by Tom Clancy
“Why not? Hell, couldn’t some university duplicate the optics?” the President asked.
“Well, yeah, I guess. The imagery systems are good, but they’re not all that new a development, except some of the thermal systems, but even so-”
“Ed, let’s say we can shock them into stopping the war. How many lives would it save?”
“Quite a few,” the DCI admitted. “Thousands. Maybe tens of thousands.”
“Including some of our people?”
“Yes, Jack, including some of ours.”
“And from a technical point of view, it’s really child’s play?”
“Yes, it’s not technically demanding at all.”
“Then turn the children loose, Ed. Right now,” Ryan ordered.
“Yes, Mr. President.”
CHAPTER 59 Loss of Control
With the death of General Peng, command of 34th Shock Army devolved to Major General Ge Li, CG also of 302nd Armored. His first task was to get himself clear, and this he did, ordering his tank off the long gun-range slope while one of the surviving reconnaissance tracks recovered Peng’s body. All of those tracked vehicles also pulled back, as Ge figured his first task was to determine what had happened, rather than to avenge the death of his army commander. It took him twenty minutes to motor back to his own command section, where he had a command track identical to the one Peng had driven about in. He needed the radios, since he knew the field phones were down, for whatever reason he didn’t know.
“I need to talk to Marshal Luo,” he said over the command frequency, which was relayed back to Beijing via several repeater stations. It took another ten minutes because the Defense Minister, he was told, was in a Politburo meeting. Finally, the familiar voice came over the radio.
“This is Marshal Luo.”
“This is Major General Ge Li, commanding Three-Oh-Second Armored. General Peng Xi-Wang is dead,” he announced.
“What happened?”
“He went forward to join the reconnaissance section to see the front, and he was killed by a sniper bullet. The recon section ran into a small ambush, looked like a single Russian personnel carrier. I drove it off with my own tank,” Ge went on. It was fairly true, and it seemed like the sort of thing he was supposed to say.
“I see. What is the overall situation?” the Defense Minister asked.
“Thirty-fourth Shock Army is advancing-well, it was. I paused the advance to reorganize the command group. I request instructions, Comrade Minister.”
“You will advance and capture the Russian gold mine, secure it, and then continue north for the oil field.”
“Very well, Comrade Minister, but I must advise you that Twenty-ninth Army, right behind us, sustained a serious attack an hour ago, and was reportedly badly hit.”
“How badly?”
“I do not know. Reports are sketchy, but it doesn’t sound good.”
“What sort of attack was it?”
“An air attack, origin unknown. As I said, reports are very sketchy at this time. Twenty-ninth seems very disorganized at the moment,” Ge reported.
“Very well. You will continue the attack. Forty-third Army is behind Twenty-ninth and will support you. Watch your left flank-”
“I know of the reports of Russian units to my west,” Ge said. “I will orient a mechanized division to deal with that, but …”
“But what?” Luo asked.
“But, Comrade Marshal, we have no reconnaissance information on what lies before us. I need such information in order to advance safely.”
“You will find your safety in advancing rapidly into enemy territory and destroying whatever formations you find,” Luo told him forcefully. “Continue your advance!”
“By your command, Comrade Minister.” There wasn’t much else he could say to that.
“Report back to me as necessary.”
“I will do that,” Ge promised.
“Very well. Out.” Static replaced the voice.
“You heard him,” Ge said to Colonel Wa Cheng-gong, whom he’d just inherited as army operations officer. “Now what, Colonel?”
“We continue the advance, Comrade General.”
Ge nodded to the logic of the situation. “Give the order.”
It took hold four minutes later, when the radio commands filtered down to battalion level and the units started moving.
They didn’t need reconnaissance information now, Colonel Wa reasoned. They knew that there had to be some light Russian units just beyond the ridgeline where Peng had met his foolish death. Didn’t I warn him? Wa raged to himself. Didn’t Ge warn him? For a general to die in battle was not unexpected. But to die from a single bullet fired by some lone rifleman was worse than foolish. Thirty years of training and experience wasted, lost to a single rifleman!
There they go again,” Major Tucker said, seeing the plume of diesel exhaust followed by the lurching of numerous armored vehicles. ”About six kilometers from your first line of tanks.”
“A pity we can’t get one of these terminals to Sinyavskiy,” Bondarenko said.
“Not that many of them, sir,” Tucker told him. “Sun Microsystems is still building them for us.”
That was General Ge Li,” Luo told the Politburo. ”We’ve had some bad luck. General Peng is dead, killed by a sniper bullet, I just learned.”
“How did that happen?” Premier Xu asked.
“Peng had gone forward, as a good general should, and there was a lucky Russian out there with a rifle,” the Defense Minister explained. Then one of his aides appeared and walked to the marshal’s seat, handing him a slip of paper. He scanned it. “This is confirmed?”
“Yes, Comrade Marshal. I requested and got confirmation myself. The ships are in sight of land even now.”
“What ships? What land?” Xu asked. It was unusual for him to take an active part in these meetings. Usually he let the others talk, listened passively, and then announced the consensus conclusions reached by the others.
“Comrade,” Luo answered. “It seems some American warships are bombarding our coast near Guangszhou.”
“Bombarding?” Xu asked. “You mean with guns?”
“That’s what the report says, yes.”
“Why would they do that?” the Premier asked, somewhat nonplussed by this bit of information.
“To destroy shore emplacements, and-”
“Isn’t that what one does prior to invading, a preparation to putting troops on the beach?” Foreign Minister Shen asked.
“Well, yes, it could be that, I suppose,” Luo replied, “but-”
“Invasion?” Xu asked. “A direct attack on our own soil?”
“Such a thing is most unlikely,” Luo told them. “They lack the ability to put troops ashore in sufficiently large numbers. America simply doesn’t have the troops to do such a-”
“What if they get assistance from Taiwan? How many troops do the bandits have?” Tong Jie asked.
“Well, they have some land forces,” Luo allowed. “But we have ample ability to-”
“You told us a week ago that we had all the forces required to defeat the Russians, even if they got some aid from America,” Qian observed, becoming agitated. “What fiction do you have for us now, Luo?”
“Fiction!” the marshal’s voice boomed. “I tell you the facts, but now you accuse me of that?”
“What have you not told us, Luo?” Qian asked harshly. “We are not peasants here to be told what to believe.”
“The Russians are making a stand. They have fought back. I told you that, and I told you this sort of thing is to be expected-and it is. We fight a war with the Russians. It’s not a burglary in an unoccupied house. This is an armed contest between two major powers-and we will win because we have more and better troops. They do not fight well. We swept aside their border defenses, and we’ve pursued their army north, and they didn’t have the manhood to stand and fight for their own land! We will smash them. Yes, they will fight back. We must expect that,
but it won’t matter. We will smash them, I tell you!” he insisted.
“Is there any information which you have not told us to this point?” Interior Minister Tong asked, in a voice more reasonable than the question itself.
“I have appointed Major General Ge to assume command of the Thirty-fourth Shock Army. He reported to me that Twenty-ninth Army sustained a serious air attack earlier today. The effects of this attack are not clear, probably they managed to damage communications-and an air attack cannot seriously hurt a large mechanized land force. The tools of war do not permit such a thing.”
“Now what?” Premier Xu asked.
“I propose that we adjourn the meeting and allow Minister Luo to return to his task of managing our armed forces,” Zhang Han Sen proposed. “And that we reconvene, say, at sixteen hours.”
There were nods around the table. Everyone wanted the time to consider the things that they’d heard this morning-and perhaps to give the Defense Minister the chance to make good his words. Xu did a head count and stood.
“Very well. We adjourn until this afternoon.” The meeting broke up in an unusually subdued manner, without the usual pairing off and pleasantries between old comrades. Outside the conference room, Qian buttonholed Fang again.
“Something is going badly wrong. I can feel it.”
“How sure are you of that?”
“Fang, I don’t know what the Americans have done to my railroad bridges, but I assure you that to destroy them as I was informed earlier this morning is no small thing. Moreover, the destruction inflicted was deliberately systematic. The Americans-it must have been the Americans-deliberately crippled our ability to supply our field armies. You only do such a thing in preparation to smashing them. And now the commanding general of our advancing armies is suddenly killed-stray bullet, my ass! That tset ha tset ha Luo leads us to disaster, Fang.”
“We’ll know more this afternoon,” Fang suggested, leaving his colleague and going to his office. Arriving there, he dictated another segment for his daily journal. For the first time, he wondered if it might turn out to be his testament.
For her part, Ming was disturbed by her minister’s demeanor. An elderly man, he’d always nonetheless been a calm and optimistic one for the most part. His mannerisms were those of a grandfatherly gentleman even when taking her or one of the other office girls to his bed. It was an endearing quality, one of the reasons the office staff didn’t resist his advances more vigorously-and besides, he did take care of those who took care of his needs. This time she took her dictation quietly, while he leaned back in his chair, his eyes closed, and his voice a monotone. It took half an hour, and she went out to her desk to do the transcription. It was time for the midday meal by the time she was done, and she went out to lunch with her co-worker, Chai.
“What is the matter with him?” she asked Ming.
“The meeting this morning did not go well. Fang is concerned with the war.”
“But isn’t it going well? Isn’t that what they say on TV?”
“It seems there have been some setbacks. This morning they argued about how serious they were. Qian was especially exercised about it, because the American attacked our rail bridges in Harbin and Bei’an.”
“Ah.” Chai shoveled some rice into her mouth with her chopsticks. “How is Fang taking it?”
“He seems very tense. Perhaps he will need some comfort this evening.”
“Oh? Well, I can take care of him. I need a new office chair anyway,” she added with a giggle.
Lunch dragged on longer than usual. Clearly their minister didn’t need any of them for the moment, and Ming took the time to walk about on the street to gauge the mood of the people there. The feeling was strangely neutral. She was out just long enough to trigger her computer’s downtime activation, and though the screen was blank, in the auto-sleep mode, the hard drive started turning, and silently activated the onboard modem.
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-g
round 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.
