Combat

by Stephen Coonts

  Xu was at the front door when they came out of Shizong’s cell. He motioned for them to hurry.

  Chiang closed the cell door, knocked out the lightbulb above it, and joined them outside as Shizong finished pulling the blouse over his head. The night was still except for the occasional boat whistle outside the harbor somewhere. So far there were no alarms, but the next patrol would be at the gate in under four minutes.

  Joseph and Xu hustled Shizong down the walk. Chiang closed the steel door and wedged it shut. The lock was gone, but from a distance in the dark the damage might not be noticeable. At least they hoped it wouldn’t be.

  Zhou powered the gate open, and as soon as the other four were safely through he hit the button to close and relock it, came out of the guardhouse on the run and just managed to slip through the narrowing opening before the gate clicked home.

  The lone sentry came around the corner fifty meters away. Joseph and the others raced across the road and dived for cover in the ditch. The son of a bitch was two minutes early, Joseph thought bitterly.

  He laid his submachinegun aside and pulled out a stiletto. If need be he was going to have to take the guard out. But silently. The others understood, and got ready to cover him.

  It seemed to take an eternity before the guard reached the gate. He said something that they couldn’t quite make out, then peered inside. After several moments he shook his head and continued along the fence past the section that had been cut and reconnected just minutes before.

  Joseph released the pent-up breath he’d been holding, sheathed his stiletto, and picked up his gun.

  The only thing that they had not been able to find out was how often the gate guard was supposed to check in with base security. Whatever that schedule might be they were racing against it now.

  When the sentry finally turned the far corner, they jumped up and raced the rest of the way down to the dry dock, keeping as low as they could. Xu and Chiang went down the ladder first, followed by Shizong and Joseph and finally Zhou.

  Fifteen minutes later they crossed over the submarine net, and made their way past the commercial docks and through the fishing fleet. The weather had begun to calm down, but it wasn’t until they were well outside the harbor and could start the outboard, that Joseph allowed himself to relax.

  “It seems that you’ve actually done it,” Shizong said. He smiled. “Congratulations, gentlemen. But now, as the Americans would say, the fat is in the fire.”

  Joseph laughed. “Indeed it is,” he said. “I didn’t know that you lived in the United States.”

  “It’s been a secret. But I spent three years in the Silicon Valley as a spy for Chinese Intelligence.”

  Joseph decided that nothing would ever surprise him again. “Tell me, do you know anything about Superman comics?”

  Two Months later The White House

  Kirk Cullough McGarvey, Deputy Director of Operations for the Central Intelligence Agency, showed his credentials at the door three stories beneath the ground floor even though the civilian guard recognized him.

  “Good morning, Mr. McGarvey, how’s it out there?” the Secret Service officer asked.

  “Hot and muggy, Brian, same as yesterday, same as tomorrow.”

  “Worst place in the world to build a capital city.”

  “Amen,” McGarvey agreed. He entered the basement situation room and took his place next to Tom Roswell, director of the National Security Agency. At fifty, McGarvey certainly wasn’t the youngest man ever to hold the third-highest job in American intelligence, but he was the most fit and had more field experience than all his predecessors put together. He’d worked for the Company in one capacity or another for the past twenty-five years: sometimes on the payroll, at other times freelance. But in the parlance of the go-go of days of the sixties and seventies at the height of the Cold War, he’d been a shooter. An assassin. A killer. The ultimate arbiter. Now he was the spy finally come in from the cold.

  There wasn’t a man or woman on either side of the Atlantic or Pacific who’d ever looked into his startlingly green, sometimes gray, eyes who’d ever come away unchanged. At a little over six feet, with a broad, honest, at times even friendly, face, he still maintained the physique of an athlete because he swam or ran nearly every day, and he worked out at least twice a week with the CIA’s fencing team. His enemies feared him, and his friends and allies revered him. An old nemesis had once said that although Mac was an anachronism in this high-tech day and age, he was still a force to be reckoned with. “Never, ever underestimate the man. If you do, he’s likely to hand you your balls on a platter.”

  The long conference table was filled with the President’s civilian and military advisors this morning. Among them were all four of the Joint Chiefs, the Secretaries of State and Defense; representatives from all the law-enforcement and intelligence services, including the FBI, Secret Service, and Defense Intelligence Agency, along with the National Reconnaissance Office, which was responsible for all the photographic data received from our KeyHole and Jupiter satellite systems as well as a host of others. His National Security Advisor, Dennis Berndt, and his Chief of Staff, Anthony Lang, were also present. All the big dogs, McGarvey thought. But he wasn’t surprised.

  Roswell had been talking to the FBI’s Associate Director, Bob Armstrong. He turned to McGarvey. “You giving the briefing this morning, Mac?”

  “Gene will start us off.”

  Eugene Carpenter was the Secretary of State. Nearing eighty, he was the oldest man in government, but everyone respected his intellectually astute, though usually practical, views. He was sitting slumped in his chair lost in his own thoughts.

  “If we don’t watch our step, this business over Taiwan is going to jump up and bite us on the ass, because the Chinese sure as hell aren’t going to forget the Nanchong.”

  “Just like the Maine, is that what you’re saying?” McGarvey asked.

  “Worked for us,” Roswell said.

  The FF502 Nanchong was a PRC frigate that had been destroyed overnight fifty miles off the southwest coast of Taiwan in international waters. The Chinese claimed that it was attacked by a Taiwanese gunboat or perhaps a submarine, while Taiwan denied any involvement. The PRC’s state-controlled media were already clamoring for retribution, and the Chinese military had been brought to the highest state of readiness they’d been in since the Vietnam War.

  The President walked in, and everyone stood until he had taken his seat. He looked tired, as if he hadn’t been getting enough sleep. It was the same affliction that every president since FDR had suffered; the job was a tough one, and it took its toll. He gave McGarvey a nod.

  “People, let’s get started, I have some tough calls to make and I’m going to need your help this morning.” He turned to the Secretary of State. “Gene?”

  Carpenter looked up as if out of a daze, and he sat up with a visible effort. He looked pale and drawn, in even greater need of rest than the President.

  “Thank you, Mr. President. Ladies and gentlemen, we’re here this morning because of an incident last night in the East China Sea in which a People’s Republic Of China warship was blown up and sunk with all hands lost. I’m going to leave the actual briefing to Mr. McGarvey, who warned us two months ago that something like this was bound to happen. But there’s something that you all need to know before he gets started. Ever since the most recent round of trouble between mainland China and Taiwan started two months ago, we’ve been trying to find a way to keep the situation out there stable.”

  Carpenter passed a hand across his eyes. “It’s no secret that we’ve not done a very good job of it. Eight weeks ago, in response to a PRC naval exercise in the area, we moved our Seventh Fleet out of Yokosuka: the George Washington and her battle group north of Taiwan and the Eisenhower and her support group to the south. Our committment, of course, was and still is to honor our pledge to keep the East China sea-lanes open.

  “China’s response in turn was to augment her East Sea Fleet pre
sence in the region with elements of her North and South Sea Fleets, greatly outnumbering us.”

  Carpenter shuffled some papers in front of him. “Four weeks ago our two Third Fleet carrier battle groups—the Nimitz and John F. Kennedy —arrived from Honolulu to cover Taiwan’s north and east coasts, which prompted China to completely strip her North and South Sea Fleets, concentrating every ship that they could commission in an area barely three hundred miles long and half that wide. In addition, the entire PRC Air Force has been moved east. Along with their army and Missile Service, the entire military might of China was placed this morning on DEFCON One.”

  “My God, what the hell do they want, war?” Attorney General Dorothy Kress demanded angrily. “Over one man?”

  “They’ve done this before,” Admiral Richard Halvorson, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, said. “The last time they rattled their sabres was during Taiwan’s elections. So long as we stand our ground they back down.” He turned to the President. “Hell, Mr. President, Shizong isn’t worth that much to them.”

  “How much is Taiwan worth to us, Admiral?” McGarvey asked across the table. All of them were in for a rude awakening that morning. They would be faced with recommending one of the toughest decisions any president could ever be faced with.

  Halvorson shrugged. “That’s a civilian policy decision, one thank God that I don’t have to make,” he said. “Ask me if we can defend Taiwan against a PRC invasion, I’ll give you the numbers. And frankly, at this moment they do not look good. We’re spread too thinly.”

  “But that’s exactly the decision we’re going to have to work out here this morning,” McGarvey pressed. He didn’t know why he was angry, except that we had worked very hard and long to get ourselves into this position. Getting ourselves back out wasn’t going to be easy. Nor would it be safe.

  The President motioned for McGarvey to back off for the moment. It was the same game we’d been playing out there ever since Nixon had opened the door and stuck his foot into it, McGarvey wanted to tell them. But they knew it; hell, everybody knew it. China was getting Most Favored Nation trading status because she was a vast market. It had to do with money and almost nothing else. The fact was we couldn’t ignore a country whose population was one-fourth that of the entire world’s. But we couldn’t give in to them either; abandon our friends and allies just as the British had abandoned Hong Kong. When the solution to a little problem was distasteful Americans lately seemed to put it off until the problem got much bigger and the solution became even tougher. Sooner or later, as Roswell suggested, the situation over Taiwan was going to bite us in the ass.

  Like now.

  “Okay, Gene, everything we’ve tried so far has failed,” the President said. “Tell them the rest.”

  “I’ve just returned from a three-day shuttle-diplomacy mission between Beijing and Taipei. I was trying to talk some sense into them; find an opening, even the slightest hint of an opening, so that we could resume a meaningful dialogue.” Carpenter pursed his lips. “I was afraid that I was coming back with the worst possible news: that there was going to be no simple way out of the morass except to continue the Mexican standoff between our navy and theirs. I thought that the best we could hope for would be, as Admiral Halvorson suggested, that the Chinese would sooner or later tire of the exercise and go home.

  “But then the Nanchong incident occurred last night while I was over the Pacific on my way home. Now all bets are off.”

  “What do they want?” Secretary of Defense Arthur Turnquist asked. His was one cabinet appointment that McGarvey never understood. The man was an asshole; he spent almost as much time saving his own reputation as he did on any real work. But he was well connected on the Hill.

  “The mainland Chinese want the immediate return of Peter Shizong, dead or alive. And the Taiwanese want nothing less than their independence unless mainland China is willing to open itself to free elections and a totally free market economy. Neither side is willing to discuss the issue beyond that.”

  “That’s hardly likely anytime soon,” the President’s advisor on national security affairs, Dennis Berndt, pointed out unnecessarily.

  “It comes down to the simple question: Do we abandon Taiwan? Do we turn tail and run? Or do we stay and risk a shooting war?” Carpenter said. “The sinking of the Nanchong may well be the catalyst. We have to consider where our breaking point is.” He sat back, the effort of bringing the discussion this far completely draining him.

  “What’s the military situation out there at the moment?” the President asked.

  “It’s a mess, Mr. President,” Admiral Halvorson answered. “We’ve offered to help with the search-and-rescue mission, but the Chinese have refused, as we expected they would. The actual effect of the sinking was to move the bulk of the PRC’s naval assets about twenty-five miles closer to Taiwan.”

  “What about the Taiwanese military?”

  “Fortunately their naval units in the near vicinity have all moved back an appropriate distance, but they, along with their Air and Ground Defense units, are at DEFCON One. In the meantime we’re keeping four Orions and five A3 AWACS aircraft in the air around the clock to make sure that this doesn’t spin out of control and blindside us. All of our carrier fighter squadrons are at a high state of readiness, as are our Air Force fighter wings in Japan and on Okinawa.” The admiral looked around the table at the others to make sure that they all would catch his exact meaning. “If someone starts an all-out shooting war over there, we’ll be the first to know about it. The PRC knows that we know, and so does Taiwan.”

  “If we have the region so well covered, how’d the Nanchong get hit without warning?” SecDef Turnquist asked peevishly.

  “I can’t answer that one, Mr. Turnquist,” Admiral Halvorson admitted. “Al Ryland’s people are the best, and he told me this morning that he was damned if he knew what happened.” Vice Admiral Ryland was the Seventh Fleet CINC. His flag was on the George Washington.

  “If it happened once, it can happen again.”

  “No, sir, that’s not a possibility you need consider,” the admiral said in such a way that it was clear he would not be pushed. “Mr. President, I would sincerely hope that we can come to some sort of an agreement with Tiawan over Shizong. I’m not saying that we turn him over to the Chinese, but Taipei could certainly be made to stop his radio and television broadcasts. Christ, it’s driving them nuts.” He looked around the table at the others to emphasize his point. “The longer our military forces are in such close proximity to the Chinese the more likely it’ll become that there’ll be a serious accident. We’re going to start killing people over there—our own kids. And on top of that my commanders have their hands tied.”

  “They are authorized to use whatever force necessary to defend themselves, Admiral,” the President said. It was clear that he wasn’t going to be pushed either. Unlike his predecessor, he had spent time in the military.

  “That’s the point. Mr. President. They might need more authority than that, and they might need it so fast that there’d be no time to phone home. Al Ryland would like full discretion—” Ryland was in overall command of the combined fleet.

  “No,” the President said even before Admiral Halvorson finished the sentence. He sat forward for emphasis in his tall, bulletproof leather chair. “This will not spin out of control into an all-out shooting war between China and the United States.”

  “Then, Mr. President, let’s pack our bags and get the hell out of there,” McGarvey said from across the table.

  The President shot him an angry, irritated look, as if he hadn’t expected a comment like that from the CIA, and especially not from McGarvey, for whom he had a great deal of respect. “The CIA does not set policy.”

  “No, sir, nor will the CIA tell this administration what it wants to hear.”

  “When have you played it any differently?”

  McGarvey had to smile, and there were a few chuckles around the table though the mood was anythi
ng but light. Friend and enemy alike all agreed that McGarvey never bullshitted the troops. Never.

  “Okay, let’s hear the CIA’s version of the situation, because I sure as hell need the unvarnished truth before I can come to a decision that makes any sense.”

  McGarvey hesitated for just a moment. He’d been in this kind of a position many times before. It never got any easier. What he wanted to do had one-hundred-to-one odds against it. But the alternatives were either losing Taiwan or going to war with mainland China. In either case tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of lives would be lost. Needlessly.

  “There may be no acceptable solution, Mr. President. At least not in the ordinary sense of the word, because the Chinese themselves engineered this situation.”

  The Secretary of Defense started to object, but the President held him off with a sharp gesture. “Go on.”

  “First of all the Nanchong was ready for the scrap heap. We believe that she was headed for the cutting yard when she was diverted at the last minute and sent out on this mission. She was a Riga-class frigate, built in 1955 in the Soviet Union and transferred to Bulgaria in 1958. Her name at that time was the Kobchik, which made her a KGB boat. Navy ships have numbers but no names.

  “The Kobchik was extensively retrofitted in ’80 and ’81, and then sold to the PRC in 1987, when she was renamed the Nanchong. By that time she was already an outdated piece of junk.”

  “Like most of the Chinese navy,” SecDef Turnquist said. He was going to make a run for the presidency next election, and the rumors were already flying that he was taking Chinese soft money. But McGarvey wasn’t going to go there right now.

  “The Nanchong’s skipper, a man by the name of Shi Kiyang, was convicted of treason eighteen months ago and sentenced to life in prison without parole at East Sea Fleet headquarters in Ningbo. His mother, his wife, and his two children were sent into exile to Yulin, in the far north, and all of his assets, car, bicycles, bank account, Beijing apartment, and furniture were confiscated by the state.