Mary Pat Foley was in her office, though it was past midnight, and she was logging onto her mail account every fifteen minutes, hoping for something new from SORGE.
“You’ve got mail!” the mechanical voice told her.
“Yes!” she said back to it, downloading the document at once. Then she lifted the phone. “Get Sears up here.”
With that done, Mrs. Foley looked at the time entry on the e-mail. It had gone out in the early afternoon in Beijing . . . what might that mean? she wondered, afraid that any irregularity could spell the death of songbird, and the loss of the SORGE documents.
“Working late?” Sears asked on entering.
“Who isn’t?” MP responded. She held out the latest printout. “Read.”
“Politburo meeting, in the morning for a change,” Sears said, scanning the first page. “Looks a little raucous. This Qian guy is raising a little hell—oh, okay, he chatted with Fang after it and expressed serious concerns . . . agreed to meet later in the day and—oh, shit!”
“What’s that?”
“They discussed increasing the readiness of their ICBM force . . . let’s see … nothing firm was decided for technical reasons, they weren’t sure how long they could keep the missiles fueled, but they were shook by our takeout of their missile submarine …”
“Write that up. I’m going to hang a CRITIC on it,” the DDO announced.
CRITIC—shorthand for “CRITICal”—is the highest priority in the United States government for message traffic. A CRITIC-flagged document must be in the President’s hands no less than fifteen minutes after being generated. That meant that Joshua Sears had to get it drafted just as quickly as he could type in his keyboard, and that made for errors in translation.
Ryan had been asleep for maybe forty minutes when the phone next to his bed went off.
“Yeah?”
“Mr. President,” some faceless voice announced in the White House Office of Signals, “we have CRITIC traffic for you.”
“All right. Bring it up.” Jack swung his body across the bed and planted his feet on the rug. As a normal human being living in his home, he wasn’t a bathrobe person. Ordinarily he’d just pad around his house barefoot in his underwear, but that wasn’t allowed anymore, and he always kept a long blue robe handy now. It was a gift from long ago, when he’d taught history at the Naval Academy—a gift from the students there—and bore on the sleeves the one wide and four narrow stripes of a Fleet Admiral. So dressed, and wearing leather slippers that also came with the new job, he walked out into the upstairs corridor. The Secret Service night team was already up and moving. Joe Hilton came to him first.
“We heard, sir. It’s on the way up now.”
Ryan, who’d been existing on less than five hours of sleep per night for the past week, had an urgent need to lash out and rip the face off someone—anyone—but, of course, he couldn’t do that to men who were just doing their job, with miserable hours of their own.
Special Agent Charlie Malone was at the elevator. He took the folder from the messenger and trotted over to Ryan.
“Hmm.” Ryan rubbed his hand over his face as he flipped the folder open. The first three lines jumped into his consciousness. “Oh, shit.”
“Anything wrong?” Hilton asked.
“Phone,” Ryan said.
“This way, sir.” Hilton led him to the Secret Service upstairs cubbyhole office.
Ryan lifted the phone and said, “Mary Pat at Langley.” It didn’t take long. “MP, Jack here. What gives?”
“It’s just what you see. They’re talking about fueling their intercontinental missiles. At least two of them are aimed at Washington.”
“Great. Now what?”
“I just tasked a KH-11 to give their launch sites a close look. There’s two of them, Jack. The one we need to look at is Xuanhua. That’s at about forty degrees, thirty-eight minutes north, one hundred fifteen degrees, six minutes east. Twelve silos with CCC-4 missiles inside. This is one of the newer ones, and it replaced older sites that stored the missiles in caves or tunnels. Straight, vertical, in-the-ground silos. The entire missile field is about six miles by six miles. The silos are well separated so that a single nuclear impact can’t take out any two missiles,” MP explained, manifestly looking at overheads of the place as she spoke.
“How serious is this?”
A new voice came on the line. “Jack, it’s Ed. We have to take this one seriously. The naval bombardment on their coast might have set them off. The damned fools think we might be attempting a no-shit invasion.”
“What? What with?” the President demanded.
“They can be very insular thinkers, Jack, and they’re not always logical by our rules,” Ed Foley told him.
“Great. Okay. You two come on down here. Bring your best China guy with you.”
“On the way,” the DCI replied.
Ryan hung up and looked at Joe Hilton. “Wake everybody up. The Chinese may be going squirrelly on us.”
The drive up the Potomac River hadn’t been easy. Captain Blandy hadn’t wanted to wait for a river pilot to help guide him up the river—naval officers tend to be overly proud when it comes to navigating their ships—and that had made it quite tense for the bridge watch. Rarely was the channel more than a few hundred yards wide, and cruisers are deepwater ships, not riverboats. Once they came within a few yards of a mudbank, but the navigator got them clear of it with a timely rudder order. The ship’s radar was up and running—people were actually afraid to turn off the billboard system because it, like most mechanical contrivances, preferred operation to idleness, and switching it off might have broken something. As it was, the RF energy radiating from the four huge billboard transmitters on Gettysburg’s superstructure had played hell with numerous television sets on the way northwest, but that couldn’t be helped, and probably nobody noticed the cruiser in the river anyway, not at this time of night. Finally, Gettysburg glided to a halt within sight of the Woodrow Wilson bridge, and had to wait for traffic to be halted on the D.C. Beltway. This resulted in the usual road rage, but at this time of night there weren’t that many people to be outraged, though one or two did honk their horns when the ship passed through the open drawbridge span. Perhaps they were New Yorkers, Captain Blandy thought. From there it was another turn to starboard into the Anacostia River, through another drawbridge, this one named for John Philip Sousa—accompanied by more surprised looks from the few drivers out—and then a gentle docking alongside the pier that was also home to USS Barry, a retired destroyer relegated to museum status.
The line handlers on the pier, Captain Blandy saw, were mainly civilians. Wasn’t that a hell of a thing?
The “evolution”—that, Gregory had learned, was what the Navy called parking a boat—had been interesting but unremarkable to observe, though the skipper looked quite relieved to have it all behind him.
“Finished with engines,” the CO told the engine room, and let out a long breath, shared, Gregory could see, by the entire bridge crew.
“Captain?” the retired Army officer asked.
“Yes?”
“What is this all about, exactly?”
“Well, isn’t it kinda obvious?” Blandy responded. “We have a shooting war with the Chinese. They have ICBMs, and I suppose the SecDef wants to be able to shoot them down if they loft one at Washington. SACLANT is also sending an Aegis to New York, and I’d bet Pacific Fleet has some looking out for Los Angeles and San Francisco. Probably Seattle, too. There’s a lot of ships there anyway, and a good weapons locker. Do you have spare copies of your software?”
“Sure.”
“Well, we’ll have a phone line from the dock in a few minutes. We’ll see if there’s a way for you to upload it to other interested parties.”
“Oh,” Dr. Gregory observed quietly. He really should have thought that one all the way through.
This is RED WOLF FOUR. I have visual contact with the Chinese advance guard,” the regimental commander called on the radio. “About ten kilometers south of us.”
“Very well,” Sinyavskiy replied. Just where Bondarenko and his American helpers said they were. Good. There were two other general officers in his command post, the CGs of 201st and 80th Motor Rifle divisions, and the commander of the 34th was supposed to be on his way as well, though 94th had turned and reoriented itself to attack east from a point about thirty kilometers to the south.
Sinyavskiy took the old, sodden cigar from his mouth and tossed it out into the grass, pulling another from his tunic pocket and lighting it. It was a Cuban cigar, and superb in its mildness. His artillery commander was on the other side of the map table—just a couple of planks on sawhorses, which was perfect for the moment. Close by were holes dug should the Chinese send some artillery fire their way, and most important of all, the wires which led to his communications station, set a full kilometer to the west—that was the first thing the Chinese would try to shoot at, because they’d expect him to be there. In fact the only humans present were four officers and seven sergeants, in armored personnel carriers dug into the ground for safety. It was their job to repair anything the Chinese might manage to break.