Chapter 35
Breaking News
Shit,” Ryan observed quietly when Murray handed him the fax from Moscow. ”Shit!” he added on further reflection. ”Is this for real?”
“We think so, Jack,” the FBI Director confirmed. He and Ryan went back more than ten years, and so he was able to use the first name. He filled in a few facts. “Our boy Reilly, he’s an OC expert, that’s why we sent him over there, but he has FCI experience, too, also in the New York office. He’s good, Jack,” Murray assured his President. “He’s going places. He’s established a very good working relationship with the local cops—helped them out on some investigations, held their hands, like we do with local cops over here, y’know?”
“And?”
“And this looks gold-plated, Jack. Somebody tried to put a hit on Sergey Nikolay’ch, and it looks as though it was an agency of the Chinese government.”
“Jesus. Rogue operation?”
“If so, we’ll find out when some Chinese minister dies of a sudden cerebral hemorrhage—induced by a bullet in the back of the head,” Murray told the President.
“Has Ed Foley seen this yet?”
“I called it in, and sent the fax over. So, yeah, he’s seen it.”
“Pat?” Ryan turned to the Attorney General, the smartest lawyer Ryan had yet met, and that included all of his Supreme Court appointees.
“Mr. President, this is a stunning revelation, again, if we assume it’s true, and not some sort of false-flag provocation, or a play by the Russians to make something happen—problem is, I can’t see the rationale for such a thing. We appear to be faced with something that’s too crazy to be true, and too crazy to be false as well. I’ve worked foreign counterintelligence operations for a long time. I’ve never seen nothing like this before. We’ve always had an understanding with the Russians that they wouldn’t hit anybody in Washington, and we wouldn’t hit anybody in Moscow, and to the best of my knowledge that agreement was never violated by either side. But this thing here. If it’s real, it’s tantamount to an act of war. That doesn’t seem like a very prudent thing for the Chinese to do either, does it?”
POTUS looked up from the fax. “It says here that your guy Reilly turned the connection with the Chinese ... ?”
“Keep reading,” Murray told him. “He was there during a surveillance and just kinda volunteered his services, and—bingo.”
“But can the Chinese really be this crazy...” Ryan’s voice trailed off. “This isn’t the Russians messing with our heads?” he asked.
“What would be the rationale behind that?” Martin asked. “If there is one, I don’t see it.”
“Guys, nobody is this crazy!” POTUS nearly exploded. It was penetrating all the way into his mind now. The world wasn’t rational yet.
“Again, sir, that’s something you’re better equipped to evaluate than we are,” Martin observed. It had the effect of calming Jack down a few notches.
“All the time I spent at Langley, I saw a lot of strange material, but this one really takes the prize.”
“What do we know about the Chinese?” Murray asked, expecting to hear a reply along the lines of jack shit, because the Bureau had not experienced conspicuous success in its efforts to penetrate Chinese intelligence operations in America, and figured that the Agency had the same problem and for much the same reason—Americans of Chinese ethnicity weren’t thick in government service. But instead he saw that President Ryan instantly adopted a guarded look and said nothing. Murray had interviewed thousands of people during his career and along the way had picked up the ability to read minds a little bit. He read Ryan’s right then and wondered about what he saw there.
“Not enough, Dan. Not enough,” Ryan replied tardily. His mind was still churning over this report. Pat Martin had put it right. It was too crazy to be true, and too crazy to be false. He needed the Foleys to go over this for him, and it was probably time to get Professor Weaver down from Brown University, assuming Ed and Mary Pat wouldn’t throw a complete hissy-fit over letting him into both SORGE and this FBI bombshell. SWORDSMAN wasn’t sure of much right now, but he was sure that he needed to figure this stuff out, and do it damned fast. American relations with China had just gone down the shitter, and now he had information to suggest they were making a direct attack on the Russian government. Ryan looked up at his guests. “Thanks for this, guys. If you have anything else to tell me, let me know quick as you can. I have to ponder this one.”
“Yeah, I believe it, Jack. I’ve told Reilly to offer all the assistance he can and report back. They know he’s doing that, of course. So, your pal Golovko wants you to know this one. How you handle that one’s up to you, I suppose.”
“Yeah, I get all the simple calls.” Jack managed a smile. The worst part was the inability to talk things over with people in a timely way. Things like this weren’t for the telephone. You wanted to see a guy’s face and body language when you picked his brain—her brain, in MP’s case—on a topic like this one. He hoped George Weaver was as smart as everyone said. Right now he needed a witch.
The new security pass was entirely different from his old SDI one, and he was heading for a different Pentagon office. This was the Navy section of the Pentagon. You could tell by all the blue suits and serious looks. Each of the uniformed services had a different corporate mentality. In the U.S. Army, everyone was from Georgia. In the Air Force, they were all from southern California. In the Navy, they all seemed to be swamp Yankees, and so it was here in the Aegis Program Office.
Gregory had spent most of the morning with a couple of serious commander-rank officers who seemed smart enough, though both were praying aloud to get the hell back on a ship and out to sea, just as Army officers always wanted to get back out in the field where there was mud to put on your boots and you had to dig a hole to piss in—but that’s where the soldiers were, and any officer worth his salt wanted to be where the soldiers were. For sailors, Gregory imagined, it was saltwater and fish, and probably better food than the MREs inflicted on the guys in BDUs.
But from his conversations with the squids, he’d learned much of what he’d already known. The Aegis radar/missile system had been developed to deal with the Russian airplane and cruise-missile threat to the Navy’s aircraft carriers. It entailed a superb phased-array radar called the SPY and a fair-to-middlin’ surface-to-air missile originally called the Standard Missile, because, Gregory imagined, it was the only one the Navy had. The Standard had evolved from the SM-1 to the SM-2, actually called the SM-2-MR because it was a “medium-range” missile instead of an ER, or extended-range, one, which had a booster stage to kick it out of the ships’ launch cells a little faster and farther. There were about two hundred of the ER versions sitting in various storage sheds for the Atlantic and Pacific fleets, because full production had never been approved—because, somebody thought, the SM-2-ER might violate the 1972 AntiBallistic Missile Treaty, which had, however, been signed with a country called the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, which country, of course, no longer existed. But after the 1991 war in the Persian Gulf, the Navy had looked at using the Standard Missile and Aegis system that shot it off against theater-missile threats like the Iraqi Scud. During that war, Aegis ships had actually been deployed into Saudi and other Gulf ports to protect them against the ballistic inbounds, but no missiles had actually been aimed that way, and so the system had never been combat-tested. Instead, Aegis ships periodically sailed out to Kwajalein Atoll, where their theater-missile capabilities were tested against ballistic target drones, and where, most of the time, they worked. But that wasn’t quite the same, Gregory saw. An ICBM reentry vehicle had a maximum speed of about seventeen thousand miles per hour, or twenty-five thousand feet per second, which was almost ten times the speed of a rifle bullet.
The problem here was, oddly enough, one of both hardware and software. The SM-2-ER-Block-IV missile had indeed been designed with a ballistic target in mind, to the point that its terminal guidance system was infrared. You could, theoretically, stealth an RV against radar, but anything plunging through the atmosphere at Mach 15-plus would heat up to the temperature of molten steel. He’d seen Minuteman warheads coming into Kwajalein from California’s Vandenberg Air Force Base; they came in like man-made meteors, visible even in daylight, screaming in at an angle of thirty degrees or so, slowing down, but not visibly so, as they encountered thicker air. The trick was hitting them, or rather, hitting them hard enough to destroy them. In this, the new ones were actually easier to kill than the old ones. The original RVs had been metallic, some actually made of beryllium copper, which had been fairly sturdy. The new ones were lighter—therefore able to carry a heavier and more powerful nuclear warhead—and made from material like the tiles on the space shuttle. This was little different in feel from Styrofoam and not much stronger, since it was designed only to insulate against heat, and then only for a brief span of seconds. The space shuttles had suffered damage when their 747 ferry had flown through rainstorms, and some in the ICBM business referred to large raindrops as “hydro meteors” for the damage they could do to a descending RV. On rare occasions when an RV had come down through a thunderstorm, relatively small hailstones had damaged them to the point that the nuclear warhead might not have functioned properly.
Such a target was almost as easy a kill as an aircraft—shooting airplanes down is easy if you hit them, not unlike dropping a pigeon with a shotgun. The trick remained hitting the damned things.
Even if you got close with your interceptor, close won you no cigars. The warhead on a SAM is little different from a shotgun shell. The explosive charge destroys the metal case, converting it into jagged fragments with an initial velocity of about five thousand feet per second. These are ordinarily quite sufficient to rip into the aluminum skin that constitutes the lift and control surfaces of the strength-members of an airplane’s internal framing, turning an aircraft into a ballistic object with no more ability to fly than a bird stripped of its wings.
But hitting one necessitates exploding the warhead far enough from the target that the cone formed of the flying fragments intersects the space occupied by the target. For an aircraft, this is not difficult, but for a missile warhead traveling faster than the explosive-produced fragments, it is—which explained the controversy over the Patriot missiles and the Scuds in 1991.
The gadget telling the SAM warhead where and when to explode is generically called the “fuse.” For most modern missiles, the fusing system is a small, low-powered laser, which “nutates,” or turns in a circle to project its beam in a cone forward of its flight path, until the beam hits and reflects off the target. The reflected beam is received by a receptor in the laser assembly, and that generates the signal telling the warhead to explode. But quick as it is, it takes a finite amount of time, and the inbound RV is coming in very fast. So fast, in fact, that if the laser beam lacks the power for more than, say, a hundred meters of range, there isn’t enough time for the beam to reflect off the RV in time to tell the warhead to explode soon enough to form the cone of destruction to engulf the RV target. Even if the RV is immediately next to the SAM warhead when the warhead explodes, the RV is going faster than the fragments, which cannot hurt it because they can’t catch up.
And there’s the problem, Gregory saw. The laser chip in the Standard Missile’s nose wasn’t very powerful, and the nutation speed was relatively slow, and that combination could allow the RV to slip right past the SAM, maybe as much as half the time, even if the SAM came within three meters of the target, and that was no good at all. They might actually have been better off with the old VT proximity fuse of World War II, which had used a non-directional RF emitter, instead of the new high-tech gallium-arsenide laser chip. But there was room for him to play. The nutation of the laser beam was controlled by computer software, as was the fusing signal. That was something he could fiddle with. To that end, he had to talk to the guys who made it, “it” being the current limited-production test missile, the SM-2-ER-Block-IV, and they were the Standard Missile Company, a joint venture of Raytheon and Hughes, right up the street in McLean, Virginia. To accomplish that, he’d have Tony Bretano call ahead. Why not let them know that their visitor was anointed by God, after all?
My God, Jack,” Mary Pat said. The sun was under the yardarm. Cathy was on her way home from Hopkins, and Jack was in his private study off the Oval Office, sipping a glass of whiskey and ice with the DCI and his wife, the DDO. ”When I saw this, I had to go off to the bathroom.”
“I hear you, MP.” Jack handed her a glass of sherry—Mary Pat’s favorite relaxing drink. Ed Foley picked a Samuel Adams beer in keeping with his working-class origins. “Ed?”
“Jack, this is totally f*cking crazy,” the Director of Central Intelligence blurted. “F*cking” was not a word you usually used around the President, even this one. “I mean, sure, it’s from a good source and all that, but, Jesus, you just don’t do shit like this.”
“Pat Martin was in here, right?” the Deputy Director (Operations) asked. She got a nod. “Well, then he told you this is damned near an act of war.”
“Damned near,” Ryan agreed, with a small sip of his Irish whiskey. Then he pulled out his last cigarette of the day, stolen from Mrs. Sumter, and lit it. “But it’s a hard one to deny, and we have to fit this into government policy somehow or other.”
“We have to get George down,” Ed Foley said first of all.
“And show him SORGE, too?” Ryan asked. Mary Pat winced immediately. “I know we have to guard that one closely, MP, but, damn it, if we can’t use it to figure out these people, we’re no better off than we were before we had the source.”
She let out a long breath and nodded, knowing that Ryan was right, but not liking it very much. “And our internal pshrink,” she said. “We need a doc to check this out. It’s crazy enough that we probably need a medical opinion.”
“Next, what do we say to Sergey?” Jack asked. “He knows we know.”
“Well, start off with ‘keep your head down,’ I suppose,” Ed Foley announced. “Uh, Jack?”
“Yeah?”
“You give this to your people yet, the Secret Service, I mean?”
“No ... oh, yeah.”
“If you’re willing to commit one act of war, why not another?” the DCI asked rhetorically. “And they don’t have much reason to like you at the moment.”
“But why Golovko?” MP asked the air. “He’s no enemy of China. He’s a pro, a king-spook. He doesn’t have a political agenda that I know about. Sergey’s an honest man.” She took another sip of sherry.
“True, no political ambitions that I know of. But he is Grushavoy’s tightest adviser on a lot of issues—foreign policy, domestic stuff, defense. Grushavoy likes him because he’s smart and honest—”
“Yeah, that’s rare enough in this town, too,” Jack acknowledged. That wasn’t fair. He’d chosen his inner circle well, and almost exclusively of people with no political ambition, which made them an endangered species in the environs of Washington. The same was true of Golovko, a man who preferred to serve rather than to rule, in which he was rather like the American President. “Back to the issue at hand. Are the Chinese making some sort of play, and if so, what?”
“Nothing that I see, Jack,” Foley replied, speaking for his agency in what was now an official capacity. “But remember that even with SORGE, we don’t see that much of their inner thinking. They’re so different from us that reading their minds is a son of a bitch, and they’ve just taken one in the teeth, though I don’t think they really know that yet.”
“They’re going to find out in less than a week.”
“Oh? How’s that?” the DCI asked.
“George Winston tells me a bunch of their commercial contracts are coming up due in less than ten days. We’ll see then what effect this has on their commercial accounts—and so will they.”
The day started earlier than usual in Beijing. Fang Gan stepped out of his official car and hurried up the steps into the building, past the uniformed guard who always held the door open for him, and this time did not get a thank-you nod from the exalted servant of the people. Fang walked to his elevator, into it, then stepped off after arriving at his floor. His office door was only a few more steps. Fang was a healthy and vigorous man for his age. His personal staff leaped to their feet as he walked in—an hour early, they all realized.
“Ming!” he called on the way to his inner office.
“Yes, Comrade Minister,” she said, on going through the still-open door.
“What items have you pulled off the foreign media?”
“One moment.” She disappeared and then reappeared with a sheaf of papers in her hand. “London Times, London Daily Telegraph, Observer, New York Times, Washington Post, Miami Herald, Boston Globe. The Western American papers are not yet available.” She hadn’t included Italian or other European papers because she couldn’t speak or read those languages well enough, and for some reason Fang only seemed interested in the opinions of English-speaking foreign devils. She handed over the translations. Again, he didn’t thank her even peremptorily, which was unusual for him. Her minister was exercised about something.
“What time is it in Washington?” Fang asked next.
“Twenty-one hours, Comrade Minister,” she answered.
“So, they are watching television and preparing for bed?”
“Yes, Comrade Minister.”
“But their newspaper articles and editorials are already prepared.”
“That is the schedule they work, Minister. Most of their stories are done by the end of a normal working day. At the latest, news stories—aside from the truly unusual or unexpected ones—are completely done before the reporters go home for their dinner.”
Fang looked up at that analysis. Ming was a clever girl, giving him information on something he’d never really thought about. With that realization, he nodded for her to go back to her desk.
For their part, the American trade delegation was just boarding their plane. They were seen off by a minor consular official who spoke plastic words from plastic lips, received by the Americans through plastic ears. Then they boarded their USAF aircraft, which started up at once and began rolling toward the runway.
“So, how do we evaluate this adventure, Cliff?” Mark Gant asked.
“Can you spell ’disaster’ ?” Rutledge asked in return.
“That bad?”
The Assistant Secretary of State for Policy nodded soberly. Well, it wasn’t his fault, was it? That stupid Italian clergyman gets in the way of a bullet, and then the widow of that other minister-person had to pray for him in public, knowing that the local government would object. And, of course, CNN had to be there for both events to stir the pot at home ... How was a diplomat supposed to make peace happen if people kept making things worse instead of better?
“That bad, Mark. China may never get a decent trade agreement if this crap keeps going on.”
“All they have to do is change their own policies a little,” Gant offered.
“You sound like the President.”
“Cliffy, if you want to join a club, you have to abide by the club rules. Is that so hard to understand?”
“You don’t treat great nations like the dentist nobody likes who wants to join the country club.”
“Why is the principle different?”
“Do you really think the United States can govern its foreign policy by principle?” Rutledge asked in exasperation. So much so, in fact, that he’d let his mind slip a gear.
“The President does, Cliff, and so does your Secretary of State,” Gant pointed out.
“Well, if we want a trade agreement with China, we have to consider their point of view.”
“You know, Cliff, if you’d been in the State Department back in 1938, maybe Hitler could have killed all the Jews without all that much of a fuss,” Gant observed lightly.
It had the desired effect. Rutledge turned and started to object: “Wait a minute—”
“It was just his internal policy, Cliff, wasn’t it? So what, they go to a different church—gas ’em. Who cares?”
“Now look, Mark—”
“You look, Cliff. A country has to stand for certain things, because if you don’t, who the f*ck are you, okay? We’re in the club—hell, we pretty much run the club. Why, Cliff? Because people know what we stand for. We’re not perfect. You know it. I know it. They all know it. But they also know what we will and won’t do, and so, we can be trusted by our friends, and by our enemies, too, and so the world makes a little sense, at least in our parts of it. And that is why we’re respected, Cliff.”
“And all the weapons don’t matter, and all the commercial power we have, what about them?” the diplomat demanded.
“How do you think we got them, Cliffy?” Gant demanded, using the diminutive of Rutledge’s name again, just to bait him. “We are what we are because people from all over the world came to America to work and live out their dreams. They worked hard. My grandfather came over from Russia because he didn’t like getting f*cked over by the czar, and he worked, and he got his kids educated, and they got their kids educated, and so now I’m pretty damned rich, but I haven’t forgotten what Grandpa told me when I was little either. He told me this was the best place the world ever saw to be a Jew. Why, Cliff? Because the dead white European men who broke us away from England and wrote the Constitution had some good ideas and they lived up to them, for the most part. That’s who we are, Cliff. And that means we have to be what we are, and that means we have to stand for certain things, and the world has to see us do it.”
“But we have so many flaws ourselves,” Rutledge protested.
“Of course we do! Cliff, we don’t have to be perfect to be the best around, and we never stop trying to be better. My dad, when he was in college, he marched in Mississippi, and got his ass kicked a couple of times, but you know, it all worked out, and so now we have a black guy in the Vice Presidency. From what I hear, maybe he’s good enough to take one more step up someday. Jesus, Cliff, how can you represent America to other nations if you don’t get it?”
Diplomacy is business, Rutledge wanted to reply. And I know how to do the business. But why bother trying to explain things to this Chicago Jew? So, he rocked his seat back and tried to look dozy. Gant took the cue and stood for a seventy-foot walk. The Air Force sergeants who pretended to be stewardesses aboard served breakfast, and the coffee was pretty decent. He found himself in the rear of the aircraft looking at all the reporters, and that felt a little bit like enemy territory, but not, on reflection, as much as it did sitting next to that diplo-jerk.
The morning sun that lit up Beijing had done the same to Siberia even earlier in the day.
“I see our engineers are as good as ever,” Bondarenko observed. As he watched, earthmoving machines were carving a path over a hundred meters wide through the primeval forests of pine and spruce. This road would serve both the gold strike and the oil fields. And this wasn’t the only one. Two additional routes were being worked by a total of twelve crews. Over a third of the Russian Army’s available engineers were on these projects, and that was a lot of troops, along with more than half of the heavy equipment in the olive-green paint the Russian army had used for seventy years.
“This is a ‘Hero Project,’ ” Colonel Aliyev said. And he was right. The “Hero Project” idea had been created by the Soviet Union to indicate something of such great national importance that it would draw the youth of the nation in patriotic zeal—and besides, it was a good way to meet girls and see a little more of the world. This one was moving even faster than that, because Moscow had assigned the military to it, and the military was no longer worrying itself about an invasion from (or into) NATO. For all its faults, the Russian army still had access to a lot of human and material resources. Plus. there was real money in this project. Wages were very high for the civilians. Moscow wanted both of these resource areas brought on line—and quickly. And so the goldfield workers had been helicoptered in with light equipment, with which they’d built a larger landing area, which allowed still heavier equipment to be air-dropped, and with that a small, rough airstrip had been built. That had allowed Russian air force cargo aircraft to lift in truly heavy equipment, which was now roughing in a proper air-landing strip for when the crew extending the railroad got close enough to deliver the cement and rebar to create a real commercial-quality airport. Buildings were going up. Some of the first things that had been sent in were the components of a sawmill, and one thing you didn’t have to import into this region was wood. Large swaths were being cleared, and the trees cut down to clear them were almost instantly transformed into lumber for building. First, the sawmill workers set up their own rough cabins. Now, administrative buildings were going up, and in four months, they expected to have dormitories for over a thousand of the miners who were already lining up for the highly paid job of digging this gold out of the ground. The Russian government had decided that the workers here would have the option of being paid in gold coin at world-price, and that was something few Russian citizens wanted to walk away from. And so expert miners were filling out their application forms in anticipation of the flights into the new strike. Bondarenko wished them luck. There were enough mosquitoes there to carry off a small child and suck him dry of blood like mini-vampires. Even for gold coin, it was not a place he’d want to work.
The oil field was ultimately more important to his country, the general knew. Already, ships were fighting their way through the late-spring ice, shepherded by navy icebreakers like the Yamal and Rossiya, to deliver the drilling equipment needed to commence proper exploration for later production. But Bondarenko had been well briefed on this subject. This oil field was no pipe dream. It was the economic salvation of his country, a way to inject huge quantities of hard currency into Russia, money to buy the things it needed to smash its way into the twenty-first century, money to pay the workers who’d striven so hard and so long for the prosperity they and their country deserved.
And it was Bondarenko’s job to guard it. Meanwhile, army engineers were furiously at work building harbor facilities so that the cargo ships would be able to land what cargo they had. The use of amphibious-warfare ships, so that the Russian navy could land the cargo on the beaches as though it were battle gear, had been examined but discarded. In many cases, the cargo to be landed was larger than the main battle tanks of the Russian army, a fact which had both surprised and impressed the commanding general of the Far East Military District.
One consequence of all this was that most of Bondarenko’s engineers had been stripped away for one project or another, leaving him with a few battalions organically attached to his fighting formations. And he had uses of his own for those engineers, the general grumbled. There were several places on the Chinese border where a couple of regiments could put together some very useful obstacles against invading mechanized forces. But they’d be visible, and too obviously intended to be used against Chinese forces, Moscow had told him, not caring, evidently, that the only way they could be used against the People’s Liberation Army was if that army decided to come north and liberate Russia!
What was it about politicians? Bondarenko thought. Even the ones in America were the same, so he’d been told by American officers he’d met. Politicians didn’t really care much about what something did, but they cared a great deal about what it appeared to do. In that sense, all politicians of whatever political tilt all over the world were communists, Bondarenko thought with an amused grunt, more interested in show than reality.
“When will they be finished?” the general-colonel asked.
“They’ve made amazing progress,” Colonel Aliyev replied. “The routes will be fully roughed in—oh, another month or six weeks, depending on weather. The finishing work will take much longer.”
“You know what worries me?”
“What is that, Comrade General?” the operations officer asked.
“We’ve built an invasion route. For the first time, the Chinese could jump across the border and make good time to the north Siberian coast.” Before, the natural obstacles—mainly the wooded nature of the terrain—would have made that task difficult to the point of impossibility. But now there was a way to get there, and a reason to go there as well. Siberia now truly was something it had often been thought to be, a treasure house of cosmic proportions. Treasure house, Bondarenko thought. And I am the keeper of the keys. He walked back to his helicopter to complete his tour of the route being carved out by army engineers.