by Clancy, Tom
Tam Li turned. One of the three men standing in the sharp sunlight was a vice admiral, his own handpicked chief of base security. A half hour before, this small, gray-haired man had been an ally.
“The prime minister has asked to see you,” the vice admiral said.
“Only me?”
“Yes,” the vice admiral replied.
The naval officer’s expression was stern save for his sad, guarded eyes. The vice admiral knew it was within Tam Li’s power to stop the investigation by taking the blame for all the misdeeds. He could also boot the responsibility back down the chain of command and take others with him.
Tam Li smiled. “There is no reason for him to see anyone else, is there?” the general asked.
“I would not know,” the vice admiral replied.
“Who will be running operations here?” Tam Li asked.
“Officially, that is no longer your concern. You have been relieved.”
“Unofficially?” Tam Li pressed. He did not move.
The vice admiral’s unhappy expression showed that he understood the choice. He could be stubborn and risk being named by the general. Or he could bend the rules of detention and tell the general what he wanted to know. In so doing, he would lose face in the eyes of the two security officers.
“Come with us, General,” the vice admiral replied.
Tam Li was pleased. The vice admiral still had a backbone. He was willing to risk his future to preserve his credibility as a commander. Perhaps he knew that the general would not seek to bring him down. Through the vice admiral at least the idea of Chinese supremacy would remain alive. If he would not undertake another operation like this one, he might inspire someone under him to try.
Tam Li left between the two security officers, the vice admiral leading the way through hallways the general once commanded. The general stood with his shoulders back, beaten but undefeated. No one saluted as he was walked through the compound to a waiting helicopter. Most of them probably had no idea what had happened. Perhaps they thought this was about Chou Shin’s airplane or some other high-level machination. Whatever they thought, the staff was doing what most people do in a time of crisis. They stayed clear of the event.
Mao had learned that successful revolutionaries have unyielding allies. Defeated revolutionaries have unyielding quarantine. This was not the kind of fallout Tam Li had expected, but he would take the heat. He would stand trial and describe what he had done and why. In a land of over a billion souls, someone would hear.
Someone would continue what he had begun.
Or rather what someone else had begun, he thought, smiling with pride. Those bold and curious ancients who, like him, had used explosives to announce a Chinese presence on the world stage.
SIXTY-ONE
Beijing, China Friday, 10:00 A.M.
The state-run newspapers and telecasts said very little about the loss of the Chinese rocket. They reported that there had been an accident at Xichang involving “foreign-built technology” but offered little elaboration.
It was typical of China, Hood thought. Every failure was easy to hide and absorb because every step forward was tentative, uncertain, almost apologetic. Even if Tam Li had succeeded in getting his confrontation with Taiwan, even if he had enjoyed a personal bump in power, he might not have gotten the coup he apparently sought. After centuries of war and upheaval, the giant nation had become entropic. Change would be slow and prompted by outside economic investment, the spread of technology to the remote farms and mountains, the glacial improvement in education and the quality of life. China probably would not change dramatically in Hood’s lifetime.
Hood wondered if that was also true of Anita.
The prime minister’s daughter had come to the embassy to see him off. She had been there before, at official receptions, but never without her father. Hood saw her in the downstairs library. Anita was standing in the center of the room. She was dressed conservatively in a black skirt and white blouse. She turned when he entered. The big, open smile on her face surprised him.
“Well, that’s nice to see,” Hood said.
“What is?”
“Your smile,” he replied.
“Oh,” she said self-consciously as she frowned her way into a more neutral expression. “Is this better?”
“You didn’t have to do that. I liked it,” Hood said. He motioned toward the high walls lined with leather-bound volumes and even occasional scrolls tucked in cylindrical cases. “This is obviously your idea of heaven.”
“If I believed in heaven, it would be,” she said.
She was looking directly at Hood when she said that. He wondered if he had just made a big foot-in-mouth faux pas. This woman did risk incineration to save him, after all.
“Did you sleep well?” she asked.
“Like Rip Van Winkle,” he replied as he reached her side.
“I’m glad to hear that.”
“You?”
“The same,” she said. “My father is sorry he could not be here.”
“I am sure today will be a busy day,” Hood said.
“He barely slept last night,” Anita said. “But it was a good insomnia, if there can be such a thing. He was more energized than I have seen him in a long time.”
“I assume there will be a trial,” Hood said.
“There will be hearings, but I suspect they will be private. My father does not want to give Tam Li a forum.”
“Understandable,” Hood said.
“Do you think so?” Anita asked. “I would have expected you to be an advocate for free speech.”
“I don’t think a government official should be allowed to justify the lies he told and the murders he authorized to send his nation into a reckless and lawless war,” Hood said.
“I am glad to see that we agree,” Anita said.
“If we had the time, we would probably find we agree on a great deal,” Hood told her.
“By the way, my father asked me to tell you that he attempted to thank General Rodgers and your other associates yesterday,” Anita said. “But they seem to have disappeared.”
“Mike left right away on a Lufthansa flight,” Hood told her. “He called and told me they had insurance matters to discuss immediately back in the States.”
“I see. And the others? The young men and women?”
“I suppose they went back to work.”
“At the space complex?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” Hood replied. “I did not have time to speak with them.”
Unlike the other night, Anita let the interrogation rest. She had obviously realized there was more to be gained by long-term trust than short-term pressure. She did a little turn around the library. “I like that story very much,” she said.
“Which one?” Hood asked.
“Rip Van Winkle. I like all of Washington Irving, in fact. Now there is an author who captured the real American. Not jingoistic, militaristic ideologues.”
“What is your definition of ‘the real American’?” Hood asked.
“The tough but good-hearted innocent,” she said. “You are that, I think.”
“Is that a good thing?” Hood asked. He was not sure that it had been a compliment, entirely.
“It is very good. Innocence is a clean slate,” she replied. “It is open and receptive to outside ideas. The toughness makes it discretionary. It only allows ideas that are enriching.”
“There is one place where the author may have captured something more universal than that,” Hood said.
Anita’s smile returned. “Waking up from a long slumber and expecting the world to be the same,” she said.
Hood had been formulating an answer more or less along those lines. Her smart and self-aware response stopped his thought process dead. There was nothing he could add to that except an impressed little smile.
“China has indeed been internally focused for many, many years,” she said. “But we do not expect the world to stay still. We expect to
learn from the mistakes of others. My father taught me that all of civilization is still relatively young, composed of creatures who are closer to the caves than to the heavens. He believes that if we move too quickly we risk making catastrophic errors. He is correct. Look at what happened yesterday. Our rush to embrace the technology of other nations, to gain scientific parity, nearly resulted in disaster.”
Hood’s smile broadened. “I was not alluding to China,” he said.
Anita was still for a moment, and then her pretty face flushed. Now she was the speechless one.
“I’m sorry,” Hood said. “I did not mean to embarrass you.”
“I believe you did,” she said, still flustered.
“Absolutely not,” he assured her. “You heard the thunder. You heard the sound of little men playing duckpins, but you did not rise with uncertainty or confusion. You jumped up. You saved my life.”
The woman relaxed somewhat. “I thought you meant—”
“That you are a bearded old man with sore knees?”
“That I am living in a political, academic, and cultural cocoon.” She smiled.
“Anita, the chances are very good I would never even have used all those words in one sentence.”
“You’re being modest, which is one of the things I’ve come to admire about you,” Anita said. “Though you were very wrong about one thing. It was ninepins.”
“Excuse me?”
“The little men in Rip Van Winkle were playing ninepins, not duckpins,” Anita informed him.
Hood smiled as modest a smile as he could muster. “I have a suggestion. When you can get away for a week or so, why don’t you come to America. We can take a drive to the Hudson Valley where Washington Irving wrote, see if there are pins of any kind lying around in the countryside.”
“I would like that,” she said.
“I promise there will be fewer fireworks,” Hood said.
“Why? Fireworks can be nice,” she said.
“Then you should come to America on the Fourth of July,” Hood said.
“I was not alluding to pyrotechnics,” Anita said over her shoulder as she walked toward the door.
Now it was Hood’s turn to blush. He did not follow her out but waited. He would not have known what to say after that. Which was almost certainly what the woman had intended.
Hood did not feel too bad, however. Anita did say the ideal American was innocent.
He glanced at his watch and realized he was late. There was a car waiting to take him to the airport. Like Rodgers, Hood would be flying commercial.
That was one good thing about a government job. It was a bureaucracy. Unlike private industry, accountability did not have to be immediate. Which was a good thing. Because right now, a comfortable seat and a few mindless DVDs sounded like a great idea before tackling his mission report for the president.
SIXTY-TWO
Washington, D.C. Friday, 10:22 A.M.
The phone call from General Raleigh Carew was not unexpected. His message, however, was not at all what General Carrie had anticipated. She suspected it would not be good when the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff called on her private, secure cell phone rather than on the office phone. Op-Center would have no record of the call being received.
“He won,” Chairman Carew said unhappily. “But that is not what bothers me the most.”
By “he,” General Carrie assumed Carew meant Paul Hood and, by extension, the president.
“He defused this situation with the help of one of your people and with your field team,” the chairman went on. “He assembled an ad hoc intelligence group that, in fact, was simply his old team burning through overhead provided by others. Do you understand what I am saying?”
“Not entirely,” Carrie admitted.
“The president has a personal crisis management czar now,” Carew said. “This individual has no staff and, if we can control the funding, he will never have much of one. So what did he do? He successfully, I would say brilliantly, outsourced this mission. He cannibalized from you, from Unexus, and from the bloody damn Chinese.”
“Mr. Chairman, with respect, I think you are overreacting to a singular situation,” Carrie said. “Our marines were on site in Xichang, positioned to act independently if they had to. General Rodgers sent them to help Paul Hood, who was already at ground zero for the attack—”
“According to the report I just read from Paul Hood, your man Bob Herbert relayed the SOS to Mike Rodgers.”
“He did that, yes,” Carrie agreed. “Are you saying we should have left Hood out there without backup?”
“The mission should have come first,” Carew said.
“I’m sorry, but I believe it did. I read the same report, Mr. Chairman. We appear to have stopped an attack against Taiwan.”
“That is speculation.”
“Taipei reported that radar had picked up an unusually high level of PLA activity in the region.”
“Which was terminated by Zhuhai command,” Carew said. “We don’t know what they were planning. That is what intelligence is for, Morgan. And right now we have lost four sources for that. Your undercover marines were sent to China as floaters. Their specific mission in this instance was to protect a satellite from being destroyed. The intelligence Mr. Herbert possessed should have gone to the team leader so he could determine a course of action. It should not have gone to Paul Hood.”
Carew practically spat the name. Carrie understood now why he had not said it before.
“The marines and Hood were in the same place,” Carrie said. “And it was General Rodgers who obtained the intelligence from a Chinese source.”
“You are missing my point,” Carew said sternly. “The marines were drawn into a mission that was designed and executed by Paul Hood. Mr. Hood was replaced because he has never followed a playbook. He ran Op-Center based on cronyism, on questionable international interests and alliances, and used civilian attitudes on military operations. His approach caused dozens of military casualties.”
“I am not a fan of Mr. Hood,” Carrie said. “But in fairness, he also defused numerous international crises.”
“Mike Rodgers did that. Colonel Brett August did that. Lieutenant Colonel Charlie Squires did that. They were the men in the field, improvising their way through situations in which Hood had placed them. Our boys signed on to protect the United States of America. Instead, they have given their lives to protect India, Japan, and Russia. We are not the intelligence police of the world, Morgan.”
She could not disagree with that assessment. Years before Homeland Security was given the job of defusing domestic crises, that had been the chartered task of Op-Center—the National Crisis Management Center.
“Hood did his reckless seat-of-the-pants thing again in Xichang,” Carew said. “No one was consulted, no one gave him any parameters. And he dragged your people into it. The press and the president look at the gains. They crow about how we saved lives, created an international bond. I look at the debits. I don’t care about the rocket, I don’t give a damn about the prime minister, and I am not concerned about what would have been a very short pissing match in the Taiwan Strait. In fact, I might have gone along with it.”
“An air and sea battle that we would have been committed to be part of?” Carrie said.
“It would not have lasted long enough for us to do much,” Carew said. “I’ve read the file on General Tam Li. He was a progressive, a black market capitalist. He got rid of Chou Shin, a hard-line Communist who was no friend of ours. He apparently blew up a boat in Charleston and a nightclub in Taipei. Maybe Tam Li should have become the next prime minister. He sounds like someone we could have dealt with.”
General Carrie was trying to figure out where Carew was going. A rant like this did not come without a price.
“The lost political landscape is not for me to say,” the chairman went on. “I am sure that Chinese security forces are reviewing tapes of the Xichang facility, looking to ID the team. What c
oncerns me is that four highly trained intelligence operatives will have to be withdrawn.”
Carrie did not know how to respond. She saw his point. The team had been compromised looking out for Chinese interests involving a satellite built by a largely European conglomerate. The gain for the United States was peripheral and hazy.
“Here’s the bottom line,” Carew went on, his tone a little softer now. “My vision for Op-Center is to make it larger and more effective. You know that, and I know you share that vision. Otherwise you would still be at G2. But I cannot get you the budget you need when your team makes someone else look good. Not when this man, Paul Hood, gives new meaning to the term Op—‘one person.’ I want Op-Center to have a good relationship with the other intelligence organizations as long as it does not compromise your mission or your charter, which is to defuse crises that affect this nation.”
“I understand,” Carrie replied.
“This is not about me, and it is not about you. It is about the uniforms we wear and the unique bond that gives us to the nation they represent.”
“I understand that, too.”
“I would like to see Mr. Herbert dismissed,” Carew said.
Carrie was surprised by the request. “Mr. Chairman, I believe I can make him understand—”
“That’s the point, isn’t it?” Carew said. “You can’t afford to have people there who require convincing. I’ve already spoken with the new topkick at G2. You can take whoever you want as an interim intelligence director while you search for a permanent replacement.”
Carrie believed the chairman was overreacting. But she shared his vision for Op-Center and, while she could refuse to dismiss Herbert, there was something to be gained by making an object lesson of the intelligence chief. The NCMC could not tolerate loose cannons. They could not accommodate those with divided loyalties.
The general promised to take care of it and hung up. She called Liz Gordon first to tell her what was going to happen and to ask her advice on handling Herbert. The psychologist had known him for many years and had written nearly a dozen psych profiles of the man. In situations where post-traumatic stress could apply—the loss of his wife and his legs in Beirut—a yearly overview was mandatory.
