Li had served with distinction in China’s last major war, its invasion of Vietnam in February 1979. As a young captain, he’d commanded a company that was among the first units over the border. The war was not even an asterisk in the twentieth century’s bloody history, but Li had never forgotten it.
The Vietnamese had known the Chinese were coming. Their soldiers and militiamen were battle-hardened from a decade of war with the United States. China sent in a huge army, hundreds of thousands of soldiers. But its men were underequipped and unready, peasants who’d received only a few weeks of training before being sent to the border. Some could barely load their rifles.
Li’s company was in the vanguard of a division attacking Lao Cai, a town just south of the border. His unit came under constant fire from the Vietnamese militias. The ground was soft and spongy and the mines were everywhere. The Vietnamese especially liked simple explosives that the Americans called ‘toe poppers,’ pressure mines with just enough power to blow off a man’s foot. Making matters worse, Li’s only medic was killed by a sniper in the battle’s first hours. After that he’d had to leave injured men where they lay. Taking care of the wounded was a luxury the Chinese army couldn’t afford.
In the first two days of fighting, he’d lost fifty men, a third of his soldiers. But somehow he and Cao Se, his first lieutenant, kept his company together even as the units around them collapsed. Finally, facing the prospect of a devastating defeat, the People’s Liberation Army brought up heavy artillery. The big guns surprised the Vietnamese and turned towns near the border into rubble. By the time Li’s unit limped into Lao Cai, only dogs and amputees were left.
Three weeks later the Chinese pulled back across the border, proclaiming the invasion successful. They’d taught Vietnam a lesson, they said. Li had learned a few lessons himself. At first the suffering of his men had stunned him. But over the years, he reconsidered. Strategically, the war had put the Vietnamese in their place. Afterward they treated China with more respect. War ought to be avoided, but sometimes it was necessary, he thought.
For him, too, the war had been a success. The near-disaster in Vietnam frightened the People’s Liberation Army into professionalizing its officer corps. For the first time in decades, fighting skill, not ideological purity, became the most important factor behind promotions. The change helped Li. His abilities had been obvious from the first days of the Vietnam invasion. He intuitively knew how to position his soldiers, when to concentrate fire and when to disperse. He thumped other commanders in the war games at the National Defense University. He rose quickly. By 2004, he’d become chief of staff. Two years later, he was named defense minister and commander of the army.
Of course, skill only went so far. Li would never have become a minister if the others on the Standing Committee had doubted his loyalty. But they didn’t. To them, Li was the ultimate soldier, always following orders. In truth, as long as Li mouthed the right words, the Party’s leaders didn’t care if he believed in ‘socialism with a human face.’ They certainly didn’t. Being rich and powerful in China meant being part of the Party. So the Party’s leaders faithfully recited the ‘Eight Dos and Don’ts’ – ‘Know plain living and hard struggle, do not wallow in luxuries’ – and then rode limousines home to their mansions. The sayings were the equivalent of a fraternity’s secret handshake. By themselves, they meant nothing. But knowing them got you in.
Li preferred to be underestimated. Even when he joined the Standing Committee, the others didn’t view him as a political threat. After all, he hadn’t even succeeded in getting rich from his position. Besides ‘Old Bull,’ the liberals – those members of the elite who had profited the most from the new China – had another name for Li. They called him ‘Guard Dog,’ though never to his face.
But the liberals misunderstood Li. He was greedier than any of them, though not for money. Li wanted to prove himself the greatest of leaders, the savior of the Chinese nation, remembered eternally for his courage. In his dreams, he lay beside Mao in the massive crypt in Tiananmen Square. Every day thousands of Chinese lined up to glimpse his body. They shuffled by in awe, wishing they could bring him back. The lines grew until the crowds filled Tiananmen and poured into the streets of Beijing. But the people were so eager to see him that no one complained.
When he woke, Li never remembered his dreams. He never consciously realized how deeply he thirsted for glory. He didn’t understand his motives, and that made him dangerous indeed.
Sitting in his usual spot, two seats from the head of the table, Li lifted his crystal wineglass and studied the burgundy liquid inside. A Château Lafitte ’92, 10,000 yuan a bottle, $1,300 US. The men around him had gone through a half-case of the stuff tonight. They surely believed they’d earned it.
In May 1989, hundreds of thousands of students had filled Tiananmen – the great open square less than a mile from here, the spiritual heart of all China – to demand democracy. The Western reporters who covered the protests called that time the Beijing Spring. For a few weeks it seemed that China might move from dictatorship to freedom. After all, on the other side of the world, Communist regimes were falling peacefully.
But China wasn’t East Germany or Poland. China had gone through a century of upheaval so terrible that even World War II seemed mild. An invasion by Japan. A long, bloody civil war. The disastrous Great Leap Forward, which led to a famine that killed tens of millions of Chinese. The Cultural Revolution. The Chinese weren’t ready for more turmoil, not so soon. They hardly protested on June 4, 1989, when the men of Zhongnanhai brought in tanks to clear Tiananmen. Hundreds of protesters were killed that day in Beijing. The People’s Liberation Army? On June 4, only the last word was true.
The leaders of the Chinese Communist Party never admitted what they’d done in Tiananmen. Instead they offered their people an unspoken bargain. Don’t challenge us. In return we’ll let you drop the farce of socialism. ‘To get rich is glorious,’ Deng Xiaoping, at the time China’s paramount leader, famously said. ‘It doesn’t matter if the cat is black or white as long as it catches mice.’ Some people said now that those words had never actually crossed Deng’s lips. But the sentiment was real enough.
For two decades, rulers and ruled had stuck to the deal, and China had produced the greatest economic miracle in history. In the 1980s, China was a third-world country, poorer than India. Now it had the third-largest economy in the world, behind only the United States and Japan.
And yet . . . and yet. Under its glittery surface China’s economy had reached a dangerous tipping point, Li thought. The boom had given hundreds of millions of Chinese a decent standard of living. But it had left hundreds of millions more in the dust.
Li sipped his wine, the smoothest he’d ever tasted – 10,000 yuan a bottle. His father Hu had worked at a tire factory until his heart gave out on his fifty-second birthday. Hu hadn’t made 10,000 yuan in his entire life. He’d never owned a television or refrigerator or even a telephone. He’d saved for years to buy his most prized possession, a Flying Pigeon bicycle, a single-geared steel beast that weighed almost fifty pounds.
Yet Li never remembered his parents complaining. They’d never felt poor, since no one they knew was any better off. And they hardly needed money. The tire factory gave them a two-room apartment with a communal bathroom. They didn’t have much, but their lives were secure. They never had to worry that Hu would be fired or the factory would close. Such things simply didn’t happen.
Now, though, factories closed all the time. Real estate developers tore down the cluttered Beijing neighborhoods called hutongs, to build apartment buildings across the giant city. The apartment towers were cleaner than the hutongs. But the hutong families didn’t get to live in the new buildings. They were shipped to hovels on the outskirts of the city, beyond the Fifth Ring Road, where the capital’s wealthy wouldn’t see them.
Today, men like Li’s father knew they were poor. They couldn’t imagine the opulence of this room, or the private clubs i
n Beijing where the wealthy gathered. But they knew China had left them behind. Fewer and fewer of them were willing to accept their fate. All over China the pot was boiling up. In southwest China, farmers had attacked police stations over land seizures. In north China, coal miners had rioted to demand safety equipment after an explosion at a mine in Hebei killed 180 men.
Even worse, the economy wasn’t booming anymore. So far, the government had hidden the slowdown from the outside world. But Li knew the real numbers. Growth had slowed month after month, from ten percent to eight to five and now to three. And no one, not the economic minister or the governor of the Central Bank, could explain what was happening, not in words that made sense to Li. They said the economy needed more reform, not less.
But Li spent more time outside Zhongnanhai than the other senior leaders combined. He might not be an economist, but he had eyes. He saw old women with bowed heads begging for help, their clothes dirty, empty bowls between their hands. He saw the peasants lined up in Tiananmen to plead for work, even though the police beat them just for being there.
The poet Du Fu had written, 1,250 years earlier, ‘Within red gates, wine and meat rot, while on the street outside people starve.’ Dynasties crumbled when emperors forgot their subjects. Inside Zhongnanhai, life was sweeter than ever. The men around him imagined they could call in the tanks again if they needed to. But this time the rebels wouldn’t be students. They would be miners and peasants and factory workers. They would be men, not boys, and this time they would fight.
Li wouldn’t let that happen. He wouldn’t use the People’s Liberation Army, his army, against civilians. He would take control of the situation, not for his own glory, of course, but to save the nation from the greed of its rulers.
But taking control wouldn’t be easy. Li couldn’t openly challenge Zhang Fenshang, the economic minister and the most powerful man on the Standing Committee. Zhang was supposedly second-in-command, ranking behind the general secretary, Xu Xilan. In reality, Zhang was the most powerful man in China. Xu was eighty-two and feeble, a figurehead who ‘consulted’ Zhang before any important decision.
Together, Zhang and the other liberals – Li gritted his teeth to think of the word – held six seats on the nine-member committee. To defeat them, Li needed to outmaneuver them. If he could take control of the committee, the people would rally around him. The rich businessmen might protest. But eventually even they would understand that Li didn’t want to destroy them, just make them share some of their wealth.
Li knew he would have only one chance to take power. If he failed, he wouldn’t just lose his spot on the Standing Committee. At best, he would spend the rest of his years under house arrest. At worst, he would suffer a tragic accident, and his death would be announced to the people in somber tones.
No, he couldn’t fail. And he needed to move quickly, before the people grew so angry that even he couldn’t calm them. In the last few months, he’d put a plan together. And now, after his visit to Iran, he believed he’d found the key to making it work.
‘All warfare is based on deception,’ Sun Tzu, China’s most famous military strategist, had written 2,500 years earlier. Under normal circumstances, Zhang could easily defeat Li. But what if Zhang suddenly faced a threat beyond his control, a threat not from inside China but from outside?
Li knew his plan was dangerous. But not acting would be even more dangerous.
Dessert – a rich pear cake with ginger ice cream – was served, and the plates cleared. The waiters poured cognac. Then they disappeared, leaving the nine men at the table to the country’s business.
Zhang, sitting beside Xu, the general secretary, raised his glass. ‘To the glory of the new China.’
‘And to the people,’ Xu said. ‘To the wisdom of the Chinese people.’
‘Of course, Comrade Xu,’ Zhang said. ‘We must always serve the people.’
Li sipped from his snifter, feeling the glow of the golden liquid in his mouth. Cognac was one of his indulgences. A glass before bed made his sleep pleasant.
The Standing Committee met for the banquets once a month. The dinners always followed the same script. Only when the waiters had left the hall did business begin. Of course, the committee met in regular sessions several times a week, but the truly important decisions were made at this table – with no aides to overhear or record the sessions. Even in here, even speaking only to one another, committee members chose their words as carefully as Mafia dons on a phone line tapped by the FBI. Speaking too clearly signaled weakness, not strength.
‘Comrade Zhang,’ Xu said. ‘Please begin.’
‘The economic situation has not changed,’ Zhang said. ‘The transition period’ – what the liberals called the economy’s slowdown – ‘is continuing. But there’s no reason for concern. The will of the people is excellent. Business conditions are good.’
Zhang had said the same thing the month before, and the month before that. How much had Zhang stolen from the national treasury and hidden in banks in Singapore? Li wondered. How many bribes had he taken? Five hundred million yuan – $60 million? A billion yuan? Two billion? With money you are a dragon, with no money, a worm.
‘Then what is the problem?’ Xu said.
‘General Secretary,’ Zhang said, ‘just as a farmer must let a field lie fallow from time to time, the economy must slow occasionally before it grows again.’ Though he’d lived most of his life in Shanghai, Zhang liked to use farming metaphors with Xu, whose parents had been peasants. ‘We’re pruning the deadwood so saplings can prosper. If the young trees aren’t rising fast enough, we must prune more vigorously.’
To the men at the table, Zhang’s meaning was clear. The government should close more state-owned factories, like the tire plant where Li’s father had worked. Li couldn’t believe that Zhang had the audacity to propose more layoffs with so many people already jobless. But arguing openly with Zhang would be futile.
‘Yes,’ Xu said. ‘I see.’
‘I’ll propose a plan for the Congress next month’ –the annual Communist Party Congress, which would officially ratify the decisions these nine men made.
‘Does anyone else have thoughts on Comrade Zhang’s view?’ Xu said. Li held his tongue. Then Xu turned toward him.
‘Comrade General Li. How was your visit to Tehran?’
Now or never, Li thought. ‘Very productive, General Secretary.’ He outlined the oil-for-nuclear-help deal he’d discussed with the Iranian president. Li could see that he’d caught Zhang by surprise, as he’d intended.
‘Zhang, what do you think?’ Xu asked.
Zhang sipped his cognac, trying to buy time. Li could imagine his calculation. An open alliance against the United States would have enormous risks. On the other hand, a confrontation with America would buy time to right the economy. And Zhang didn’t want to appear as though he feared the United States.
Zhang looked at Li. ‘What’s your view, Comrade General?’
Zhang was hoping to force the responsibility for the decision back on Li. In doing so, Zhang had slipped into Li’s trap. Zhang had never before given up control on an important issue. He would find retaking it more difficult than he expected, Li thought.
‘My view, Comrade Zhang?’ he said. ‘Let’s seize this opportunity. The Iranians can give us leverage against the hegemonists’ – the Americans. ‘Our industries will benefit from a guaranteed supply of oil. And the Persians will be a new market for us. They see all that we’ve done. They can help us through the transition period. Anyway, why should we let the Americans decide what nations have certain weapons?’ – nuclear bombs. ‘The Persians don’t threaten us.’
‘And the Americans? What will they say?’
‘Let them talk,’ Li said. ‘Talk does not cook rice.’
‘It isn’t their talk that concerns me,’ Zhang said. ‘What if they misunderstand our peaceful intent?’
Li had to admit that Zhang could turn a phrase. Of course the United States would ‘misu
nderstand’ if China allied with Iran, America’s biggest enemy.
‘The hegemonists aren’t interested in any more wars.’
‘You’re certain.’
‘Nothing is certain, Comrade Zhang. But they are distracted now, and our army and navy are valiant.’
The table was silent when Li finished speaking, and he knew he’d won. They’d send him back to Tehran to finalize an agreement with Iran. For the first time since the end of the Cold War, the United States would face a challenge to its global dominance.
The Americans would want to respond. But they had their own problems, Li knew. The death of their North Korean spy had cost them their best intelligence on Pyongyang. The war in Iraq had sapped their army. They were on the defensive – and the public announcement of the Chinese/Iranian alliance would irritate them further. Like a wounded bear, they would lash out but with words, not actions. The American president would speak against the agreement, and that would irritate the men around him. No one in this room wanted advice from the United States on how China should conduct its affairs.
But neither Washington nor Beijing would expect the war of words to go any further. What no one at this table realized was that Li intended the agreement with Iran to be only the start of China’s confrontation with America.
‘It’s agreed, then?’ Li said. ‘We’ll accept the Iranian proposal?’
Nods around the table. By springing the deal on them this way, Li had given them little choice. Turning down the offer would have made them look weak, and none of these men wanted to look weak, least of all Zhang. If they’d known what he planned next, they would have been more cautious, but they didn’t.
Li raised his glass to his lips. Another step toward the power he’d been chasing for so long. He took a deep sip of cognac, filling his mouth with its sweetness.
THIRTEEN
‘NOW!’ HUGHLEY YELLED. ‘Now!’
Holding the frame of the juddering Black Hawk, Wells tugged on his pack: sixty-three pounds of ammunition, grenades, energy bars, water, bandages, and the other essentials of close combat.
The Ghost Agent Page 12
