China Dolls

by Rob Wood

  Partridge delivered conversational lines like a teletype. “First: The captain passes along his congratulations to one and all. Our guests were well taken care of. I think we showed them what the Vinson can do—in this very unique international exchange. And that clearly was last night’s first objective.

  “Now.” Said Partridge, “I’m interested in what any of you may have gleaned from conversations directly with the guests . . . or overheard as they talked to each other. We’ll make this brief, but gathering intelligence is clearly within our purview.

  “Simmonds,” he said addressing a lanky officer in thick-rimmed glasses, we’ll begin with you.”

  Simmonds sat imperceptibly straighter in his chair. “Yes sir, thank you sir. Two guests, including the colonel—what’s his name, Cao?—told me with pride that China’s first aircraft carrier, currently in the Dalian shipyard, will be ready for sea trials this year, sir.”

  “That would be the retrofit on the old hulk they brought in piece by piece from the Ukraine,” put in Purdy. “They paid $20 million for it. They claimed it was to be a floating casino.”

  “Well, it’s not,” said the XO. “It’s a flat top. Probably best used as a trainer. I wouldn’t go to war with that baby. But it’s interesting that their brass isn’t pretending anymore. And if the wraps are off, it’s a sure sign it won’t take ‘em long to drop the training wheels and have real capability. Next. . .”

  He went around the table, reminding his people that he wasn’t after chatter—just need-to-know material.

  “That’s it,” he said at last. “Good job, people. Ensign Botti—pass out the gifts. Then it’s duty station and back to normal operations on what is first and foremost a warship—not a nightclub. And one more thing. . . . Cochrane.

  “Cochrane!” Partridge fixed her with an icy stare from under his bushy gray eyebrows. “What is this?” He gestured at the ebony, ivory and gold object in front of him.

  “That would be a ruyi, sir.” She hesitated, then determined that a fuller explanation was permitted . . . and expected.

  “It is always in the shape of a flat S and made from any number of valuable materials. The ruyi, it is said, was born out of a common household article—the back scratcher. In that way it created a sense of well-being. Gradually, it became a purely ornamental object. On festive occasions, it was presented as a gift to important nobles—including the emperor.

  “The last emperor, in fact, was fond of using his to point at his concubine of choice for the evening. Yours, sir, with its carved ivory is especially beautiful. The carving invariably contains good wishes for vigor in old age.”

  The XO colored slightly.

  “The gift is well meant, sir.”

  “Dis-missed,” Partridge said curtly.

  Cochrane caught up to Purdy as they left the meeting. “Like you said, I know it’s not Christmas, but it might be fun to open our presents together.” She had sensed Purdy was cooler toward her since the cocktail reception, and she wanted to do something about it.

  “Sure,” he said. “Let’s find a place in the rec room.”

  They headed for two chairs in the corner. Several of the China Team had had the same idea, and as Cochrane and Purdy passed by, they smiled and held up their new treasures: elaborate scenes from Chinese opera cut from whisper thin paper, discs of lustrous green jade—amulets of good fortune—and elaborately embroidered silk balls from the Guangxi Zhuang region.

  Cochrane and Purdy settled in and placed their gifts in front of them. Both were wrapped in red. Both were identical in size.

  “You first,” said Cochrane.

  “Thanks,” he smiled. “At home, I was the oldest, so I always had to go last.”

  “And where’s home?”

  “Fostoria, Ohio. Farm belt town. It was a big deal until the railroad moved out—rail isn’t what it used to be. Dad sold insurance. I have two brothers. The Navy was my ticket to a good education and seeing things we didn’t have in Ohio.”

  “And the interest in food?”

  “Oh, I suppose that represents a break from growing up with macaroni and cheese, tube steak, and meatloaf. And, like I said, the technology interests me.”

  Purdy carefully cut the wrapping paper with his fingernail and removed a rectangular box, upholstered in padded silk. It had a brass clasp, delicately wrought.

  “Open it,” urged Cochrane in a whisper.

  Purdy didn’t need all that much urging. He withdrew a heavy scroll and unfurled it. It was some 18 inches long. A rectangle in the center was painted with a scene showing a man astride a proud, raw-boned stallion. The man’s cloak whipped around him in the wind. There was a fierce determination about both horse and rider. Running down the right-hand side was a row of beautifully executed Chinese characters.

  “Jing zhang bao guo,” read Purdy. “’Serve the country loyally.’ Say, isn’t that what their president Hu Jintao is always going on about?”

  “Yeah, stuff like that. That’s ‘PR from the PLA.’ But this is different. That’s a quote from Yue Fei, the warrior poet of the Song Dynasty. He was a pretty admirable character. Maybe someone thinks you are, too.”

  Purdy hesitated, turning over something in his mind. “That would be nice,” he said and left it at that. “Your turn.”

  Cochrane tore into her package. She just wasn’t as fastidious as Purdy. Out came another silk covered box, padded, with elaborate brass clasp.

  “Same thing,” she said, a little chagrined.

  “Well, let’s see.”

  Cochrane removed another scroll and unrolled it. It had a simple block of characters in the center, drawn in what seemed a swift, determined hand.

  “Cochrane. . .” Purdy moved forward; his head close to hers for a better look. “Cochrane,” he said, “that’s not the Chinese I know.”

  “No, it’s not,” she said very slowly.

  “Can you read it?”

  “Oh, yeah.”

  “What’s it say?”

  “It says, ‘We believe highly radioactive material taken from crippled Daiichi nuclear plant. Terrorists. Destination: U.S.A.”

  6

  FIFTY KILOGRAMS

  “Frankly, Cochrane, I’m nonplussed.” XO Brian Partridge was tapping his pencil furiously on the desk. “This thing is on the knife edge of crackpot. Who is ‘We?’ Who sends a terrorist message on a scroll? And why to you? Where’s the credibility? How about a little hard evidence here!”

  He was not a man to equivocate, and he’d corralled select China Team members ASAP. He wanted answers. Or at least plausible scenarios.

  “I have a response to some of the issues,” Cochrane began.

  “First things first,” interrupted Simmonds. “Do we know, really, whom the gifts are from? They were screened when coming aboard. So, we knew they were safe. All the signs pointed to thank-you gifts. But from whom? It was my understanding that they were labeled only, ‘from the people of China.’ I assumed . . .”

  “Right,” said the XO. “So, the question becomes who would have reason to do this?”

  “Reason and means, sir,” said Cochrane. “Everyone received gifts. A lot of moola was laid out for those trinkets, when you think about it.”

  “Look at who was on the guest list,” said Purdy. “Consular staff, government dignitaries, the military, even business execs . . .”

  “Now, you’re getting warmer,” said Cochrane.

  “You’ve obviously got a theory,” said the XO. “Let’s hear it.”

  “Lily Zhang.”

  “The actress?”

  “The businesswoman,” Cochrane corrected him. “True, she is one of Hong Kong’s most sought after actresses, but she has been the beneficiary of a lot of the nascent capitalism of the last ten years. She’s got forest lands in a country that’s running out of trees. She’s into green technology in a country that desperately wants to cut coal consumption. When they opened the Shanghai stock exchange to IPOs, Lily Zhang was there. And real estate?
My God, given the bubble in prices lately, that alone would make her one of the richest single investors in an economy which, as you know, averages 9 to 10 percent growth per year.”

  “And she just happens to get wind of a terrorist plot?” Simmonds was clearly unconvinced.

  “Just consider,” said Purdy, “if she is as connected as Cochrane suggests, such a person would be likely to have a highly developed business intelligence network working for her. That would be true in the West. And here they play on a bigger scale—and they fight bare-knuckled.”

  “What’s her motivation?”

  “Well,” Purdy said, “First there’s her interest in business: pairing U.S. high-tech products with what she hopes will be a growing middle class in China. In addition, I find she has some, well, romantic notions about Middle America.”

  “Like life in Fostoria, Ohio?” Cochrane raised an eyebrow.

  ‘Notions of enterprise, self-determination, family-centered values. These can be the same across cultures, can’t they?” returned Purdy. “She is something of an American fan, hoping one day for the freedoms one associates with the West. She knows the story of Rockefeller, Buffett and Gates. Heck, she even knows baseball—thinks the Cleveland Indians are something wonderful. You know, she always wanted to throw a good curve ball, but her hands were too small.”

  “And how do you know these tidbits of information?” asked the XO.

  “We talked a little last night.”

  “Only a little?” Cochrane shot him a sarcastic glance. “Actually, I’m prepared to credit the pro-democracy characterization Purdy sketches out, although he may have been listening with his heart as much as his ears. She’s a beautiful woman.”

  “They say she’s charmed half the heads of state in the Asian Pacific Economic Council.”

  “We’re running off topic here,” cautioned the XO.

  “Which is motivation,” put in Simmonds. “Why would a Chinese actress—businesswoman—whatever . . . why would she run any sort of risk to warn us of a terrorist plot?”

  “Well, first of all, she’s not Chinese,” said Cochrane.

  “What?” What?” The exclamations popped off around the room like echoes off a canyon wall.

  “She’s not Chinese!” sputtered Simmonds. “Man, this is tougher to take than thinking of her throwing curve balls for the Indians.”

  “She’s from Xinjiang,” said Cochrane.

  “That’s China’s western-most province, which makes her, ipso facto, Chinese!” Simmonds had the air of the frustrated teacher who thinks, “I can explain it to you, but I can’t understand it for you.”

  “In fact,” replied Cochrane coolly, many of the people in this province do not think of themselves as Chinese. They long for independence. There is a well-established separatist underground. And that, as much as anything, could be the source of Zhang’s information.”

  “I’m not the China expert here,” said XO Partridge, “run through this independence movement analysis for me.”

  “The people of Xinjiang trace their roots back to a time when the area was independent from China. And that, by the way, is fairly recent. Their language, customs, and beliefs have much more to do with the non-Chinese countries across the western border. That’s true even of their DNA. Heck, many of them don’t look oriental; they look Western.”

  “I assumed that was the result of this cosmetic surgery that’s now so fashionable among certain elites,” said Partridge.

  “Not in her case,” said Cochrane. “The looks are natural. Her language ability was developed by missionaries. Not so natural. Kind of stilted. That left her with a curiosity, though not a mastery, of American idioms. Then, of course, there was her work in theater and films. She worked in Hong Kong, but the standard was Hollywood. So, of course, she toyed with American idioms—and American values. I can say this: her heart is fiercely independent.”

  “Her heart?” said Purdy with raised eyebrows. “Did you two talk a little last night?”

  “A little.”

  “Sounds like Lily Zhang knows how to ‘work the room,’” said Partridge.

  “She was frank about her concern for the religious minority from Xinjiang,” said Cochrane. “They’re called the Uighurs. It wouldn’t be a stretch to say she favors independence, though she probably views that as a pipedream. The Uighurs are Muslims. Their top echelon is well aware that after 9/11 there was an upswing in anti-Muslim sentiment in the U.S. They feel that this is an obstacle to establishing sympathy for their cause among normally pro-democratic Americans—people who could help them with money or diplomatic influence. Zhang may be reaching out with this message, and taking the attendant risks of discovery, because she wants the Xinjiang movement to be seen in a compassionate, pro-U.S. light.”

  “Anything else?’ asked Partridge.

  “I shared . . . . ” Cochrane hesitated. “I shared some of my personal data that wouldn’t necessarily show up on a routine bio. I do hope for a life outside of assistance to the Navy, you know. I think that may explain why she sent the message to me.”

  “Because you’re suddenly BFF?”

  “Because I read nushu. It was the subject of one of my early papers, The Secret Rhetoric of Women. Nushu was a writing style developed in part of China in the 19th century. It was used and read only by women. Women who wanted to speak in secret of love affairs, business affairs, government affairs. . . anything that they may wish to influence at a time when society had relegated them to a secondary status.

  “Lily Zhang has mastered it. Her message to me was from one woman to another—just like the old days.”

  “The message to Cochrane was written in nushu,” said Purdy. “I think it was dashed off quickly by . . . possibly by Zhang . . . and would pass for Chinese at a glance. That is, if anyone had chosen her parcel for inspection from among the many that were shipped aboard. Nushu came to light in the 1960s. The Communist government suspected at first that it was tied to international espionage. It wasn’t. And interest in the language dropped right off the radar screen.”

  “There’s a persistent cultural bias against women in China,” said Cochrane. “They are truly second-class citizens. The best jobs go to men. So does the influence. No woman, for example, is part of the inner Communist Party committee. It’s in the nature of Chinese men to be dismissive of feminine things, including nushu.”

  “So, we’ve identified a possible author of the ‘nushu message’ . . . and a possible motive,” reflected Partridge. “Let’s talk about the credibility of the threat.”

  “That’s the part of this whole business that is most troubling—and convincing—to me,” said Simmonds. “Daiichi was a mess. No sound crisis management. Communication with the public was sporadic and confused—an accurate reflection, I think, of the conditions on the ground.

  “My God, there weren’t even any sensors! When the reactor went into meltdown, they ran around in a little white Toyota to get readings from hand-held gear. The workers weren’t wearing proper suits with dosimeters. In some cases, they were groping their way around in the pitch-dark with radioactive water up to their ankles. The manpower there is all subcontracted and sub-subcontracted. Could something have been stolen? Is the Pope a Catholic?”

  “There was radioactive material everywhere there,” said Purdy. “And not just house and garden variety stuff. Daiichi reactor number 3 used mixed oxide or MOX fuel rods. MOX contains enough plutonium to be very dangerous. When we planned for MOX fuel at the Savannah River power plant, the excess plutonium was to be locked in molten glass logs in a fail-safe repository. Not the case at Daiichi.”

  “So,” said XO Partridge, “there’s a real possibility something nasty could have been taken—and that theft was undetected in the chaos there. How much are we talking about?”

  Purdy thought for a moment and said, “Less than 50 kilograms could . . .”

  7

  WHO? WHAT? WHERE?

  “Less than 50 kilograms—the amount that wo
uld fit in a suitcase—could make a simple gun-type nuclear bomb.” Simon Raj peered over the half-rimmed glasses he habitually wore. At this moment, he wanted to look Lily right in the eye. “A bomb like the Americans used at Nagasaki could be made with as little as 6 kilograms of plutonium—if you knew what you were doing.”

  Lily thought of Raj as tech support. He was part Indian, part Dayak from east Malaysia. He’d been educated in Kuala Lumpur and India. And, he was a newly acquired asset—part of the arms race with the PLA.

  In 1997 and again in 2009, Xinjiang rebels had lost badly to the Chinese, outmanned and technologically outgunned. The Chinese hacked Xinjiang computers and tapped Uighur phones. They’d even compromised telecommunications in the parts of India where Lily liked to shop for guns and gadgets.

  During the uprisings, the rebels were logistically handicapped because China simply shut off cellphone towers; screened e-mail, forbid mass meetings, and generally disrupted communications options.

  Simon Raj, who knew hardware and arms vendors in Mumbai, Seoul, Taiwan, and Moscow, was helping Lily to level the playing field. He glanced around her Beijing high-rise carefully. And it wasn’t because he had an eye for Ligne Roset high-fashion French furniture.

  “Should we be having this conversation here?”

  “You’re the expert on surveillance. Wherever I go, you’re responsible for sweeping for bugs. You’d know better than I whether this site is compromised.”

  “I’m just thinking about the windows. I could be seen.”

  “No doubt you’ve already been seen. You’re just another in a very long line of actors, writers, directors, decorators, musicians, and investors I’ve entertained here. I take it for granted that we’re in a fishbowl, but you’ll note that my desk and chairs do not directly face the windows, so even the best lip-reader will be frustrated.

  “It’s just that Cao’s here all the time. Or so they say. He once told the Daily Mirror that he knows your condo intimately.”

  “I like hiding things in plain sight. And believe me, Cao is nowhere near as intimate as he would like to be. I just keep him around because he might be useful. For example, now. The Daiichi material—could he stop it from being smuggled? Could we stop it?”