“Is it true you rode it out on the ship down at the Navy Yard?”
“Yep.” Ryan bobbed his head.
“Why?”
“I couldn’t run away, Arnie. I couldn’t run off to safety and leave a couple of million people to fry. Call it brave. Call it stupid. I just couldn’t bug out that way.”
Van Damm leaned into the corridor and made the drink order to someone Jack couldn’t see, and then he came back in. “I was just starting dinner at my place in Georgetown when CNN ran the flash. Figured I might as well come here—didn’t really believe it like I should have, I suppose.”
“It was somewhat difficult to swallow. I suppose I ought to ask myself if it was our fault, sending the special-operations people in. Why is it that people second-guess everything we do here?”
“Jack, the world is full of people who can only feel big by making other people look small, and the bigger the target, the better they feel about it. And reporters love to get their opinions, because it makes a good story to say you’re wrong about anything. The media prefers a good story to a good truth most of the time. It’s just the nature of the business they’re in.”
“That’s not fair, you know,” Ryan observed, when the head usher arrived with a silver tray, a bottle of Irish whiskey, and some glasses with ice already in them. “Charlie, you pour yourself one, too,” the President told him.
“Mr. President, I’m not supposed—”
“Today the rules changed, Mr. Pemberton. If you get too swacked to drive home, I’ll have the Secret Service take you. Have I ever told you what a good guy you are, Charlie? My kids just plain love you.”
Charles Pemberton, son and grandson of ushers at the White House, poured three drinks, just a light one for himself, and handed the glasses over with the grace of a neurosurgeon.
“Sit down and relax, Charlie. I have a question for you.”
“Yes, Mr. President?”
“Where did you ride it out? Where did you stay when that H-bomb was coming down on Washington?”
“I didn’t go to the shelter in the East Wing, figured that was best for the womenfolk. I—well, sir, I took the elevator up to the roof and figured I’d just watch.”
“Arnie, there sits a brave man,” Jack said, saluting with his glass.
“Where were you, Mr. President?” Pemberton asked, breaking the etiquette rules because of pure curiosity.
“I was on the ship that shot the damned thing down, watching our boys do their job. That reminds me, this Gregory guy, the scientist that Tony Bretano got involved. We look after him, Arnie. He’s one of the people who saved the day.”
“Duly noted, Mr. President.” Van Damm took a big pull on his glass. “What else?”
“I don’t have a what-else right now,” SWORDSMAN admitted.
Neither did anyone in Beijing, where it was now eight in the morning, and the ministers were filing into their conference room like sleepwalkers, and the question on everyone’s lips was “What happened?”
Premier Xu called the meeting to order and ordered the Defense Minister to make his report, which he did in the monotone voice of a phone recording.
“You ordered the launch?” Foreign Minister Shen asked, aghast.
“What else was I to do? General Xun told me his base was under attack. They were trying to take our assets away—we spoke of this possibility, did we not?”
“We spoke of it, yes,” Qian agreed. “But to do such a thing without our approval? That was a political action without reflection, Luo. What new dangers have you brought on us?”
“And what resulted from it?” Fang asked next.
“Evidently, the warhead either malfunctioned or was somehow intercepted and destroyed by the Americans. The only missile that launched successfully was targeted on Washington. The city was not, I regret to say, destroyed.”
“You regret to say—you regret to say?” Fang’s voice spoke more loudly than anyone at the table could ever remember. “You fool! If you had succeeded, we would be facing national death now! You regret?”
At about that time in Washington, a mid-level CIA bureaucrat had an idea. They were feeding live and taped coverage from the Siberian battlefield over the Internet, because independent news coverage wasn’t getting into the People’s Republic. “Why not,” he asked his supervisor, “send them CNN as well?” That decision was made instantaneously, though it was possibly illegal, maybe a violation of copyright laws. But on this occasion, common sense took precedence over bureaucratic caution. CNN, they decided quickly, could bill them later.
And so, an hour and twenty minutes after the event, http://www.darkstarfeed.cia.gov/siberiabattle/realtime.ram began to cover the coverage of the near-destruction of Washington, D.C. The news that a nuclear war had been begun but aborted stunned the students in Tiananmen Square. The collective realization that they themselves might be the targets of a retaliatory strike did not put fear so much as rage into their young hearts. There were about ten thousand of them now, many with their portable laptop computers, and many of those hooked into cell phones for Internet access. From overhead you could tell their positions just by the tiny knots of pressed-together bodies. Then the Leaders of the demonstration got together and started talking fast among themselves. They knew they had to do something, they just didn’t know exactly what. For all they knew, they might well all be facing death.
The ardor was increased by the commentators CNN had hurriedly rushed into their studios in Atlanta and New York, many of whom opined that the only likely action for America was to reply in kind to the
Chinese attack, and when the reporter acting as moderator asked what “in kind” meant, the reply was predictable.
For the students, the question now was not so much life and death as saving their nation—the thirteen hundred million citizens whose lives had been made forfeit by the madmen of the Politburo. The Council of Ministers Building was not all that far away, and the crowd started heading that way.
By this time, there was a police presence in the Square of Heavenly Peace. The morning watch replaced the night team and saw the mass of young people—to their considerable surprise, since this had not been a part of their morning briefing. The men going off duty explained that nothing had happened at all that was contrary to the law, and for all they knew, it was a spontaneous demonstration of solidarity and support for the brave PLA soldiers in Siberia. So, there were few of them about, and fewer still of the People’s Armed Police. It would probably not have mattered in any case. The body of students coalesced, and marched with remarkable discipline to the seat of their country’s government. When they got close, there were armed men there. These police officers were not prepared to see so many people coming toward them. The senior of their number, a captain, walked out alone and demanded to know who was in charge of this group, only to be brushed aside by a twenty-two-year-old engineering student.
Again, it was a case of a police officer totally unaccustomed to having his words disregarded, and totally nonplussed when it took place. Suddenly, he was looking at the back of a young man who was supposed to have stopped dead in his tracks when he was challenged. The security policeman had actually expected the students to stop as a body at his command, for such was the power of law in the People’s Republic, but strong as the force of law was, it was also brittle, and when broken, there was nothing behind it. There were also only forty armed men in the building, and all of them were on the first floor in the rear, kept out of the way because the ministers wanted the armed peasants out of sight, except in ones and twos. The four officers on duty at the main entrance were just swept aside as the crowd thundered in through the double doors. All drew their pistols, but only one fired, wounding three students before being knocked down and kicked into senselessness. The other three just ran to the main post to find the reserve force. By the time they got there, the students were running up the wide, ceremonial stairs to the second floor.
The meeting room was well soundproofed, a security measure to prevent eavesdropping. But soundproofing worked in both directions, and so the men sitting around the table did not hear anything until the corridor was filled with students only fifty meters away, and even then the ministers just turned about in nothing more than annoyance—
—the armed guard force deployed in two groups, one running to the front of the building on the first floor, the other coming up the back on the second, led by a major who thought to evacuate the ministers. The entire thing had developed much too quickly, with virtually no warning, because the city police had dropped the ball rather badly, and there was no time to call in armed reinforcements. As it played out, the first-floor team ran into a wall of students, and while the captain in command had twenty men armed with automatic rifles, he hesitated to order opening fire because there were more students in view than he had cartridges in his rifles, and in hesitating, he lost the initiative. A number of students approached the armed men, their hands raised, and began to engage them in reasonable tones that belied the wild-eyed throng behind them.