by Randy Moffat
“Uhhh…” He obviously had a lot of questions.
“You obviously will have a lot of questions.” I said pretty casually I thought considering that I had just publically acknowledged that TESS actually had an intelligence network to generate secret reports from. “I will be happy to answer them all in time… but I assure you that what is in my report is perfectly genuine. So genuine that I imagine you may want to read it quickly after which you’ll probably be wanting to deploy an oceanic fleet in the direction of China pretty soon. Perhaps even consider starting a review of your emergency evacuation plans for US citizens from mainland China. There may be tourists…” That was an understatement. There were more US tourists on the Great Well than there were ants. “Perhaps we can talk later in person… ?”
I moved my hand, but he spoke up before I could cut our connection, ruining my whole effect. He was getting wise to my tricks.
“IN ADDITION to the report…” He didn’t quite shout. “I have had a request for information on a missing FBI agent… one of ours. The FBI wants to know what TESS knows about her. I recall that last time we spoke you mentioned that you had become aware of an FBI attempt to… errr… investigate… TESS. You did not mention any agent’s name though.”
“FBI Agent?” I asked putting on my best puzzlement face. “I cannot imagine why we would know anything about any missing FBI agent. I am fairly certain I did mention someone we detected trying to penetrate our security and the fact that they were an FBI agent. But certainly not that we had any knowledge of their current whereabouts. Did I?” I tried to look puzzled.
He looked hard at me. Suspiciously. So much for my acting skills. Double talk may be part and parcel of diplomacy, but he did not have to buy into it. It smelled.
“As a matter of fact…”
“Send us their picture and information… if you think TESS can positively be of help… and if you can please be sure and include a reasonable explanation of why you think TESS might be able to help you pinpoint this errant FBI agent of yours… well… certainly if I concur with your logic, we will of course be more than happy to assist the second oldest democracy on the planet Earth in helping hunt him down. After all… you have helped us by providing some limited information that might help us find Colonel Jeeter… it is the least we can do.”
That was a particular can of worms I expected him never to open no matter how many words I used to say nothing. The US as a nation would never reveal at this point that they had been trying to infiltrate us clandestinely. Certainly not in writing. A written request would make the whole thing official. TESS and the US had just conducted a formal exchange of intelligence information. Following that up with a public declaration that they had been trying to infiltrate agents into our organization would imperil whatever that implied for future relations. Besides, TESS was space flight right now… you do not want to piss off the guys who can put your satellite in space in an hour without serious thought. The fly of Agent Matthews was firmly ensnared in the web of real politik! I doubted the US would ever mention her to us again. Ownership of the Matthew’s challenge had passed to me. She was going to be my problem alone to solve.
Chen was finishing his third meeting of the day. He had been having relatively clandestine meetings with small selected groups of members of the National People’s Congress. He and Lau were aiming to arrange a political block that would ratify the actions that Lau was planning to execute soon when the Spring session of the congress was called in six months time. It had been a wake-up call for Chen and was turning out to be hard going. A few of the folk he had talked to had been sympathetic, but in many cases the meetings had been a dialog of the deaf. The number of Hú loyalists among its 2900 plus members had shocked him—particularly in members from the various political groups making up the bulk of the congress who were not from the United Front. The United Front represented the hard core of Communist Party interests. Worse than the rank and file though, Chen’s sense was that the rot was even greater in the Presidium of the Congress. The Presidium was a small subset of the overall congress made up of about 170 members and whose job it was to vet and nominate the leadership positions of the council. Hú’s cunning meant he now controlled closer to 40% of those seats.
Overall the Congress was largely a rubber stamp organization for the Council’s operating decisions, but the group at least nominally ratified the council makeup through the Presidium. It was the council who leveraged their ‘election,’ translating it into day to day power over the political mechanisms of the Chinese state, but for legitimacy they needed the Congress and Presidium to endorse them. The difference between 50 men speaking for China and 3000 people speaking for them. Chen’s gut told him that if the contest leaked out of the Presidium and became a popularity issue forced tomorrow in that congress that twenty five to thirty percent of the congressional body would vote for Hú immediately. It was horrible.
Lau had been busy along the same lines inside the council and indicated that the same relative strength ratio probably existed among its most powerful 30 or so members.
Hú had been a very busy and cunning little dog. It was going to take dramatic action to bring the bitch to heel.
Chen was walking along a corridor heading for yet another meeting when a squad of army troops with white gloves and weapons held across their chests at port arms rounded a corner ahead him at a jog. At their head was a captain The captain spotted him, rushed up and saluted.
“Vice Chairman. I have been sent by Premier Lau to bring you to him. He informs me I should simply say the words… Yúntāi Shān.”
Chen tried to catch his breath.
Mount Yuntai was a code word he had agreed upon with Lau to place key personnel under protection from physical threat. It meant bad things were going to happen very soon. He squared his shoulders and nodded.
The soldiers surrounded him in a loose ring and they moved just short of a run out of the building and into armored vehicles conveniently parked there. Chen noticed several others loading with various other government officials as his own APC rolled away. He was shaking his head.
A certain number of the people climbing in other vehicles were doing so at gunpoint.
CHAPTER 9
‘A Number 1’ leverage for the Petrovski effect
Lieutenant 3 Woo leaned over her new rig on the bridge and thumbed the on switch. SFC Rivera had figured out and assembled the basic components with her usual competence and Woo had only required a couple hours to add a few touches and prepare to energize the system while Rivera looked on interestedly. Power flowed like life’s blood into the system and the small standard computer monitor zip-tied there blinked sweetly to life above the rig’s station.
Woo’s fingers flew over the keys of a second keyboard on a laptop beside the station and the letters she typed appeared on both her screen and the one physically at the station. She looked up, her face a mask, but Rivera had worked with her for almost two years now and knew the lines of triumph when she saw it. She did the smiling for both of them.
Woo shut her laptop off decisively.
“You have done really well, Sergeant.” Woo said distractedly. “I will return to L5 tomorrow and we will run a full scale test together after I get there. You understand the modifications down in the engine compartment and on the bow sprinkler?”
‘Sprinkler’ was how TESS referred to the device mounted a the ship’s bow and stern that smeared out gravitons to surround a ship in a Petrovski field.
Rivera nodded her head up and down in affirmation.
“No!” She verbally contradicted her body language jokingly and grinned engagingly. “But Chief Gaston seems to and I can always ask him for help.”
Woo stood indecisively and began looking around in the same way. She looked just for that moment like a little lost girl. The Gaia was under gravity right now and her feet remained more or less on the floor, but her mind seemed to b
e roving elsewhere.
Rivera laughed and gave her a break.
“I am sure our test will go well tomorrow. Oh… and before I forget… . Chief Pinta asked that you join him in cabin Delta three—Starboard side—Deck three low. Something about discussing your tests?”
Woo looked at her with her apparent neutrality belied by a sudden glow in her eyes. She abruptly disappeared like a conjuror. Rivera knew the look. She’s seen it in her cat’s eyes when it spotted a chipmunk and dropped into a hunting crouch. Rivera smiled after her, pleased to be a source of complicity in making them happy.
Two minutes later Woo skated into sleeping compartment D3 and slammed the door behind her. Chief Pinta was dressed in standard ship’s work uniform boxers and sitting contemplatively on a chair by a monitor in the dimly lit chamber. Soft music floated out of the speakers. As she barged in his scarred face changed instantly from a brown study to smiling delight.
“Tia! Do you think your rig will work?” He asked examining her face.
Woo’s plain face contorted. Its rather round smoothness was working and suddenly there were tears in her eyes and delight in every new line on her face. An emotional combination he had never seen except in moments of passion. He stared in astonishment at this new side of her.
“I am certain of it. I have figured it all out, Esteban! I can make the Alcubierre packets obey me like I told you. They will literally dance… .” She stopped, overcome by letting what had been bottled up firmly behind the dam of reserve she kept her emotions behind.
Pinta started to rise and hug her in support.
“Tia I am so proud of…”
He was three quarters of the way to his feet with his arms spread when she was on him like a tigress. She tore his work belt and underpants off, slammed her lips onto his, her tongue like a serpent in his mouth and her fingers were working on the hard places about his person, seeking the fulcrum of the moment. Pinta reciprocated as a willing laggard. He overcame his surprise to begin enthusiastically seeking leverage using the fulcrums of his wrists in touching her softer places in return. They devolved into a writhing mess with levers prominent.
Nature has provided that all women are beautiful and all men are handsome at such a time. This one was no exception and they celebrated that particular blindness together.
Qin Li considered.
Murray had been perfectly correct.
Hú’s ambitions had been much larger than Li had suspected.
Li’s new interpretation of events unfolding in China proper were very much in line with Murray’s analysis. Li made a mental note never to underestimate the heavy set American. ‘Terran Space Service’ man Li mentally corrected himself. Members of TESS had given up their nationalities on entering their service. TESS was being well served by him whatever label attached. Li suspected that events would be coming to head in China very soon. Either Hú would come out ahead or Lau would. If he had been an odds maker Li would have put them at dead even.
Li was complacent to a point. If Hú came out on top in the struggle than Li was positioned to be regarded as a critical asset and friend to Hú and his militia idiots. If Lau came through still in control however, Li would be in a position of having made several reports to the ministry of State Security hinting at Hú’s actions outside the country. Reports that were likely the first hint that the Ministry of State Security had of what Hú was up to. Ultimately Lau too owed him for that. If necessary he could even cite his recent support to TESS as an example of his resistance to Hú. All in all he preferred Lau and TESS to come out on top, but events had a life outside him now. He was wise enough to see that his personal favorites were neither here nor there.
Having lived so long in the United States that his idioms were American, Li smiled and framed the thought that both his bases were covered. There was an odd emotional undercurrent in this thought though. A sense of dissatisfaction at what should have been a nearly perfect position for him to be in as an intelligence officer. He settled back in his chair and twined his fingers together over his meager non-American belly and considered like any passive observer what was going on and the role he was playing on the current stage. Whatever his emotional state, he was in a protected position and large events were rolling forward now. His position of safety meant he was also largely irrelevant to what was playing out now. It had never bothered him before, but this time something was nagging at him. He knew what it was. He’d found he liked Murray. Espionage is a lonely game. The chance to meet an equal, to be in a position to exchange ideas, to interact with a peer, just to talk to a non-hostile fellow professional and… shout it down a well… to be able to do each other a small favor with no major strings attached was the rarest of the rare opportunities in that game. He steeled himself against emotionalism. As always Li was a survivor. Though he had a preference based on his like of Murray, Li must be most concerned for himself. Besides…
Qin Li had his own plans in motion.
Murray sat tiredly on the dirty linoleum floor and leaned against a wall in the bare apartment, bereft of furnishings. They had rented the place and four others in the Hongkou district of Shanghai. An area was once called the ‘Ghetto of China’, where thousands of Jews fleeing from Nazi Germany had arrived and lived in the late 1930’s only to fall under the control of the invading Japanese who restricted them to a small region of the city. Hongkou was a district that was fairly central to the increasingly modern city. As a result the rents were enormous based on the town’s current explosive growth. Murray had paid the bills and whistled as he signed the checks sent to his black operational budget account through various dummy corporations. Those outrageous costs were at current conflict prices, he could only imagine what the rents would have been in a time of full peace. Surreptitiously he’d put in bids to buy up several properties in Major key Chinese cities on behalf of the same TESS dummy corporations while they were still theoretically cheap.
The beer in Murray’s hand dribbled condensation onto the floor. He was very tired. Sprawled opposite Murray in similar poses were three other tired men. Lieutenant 3 Spaulding, the Brutus team leader, Rear Admiral Wong and Captain ‘Caveman’ Craig—who had elbowed his way into the operation using his title as head of TESS security and not much else. They had endured a rough time of it flying from the central time zone in the US to Korea where they squatted through four agonizing hours while arrangements to fly on came together. Then their rental aircraft had arrived from Kimpo airport in Korea at Shanghai’s Hongqiao airport near the town center and they had endured rigid customs inspections and three roadblocks just to exit the airport and get to the apartments they had leased here to drop their bags and use a potty. They had barely had time to pee before racing out again and spending all day collecting and greeting the final members of their teams and equipment as they filtered unevenly in by plane and boat. These collection trips had meant weathering through at least thirteen more road blocks and inspections by the time they were done. Other than these energetic movements and the labor involved, those who had come from Missouri found their circadian rhythms and sleep patterns shot to hell by all the time zones and additional stress. They were beat.
Murray evaluated the others. From the way they drooped it was clear that none of them had gotten much rest in the weeks before this operation and they looked as tired as he felt.
“Give.” Craig said with unusual eloquence for him.
Spaulding looked up too. He as a surprisingly small and neat looking man wearing gold framed glasses and with a mocha skin hinting at a complex ethnicity. Murray had learned that when Spaulding lifted his head in reserved attention it was the moral equivalent of Craig’s much ruder ‘give.’ Wong appeared calm—his passive-aggressive Buddha imitation mirroring the demands of the rest.
Murray went on.
“No essential change in the overall situation. Some areas of Shanghai city are off limits right now because of demonstrati
ons; but Shanghai is one of four or five critical business centers in China. Neither side sees it as in their best interests to shut the business down completely so they are jockeying for position using whatever assets are on hand relatively non-violently.”
“Demonstrations?” Spaulding asked pointedly.
“OK.” Murray conceded. “Violent demonstrations then.”
“Violent demonstrations?” Craig asked even more pointedly than Spaulding.
“OK.” Murray took another annoyed verbal step back. “Riots. Big fucking riots. Large scale civil disobedience. Unrest. Periods of Lawlessness. Tombstone… frontier… wild west kinda shit out here in the far east… including gunfights and banditos wandering about the countryside stealing cattle. Are you happy? What I should have said was ‘You should see the cities inland like Wuhan, Chengdu and Chongqing—things are really nice here . . . compared to there. The government has started bombing the shit out of them over there.”
“Better.” Craig said taking a swig from his own water bottle. “Now we get the real picture… there is only one question that counts. Are we too late? Are we going to be able to pull this off with all this ruckus starting up then?”
Murray nodded not in agreement so much as in fatigue. He pulled out a paper copy of a map of the city and marked a spot on the south side with a purple pen and tossed it onto the floor in front of the other three who leaned over to peer at it.
“All I was saying was that its lucky this place is in Shanghai rather than one of the places things are really going bad in. If anything the current unrest around here will help us out a little bit. It is 1700 hours local now. The military has placed travel restrictions on movements during hours of darkness. A curfew is in effect. Business is business though. Both sides are smart enough to open things up again during the daylight hours and let money flow naturally. So my plan is that we rest here until tomorrow when the curfew lets up. Then we go down and recon that spot I just marked on the map. We see if it is any good as a pickup point. It looks real nice on Google, but I want to put my eyeballs on it before we commit. I never trust a satellite view. You need to go and look. Admiral MacMoran was a grunt once. He calls it ‘a terrain walk’ and I agree one hundred percent. We walk the ground. Assuming it is cool, then we come back here before curfew tomorrow. That gives us tomorrow night to brief the rest of the team on the plan, get them all up to speed on current operational conditions and then actually execute the scheme the next day in broad daylight. We’ll do it when the highways are fully operational and open to traffic and we can move around in a reasonably low profile, mingling with gobs of locals. The critical bit though is that we need to reach that point I marked on the map just about at dusk the day of the operation so we do not get caught up in the next curfew cycle as the army shuts the city down on us again and we cannot move. It outta work. It should work.”
