by Tom Clancy
“Just have to wait and see, sir, if it comes to that. The Russians have doubtless thought it over many times. We’ll depend on them for that.”
“Great,” the Vice President muttered. A lifelong USN sailor, he didn’t like depending on anything except people who spoke American and wore Navy Blue.
“If the variables were fully in our favor, the Chinese wouldn’t be thinking about this operation as seriously as they evidently are.” Which was about as obvious as the value of a double play with the bases loaded and one out in the bottom of the ninth.
“The problem,” George Winston told them, “is that the prize is just too damned inviting. It’s like the bank doors have been left open over a three-day weekend, and the local cops are on strike.”
“Jack keeps saying that a war of aggression is just an armed robbery writ large,” Jackson told them.
“That’s not far off,” SecTreas agreed. Professor Weaver thought the comparison overly simplistic, but what else could you expect of people like these?
“We can warn them off when we start seeing preparations on our overheads,” Ed Foley proposed. “Mickey, when will we start seeing that?”
“Conceivably, two days. Figure a week for them to get ramped up. Their forces are pretty well in theater already, and it’s just a matter of getting them postured—putting them all near their jump-off points. Then doing the final approach march will happen, oh, thirty-six hours before they start pulling the strings on their field guns.”
“And Ivan can’t stop them?”
“At the border? Not a chance,” the general answered, with an emphatic shake of the head. “They’ll have to play for time, trading land for time. The Chinese have a hell of a long trip to get the oil. That’s their weakness, a huge flank to protect and a god-awful vulnerable logistics train. I’d look out for an airborne assault on either the gold or the oil fields. They don’t have much in the way of airborne troops or airlift capacity, but you have to figure they’ll try it anyway. They’re both soft targets.”
“What can we send in?”
“First thing, a lot of air assets, fighters, fighter-bombers, and every aerial tanker we can scrape up. We may not be able to establish air superiority, but we can quickly deny it to them, make it a fifty-fifty proposition almost at once, and then start rolling their air force back. Again it’s a question of numbers, Robby, and a question of how well their flyers are trained. Probably better than the Russians, just because they have more hours on the stick, but technically the Russians actually have generally better aircraft, and probably better doctrine—except they haven’t had the chance to practice it.”
Robby Jackson wanted to grumble that the situation had too many unknowns, but if there hadn’t been, as Mickey Moore had just told him, the Chinese wouldn’t be leaning on their northern border. Muggers went after little old ladies with their Social Security money, not cops who had just cashed their paychecks on the way home from work. There was much to be said for carrying a gun on the street, and as irrational as street crime or war-starting might be, those who did it were somewhat reflective in their choices.
Scott Adler hadn’t slept at all on the flight, as he’d played over and over in his mind the question of how to stop a war from starting. That was the primary mission of a diplomat, wasn’t it? Mainly he considered his shortcomings. As the prime foreign-affairs officer of his country, he was supposed to know—he was paid to know—what to say to people to deflect them from irrational actions. At base that could mean telling them, Do this and the full power and fury of America will descend on you and ruin your whole day. Better to cajole them into being reasonable, because in reasonableness was their best salvation as a nation in the global village. But the truth was that the Chinese thought in ways that he could not replicate within his own mind, and so he wasn’t sure what to say to make them see the light. The worst part of all was that he’d met this Zhang guy in addition to Foreign Minister Shen, and all he knew for sure was that they did not look upon reality as he did. They saw blue where he saw green, and he couldn’t understand their strange version of green well enough to explain it into blue. A small voice chided him for possible racism, but this situation was too far gone for political correctness. He had a war to stop, and he didn’t know how. He ended up staring at the bulkhead in front of his comfortable glove-leather seat and wishing it was a movie screen. He felt like seeing a movie now, something to get his mind off the hamster wheel that just kept turning and turning. Then he felt a tap on his shoulder, and turned to see his President, who motioned him to the circular staircase to the upper level. Again they chased two Air Force communicators off their seats.
“Thinking over the newest SORGE?”
“Yep.” EAGLE nodded.
“Any ideas?”
The head moved in a different plane now. “No. Sorry, Jack, but it just isn’t there. Maybe you need a new SecState.”
Ryan grunted. “No, just different enemies. The only thing I see is to tell them we know what they’re up to, and that they’d better stop.”
“And when they tell us to shove it up our collective ass, then what?”
“You know what we need right now?” SWORDSMAN asked.
“Oh, yeah, a couple hundred Minuteman or Trident missiles would work just fine to show them the light. Unfortunately ...”
“Unfortunately, we did away with them to make the world a safer place. Oops,” Ryan concluded.
“Well, we have the bombs and the aircraft to deliver them, and—”
“No!” Ryan hissed. “No, God damn it, I will not initiate a nuclear war in order to stop a conventional one. How many people do you want me to kill?”
“Easy, Jack. It’s my job to present options, remember? Not to advocate them—not that one anyway.” He paused. “What did you think of Auschwitz?”
“It’s the stuff of nightmares—wait a minute, your parents, right?”
“My father—Belzec in his case, and he lucked out and survived.”
“Does he talk about it?”
“Never. Not a single word, even to his rabbi. Maybe a pshrink. He went to one for a few years, but I never knew what for.”
“I can’t let anything like that happen again. To stop that—yeah, to stop that,” Ryan speculated aloud, “yeah, I might drop a B-83.”
“You know the lingo?”
“A little. I got briefed in a long time ago, the names for the hardware stuck in my mind. Funny thing, I’ve never had nightmares about that. Well, I’ve never read into the SIOP—Single Integrated Operation Plan, the cookbook for ending the world. I think I’d eat a gun before I did that.”
“A whole lot of presidents had to think those things over,” Adler pointed out.
“Before my time, Scott, and they never expected them to happen anyway. They all figured they’d smart their way through it. ’Til Bob Fowler came along and damned near stumbled into calling in the codes. That was some wild Sunday night,” Ryan said, remembering.
“Yeah, I know the story. You kept your head screwed on straight. Not many others did.”
“Yeah. And look where it got me,” POTUS observed with a grim chuckle. He looked out a window. They were over land now, probably Labrador, lots of green and lakes, and few straight lines to show the hand of man on the land. “What do we do, Scott?”
“We try to warn them off. They’ll do things we can see with satellites, and then we can call them on it. Our last play will be to tell them that Russia is an American ally now, and messing with Ivan means messing with Uncle Sam. If that doesn’t stop them, nothing else will.”
“Offer some danegeld to buy them off?” the President wondered.
“A waste of time. I don’t think it would work, but I’d be for-damned sure they’d see it as a sign of weakness and be encouraged by it. No, they respect strength, and we have to show them that. Then they’ll react one way or another.”
“They’re going to go,” Jack thought.
“Coin toss. Hope it comes up tails, b
uddy.”
“Yeah.” Ryan checked his watch. “Early morning in Beijing.”
“They’ll be waking up and heading in for work,” Adler agreed. “What exactly can you tell me about this SORGE source?”
“Mary Pat hasn’t told me much, probably best that way. One of the things I learned at Langley. You can know too much sometimes. Better not to know their faces, and especially their names.”
“In case something bad happens?”
“When it does, it’s pretty bad. Don’t want to think what these people would do. Their version of the Miranda warning is, ‘You can scream all you want. We don’t mind.’ ”
“Funny,” SecState thought.
“Actually it’s not all that effective as an interrogation technique. They end up telling you exactly what you want to hear, and you end up dictating it to them instead of getting what they really know.”
“What about the appeals process?” Scott asked, with a yawn. Finally, belatedly, he was getting sleepy.
“In China? That’s when the shooter asks if you prefer the left ear or the right ear.” Ryan stopped himself. Why was he making bad jokes on this subject?
The busy place in the Washington, D.C., area was the National Reconnaissance Office. A joint venture of CIA and the Pentagon, NRO ran the reconsats, the big camera birds circling the earth at low-medium altitude, looking down with their hugely expensive cameras that rivaled the precision and expense of the Hubble space telescope. There were three photo-birds up, circling the earth every two hours or so, and passing over the same spot twice a day each. There was also a radar-reconnaissance satellite that had much poorer resolution than the Lockheed- and TRW-MADE KH-11s, but which could see through clouds. This was important at the moment, because a cold front was tracing across the Chinese-Siberian border, and the clouds at its forward edge blanked out all visual light, much to the frustration of the NRO technicians and scientists whose multibillion-dollar satellites were useful only for weather forecasting at the moment. Cloudy with scattered showers, and chilly, temperature in the middle forties, dropping to just below freezing at night.
The intelligence analysts, therefore, closely examined the “take” from the Lacrosse radar-intelligence bird because that was the only game in town at the moment.
“The clouds go all the way down to six thousand feet or so. Even a Blackbird wouldn’t be much use at the moment,” one of the photo-interpreters observed. “Okay, what do we have here ... ? Looks like a higher level of railroad activity, looks like flatcars mostly. Something on them, but too much clutter to pick out the shapes.”
“What do they move on flatcars?” a naval officer asked.
“Tracked vehicles,” an Army major answered, “and heavy guns.”
“Can we confirm that supposition from this data?” the Navy guy asked.
“No,” the civilian answered. “But ... there, that’s the yard. We see six long trains sitting still in the yard. Okay, where’s the ...” He accessed his desktop computer and called up some visual imagery. “Here we go. See these ramps? They’re designed to offload rolling equipment from the trains.” He turned back to the Lacrosse “take.” “Yeah, these here look like tank shapes coming off the ramps, and forming up right here in the assembly areas, and that’s the shape of an armored regiment. That’s three hundred twenty-two main battle tanks, and about a buck and a quarter of APCs, and so ... yeah, I’d estimate that this is a full armored division detraining. Here’s the truck park ... and this grouping here, I’m not sure. Looks bulky ... square or rectangular shapes. Hmm,” the analyst concluded. He turned back to his own desktop and queried some file images. “You know what this looks like?”
“You going to tell us?”
“Looks like a five-ton truck with a section of ribbon bridge on it. The Chinese copied the Russian bridge design—hell, everybody did. It’s a beautiful little design Ivan cobbled together. Anyway, on radar, it looks like this and”—he turned back to the recent satellite take—“that’s pretty much what these look like, isn’t it? I’ll call that eighty percent likelihood. So, this group here I’ll call two engineer regiments accompanying this tank division.”
“Is that a lot of engineers to back up a single division?” the naval officer asked.
“Sure as hell,” the Army major confirmed.
“I’d say so,” the photo-interpreter agreed. “The normal TO and E is one battalion per division. So, this is a corps or army vanguard forming up, and I’d have to say they plan to cross some rivers, guys.”
“Go on,” the senior civilian told him.
“They’re postured to head north.”
“Okay,” the Army officer said. “Have you ever seen this before?”
“Two years ago, they were running an exercise, but that was one engineer regiment, not two, and they left this yard and headed southeast. That one was a pretty big deal. We got a lot of visual overheads. They were simulating an invasion or at least a major assault. That one used a full Group A army, with an armored division and two mechanized divisions as the assault force, and the other mech division simulating a dispersed defense force. The attacking team won that one.”
“How different from the way the Russians are deployed on their border?” This was the Navy intelligence officer.
“Thicker—I mean, for the exercise the Chinese defenders were thicker on the ground than the Russians are today.”
“And the attacking force won?”
“Correct.”
“How realistic was the exercise?” the major asked.
“It wasn’t Fort Irwin, but it was as honest as they can run one, and probably accurate. The attackers had the usual advantages in numbers and initiative. They punched through and started maneuvering in the defender’s trains area, had themselves a good old time.”
The naval officer looked at his colleague in green. “Just what they’d be thinking if they wanted to head north.”
“Concur.”
“Better call this one in, Norm.”
“Yep.” And both uniformed officers headed to the phones.
“When’s the weather clear?” the lingering civilian asked the tech.
“Call it thirty-six hours. It’ll start to clear tomorrow night, and we have the taskings already programmed in.” He didn’t have to say that the nighttime capabilities on the KH-11 satellites weren’t all that different from in the daylight—you just didn’t get much in the way of color.
CHAPTER 47
Outlooks and All-Nighters
Westbound jet lag, or travel-shock, as President Ryan preferred to call it, is always easier than eastbound’s, and he’d gotten sleep on the airplane. Jack and Cathy walked off Air Force One and to the waiting helicopter, which got them to the landing pad on the South Lawn in the usual ten minutes. This time FLOTUS walked directly into the White House while POTUS walked left toward the West Wing, but to the Situation Room rather than the Oval Office. Vice President Jackson was waiting for him there, along with the usual suspects.
“Hey, Robby.”
“How was the flight, Jack?”
“Long.” Ryan stretched to get his muscles back under control. “Okay, what’s happening?”
“Ain’t good, buddy. We have Chinese mechanized troops heading for the Russian border. Here’s what we got in from NRO.” Jackson personally spread out the printouts from the photo-intelligence troops. “We got mechanized forces here, here, and here, and these are engineers with bridging equipment.”
“How long before they’re ready?” Ryan asked.
“Potentially as little as three days,” Mickey Moore answered. “More likely five to seven.”
“What are we doing?”
“We have a lot of warning orders out, but nobody’s moving yet.”
“Do they know we’re onto this?” the President asked next.
“Probably not, but they must know we’re keeping an eye on things, and they must know our reconnaissance capabilities. It’s been in the open media for twenty-some year
s,” Moore answered.
“Nothing from them to us over diplomatic channels?”
“Bupkis,” Ed Foley said.
“Don’t tell me they don’t care. They have to care.”
“Maybe they care, Jack,” the DCI responded. “But they’re not losing as much sleep over it as they are over internal political problems.”
“Anything new from SORGE?”
Foley shook his head. “Not since this morning.”
“Okay, who’s our senior diplomat in Beijing?”
“The DCM at the embassy, but he’s actually fairly junior, new in the post,” the DCI said.
“Okay, well, the note we’re going to send won’t be,” Ryan said. “What time is it over there?”
“Eight-twelve in the morning,” Jackson said, pointing to a wall clock set on Chinese time.
“So, SORGE didn’t report anything from their working day yesterday?”
“No. That happens two or three days per week. It’s not unusual,” Mary Pat pointed out. “Sometimes that means the next one will be extra meaty.”
Everyone looked up when Secretary Adler came in; he had driven instead of helicoptered in from Andrews. He quickly came up to speed.
“That bad?”
“They look serious, man,” Jackson told SecState.
“Sounds like we have to send them that note.”
“They’re too far gone down this road to stop,” another person said. “It’s not likely that any note will work.”
“Who are you?” Ryan asked.
“George Weaver, sir, from Brown. I consult to the Agency on China.”
“Oh, okay. I’ve read some of your work. Pretty good stuff, Dr. Weaver. So, you say they won’t turn back. Tell us why,” the President commanded.
“It’s not because they fear revelation of what they’re up to. Their people don’t know, and won’t find out until Beijing tells them. The problem, as you know, is that they fear a potential economic collapse. If their economy goes south, sir, then you get a revolt of the masses, and that’s the one thing they really fear. They don’t see a way to avoid that other than getting rich, and the way for them to get rich is to seize the newly discovered Russian assets.”
