It was just after nine in the morning in Beijing when the Politburo began its emergency session. Some of those present had enjoyed a restful night’s sleep, and then been disturbed by the news that came over the phone at breakfast. Those better informed had hardly slept at all past three in the morning and, though more awake than their colleagues, were not in a happier mood.
“Well, Luo, what is happening?” Interior Minister Tong Jie asked.
“Our enemies counterattacked last night. This sort of thing we must expect, of course,” he admitted in as low-key a voice as circumstances permitted.
“How serious were these counterattacks?” Tong asked.
“The most serious involved some damage to railroad bridges in Harbin and Bei’an, but repairs are under way.”
“I hope so. The repair effort will require some months,” Qian Kun interjected.
“Who said that!” Luo demanded harshly.
“Marshal, I supervised the construction of two of those bridges. This morning I called the division superintendent for our state railroad in Harbin. All six of them have been destroyed—the piers on both sides of the river are totally wrecked; it will take over a month just to clear the debris. I admit this surprised me. Those bridges were very sturdily built, but the division superintendent tells me they are quite beyond repair.”
“And who is this defeatist?” Luo demanded.
“He is a loyal party member of long standing and a very competent engineer whom you will not threaten in my presence!” Qian shot back. “There is room in this building for many things, but there is not room here for a lie!”
“Come now, Qian,” Zhang Han Sen soothed. “We need not have that sort of language here. Now, Luo, how bad is it really?”
“I have army engineers heading there now to make a full assessment of the damage and to commence repairs. I am confident that we can restore service shortly. We have skilled bridging engineers, you know.”
“Luo,” Qian said, “your MAGIC army bridges can support a tank or a truck, yes, but not a locomotive that weighs two hundred tons pulling a train weighing four thousand. Now, what else has gone wrong with your Siberian adventure?”
“It is foolish to think that the other side will simply lie down and die. Of course they fight back. But we have superior forces in theater, and we will smash them. We will have that new gold mine in our pocket before this meeting is over,” the Defense Minister promised. But the pledge seemed hollow to some of those around the table.
“What else?” Qian persisted.
“The American naval air forces attacked last night and succeeded in sinking some of our South Sea Fleet units.”
“Which units?”
“Well, we have no word from our missile submarine, and—”
“They sank our only missile submarine?” Premier Xu asked. “How is this possible? Was it sitting in harbor?”
“No,” Luo admitted. “It was at sea, in company with another nuclear submarine, and that one is also possibly lost.”
“Marvelous!” Tong Jie observed. “Now the Americans strike at our strategic assets! That’s half our nuclear deterrent gone, and that was the safe half of it. What goes on, Luo? What is happening now?”
At his seat, Fang Gan took note of the fact that Zhang was strangely subdued. Ordinarily he would have leaped to Luo’s defense, but except for the one conciliatory comment, he was leaving the Defense Minister to flap in the wind. What might that mean?
“What do we tell the people?” Fang asked, trying to center the meeting on something important.
“The people will believe what they are told,” Luo said.
And everyone nodded nervous agreement on that one. They did control the media. The American CNN news service had been turned off all over the People’s Republic, along with all Western news services, even in Hong Kong, which usually enjoyed much looser reins than the rest of the country. But the thing no one addressed, but everyone knew to worry about, was that every soldier had a mother and a father who’d notice when the mail home stopped coming. Even in a nation as tightly controlled as the PRC, you couldn’t stop the Truth from getting out— or rumors, which, though false, could be even worse than an adverse Truth. People would believe things other than those they were told to believe, if those other things made more sense than the Official Truth proclaimed by their government in Beijing.
Truth was something so often feared in this room, Fang realized, and for the first time in his life he wondered why that had to be. If the Truth was something to fear, might that mean they were doing something wrong in here? But, no, that couldn’t be true, could it? Didn’t they have a perfect political model for reality? Wasn’t that Mao’s bequest to their country?
But if that were true, why did they fear having the people find out what was really happening?
Could it be that they, the Politburo members, could handle the Truth and the peasantry could not?
But then, if they feared having the peasantry get hold of the Truth, didn’t that have to mean that the Truth was harmful to the people sitting in this room? And if the Truth was a danger to the peasants and workers, then didn’t they have to be wrong?
Fang suddenly realized how dangerous was the thought that had just entered his mind.
“Luo, what does it mean to us strategically,” the Interior Minister asked, “if the Americans remove half of our strategic weapons? Was that done deliberately? If so, for what cause?”
“Tong, you do not sink a ship by accident, and so, yes, the attack on our missile submarine must have been a deliberate act,” Luo answered.
“So, the Americans deliberately removed from the table one of our only methods for attacking them directly? Why? Was that not a political act, not just a military one?”
The Defense Minister nodded. “Yes, you could see it that way.”
“Can we expect the Americans to strike at us directly? To this date they have struck some bridges, but what about our government and vital industries? Might they strike directly at us?” Tong went on.
“That would be unwise. We have missiles targeted at their principal cities. They know this. Since they disarmed themselves of nuclear missiles some years ago—well, they still have nuclear bombs that can be delivered by bombers and tactical aircraft, of course, but not the ability to strike at us in the way that we could strike at them—and the Russians, of course.”
“How sure are we that they are disarmed?” Tong persisted.
“If they have ballistic arms, they’ve concealed it from everyone,” Tan Deshi told them all. Then he shook his head decisively. “No, they have no more.”
“And that gives us an advantage, doesn’t it?” Zhong asked, with a ghoulish smile.
USS Gettysburg was alongside the floating pier in the York River. Once the warheads for Trident missiles had been stored here, and there must still have been some awaiting dismantlement, because there were Marines to be seen, and only Marines were entrusted to guard the Navy’s nuclear weapons. But none of those were on the pier. No, the trucks that rolled out from the weapons depot were carrying long square-cross-sectioned boxes that contained SM-2 ER Block-IVD surface-to-air missiles. When the trucks got to the cruiser, a traveling crane lifted them up to the foredeck of the ship, where, with the assistance of some strong-backed sailors, the boxes were rapidly lowered into the vertical launch cells of the forward missile launcher. It took about four minutes per box, Gregory saw, with the captain pacing his wheel-house all the while. Gregory knew why. He had an order to take his cruiser right to Washington, D.C., and the order had the word “expedite” on it. Evidently, “expedite” was a word with special meaning for the United States Navy, like having your wife call for you from the baby’s room at two in the morning. The tenth box was duly lowered, and the crane swung clear of the ship.
“Mr. Richardson,” Captain Blandy said to the Officer of the Deck.
“Yes, sir,” the lieutenant answered.
“Let’s get under way.”
Gregory walked out on the bridge wing to watch. The Special Sea Detail cast off the six-inch hawsers, and scarcely had they fallen clear of the cleats on the main deck when the cruiser’s auxiliary power unit started pushing the ten thousand tons of gray steel away from the floating pier. And the ship was for sure in a hurry. She was not fifteen feet away when the main engines started turning, and less than a minute after that, Gregory heard the WHOOSH of the four jet-turbines taking a big gulp of air, and he could feel the ship accelerate for the Chesapeake Bay, almost like being on a city transit bus.
“Dr. Gregory?” Captain Blandy had stuck his head out the pilothouse door.