman doing?” Mancuso asked, as a steward’s mate brought in coffee.
“Not much in our area of direct interest, but he’s got a hell of a lot of combat power deployed in the Shenyang Military District, most of it right up on the Amur River.” Lahr set up a map stand and started moving his hand on the acetate overlay, which had a lot of red markings on it. For the first time in his memory, Mancuso saw Russian units drawn in blue, which was the “friendly” color. It was too surprising to comment on. “What are we doing?”
“We’re moving a lot of air assets into Siberia. The shooters are here at Suntan Reconnaissance assets back here at Zhigansk. The Dark Stars ought to be up and flying soon. It’ll be the first time we’ve deployed ’em in a real shooting war, and the Air Force has high hopes for them. We have some satellite overheads that show where the Chinese are. They’ve camouflaged their heavy gear, but the Lacrosse imagery sees right through the nets.”
“And?”
“And it’s over half a million men, five Group-A mechanized armies. That’s one armored division, two mechanized infantry, and one motorized infantry each, plus attachments that belong directly to the army commander. The forces deployed are heavy in tanks and APCs, fair in artillery, but light in helicopters. The air assets belong to somebody else. Their command structure for coordinating air and ground isn’t as streamlined as it ought to be, and their air forces aren’t very good by our standards, but their numbers are better than the Russians’. Manpower-wise, the Chinese have a huge advantage on the ground. The Russians have space to play with, but if it comes down to a slugging match, bet your money on the People’s Liberation Army.”
“And at sea?”
“Their navy doesn’t have much out of port at the moment, but overheads show they’re lighting up their boilers alongside. I would expect them to surge some ships out. Expect them to stay close in, defensive posture, deployment just to keep their coast clear.”
Mancuso didn’t have to ask what he had out. Seventh Fleet was pretty much out to sea after the warnings from previous weeks. His carriers were heading west. He had a total of six submarines camped out on the Chinese coast, and his surface forces were spun up. If the People’s Liberation Army Navy wanted to play, they’d regret it.
“Orders?”
“Self-defense only at this point,” Lahr said.
“Okay, we’ll close to within two hundred fifty miles of their coast minimum for surface ships. Keep the carriers an additional hundred back for now. The submarines can close in and shadow any PLAN forces at will, but no shooting unless attacked, and I don’t want anyone counter-detected. The Chinese have that one reconsat up. I don’t want it to see anything painted gray.” Dodging a single reconnaissance satellite wasn’t all that difficult, since it was entirely predictable in course and speed. You could even keep out of the way of two. When the number got to three, things became difficult.
In the Navy, the day never starts because the day never ends, but that wasn’t true for a ship sitting in wooden blocks. Then things changed, if not to an eight-hour day, then at least to a semi-civilian job where most of the crew lived at home and drove in every morning (for the most part) to do their jobs. That was principally preventive maintenance, which is one of the U.S. Navy’s religions. It was the same for Al Gregory; in his case, he drove his rented car in from the Norfolk motel and blew a kiss at the rent-a-cop at the guard shack, who waved everyone in. Once there had been armed Marines at the gates, but they’d gone away when the Navy had been stripped of its tactical nuclear weapons. There were still some nukes at the Yorktown ordnance station, because the Trident warheads hadn’t yet all been disassembled out at Pantex in Texas, and some still occupied their mainly empty bunkers up on the York River, awaiting shipment west for final disposal. But not at Norfolk, and the ships that had guards mainly depended on sailors carrying Beretta M9 pistols which they might, or might not, know how to use properly. That was the case on USS Gettysburg, whose sailors recognized Gregory by sight and waved him aboard with a smile and a greeting.
“Hey, Doc,” Senior Chief Leek said, when the civilian came into CIC. He pointed to the coffee urn. The Navy’s real fuel was coffee, not distillate fuel, at least as far as the chiefs were concerned.
“So, anything good happening?”
“Well, they’re going to put a new wheel on today.”
“Wheel?”
“Propeller,” Leek explained. “Controllable pitch, reversible screw, made of high-grade manganese-bronze. They’re made up in Philadelphia, I think. It’s interesting to watch how they do it, long as they don’t drop the son of a bitch.”
“What about your toy shop?”
“Fully functional, Doc. The last replacement board went in twenty minutes ago, didn’t it, Mr. Olson?” The senior chief addressed his assistant CIC officer, who came wandering out of the darkness and into view. “Mr. Olson, this here’s Dr. Gregory from TRW.”
“Hello,” the young officer said, stretching his hand out. Gregory took it.
“Dartmouth, right?”
“Yep, physics and mathematics. You?”
“West Point and Stony Brook, math,” Gregory said.
“Hudson High?” Chief Leek asked. “You never told me that.”
“Hell, I even did Ranger School between second- and first-class years,” he told the surprised sailors. People looked at him and often thought “pussy.” He enjoyed surprising them. “Jump School, too. Did nineteen jumps, back when I was young and foolish.”