by David Poyer
“Sure, sure,” Talmadge said good-naturedly, flapping a hand. “Talk it all over. Won’t happen overnight. But once you hold general elections, y’all can start a new tradition. No more Generalissimo Zhangs. Peaceful transfers of power.”
“And the camps? The police?” Chagatai narrowed his eyes.
Talmadge wiggled his fingers again. “Believe you me, son, you transition to a rule of law, devolve some self-government to your provinces, you’ll be surprised how fast these upsets can just simmer right down. But this here is somethin’ I can take to the heads of state. Get you a treaty. A high level of positive engagement. Show the Foreign Relations Committee, and pry loose a few billion in transitional aid. Get trade and agriculture started again, get your country back on its feet.” The old man shoved back from the table and looked to Yangerhans. “Jim, how about we let ’em stew on it awhile? It’s a good offer. They’ll be Fathers of their Country.”
Chen waited for the translation of that, eyes nearly closed. He seemed to be thinking it over.
Finally he nodded, and stood. “No promises,” he murmured. “But we will talk it over.”
The others stood too, and forced thin smiles. It seemed the meeting, and perhaps the negotiations, were at an end.
* * *
YANGERHANS caught up with her as she and Salyers were descending the broad steps of the Hall of Supreme Harmony. “Blair. A word?”
She excused herself to Shira, and halted. What now? Had she been too aggressive with Chen? Too bad. They were shooting themselves in the foot if they stonewalled. The heads of state were in no mood for a soft peace. Not after the unprovoked aggressions against so many countries, the massacres in the occupied territories. Even the noncombatant nations had suffered, from famine and environmental disruption, the cross-border flood tides of hungry refugees, the worldwide spread of radioactivity from the exchange that had climaxed the war. She crossed her arms. “What can I help you with, Admiral?”
“Jim, please. This has nothing to do with the mission. Not directly, anyway. But I wanted to sound you out on something.”
She glanced around. They were alone; the other members of the party were already far down the steps, heading for the limos that would take them back, accompanied by waiting sirens, to their chilly and still-unlighted hotel. Talmadge trailed them, limping, but the tall diplomatic security man was at his side, steadying his steps. “Uh … sure.”
“You’d have to agree to keep this under wraps.”
What the hell? She nodded reluctantly. “Okay. Agreed.”
He dawdled like a small boy, looking down at his shoes. “Well … you know we have the election coming up. This fall. I’d, um, like you to join my exploratory team. Head it, if possible.”
She bit her lip, not just surprised, but gobsmacked. “Uh … what did you plan to run for, Jim? Senate?”
“I thought we might start out aiming higher.” He looked abashed; then grinned that sad, twisted smile. It looked out of place on his long, ugly face, but also she could see how it might be called Lincolnesque.
“Aiming higher…?” she repeated.
“Since the president said he’s not going to run again. Just to, you know, explore it.”
“I see. And we’re talking which party?”
He glanced at the sky. “Haven’t decided yet. I’d run as a centrist.”
“The middle of the road’s where people get run over.” Someone had told her that once.
“Perhaps. But I think the country’s tired of being divided, at loggerheads. I could bring people together again. Or sure as hell try.”
“As the architect of victory? Yeah, that’d be a selling point.” God help her, she was thinking about the politics of it. America hadn’t had a war hero for president since Eisenhower. Wait, maybe Kennedy. Perhaps the elder Bush. All for World War II service. But then, there hadn’t really been a victorious war since then. Just more or less messy skirmishes that petered out, as often as not simply because the public had just had enough.
The wind was messing with her hair; she smoothed it back over her damaged ear. “Yeah, you could probably make a splash in the primary. But … Jim, look, I appreciate the compliment. But you realize, I’m already in government. And not terrifically popular with either party.”
“Again, that places you in the center. A progressive, but one who helped win the war.” He took her hand, but not in any untoward way. And he was married, anyway. Happily, as far as she knew. “I’m not looking for a huge persona. Just someone with organizational ability, clout with the funding sources, credibility. Maybe not head of the team. Necessarily. But high on the team. Essential.” He waited a beat, then added, releasing her hand, “Anyway, I’d like you to at least consider it. We don’t need to do anything more right now. But do tell me if you’re definitely ruling it out, for personal reasons, or that you don’t think I’m the right candidate, or whatever. I won’t ask why. Just a simple no will be enough.”
She smoothed her hair back again, stalling for time. Feeling that sense of the world shifting under her feet again. Of possibilities materializing, history happening. She’d felt it at the start of these negotiations. And again today, when Talmadge had seemed to make headway with the Chinese.
Oh, she knew why it felt so unreal. She’d just had to think about everything in terms of the fucking war for so fucking long she’d never had a chance to consider what might come next. But the postwar world was hurtling toward them all, faster than anyone could imagine.
He was still intently staring at her. Still waiting. She drew a breath. “Like you say, it’s too soon. To give you a yes or no answer.”
“Sure. I understand.”
“But if you want some kind of response right now … for your own planning … I’m not instantly saying no.”
Those unattractive features twisted into a delighted grin. Suddenly they weren’t all that ugly anymore. But they were still sad, with the compassion of a man who’d seen war, and death, yet who still hoped the world could be made better, despite it all.
Yeah. She could see him in a campaign video, easily. With the right coach. Yeah. Absolutely.
“That’s all I was asking for.” He glanced toward the limos. “Guess they’re holding a car for us.”
“Oh yes,” she said, pushing her hair back into place again. Feeling, for some obscure reason, a flush burning her cheeks. And together, they descended the ancient stone stairs.
7
35°17′02″ N, 130°34′55″ E: The Sea of Japan
THE sea was a black, heaving dark, and the wind was a blustery twenty-five to thirty knots. A summer night, but it didn’t look like anyone’s idea of summer out here.
High on Savo Island’s bridge, Captain Cheryl Staurulakis winced at a clatter of wind-driven spray on the windshield. She studied a glowing screen, wishing they had a moon at least. Commander Mills, her exec, was down in his bunk, snatching a well-deserved hour off. The underway watch was set, but compared to the ships she’d served on earlier in her career, there were all too few people up here.
Off in a corner of the pilothouse, the mumble of low voices: Lieutenant Max Mytsalo, relieving Noah Pardees as officer of the deck. Mytsalo had been an ensign when the war started. He still looked young, but the strain of wartime watches had engraved lines around his eyes and sagged those once-peach-fuzzed cheeks. The others, enlisted and officer alike, tottered about the bridge like robots supplied with insufficient voltage. Chief Van Gogh was nodding over the nav screen. There was no helmsman anymore, just a remote console the OOD maneuvered the ship from.
Lieutenant Commander Pardees was a lanky shadow, his tones almost lost in the hiss of circuits and the hum of fans and the renewed rattle of spray as the cruiser burrowed her bow into the trough of an obsidian sea. “Ma’am, um, properly relieved by Lieutenant Mytsalo.”
She returned his salute in the dark, though neither could see the other. “Very well.”
A younger tenor: “This is Lieutenant Mytsalo. I have
the deck and the conn. Course is zero three zero, speed one five. Savo is the guide. All ships in formation sectors for night steaming. Ma’am.”
“Very well,” she said again, and nodded. “We’ve got half an hour to COMEX. Let’s make sure we’re ready.”
Silence returned to the darkened bridge. She chewed a lip, matching the pips on the faintly glowing night-adapted screen to the formation she’d hastily set up.
Exercise Trident Junction hadn’t been planned through the normal process, staffed and coordinated and deconflicted to support a mission-focused joint training program. Fleet had stapled it together overnight from old exercise op orders, with coordinates hastily rejiggered for a sea the US Navy had seldom cruised, let alone conducted fleet ops in. Except for Operation Chromite, the takedown of North Korea. That now-ravaged country lay to the northwest. To the south, behind her, lay Tsushima Island and Tsushima Strait, where the Russian fleet had come to grief back in 1905.
Yeah … Tsushima. She’d read about that battle, which bore a ghostly, unsettling resemblance to what might be taking shape now.
Early in the preceding century, Admiral Zinovy Rozhestvensky had steamed his coal-burning battleships eighteen thousand miles, nearly around the globe, to link up with tsarist forces blockaded in Port Arthur, and crush the Japanese. Instead, Admiral Togo Heihachiro had obliterated the Russians in an afternoon. Winning the war, and planting the seeds of the Russian Revolution and the eventual death of the Romanov dynasty and the tsar’s whole family.
Now a new fleet was gathering, this time to the north, to retake that same chunk of China. Dalian had once been Port Arthur, a Russian enclave. Once Moscow reoccupied it, Russia would surround and dominate the mineral riches of Manchuria. Augmented and reequipped with the profits the Russian Federation had reaped from the runup in oil prices during America’s war with China, the fleet now headed toward her was far more powerful than either Rozhestvensky or Togo could have imagined.
Which was no surprise to her, of course. But what concerned her most was that it had recently been joined by Peter the Great. Intel said that massive nuclear-powered battle cruiser had just been updated with the Zircon-C hypersonic antiship missile. Meanwhile, US forces had begun their drawdown after the end of the war, headed back to Pearl and the West Coast for refit, or mothball, or scrapping.
Which meant that, in many ways, the oncoming forces both outnumbered and outranged those she could bring to bear. And Higher had already said the Air Force strikes she’d requested on the advancing ships would not take place, in order to avoid what they called “premature escalation.”
“Fuck,” she muttered. A fierce itch triggered just under one armpit. Mustering all her will not to claw at it, she scowled down again at the screen.
To the north, the Sea of Japan narrowed nearly to nothing. A four-mile-wide pinch point there separated it from the Sea of Okhotsk. No guarantee the Russians would thread that choke point, though. More likely they’d skirt the northern tip of Sakhalin, the same route she herself had taken to her anti-ICBM station a few months before.
Entering the Sea of Japan via one of two international straits, the Peter the Great group could join up with a Russian task force already moored in Vladivostok. It was even possible, though Intel judged it unlikely, that they might round the southernmost tip of Japan, Kyushu, and enter the Sea of Japan from the south.
Resulting in a battle cruiser–centered task force nearly twice the size and fighting capability of her own …
She pushed that thought away irritably as Pardees, still on the bridge, centered his tablet in front of her. “We’re about to COMEX, Skipper. Here’s the message, if you want to review Phase I.”
“Any word from Chokai? Ashigara? Commodore Ota?” The Japanese Aegis destroyers would double the capability of her force. They’d operated with her during the war. She’d requested submarine and air support from the Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Force as well. But Pardees simply shook his head.
She sighed and accepted the tablet. Yeah, she’d have to review it. But the close-set paragraphs read like so much naval prose did, dense with acronyms and larded with clichés. After the usual boilerplate about “honing interoperability skills” and “demonstrating close operational relationships” it set up the overall exercise scenario. All in all, she reflected sourly, it was a terrific tasking. Whipped up overnight, the order outlined an ambiguous commander’s intent, inserting full deniability for Higher, but pushing the risk down to her.
She sighed and buckled down to reading.
The order specified no dedicated opposing force—OPFOR, in joint terminology—for the events. Only a scripted enemy. The “Federation of Phosphora” was threatening a seaborne landing in eastern China. Blue naval and air units would constitute a blocking force in a constructive battlespace whose dimensions just happened to match the real Sea of Japan. They would intercept and warn the Phosphorian forces, but it was possible the scenario could degenerate into a limited conventional engagement. Phosphora’s objective lay to the west, in the middle of the operating area.
“Fuck,” she muttered again, kneading her brow. The opposing force’s strength factors included a two-to-one advantage in surface forces, three-to-one in submarines, two-to-one in available aircraft, and three-to-one in missiles. Blue’s strength factors included a slight technical superiority in antimissile defense and support from shore-based air to the east.
Phosphora also had the initiative: the freedom to choose the timing and method of their opposed transit of the strait. They were operating from comparatively short lines of supply, and had missile and aircraft replacements available within hours. Both forces were rated as equally acclimated to the operating area and at roughly equivalent levels of training.
“You read this?” she asked Pardees. “All of it?”
“Yes’m. Not too encouraging, on the face of it. The balance of forces.”
“No shit,” she muttered, wincing as a new lash of spray hit the glass two feet from her face like a fusillade. She grew heavy on her feet, then light, as Savo dipped and reeled in the near-utter darkness. “But if we have to engage … We need to see if the Marines can redeploy a couple of NEMESIS batteries from Taiwan. And if the Japanese will commit some from the Ryukyus. Get those land-based antiship missiles redeployed where they can help us out.”
He nodded. “The Russians—sorry, the Phosphorians—are going to be handicapped too. They’ll have to escort the amphibs for the landing. All we have to do is goalie. Keep them from landing in Dalian, and we succeed.”
“Right, they have to come punch us,” Cheryl agreed. Dalian lay to the west of the Korean Peninsula, past the strait she guarded now. “But whoever wrote this about levels of training being equal, that’s bullshit. We’ve just come through a war. While they haven’t fought a fleet action since, since—when?”
“1905?” Pardees ventured.
She grinned. “I was thinking the same thing, Noah.”
The 21MC lit, someone calling from far below in the armored and sealed citadel. “CO, Combat.”
Pardees leaned forward to depress the lever. “She’s listening.”
“Ma’am, chat message on the TF side. Chokai and Ashigara do not anticipate joining.”
Cheryl took a quick breath; she and Pardees traded glances. “Uh, that’s not good news. Reason given?”
“No reason, ma’am. Just a personal from their COs.”
She acknowledged with a double click. Then sighed, blinking out into the seething chaos of night, and fog so thick it blotted out the stars. No, not good news at all. The Japanese would have brought more than two destroyers to the battle. Their modern submarines alone might well have tilted the balance in her favor, in these narrow, shallow seas.
“We might have to fight this one alone,” Pardees muttered. “In which case…”
“Yeah.” In a way, she couldn’t blame Tokyo. The naval commanders, she was sure, would have joined her, given half a chance. But the Japanese government h
ad played it cagey throughout the war. Hung back during its first months, until it looked like the US would really strike back at China. Then joined in full bore. They’d contributed mightily to the victory. But now, apparently, they weren’t eager to make any new enemies.
Pardees cleared his throat. “Uh, Captain … this may be a little outside the box. But have we considered seeing if there are any Chinese capabilities left? That could collaborate, maybe join us in a show of force at least?”
She scratched her ribs absently as she pondered it. “Huh … It’s not a bad idea, Noah, but I doubt they’ve got much left. We pretty much cleared everything out with the autonomous torpedoes, the air strikes, and so forth. And then the nuclear laydown. Even if there was, they wouldn’t be interoperable with us in any meaningful way. But … I guess it’s worth a try. Get a message off to, uh…”
She stalled out. To whom? There was no Beijing government anymore, as far as she knew. “Uh, maybe shoot it up to PACOM, okay? Ask if they can make the request via whatever channels they have, staff to staff. And expedite it.”
He nodded, head down, making notes.
She said reluctantly, raising her voice to the inchoate shadows around her, “This is the CO. Let’s shift the conn to CIC.” And headed aft to take the elevator down.
* * *
COMBAT was icy cold and so nearly dark that even after being on the bridge, she had to wait a few seconds while her pupils dilated before she could make out the rows of consoles, the big vertical displays near the front. She paused at the coffee mess and poured herself a shot, black. Studied the displays again as she carried the cup to her seat at the command desk.
The screen showed Korea off to the west. Newly reunified, but by all accounts still in turmoil as accounts from the war got settled and the interim president, Jun Min Jung, tried to assert control over renegade generals in the North. To the east lay the angular, tortured coastline of Japan.
And behind her, the strait itself. Seventy-five miles across, with Tsushima Island stuck in the middle like a bone in the throat. A natural choke point, the kind anyone with the most basic strategic sense would choose for an ambush. Which Togo obviously had decided too.
