“I have discussed using the life rafts and scuttling with the crew,” Holloway said. “They will obey the order without argument, Mr. President.”
“Hang on now, Captain,” Ryan said. “We’re not there yet.” He tried to imagine launching a rubber raft in gale winds and thirty-foot seas, let alone boarding the damned thing from a pitching ship. If the crew survived the deployment, and if the storm didn’t shred the inflatable rafts, then their best hope for survival was getting picked up by a Chinese patrol. “You take care of your people, Captain,” Ryan said. “We’ll get the cavalry heading your way with all possible speed.”
“Thank you, Mr. President,” the captain said. The strain in his voice made it apparent that he was experienced and realistic enough to feel grateful for the President’s outreach, without holding out some insane hope for an actual rescue.
Ryan ended the call and then looked at his watch. “All right, gentlemen,” he said. “It’s half past two. Let’s find out what we have in the way of a cavalry.”
Arnie stood. “We’ll have the NSC Principals Committee here inside the hour,” he said.
“Very well.” Ryan looked at the deputy national security adviser. “It’s early afternoon in Beijing. Robby, get with the duty officers downstairs and have them line up a Mandarin interpreter. Tell them we’ll just need one. It’ll be a fifteen-minute call at most. And get me the background sheet on President Zhao. I want you to set up a call with him as soon as humanly possible.”
“Right away, Mr. President.”
Van Damm’s head snapped around as if he’d been slapped. “Oh, I’d urge against that, Jack.”
“I agree with Arnie, Mr. President,” the SecDef said. “We’re not even sure the ChiComs know where this boat is.”
“And I don’t plan to tell them,” Ryan said.
Commander Forrestal was already out the door. He had his orders, and the arguments of two advisers shouldn’t slow him down. If the President wanted him to stop, the President would have to be the one to stop him.
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Ryan was showered, shaved, and freshly suited in twenty minutes. Someone had rustled him up a cup of coffee and a Danish, and they were on his desk by the time he got back to the Oval. He took a bite and wondered idly what it would be like when he wasn’t the leader of the free world anymore and magic coffee fairies didn’t leave him pastries and Arabica roast when he most needed them.
It was just after four in the morning by the time USAF Major Jennifer Yi, the Mandarin speaker sent over by the Pentagon, entered the Oval Office ahead of Commander Forrestal. She was a tall, no-nonsense woman with a stern face that made Ryan think she probably voted for the other guy in the last election. Still, she was professional and looked him in the eye when she shook his hand. He didn’t have to ask about her credentials as a simultaneous interpreter or her clearance. The NSC guys in the watch center would have handled all of that. By necessity, interpreters got to be a part of conversations that only a select few were privy to. Intense and often delicate negotiations hung in the balance of an interpreter’s ability to pick up on what speakers meant to say and the words they chose to convey it.
Van Damm, Burgess, and Foley took seats on the couches while Major Yi moved her chair around behind the desk so she could be seated beside the President, closer to his ear. She would listen to the conversation via a headset, translating the Chinese president’s Mandarin almost simultaneously. The effort required intense concentration, and she situated her chair so she faced away from the others in attendance, close to Ryan’s ear but not looking at him. In addition to those in the room, the call would be recorded and monitored by a half-dozen aides and staffers.
Presumably, Zhao would have a similar situation on his end.
Forrestal picked up the handset on the President’s desk, spoke to someone on the other end of the line for a moment, and then handed it to Ryan, giving him a thumbs-up.
“Mr. President,” Ryan said. “Thank you for taking my call . . .”
55
Arnie van Damm sat back on the sofa in the Oval Office after the interpreter had gone. “I can’t believe he agreed to hold off.” He breathed an audible sigh of relief. The phone call with the president of the People’s Republic of China was straight from the Jack Ryan shoot-from-the-gut playbook. Unfortunately, that kind of shooting worked both ways, and brought with it the strong possibility of gut-shooting yourself in the process.
True to form, President Zhao had begun the call with an insistence that the United States affirm a one-China policy that denied the existence of Taiwan as an independent nation. It was a scripted verbal ballet, and once the two world leaders got past their respective parts, the call had progressed quickly. Ryan was his usual direct self, making statements that from the mouths of other men would have sounded like ultimatums but from him were just statements of cold, dispassionate fact.
It was apparent that Zhao already knew about the Meriwether’s predicament and geographic position. He had bristled at the incursion of yet another American vessel into Chinese waters at first. But in the end, he agreed to forgo intercepting Meriwether while she was in waters claimed by both China and Japan, adding, however, that his humanity necessitated that he “rescue” the hapless research vessel the moment it entered waters not also claimed by the Japanese.
“I know exactly why he agreed,” Mary Pat Foley said.
Ryan nodded. “The PLA Navy has already moved all their ships out of the path of the typhoon. He couldn’t board the Meriwether if he wanted to.”
Burgess looked at his watch. “That gives us roughly five hours,” he said. “You can bet the ChiCom Navy is steaming out now. An American spy ship would be a grand coup for them in the media, not to mention the technology they’ll glean if Captain Holloway doesn’t have the sense to destroy it. We could be looking at another Pueblo.”
The USS Pueblo was the only commissioned U.S. Navy ship to remain the captive of an enemy state. Many in the IC believed that the seizure of communications gear when the Pueblo was captured in 1968 had allowed the DPRK and the Soviet Union to monitor U.S. Naval communications late into the 1980s. The Pueblo remained moored in Pyongyang at the Victorious War Museum.
Ryan looked again at the massive white vortex that was Typhoon Catelyn on Forrestal’s computer screen.
“Five hours,” he said. “That’s assuming the sea doesn’t take her first.”
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