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 counter intelligence 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 salt water 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 Anti-Ballistic 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 fucking crazy," the Director of Central Intelligence blurted. "Fucking" 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 fuck 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 fucked 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 gold-field 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.

CHAPTER 36

SORGE Reports
   
President Ryan awoke just before six in the morning. The Secret Service preferred that he keep the shades closed, thus blocking the windows, but Ryan had never wanted to sleep in a coffin, even a large one, and so when he awoke momentarily at such times as 3:53 he preferred to see some sort of light outside the window, even if only the taillights of a patrolling police car or a lonely taxicab. Over the years, he'd become accustomed to waking early. That surprised him. As a boy, he'd always preferred to sleep late, especially on weekends. But Cathy had been the other way, like most doctors, and especially most SURGEONs: early to rise, and get to the hospital, so that when you worked on a patient you had all day to see how he or she tolerated the procedure.
   So, maybe he'd picked it up from her, and in some sort of perverse one-upmanship he'd come to open his eyes even earlier. Or maybe it was a more recently acquired habit in this damned place, Jack thought, as he slid off the bed and padded off to the bathroom as another damned day started, this one like so many others, too damned early. What the hell was the matter? the President wondered. Why was it that he didn't need sleep as much anymore? Hell, sleep was one of the very few pure pleasures given to man on earth, and all he wanted was just a little more of it...
   But he couldn't have it. It was just short of six in the morning, Jack told himself as he looked out the window. Milkmen were up, as were paperboys. Mailmen were in their sorting rooms, and in other places people who had worked through the night were ending their working days.
   That included a lot of people right here in the White House: protective troops in the Secret Service, domestic staff, some people Ryan knew by sight but not by name, which fact shamed him somewhat. They were his people, after all, and he was supposed to know about them, know their names well enough to speak them when he saw the owners thereof—but there were just too many of them for him to know. Then there were the uniformed people in the White House Military Office—called Wham-o by insiders—who supplemented the Office of Signals. There was, in fact, a small army of men and women who existed only to serve John Patrick Ryan—and through him the country as a whole, or that was the theory. What the hell, he thought, looking out the window. It was light enough to see. The streetlights were clicking off as their photoelectric sensors told them the sun was coming up. Jack pulled on his old Naval Academy robe, stepped into his slippers—he'd only gotten them recently; at home he just walked around barefoot, but a President couldn't do that in front of the troops, could he?—and moved quietly into the corridor.
   There must have been some sort of bug or motion sensor close to the bedroom door, Jack thought. He never managed to surprise anyone when he came out into the upstairs corridor unexpectedly. The heads always seemed to be looking in his direction and there was the instant morning race to see who could greet him first.
   The first this time was one of the senior Secret Service troops, head of the night crew. Andrea Price-O'Day was still at her home in Maryland, probably dressed and ready to head out the door—what shitty hours these people worked on his behalf, Jack reminded himself—for the hourlong drive into D.C. And with luck she'd make it home– when? Tonight? That depended on his schedule for today, and he couldn't remember offhand what he had happening.
   "Coffee, boss?" one of the younger agents asked.
   "Sounds like a winner, Charlie." Ryan followed him, yawning. He ended up in the Secret Service guard post for this floor, a walk-in closet, really, with a TV and a coffeepot—probably stocked by the kitchen staff—and some munchies to help the people get through the night.
   "When did you come on duty?" POTUS asked.
   "Eleven, sir," Charlie Malone answered.
   "Boring duty?"
   "Could be worse. At least I'm not working the bad-check detail in Omaha anymore."
   "Oh, yeah," agreed Joe Hilton, another one of the young agents on the deathwatch.
   "I bet you played ball," Jack observed.
   Hilton nodded. "Outside linebacker, sir. Florida State University. Not big enough for the pros, though."
   Only about two-twenty, and it's all lean meat, Jack thought. Young Special Agent Hilton looked like a fundamental force of nature.
   "Better off playing baseball. You make a good living, work fifteen years, maybe more, and you're healthy at the end of it."
   "Well, maybe I'll train my boy to be an outfielder," Hilton said.
   "How old?" Ryan asked, vaguely remembering that Hilton was a recent father. His wife was a lawyer at the Justice Department, wasn't she?
   "Three months. Sleeping through the night now, Mr. President. Good of you to ask."
   I wish they'd just call me Jack. I'm not God, am I? But that was about as likely as his calling his commanding general Bobby-Ray back when he'd been Second Lieutenant John P. Ryan, USMC.
   "Anything interesting happen during the night?"
   "Sir, CNN covered the departure of our diplomats from Beijing, but that just showed the airplane taking off."
   "I think they just send the cameras down halfway hoping the airplane'll blow up so that they'll have tape of it—you know, like when the chopper comes to lift me out of here." Ryan sipped his coffee. These junior Secret Service agents were probably a little uneasy to have "The Boss," as he was known within the Service, talking with them as if he and they were normal people. If so, Jack thought, tough shit. He wasn't going to turn into Louis XIV just to make them happy. Besides, he wasn't as good-looking as Leonardo DiCaprio, at least according to Sally, who thought that young actor was the cat's ass.
   Just then, a messenger arrived with the day's copies of the morning's Early Bird. Jack took one along with the coffee and headed back to read it over. A few editorials bemoaning the recall of the trade delegation– maybe it was the lingering liberalism in the media, the reason they were not, never had been, and probably never would be entirely comfortable with the amateur statesman in the White House. Privately, Ryan knew, they called him other things, some rather less polite, but the average Joe out there, Arnie van Damm told Jack once a week or so, still liked him a lot. Ryan's approval rating was still very high, and the reason for it, it seemed, was that Jack was perceived as a regular guy who'd gotten lucky—if they called this luck, POTUS thought with a stifled grunt.
   He returned to reading the news articles, wandering back to the breakfast room, as he did so, where, he saw, people were hustling to get things set up—notified, doubtless, by the Secret Service that SWORDSMAN was up and needed to be fed. Yet more of the His Majesty Effect, Ryan groused. But he was hungry, and food was food, and so he wandered in, picked what he wanted off the buffet, and flipped the TV on to see what was happening in the world as he attacked his eggs Benedict. He'd have to devour them quickly, before Cathy appeared to yell at him about the cholesterol intake. All around him, to a radius of thirty miles or so, the government was coming to consciousness, or what passed for it, dressing, getting in their cars, and heading in, just as he was, but not as comfortably.
   "Morning, Dad," Sally said, coming in next and walking to the TV, which she switched to MTV without asking. It was a long way since that bright afternoon in London when he'd been shot, Jack thought. He'd been "daddy" then.
 
   In Beijing, the computer on Ming's desk had been in auto-sleep mode for just the right number of minutes. The hard drive started turning again, and the machine began its daily routine. Without lighting up the monitor, it examined the internal file of recent entries, compressed them, and then activated the internal modem to shoot them out over the 'Net. The entire process took about seventeen seconds, and then the computer went back to sleep. The data proceeded along the telephone lines in the city of Beijing until it found its destination server, which was, actually, in Wisconsin. There it waited for the signal that would call it up, after which it would be dumped out of the server's memory, and soon thereafter written over, eliminating any trace that it had ever existed.
   In any case, as Washington woke up, Beijing was heading for sleep, with Moscow a few hours behind. The earth continued its turning, oblivious of what transpired in the endless cycle of night and day.
 
   Well?" General Diggs looked at his subordinate. "Well, sir," Colonel Giusti said, "I think the cavalry squadron is in pretty good shape." Like Diggs, Angelo Giusti was a career cavalryman. His job as commander of 1st Armored's cavalry squadron (actually a battalion, but the cav had its own way of speaking) was to move out ahead of the division proper, locating the enemy and scouting out the land, being the eyes of Old Ironsides, but with enough combat power of its own to look after itself. A combat veteran of the Persian Gulf War, Giusti had smelled the smoke and seen the elephant. He knew what his job was, and he figured he had his troopers trained up about as well as circumstances in Germany allowed. He actually preferred the free-form play allowed by simulators to the crowded training fields of the Combat Maneuver Training Center, which was barely seventy-five square kilometers. It wasn't the same as being out there in your vehicles, but neither was it restricted by time and distance, and on the global SimNet system you could play against a complete enemy battalion, even a brigade if you wanted your people to get some sweat in their play. Except for the bumpy-float sensation of driving your Abrams around (some tankers got motion sickness from that), it conveyed the complexity better than any place except the NTC at Fort Irwin in the California desert, or the comparable facility the Army had established for the Israelis in the Negev.
   Diggs couldn't quite read the younger officer's mind, but he'd just watched the Quarter Horse move around with no lack of skill. They'd played against some Germans, and the Germans, as always, were pretty good at the war business—but not, today, as good as First Tanks' cavalry troopers, who'd first outmaneuvered their European hosts, and then (to the surprise and distaste of the German brigadier who'd supervised the exercise) set an ambush that had cost them half a battalion of their Leos, as the Americans called the Leopard-II main battle tanks. Diggs would be having dinner with the brigadier later today. Even the Germans didn't know night-fighting as well as the Americans did—which was odd, since their equipment was roughly comparable, and their soldiers pretty well trained ... but the German army was still largely a conscript army, most of whose soldiers didn't have the time-in-service the Americans enjoyed.
   In the wider exercise—the cavalry part had just been the "real" segment of a wider command post exercise, or CPX—Colonel Don Lisle's 2nd Brigade was handling the fuller, if theoretical, German attack quite capably. On the whole, the Bundeswehr was not having a good day. Well, it no longer had the mission of protecting its country against a Soviet invasion, and with that had gone the rather furious support of the citizenry that the West German army had enjoyed for so many years. Now the Bundeswehr was an anachronism with little obvious purpose, and the occupier of a lot of valuable real estate for which Germans could think up some practical uses. And so the former West German army had been downsized and mainly trained to do peacekeeping duty, which, when you got down to it, was heavily armed police work. The New World Order was a peaceful one, at least so far as Europeans were concerned. The Americans had engaged in combat operations to the rather distant interest of the Germans, who, while they'd always had a healthy interest in war-fighting, were now happy enough that their interest in it was entirely theoretical, rather like a particularly intricate Hollywood production. It also forced them to respect America a little more than they would have preferred. But some things couldn't be helped.
   "Well, Angelo, I think your troopers have earned themselves a beer or two at the local Gasthauses. That envelopment you accomplished at zero-two-twenty was particularly adroit."
   Giusti grinned and nodded his appreciation. "Thank you, General. I'll pass that one along to my S-3. He's the one who thought it up."
   "Later, Angelo."
   "Roger that one, sir." Lieutenant Colonel Giusti saluted his divisional commander on his way.
   "Well, Duke?"
   Colonel Masterman pulled a cigar out of his BDU jacket and lit it up. One nice thing about Germany was that you could always get good Cuban ones here. "I've known Angelo since Fort Knox. He knows his stuff, and he had his officers particularly well trained. Even had his own book on tactics and battle-drill printed up."
   "Oh?" Diggs turned. "Is it any good?"
   "Not bad at all," the G-3 replied. "I'm not sure that I agree with it all, but it doesn't hurt to have everyone singing out of the same hymnal. His officers all think pretty much the same way. So, Angelo's a good football coach. Sure enough he kicked the Krauts' asses last night." Masterman closed his eyes and rubbed his face. "These night exercises take it out of you."
   "How's Lisle doing?"
   "Sir, last time I looked, he had the Germans well contained. Our friends didn't seem to know what he had around them. They were putzing around trying to gather information—short version, Giusti won the reconnaissance battle, and that decided things—again."
   "Again," Diggs agreed. If there was any lesson out of the National Training Center, it was that one. Reconnaissance and counter-reconnaissance. Find the enemy. Don't let the enemy find you. If you pulled that off, it was pretty hard to lose. If you didn't, it was very hard to win.
   "How's some sleep grab you, Duke?"
   "It's good to have a CG who looks after his troopers, mon General." Masterman was sufficiently tired that he didn't even want a beer first.
   And so with that decided, they headed for Diggs's command UH-60 Blackhawk helicopter for the hop back to the divisional kazerne. Diggs particularly liked the four-point safety belt. It made it a lot easier to sleep sitting up.
 
   One of the things I have to do today, Ryan told himself, is figure out what to do about the Chinese attempt on Sergey. He checked his daily briefing sheet. Robby was out west again. That was too bad. Robby was both a good sounding board and a source of good ideas. So, he'd talk it over with Scott Adler, if he and Scott both had holos in their day, and the Foleys. Who else? Jack wondered. Damn, whom else could he trust with this? If this one leaked to the press, there'd be hell to pay. Okay, Adler had to be there. He'd actually met that Zhang guy, and if some Chinese minister-type had owned a piece of this, then he'd be the one, wouldn't he?
   Probably. Not certainly, however. Ryan had been in the spook business too long to make that mistake. When you made certainty assumptions about things you weren't really sure about, you frequently walked right into a stone wall headfirst, and that could hurt. Ryan punched a button on his desk. "Ellen?"
   "Yes, Mr. President."
   "Later today, I need Scott Adler and the Foleys in here. It'll take about an hour. Find me a hole in the schedule, will you?"
   "About two-thirty, but it means putting off the Secretary of Transportation's meeting about the air-traffic-control proposals."
   "Make it so, Ellen. This one's important," he told her.
   "Yes, Mr. President."
   It was by no means perfect. Ryan preferred to work on things as they popped into his mind, but as President you quickly learned that you served the schedule, not the other way around. Jack grimaced. So much for the illusion of power.
 
   Mary Pat Foley strolled into her office, as she did nearly every morning, and as always turned on her computer—if there was one thing she'd learned from SORGE, it was to turn the damned thing all the way off when she wasn't using it. There was a further switch on her phone line that manually blocked it, much as if she'd pulled the plug out of the wall. She flipped that, too. It was an old story for an employee of an intelligence service. Sure, she was paranoid, but was she paranoid enough?
   Sure enough, there was another e-mail from cgood@jadecastle.com. Chet Nomuri was still at work, and this download took a mere twenty-three seconds. With the download complete, she made sure she'd backed it up, then clobbered it out of her in-box so that no copies remained even in the ether world. Next, she printed it all up and called down for Joshua Sears to do the translations and some seat-of-the-pants analysis. SORGE had become routine in handling if not in importance, and by a quarter to nine she had the translation in hand.
   "Oh, Lord. Jack's just going to love this one," the DDO observed at her desk. Then she walked the document to Ed's larger office facing the woods. That's when she found out about the afternoon trip to the White House.
 
   Mary Abbot was the official White House makeup artist. It was her job to make the President look good on TV, which meant making him look like a cheap whore in person, hut that couldn't be helped. Ryan had learned not to fidget too much, which made her job easier, but she knew he was fighting the urge, which both amused and concerned her.
   "How's your son doing at school?" Ryan asked.
   "Just fine, thank you, and there's a nice girl he's interested in."
   Ryan didn't comment on that. He knew that there had to be some boy or boys at St. Mary's who found his Sally highly interesting (she was pretty, even to disinterested eyes), but he didn't want to think about that. It did make him grateful for the Secret Service, however. Whenever Sally went on a date, there would be at least a chase car full of armed agents close by, and that would take the starch out of most teenaged boys. So, the USSS did have its uses, eh? Girl children, Jack thought, were God's punishment on you for being a man. His eyes were scanning his briefing sheets for the mini-press conference. The likely questions and the better sorts of answers to give to them. It seemed very dishonest to do it this way, but some foreign heads of government had the question prescreened so that the answers could be properly canned. Not a bad idea in the abstract, Jack thought, but the American media would spring for that about as quickly as a coyote would chase after a whale.
   "There," Mrs. Abbot said, as she finished touching up his hair. Ryan stood, looked in the mirror, and grimaced as usual.
   "Thank you, Mary," he managed to say.
   "You're welcome, Mr. President."
   And Ryan walked out, crossing the hall from the Roosevelt Room to the Oval Office, where the TV equipment was set up. The reporters stood when he entered, as the kids at St. Matthew's had stood when the priest came into class. But in third grade, the kids asked easier questions. Jack sat down in a rocking swivel chair. Kennedy had done something similar to that, and Arnie thought it a good idea for Jack as well. The gentle rocking that a man did unconsciously in the chair gave him a homey look, the spin experts all thought—Jack didn't know that, and knowing it would have caused him to toss the chair out the window, but Arnie did and he'd eased the President into it merely by saying it looked good, and getting Cathy Ryan to agree. In any case, SWORDSMAN sat down, and relaxed in the comfortable chair, which was the other reason Arnie had foisted it on him, and the real reason why Ryan had agreed. It was comfortable.
   "We ready?" Jack asked. When the President asked that, it usually meant Let's get this fucking show on the road! But Ryan thought it was just a question.
   Krystin Matthews was there to represent NBC. There were also reporters from ABC and Fox, plus a print reporter from the Chicago Tribune. Ryan had come to prefer these more intimate press conferences, and the media went along with it because the reporters were assigned by lot, which made it fair, and everyone had access to the questions and answers. The other good thing from Ryan's perspective was that a reporter was less likely to be confrontational in the Oval Office than in the raucous locker-room atmosphere of the pressroom, where the reporters tended to bunch together in a mob and adopt a mob mentality.
   "Mr. President," Krystin Matthews began. "You've recalled both the trade delegation and our ambassador from Beijing. Why was that necessary?"
   Ryan rocked a little in the chair. "Krystin, we all saw the events in Beijing that so grabbed the conscience of the world, the murder of the cardinal and the minister, followed by the roughing-up—to use a charitable term for it—of the minister's widow and some members of the congregation."
   He went on to repeat the points he'd made in his previous press conference, making particular note of the Chinese government's indifference to what had happened.
   "One can only conclude that the Chinese government doesn't care. Well, we care. The American people care. And this administration cares. You cannot take the life of a human being as casually as though you are swatting an insect. The response we received was unsatisfactory, and so, I recalled our ambassador for consultations."
   "But the trade negotiations, Mr. President," the Chicago Tribune broke in.
   "It is difficult for a country like the United States of America to do business with a nation which does not recognize human rights. You've seen for yourself what our citizens think of all this. I believe you will find that they find those murders as repellent as I do, and, I would imagine, as you do yourself."
   "And so you will not recommend to Congress that we normalize trading relations with China?"
   Ryan shook his head. "No, I will not so recommend, and even if I did, Congress would rightly reject such a recommendation."
   "At what time might you change your position on this issue?"
   "At such time as China enters the world of civilized nations and recognizes the rights of its common people, as all other great nations do."
   "So you are saying that China today is not a civilized country?"
   Ryan felt as though he'd been slapped across the face with a cold, wet fish, but he smiled and went on. "Killing diplomats is not a civilized act, is it?"
   "What will the Chinese think of that?" Fox asked.
   "I cannot read their minds. I do call upon them to make amends, or at least to consider the feelings and beliefs of the rest of the world, and then to reconsider their unfortunate action in that light."
   "And what about the trade issues?" This one came from ABC.
   "If China wants normalized trade relations with the United States, then China will have to open its markets to us. As you know, we have a law on the books here called the Trade Reform Act. That law allows us to mirror-image other countries' trade laws and practices, so that whatever tactics are used against us, we can then use those very same tactics with respect to trade with them. Tomorrow, I will direct the Department of State and the Department of Commerce to set up a working group to implement TRA with respect to the People's Republic," President Ryan announced, making the story for the day, and a bombshell it was.
 
   Christ, Jack," the Secretary of the Treasury said in his office across the street. He was getting a live feed from the Oval Office. He lifted his desk phone and punched a button. "I want a read of the PRC's current cash accounts, global," he told one of his subordinates from New York. Then his phone rang.
   "Secretary of State on Three," his secretary told him over the intercom. SecTreas grunted and picked up the phone. "Yeah, I saw it too, Scott."
 
   So, Yuriy Andreyevich, how did it go?" Clark asked. It had taken over a week to set up and mainly because General Kirillin had spent a few hours on the pistol range working on his technique. Now he'd just stormed into the officers' club bar looking as though he'd taken one in the guts.
   "Is he a Mafia assassin?"
   Chavez had himself a good laugh at that. "General, he came to us because the Italian police wanted to get him away from the Mafia. He got in the way of a mob assassination, and the local chieftain made noises about going after him and his family. What did he get you for?"
   "Fifty euros," Kirillin nearly spat.
   "You were confident going in, eh?" Clark asked. "Been there, done that."
   "Got the fuckin' T-shirt," Ding finished the statement with a laugh. And fifty euros was a dent even in the salary of a Russian three-star.
   "Three points, in a five-hundred-point match. I scored four ninety-three!"
   "Ettore only got four ninety-six?" Clark asked. "Jesus, the boy's slowing down." He slid a glass in front of the Russian general officer.
   "He's drinking more over here," Chavez observed.
   "That must be it." Clark nodded. The Russian general officer was not, however, the least bit amused.
   "Falcone is not human," Kirillin said, gunning down his first shot of vodka.
   "He could scare Wild Bill Hickok, and that's a fact. And you know the worst part about it?"
   "What is that, Ivan Sergeyevich?"
   "He's so goddamned humble about it, like it's fucking normal to shoot like that. Jesus, Sam Snead was never that good with a five-iron."
   "General," Domingo said after his second vodka of the evening. The problem with being in Russia was that you tended to pick up the local customs, and one of those was drinking. "Every man on my team is an expert shot, and by expert, I mean close to being on his country's Olympic team, okay? Big Bird's got us all beat, and none of us are used to losing any more'n you are. But I'll tell you, I'm goddamned glad he's on my team." Just then, Falcone walked through the door. "Hey, Ettore, come on over!"
   He hadn't gotten any shorter. Ettore towered over the diminutive Chavez, and still looked like a figure from an El Greco painting. "General," he said in greeting to Kirillin. "You shoot extremely well."
   "Not so good as you, Falcone," the Russian responded.
   The Italian cop shrugged. "I had a lucky day."
   "Sure, guy," Clark reacted, as he handed Falcone a shot glass.
   "I've come to like this vodka," Falcone said on gunning it down. "But it affects my aim somewhat."
   "Yeah, Ettore." Chavez chuckled. "The general told us you blew four points in the match."
   "You mean you have done better than this?" Kirillin demanded.
   "He has," Clark answered. "I watched him shoot a possible three weeks ago. That was five hundred points, too."
   "That was a good day," Falcone agreed. "I had a good night's sleep beforehand and no hangover at all."
   Clark had himself a good chuckle and turned to look around the room. Just then, another uniform entered the room and looked around. He spotted General Kirillin and walked over.
   "Damn, who's this recruiting poster?" Ding wondered aloud as he approached.
   "Tovarisch General," the man said by way of greeting.
   "Anatoliy Ivan'ch," Kirillin responded. "How are things at the Center?"
   Then the guy turned. "You are John Clark?"
   "That's me," the American confirmed. "Who are you?"
   "This is Major Anatoliy Shelepin," General Kirillin answered. "He's chief of personal security for Sergey Golovko."
   "We know your boss." Ding held out his hand. "Howdy. I'm Domingo Chavez."
   Handshakes were exchanged all around.
   "Could we speak in a quieter place?" Shelepin asked. The four men took over a corner booth in the club. Falcone remained at the bar.
   "Sergey Nikolay'ch sent you over?" the Russian general asked.
   "You haven't heard," Major Shelepin answered. It was the way he said it that got everyone's attention. He spoke in Russian, which Clark and Chavez understood well enough. "I want my people to train with you."
   "Haven't heard what?" Kirillin asked.
   "We found out who tried to kill the Chairman," Shelepin announced.
   "Oh, he was the target? I thought they were after the pimp," Kirillin objected.
   "You guys want to tell us what you're talking about?" Clark asked.
   "A few weeks ago, there was an assassination attempt in Dzerzhinskiy Square," Shelepin responded, explaining what they'd thought at the time. "But now it appears they hit the wrong target."
   "Somebody tried to waste Golovko?" Domingo asked. "Damn."
   "Who was it?"
   "The man who arranged it was a former KGB officer named Suvorov—so we believe, that is. He used two ex—Spetsnaz soldiers. They have both been murdered, probably to conceal their involvement, or at least to prevent them from discussing it with anyone." Shelepin didn't add anything else. "In any case, we have heard good things about your RAINBOW troops, and we want you to help train my protective detail."
   "It's okay with me, so long as it's okay with Washington." Clark stared hard into the bodyguard's eyes. He looked damned serious, but not very happy with the world at the moment.
   "We will make the formal request tomorrow."
   "They are excellent, these RAINBOW people," Kirillin assured him. "We're getting along well with them. Anatoliy used to work for me, back when I was a colonel." The tone of voice told what he thought of the younger man.
   There was more to this, Clark thought. A senior Russian official didn't just ask a former CIA officer for help with something related to his personal safety out of the clear blue. He caught Ding's eye and saw the same thought. Suddenly both were back in the spook business.
   "Okay," John said. "I'll call home tonight if you want." He'd do that from the American Embassy, probably on the STU-6 in the station chief's office.

CHAPTER 37

Fallout
   
The VC-137 landed without fanfare at Andrews Air Force Base. The base lacked a proper terminal and the attendant jetways, and so the passengers debarked on stairs grafted onto a flatbed truck. Cars waited at the bottom to take them into Washington. Mark Gant was met by two Secret Service agents who drove him at once to the Treasury Department building across the street from the White House. He'd barely gotten used to being on the ground when he found himself in the Secretary's office.
   "How'd it go?" George Winston asked.
   "Interesting, to say the least," Gant said, his mind trying to get used to the fact that his body didn't have a clue where it was at the moment. "I thought I'd be going home to sleep it off."
   "Ryan's invoking the Trade Recovery Act against the Chinese."
   "Oh? Well, that's not all that much of a surprise, is it?"
   "Look at this," SecTreas commanded, handing over a recently produced printout. "This" was a report on the current cash holdings of the People's Republic of China.
   "How solid is this information?" TELESCOPE asked TRADER.
   The report was an intelligence estimate in all but name. Employees within the Treasury Department routinely kept track of international monetary transactions as a means of determining the day-to-day strength of the dollar and other internationally traded currencies. That included the Chinese yuan, which had been having a slightly bad time of late.
   "They're this thin?" Gant asked. "I thought they were running short of cash, but I didn't know it was quite this bad ..."
   "It surprised me, too," SecTreas admitted. "It appears that they've been purchasing a lot of things on the international market lately, especially jet engines from France, and because they're late paying for the last round, the French company has decided to take a harder line—they're the only game in town. We won't let GE or Pratt and Whitney bid on the order, and the Brits have similarly forbidden Rolls-Royce. That makes the French the sole source, which isn't so bad for the French, is it? They've jacked up the price about fifteen percent, and they're asking for cash up front."
   "The yuan's going to take a hit," Gant predicted. "They've been trying to cover this up, eh?"
   "Yeah, and fairly successfully."
   "That's why they were hitting us so hard on the trade deal. They saw this one coming, and they wanted a favorable announcement to bail them out. But they sure didn't play it very smart. Damn, you have this sort of a problem, you learn to crawl a little."
   "I thought so, too. Why, do you think?"
   "They're proud, George. Very, very proud. Like a rich family that's lost its money but not it’s social position, and tries to make up for the one with the other. But it doesn't work. Sooner or later, people find out that you're not paying your bills, and then the whole world comes crashing in on you. You can put it off for a while, which makes sense if you have something coming in, but if the ship don't dock, you sink." Gant flipped some pages, thinking: The other problem is that countries are run by politicians, people with no real understanding of money, who figure they can always maneuver their way out of whatever comes up. They're so used to having their own way that they never really think they can't have it that way all the time. One of the things Gant had learned working in D.C. was that politics was just as much about illusion as the motion-picture business was, which perhaps explained the affinity the two communities had for each other. But even in Hollywood you had to pay the bills, and you had to show a profit. Politicians always had the option of using T-bills to finance their accounts, and they also printed the money. Nobody expected the government to show a profit, and the board of directors was the voters, the people whom politicians conned as a way of life. It was all crazy, but that was the political game.
   That's probably what the PRC leaders were thinking, Gant surmised.
   But sooner or later, reality raised its ugly head, and when it did all the time spent trying to avoid it was what really bit you on the ass. That was when the whole world said gotcha. And then you were well and truly got. In this case, the gotcha could be the collapse of the Chinese economy, and it would happen virtually overnight.
   "George, I think State and CIA need to see this, and the President, too."
 
   "Lord." The President was sitting in the Oval Office, smoking one of Ellen Sumter's Virginia Slims and watching TV. This time it was C-SPAN. Members of the United States House of Representatives were speaking in the well about China. The content of the speeches was not complimentary, and the tone was decidedly inflammatory. All were speaking in favor of a resolution to condemn the People's Republic of China. C-SPAN2 was covering much the same verbiage in the Senate. Though the language was a touch milder, the import of the words was not. Labor unions were united with churches, liberals with conservatives, even free-TRADERs with protectionists.
   More to the point, CNN and the other networks showed demonstrations in the streets, and it appeared that Taiwan's "We're the Good Guys" campaign had taken hold. Somebody (nobody was sure who yet) had even printed up stickers of the Red Chinese flag with the caption "We Kill Babies and Ministers." They were being attached to products imported from China, and the protesters were also busy identifying the American firms that did a lot of business on the Chinese mainland, with the aim of boycotting them.
   Ryan's head turned. "Talk to me, Arnie."
   "This looks serious, Jack," van Damm said.
   "Gee, Arnie, I can see that. How serious?"
   "Enough that I'd sell stock in those companies. They're going to take a hit. And this movement may have legs ..."
   "What?"
   "I mean it might not go away real soon. Next you're going to see posters with stills from the TV coverage of those two clerics being murdered. That's an image that doesn't go away. If there's any product the Chinese sell here that we can get elsewhere, then a lot of Americans will start buying it elsewhere."
   The picture on CNN changed to live coverage of a demonstration outside the PRC Embassy in Washington. The signs said things like MURDERERS, KILLERS, and BARBARIANS!
   "I wonder if Taiwan is helping to organize this . . ."
   "Probably not—at least not yet," van Damm thought. "If I were they, I wouldn't exactly mind, but I wouldn't need to play with this. They'll probably increase their efforts to distinguish themselves from the mainland—and that amounts to the same thing. Look for the networks to do stories about the Republic of China, and how upset they are with all this crap in Beijing, how they don't want to be tarred with the same brush and all that," the Chief of Staff said. "You know, 'Yes, we are Chinese, but we believe in human rights and freedom of religion.' That sort of thing. It's the smart move. They have some good PR advisers here in D.C. Hell, I probably know some of them, and if I were on the payroll, that's what I would advise."
   That's when the phone rang. It was Ryan's private line, the one that usually bypassed the secretaries. Jack lifted it. "Yeah?"
   "Jack, it's George across the street. Got a minute? I want to show you something, buddy."
   "Sure. Come on over." Jack hung up and turned to Arnie. "Sec-Treas," he explained. "Says it's important." The President paused. "Arnie?"
   "Yeah?"
   "How much maneuvering room do I have with this?"
   "The Chinese?" Arnie asked, getting a nod. "Not a hell of a lot, Jack. Sometimes the people themselves decide what our policy is. And the people will be making policy now by voting with their pocketbooks. Next we'll see some companies announce that they're suspending their commercial contracts with the PRC. The Chinese already fucked Boeing over, and in the full light of day, which wasn't real smart. Now the people out there will want to fuck them back. You know, there are times when the average Joe Citizen stands up on his hind feet and gives the world the finger. When that happens, it's your job mainly to follow them, not to lead them," the Chief of Staff concluded. His Secret Service code name was CARPENTER, and he'd just constructed a box for his President to stay inside.
   Jack nodded and stubbed out the smoke. He might be the Most Powerful Man in the World, hut his power came from the people, and as it was theirs to give, it was also sometimes theirs to exercise.
   Few people could simply open the door to the Oval Office and walk in, but George Winston was one of them, mainly because the Secret Service belonged to him. Mark Gant was with him, looking as though he'd just run a marathon chased by a dozen armed and angry Marines in jeeps.
   "Hey, Jack."
   "George. Mark, you look like hell," Ryan said. "Oh, you just flew in, didn't you?"
   "Is this Washington or Shanghai?" Gant offered, as rather a wan joke.
   "We took the tunnel. Jesus, have you seen the demonstrators outside? I think they want you to nuke Beijing," SecTreas observed. The President just pointed at his bank of television sets by way of an answer.
   "Hell, why are they demonstrating here? I'm on their side—at least I think I am. Anyway, what brings you over?"
   "Check this out." Winston nodded to Gant.
   "Mr. President, these are the PRC's current currency accounts. We keep tabs on currency trading worldwide to make sure we know where the dollar is—which means we pretty much know where all the hard currency is in the world."
   "Okay." Ryan knew about that—sort of. He didn't worry much about it, since the dollar was in pretty good shape, and the nonsqueaky wheel didn't need any grease. "So?"
   "So, the PRC's liquidity situation is in the shitter," Gant reported. "Maybe that's why they were so pushy in the trade talks. If so, they picked the wrong way to approach us. They demanded instead of asked."
   Ryan looked down the columns of numbers. "Damn, where have they been dumping all their money?"
   "Buying military hardware. France and Russia, mostly, but a lot went to Israel, too." It was not widely known that the PRC had spent a considerable sum of money in Israel, mainly paid to IDI—Israel Defense Industries—to buy American-designed hardware manufactured under license in Israel. It was stuff the Chinese could not purchase directly from America, including guns for their tanks and air-to-air missiles for their fighter aircraft. America had winked at the transactions for years. In conducting this business, Israel had turned its back on Taiwan, despite the fact that both countries had produced their nuclear weapons as a joint venture, back when they'd stuck together—along with South Africa—as international pariahs with no other friends in that particular area. In polite company, it was called realpolitik. In other areas of human activity, it was called fuck your buddy.
   "And?" Ryan asked.
   "And they've spent their entire trade surplus this way," Gant reported. "All of it, mainly on short-term purchase items, but some long-term as well, and for the long-term stuff they had to pay cash up front because of the nature of the transactions. The producers need the cash to run the production, and they don't want to get stuck holding the bag. Not too many people need five thousand tank guns," Gant explained. "The market is kinda exclusive."
   "So?"
   "So, China is essentially out of cash. And they have real short-term cash needs. Like oil," TELESCOPE went on. "China's a net importer of oil. Production in their domestic fields falls well short, even though their needs are not really that great. Not too many Chinese citizens own cars. They have enough cash for three months' worth of oil, and then they come up short. The international oil market demands prompt payment. They can skate for a month, maybe six weeks, but after that, the tankers will turn around in mid-ocean and go somewhere else—they can do that, you know—and then the PRC runs out. It'll be like running into a wall, sir. Smack. No more oil, and then their country starts coming to a stop, including their military, which is their largest oil consumer. They've been running unusually high for some years because of increased activity in their maneuvers and training and stuff. They probably have strategic reserves, but we don't know exactly how much. And that can run out, too. We've been expecting them to make a move on the Spratly Islands. There's oil there, and they've been making noises about it off and on for about ten years, but the Philippines and other countries in the area have made claims, too, and they probably expect us to side with the Philippines for historical reasons. Not to mention, Seventh Fleet is still the biggest kid on the block in that part of the world."
   "Yeah." Ryan nodded. "If it came to a showdown, the Philippines appear to have the best claim on the islands, and we would back them up. We've shed blood together in the past, and that counts. Go on."
   "So, John Chinaman is short of oil, and he may not have the cash to pay for it, especially if our trade with them goes down the toilet. They need our dollars. The yuan isn't very strong anyway. International trading is also done in dollars, and as I just told you, sir, they've spent most of them."
   "What are you telling me?"
   "Sir, the PRC is just about bankrupt. In a month or so, they're going to find that out, and it's going to be a bit of a shock for them."
   "When did we find this out?"
   "That's my doing, Jack," the Secretary of the Treasury said. "I called up these documents earlier today, and then I had Mark go over them. He's our best man for economic modeling, even whacked out with jet lag."
   "So, we can squeeze them on this?"
   "That's one option."
   "What if these demonstrations take hold?"
   Gant and Winston shrugged simultaneously. "That's where psychology enters into the equation," said Winston. "We can predict it to some extent on Wall Street—that's how I made most of my money—but psychoanalyzing a country is beyond my ken. That's your job, pal. I just run your accounting office across the street."
   "I need more than that, George."
   Another shrug. "If the average citizen boycotts Chinese goods, and/or if American companies who do business over there start trimming their sails—"
   "That's damned likely," Gant interjected. "This has got to have a lot of CEOs shitting their pants."
   "Well, if that happens, the Chinese get one in the guts, and it's going to hurt, big time," TRADER concluded.
   And how will they react to that? Ryan wondered. He punched his phone button. "Ellen, I need one." His secretary appeared in a flash and handed him a cigarette. Ryan lit it and thanked her with a smile and a nod.
   "Have you talked this one over with State yet?"
   A shake of the head. "No, wanted to show it to you first."
   "Hmm. Mark, what did you make of the negotiations?"
   "They're the most arrogant sons of bitches I've ever seen. I mean, I've met all sorts of big shots in my time, movers and shakers, but even the worst of them know when they need my money to do business, and when they know that, their manners get better. When you shoot a gun, you try to make sure you don't have it aimed at your own dick."
   That made Ryan laugh, while Arnie cringed. You weren't supposed to talk that way to the President of the United States, but some of these people knew that you could talk that way to John Patrick Ryan, the man.
   "By the way, along those lines, I liked what you told that Chinese diplomat."
   "What's that, sir?"
   "Their dicks aren't big enough to get in a pissing contest with us. Nice turn of phrase, if not exactly diplomatic."
   "How did you know that?" Gant asked, the surprise showing on his face. "I never repeated that to anybody, not even to that jerk Rutledge."
   "Oh, we have ways," Jack answered, suddenly realizing that he'd revealed something from a compartment named SORGE. Oops.
   "Sounds like something you say at the New York Athletic Club," SecTreas observed. "But only if you're four feet or so away from the guy."
   "But it appears it's true. At least in monetary terms. So, we have a gun we can point at their heads?"
   "Yes, sir, we sure do," Gant answered. "It might take them a month to figure it out, but they won't be able to run away from it for very long."
   "Okay, make sure State and the Agency find this out. And, oh, tell CIA that they're supposed to get this stuff to me first. Intelligence estimates are their job."
   "They have an economics unit, but they're not all that good," Gant told the others. "No surprise. The smart people in this area work The Street, or maybe academia. You can make more money at Harvard Business School than you can in government service."
   "And talent goes where the money is," Jack agreed. Junior partners at medium-sized law firms made more than the President, which sometimes explained the sort of people who ended up here. Public service was supposed to be a sacrifice. It was for him—Ryan had proven his ability to make money in the trading business, but for him service to his country had been learned from his father, and at Quantico, long before he'd been seduced into the Central Intelligence Agency and then later tricked into the Oval Office. And once here, you couldn't run away from it. At least, not and keep your manhood. That was always the trap. Robert Edward Lee had called duty the most sublime of words. And he would have known, Ryan thought. Lee had felt himself trapped into fighting for what was at best a soiled cause because of his perceived duty to his place of birth, and therefore many would curse his name for all eternity, despite his qualities as a man and a soldier. So, Jack, he asked himself, in your case, where do talent and duty and right and wrong and all that other stuff lie? What the hell are you supposed to do now? He was supposed to know. All those people outside the White House's campuslike grounds expected him to know all the time where the right thing was, right for the country, right for the world, right for every working man, woman, and innocent little kid playing T-ball. Yeah, the President thought, sure. You're anointed by the wisdom fairy when you walk in here every day, or kissed on the ear by the muse, or maybe Washington and Lincoln whisper to you in your dreams at night. He sometimes had trouble picking his tie in the morning, especially if Cathy wasn't around to be his fashion adviser. But he was supposed to know what to do with taxes, defense, and Social Security—why? Because it was his job to know. Because he happened to live in government housing at One Thousand six Hundred Pennsylvania Avenue and had the Secret goddamned Service protect him everywhere he went. At the Basic School at Quantico, the officers instructing newly commissioned Marine second lieutenants had told them about the loneliness of command. The difference between that and what he had here was like the difference between a fucking firecracker and a nuclear weapon. This kind of situation had started wars in the past. That wouldn't happen now, of course, but it had once. It was a sobering thought. Ryan took a last puff on his fifth smoke of the day and killed it in the brown glass ashtray he kept hidden in a desk drawer.
   "Thanks for bringing me this. Talk it over with State and CIA," he told them again. "I want a SNIE on this, and I want it soon."
   "Right," George Winston said, standing for the underground walk back to his building across the street.
   "Mr. Gant," Jack added. "Get some sleep. You look like hell."
   "I'm allowed to sleep in this job?" TELESCOPE asked.
   "Sure you are, just like I am," POTUS told him with a lopsided smile. When they left, he looked at Arnie: "Talk to me."
   "Speak to Adler, and have him talk to Hitch and Rutledge, which you ought to do, too," Arnie advised.
   Ryan nodded. "Okay, tell Scott what I need, and that I need it fast."
 
   Good news," Professor North told her, as she came back into the room.
   Andrea Price-O'Day was in Baltimore, at the Johns Hopkins Hospital, seeing Dr. Madge North, Professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology.
   "Really?"
   "Really," Dr. North assured her with a smile. "You're pregnant."
   Before anything else could happen, Inspector Patrick O'Day leapt to his feet and lifted his wife in his arms for a powerful kiss and a rib-cracking hug.
   "Oh," Andrea said almost to herself. "I thought I was too old."
   "The record is well into the fifties, and you're well short of that," Dr. North said, smiling. It was the first time in her professional career that she'd given this news to two people carrying guns. "Any problems?" Pat asked.
   "Well, Andrea, you are prime-ep. You're over forty and this is your first pregnancy, isn't it?"
   "Yes." She knew what was coming, but she didn't invite it by speaking the word.
   "That means that there is an increased likelihood of Down's syndrome. We can establish that with an amniocentesis. I'd recommend we do that soon,"
   "How soon?"
   "I can do it today if you wish."
   "And if the test is ...?”
   "Positive? Well, then you two have to decide if you want to bring a Down's child into the world. Some people do, but others don't. It's your decision to make, not mine," Madge North told them. She'd done abortions in her career, but like most obstetricians, she much preferred to deliver babies.
   "Down's—how and ... I mean . . ." Andrea said, squeezing her husband's hand.
   "Look, the odds are very much in your favor, like a hundred to one or so, and those are betting odds. Before you worry about it, the smart thing is to find out if there's anything to worry about at all, okay?"
   "Right now?" Pat asked for his wife.
   Dr. North stood. "Yes, I have the time right now."
   "Why don't you take a little walk, Pat?" Special Agent Price-O'Day suggested to her husband. She managed to keep her dignity intact, which didn't surprise her husband.
   "Okay, honey." A kiss, and he watched her leave. It was not a good moment for the career FBI agent. His wife was pregnant, but now he had to wonder if the pregnancy was a good one or not. If not—then what? He was an Irish Catholic, and his church forbade abortion as murder, and murders were things he'd investigated—and even witnessed once. Ten minutes later, he'd killed the two terrorists responsible for it. That day still came back to him in perverse dreams, despite the heroism he'd displayed and the kudos he'd received for all of it.
   But now, he was afraid. Andrea had been a fine stepmother for his little Megan, and both he and she wanted nothing in all the world more than this news—if it was, really, good news. It would probably take an hour, and he knew he couldn't spend it sitting down in a doctor's outer office full of pregnant women reading old copies of People and US Weekly. But where to go? Whom to see?
   Okay. He stood and walked out, and decided to head over to the Maumenee Building. It ought not be too hard to find. And it wasn't.
   Roy Altman was the telltale. The big former paratrooper who headed the SURGEON detail didn't stand in one place like a potted plant, but rather circulated around, not unlike a lion in a medium-sized cage, always checking, looking with highly trained and experienced eyes for something that wasn't quite right. He spotted O'Day in the elevator lobby and waved.
   "Hey, Pat! What's happening?" All the rivalry between the FBI and the USSS stopped well short of this point. O'Day had saved the life of SANDBOX and avenged the deaths of three of Altman's fellow agents, including Roy's old friend, Don Russell, who'd died like a man, gun in hand and three dead assassins in front of him. O'Day had finished Don's work.
   "My wife's over being checked out," the FBI inspector answered.
   "Nothing serious?" Altman asked.
   "Routine," Pat responded, and Altman caught the scent of a lie, but not an important one.
   "Is she around? While I'm here, I thought I'd stop over and say hi."
   "In her office." Altman waved. "Straight down, second on the right."
   "Thanks."
   "Bureau guy coming back to see SURGEON," he said into his lapel mike.
   "Roger," another agent responded.
   O'Day found the office door and knocked.
   "Come in," the female voice inside said. Then she looked up. "Oh, Pat, how are you?"
   "No complaints, just happened to be in the neighborhood, and—"
   "Did Andrea see Madge?" Cathy Ryan asked. FLOTUS had helped make the appointment, of course.
   "Yeah, and the little box doodad has a plus sign in it," Pat reported.
   "Great!" Then Professor Ryan paused. "Oh, you're worried about something." In addition to being an eye doctor, she knew trouble when she saw it.
   "Dr. North is doing an amniocentesis. Any idea how long it takes?"
   "When did it start?"
   "Right about now, I think."
   Cathy knew the problem. "Give it an hour. Madge is very good, and very careful in her procedures. They tap into the uterus and withdraw some of the amniotic fluid. That will give them some of the tissue from the embryo, and then they examine the chromosomes. She'll have the lab people standing by. Madge is senior staff, and when she talks, people listen."
   "She seems pretty competent."
   "She's a wonderful doc. She's my OB. You're worried about Down's, right?"
   A nod. "Yep."
   "Nothing you can do but wait."
   "Dr. Ryan, I'm—"
   "My name's Cathy, Pat. We're friends, remember?" There was nothing like saving the life of a woman's child to get on her permanent good side.
   "Okay, Cathy. Yeah, I'm scared. It's not—I mean, Andrea's a cop, too, but—"
   "But being good with a gun or just being tough doesn't help much right now, does it?"
   "Not worth a damn," Inspector O'Day confirmed quietly. He was about as used to being frightened as he was of flying the Space Shuttle, but potential danger to his wife and/or kid—kids now, maybe—the kind of danger in which he was utterly helpless—well, that was one of the buttons a capricious Fate could push while she laughed.
   "The odds are way in your favor," Cathy told him.
   "Yeah, Dr. North said so ... but..."
   "Yeah. And Andrea's younger than I am."
   O'Day looked down at the floor, feeling like a total fucking wimp. More than once in his life, he'd faced down armed men—criminals with violent pasts—and intimidated them into surrender. Once in his life he'd had to use his Smith & Wesson 1076 automatic in anger, and both times he'd double-tapped the heads of the terrorists, sending them off to Allah—so they'd probably believed—to answer for the murder of the innocent woman. It hadn't been easy, exactly, but neither had it been all that hard. The endless hours of practice had made it nearly as routine as the working of his service automatic. But this wasn't danger to himself. He could deal with that. The worst danger, he was just learning, was to those you loved.
   "Pat, it's okay to be scared. John Wayne was just an actor, remember?"
   But that was it. The code of manhood to which most Americans subscribed was that of the Duke, and that code did not allow fear. In truth it was about as realistic as Who Framed Roger Rabbit, but foolish or not, there it was.
   "I'm not used to it."
   Cathy Ryan understood. Most doctors did. When she'd been a straight ophthalmic SURGEON, before specializing in lasers, she'd seen the patients and the patients' families, the former in pain, but trying to be brave, the latter just scared. You tried to repair the problems of one and assuage the fears of the other. Neither task was easy. The one was just skill and professionalism; the other involved showing them that, although this was a horrid emergency which they'd never experienced before, for Cathy Ryan, M.D., FACS, it was just another day at the office. She was the Pro from Dover. She could handle it. SURGEON was blessed with the demeanor that inspired confidence in all she met.
   But even that didn't apply here. Though Madge North was a gifted physician, she was testing for a predetermined condition. Maybe someday it could be fixed—genetic therapy offered that hope, ten years or so down the line—but not today. Madge could merely determine what already was. Madge had great hands, and a good eye, but the rest of it was in God's hands, and God had already decided one way or the other. It was just a matter of finding out what His decision had been.
   "This is when a smoke comes in handy," the inspector observed, with a grimacing smirk.
   "You smoke?"
   He shook his head. "Gave it up a long time ago."
   "You should tell Jack."
   The FBI agent looked up. "I didn't know he smokes."
   "He bums them off his secretary every so often, the wimp," Cathy told the FBI agent, with almost a laugh. "I'm not supposed to know."
   "That's very tolerant for a doc."
   "His life's hard enough, and it's only a couple a day, and he doesn't do it around the kids, or Andrea'd have to shoot me for ripping his face off."
   "You know," O'Day said, looking down again and speaking from the cowboy boots he liked to wear under his blue FBI suit, "if it comes back that it's a Down's kid, what the hell do we do then?"
   "That's not an easy choice."
   "Hell, under the law I don't get a choice. I don't even have a say in it, do I?"
   "No, you don't." Cathy didn't venture that this was an inequity. The law was firm on the point. The woman—in this case, the wife– alone could choose to continue the pregnancy or terminate it. Cathy knew her husband's views on abortion. Her own views were not quite identical, but she did regard that choice as distasteful. "Pat, why are you borrowing trouble?"
   "It's not under my control."
   Like most men, Cathy saw, Pat O'Day was a control freak. She could understand that, because so was she. It came from using instruments to change the world to suit her wishes. But this was an extreme case. This tough guy was deeply frightened. He really ought not to be, but it was a question of the unknown for him. She knew the odds, and they were actually pretty good, but he was not a doctor, and all men, even the tough ones, she saw, feared the unknown. Well, it wasn't the first time she'd baby-sat an adult who needed his hand held—and this one had saved Katie's life.
   "Want to walk over to the day-care center?"
   "Sure." O'Day stood.
   It wasn't much of a walk, and her intention was to remind O'Day what this was all about—getting a new life into the world.
   "SURGEON’S on the way to the playpen," Roy Altman told his detail. Kyle Daniel Ryan—SPRITE—was sitting up now, and playing very simply with very rudimentary toys under the watchful eyes of the lionesses, as Altman thought of them, four young female Secret Service agents who fawned over SPRITE like big sisters. But these sisters all carried guns, and they all remembered what had nearly happened to SANDBOX. A nuclear-weapons-storage site was hardly as well-guarded as this particular day-care center.
   Outside the playroom was Trenton "Chip" Kelley, the only male agent on the detail, a former Marine captain who would have frightened the average NFL lineman with a mere look.
   "Hey, Chip."
   "Hi, Roy. What's happening?"
   "Just strolling over to see the little guy."
   "Who's the muscle?" Kelley saw that O'Day was carrying heat, but decided he looked like a cop. But his left thumb was still on the button of his "crash alarm," and his right hand was within a third of a second of his service automatic.
   "Bureau. He's cool," Altman assured his subordinate.
   " 'Kay." Kelley opened the door.
   "Who'd he play for?" O'Day asked Altman, once inside.
   "The Bears drafted him, but he scared Ditka too much." Altman laughed. "Ex-Marine."
   "I believe it." Then O'Day walked up behind Dr. Ryan. She'd already scooped Kyle up, and his arms were around her neck. The little boy was babbling, still months away from talking, but he knew how to smile when he saw his mommy.
   "Want to hold him?" Cathy asked.
   O'Day cradled the infant somewhat like a football. The youngest Ryan examined his face dubiously, especially the Zapata mustache, but Mommy's face was also in sight, and so he didn't scream.
   "Hey, buddy," O'Day said gently. Some things came automatically. When holding a baby, you don't stand still. You move a little bit, rhythmically, which the little ones seemed to like.
   "It'll ruin Andrea's career," Cathy said.
   "Make for a lot better hours for her, and be nice to see her every night, but, yeah, Cathy, be kinda hard for her to run alongside the car with her belly sticking out two feet." The image was good enough for a laugh. "I suppose they'll put her on restricted duty."
   "Maybe. Makes for a great disguise, though, doesn't it?"
   O'Day nodded. This wasn't so bad, holding a kid. He remembered the old Irish adage: True strength lies in gentleness. But what the hell, taking care of kids was also a man's duty. There was a lot more to being a man than just having a dick.
   Cathy saw the display and had to smile. Pat O'Day had saved Katie's life, and done it like something out of a John Woo movie, except that Pat was a real tough guy, not the movie kind. His scenes weren't scripted; he'd had to do it for real, making it up as he'd gone along. He was a lot like her husband, a servant of the law, a man who'd sworn an oath to Do the Right Thing every time, and like her husband, clearly a man who took his oaths seriously. One of those oaths concerned Pat's relationship with Andrea, and they all came down to the same thing: preserve, protect, defend. And now, this tiger with a tie was holding a baby and smiling and swaying back and forth, because that's what you did with a baby in your arms.
   "How's your daughter?" Cathy asked.
   "She and your Katie are good friends. And she's got a thing going with one of the boys at Giant Steps."
   "Oh?"
   "Jason Hunt. I think it's serious. He gave Megan one of his Hot Wheels cars." O'Day laughed. That's when his cell phone went off. "Right side coat pocket," he told the First Lady.
   Cathy fished in his pocket and pulled it out. She flipped it open. "Hello?"
   "Who's this?" a familiar voice asked.
   "Andrea? It's Cathy. Pat's right here." Cathy took Kyle and handed off the phone, watching the FBI agent's face.
   "Yeah, honey?" Pat said. Then he listened, and his eyes closed for two or three seconds, and that told the tale. His tense face relaxed. A long breath came out slowly, and the shoulders no longer looked like a man anticipating a heavy blow. "Yeah, baby, I came over to see Dr. Ryan, and we're in the nursery. Oh, okay." Pat looked over and handed over the phone. Cathy cradled it between her shoulder and ear.
   "So, what did Madge say?" Cathy asked, already knowing most of it.
   "Normal—and it's going to be a boy."
   "So, Madge was right, the odds were in your favor." And they still were. Andrea was very fit. She wouldn't have any problems, Cathy was sure.
   "Seven months from next Tuesday," Andrea said, her voice already bubbling.
   "Well, listen to what Madge says. I do," Cathy assured her. She knew all the stuff Dr. North believed in. Don't smoke. Don't drink. Do your exercises. Take the classes on prepared delivery along with your husband. Come see me in five weeks for your next checkup. Read What to Expect When You're Expecting. Cathy handed the phone back. Inspector O'Day had taken a few steps and turned away. When he turned back to take the phone, his eyes were unusually moist.
   "Yeah, honey, okay. I'll be right over." He killed the phone and dumped it back in his pocket.
   "Feel better?" she asked with a smile. One of the lionesses came over to take Kyle back. The little guy loved them all, and smiled up at her.
   "Yes, ma'am. Sorry to bother you. I feel like a wuss."
   "Oh, bullcrap." Rather a strong imprecation for Mrs. Dr. Ryan.
   "Like I said, life isn't a movie, and this isn't the Alamo. I know you're a tough guy, Pat, and so does Jack. What about you, Roy?"
   "Pat can work with me any day. Congratulations, buddy," Altman added, turning back from the lead.
   "Thanks, pal," O'Day told his colleague.
   "Can I tell Jack, or does Andrea want to?" SURGEON asked.
   "I guess you'll have to ask her about that one, ma'am."
   Pat O'Day was transformed, enough spring in his step now to make him collide with the ceiling. He was surprised to see that Cathy was heading off to the OB-GYN building, but five minutes later it was obvious why. This was to be girl-girl bonding time. Even before he could embrace his wife, Cathy was there.
   "Wonderful news, I'm so happy for you!"
   "Yeah, well, I suppose the Bureau is good for something after all," Andrea joked.
   Then the bear with the Zapata mustache lifted her off the floor with a hug and a kiss. "This calls for a small celebration," the inspector observed.
   "Join us for dinner tonight at the House?" SURGEON asked.
   "We can't," Andrea replied.
   "Says who?" Cathy demanded. And Andrea had to bow to the situation.
   "Well, maybe, if the President says it's okay."
   "I say it's okay, girl, and there are times when Jack doesn't count," Dr. Ryan told them.
   "Well, yes, then, I guess."
   "Seven-thirty," SURGEON told them. "Dress is casual." It was a shame they were no longer regular people. This would have been a good chance for Jack to do steaks on the grill, something he remained very good at, and she hadn't made her spinach salad in months. Damn the Presidency anyway! "And, Andrea, you are allowed two drinks tonight to celebrate. After that, one or two a week."
   Mrs. O'Day nodded. "Dr. North told me."
   "Madge is a real stickler on the alcohol issue." Cathy wasn't sure about the data on that, but then, she wasn't an OB-GYN, and she'd followed Dr. North's rules with Kyle and Katie. You just didn't fool around when you were pregnant. Life was too precious to risk.

CHAPTER 38

Developments
   
It's all handled electronically. Once a country's treasury was in its collection of gold bricks, which were kept in a secure, well-guarded place, or else traveled in a crate with the chief of state wherever he went. In the nineteenth century, paper currency had gained wide acceptance. At first, it had to be redeemable for gold or silver– something whose weight told you its worth—but gradually this, too, was discarded, because precious metals were just too damned heavy to lug around. But soon enough even paper currency became too bulky to drag about, as well. For ordinary citizens, the next step was plastic cards with magnetic strips on the back, which moved your theoretical currency from your account to someone else's when you made a purchase. For major corporations and nations, it meant something even more theoretical. It became an electronic expression. A nation determined the value of its currency by estimating what quantity of goods and services its citizens generated with their daily toil, and that became the volume of its monetary wealth, which was generally agreed upon by the other nations and citizens of the world. Thus it could be traded across national boundaries by fiber-optic or copper cables, or even by satellite transmissions, and so billions of dollars, pounds, yen, or the new euros moved from place to place via simple keystrokes. It was a lot easier and faster than shipping gold bricks, but, for all the convenience, the system that determined a persons or a nation's wealth was no less rigid, and at certain central banks of the world, a country's net collection of those monetary units was calculated down to a fraction of a percentage point. There was some leeway built into the system, to account for trades in process and so forth, hut that leeway was also closely calculated electronically. What resulted was no different in its effect from the numbering of the bricks of King Croesus of Lydia. In fact, if anything, the new system that depended on the movement of electrons or photons from one computer to another was even more exact, and even less forgiving. Once upon a time, one could paint lead bricks yellow and so fool a casual inspector, but lying to a computerized accounting system required a lot more than that.
   In China, the lying was handled by the Ministry of Finance, a bastard orphan child in a Marxist country peopled by bureaucrats who struggled on a daily basis to do all manner of impossible things. The first and easiest impossibility—because it had to be done—was for its senior members to cast aside everything they'd learned in their universities and Communist Party meetings. To operate in the world financial system, they had to understand and play by—and within—the world monetary rules, instead of the Holy Writ of Karl Marx.
   The Ministry of Finance, therefore, was placed in the unenviable position of having to explain to the communist clergy that their god was a false one, that their perfect theoretical model just didn't play in the real world, and that therefore they had to bend to a reality which they had rejected. The bureaucrats in the ministry were for the most part observers, rather like children playing a computer game that they didn't believe in but enjoyed anyway. Some of the bureaucrats were actually quite clever, and played the game well, sometimes even making a profit on their trades and transactions. Those who did so won promotions and status within the ministry. Some even drove their own automobiles to work and were befriended by the new class of local industrialists who had shed their ideological straitjackets and operated as capitalists within a communist society. That brought wealth into their nation, and earned the tepid gratitude, if not the respect, of their political masters, rather as a good sheepdog might. This crop of industrialists worked closely with the Ministry of Finance, and along the way influenced the bureaucracy that managed the income that they brought into their country.
   One result of all this activity was that the Ministry of Finance was surely and not so slowly drifting away from the True Faith of Marxism into the shadowy in-between world of socialist capitalism—a world with no real name or identity. In fact, every Minister of Finance had drifted away from Marxism to some greater or lesser extent, whatever his previous religious fervor, because one by one they had all seen that their country needed to play on this particular international playground, and to do that, had to play by the rules, and, oh, by the way, this game was bringing prosperity to the People's Republic in a way that fifty years of Marx and Mao had singularly failed to do.
   As a direct result of this inexorable process, the Minister of Finance was a candidate, not a full member of the Politburo. He had a voice at the table, but not a vote, and his words were judged by those who had never really troubled themselves to understand his words or the world in which he operated.
   This minister was surnamed Qian, which, appropriately, meant coins or money, and he'd been in the job for six years. His background was in engineering. He'd built railroads in the northeastern part of his country for twenty years, and done so well enough to merit a change in posting. He'd actually handled his ministerial job quite well, the international community judged, but Qian Kun was often the one who had to explain to the Politburo that the Politburo couldn't do everything it wanted to do, which meant he was often about as welcome in the room as a plague rat. This would be one more such day, he feared, sitting in the back of his ministerial car on the way to the morning meeting.
 
   Eleven hours away, on Park Avenue in New York, another meeting was under way. Butterfly was the name of a burgeoning chain of clothing stores which marketed to prosperous American women. It had combined new microfiber textiles with a brilliant young designer from Florence, Italy, into fully a six percent share of its market, and in America that was big money indeed.
   Except for one thing. Its textiles were all made in the People's Republic, at a factory just outside the great port city of Shanghai, and then cut and sewn into clothing at yet another plant in the nearby city of Yancheng.
   The chairman of Butterfly was just thirty-two, and after ten years of hustling, he figured he was about to cash in on a dream he'd had from all the way back in Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn. He'd spent nearly every day since graduating Pratt Institute conceiving and building up his business, and now it was his time. It was time to buy that G so that he could fly off to Paris on a whim, get that house in the hills of Tuscany, and another in Aspen, and really live in the manner he'd earned.
   Except for that one little thing. His flagship store at Park and 50th today had experienced something as unthinkable as the arrival of men from Mars. People had demonstrated there. People wearing Versace clothing had shown up with cardboard placards stapled to wooden sticks proclaiming their opposition to trade with BARBARIANS! and condemning Butterfly for doing business with such a country. Someone had even shown up with an image of the Chinese flag with a swastika on it, and if there was anything you didn't want associated with your business in New York, it was Hitler's odious logo.
   "We've got to move fast on this," the corporate counsel said. He was Jewish and smart, and had steered Butterfly through more than one minefield to bring it to the brink of ultimate success. "This could kill us."
   He wasn't kidding, and the rest of the board knew it. Exactly four customers had gone past the protesters into the store today, and one of them had been returning something which, she said, she no longer wanted in her closet.
   "What's our exposure?" the founder and CEO asked.
   "In real terms?" the head of accounting asked. "Oh, potentially four hundred." By which he meant four hundred million dollars. "It could wipe us out in, oh, twelve weeks."
   Wipe us out was not what the CEO wanted to hear. To bring a line of clothing this far was about as easy as swimming the Atlantic Ocean during the annual shark convention. This was his moment, but he found himself standing in yet another minefield, one for which he'd had no warning at all.
   "Okay," he responded as coolly as the acid in his stomach allowed. "What can we do about it?"
   "We can walk on our contracts," the attorney advised.
   "Is that legal?"
   "Legal enough." By which he meant that the downside exposure of shorting the Chinese manufacturers was less onerous than having a shop full of products that no person would buy.
   "Alternatives?"
   "The Thais," Production said. "There's a place outside Bangkok that would love to take up the slack. They called us today, in fact."
   "Cost?"
   "Less than four percent difference. Three-point-six-three, to be exact, and they will be off schedule by, oh, maybe four weeks max. We have enough stock to keep the stores open through that, no problem," Production told the rest of the board with confidence.
   "How much of that stock is Chinese in origin?"
   "A lot comes from Taiwan, remember? We can have our people start putting the Good Guys stickers on them ... and we can fudge that some, too." Not all that many consumers knew the difference between one Chinese place name and another. A flag was much easier to differentiate.
   "Also," Marketing put in, "we can start an ad campaign tomorrow. 'Butterfly doesn't do business with dragons.' " He held up an illustration that showed the corporate logo escaping a dragon's fiery breath. That it looked terminally tacky didn't matter for the moment. They had to take action, and they had to do it fast.
   "Oh, got a call an hour ago from Frank Meng at Meng, Harrington, and Cicero," Production announced. "He says he can get some ROC textile houses on the team in a matter of days, and he says they have the flexibility to retool in less than a month—and if we green-light it, the ROC ambassador will officially put us on their good-guy list. In return, we just have to guarantee five years' worth of business, with the usual escape clauses."
   "I like it," Legal said. The ROC ambassador would play fair, and so would his country. They knew when they had the tiger by the balls.
   "We have a motion on the table," the chairman and CEO announced. "All in favor?"
   With this vote, Butterfly was the first major American company to walk out on its contracts with the People's Republic. Like the first goose to leave Northern Canada in the fall, it announced that a new and chilly season was coming. The only potential problem was legal action from the PRC businesses, but a federal judge would probably understand that a signed contract wasn't quite the same thing as a suicide note, and perhaps even regard the overarching political question sufficient to make the contract itself void. After all, counsel would argue in chambers—and in front of a New York jury if necessary—when you find out you're doing business with Adolf Hitler, you have to take a step back. Opposing counsel would argue back, but he'd know his position was a losing one, and he'd tell his clients so before going in.
   "I'll tell our bankers tomorrow. They're not scheduled to cut the money loose for another thirty-six hours." This meant that one hundred forty million dollars would not be transferred to a Beijing account as scheduled. And now the CEO could contemplate going ahead with his order for the G. The corporate logo of a monarch butterfly leaving its cocoon, he thought, would look just great on the rudder.
 
   We don't know for sure yet," Qian told his colleagues, "but I am seriously concerned."
   "What's the particular problem today?" Xu Kun Piao asked.
   "We have a number of commercial and other contracts coming due in the next three weeks. Ordinarily I would expect them to proceed normally, but our representatives in America have called to warn my office that there might be a problem."
   "Who are these representatives?" Shen Tang asked.
   "Mainly lawyers whom we employ to manage our business dealings for us. Almost all are American citizens. They are not fools, and their advice is something a wise man attends carefully," Qian said soberly.
   "Lawyers are the curse of America," Zhang Han San observed. "And all civilized nations." At least here we decide the law, he didn't have to explain.
   "Perhaps so, Zhang, but if you do business with America you need such people, and they are very useful in explaining conditions there. Shooting the messenger may get you more pleasant news, but it won't necessarily be accurate."
   Fang nodded and smiled at that. He liked Qian. The man spoke the truth more faithfully than those who were supposed to listen for it. But Fang kept his peace on this. He, too, was concerned with the political developments caused by those two overzealous policemen, but it was too late to discipline them now. Even if Xu suggested it, Zhang and the others would talk him out of it.
 
   Secretary Winston was at home watching a movie on his DVD player. It was easier than going to the movies, and he could do it without four Secret Service agents in attendance. His wife was knitting a ski sweater—she did her important Christmas presents herself, and it was something she could do while watching TV or talking, and it brought the same sort of relaxation to her that sailing his big offshore yacht did for her husband.
   Winston had a multiline phone in the family room—and every other room in his Chevy Chase house—and the private line had a different ring so that he knew which one he had to answer himself.
   "Yeah?"
   "George, it's Mark."
   "Working late?"
   "No, I'm home. Just got a call from New York. It may have just started."
   "What's that?" TRADER ASKED TELESCOPE.
   "Butterfly—the ladies' clothing firm?"
   "Oh, yeah, I know the name," Winston assured his aide. Well he might: His wife and daughter loved the place.
   "They're going to bail on their contracts with their PRC suppliers."
   "How big?"
   "About a hundred forty."
   Winston whistled. "That much?"
   "That big," Gant assured him. "And they're a trend-setter. When this breaks tomorrow, it's going to make a lot of people think. Oh, one other thing."
   "Yeah?"
   "The PRC just terminated its options with Caterpillar—equipment to finish up the Three Gorges project. That's about three-ten million, switching over to Kawa in Japan. That's going to be in the Journal tomorrow morning."
   "That's real smart!" Winston grumbled.
   "Trying to show us who's holding the whip, George."
   "Well, I hope they like how it feels going up their ass," SecTreas observed, causing his wife to look over at him.
   "Okay, when's the Butterfly story break?"
   "It's too late for the Journal tomorrow, but it'll be on CNN-FN and CNBC for damned sure."
   "And what if other fashion houses do the same?"
   "Over a billion, right away, and you know what they say, George, a billion here, a billion there, pretty soon you're talking real money." It had been one of Everett McKinley Dirksen's better Washington observations.
   "How much before their currency account goes in the tank?"
   "Twenty, and it starts hurting. Forty, and they're in the shitter. Sixty, and they're fuckin' broke. Never seen a whole country sleeping over a steam vent, y'know? George, they also import food, wheat mainly, from Canada and Australia. That could really hurt."
   "Noted. Tomorrow."
   "Right." The phone clicked off.
   Winston picked up the controller to un-pause the DVD player, then had another thought. He picked up the mini-tape machine he used for notes and said, "Find out how much of the PRC military purchases have been executed financially—especially Israel." He clicked the STOP button, set it down, and picked the DVD controller back up to continue his movie, but soon found he couldn't concentrate on it very well. Something big was happening, and experienced as he was in the world of commerce, and now in the business of international transactions, he realized that he didn't have a handle on it. That didn't happen to George Winston very often, and it was enough to keep him from laughing at Men in Black.
 
   Her minister didn't look very happy, Ming saw. The look on his face made her think that he might have lost a family member to cancer. She found out more when he called her in to dictate his notes. It took fully ninety minutes this time, and then two entire hours for her to transcribe them into her computer. She hadn't exactly forgotten what her computer probably did with them every night, but she hadn't thought about it in weeks. She wished she had the ability to discuss the notes' content with Minister Fang. Over the years of working for him, she'd acquired rather a sophisticated appreciation for the politics of her country, to the point that she could anticipate not only the thoughts of her master, but also those of some of his colleagues. She was in effect, if not in fact, a confidant of her minister, and while she could not counsel him on his job, if he'd had the wit to appreciate the effect of her education and her time inside his head, he might have used her far more efficiently than as a mere secretary. But she was a woman in a land ruled by men, and therefore voiceless. Orwell had been right. She'd read Animal Farm some years ago. Everyone was equal, but some were more equal than others. If Fang were smart, he'd use her more intelligently, but he wasn't, and he didn't. She'd talk to Nomuri-san about that tonight.
 
   For his part, Chester was just finalizing an order for one thousand six hundred sixty-one high-end NEC desktops at the China Precision Machine Import and Export Corporation, which, among other things, made guided missiles for the People's Liberation Army. That would make Nippon Electric Company pretty happy. The sad part was that he couldn't rig these machine to talk as glibly as the two in the Council of Ministers, but that would have been too dangerous, if a good daydream over a beer and a smoke. Chester Nomuri, cyber-spy. Then his beeper started vibrating. He reached down and gave it a look. The number was 745-4426. Applied to the keys on a phone, and selecting the right letters, that translated in personal code to shin gan, "heart and soul," Ming's private endearment for her lover and an indication that she wanted to come over to his place tonight. That suited Nomuri just fine. So, he'd turned into James Bond after all. Good enough for a private smile, as he walked out to his car. He flipped open his shoephone, dialed up his e-mail access, and sent his own message over the 'Net, 226-234: bao bei, "beloved one." She liked to hear him say that, and he didn't mind saying it. So, something other than TV for tonight. Good. He hoped he had enough of the Japanese scotch for the apres-sex.
 
   You knew you had a bad job when you welcomed a trip to the dentist. Jack had been going to the same one for nineteen years, but this time it involved a helicopter flight to a Maryland State Police barracks with its own helipad, followed by five minutes in a car to the dentist's office. He was thinking about China, but his principal bodyguard mistook his expression.
   "Relax, boss," Andrea told the President. "If he makes you scream, I'll cap him."
   "You shouldn't be up so early," Ryan responded crossly.
   "Dr. North said I could work my regular routine until further notice, and I just started the vitamins she likes."
   "Well, Pat looks rather pleased with himself." It had been a pleasant evening at the White House. It was always good to entertain guests who had no political agenda.
   "What is it about you guys? You strut like roosters, but we have to do all the work!"
   "Andrea, I would gladly switch jobs with you!" Ryan joked. He'd had this discussion with Cathy often enough, claiming that having a baby couldn't be all that hard—men had to do almost all of the tough work in life. But he couldn't joke with someone else's wife that way.
 
   Nomuri heard his computer beep in the distance, meaning it had received and was now automatically encrypting and retransmitting the date e-mailed from Ming's desktop. It made an entertaining interruption to his current activity. It had been five days since their last tryst, and that was a long enough wait for him . . . and evidently for her as well, judging by the passion in her kisses. In due course, it was over, and they both rolled over for a smoke.
   "How is the office?" Nomuri asked, with the answer to his question now residing in a server in Wisconsin.
   "The Politburo is debating great finance. Qian, the minister in charge of our money, is trying to persuade the Politburo to change its ways, but they're not listening as Minister Fang thinks they ought."
   "Oh?"
   "He's rather angry with his old comrades for their lack of flexibility." Then Ming giggled. "Chai said the minister was very flexible with her two nights ago."
   "Not a nice thing to say about a man, Ming," Nomuri chided.
   "I would never say it about you and your jade sausage, shin gan," she said, turning for a kiss.
   "Do they argue often there? In the Politburo, I mean?"
   "There are frequent disagreements, but this is the first time in months that the matter has not been resolved to Fang's satisfaction. They are usually collegial, but this is a disagreement over ideology. Those can be violent—at least in intellectual terms." Obviously, the Politburo members were too old to do much more than smack an enemy over the head with their canes.
   "And this one?"
   "Minister Qian says the country may soon be out of money. The other ministers say that is nonsense. Qian says we must accommodate the Western countries. Zhang and the others like him say we cannot show weakness after all they—especially the Americans—have done to us lately."
   "Don't they see that killing that Italian priest was a bad thing?"
   "They see it as an unfortunate accident, and besides, he was breaking our laws."
   Jesus, Nomuri thought, they really do think they're god-kings, don't they? "Bao bei, that is a mistake on their part."
   "You think so?"
   "I have been to America, remember? I lived there for a time. Americans are very solicitous to their clergy, and they place a high value on religion. Spitting on it angers them greatly."
   "You think Qian is right, then?" she asked. "You think America will deny us money for this foolish action?"
   "I think it is possible, yes. Very possible, Ming."
   "Minister Fang thinks we should take a more moderate course, to accommodate the Americans somewhat, but he did not say so at the meeting."
   "Oh? Why?"
   "He does not wish to depart too greatly from the path of the other ministers. You say that in Japan people fear not being elected. Here, well, the Politburo elects its own, and it can expel those who no longer fit in. Fang does not wish to lose his own status, obviously, and to make sure that doesn't happen, he takes a cautious line."
   "This is hard for me to understand, Ming. How do they select their members? How do the 'princes' choose the new 'prince'?"
   "Oh, there are party members who have distinguished themselves ideologically, or sometimes from work in the field. Minister Qian, for example, used to be chief of railroad construction, and was promoted for that reason, but mainly they are picked for political reasons."
   "And Fang?"
   "My minister is an old comrade. His father was one of Mao's faithful lieutenants, and Fang has always been politically reliable, but in recent years he has taken note of the new industries and seen how well they function, and he admires some of the people who operate them. He even has some into his office from time to time for tea and talk."
   So, the old pervert is a progressive here? Nomuri wondered. Well, the bar for that was pretty low in China. You didn't have to jump real high, but that put him in advance of the ones who dug a trench under it, didn't it?
   "Ah, so the people have no voice at all, do they?"
   Ming laughed at that. "Only at party meetings, and there you guard your voice."
   "Are you a member?"
   "Oh, yes. I go to meetings once a month. I sit in the back. I nod when others nod, and applaud when they applaud, and I pretend to listen. Others probably listen better. It is not a small thing to be a party member, but my membership is because of my job at the ministry. I am here because they needed my language and computer skills—and besides, the ministers like to have young women under them," she added.
   "You're never on top of him, eh?"
   "He prefers the ordinary position, but it is hard on his arms." Ming giggled.
 
   Ryan was glad to see that he was brushing enough. The dentist told him to floss, as he always did, and Ryan nodded, as he always did, and he'd never bought floss in his life and wasn't going to start now. But at least he'd undergone nothing more invasive than a couple of X rays, for which, of course, he'd gotten the leather apron. On the whole, it had been ninety minutes torn off the front of his day. Back in the Oval Office, he had the latest SORGE, which was good enough for a whispered "damn." He lifted the phone for Mary Pat at Langley.
   "They're dense," Ryan observed.
   "Well, they sure as hell don't know high finance. Even I know better than this."
   "TRADER has to see this. Put him on the SORGE list," POTUS ordered.
   "With your day-to-day approval only," the DDO hedged. "Maybe he has a need-to-know on economics, but nothing else, okay?"
   "Okay, for now," Jack agreed. But George was coming along nicely on strategic matters, and might turn into a good policy adviser. He understood high-stress psychology better than most, and that was the name of the game. Jack broke the connection and had Ellen Sumter call the SecTreas over from across the street.
 
   So, what else do they worry about?" Chester asked. "They're concerned that some of the workers and peasants are not as happy as they should be. You know about the riots they had in the coal region."
   "Oh?"
   "Yes, the miners rioted last year. The PLA went in to settle things down. Several hundred people were shot, and three thousand arrested." She shrugged while putting her bra back on. "There is unrest, but that is nothing especially new. The army keeps control of things in the outlying regions. That's why they spend so much money, to keep the army reliable. The generals run the PLA's economic empire—all the factories and things—and they're good at keeping a lid on things. The ordinary soldiers are just workers and peasants, but the officers are all party members, and they are reliable, or so the Politburo thinks. It's probably true," Ming concluded. She hadn't seen her minister worry all that much about it. Power in the People's Republic decidedly grew from the barrel of a gun, and the Politburo owned all the guns. That made things simple, didn't it?
   For his part, Nomuri had just learned things he'd never thought about before. He might want to make his own report on this stuff. Ming probably knew a lot of things that didn't go out as SONGBIRD material, and he'd be remiss not to send that to Langley, too.
 
   It's like a five-year-old in a gun store," Secretary Winston observed. "These people have no business making economic decisions for a city government, much less a major country. I mean, hell, as stupid as the Japanese were a few years ago, at least they know to listen to the coaches."
   "And?"
   "And when they run into the brick wall, their eyes'll still be closed. That can smart some, Jack. They're going to get bit on the ass, and they don't see it coming." Winston could mix metaphors with the best of 'em, Ryan saw.
   "When?" SWORDSMAN asked.
   "Depends on how many companies do what Butterfly did. We'll know more in a few days. The fashion business will be the lead indicator, of all things."
   "Really?"
   "Surprised me, too, but this is the time for them to commit to the next season, and there's a ton of money in that business going on over there, man. Toss in all the toys for next Christmas. There's seventeen billion—plus just in that, Mark Gant tells me."
   "Damn."
   "Yeah, I didn't know Santa's reindeer had slanted eyes either, Jack. At least not to that extent."
   "What about Taiwan?" Ryan wondered.
   "You're not kidding. They're jumping into the growing gap with both feet. Figure they pick up a quarter, maybe a third, of what the PRC is going to lose. Singapore's going to be next. And the Thais. This little bump in the road will go a long way to restore the damage done to their economy a few years back. In fact, the PRC's troubles might rebuild the whole South Asian economy. It could be a swing of fifty billion dollars out of China, and it has to go somewhere. We're starting to take bids, Jack. It won't be a bad deal for our consumers, and I'll bet those countries learn from Beijing's example, and kick their doors open a notch or so. So, our workers will profit from it, too—somewhat, anyway."
   "Downside?"
   "Boeing's squealing some. They wanted that triple-seven order, but you wait an' see. Somebody's going to take up that slack, too. One other thing."
   "Yeah?" Ryan asked.
   "It's not just American companies hailing out on them. Two big Italian places, and Siemens in Germany, they've announced termination of some business with their Chinese partners," TRADER said.
   "Will it turn into a general movement . . . ?"
   "Too soon to say, but if I were these guys"—Winston shook the fax from CIA—"I'd be thinking about fence-mending real soon."
   "They won't do it, George."
   "Then they're going to learn a nasty lesson."

CHAPTER 39

The Other Question
   
"No action with our friend?" Reilly asked.
   "Well, he continues his sexual adventures," Provalov answered.
   "Talk to any of the girls yet?"
   "Earlier today, two of them. He pays them well, in euros or d-marks, and doesn't request any, uh, 'exotic' services from them."
   "Nice to know he's normal in his tastes," the FBI agent observed, with a grunt.
   "We have numerous photos of him now. We've put an electronic tracker on his cars, and we've also planted a bug on his computer keyboard. That'll allow us to determine his encryption password, next time he makes use of it."
   "But he hasn't done anything incriminating yet," Reilly said. He didn't even make it a question.
   "Not under our observation," Oleg confirmed.
   "Damn, so, he was really trying to whack Sergey Golovko. Hard to believe, man."
   "That is so, but we cannot deny it. And on Chinese orders."
   "That's like an act of war, buddy. It's a big fucking deal." Reilly took a sip of his vodka.
   "So it is, Mishka. Rather more complex than any case I've handled this year." It was, Provalov thought, an artful understatement. He'd gladly go back to a normal homicide, a husband killing his wife for fucking a neighbor, or the other way around. Such things, nasty as they were, were far less nasty than this one was.
   "How's he pick the girls up, Oleg?" Reilly asked.
   "He doesn't call for them on the phone. He seems to go to a good restaurant with a good bar and wait until a likely prospect appears at his elbow."
   "Hmm, plant a girl on him?"
   "What do you mean?"
   "I mean get yourself a pretty girl who does this sort of thing for a living, brief her on what she ought to say, and set her in front of him like a nice fly on your fishhook. If he picks her up, maybe she can get him to talk."
   "Have you ever done such a thing?"
   "We got a wiseguy that way in Jersey City three years ago. Liked to brag in front of women how tough he was, and the guys he whacked, that sort of thing. He's in Rahway State Prison now on a murder rap. Oleg, a lot more people have talked their way into prison than you'll ever catch on your own. Trust me. That's how it is for us, even."
   "I wonder if the Sparrow School has any graduates working...?" Provalov mused.
 
   It wasn't fair to do it at night, but nobody had ever said war was marked by fairness in its execution. Colonel Boyle was in his command post monitoring the operation of 1st Armored's Aviation Brigade. It was mainly his Apaches, though some Kiowa Warriors were up, too, as scouts for the heavy shooters. The target was a German heavy battalion, simulating a night's laagering after a day on the offense. In fact, they were pretending to be Russians—it was a NATO scenario that went back thirty years to the introduction of the first Huey Cobras, back in the 1970s, when the value of a helicopter gunship had first been noticed in Vietnam. And a revelation it had been. Armed for the first time in 1972 with TOW missiles, they'd proven to the tanks of the North Vietnamese just how fearsome a foe a missile-armed chopper could be, and that had been before night-vision systems had come fully on line. Now the Apache turned combat operations into sport shooting, and the Germans were still trying to figure a counter for it. Even their own night-vision gear didn't compensate for the huge advantage held by the airborne hunters. One idea that had almost worked was to lay a thermal-insulating blanket over the tanks so as to deny the helicopters the heat signature by which they hunted their motionless prey, but the problem there was the tank's main gun tube, which had proved impractical to conceal, and the blankets had never really worked properly, any more than a twin-bed coverlet could be stretched over a king-size bed. And so, now, the Apaches' laser-illumination systems were "painting" the Leos for enough seconds to guarantee hits from the Hellfire missiles, and while the German tanks tried to shoot back, they couldn't seem to make it work. And now the yellow "I'm dead" lights were blinking, and yet another tank battalion had fallen victim to yet another administrative attack.
   "They should have tried putting SAM teams outside their perimeter," Colonel Boyle observed, watching the computer screen. Instead, the German colonel had tried IR lures, which the Apache gunners had learned to distinguish from the real thing. Under the rules of the scenario, proper tank decoys had not been allowed. They were a little harder to discriminate—the American-made ones almost exactly replicated the visual signature of an M1 tank, and had an internal heat source for fooling infrared gear at night—and fired off a Hoffman pyrotechnic charge to simulate a return shot when they took a hit. But they were made so well for their mission that they could not be mistaken for anything other than what they were, either a real Ml main battle tank, and hence friendly, or a decoy, and thus not really useful in a training exercise, all in all a case of battlefield technology being too good for a training exercise.
   "Pegasus Lead to Archangel, over," the digital radio called. With the new radios, it was no longer a static-marred crackle.
   "Archangel to Pegasus," Colonel Boyle answered.
   "Sir, we are Winchester and just about out of targets. No friendly casualties. Pegasus is RTB, over."
   "Roger, Pegasus. Looks good from here. Out."
   And with that, the Apache battalion of attack choppers and their Kiowa bird-dogs turned back for their airfield for the mission debrief and post-game beers.
   Boyle looked over at General Diggs. "Sir, I don't know how to do it much better than that."
   "Our hosts are going to be pissed."
   "The Bundeswehr isn't what it used to be. Their political leadership thinks peace has broken out all the way, and their troopers know it. They could have put some of their own choppers up to run interference, but my boys are pretty good at air-to-air—we train for it, and my pilots really like the idea of making ace on their own—but their chopper drivers aren't getting all the gas they need for operational training. Their best chopper drivers are down in the Balkans doing traffic observation."
   Diggs nodded thoughtfully. The problems of the Bundeswehr were not, strictly speaking, his problems. "Colonel, that was well done. Please convey my pleasure to your people. What's next for you?"
   "General, we have a maintenance stand-down tomorrow, and two days later we're going to run a major search-and-rescue exercise with my Blackhawks. You're welcome to come over and watch."
   "I just might, Colonel Boyle. You done good. Be seeing you."
   "Yes, sir." The colonel saluted, and General Diggs walked out to his. HMMWV, with Colonel Masterman in attendance.
   "Well, Duke?"
   "Like I told you, sir, Boyle's been feeding his boys and girls a steady diet of nails and human babies."
   "Well, his next fitness report's going to get him a star, I think."
   "His Apache commander's not bad either."
   "That's a fact," the divisional G-3 agreed. "Pegasus" was his call sign, and he'd kicked some serious ass this night.
   "What's next?"
   "Sir, in three days we have a big SimNet exercise against the Big Red One at Fort Riley. Our boys are pretty hot for it."
   "Divisional readiness?" Diggs asked.
   "We're pushing ninety-five percent, General. Not much slack left to take up. I mean, sir, to go any farther, we gotta take the troops out to Fort Irwin or maybe the Negev Training Area. Are we as good as the Tenth Cav or the Eleventh? No, we don't get to play in the field as much as they do." And, he didn't have to add, no division in any army in the world got the money to train that hard. "But given the limitations we have to live with, there's not a whole lot more we can do. I figure we play hard on SimNet to keep the kids interested, but we're just about as far as we can go, sir."
   "I think you're right, Duke. You know, sometimes I kinda wish the Cold War could come back—for training purposes, anyway. The Germans won't let us play the way we used to back then, and that's what we need to take the next step."
   "Unless somebody springs for the tickets to fly a brigade out to California." Masterman nodded.
   "That ain't gonna happen, Duke," Diggs told his operations officer. And more was the pity. First Tanks' troops were almost ready to give the Blackhorse a run for their money. Close enough, Diggs thought, that he'd pay to watch. "How's a beer grab you, Colonel?"
   "If the General is buying, I will gladly assist him in spending his money," Duke Masterman said graciously, as their sergeant driver pulled up to the kazerne's O-Club.
 
   “Good morning, Comrade General," Gogol said, pulling himself to attention.
   Bondarenko had felt guilt at coming to see this old soldier so early in the morning, but he'd heard the day before that the ancient warrior was not one to waste daylight. And so he wasn't, the general saw.
   "You kill wolves," Gennady Iosifovich observed, seeing the gleaming pelts hanging on the wall of this rough cabin.
   "And bear, but when you gild the pelts, they grow too heavy," the old man agreed, fetching tea for his guests.
   "These are amazing," Colonel Aliyev said, touching one of the remaining wolf pelts. Most had been carried off.
   "It's an amusement for an old hunter," Gogol said, lighting a cigarette.
   General Bondarenko looked at his rifles, the new Austrian-made one, and the old Russian Ml891 Mosin-Nagant sniper rifle.
   "How many with this one?" Bondarenko asked.
   "Wolves, bears?"
   "Germans," the general clarified, with coldness in his voice.
   "I stopped counting at thirty, Comrade General. That was before Kiev. There were many more after that. I see we share a decoration," Gogol observed, pointing to his visitor's gold star, for Hero of the Soviet Union, which he'd won in Afghanistan. Gogol had two, one from Ukraine and the other in Germany.
   "You have the look of a soldier, Pavel Petrovich, and a good one." Bondarenko sipped his tea, served properly, a clear glass in a metal—was it silver?—holder.
   "I served in my time. First at Stalingrad, then on the long walk to Berlin."
   I bet you did walk all the way, too, the general thought. He'd met his share of Great Patriotic War veterans, now mostly dead. This wizened old bastard had stared death in the face and spat at it, trained to do so, probably, by his life in these woods. He'd grown up with bears and wolves as enemies—as nasty as the German fascists had been, at least they didn't eat you—and so had been accustomed to wagering his life on his eye and his nerve. There was no real substitute for that, the kind of training you couldn't institute for an army. A gifted few learned how the hard way, and of those the lucky ones survived the war. Pavel Petrovich hadn't had an easy time. Soldiers might admire their own snipers, might value them for their skills, but you could never say "comrade" to a man who hunted men as though they were animals—because on the other side of the line might be another such man who wanted to hunt you. Of all the enemies, that was the one you loathed and feared the most, because it became personal to see another man through a telescopic sight, to see his face, and take his life as a deliberate act against one man, even gazing at his face when the bullet struck. Gogol had been one of those, Gennady thought, a hunter of individual men. And he'd probably never lost a minute's sleep over it. Some men were just born to it, and Pavel Petrovich Gogol was one of them. With a few hundred thousand such men, a general could conquer the entire world, but they were too rare for that. . .
   . . . and maybe that was a good thing, Bondarenko mused.
   "Might you come to my headquarters some night? I would like to feed you dinner and listen to your stories."
   "How far is it?"
   "I will send you my personal helicopter, Sergeant Gogol."
   "And I will bring you a gilded wolf," the hunter promised his guest.
   "We will find an honored place for it at my headquarters," Bondarenko promised in turn. "Thank you for your tea. I must depart and see to my command, but I will have you to headquarters for dinner,
   Sergeant Gogol." Handshakes were exchanged, and the general took his leave.
   "I would not want him on the other side of a battlefield," Colonel Aliyev observed, as they got into their helicopter.
   "Do we have a sniper school in the command?"
   "Yes, General, but it's mainly inactive."
   Gennady turned. "Start it up again, Andrushka! We'll get Gogol to come and teach the children how it's done. He's a priceless asset. Men like that are the soul of a fighting army. It's our job to command our soldiers, to tell them where to go and what to do, but those are the men who do the fighting and the killing, and it's our job to make sure they're properly trained and supplied. And when they're too old, we use them to teach the new boys, to give them heroes they can touch and talk to. How the hell did we ever forget that, Andrey?" The general shook his head as the helicopter lifted off.
 
   Gregory was back in his hotel room, with three hundred pages of technical information to digest as he sipped his Diet Coke and finished off his french fries. Something was wrong with the whole equation, but he couldn't put his finger on it. The Navy had tested its Standard-2-ER missile against all manner of threats, mainly on computer, but also against live targets at Kwajalein Atoll. It had done pretty well, but there'd never been a full-up live test against a for-real ICBM reentry vehicle. There weren't enough of them to go around. Mainly they used old Minuteman-II ICBMs, long since retired from service and fired out of test silos at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, but those were mostly gone. Russia and America had retired all of their ballistic weapons, chiefly as a reaction to the nuclear terrorist explosion at Denver and the even more horrific aftermath that had barely been averted. The negotiations to draw the numbers down to zero—the last ones had been eliminated in public just before the Japanese had launched their sneak attack on the Pacific Fleet—had gone so rapidly that a lot of the minor ancillary points had scarcely been considered, and only later had it been decided to take the "spare" launchers whose disposition had somehow been overlooked and retain them for ABM testing (every month a Russian officer checked the American ones at Vandenberg, and an American officer counted the Russian ones outside Plesetsk). The ABM tests were also monitored, hut that entire area of effort was now largely theoretical. Both America and Russia retained a goodly number of nuclear warheads, and these could easily be affixed to cruise missiles, which, again, both sides had in relative abundance and no country could stop. It might take five hours instead of thirty-four minutes, but the targets would be just as dead.
   Anti-missile work had been relegated to theater missiles, such as the ubiquitous Scuds, which the Russians doubtless regretted ever having built, much less sold to jerkwater countries that couldn't even field a single decent mechanized division, but who loved to parade those upgraded V-2-class ballistic stovepipes because they looked impressive as hell to the people on the sidewalks. But the new upgrades on Patriot and its Russian counterpart SAM largely negated that threat, and the Navy's Aegis system had been tested against them, with pretty good success. Like Patriot, though, Standard was really a point-defense weapon with damned little cross-range ability to cover an area instead of maybe twenty square miles of important sea-estate.
   All in all, it was a pity that they'd never solved the power-throughput problem with his free-electron lasers. Those could have defended whole coastlines, if only . . . and if only his aunt had balls, Gregory thought, she'd be his uncle. There was talk of building a chemical laser aboard a converted 747 that could sure as hell clobber a ballistic launch during boost phase, but to do that, the 747 had to be fairly close to the launch point, and so that was just one more version of theater defense, and of little strategic use.
   The Aegis system had real possibilities. The SPY radar system was first-rate, and though the computer that managed the information was the flower of 1975 technology—a current Apple Macintosh had it beat by a good three orders of magnitude in all categories of performance– intercepting a ballistic warhead wasn't a question of computing speed so much as kinetic energy—getting the kill vehicle to the right place at the right time. Even that wasn't so great a feat of engineering. The real work had been done as far back as 1959, with the Nike Zeus, which had turned into Spartan and shown great promise before being shitcanned by the 1972 treaty with the Soviet Union, which was, belatedly, just as dead as the Safeguard system, which had been aborted at half-built.
   Well, the fact of the matter was that MIRV technology had negated that entire defense concept. No, you had to kill the ICBM in boost phase to kill all the MIRVs at once, and do it over the enemy's territory so that if he had a primitive arming system he'd only fry his own turf. The method for doing that was the Brilliant Pebbles system developed at Lawrence-Livermore National Laboratory, and though it had never been given a full-up test, the technology was actually pretty straightforward. Being hit by a matchstick traveling at fifteen thousand miles per hour would ruin your entire day. But that would never happen. The drive to fund and deploy such a system had died with all the ballistic launchers. In a way, it was a pity, Gregory thought. Such a system would have been a really cool engineering accomplishment—but it had little practical application today. The PRC retained its land-based ballistic launchers, but there were only ten or so of them, and that was a long way from the fifteen hundred the Soviets had once pointed at America. The Chinese had a missile submarine, too, but Gregory figured that CINCPAC could make that go away if he had to. Even if it was just tied alongside the pier, one two-thousand-pound smart bomb could take it out of play, and the Navy had a lot of those.
   So, he thought, figure the PRC gets really pissed at Taiwan, and figure the Navy has an Aegis cruiser tied alongside so that its sailors can get drunk and laid in the city, and those folks in Beijing pick that moment to push the button on one of their ICBMs, how can the Navy keep its cruiser from turning into slag, and oh, by the way, keep the city of Taipei alive...?
   The SM-2-ER had almost enough of the right ingredients to handle such a threat. If the missile was targeted on where the cruiser was, cross-range was not an issue. You just had to put the interceptor on the same line of bearing, because in essence the inbound rack wasn't moving at all, and you just had to put the SAM in the same place—Spot X– that the RV was going to be, at Time Y. The Aegis computer could figure where and when that was, and you weren't really hitting a bullet with a bullet. The RV would be about a meter across, and the kill-zone of the SAM's warhead would be about, what? Three meters across? Five? Maybe even eight or ten?
   Call it eight, Al Gregory thought. Was the SM-2 that accurate? In absolute terms, probably yes. It had ample-sized control surfaces, and getting into the line of a jet aircraft—what the SM-2 had been designed to kill—had to take into account the maneuverability of the aircraft (pilots would do their damnedest to avoid the things), and so the eight-meter globe of destruction could probably be made to intercept the inbound RV in terms of pure geometry.
   The issue was speed. Gregory popped open another Diet Coke from the room's minibar and sat back on the bed to consider how troublesome that issue was. The inbound RV, at a hundred thousand feet, would be traveling at about sixteen thousand miles per hour, 23,466 feet per second, eight times the speed of a rifle bullet, 7,150 meters per second. That was pretty damned fast. It was about the same speed as a high-explosive detonation. You could have the RV sitting next to a ton of TNT at the moment the explosive went off, and the explosion couldn't catch up with the RV. That was FAST.
   So, the SAM's warhead has to go off well before it gets to where the RV is. Figuring out how much was a simple mathematical exercise. That meant that the proximity fuse on the SM-2 was the important variable in the equation, Gregory decided. He didn't know that he was wrong on this, didn't see what he was missing, and went on with his calculations. The software fix for the proximity laser fusing system looked less difficult than he'd imagined. Well, wasn't that good news?
 
   It was another early day for Minister Fang Gan. He'd gotten a phone call at his home the previous night, and decided he had to arrive early for the appointment made then. This was a surprise for his staff, who were just setting up for the day when he breezed in, not looking as cross as he felt for the disturbance of his adamantine routine. It wasn't their fault, after all, and they had the good sense not to trouble him, and thus generate artificial wrath.
   Ming was just printing up her downloads from the Web. She had pieces that she thought would be of interest, especially one from The Wall Street Journal, and another from Financial Times. Both commented on what she thought might be the reason for the minister's early arrival. His 9:20 appointment was with Ren He-Ping, an industrialist friendly with her boss. Ren arrived early. The slender, elderly man looked unhappy—no, she thought, worried—about something. She lifted her phone to get permission, then stood and walked him into the inner office, racing back outside to fetch morning tea, which she hadn't had a chance to serve her boss yet.
   Ming was back inside in less than five minutes, with the fine porcelain cups on a decorated serving tray. She presented the morning drinks to both men with an elegance that earned her a thank-you from her boss, and then she took her leave. Ren, she saw, wasn't any happier to be in with her minister.
   "What is the problem, Ren?"
   "In two weeks, I will have a thousand workers with nothing to do, Fang."
   "Oh? What is the reason for that, my friend?"
   "I do much business with an American business. It is called Butterfly. They sell clothing to wealthy American women. My factory outside Shanghai makes the cloth, and my tailoring plant at Yancheng turns the fabric into clothing, which we ship to America and Europe. We've been doing business with Butterfly for three years now, very satisfactorily for all concerned."
   "Yes? So, what, then, is the difficulty?"
   "Fang, Butterfly just canceled an order worth one hundred forty million American dollars. They did it without any warning. Only last week they told us how happy they were with our products. We've invested a fortune into quality control to make sure they would stay with us—but they've left us like a dog in the street."
   "Why did this happen, Ren?" Minister Fang asked, fearing he knew the answer.
   "Our representative in New York tells us that it's because of the deaths of the two clergymen. He tells us that Butterfly had no choice, that Americans demonstrated outside his establishment in New York and prevented people from going inside to buy his wares. He says that Butterfly cannot do business with me for fear of having their own business collapse."
   "Do you not have a contract with them? Are they not obligated to honor it?"
   Ren nodded. "Technically, yes, but business is a practical thing, Minister. If they cannot sell our goods, then they will not buy them from us. They cannot get the financing to do so from their bankers—bankers loan money in the expectation that it will be paid back, yes? There is an escape clause in the contract. We could dispute it in court, but it would take years, and we would probably not succeed, and it would also offend others in the industry, and thus prevent us from ever doing business in New York again. So, in practical terms there is no remedy."
   "Is this a temporary thing? Surely this difficulty will pass, will it not?"
   "Fang, we also do business in Italy, with the House of d'Alberto, a major trend-setter in European fashion. They also canceled their relationship with us. It seems that the Italian man our police killed comes from a powerful and influential family. Our representative in Italy says that no Chinese firm will be able to do business there for some time. In other words, Minister, that 'unfortunate incident' with the churchmen is going to have grave consequences."
   "But these people have to purchase their cloth somewhere," Fang objected.
   "Indeed they do. And they will do so in Thailand, Singapore, and
   Taiwan."
   "Is that possible?"
   Ren nodded quickly and sadly. "It is very possible. Sources have told me that they are busily contacting our former business partners to 'take up the slack,' as they put it. You see, the Taiwan government has launched an aggressive campaign to distinguish themselves from us, and it would appear that their campaign is, for the moment, highly success-fill."
   "Well, Ren, surely you can find other customers for your goods," Fang suggested with confidence.
   But the industrialist shook his head. He hadn't touched his tea and his eyes looked like wounds in a stone head. "Minister, America is the world's largest such market, and it appears it will soon be closed to us. After that is Italy, and that door, also, has been slammed shut. Paris, London, even the avant-garde marketers in Denmark and Vienna will not even return our phone calls. I've had my representatives contact all potential markets, and they all say the same thing: No one wants to do business with China. Only America could save us, but America will not."
   "What will this cost you?"
   "As I told you, one hundred forty million dollars just from the Butterfly account alone, and another similar amount from our other American and European businesses."
   Fang didn't have to think long to calculate the take the PRC's government got from that.
   "Your colleagues?"
   "I have spoken with several. The news is the same. The timing could hardly be worse. All of our contracts are coming due at the same time. We are talking billions of dollars, Minister. Billions," he repeated.
   Fang lit a cigarette. "I see," he said. "What would it take to fix this?"
   "Something to make America happy, not just the government, but the citizens, too."
   "Is that truly important?" Fang asked, somewhat tiredly. He'd heard this rubbish so many times from so many voices.
   "Fang, in America people can buy their clothing from any number of stores and manufacturers, any number of marketers. The people choose which succeeds and which fails. Women's clothing in particular is an industry as volatile as vapor. It does not take much to make such a company fail. As a result, those companies will not assume additional and unnecessary risks. To do business with the People's Republic, now, today, is something they see as an unnecessary risk."
   Fang took a drag and thought about that. It was, actually, something he'd always known, intellectually, but never quite appreciated. America was a different place, and it did have different rules. And since China wanted American money, China had to abide by those rules. That wasn't politics. That was practicality.
   "So, you want me to do what?"
   "Please, tell your fellow ministers that this could mean financial ruin for us. Certainly for my industry, and we are a valuable asset for our country. We bring wealth into China. If you want that wealth to spend on other things, then you must pay attention to what we need in order to get you that wealth." What Ren could not say was that he and his fellow industrialists were the ones who made the Politburo's economic (and therefore, also political) agenda possible, and that therefore the Politburo needed to listen to them once in a while. But Fang knew what the Politburo would say in reply. A horse may pull the cart, but you do not ask the horse where it wishes to go.
   Such was political reality in the People's Republic of China. Fang knew that Ren had been around the world, that he had a sizable personal fortune which the PRC had graciously allowed him to accumulate, and that, probably more important, he had the intelligence and personal industry to thrive anywhere he chose to live. Fang knew also that Ren could fly to Taiwan and get financing to build a factory there, where he could employ others who looked and spoke Chinese, and he'd make money there and get some political influence in the bargain. Most of all, he knew that Ren knew this. Would he act upon it? Probably not. He was Chinese, a citizen of the mainland. This was his land, and he had no desire to leave it, else he would not be here now, pleading his case to the one minister—well, probably Qian Kun would listen also—whose ear might be receptive to his words. Ren was a patriot, but not a communist. What an odd duality that was . . .
   Fang stood. This meeting had gone far enough. "I will do this, my friend," he told his visitor. "And I will let you know what develops."
   "Thank you, Comrade Minister." Ren bowed and took his leave, not looking better, but pleased that someone had actually listened to him. Listening was not what one expected of Politburo members.
   Fang sat back down and lit another cigarette, then reached for his tea. He thought for a minute or so. "Ming!" he called loudly. It took seven seconds by his watch.
   "Yes, Minister?"
   "What news articles do you have for me?" he asked. His secretary disappeared for another few seconds, then reappeared, holding a few pages.
   "Here, Minister, just printed up. This one may be of particular interest."
   'This one" was a cover story from The Wall Street Journal. "Major Shift in China Business?" it proclaimed. The question mark was entirely rhetorical, he saw in the first paragraph. Ren was right. He had to discuss this with the rest of the Politburo.
   The second major item in Bondarenko's morning was observing tank gunnery. His men had the newest variant of the T-80UM main battle tank. It wasn't quite the newest T-99 that was just coming into production. This UM did, however, have a decent fire-control system, which was novel enough. The target range was about as simple as one could ask, large white cardboard panels with black tank silhouettes painted on them, and they were set at fixed, known ranges. Many of his gunners had never fired a live round since leaving gunnery school—such was the current level of training in the Russian Army, the general fumed.
   Then he fumed some more. He watched one particular tank, firing at a target an even thousand meters away. It should have been mere spitting distance, but as he watched, first one, then two more, of the tracer rounds missed, all falling short, until the fourth shot hit high on the painted turret shape. With that feat accomplished, the tank shifted aim to a second target at twelve hundred meters and missed that one twice, before achieving a pinwheel in the geometric center of the target.
   "Nothing wrong with that," Aliyev said next to him.
   "Except that the tank and the crew were all dead ninety seconds ago!" Bondarenko observed, followed by a particularly vile oath. "Ever see what happens when a tank blows up? Nothing left of the crew but sausage! Expensive sausage."
   "It's their first time in a live-fire exercise," Aliyev said, hoping to calm his boss down. "We have limited practice ammunition, and it's not as accurate as warshots."
   "How many live rounds do we have?"
   Aliyev smiled. "Millions." They had, in fact, warehouses full of the things, fabricated back in the 1970s.
   "Then issue them," the general ordered.
   "Moscow won't like it," the colonel warned. Warshots were, of course, far more expensive.
   "I am not here to please them, Andrey Petrovich. I am here to defend them." And someday he'd meet the fool who'd decided to replace the tank's loader crewman with a machine. It was slower than a soldier, and removed a crewman who could assist in repairing damage. Didn't engineers ever consider that tanks were actually supposed to go into battle? No, this tank had been designed by a committee, as all Soviet weapons had been, which explained, perhaps, why so many of them didn't work—or, just as badly, didn't protect their users. Like putting the gas tank inside the doors of the BTR armored personnel carrier. Who ever thought that a crewman might want to bail out of a damaged vehicle and perhaps even survive to fight afoot? The tank's vulnerability had been the very first thing the Afghans had learned about Soviet mobile equipment . . . and how many Russian boys had burned to death because of it? Well, Bondarenko thought, I have a new country now, and Russia does have talented engineers, and in a few years perhaps we can start building weapons worthy of the soldiers who carry them.
   "Andrey, is there anything in our command which does work?" "That's why we're training, Comrade General." Bondarenko's service reputation was of an upbeat officer who looked for solutions rather than problems. His operations officer supposed that Gennady Iosifovich was overwhelmed by the scope of the difficulties, not yet telling himself that however huge a problem was, it had to be composed of numerous small ones which could be addressed one at a time. Gunnery, for example. Today, it was execrable. But in a week it would be much better, especially if they gave the troops real rounds instead of the practice ones. Real "bullets," as soldiers invariably called them, made you feel like a man instead of a schoolboy with his workbook. There was much to be said for that, and like many of the things his new boss was doing, it made good sense. In two weeks, they'd be watching more tank gunnery, and seeing more hits than misses.

CHAPTER 40

Fashion Statements
   
"So, George?" Ryan asked.
   "So, it's started. Turns out there are a ton of similar contracts coming due for the next season or something, plus Christmas toy contracts," SecTreas told his President. "And it's not just us. Italy, France, England, everybody's bugging out on them. The Chinese have made huge inroads into that industry, and they pissed off a lot of people in the process. Well, the chicken hasn't so much come home to roost as it's flown the coop, and that leaves our friends in Beijing holding the bag. It's a big bag, Jack. We're talking billions here."
   "How badly will that hurt them?" SecState asked.
   "Scott, I grant you it seems a little odd that the fate of a nation could ride on Victoria's Secret brassieres, but money is money. They need it, and all of a sudden there's a big hole in their current account. How big? Billions. It's going to make a hell of a bellyache for them."
   "Any actual harm?" Ryan asked.
   "Not my department, Jack," Winston answered. "That's Scott."
   "Okay." Ryan turned his head to look at his other cabinet member.
   "Before I can answer that, I need to know what net effect this will have on the Chinese economy."
   Winston shrugged. "Theoretically, they could ride this out with minimal difficulties, but that depends on how they make up the shortfall. Their national industrial base is an incredibly muddled hodgepodge of private– and state-owned industries. The private ones are the efficient ones, of course, and the worst of the state-owned industries belong to their army. I've seen analyses of PLA operations that look like something out of MAD magazine, just impossible to credit on first reading. Soldiers don't generally know much about making things—they're better at breaking them—and tossing Marxism into the mix doesn't exactly help the situation. So, those 'enterprises' piss away vast quantities of cash. If they shut those down, or just cut them back, they could kiss this little shortfall off and move on—but they won't."
   "That's right," Adler agreed. "The Chinese People's Liberation Army has a lot of political clout over there. The party controls it, but the tail wags the dog to a considerable extent. There's quite a bit of political and economic unrest over there. They need the army to keep things under control, and the PLA takes a big cut off the top of the national treasure because of that."
   "The Soviets weren't like that," POTUS objected.
   "Different country, different culture. Keep that in mind."
   "Klingons," Ryan muttered, with a nod. "Okay, go on."
   Winston took the lead. "We can't predict the impact this will have on their society without knowing how they're going to react to the cash shortfall."
   "If they squeal when it starts to hurt, what do we do?" Ryan asked next.
   "They're going to have to make nice, like reinstating the Boeing and Caterpillar orders, and doing it publicly."
   "They won't—they can't," Adler objected. "Too much loss of face. Asian mind-set. That won't happen. They might offer us concessions, but they'll have to be hidden ones."
   "Which is not politically acceptable to us. If I try to take that to Congress, first they'll laugh at me, then they'll crucify me." Ryan took a sip of his drink.
   "And they won't understand why you can't tell Congress what to do. They think you're a strong leader, and therefore you're supposed to make decisions on your own," EAGLE informed his President.
   "Don't they know anything about how our government works?" POTUS asked.
   "Jack, I'm sure they have all sorts of experts who know more about the constitutional process than I do, but the Politburo members are not required to listen to them. They come from a very different political environment, and that's the one they understand. For us 'the people' means popular opinion, polls, and ultimately elections. For them, it means the peasants and workers who are supposed to do what they're told."
   "We do business with these people?" Winston asked the ceiling.
   "It's called realpolitik, George," Ryan explained.
   "But we can't pretend they don't exist. There's over a billion of them, and, oh, by the way, they also have nuclear weapons, on ballistic launchers, even." Which added a decidedly unpleasant element to the overall equation.
   "Twelve of them, according to CIA, and we can turn their country into a parking lot if we have to, just it'll take twenty-four hours instead of forty minutes," Ryan told his guests, managing not to get a chill when he said it. The possibility was too remote to make him nervous. "And they know that, and who wants to be the king of a parking lot? They are that rational, Scott, aren't they?"
   "I think so. They rattle their saber at Taiwan, but not even much of that lately, not when we have Seventh Fleet there all the time." Which, however, burned up a lot of fuel oil for the Navy.
   "Anyway, this cash problem won't actually cripple their economy?" Jack asked.
   "I don't think so, unless they're pretty damned dumb."
   "Scott, are they dumb?" Ryan asked State Department.
   "Not that dumb—at least I don't think so," State told the President.
   "Good, then I can go upstairs and have another drink." Ryan rose, and his guests did the same.
 
   "This is lunacy!" Qian Kun growled at Fang half a world away, discussing what turned out to be the same set of issues.
   "I will not disagree with you, Qian, but we must make our case to the rest of our colleagues."
   "Fang, this could mean ruin for us. With what shall we buy wheat and oil?"
   "What are our reserves?"
   The Finance Minister had to sit back and think about that one. He closed his eyes and tried to remember the numbers on which he got briefed the first Monday of every month. The eyes opened. "The harvest from last year was better than average. We have food for about a year—assuming an average harvest this year, or even a slightly short one. The immediate problem is oil. We've been using a lot of that lately, with the PLA's constant exercises up north and on the coast. In oil, we have perhaps four months in reserve, and the money to purchase another two months. After that, we will have to cut back our uses. Now, we are self-sufficient in coal, and so we'll have all the electricity we need. The lights will burn. The trains will run, but the PLA will be crippled." Not that this is an entirely bad thing, he didn't add. Both men acknowledged the value of the People's Liberation Army, but today it was really more of a domestic security service, like a large and well-armed police force, than a real guarantor of their national security, which had, really, no external threats to deal with.
   "The army won't like that," Fang warned.
   "I am not overly concerned with their likes and dislikes, Fang," the Finance Minister countered. "We have a country to bring out of the nineteenth century. We have industries to grow, and people to feed and employ. The ideology of our youth has not been as successful in bringing this about as we were educated to expect."
   "Do you say that...?"
   Qian shifted in his chair. "Remember what Deng said? It doesn't matter if the cat is black or white as long as it catches mice. And Mao exiled him soon thereafter, and so today we have two hundred million more mouths to feed, but the only additional funds with which we do it came to us from the black cat, not the white one. We live in a practical world, Fang. I, too, have my copy of The Little Red Book, but I've never tried to eat it."
   This former railroad engineer had been captured by his bureaucracy and his job, just like the last one had been—he'd died at the relatively young age of seventy-eight, before he could be expelled from his Politburo chair. Qian, a youthful sixty-six, would have to learn to watch his words, and his thoughts, more carefully. He was about to say so when Qian started speaking again.
   "Fang, people like you and me, we must be able to speak freely to one another. We are not college students full of revolutionary zeal. We are men of years and knowledge, and we must have the ability to discuss issues frankly. We waste too much time in our meetings kneeling before Mao's cadaver. The man is dead, Fang. Yes, he was a great man, yes, he was a great leader for our people, but no, he wasn't the Lord Buddha, or Jesus, or whatever. He was only a man, and he had ideas, and most of them were right, but some of them were wrong, some of them don't work. The Great Leap Forward accomplished nothing, and the Cultural Revolution, in addition to killing off undesirable intellectuals and troublemakers, also starved millions of our people to death, and that is not desirable, is it?"
   "That is true, my young friend, but it is important how you present your ideas," Fang warned his junior, non-voting member of the Politburo. Present them stupidly, and you'll find yourself counting rice bags on a collective farm. He was a little old to go barefoot into the paddies, even as punishment for ideological apostasy.
   "Will you support me?" Qian asked.
   "I will try," was the halfhearted answer. He had to plead Ren He-Ping's case as well this day, and it wouldn't be easy.
 
   They'd counted on the funds transfer at Qian's ministry. They had contracts to pay for. The tanker had long since been scheduled, because they were booked well in advance, and this carrier was just now coming alongside the loading pier off the coast of Iran. She'd load four hundred and fifty-six thousand tons of crude oil over a period of less than a day, then steam back out of the Persian Gulf, turn southeast for the passage around India, then transit the crowded Malacca Strait past Singapore and north to the huge and newly built oil terminal at Shanghai, where she'd spend thirty or forty hours offloading the cargo, then retrace her journey back to the Gulf for yet another load in an endless procession.
   Except that the procession wasn't quite endless. It would end when the money stopped, because the sailors had to be paid, the debt on the tanker serviced, and most of all, the oil had to be bought. And it wasn't just one tanker. There were quite a few of them on the China run. A satellite focused on just that one segment of the world's oil trade would have seen them from a distance, looking like cars on a highway going to and from the same two points continuously. And like cars, they didn't have to go merely between those two places. There were other ports at which to load oil, and others at which to offload it, and to the crews of the tankers, the places of origin and destination didn't really matter very much, because almost all of their time was spent at sea, and the sea was always the same. Nor did it matter to the owners of the tankers, or the agents who did the chartering. What mattered was that they got paid for their time.
   For this charter, the money had been wire-transferred from one account to another, and so the crew stood at their posts watching the loading process—monitoring it mainly by watching various dials and gauges; you couldn't see the oil going through the pipes, after all. Various crew members were on the beach to see to the victualing of their ship, and to visit the chandlers to get books and magazines to read, videocassette movies, and drink to go with the food, plus whatever consumable supplies had been used up on the inbound trip. A few crewmen looked for women whose charms might be rented, but that was an iffy business in Iran. None of them knew or thought very much about who paid for their services. Their job was to operate the ship safely and efficiently. The ship's officers mainly had their wives along, for whom the voyages were extended, if rather boring, pleasure cruises: Every modern tanker had a swimming pool and a deck for tanning, plus satellite TV for news and entertainment. And none of them particularly cared where the ship went, because for the women shopping was shopping, and any new port had its special charms.
   This particular tanker, the World Progress, was chartered out of London, and had five more Shanghai runs scheduled until the charter ran out. The charter was paid, however, on a per-voyage basis, and the funds for this trip had been wired only seven days before. That was hardly a matter of concern for the owners or the ship's agent. After all, they were dealing with a nation-state, whose credit tended to be good. In due course, the loading was completed. A computerized system told the ship's first officer that the ship's trim was correct, and he so notified the master, who then told the chief engineer to wind up the ship's gas-turbine engines. This engine type made things easy, and in less than five minutes, the ship's power plant was fully ready for sea. Twenty minutes after that, powerful harbor tugs eased the ship away from the loading dock. This evolution is the most demanding for a tanker's crew, because only in confined waters is the risk of collision and serious damage quite so real. But within two hours, the tanker was under way under her own power, heading for the narrows at Bandar Abbas, and then the open sea.
 
   "Yes, Qian," Premier Xu said tiredly. "Proceed." "Comrades, at our last meeting I warned you of a potential problem of no small proportions. That problem is with us now, and it is growing larger."
   "Are we running out of money, Qian?" Zhang Han San asked, with a barely concealed smirk. The answer amused him even more,
   "Yes, Zhang, we are."
   "How can a nation run out of money?" the senior Politburo member demanded.
   "The same way a factory worker can, by spending more than he has. Another way is to offend his boss and lose his job. We have done both," Qian replied evenly.
   "What 'boss' do we have?" Zhang inquired, with a disarming and eerie gentleness.
   "Comrades, that is what we call trade. We sell our goods to others in return for money, and we use that money to purchase goods from those others. Since we are not peasants from ancient times bartering a pig for a sheep, we must use money, which is the means of international exchange. Our trade with America has generated an annual surplus on the order of seventy billion American dollars."
   "Generous of the foreign devils," Premier Xu observed to Zhang sotto voce.
   "Which we have almost entirely spent for various items, largely for our colleagues in the People's Liberation Army of late. Most of these are long-term purchase items for which advance payment was necessary, as is normal in the international arms business. To this, we must add oil and wheat. There are other things which are important to our economy, but we will concentrate on these for the moment." Qian looked around the table for approval. He got it, though Marshal Luo Cong, Defense Minister, and commander-in-chief of the People's Liberation Army– and lord of the PLA's sizable industrial empire—was now looking on with a gimlet eye. The expenditures of his personal empire had been singled out, and that was not calculated to please him.
   "Comrades," Qian continued, "we now face the loss of much, perhaps most, of that trade surplus with America, and other foreign countries as well. You see these?" He held up a fistful of telexes and e-mail printouts. "These are cancellations of commercial business orders and funds transfers. Let me clarify. These are billions of lost dollars, money which in some cases we have already spent—but money we will never have because we have angered those with whom we do business."
   "Do you tell me that they have such power over us? Rubbish!" another member observed.
   "Comrade, they have the power to buy our trade goods for cash, or not buy them for cash. If they choose not to buy them, we do not get the money we need to spend for Marshal Luo's expensive toys." He used that word deliberately. It was time to explain the facts of life to these people, and a slap across the face was sure to get their attention. "Now, let us consider wheat. We use wheat to make bread and noodles. If you have no wheat, you have no noodles.
   "Our country does not grow enough wheat to feed our people. We know this. We have too many mouths to feed. In a few months, the great producing countries, America, Canada, Australia, Argentina, and so forth, they will all have wheat to sell—but with what shall we buy it? Marshal Luo, your army needs oil to refine into diesel fuel and jet fuel, does it not? We need the same things for our diesel trains, and our airlines. But we cannot produce all the oil we need for our domestic needs, and so we must buy it from the Persian Gulf and elsewhere—again, with what shall we buy it?"
   "So, sell our trade goods to someone else?" a member asked, with rather surprising innocence, Qian thought.
   "Who else might there be, comrade? There is only one America. We have also offended all of Europe. Whom does that leave? Australia? They are allied to Europe and America. Japan? They also sell to America, and they will move to replace our lost markets, not to buy from us. South America, perhaps? Those are all Christian countries, and we just killed a senior Christian churchman, didn't we? Moreover, in their ethical world, he died heroically. We have not just killed. We have created a holy martyr to their faith!
   "Comrades, we have deliberately structured our industry base to sell to the American market. To sell elsewhere, we would first have to determine what they need that we can make, and then enter the market. You don't just show up with a boatload of products and exchange it for cash on the dock! It takes time and patience to become a force in such a market. Comrades, we have cast away the work of decades. The money we are losing will not come back for years, and until then, we must learn to live our national life differently."
   "What are you saying?" Zhang shot back.
   "I am saying that the People's Republic faces economic ruin because two of our policemen killed those two meddling churchmen."
   "That is not possible!"
   "It is not possible, Zhang? If you offend the man who gives you money, then he will give you no more. Can you understand that? We've gone far out of our way to offend America, and then we offended all of Europe as well. We have made ourselves outcasts—they call us barbarians because of that unhappy incident at the hospital. I do not defend them, but I must tell you what they say and think. And as long as they say those things and think those things, it is we who will pay for the error."
   "I refuse to believe this!" Zhang insisted.
   "That is fine. You may come to my ministry and add up the numbers yourself." Qian was feeling full of himself, Fang saw. Finally, he had them listening to him. Finally, he had them thinking about his thoughts and his expertise. "Do you think I make this story up to tell in some country inn over rice wine?"
   Then it was Premier Xu leaning forward and thinking aloud. "You have our attention, Qian. What can we do to avert this difficulty?"
   Having delivered his primary message quickly and efficiently, Qian Kun didn't know what to say now. There wasn't a way to avert it that these men would accept. But having given them a brief taste of the harsh truth, now he had to give them some more:
   "We need to change the perception of American minds. We need to show them that we are not what they consider barbarians. We have to transform our image in their eyes. For starters, we must make amends for the deaths of those two priests."
   "Abase ourselves before the foreign devils? Never!" Zhang snarled.
   "Comrade Zhang," Fang said, coming carefully to Qian's defense. "Yes, we are the Middle Kingdom, and no, we are not the barbarians. They are. But sometimes one must do business with barbarians, and that might mean understanding their point of view, and adapting to it somewhat."
   "Humble ourselves before them?"
   "Yes, Zhang. We need what they have, and to get it, we must be acceptable to them."
   "And when they next demand that we make political changes, then what?" This was the premier, Xu, getting somewhat agitated, which was unusual for him.
   "We face such decisions when and if they come," Qian answered, pleasing Fang, who didn't want to risk saying that himself.
   "We cannot risk that," the Interior Minister, Tong Jie, responded, speaking for the first time. The police of the nation belonged to him, and he was responsible for civil order in the country—only if he failed would he call upon Marshal Luo, which would cause him both loss of face and loss of power at this table. In a real sense, the deaths of the two men had been laid at his place, for he had generated the formal orders on the suppression of religious activity in the PRC, increasing the harshness of law enforcement in order to increase the relative influence of his own ministry. "If the foreigners insist upon internal political changes, it could bring us all down."
   And that was the core issue, Fang saw at once. The People's Republic rested absolutely upon the power of the party and its leaders, these men before him in this room. Like noblemen of old, each was attended by a trusted servant, sitting in the chairs against the wall, around the table, waiting for the order to fetch tea or water. Each had his rationale for power, whether it was Defense, or Interior, or Heavy Industry, or in his particular case, friendship and general experience. Each had labored long and hard to reach this point, and none of them relished the thought of losing what he had, any more than a provincial governor under the Ching Dynasty would have willingly reverted to being a mere mandarin, because that meant at least ignominy, and just as likely, death. These men knew that if a foreign country demanded and got internal political concessions, then their grip on power would loosen, and that was the one thing they dared not risk. They ruled the workers and peasants, and because of that, they also feared them. The noblemen of old could fall back upon the teachings of Confucius, or Buddha; on a spiritual foundation for their temporal power. But Marx and Mao had swept all that away, leaving only force as their defense. And if to maintain their country's prosperity they had to diminish that force, what would then happen? They didn't know, and these men feared the unknown as a child feared the evil monsters under his bed at night, but with far more reason. It had happened, right here in Beijing, not all that many years before. Not one of these men had forgotten it. To the public, they'd always shown steadfast determination. But each of them, alone in his bathroom before the mirror, or lying in bed at night before sleep came, had shown fear. Because though they basked in the devotion of the peasants and workers, somehow each of them knew that the peasants and workers might fear them, but also hated them. Hated them for their arrogance, their corruption, for their privilege, their better food, their luxurious housing, their personal servants. Their servants, they all knew, loathed them as well, behind smiles and bows of obeisance, which could just as easily conceal a dagger, because that's how the peasants and workers had felt about the nobles of a hundred years before. The revolutionaries had made use of that hatred against the class enemies of that age, and new ones, they all knew, could make use of the same silent rage against themselves. And so they would cling to power with the same desperation as the nobles of old, except they would show even more ruthlessness, because unlike the nobles of old, they had no place to run to. Their ideology had trapped them in their golden cages more surely than any religion could.
   Fang had never before considered all of these thoughts in toto. Like the others, he'd worried a lot when the college students had demonstrated, building up their "goddess of liberty" out of plaster or papier-mache—Fang didn't remember, though he did remember his sigh of relief when the PLA had destroyed it. It came as a surprise to him, the realization of how snared he was here in this place. The power he and his colleagues exercised was like something shown before a mirror that could be turned on them all instantly under the proper circumstances. They had immense power over every citizen in their country, but that power was all an illusion—
   –and, no, they couldn't allow another country to dictate political practices to them, because their lives all depended on that illusion. It was like smoke on a calm day, seemingly a pillar to hold up the heavens, but the slightest wind could blow it all away, and then the heavens would fall. On them all.
   But Fang also saw that there was no way out. If they didn't change to make America happy, then their country would run out of wheat and oil, and probably other things as well, and they would risk massive social change in a groundswell from below. But if to prevent that, they allowed some internal changes, they would just be inviting the same thing on themselves.
   Which would kill them the more surely?
   Did it matter? Fang asked himself. Either way, they'd be just as dead. He wondered idly how it would come, the fists of a mob, or bullets before a wall, or a rope. No, it would be bullets. That was how his country executed people. Probably preferable to the beheading sword of old. What if the SWORDSMAN missed his aim, after all? It must have been a horrid mess. He only had to look around the table to see that everyone here had similar thoughts, at least those with enough wit. All men feared the unknown, but now they had to choose which unknown to fear, and the choice was yet another thing to dread.
   "So, Qian, you say we risk running out of things because we can no longer get the money we need to purchase them?" Premier Xu asked.
   "That is correct," the Finance Minister confirmed.
   "In what other ways could we get money and oil?" Xu asked next.
   "That is not within my purview, Chairman," Qian answered.
   "Oil is its own currency," Zhang said. "And there is ample oil to our north. There is also gold, and many other things we need. Timber in vast quantities. And that which we need most of all—space, living space for our people."
   Marshal Luo nodded. "We have discussed this before."
   "What do you mean?" Fang asked.
   "The Northern Resource Area, our Japanese friends once called it," Zhang reminded them all.
   "That adventure ended in disaster," Fang observed at once. "We were fortunate not to have been damaged by it."
   "But we were not damaged at all," Zhang replied lightly. "We were not even implicated. We can be sure of that, can we not, Luo?"
   "This is so. The Russians have never strengthened their southern defenses. They even ignore our exercises that have raised our forces to a high state of readiness."
   "Can we be sure of that?"
   "Oh, yes," the Defense Minister told them all. "Tan?" he asked.
   Tan Deshi was the chief of the Ministry of State Security, in charge of the PRC's foreign and domestic intelligence services. One of the younger men here at seventy, he was probably the healthiest of them all, a nonsmoker and a very light imbiber of alcohol. "When we first began our increased exercises, they watched with concern, but after the first two years, they lost interest. We have over a million of our citizens living in eastern Siberia—it's illegal, but the Russians do not make much issue of it. A goodly number of them report to me. We have good intelligence of the Russian defenses."
   "And what is their state of readiness?" Tong Jie asked.
   "Generally, quite poor. They have one full-strength division, one at two-thirds, and the rest are hardly better than cadre-strength. Their new Far East commander, a General-Colonel Bondarenko, despairs of making things better, our sources tell us."
   "Wait," Fang objected. "Are we discussing the possibility of war with Russia here?"
   "Yes," Zhang Han San replied. "We have done this before."
   "That is true, but on the first such occasion, we would have had Japan as an ally, and America neutralized. On the second, we assumed that Russia would have been broken up beforehand along religious lines. Who are our allies in this case? How has Russia been crippled?"
   "We've been a little unlucky," Tan answered. "The chief minister—well, the chief adviser to their President Grushavoy is still alive."
   "What do you mean?" Fang asked.
   "I mean that our attempt to kill him misfired." Tan explained on for two minutes. The reaction around the table was one of mild shock.
   "Tan had my approval," Xu told them calmly.
   Fang looked over at Zhang Han San. That's where the idea must have originated. His old friend might have hated capitalists, but that didn't stop him from acting like the worst pirate when it suited his goals. And he had Xu's ear, and Tan as his strong right arm. Fang thought he knew all of these men, but now he saw that his assumption had been in error. In each was something hidden, and sinister. They were far more ruthless than he, Fang saw.
   "That is an act of war," Fang objected.
   "Our operational security was excellent. Our Russian agent, one Klementi Suvorov, is a former KGB officer we recruited ages ago when he was stationed here in Beijing. He's performed various functions for us for a long time and he has superb contacts within both their intelligence and military communities—that is, those segments of it that are now in the new Russian underworld. In fact he's a common criminal– a lot of the old KGB people have turned into that—but it works for us. He likes money, and for enough of it, he will do anything. Unfortunately in this case, a pure happenstance prevented the elimination of this Golovko person," Tan concluded.
   "And now?" Fang asked. Then he cautioned himself. He was asking too many questions, taking too much of a personal position here. Even in this room, even with these old comrades, it didn't pay to stand out too far.
   "And now, that is for the Politburo to decide," Tan replied blandly. It had to be affected, but was well acted in any case.
   Fang nodded and leaned back, keeping his peace for the moment.
   "Luo?" Xu asked. "Is this feasible?"
   The Marshal had to guard his words as well, not to appear too confident. You could get in trouble around this table by promising more than you could deliver, though Luo was in the unique position—somewhat shared by Interior Minister Tong—of having guns behind him and his position.
   "Comrades, we have long examined the strategic issue here. When Russia was the Soviet Union, this operation was not possible. Their military was much larger and better supported, and they had numerous intercontinental and theater ballistic missiles tipped with thermonuclear warheads. Now they have none, thanks to their bilateral agreement with America. Today, the Russian military is a shadow of what it was only ten or twelve years ago. Fully half of their draftees do not even report when called for service—if that happened here, we all know what would happen to the miscreants, do we not? They squandered much of their remaining combat power with their Chechen religious minority—and so, you might say that Russia is already splitting up along religious lines. In practical terms, the task is straightforward, if not entirely easy. The real difficulty facing us is distance and space, not actual military opposition. It's many kilometers from our border to their new oil field on the Arctic Ocean—much fewer to the new gold field. The best news of all is that the Russian army is itself building the roads we need to make the approach. It reduces our problems by two thirds right there. Their air force is a joke. We should be able to cope with it—they sell us their best aircraft, after all, and deny them to their own flyers. To make our task easier, we would do well to disrupt their command and control, their political stability and so forth. Tan, can you accomplish that?"
   "That depends on what, exactly, is the task," Tan Deshi replied.
   "To eliminate Grushavoy, perhaps," Zhang speculated. "He is the only person of strength in Russia at the moment. Remove him, and their country would collapse politically."
   "Comrades," Fang had to say, taking the risk, "what we discuss here is bold and daring, but also fraught with danger. What if we fail?"
   "Then, my friend, we are no worse off than we appear to be already," Zhang replied. "But if we succeed, as appears likely, we achieve the position for which we have striven since our youth. The People's Republic will become the foremost power in all the world." As is our right, he didn't have to add. "Chairman Mao never considered failing to destroy Chiang, did he?"
   There was no arguing with that, and Fang didn't attempt it. The switchover from fear to adventurousness had been as abrupt as it was now becoming contagious. Where was the caution these men exercised so often? They were men on a floundering ship, and they saw a means of saving themselves, and having accepted the former proposition, they were catapulted into the latter. All he could do was lean back and watch the talk evolve, waiting—hoping—that reason would break out and prevail.
   But from whom would it come?

CHAPTER 41
Plots of State
   
"Yes, Minister?" Ming said, looking up from her almost-completed notes. "You are careful with these notes, aren't you?"
   "Certainly, Comrade Minister," she replied at once. "I never even print these documents up, as you well know. Is there a concern?"
   Fang shrugged. The stresses of today's meeting were gradually bleeding off. He was a practical man of the world, and he was an elderly man. If there was a way to deal with the current problem, he would find it. If there wasn't, then he would endure. He always had. He was not the one taking the lead here, and his notes would show that he was one of the few cautious skeptics at the meeting. One of the others, of course, was Qian Kun, who'd walked out of the room shaking his head and muttering to his senior aide. Fang then wondered if Qian was keeping notes. It would have been a good move. If things went badly, those could be his only defense. At this level of risk, the hazard wasn't relegation to a menial job, but rather having one's ashes scattered in the river.
   "Ming?"
   "Yes, Minister?"
   "What did you think of the students in the square all those years ago?"
   "I was only in school then myself, Minister, as you know."
   "Yes, but what did you think?"
   "I thought they were reckless. The tallest tree is always the first to be cut down." It was an ancient Chinese adage, and therefore a safe thing to say. Theirs was a culture that discouraged taking such action—but perversely, their culture also lionized those who'd had the courage to do so. As with every human tribe, the criterion was simple. If you succeeded, then you were a hero, to be remembered and admired. If you failed, nobody would remember you anyway, except, perhaps, as a negative example. And so safety lay always in the middle course, and in safety was life.
   The students had been too young to know all that. Too young to accept the idea of death. The bravest soldiers were always the young ones, those spirits of great passions and beliefs, those who had not lived long enough to reflect on what shape the world took when it turned against you, those too foolish to know fear. For children, the unknown was something you spent almost all your time exploring and finding out. Somewhere along the line, you discovered that you'd learned all that was safe to learn, and that's where most men stopped, except for the very few upon whom progress depended, the brave ones and the bold ones who walked with open eyes into the unknown, and humanity remembered those few who came back alive . . .
   . . . and soon enough forgot those who did not.
   But it was the substance of history to remember those who did, and the substance of Fang's society to remind them of those who didn't. Such a strange dichotomy. What societies, he wondered, encourage people to seek out the unknown? How did they do? Did they thrive, or did they blunder about in the darkness and lose their substance in aimless, undirected wanderings? In China, everyone followed the words and thoughts of Marx, as modified by Mao, because he had boldly walked into the darkness and returned with revolution, and changed the path of his nation. But there things had stopped, because no one was willing to proceed beyond the regions Mao had explored and illuminated—and proclaimed to be all that China and the world in general needed to know about. Mao was like some sort of religious prophet, wasn't he? Fang reflected.
   . . . Hadn't China just killed a couple of those?
   "Thank you, Ming," he told her, waiting there for his next order. He didn't see her close the door as she went to her desk to transcribe the notes of this Politburo meeting.
 
   "Dear God," Dr. Sears whispered at his desk. As usual, the SORGE document had been printed up on the DDO's laser jet and handed over to him, and he'd walked back to his office to do the translation. Sometimes the documents were short enough to translate standing in front of her desk, but this one was pretty long. It was, in fact, going to take eight line-and-a-half-spaced pages off his laser printer. He took his time on this because of its content. He rechecked his translation. Suddenly he had doubts about his understanding of the Chinese language. He couldn't afford to mistranslate or misrepresent this sort of thing. It was just too hot. All in all, he took two and a half hours, more than double what Mrs. Foley probably expected, before he walked back.
   "What took so long?" MP asked when he returned.
   "Mrs. Foley, this is hot."
   "How hot?"
   "Magma," Sears said, as he handed the folder across.
   "Oh?" She took the pages and leaned back in her comfortable chair to read it over. SORGE, source SONGBIRD. Her eyes cataloged the heading, yesterday's meeting of the Chinese Politburo. Then Sears saw it. Saw her eyes narrow as her hand reached for a butterscotch. Then her eyes shifted to him. "You weren't kidding. Evaluation?"
   "Ma'am, I can't evaluate the accuracy of the source, but if this is for real, well, then we're looking in on a process I've never seen before outside history books, and hearing words that nobody has ever heard in this building—not that I've ever heard about, anyway. I mean, every minister in their government is quoted there, and most of them are saying the same thing—"
   "And it's not something we want them to say," Mary Patricia Foley concluded his statement. "Assuming this is all accurately reported, does it feel real?"
   Sears nodded. "Yes, ma'am. It sounds to me like real conversation by real people, and the content tracks with the personalities as I know them. Could it be fabricated? Yes, it could. If so, the source has been compromised in some way or other. However, I don't see that this could be faked without their wanting to produce a specific effect, and that would be an effect which would not be overly attractive to them."
   "Any recommendations?"
   "It might be a good idea to get George Weaver down from Providence," Sears replied. "He's good at reading their minds. He's met a lot of them face-to-face, and he'll be a good backup for my evaluation."
   "Which is?" Mary Pat asked, not turning to the last page, where it would be printed up.
   "They're considering war."
   The Deputy Director (Operations) of the Central Intelligence Agency stood and walked out her door, with Dr. Joshua Sears right behind her. She took the short walk to her husband's office and went through the door without even looking at Ed's private secretary.
   Ed Foley was having a meeting with the Deputy Director (Science and Technology) and two of his senior people when MP walked in. He looked up in surprise, then saw the blue folder in her hand. "Yeah, honey?"
   "Excuse me, but this can't wait even one minute." Her tone of voice told as much as her words did.
   "Frank, can we get together after lunch?"
   "Sure, Ed." DDS&T gathered his documents and his people and headed out.
   When they were gone and the door closed, the DCI asked,
   "SORGE?"
   Mary Pat just nodded and handed the folder across, taking a seat on the couch. Sears remained standing. It was only then that he realized his hands were a little moist. That hadn't happened to him before. Sears, as head of the DI's Office of China Assessments, worked mainly on political evaluations: who was who in the PRC's political hierarchy, what economic policies were being pursued—the Society Page for the People's Republic, as he and his people thought of it, and joked about it over lunch in the cafeteria. He'd never seen anything like this, nothing hotter than handling internal dissent, and while their methods for handling such things tended to be a little on the rough side, as he often put it—mainly it meant summary execution, which was more than a little on the rough side for those affected—the distances involved helped him to take a more detached perspective. But not on this.
   "Is this for real?" the DC asked.
   "Dr. Sears thinks so. He also thinks we need to get Weaver down from Brown University."
   Ed Foley looked over at Sears. "Call him. Right now."
   "Yes, sir." Sears left the room to make the call.
   "Jack has to see this. What's he doing now?"
   "He's leaving for Warsaw in eight hours, remember? The NATO meeting, the photo opportunity at Auschwirz., stopping off at London on the way home for dinner at Buckingham Palace. Shopping on Bond Street," Ed added. There were already a dozen Secret Service people in London working with the Metropolitan Police and MI-5, properly known as the Security Service. Twenty more were in Warsaw, where security concerns were not all that much of an issue. The Poles were very happy with America right now, and the leftover police agencies from the communist era still kept files on everyone who might be a problem. Each would have a personal baby-sitter for the entire time Ryan was in country. The NATO meeting was supposed to be almost entirely ceremonial, a basic feel-good exercise to make a lot of European politicians look pretty for their polyglot constituents.
   "Jesus, they're talking about making a move on Grushavoy!" Ed Foley gasped, getting to page three. "Are they totally off their fuckin' rockers?"
   "Looks like they found themselves in a corner unexpectedly," his wife observed. "We may have overestimated their political stability."
   Foley nodded and looked up at his wife. "Right now?"
   "Right now," she agreed.
   Her husband lifted his phone and punched speed-dial #1.
   "Yeah, Ed, what is it?" Jack Ryan asked.
   "Mary and I are coming over."
   "When?"
   "Now."
   "That important?" the President asked.
   "This is CRITIC stuff, Jack. You'll want Scott, Ben, and Arnie there, too. Maybe George Winston. The foundation of the issue is his area of expertise."
   "China?"
   "Yep."
   "Okay, come on over." Ryan switched phones. "Ellen, I need Sec-State, SecTreas, Ben, and Arnie in my office, thirty minutes from right now."
   "Yes, Mr. President," his secretary acknowledged. This sounded hot, but Robby Jackson was on his way out of town again, to give a speech in Seattle, at the Boeing plant of all places, where the workers and the management wanted to know about the 777 order to China. Robby didn't have much to say on that point, and so he'd talk about the importance of human rights and America's core beliefs and principles, and all that wave-the-flag stuff. The Boeing people would be polite about it, and it was hard to be impolite to a black man, especially one with Navy Wings of Gold on his lapel, and learning to handle this political bullshit was Robby's main task. Besides, it took pressure off Ryan, and that was Jackson's primary mission in life, and oddly enough, one which he accepted with relative equanimity. So, his VC-20B would be over Ohio right about now, Jack thought. Maybe Indiana. Just then Andrea came in.
   "Company coming?" Special Agent Price-O'Day asked. She looked a little pale, Jack thought.
   "The usual suspects. You feeling okay?" the President asked.
   "Stomach is a little upset. Too much coffee with breakfast."
   Morning sickness? Ryan wondered. If so, too bad. Andrea tried so hard to be one of the boys. Admitting this female failing would scar her soul as though from a flamethrower. He couldn't say anything about it. Maybe Cathy could. It was a girl thing.
   "Well, the DCI's coming over with something he says is important. Maybe they've changed the toilet paper in the Kremlin, as we used to say at Langley back when I worked there."
   "Yes, sir." She smiled. Like most Secret Service agents, she'd seen the people and the secrets come and go, and if there were important things for her to know, she'd find out in due course.
 
   General-Lieutenant Kirillin liked to drink as much as most Russians, and that was quite a lot by American standards. The difference between Russians and Brits, Chavez had learned, was that the Brits drank just as much, but they did it with beer, while the Russians made do with vodka. Ding was neither a Mormon nor a Baptist, but he was over his capacity here. After two nights of keeping up with the local Joneses, he'd nearly died on the morning run with his team, and only avoided falling out for fear of losing face before the Russian Spetsnaz people they were teaching to come up to RAINBOW standards. Somehow he'd managed not to puke, though he had allowed Eddie Price to take charge of the first two classes that day while he'd wandered off to drink a gallon of water to chase down three aspirins. Tonight, he'd decided, he'd cut off the vodkas at two . . . maybe three.
   "How are our men doing?" the general asked.
   "Just fine, sir," Chavez answered. "They like their new weapons, and they're picking up on the doctrine. They're smart. They know how to think before they act."
   "Does this surprise you?"
   "Yes, General, it does. It was the same for me once, back when I was a squad sergeant in the Ninjas. Young soldiers tend to think with their dicks rather than their brains. I learned better, but I had to learn it the hard way in the field. It's sometimes a lot easier to get yourself into trouble than it is to think yourself out of it. Your Spetsnaz boys started off that way, but if you show them the right way, they listen pretty good. Today's exercise, for example. We set it up with a trap, but your captain stopped short on the way in and thought it through before he committed, and he passed the test. He's a good team leader, by the way. I'd say bump him to major." Chavez hoped he hadn't just put the curse of hell on the kid, realizing that praise from a CIA officer wasn't calculated to be career-enhancing for a Russian officer.
   "He's my nephew. His father married my sister. He's an academician, a professor at Moscow State University."
   "His English is superb. I'd take him for a native of Chicago." And so Captain Leskov had probably been talent-scouted by KGB or its successor agency. Language skills of that magnitude didn't just happen.
   "He was a parachutist before they sent him to Spetsnaz," Kirillin went on, "a good light-infantryman."
   "That's what Ding was, once upon a time," Clark told the Russian.
   "Seventh Light Infantry. They de-established the division after I left. Seems like a long time now."
   "How did you go from the American army into CIA?"
   "His fault," Chavez answered. "John spotted me and foolishly thought I had potential."
   "We had to clean him up and send him to school, but he's worked out pretty well—even married my daughter."
   "He's still getting used to having a Latino in the family, but I made him a grandfather. Our wives are back in Wales."
   "So, how did you emerge from CIA into RAINBOW?"
   "My fault, again," Clark admitted. "I did a memo, and it perked to the top, and the President liked it, and he knows me, and so when they set the outfit up, they put me in charge of it. I wanted Domingo here to be part of it, too. He's got young legs, and he shoots okay."
   "Your operations in Europe were impressive, especially at the park in Spain."
   "Not our favorite. We lost a kid there."
   "Yeah," Ding confirmed with a tiny sip of his drink. "I was fifty yards away when that bastard killed Anna. Homer got him later on. Nice shot it was."
   "I saw him shoot two days ago. He's superb."
   "Homer's pretty good. Went home last fall on vacation and got himself a Dall sheep at eight hundred-plus yards up in Idaho. Hell of a trophy. He made it into the Boone and Crockett book in the top ten."
   "He should go to Siberia and hunt tiger. I could arrange that," Kirillin offered.
   "Don't say that too loud." Chavez chuckled. "Homer will take you up on it."
   "He should meet Pavel Petrovich Gogol," Kirillin went on.
   "Where'd I hear that name?" Clark wondered at once.
   "The gold mine," Chavez handled the answer.
   "He was a sniper in the Great Patriotic War. He has two gold stars for killing Germans, and he's killed hundreds of wolves. There aren't many like him left."
   "Sniper on a battlefield. The hunting must get real exciting."
   "Oh, it is, Domingo. It is. We had a guy in Third SOG who was good at it, but he damned near got his ass killed half a dozen times. You know—" John Clark had a satellite beeper, and it started vibrating in his belt. He picked it up and checked the number. "Excuse me," he said and looked for a good place. The Moscow officers' club had a courtyard, and he headed for it.
 
   What does this mean?" Arnie van Damm asked. The executive meeting had started with copies of the latest SORGE/SONGBIRD being passed out. Arnie was the fastest reader of the group, but not the best strategic observer.
   "It doesn't mean anything good, pal," Ryan observed, turning to the third page.
   "Ed," Winston asked, looking up from page two. "What can you tell me about the source? This looks like the insider-trading document from hell."
   "A member of the Chinese Politburo keeps notes on his conversations with the other ministers. We have access to those notes, never mind how."
   "So, this document and the source are both genuine?"
   "We think so, yes."
   "How reliable?" TRADER persisted.
   The DCI decided to take a long step out on a thin limb. "About as reliable as one of your T-bills."
   "Okay, Ed, you say so." And Winston's head went back down. In ten seconds, he muttered, "Shit..."
   "Oh, yeah, George," POTUS agreed. " 'Shit' about covers it."
   "Concur, Jack," SecState agreed.
   Of those present, only Ben Goodley managed to get all the way through it without a comment. For his part, Goodley, for all the status and importance that came from his job as the President's National Security Adviser, felt particularly junior and weak at the moment. Mainly he knew that he was far the President's inferior in knowledge of national-security affairs, that he was in his post mainly as a high-level secretary. He was a carded National Intelligence Officer, one of whom, by law and custom, accompanied the President everywhere he went. His job was to convey information to the President. Former occupants of his corner office in the West Wing of the White House had often told their presidents what to think and what to do. But he was just an information-conveyor, and at the moment, he felt weak even in that diminished capacity.
   Finally, Jack Ryan looked up with blank eyes and a vacant face. "Okay. Ed, Mary Pat, what do we have here?"
   "It looks as if Secretary Winston's predictions on the financial consequences of the Beijing Incident might be coming true."
   "They're talking about precipitous consequences," Scott Adler observed coolly. "Where's Tony?"
   "Secretary Bretano's down at Fort Hood, Texas, looking at the heavy troopers at Third Corps. He gets back late tonight. If we yank him back in a hurry, people will notice," van Damm told the rest.
   "Ed, will you object if we get this to him, secure?"
   "No."
   "Okay." Ryan nodded and reached across his desk for his phone. "Send Andrea in, please." That took less than five seconds.
   "Yes, Mr. President?"
   "Could you walk this over to Signals, and have them TAPDANCE it to THUNDER?" He handed her the document. "Then please bring it back here?"
   "Yes, sir."
   "Thanks, Andrea," Ryan told the disappearing form. Then he took a drink of water and turned to his guests. "Okay, it looks pretty serious. How serious is it?"
   "We're bringing Professor Weaver down from Brown to evaluate it for us. He's about the best guy in the country for reading their minds."
   "Why the hell doesn't he work for me?" Jack asked.
   "He likes it at Brown. He comes from Rhode Island. We've offered him a job across the river half a dozen times that I know of," DCI Foley told Ryan, "but he always says the same thing."
   "Same at State, Jack. I've known George for fifteen years or more. He doesn't want to work for the government."
   "Your kind of man, Jack," Arnie added for a little levity.
   "Besides, he can make more money as a contractor, can't he? Ed, when he comes down, make sure he comes in to see me."
   "When? You're flying out in a few hours," Ed pointed out.
   "Shit." Ryan remembered it now. Callie Weston was just finishing up the last of his official speeches in her office across the street. She was even coming across on Air Force One with the official party. Why was it that you couldn't deal with things one at a time? Because at this level, they just didn't arrive that way.
   "All right," Jack said next. "We need to evaluate how serious this is, and then figure a way to forestall it. That means—what?"
   "One of several things. We can approach them quietly," SecState Adler said. "You know, tell them that this has gone too far, and we want to work with them on the sly to ameliorate the situation."
   "Except Ambassador Hitch is over here now, consulting, remember? Where's he doing it today, Congressional or Burning Tree?" POTUS asked. Hitch enjoyed golf, a hobby he could hardly pursue in Beijing. Ryan could sympathize. He was lucky to get in one round a week, and what swing he'd once had was gone with the wind.
   "The DCM in Beijing is too junior for something like this. No matter what we said through him, they wouldn't take it seriously enough."
   "And what, exactly, could we give them?" Winston asked. "There's nothing big enough to make them happy that we could keep quiet. They'd have to give us something so that we could justify giving them anything, and from what I see here, they don't want to give us anything but a bellyache. We're limited in our action by what the country will tolerate."
   "You think they'd tolerate a shooting war?" Adler snapped.
   "Be cool, Scott. There are practical considerations. Anything juicy enough to make these Chinese bastards happy has to be approved by Congress, right? To get such a concession through Congress would mean giving them the justification for it." Winston waved the secret document in his hand. "But we can't do that because Ed here would have a fit, and even if we did, somebody on the Hill would leak it to the papers in a New York minute, and half of them would call it danegeld, and say fuck the Chinks, millions for defense but not one penny for tribute. Am I right?"
   "Yes," Arnie answered. "The other half would call it responsible statesmanship, but the average Joe out there wouldn't much like it. The average citizen would expect you to call Premier Xu on the phone and say, 'Better not do this, buddy,' and expect it to stick."
   "Which would, by the way, kill SONGBIRD," Mary Pat added as a warning, lest they take that option seriously. "That would end a human life, and deny us further information that we need to have. And from my reading of this report, Xu would deny everything and just keep going forward. They really think they're in a corner, but they can't see a way to smart themselves out of it."
   "The danger is ...?" TRADER asked.
   "Internal political collapse," Ryan explained. "They're afraid that if anything upsets the political or economic conditions inside the country, the whole house of cards comes tumbling down. With serious consequences for the current royal family of the PRC."
   "Called the chop." Ben Goodley had to say something, and that was an easy one. "Actually a rifle bullet today." It didn't help him feel much better. He was out of his depth and he knew it.
   That's when the President's STU rang. It was SecDef Tony Bretano, THUNDER. "Yeah," Ryan said. "Putting you on speaker, Tony. Scott, George, Arnie, Ed, Mary Pat, and Ben are here, and we just read what you got."
   "I presume this is real?"
   "Real as hell," Ed Foley told the newest member of the SORGE/SONGBIRD chorus.
   "This is worrisome."
   "On that we are agreed, Tony. Where are you now?"
   "Standing on top of a Bradley in the parking lot. Never seen so many tanks and guns in my life. Feels like real power here."
   "Yeah, well, what you just read shows you the limits of our power."
   "So I gather. If you want to know what I think we should do about it—well, make it clear to them somehow that this would be a really bad play for them."
   "How do we do that, Tony?" Adler asked.
   "Some animals—the puffer fish, for example. When threatened, it swallows a gallon of water and expands its size—makes it look too big to eat."
   Ryan was surprised to hear that. He'd no idea that Bretano knew anything about animals. He was a physics and science guy. Well, maybe he watched the Discovery Channel like everyone else.
   "Scare them, you mean?"
   "Impress them, better way of putting it."
   "Jack, we're going to Warsaw—we can let Grushavoy know about this . . . how about we invite him into NATO? The Poles are there already. It would commit all of Europe to come to Russia's defense in the event of an invasion. I mean, that's what alliances and mutual-defense treaties are all about. 'You're not just messing with me, Charlie. You're messing with all my friends, too.' It's worked for a long time."
   Ryan considered that one, and looked around the room. "Thoughts?"
   "It's something," Winston thought.
   "But what about the other NATO counties? Will they buy into this? The whole purpose of NATO," Goodley reminded them, "was to protect them from the Russians."
   "The Soviets," Adler corrected. "Not the same thing anymore, remember?"
   "The same people, the same language, sir," Goodley persisted. He felt pretty secure on this one. "What you propose is an elegant possible solution to the present problem, but to make it happen we'd have to share SORGE with other countries, wouldn't we?" The suggestion made the Foleys both wince. There were few things on the planet as talkative as a chief of government.
   "What the hell, we've been watching their military with overheads for a long time. We can say that we're catching stuff there that makes us nervous. Good enough for the unwashed," the DCI offered.
   "Next, how do we persuade the Russians?" Jack wondered aloud. "This could be seen in Moscow as a huge loss of face."
   "We have to explain the problem to them. The danger is to their country, after all," Adler pronounced.
   "But they're not unwashed. They'll want to know CHAPTER and verse, and it is their national security we're talking about here," Goodley added.
   "You know who's in Moscow now?" Foley asked POTUS.
   "John?"
   "RAINBOW SIX. John and Ding both know Golovko, and he's Grushavoy's number-one boy. It's a nice, convenient back channel. Note that this also confirms that the Moscow rocket was aimed at him. Might not make Sergey Nikolay'ch feel better, but he'd rather know than guess."
   "Why can't those stupid fucking people just say they're sorry they shot those two people?" Ryan wondered crossly.
   "Why do you think pride is one of the Seven Deadly Sins?" the DCI asked in reply.
 
   Clark's portable phone was a satellite type with a built-in encryption system, really just a quarter-inch-thick plastic pad that actually made the phone easier to cradle against his shoulder. Like most such phones, it took time to synchronize with its companion on the other end, the task made harder by the delay inherent in the use of satellites.
   "Line is secure," the synthetic female voice said finally.
   "Who's this?"
   "Ed Foley, John. How's Moscow?"
   "Pleasant. What gives, Ed?" John asked. The DCI didn't call from D.C. on a secure line to exchange pleasantries.
   "Get over to the embassy. We have a message we want you to deliver."
   "What sort?"
   "Get to the embassy. It'll be waiting. Okay?"
   "Roger. Out." John killed the phone and walked back inside.
   "Anything important?" Chavez asked.
   "We have to go to the embassy to see somebody," Clark replied, simulating anger at the interruption of his quiet time of the day.
   "See you tomorrow then, Ivan and Domingo," Kirillin saluted them with his glass.
   "What gives?" Chavez asked from thirty feet away.
   "Not sure, but it was Ed Foley who paged me."
   "Something important?"
   "I guess we'll just have to wait and see."
   "Who drives?"
   "Me." John knew Moscow fairly well, having learned it first on missions in the 1970s that he was just as happy to forget about, when his daughters had been the age of his new grandson.
   The drive took twenty minutes, and the hard part turned out to be persuading the Marine guard that they really were entitled to come inside after normal business hours. To this end, the man waiting for them, Tom Barlow, proved useful. The Marines knew him, and he knew them, and that made everything okay, sort of.
   "What's the big deal?" Jack asked, when they got to Barlow's office.
   "This." He handed the fax across, a copy to each. "Might want to take a seat, guys."
   "Madre de Dios" Chavez gasped thirty seconds later.
   "Roger that, Domingo," his boss agreed. They were reading a hastily laundered copy of the latest SORGE dispatch.
   "We got us a source in Beijing, 'mano."
   "Hang a big roger on that one, Domingo. And we're supposed to share the take with Sergey Nikolay'ch. Somebody back home is feeling real ecumenical."
   "Fuck!" Chavez observed. Then he read on a little. "Oh, yeah, I see. This does make some sense."
   "Barlow, we have a phone number for our friend?"
   "Right here." The CIA officer handed over a Post-it note and pointed to a phone. "He'll be out at his dacha, out in the Lenin Hills. They haven't changed the name yet. Since he found out he was the target, he's gotten a little more security-conscious."
   "Yeah, we've met his baby-sitter, Shelepin," Chavez told Barlow. "Looks pretty serious."
   "He'd better be. If I read this right, he might be called up to bat again, or maybe Grushavoy's detail."
   "Is this for real?" Chavez had to wonder. "I mean, this is cams belli stuff."
   "Well, Ding, you keep saying that international relations is two countries fucking each other." Then he dialed the phone. "Tovarisch Golovko," he told the voice that answered it, adding in Russian, "It's Klerk, Ivan Sergeyevich. That'll get his attention," John told the other two.
   "Greetings, Vanya," a familiar voice said in English. "I will not ask how you got this number. What can I do for you?"
   "Sergey, we need to see you at once on an important matter."
   "What sort of matter?"
   "I am the mailman, Sergey. I have a message to deliver to you. It is worthy of your attention. Can Domingo and I see you this evening?"
   "Do you know how to get here?"
   Clark figured he'd find his way out to the woods. "Just tell the people at the gate to expect two capitalist friends of Russia. Say about an hour from now?"
   "I will be waiting."
   "Thank you, Sergey." Clark replaced the phone. "Where's the piss-parlor, Barlow?"
   "Down the hall on the right."
   The senior field intelligence officer folded the fax and tucked it into his coat pocket. Before having a talk about something like this, he needed a bathroom.

CHAPTER 42

Birch Trees
   
They drove into the sunset, west from the Russian capital. Traffic had picked up in Moscow since his last real adventure here, and you could use the center lane in the wide avenues. Ding handled navigation with a map, and soon they were beyond the ring roads around the Russian capital and entering the hills that surrounded the city. They passed a memorial which neither had ever seen before, three huge—
   "What the hell is that?" Ding asked.
   "This is as close as the Germans got in 1941," John explained. "This is where they stopped 'em."
   "What do you call those things?" "Those things" were immense steel I-beams, three of them welded at ninety-degree angles to look like enormous jacks.
   "Hedgehogs, but in the SEALs we called 'em horned scullies. Hard to drive a tank over one," Clark told his younger partner.
   "They take their history serious here, don't they?"
   "You would, too, if you stopped somebody who wanted to erase your country right off the map, sonny. The Germans were pretty serious back then, too. It was a very nasty war, that one."
   "Guess so. Take the next right, Mr. C."
   Ten minutes later, they were in a forest of birch trees, as much a part of the Russian soul as vodka and borscht. Soon thereafter they came to a guard shack. The uniformed guard held an AK-74 and looked surprisingly grim. Probably briefed on the threat to Golovko and others, John imagined. But he'd also been briefed on who was authorized to pass, and they only had to show their passports to get cleared, the guard also giving them directions about which country lane to take.
   "The houses don't look too bad," Chavez observed.
   "Built by German POWs," John told him. "Ivan doesn't exactly like the Germans very much, but he does respect their workmanship. These were built for the Politburo members, mainly after the war, probably. There's our place."
   It was a wood-frame house, painted brown and looking like a cross between a German country house and something from an Indiana farm, Clark thought. There were guards here, too, armed and walking around. They'd been called from the first shack, John figured. One of them waved. The other two stood back, ready to cover the first one if something untoward happened.
   "You are Klerk, Ivan Sergeyevich?"
   "Da,” John answered. "This is Chavez, Domingo Stepanovich."
   "Pass, you are expected," the guard told them.
   It was a pleasant evening. The sun was down now, and the stars were making their appearance in the sky. There was also a gentle westerly breeze, but Clark thought he could hear the ghosts of war here. Hans von Kluge's panzer grenadiers, men wearing the feldgrau of the Wehrmacht. World War II on this front had been a strange conflict, like modern TV wrestling. No choice between good and bad, but only between bad and worse, and on that score it had been six-five and pick 'em. But their host probably wouldn't see history that way, and Clark had no intention of bringing up the subject.
   Golovko was there, standing on the sheltered porch by the furniture, dressed casually. Decent shirt, but no tie. He wasn't a tall man, about halfway between Chavez and himself in height, but the eyes always showed intelligence, and now they also showed interest. He was curious about the purpose of this meeting, as well he might be.
   "Ivan Sergeyevich," Golovko said in greeting. Handshakes were exchanged, and the guests conducted inside. Mrs. Golovko, a physician, was nowhere in evidence. Golovko first of all served vodka, and directed them to seats.
   "You said you had a message for me." The language for this meeting was to be English, John saw.
   "Here it is." Clark handed the pages across.
   "Spasiba." Sergey Nikolay'ch sat back in his chair and started to read.
   He would have been a fine poker player, John thought. His face changed not at all through the first two pages. Then he looked up.
   "Who decided that I needed to see this?" he asked.
   "The President," Clark answered.
   "Your Ryan is a good comrade, Vanya, and an honorable man." Golovko paused. "I see you have improved your human-intelligence capabilities at Langley."
   "That's probably a good supposition, but I know nothing of the source here, Chairman Golovko," Clark answered.
   "This is, as you say, hot."
   "It is all of that," John agreed, watching him turn another page.
   "Son of a bitch!" Golovko observed, finally showing some emotion.
   "Yeah, that's about what I said," Chavez entered the conversation.
   "They are well-informed. This does not surprise me. I am sure they have ample espionage assets in Russia," Golovko observed, with anger creeping into his voice. "But this is—this is naked aggression they discuss."
   Clark nodded. "Yep, that's what it appears to be."
   "This is genuine information?" Golovko asked.
   "I'm just the mailman, Chairman," Clark replied. "I vouch for nothing here."
   "Ryan is too good a comrade to play agent provocateur. This is madness." And Golovko was telling his guests that he had no good intelligence assets in the Chinese Politburo, which actually surprised John. It wasn't often that CIA caught the Russians short at anything. Golovko looked up. "We once had a source for such information, but no longer."
   "I've never worked in that part of the world, Chairman, except long ago when I was in the Navy." And the Chinese part of that, he didn't explain, was mainly getting drunk and laid in Taipei.
   "I've traveled to Beijing several times in a diplomatic capacity, not recently. I cannot say that I've ever really understood those people." Golovko finished reading the document and set it down. "I can keep this?"
   "Yes, sir," Clark replied.
   "Why does Ryan give us this?"
   "I'm just the delivery boy, Sergey Nikolay'ch, but I should think the motive is in the message. America does not wish to see Russia hurt."
   "Decent of you. What concessions will you require?"
   "None that I am aware of."
   "You know," Chavez observed, "sometimes you just want to be a good neighbor."
   "At this level of statecraft?" Golovko asked skeptically.
   "Why not? It does not serve American interests to see Russia crippled and robbed. How big are these mineral finds, anyway?" John asked.
   "Immense," Golovko replied. "I'm not surprised you've learned of them. Our efforts at secrecy were not serious. The oil field is one to rival the Saudi reserves, and the gold mine is very rich indeed. Potentially, these finds could save our economy, could make us a truly wealthy nation and a fit partner for America."
   "Then you know why Jack sent this over. It's a better world for both of us if Russia prospers."
   "Truly?" Golovko was a bright man, but he'd grown up in a world in which both America and Russia had often wished each other dead. Such thoughts died hard, even in so agile a mind as his.
   "Truly," John confirmed. "Russia is a great nation, and you are great people. You are fit partners for us." He didn't add that, this way, America wouldn't have to worry about bailing them out. Now they'd have the wherewithal to see to their own enrichment, and America needed only offer expertise and advice about how to enter the capitalist world with both feet, and open eyes.
   "This from the man who helped arrange the defection of the KGB chairman?" Golovko asked.
   "Sergey, as we say at home, that was business, not personal. I don't have a hard-on for Russians, and you wouldn't kill an American just for entertainment purposes, would you?"
   Indignation: "Of course not. That would be nekulturniy."
   "It is the same with us, Chairman."
   "Hey, man," Chavez added. "From when I was a teenager, I was trained to kill your people, back when I was an Eleven-Bravo carrying a rifle, but, guess what, we're not enemies anymore, are we? And if we're not enemies, then we can be friends. You helped us out with Japan and Iran, didn't you?"
   "Yes, but we saw that we were the ultimate target of both conflicts, and it was in our national interest."
   "And perhaps the Chinese have us as their ultimate target. Then this is in our interest. They probably don't like us any more than they like you."
   Golovko nodded. "Yes, one thing I do know about them is their sense of racial superiority."
   "Dangerous way for people to think, man. Racism means your enemies are just insects to be swatted," Chavez concluded, impressing Clark with the mixture of East LA accent and master's-degree analysis of the situation at hand. "Even Karl Marx didn't say that he was better than anybody else 'cuz of his skin color, did he?"
   "But Mao did," Golovko added.
   "Doesn't surprise me," Ding went on. "I read his Little Red Book in graduate school. He didn't want to be just a political leader. Hell, he wanted to be God. Let his ego get in the way of his brain—not an uncommon affliction for people who take countries over, is it?"
   "Lenin was not such a man, but Stalin was," Golovko observed. "So, then Ivan Emmetovich is a friend of Russia. What shall I do with this?"
   "That's up to you, pal," Clark told him.
   "I must speak to my president. Yours comes to Poland tomorrow, doesn't he?"
   "I think so."
   "I must make some phone calls. Thank you for coming, my friends. Perhaps another time I will be able to entertain you properly."
   "Fair enough." Clark stood and tossed off the end of his drink. More handshakes, and they left the way they'd come.
   "Christ, John, what happens now?" Ding asked, as they drove back out.
   "I suppose everybody tries to beat some sense into the Chinese."
   "Will it work?"
   A shrug and arched eyebrows: "News at eleven, Domingo."
 
   Packing for a trip isn't easy, even with a staff to do it all for you. This was particularly true for SURGEON, who was not only concerned about what she wore in public while abroad, but was also the Supreme
   Authority on her husband's clothes, a status which her husband tolerated rather than entirely approved. Jack Ryan was still in the Oval Office trying to do business that couldn't wait—actually it mostly could, but there were fictions in government that had to be honored—and also waiting for the phone to ring.
   "Arnie?"
   "Yeah, Jack?"
   "Tell the Air Force to have another G go over to Warsaw in case Scott has to fly to Moscow on the sly."
   "Not a bad idea. They'll probably park it at some air force base or something." Van Damm went off to make the phone call.
   "Anything else, Ellen?" Ryan asked his secretary.
   "Need one?"
   "Yeah, before Cathy and I wing off into the sunset." Actually, they were heading east, but Mrs. Sumter understood. She handed Ryan his last cigarette of the day.
   "Damn," Ryan breathed with his first puff. He'd be getting a call from Moscow sure as hell—wouldn't he? That depended on how quickly they digested the information, or maybe Sergey would wait for the morning to show it to President Grushavoy. Would he? In Washington, something that hot would be graded CRITIC and shoved under the President's nose inside twenty minutes, but different countries had different rules, and he didn't know what the Russians did. For damned sure he'd be hearing from one of them before he stepped off the plane at Warsaw. But for now . . . He stubbed the smoke out, reached inside his desk for the breath spray, and zapped his mouth with the acidic stuff before leaving the office and heading outside—the West Wing and the White House proper are not connected by an indoor corridor, due to some architectural oversight. In any case, inside six minutes he was on the residential level, watching the ushers organize his bags. Cathy was there, trying to supervise, under the eyes of the Secret Service as well, who acted as though they worried about having a bomb slipped in. But paranoia was their job. Ryan walked over to his wife. "You need to talk to Andrea."
   "What for?"
   "Stomach trouble, she says."
   "Uh-oh." Cathy had suffered from queasiness with Sally, but that was ages ago, and it hadn't been severe. "Not really much you can do about it, you know."
   "So much for medical progress," Jack commented. "She probably could use some girl-girl support anyway."
   Cathy smiled. "Oh, sure, womanly solidarity. So, you're going to bond with Pat?"
   Jack grinned back at her. "Yeah, maybe he'll teach me to shoot a pistol better."
   "Super," SURGEON observed dryly.
   "Which dress for the big dinner?" POTUS asked FLOTUS.
   "The light-blue one."
   "Slinky," Jack said, touching her arm.
   The kids showed up then, shepherded up to the bedroom level by their various detail leaders, except for Kyle, who was carried by one of his lionesses. Leaving the kids was never particularly easy, though all concerned were somewhat accustomed to it. The usual kisses and hugs took place, and then Jack took his wife's hand and led her to the elevator.
   It let them off at the ground level, with a straight walk out to the helicopter pad. The VH-3 was there, with Colonel Malloy at the controls. The Marines saluted, as they always did. The President and First Lady climbed inside and buckled into the comfortable seats, under the watchful eyes of a Marine sergeant, who then went forward to report to the pilot in the right-front seat.
   Cathy enjoyed helicopter flight more than her husband did, since she flew in one twice a day. Jack was no longer afraid of it, but he did prefer driving a car, which he hadn't been allowed to do in months. The Sikorsky lifted up gently, pivoted in the air, and headed off to Andrews. The flight took about ten minutes. The helicopter alighted close to the VC-25A, the Air Force's version of the Boeing 747; it was just a few seconds to the stairs, with the usual TV cameras to mark the event.
   "Turn and wave, honey," Jack told Cathy at the top of the steps. "We might make the evening news."
   "Again?" Cathy grumped. Then she waved and smiled, not at people, but at cameras. With this task completed, they went inside the aircraft and forward to the presidential compartment. There they buckled in, and were observed to do so by an Air Force NCO, who then told the pilot it was okay to spool up the engines and taxi to the end of Runway
   Zero-one-right. Everything after that was ordinary, including the speech from the pilot, followed by the usual, stately takeoff roll of the big Boeing, and the climb out to thirty-eight thousand feet. Aft, Ryan was sure, everyone was comfortable, because the worst seat on this aircraft was as good as the best first-class seat on any airline in the world. On the whole this seemed a serious waste of the taxpayers' money, but to the best of his knowledge no taxpayer had ever complained very loudly.
   The expected happened off the coast of Maine.
   "Mr. President?" a female voice asked.
   "Yeah, Sarge?"
   "Call for you, sir, on the STU. Where do you want to take it?"
   Ryan stood. "Topside."
   The sergeant nodded and waved. "This way, sir."
   "Who is it?"
   "The DCI."
   Ryan figured that made sense. "Let's get Secretary Adler in on this, too."
   "Yes, sir," she said as he started up the spiral stairs.
   Upstairs, Ryan settled into a working-type seat vacated for him by an Air Force NCO who handed him the proper phone. "Ed?"
   "Yeah, Jack. Sergey called."
   "Saying what?"
   "He thinks it's a good idea you coming to Poland. He requests a high-level meeting, on the sly if possible."
   Adler took the chair next to Ryan and caught the comment.
   "Scott, feel like a hop to Moscow?"
   "Can we do it quietly?" SecState asked.
   "Probably."
   "Then, yes. Ed, did you field the NATO suggestion?"
   "Not my turf to try that, Scott," the Director of Central Intelligence replied.
   "Fair enough. Think they'll spring for it?"
   "Three-to-one, yes."
   "I'll agree with that," Ryan concurred. "Golovko will like it, too."
   "Yeah, he will, once he gets over the shock," Adler observed, with irony in his voice.
   "Okay, Ed, tell Sergey that we are amenable to a covert meeting. SecState flying into Moscow for consultations. Let us know what develops."
   "Will do."
   "Okay, out." Ryan set the handset down and turned to Adler. "Well?"
   "Well, if they spring for it, China will have something to think about." This statement was delivered with a dollop of hope.
   The problem, Ryan thought once again as he stood, is that Klingons don't think quite the same way we do.
 
   The bugs had them all smirking. Suvorov/Koniev had picked up another expensive hooker that night, and her acting abilities had played out in the proper noises at the proper moments. Or maybe he was really that good in bed, Provalov wondered aloud, to the general skepticism of the others in the surveillance van. No, the others thought, this girl was too much of a professional to allow herself to get into it that much. They all thought that was rather sad, lovely as she was to look at. But they knew something their subject didn't know. This girl had been a "dangle," pre-briefed to meet Suvorov/Koniev.
   Finally the noise subsided, and they heard the distinctive snap of an American Zippo lighter, and the usual post-sex silence of a sated man and a (simulatedly) satisfied woman.
   "So, what sort of work do you do, Vanya?" the female voice asked, showing the expected professional interest of an expensive hooker in a wealthy man she might wish to entertain again.
   "Business" was the answer.
   "What sort?" Again, just the right amount of interest. The good news, Provalov thought, was that she didn't need coaching. The Sparrow School must have been fairly easy to operate, he realized. Women did this sort of thing from instinct.
   "I take care of special needs for special people," the enemy spy answered. His revelation was followed by a feminine laugh.
   "I do that, too, Vanya."
   "There are foreigners who need special services which I was trained to handle under the old regime."
   "You were KGB? Really?" Excitement in her voice. This girl was good.
   "Yes, one of many. Nothing special about it."
   "To you, perhaps, but not to me. Was there really a school for women like me? Did KGB train women to ... to take care of the needs of men?"
   A man's laugh this time: "Oh, yes, my dear. There was such a school. You would have done well there."
   Now the laugh was coquettish. "As well as I do now?"
   "No, not at what you charge."
   "But am I worth it?" she asked.
   "Easily" was the satisfied answer.
   "Would you like to see me again, Vanya?" Real hope, or beautifully simulated hope, in the question.
   "Da, I would like that very much, Maria."
   "So, you take care of people with special needs. What needs are those?" She could get away with this because men so enjoyed to be found fascinating by beautiful women. It was part of their act of worship at this particular altar, and men always went for it.
   "Not unlike what I was trained to do, Maria, but the details need not concern you."
   Disappointment: "Men always say that," she grumped. "Why do the most interesting men have to be so mysterious?"
   "In that is our fascination, woman," he explained. "Would you prefer that I drove a truck?"
   "Truck drivers don't have your . . . your manly abilities," she replied, as if she'd learned the difference.
   "A man could get hard just listening to this bitch," one of the FSS officers observed.
   "That's the idea," Provalov agreed. "Why do you think she can charge so much?"
   "A real man need not pay for it."
   "Was I that good?" Suvorov/Koniev asked in their headphones.
   "Any better and I would have to pay you, Vanya," she replied, with joy in her voice. Probably a kiss went along with the proclamation.
   "No more questions, Maria. Let it lie for now," Oleg Gregoriyevich urged to the air. She must have heard him.
   "You know how to make a man feel like a man," the spy/assassin told her. "Where did you learn this skill?"
   "It just comes naturally to a woman," she cooed.
   "To some women, perhaps." Then the talking stopped, and in ten minutes, the snoring began.
   "Well, that's more interesting than our normal cases," the FSS officer told the others.
   "You have people checking out the bench?"
   "Hourly." There was no telling how many people delivered messages to the dead-drop, and they probably weren't all Chinese nationals. No, there'd be a rat-line in this chain, probably not a long one, but enough to offer some insulation to Suvorov's handler. That would be good fieldcraft, and they had to expect it. So, the bench and its dead-drop would be checked out regularly, and in that surveillance van would be a key custom-made to fit the lock on the drop-box, and a photocopier to make a duplicate of the message inside. The FSS had also stepped up surveillance of the Chinese Embassy. Nearly every employee who came outside had a shadow now. To do this properly meant curtailing other counterespionage operations in Moscow, but this case had assumed priority over everything else. It would soon become even more important, but they didn't know that yet.
 
   How many engineers do we have available?" Bondarenko asked Aliyev in the east Siberian dawn.
   "Two regiments not involved with the road-building," the operations officer answered.
   "Good. Get them all down here immediately to work on the camouflage on these bunkers, and to set up false ones on the other side of these hills. Immediately, Andrey."
   "Yes, General, I'll get them right on it."
   "I love the dawn, the most peaceful time of day."
   "Except when the other fellow uses it for his attack." Dawn was the universal time for a major offensive, so that one had all the light of the day to pursue it.
   "If they come, it will be right up this valley."
   "Yes, it will."
   "They will shoot up the first line of defenses—what they think they are, that is," Bondarenko predicted, pointing. The first line was composed of seemingly real bunkers, made of rebarred concrete, but the gun tubes sticking out of them were fake. Whatever engineer had laid out these fortifications had been born with an eye for terrain worthy of Alexander of Macedon. They appeared to be beautifully sited, but a little too much so. Their positioning was a little too predictable, and they were visible, if barely so, to the other side, and something barely visible would be the first target hit. There were even pyrotechnic charges in the false bunkers, so that after a few direct hits they'd explode, and really make the enemy feel fine for having hit them. Whoever had come up with that idea had been a genius of a military engineer.
   But the real defenses on the front of the hills were tiny observation posts whose buried phone lines led back to the real bunkers, and beyond them to artillery positions ten or more kilometers back. Some of these were old, also pre-sited, but the rockets they launched were just as deadly today as they'd been in the 1940s, design progeny of the Katushka artillery rockets the Germans had learned to hate. Then came the direct-fire weapons. The first rank of these were the turrets of old German tanks. The sights and the ammunition still worked, and the crewmen knew how to use them, and they had escape tunnels leading to vehicles that would probably allow them to survive a determined attack. The engineers who had laid this line out were probably all dead now, and General Bondarenko hoped they'd been buried honorably, as soldiers deserved. This line wouldn't stop a determined attack—no fixed line of defenses could accomplish that—but it would be enough to make an enemy wish he'd gone somewhere else.
   But the camouflage needed work, and that work would be done at night. A high-flying aircraft tracing over the border with a side-looking camera could see far into his country and take thousands of useful, pretty pictures, and the Chinese probably had a goodly collection of such pictures, plus whatever they could get from their own satellites, or from the commercial birds that anyone could employ now for money—
   "Andrey, tell intelligence to see if we can determine if the Chinese have accessed commercial photo satellites."
   "Why bother? Don't they have their own—"
   "We don't know how good their reconsats are, but we do know that the new French ones are as good as anything the Americans had up until 1975 or so, and that's good enough for most purposes."
   "Yes, General." Aliyev paused. "You think something is going to happen here?"
   Bondarenko paused, frowning as he stared south over the river. He could see into China from this hilltop. The ground looked no different, but for political reasons it was alien land, and though the inhabitants of that land were no different ethnically from the people native to his land, the political differences were enough to make the sight of them a thing of concern, even fear, for him. He shook his head.
   "Andrey Petrovich, you've heard the same intelligence briefings I've heard. What concerns me is that their army has been far more active than ours. They have the ability to attack us, and we do not have the ability to defeat them. We have less than three full-strength divisions, and the level of their training is inadequate. We have much to do before I will begin to feel comfortable. Firming up this line is the easiest thing to do, and the easiest part of firming it up is hiding the bunkers. Next, we'll start rotating the soldiers back to the training range and have them work on their gunnery. That will be easy for them to do, but it hasn't been done in ten months! So much to do, Andrushka, so much to do."
   "That is so, Comrade General, but we've made a good beginning."
   Bondarenko waved his hand and growled, "Ahh, a good beginning will be a year from now. We've taken the first morning piss in what will be a long day, Colonel. Now, let's fly east and see the next sector."
 
   General Peng Xi-Wang, commander of the Red Banner 34th Shock Army, only sixteen kilometers away, looked through powerful spotting glasses at the Russian frontier. Thirty-fourth Shock was a Type A Group Army, and comprised about eighty thousand men. He had an armored division, two mechanized ones, a motorized infantry division, and other attachments, such as an independent artillery brigade under his direct command. Fifty years of age, and a party member since his twenties, Peng was a long-term professional soldier who'd enjoyed the last ten years of his life. Since commanding his tank regiment as a senior colonel, he'd been able to train his troops incessantly on what had become his home country.
   The Shenyang Military District comprised the north-easternmost part of the People's Republic. It was composed of hilly, wooded land, and had warm summers and hitter winters. There was a touch of early ice on the Amur River below Peng now, but from a military point of view, the trees were the real obstacle. Tanks could knock individual trees down, but not every ten meters. No, you had to drive between and around them, and while there was room for that, it was hard on the drivers, and it ate up fuel almost as efficiently as tipping the fuel drum over on its side and just pouring it out. There were some roads and railroad rights-of-way, and if he ever went north, he'd be using them, though that made for good ambush opportunities, if the Russians had a good collection of antitank weapons. But the Russian doctrine, going back half a century, was that the best antitank weapon was a better tank. In their war with the fascists, the Soviet army had enjoyed possession of a superb tank in the T-34. They'd built a lot of the Rapier antitank guns, and duly copied NATO guided antitank weapons, but you dealt with those by blanketing an area with artillery fire, and Peng had lots of guns and mountains of shells to deal with the unprotected infantrymen who had to steer the missiles into their targets. He wished he had the Russian-designed Arena anti-missile system, which had been designed to protect their tanks from the swarm of NATO's deadly insects, but he didn't, and he heard it didn't work all that well anyway.
   The spotting glasses were Chinese copies of a German Zeiss model adopted for use by the Soviet Army of old. They zoomed from twenty to fifty-power, allowing him an intimate view of the other side of the river. Peng came up here once a month or so, which allowed him to inspect his own border troops, who stood what was really a defensive watch, and a light one at that. He had little concern about a Russian attack into his country. The People's Liberation Army taught the same doctrine as every army back to the Assyrians of old: The best defense is a good offense. If a war began here, better to begin it yourself. And so Peng had cabinets full of plans to attack into Siberia, prepared by his operations and intelligence people, because that was what operations people did.
   "Their defenses look ill-maintained," Peng observed.
   "That is so, Comrade," the colonel commanding the border-defense regiment agreed. "We see little regular activity there."
   "They are too busy selling their weapons to civilians for vodka," the army political officer observed. "Their morale is poor, and they do not train anything like we do."
   "They have a new theater commander," the army's intelligence chief countered. "A General-Colonel Bondarenko. He is well regarded in Moscow as an intellect and as a courageous battlefield commander from Afghanistan."
   "That means he survived contact once," Political observed. "Probably with a Kabul whore."
   "It is dangerous to underestimate an adversary," Intelligence warned.
   "And foolish to overestimate one."
   Peng just looked through the glasses. He'd heard his intelligence and political officer spar before. Intelligence tended to be an old woman, but many intelligence officers were like that, and Political, like so many of his colleagues, was sufficiently aggressive to make Genghis Khan seem womanly. As in the theater, officers played the roles assigned to them. His role, of course, was to be the wise and confident commander of one of his country's premier striking arms, and Peng played that role well enough that he was in the running for promotion to General First Class, and if he played his cards very carefully, in another eight years or so, maybe Marshal. With that rank came real political power and personal riches beyond counting, with whole factories working for his own enrichment. Some of those factories were managed by mere colonels, people with the best of political credentials who knew how to kowtow to their seniors, but Peng had never gone that route. He enjoyed soldering far more than he enjoyed pushing paper and screaming at worker-peasants. As a new second lieutenant, he'd fought the Russians, not very far from this very spot. It had been a mixed experience. His regiment had enjoyed initial success, then had been hammered by a storm of artillery. That had been back when the Red Army, the real Soviet Army of old, had fielded whole artillery divisions whose concentrated fire could shake the very earth and sky, and that border clash had incurred the wrath of the nation the Russians had once been. But no longer. Intelligence told him that the Russian troops on the far side of this cold river were not even a proper shadow of what had once been there. Four divisions, perhaps, and not all of them at full strength. So, however clever this Bondarenko fellow was, if a clash came, he'd have his hands very full indeed.
   But that was a political question, wasn't it? Of course. All the really important things were.
   "How are the bridging engineers?" Peng asked, surveying the watery obstacle below.
   "Their last exercise went very well, Comrade General," Operations replied. Like every other army in the world, the PLA had copied the Russian "ribbon" bridge, designed by Soviet engineers in the 1960s to force crossings of all the streams of Western Germany in a NATO/Warsaw Pact war so long expected, but never realized. Except in fiction, mainly Western fiction that had had the NATO side win in every case. Of course. Would capitalists spend money on books that ended their culture? Peng chuckled to himself. Such people enjoyed their illusions . . .
   ... almost as much as his own country's Politburo members. That's the way it was all over the world, Peng figured. The rulers of every land held images in their heads, and tried to make the world conform to them. Some succeeded, and those were the ones who wrote the history books.
   "So, what do we expect here?"
   "From the Russians?" Intelligence asked. "Nothing that I have heard about. Their army is training a little more, but nothing to be concerned about. If they wanted to come south across that river, I hope they can swim in the cold."
   "The Russians like their comforts too much for that. They've grown soft with their new political regime," Political proclaimed.
   "And if we are ordered north?" Peng asked.
   "If we give them one hard kick, the whole rotten mess will fall down," Political answered. He didn't know that he was exactly quoting another enemy of the Russians.

CHAPTER 42

Birch Trees
   
They drove into the sunset, west from the Russian capital. Traffic had picked up in Moscow since his last real adventure here, and you could use the center lane in the wide avenues. Ding handled navigation with a map, and soon they were beyond the ring roads around the Russian capital and entering the hills that surrounded the city. They passed a memorial which neither had ever seen before, three huge—
   "What the hell is that?" Ding asked.
   "This is as close as the Germans got in 1941," John explained. "This is where they stopped 'em."
   "What do you call those things?" "Those things" were immense steel I-beams, three of them welded at ninety-degree angles to look like enormous jacks.
   "Hedgehogs, but in the SEALs we called 'em horned scullies. Hard to drive a tank over one," Clark told his younger partner.
   "They take their history serious here, don't they?"
   "You would, too, if you stopped somebody who wanted to erase your country right off the map, sonny. The Germans were pretty serious back then, too. It was a very nasty war, that one."
   "Guess so. Take the next right, Mr. C."
   Ten minutes later, they were in a forest of birch trees, as much a part of the Russian soul as vodka and borscht. Soon thereafter they came to a guard shack. The uniformed guard held an AK-74 and looked surprisingly grim. Probably briefed on the threat to Golovko and others, John imagined. But he'd also been briefed on who was authorized to pass, and they only had to show their passports to get cleared, the guard also giving them directions about which country lane to take.
   "The houses don't look too bad," Chavez observed.
   "Built by German POWs," John told him. "Ivan doesn't exactly like the Germans very much, but he does respect their workmanship. These were built for the Politburo members, mainly after the war, probably. There's our place."
   It was a wood-frame house, painted brown and looking like a cross between a German country house and something from an Indiana farm, Clark thought. There were guards here, too, armed and walking around. They'd been called from the first shack, John figured. One of them waved. The other two stood back, ready to cover the first one if something untoward happened.
   "You are Klerk, Ivan Sergeyevich?"
   "Da,” John answered. "This is Chavez, Domingo Stepanovich."
   "Pass, you are expected," the guard told them.
   It was a pleasant evening. The sun was down now, and the stars were making their appearance in the sky. There was also a gentle westerly breeze, but Clark thought he could hear the ghosts of war here. Hans von Kluge's panzer grenadiers, men wearing the feldgrau of the Wehrmacht. World War II on this front had been a strange conflict, like modern TV wrestling. No choice between good and bad, but only between bad and worse, and on that score it had been six-five and pick 'em. But their host probably wouldn't see history that way, and Clark had no intention of bringing up the subject.
   Golovko was there, standing on the sheltered porch by the furniture, dressed casually. Decent shirt, but no tie. He wasn't a tall man, about halfway between Chavez and himself in height, but the eyes always showed intelligence, and now they also showed interest. He was curious about the purpose of this meeting, as well he might be.
   "Ivan Sergeyevich," Golovko said in greeting. Handshakes were exchanged, and the guests conducted inside. Mrs. Golovko, a physician, was nowhere in evidence. Golovko first of all served vodka, and directed them to seats.
   "You said you had a message for me." The language for this meeting was to be English, John saw.
   "Here it is." Clark handed the pages across.
   "Spasiba." Sergey Nikolay'ch sat back in his chair and started to read.
   He would have been a fine poker player, John thought. His face changed not at all through the first two pages. Then he looked up.
   "Who decided that I needed to see this?" he asked.
   "The President," Clark answered.
   "Your Ryan is a good comrade, Vanya, and an honorable man." Golovko paused. "I see you have improved your human-intelligence capabilities at Langley."
   "That's probably a good supposition, but I know nothing of the source here, Chairman Golovko," Clark answered.
   "This is, as you say, hot."
   "It is all of that," John agreed, watching him turn another page.
   "Son of a bitch!" Golovko observed, finally showing some emotion.
   "Yeah, that's about what I said," Chavez entered the conversation.
   "They are well-informed. This does not surprise me. I am sure they have ample espionage assets in Russia," Golovko observed, with anger creeping into his voice. "But this is—this is naked aggression they discuss."
   Clark nodded. "Yep, that's what it appears to be."
   "This is genuine information?" Golovko asked.
   "I'm just the mailman, Chairman," Clark replied. "I vouch for nothing here."
   "Ryan is too good a comrade to play agent provocateur. This is madness." And Golovko was telling his guests that he had no good intelligence assets in the Chinese Politburo, which actually surprised John. It wasn't often that CIA caught the Russians short at anything. Golovko looked up. "We once had a source for such information, but no longer."
   "I've never worked in that part of the world, Chairman, except long ago when I was in the Navy." And the Chinese part of that, he didn't explain, was mainly getting drunk and laid in Taipei.
   "I've traveled to Beijing several times in a diplomatic capacity, not recently. I cannot say that I've ever really understood those people." Golovko finished reading the document and set it down. "I can keep this?"
   "Yes, sir," Clark replied.
   "Why does Ryan give us this?"
   "I'm just the delivery boy, Sergey Nikolay'ch, but I should think the motive is in the message. America does not wish to see Russia hurt."
   "Decent of you. What concessions will you require?"
   "None that I am aware of."
   "You know," Chavez observed, "sometimes you just want to be a good neighbor."
   "At this level of statecraft?" Golovko asked skeptically.
   "Why not? It does not serve American interests to see Russia crippled and robbed. How big are these mineral finds, anyway?" John asked.
   "Immense," Golovko replied. "I'm not surprised you've learned of them. Our efforts at secrecy were not serious. The oil field is one to rival the Saudi reserves, and the gold mine is very rich indeed. Potentially, these finds could save our economy, could make us a truly wealthy nation and a fit partner for America."
   "Then you know why Jack sent this over. It's a better world for both of us if Russia prospers."
   "Truly?" Golovko was a bright man, but he'd grown up in a world in which both America and Russia had often wished each other dead. Such thoughts died hard, even in so agile a mind as his.
   "Truly," John confirmed. "Russia is a great nation, and you are great people. You are fit partners for us." He didn't add that, this way, America wouldn't have to worry about bailing them out. Now they'd have the wherewithal to see to their own enrichment, and America needed only offer expertise and advice about how to enter the capitalist world with both feet, and open eyes.
   "This from the man who helped arrange the defection of the KGB chairman?" Golovko asked.
   "Sergey, as we say at home, that was business, not personal. I don't have a hard-on for Russians, and you wouldn't kill an American just for entertainment purposes, would you?"
   Indignation: "Of course not. That would be nekulturniy."
   "It is the same with us, Chairman."
   "Hey, man," Chavez added. "From when I was a teenager, I was trained to kill your people, back when I was an Eleven-Bravo carrying a rifle, but, guess what, we're not enemies anymore, are we? And if we're not enemies, then we can be friends. You helped us out with Japan and Iran, didn't you?"
   "Yes, but we saw that we were the ultimate target of both conflicts, and it was in our national interest."
   "And perhaps the Chinese have us as their ultimate target. Then this is in our interest. They probably don't like us any more than they like you."
   Golovko nodded. "Yes, one thing I do know about them is their sense of racial superiority."
   "Dangerous way for people to think, man. Racism means your enemies are just insects to be swatted," Chavez concluded, impressing Clark with the mixture of East LA accent and master's-degree analysis of the situation at hand. "Even Karl Marx didn't say that he was better than anybody else 'cuz of his skin color, did he?"
   "But Mao did," Golovko added.
   "Doesn't surprise me," Ding went on. "I read his Little Red Book in graduate school. He didn't want to be just a political leader. Hell, he wanted to be God. Let his ego get in the way of his brain—not an uncommon affliction for people who take countries over, is it?"
   "Lenin was not such a man, but Stalin was," Golovko observed. "So, then Ivan Emmetovich is a friend of Russia. What shall I do with this?"
   "That's up to you, pal," Clark told him.
   "I must speak to my president. Yours comes to Poland tomorrow, doesn't he?"
   "I think so."
   "I must make some phone calls. Thank you for coming, my friends. Perhaps another time I will be able to entertain you properly."
   "Fair enough." Clark stood and tossed off the end of his drink. More handshakes, and they left the way they'd come.
   "Christ, John, what happens now?" Ding asked, as they drove back out.
   "I suppose everybody tries to beat some sense into the Chinese."
   "Will it work?"
   A shrug and arched eyebrows: "News at eleven, Domingo."
 
   Packing for a trip isn't easy, even with a staff to do it all for you. This was particularly true for SURGEON, who was not only concerned about what she wore in public while abroad, but was also the Supreme
   Authority on her husband's clothes, a status which her husband tolerated rather than entirely approved. Jack Ryan was still in the Oval Office trying to do business that couldn't wait—actually it mostly could, but there were fictions in government that had to be honored—and also waiting for the phone to ring.
   "Arnie?"
   "Yeah, Jack?"
   "Tell the Air Force to have another G go over to Warsaw in case Scott has to fly to Moscow on the sly."
   "Not a bad idea. They'll probably park it at some air force base or something." Van Damm went off to make the phone call.
   "Anything else, Ellen?" Ryan asked his secretary.
   "Need one?"
   "Yeah, before Cathy and I wing off into the sunset." Actually, they were heading east, but Mrs. Sumter understood. She handed Ryan his last cigarette of the day.
   "Damn," Ryan breathed with his first puff. He'd be getting a call from Moscow sure as hell—wouldn't he? That depended on how quickly they digested the information, or maybe Sergey would wait for the morning to show it to President Grushavoy. Would he? In Washington, something that hot would be graded CRITIC and shoved under the President's nose inside twenty minutes, but different countries had different rules, and he didn't know what the Russians did. For damned sure he'd be hearing from one of them before he stepped off the plane at Warsaw. But for now . . . He stubbed the smoke out, reached inside his desk for the breath spray, and zapped his mouth with the acidic stuff before leaving the office and heading outside—the West Wing and the White House proper are not connected by an indoor corridor, due to some architectural oversight. In any case, inside six minutes he was on the residential level, watching the ushers organize his bags. Cathy was there, trying to supervise, under the eyes of the Secret Service as well, who acted as though they worried about having a bomb slipped in. But paranoia was their job. Ryan walked over to his wife. "You need to talk to Andrea."
   "What for?"
   "Stomach trouble, she says."
   "Uh-oh." Cathy had suffered from queasiness with Sally, but that was ages ago, and it hadn't been severe. "Not really much you can do about it, you know."
   "So much for medical progress," Jack commented. "She probably could use some girl-girl support anyway."
   Cathy smiled. "Oh, sure, womanly solidarity. So, you're going to bond with Pat?"
   Jack grinned back at her. "Yeah, maybe he'll teach me to shoot a pistol better."
   "Super," SURGEON observed dryly.
   "Which dress for the big dinner?" POTUS asked FLOTUS.
   "The light-blue one."
   "Slinky," Jack said, touching her arm.
   The kids showed up then, shepherded up to the bedroom level by their various detail leaders, except for Kyle, who was carried by one of his lionesses. Leaving the kids was never particularly easy, though all concerned were somewhat accustomed to it. The usual kisses and hugs took place, and then Jack took his wife's hand and led her to the elevator.
   It let them off at the ground level, with a straight walk out to the helicopter pad. The VH-3 was there, with Colonel Malloy at the controls. The Marines saluted, as they always did. The President and First Lady climbed inside and buckled into the comfortable seats, under the watchful eyes of a Marine sergeant, who then went forward to report to the pilot in the right-front seat.
   Cathy enjoyed helicopter flight more than her husband did, since she flew in one twice a day. Jack was no longer afraid of it, but he did prefer driving a car, which he hadn't been allowed to do in months. The Sikorsky lifted up gently, pivoted in the air, and headed off to Andrews. The flight took about ten minutes. The helicopter alighted close to the VC-25A, the Air Force's version of the Boeing 747; it was just a few seconds to the stairs, with the usual TV cameras to mark the event.
   "Turn and wave, honey," Jack told Cathy at the top of the steps. "We might make the evening news."
   "Again?" Cathy grumped. Then she waved and smiled, not at people, but at cameras. With this task completed, they went inside the aircraft and forward to the presidential compartment. There they buckled in, and were observed to do so by an Air Force NCO, who then told the pilot it was okay to spool up the engines and taxi to the end of Runway
   Zero-one-right. Everything after that was ordinary, including the speech from the pilot, followed by the usual, stately takeoff roll of the big Boeing, and the climb out to thirty-eight thousand feet. Aft, Ryan was sure, everyone was comfortable, because the worst seat on this aircraft was as good as the best first-class seat on any airline in the world. On the whole this seemed a serious waste of the taxpayers' money, but to the best of his knowledge no taxpayer had ever complained very loudly.
   The expected happened off the coast of Maine.
   "Mr. President?" a female voice asked.
   "Yeah, Sarge?"
   "Call for you, sir, on the STU. Where do you want to take it?"
   Ryan stood. "Topside."
   The sergeant nodded and waved. "This way, sir."
   "Who is it?"
   "The DCI."
   Ryan figured that made sense. "Let's get Secretary Adler in on this, too."
   "Yes, sir," she said as he started up the spiral stairs.
   Upstairs, Ryan settled into a working-type seat vacated for him by an Air Force NCO who handed him the proper phone. "Ed?"
   "Yeah, Jack. Sergey called."
   "Saying what?"
   "He thinks it's a good idea you coming to Poland. He requests a high-level meeting, on the sly if possible."
   Adler took the chair next to Ryan and caught the comment.
   "Scott, feel like a hop to Moscow?"
   "Can we do it quietly?" SecState asked.
   "Probably."
   "Then, yes. Ed, did you field the NATO suggestion?"
   "Not my turf to try that, Scott," the Director of Central Intelligence replied.
   "Fair enough. Think they'll spring for it?"
   "Three-to-one, yes."
   "I'll agree with that," Ryan concurred. "Golovko will like it, too."
   "Yeah, he will, once he gets over the shock," Adler observed, with irony in his voice.
   "Okay, Ed, tell Sergey that we are amenable to a covert meeting. SecState flying into Moscow for consultations. Let us know what develops."
   "Will do."
   "Okay, out." Ryan set the handset down and turned to Adler. "Well?"
   "Well, if they spring for it, China will have something to think about." This statement was delivered with a dollop of hope.
   The problem, Ryan thought once again as he stood, is that Klingons don't think quite the same way we do.
 
   The bugs had them all smirking. Suvorov/Koniev had picked up another expensive hooker that night, and her acting abilities had played out in the proper noises at the proper moments. Or maybe he was really that good in bed, Provalov wondered aloud, to the general skepticism of the others in the surveillance van. No, the others thought, this girl was too much of a professional to allow herself to get into it that much. They all thought that was rather sad, lovely as she was to look at. But they knew something their subject didn't know. This girl had been a "dangle," pre-briefed to meet Suvorov/Koniev.
   Finally the noise subsided, and they heard the distinctive snap of an American Zippo lighter, and the usual post-sex silence of a sated man and a (simulatedly) satisfied woman.
   "So, what sort of work do you do, Vanya?" the female voice asked, showing the expected professional interest of an expensive hooker in a wealthy man she might wish to entertain again.
   "Business" was the answer.
   "What sort?" Again, just the right amount of interest. The good news, Provalov thought, was that she didn't need coaching. The Sparrow School must have been fairly easy to operate, he realized. Women did this sort of thing from instinct.
   "I take care of special needs for special people," the enemy spy answered. His revelation was followed by a feminine laugh.
   "I do that, too, Vanya."
   "There are foreigners who need special services which I was trained to handle under the old regime."
   "You were KGB? Really?" Excitement in her voice. This girl was good.
   "Yes, one of many. Nothing special about it."
   "To you, perhaps, but not to me. Was there really a school for women like me? Did KGB train women to ... to take care of the needs of men?"
   A man's laugh this time: "Oh, yes, my dear. There was such a school. You would have done well there."
   Now the laugh was coquettish. "As well as I do now?"
   "No, not at what you charge."
   "But am I worth it?" she asked.
   "Easily" was the satisfied answer.
   "Would you like to see me again, Vanya?" Real hope, or beautifully simulated hope, in the question.
   "Da, I would like that very much, Maria."
   "So, you take care of people with special needs. What needs are those?" She could get away with this because men so enjoyed to be found fascinating by beautiful women. It was part of their act of worship at this particular altar, and men always went for it.
   "Not unlike what I was trained to do, Maria, but the details need not concern you."
   Disappointment: "Men always say that," she grumped. "Why do the most interesting men have to be so mysterious?"
   "In that is our fascination, woman," he explained. "Would you prefer that I drove a truck?"
   "Truck drivers don't have your . . . your manly abilities," she replied, as if she'd learned the difference.
   "A man could get hard just listening to this bitch," one of the FSS officers observed.
   "That's the idea," Provalov agreed. "Why do you think she can charge so much?"
   "A real man need not pay for it."
   "Was I that good?" Suvorov/Koniev asked in their headphones.
   "Any better and I would have to pay you, Vanya," she replied, with joy in her voice. Probably a kiss went along with the proclamation.
   "No more questions, Maria. Let it lie for now," Oleg Gregoriyevich urged to the air. She must have heard him.
   "You know how to make a man feel like a man," the spy/assassin told her. "Where did you learn this skill?"
   "It just comes naturally to a woman," she cooed.
   "To some women, perhaps." Then the talking stopped, and in ten minutes, the snoring began.
   "Well, that's more interesting than our normal cases," the FSS officer told the others.
   "You have people checking out the bench?"
   "Hourly." There was no telling how many people delivered messages to the dead-drop, and they probably weren't all Chinese nationals. No, there'd be a rat-line in this chain, probably not a long one, but enough to offer some insulation to Suvorov's handler. That would be good fieldcraft, and they had to expect it. So, the bench and its dead-drop would be checked out regularly, and in that surveillance van would be a key custom-made to fit the lock on the drop-box, and a photocopier to make a duplicate of the message inside. The FSS had also stepped up surveillance of the Chinese Embassy. Nearly every employee who came outside had a shadow now. To do this properly meant curtailing other counterespionage operations in Moscow, but this case had assumed priority over everything else. It would soon become even more important, but they didn't know that yet.
 
   How many engineers do we have available?" Bondarenko asked Aliyev in the east Siberian dawn.
   "Two regiments not involved with the road-building," the operations officer answered.
   "Good. Get them all down here immediately to work on the camouflage on these bunkers, and to set up false ones on the other side of these hills. Immediately, Andrey."
   "Yes, General, I'll get them right on it."
   "I love the dawn, the most peaceful time of day."
   "Except when the other fellow uses it for his attack." Dawn was the universal time for a major offensive, so that one had all the light of the day to pursue it.
   "If they come, it will be right up this valley."
   "Yes, it will."
   "They will shoot up the first line of defenses—what they think they are, that is," Bondarenko predicted, pointing. The first line was composed of seemingly real bunkers, made of rebarred concrete, but the gun tubes sticking out of them were fake. Whatever engineer had laid out these fortifications had been born with an eye for terrain worthy of Alexander of Macedon. They appeared to be beautifully sited, but a little too much so. Their positioning was a little too predictable, and they were visible, if barely so, to the other side, and something barely visible would be the first target hit. There were even pyrotechnic charges in the false bunkers, so that after a few direct hits they'd explode, and really make the enemy feel fine for having hit them. Whoever had come up with that idea had been a genius of a military engineer.
   But the real defenses on the front of the hills were tiny observation posts whose buried phone lines led back to the real bunkers, and beyond them to artillery positions ten or more kilometers back. Some of these were old, also pre-sited, but the rockets they launched were just as deadly today as they'd been in the 1940s, design progeny of the Katushka artillery rockets the Germans had learned to hate. Then came the direct-fire weapons. The first rank of these were the turrets of old German tanks. The sights and the ammunition still worked, and the crewmen knew how to use them, and they had escape tunnels leading to vehicles that would probably allow them to survive a determined attack. The engineers who had laid this line out were probably all dead now, and General Bondarenko hoped they'd been buried honorably, as soldiers deserved. This line wouldn't stop a determined attack—no fixed line of defenses could accomplish that—but it would be enough to make an enemy wish he'd gone somewhere else.
   But the camouflage needed work, and that work would be done at night. A high-flying aircraft tracing over the border with a side-looking camera could see far into his country and take thousands of useful, pretty pictures, and the Chinese probably had a goodly collection of such pictures, plus whatever they could get from their own satellites, or from the commercial birds that anyone could employ now for money—
   "Andrey, tell intelligence to see if we can determine if the Chinese have accessed commercial photo satellites."
   "Why bother? Don't they have their own—"
   "We don't know how good their reconsats are, but we do know that the new French ones are as good as anything the Americans had up until 1975 or so, and that's good enough for most purposes."
   "Yes, General." Aliyev paused. "You think something is going to happen here?"
   Bondarenko paused, frowning as he stared south over the river. He could see into China from this hilltop. The ground looked no different, but for political reasons it was alien land, and though the inhabitants of that land were no different ethnically from the people native to his land, the political differences were enough to make the sight of them a thing of concern, even fear, for him. He shook his head.
   "Andrey Petrovich, you've heard the same intelligence briefings I've heard. What concerns me is that their army has been far more active than ours. They have the ability to attack us, and we do not have the ability to defeat them. We have less than three full-strength divisions, and the level of their training is inadequate. We have much to do before I will begin to feel comfortable. Firming up this line is the easiest thing to do, and the easiest part of firming it up is hiding the bunkers. Next, we'll start rotating the soldiers back to the training range and have them work on their gunnery. That will be easy for them to do, but it hasn't been done in ten months! So much to do, Andrushka, so much to do."
   "That is so, Comrade General, but we've made a good beginning."
   Bondarenko waved his hand and growled, "Ahh, a good beginning will be a year from now. We've taken the first morning piss in what will be a long day, Colonel. Now, let's fly east and see the next sector."
 
   General Peng Xi-Wang, commander of the Red Banner 34th Shock Army, only sixteen kilometers away, looked through powerful spotting glasses at the Russian frontier. Thirty-fourth Shock was a Type A Group Army, and comprised about eighty thousand men. He had an armored division, two mechanized ones, a motorized infantry division, and other attachments, such as an independent artillery brigade under his direct command. Fifty years of age, and a party member since his twenties, Peng was a long-term professional soldier who'd enjoyed the last ten years of his life. Since commanding his tank regiment as a senior colonel, he'd been able to train his troops incessantly on what had become his home country.
   The Shenyang Military District comprised the north-easternmost part of the People's Republic. It was composed of hilly, wooded land, and had warm summers and hitter winters. There was a touch of early ice on the Amur River below Peng now, but from a military point of view, the trees were the real obstacle. Tanks could knock individual trees down, but not every ten meters. No, you had to drive between and around them, and while there was room for that, it was hard on the drivers, and it ate up fuel almost as efficiently as tipping the fuel drum over on its side and just pouring it out. There were some roads and railroad rights-of-way, and if he ever went north, he'd be using them, though that made for good ambush opportunities, if the Russians had a good collection of antitank weapons. But the Russian doctrine, going back half a century, was that the best antitank weapon was a better tank. In their war with the fascists, the Soviet army had enjoyed possession of a superb tank in the T-34. They'd built a lot of the Rapier antitank guns, and duly copied NATO guided antitank weapons, but you dealt with those by blanketing an area with artillery fire, and Peng had lots of guns and mountains of shells to deal with the unprotected infantrymen who had to steer the missiles into their targets. He wished he had the Russian-designed Arena anti-missile system, which had been designed to protect their tanks from the swarm of NATO's deadly insects, but he didn't, and he heard it didn't work all that well anyway.
   The spotting glasses were Chinese copies of a German Zeiss model adopted for use by the Soviet Army of old. They zoomed from twenty to fifty-power, allowing him an intimate view of the other side of the river. Peng came up here once a month or so, which allowed him to inspect his own border troops, who stood what was really a defensive watch, and a light one at that. He had little concern about a Russian attack into his country. The People's Liberation Army taught the same doctrine as every army back to the Assyrians of old: The best defense is a good offense. If a war began here, better to begin it yourself. And so Peng had cabinets full of plans to attack into Siberia, prepared by his operations and intelligence people, because that was what operations people did.
   "Their defenses look ill-maintained," Peng observed.
   "That is so, Comrade," the colonel commanding the border-defense regiment agreed. "We see little regular activity there."
   "They are too busy selling their weapons to civilians for vodka," the army political officer observed. "Their morale is poor, and they do not train anything like we do."
   "They have a new theater commander," the army's intelligence chief countered. "A General-Colonel Bondarenko. He is well regarded in Moscow as an intellect and as a courageous battlefield commander from Afghanistan."
   "That means he survived contact once," Political observed. "Probably with a Kabul whore."
   "It is dangerous to underestimate an adversary," Intelligence warned.
   "And foolish to overestimate one."
   Peng just looked through the glasses. He'd heard his intelligence and political officer spar before. Intelligence tended to be an old woman, but many intelligence officers were like that, and Political, like so many of his colleagues, was sufficiently aggressive to make Genghis Khan seem womanly. As in the theater, officers played the roles assigned to them. His role, of course, was to be the wise and confident commander of one of his country's premier striking arms, and Peng played that role well enough that he was in the running for promotion to General First Class, and if he played his cards very carefully, in another eight years or so, maybe Marshal. With that rank came real political power and personal riches beyond counting, with whole factories working for his own enrichment. Some of those factories were managed by mere colonels, people with the best of political credentials who knew how to kowtow to their seniors, but Peng had never gone that route. He enjoyed soldering far more than he enjoyed pushing paper and screaming at worker-peasants. As a new second lieutenant, he'd fought the Russians, not very far from this very spot. It had been a mixed experience. His regiment had enjoyed initial success, then had been hammered by a storm of artillery. That had been back when the Red Army, the real Soviet Army of old, had fielded whole artillery divisions whose concentrated fire could shake the very earth and sky, and that border clash had incurred the wrath of the nation the Russians had once been. But no longer. Intelligence told him that the Russian troops on the far side of this cold river were not even a proper shadow of what had once been there. Four divisions, perhaps, and not all of them at full strength. So, however clever this Bondarenko fellow was, if a clash came, he'd have his hands very full indeed.
   But that was a political question, wasn't it? Of course. All the really important things were.
   "How are the bridging engineers?" Peng asked, surveying the watery obstacle below.
   "Their last exercise went very well, Comrade General," Operations replied. Like every other army in the world, the PLA had copied the Russian "ribbon" bridge, designed by Soviet engineers in the 1960s to force crossings of all the streams of Western Germany in a NATO/Warsaw Pact war so long expected, but never realized. Except in fiction, mainly Western fiction that had had the NATO side win in every case. Of course. Would capitalists spend money on books that ended their culture? Peng chuckled to himself. Such people enjoyed their illusions . . .
   ... almost as much as his own country's Politburo members. That's the way it was all over the world, Peng figured. The rulers of every land held images in their heads, and tried to make the world conform to them. Some succeeded, and those were the ones who wrote the history books.
   "So, what do we expect here?"
   "From the Russians?" Intelligence asked. "Nothing that I have heard about. Their army is training a little more, but nothing to be concerned about. If they wanted to come south across that river, I hope they can swim in the cold."
   "The Russians like their comforts too much for that. They've grown soft with their new political regime," Political proclaimed.
   "And if we are ordered north?" Peng asked.
   "If we give them one hard kick, the whole rotten mess will fall down," Political answered. He didn't know that he was exactly quoting another enemy of the Russians.

CHAPTER 43

Decisions
   
The colonel flying Air Force One executed an even better landing than usual. Jack and Cathy Ryan were already awake and showered to alertness, helped by a light breakfast heavy on fine coffee. The President looked out the window to his left and saw troops formed up in precise lines, as the aircraft taxied to its assigned place. "Welcome to Poland, babe. What do you have planned?" "I'm going to spend a few hours at their big teaching hospital. Their chief eye-cutter wants me to look at his operation." It was always the same for FLOTUS, and she didn't mind. It came from being an academic physician, treating patients, but also teaching young docs, and observing how her counterparts around the world did their version of her job. Every so often, you saw something new that was worth learning from, or even copying, because smart people happened everywhere, not just at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. It was the one part of the First Lady folderol that she actually enjoyed, because she could learn from it, instead of just being a somewhat flat-chested Barbie doll for the world to gawk at. To this end she was dressed in a beige business suit, whose jacket she would soon exchange for a doc's proper white lab coat, which was always her favorite item of apparel. Jack was wearing one of his dark-blue white-pinstriped President-of-the-United-States suits, with a maroon striped tie because Cathy liked the color combination, and she really did decide what Jack wore, except for the shirt. SWORDSMAN wore only white cotton shirts with button-down collars, and despite Cathy's lobbying for something different, on that issue he stood firm. This had caused Cathy to observe more than once that he'd wear the damned things with his tuxedos if convention didn't demand otherwise.
   The aircraft came to a halt, and the stagecraft began. The Air Force sergeant—this one always a man—opened the door on the left side of the aircraft to see that the truck-mounted stairs were already in place. Two more non-coms scurried down so that they could salute Ryan when he walked down. Andrea Price-O'Day was talking over her digital radio circuit to the chief of the Secret Service advance team to make sure it was safe for the President to appear in the open. She'd already heard that the Poles had been as cooperative as any American police force, and had enough security deployed here to defend against an attack by space aliens or Hitler's Wehrmacht. She nodded to the President and Mrs. Ryan.
   "Showtime, babe," Jack told Cathy, with a dry smile.
   "Knock 'em dead, Movie Star," she said in reply. It was one of their inside jokes.
   John Patrick Ryan, President of the United States of America, stood in the door to look out over Poland, or at least as much of it as he could see from this vantage. The first cheers erupted then, for although he'd never even been close to Poland before, he was a popular figure here, for what reason Jack Ryan had no idea. He walked down, carefully, telling himself not to trip and spill down the steps. It looked bad to do so, as one of his antecedents had learned the hard way. At the bottom, the two USAF sergeants snapped off their salutes, which Ryan unconsciously returned, and then he was saluted again by a Polish officer. They did it differently, Jack saw, with ring and little finger tucked in, like American Cub Scouts. Jack nodded and smiled to this officer, then followed him to the receiving line. There was the U.S. ambassador to introduce him to the Polish president. Together they walked down a red carpet to a small lectern, where the Polish president welcomed Ryan, and Ryan make remarks to demonstrate his joy at visiting this ancient and important new American ally. Ryan had a discordant memory of the "Polack" jokes so popular when he'd been in high school, but managed not to relate any to the assembled throng. This was followed by a review past the honor guard of soldiers, about three companies of infantrymen, all spiffed up for this moment; Jack walked past them, looking in each face for a split second and figuring they just wanted to go back to barracks to change into their more comfortable fatigues, where they'd say that this Ryan guy looked okay for a damned American chief of state, and wasn't it good that this pain-in-the-ass duty was over. Then Jack and Cathy (carrying flowers given to her by two cute Polish kids, a boy and a girl, age six or so, because that was the best age to greet an important foreign woman) got into the official car, an American limo from the U.S. Embassy, for the drive into town. Once there, Jack looked over to the ambassador.
   "What about Moscow?"
   Ambassadors had once been Very Important People, which explained why each still had to be approved by vote of the United States Senate. When the Constitution had been drafted, world travel had been done by sailing ship, and an ambassador in a foreign land was the United States of America, and had to be able to speak for his country entirely without guidance from Washington. Modern communications had transformed ambassadors into glorified mailmen, but they still, occasionally, had to handle important matters with discretion, and this was such a case.
   "They want the Secretary to come over as soon as possible. The backup aircraft is at a fighter base about fifteen miles from here. We can get Scott there within the hour," Stanislas Lewendowski reported.
   "Thanks, Stan. Make it happen."
   "Yes, Mr. President," the ambassador, a native of Chicago, agreed with a curt nod.
   "Anything we need to know?"
   "Aside from that, sir, no, everything's pretty much under control."
   "I hate it when they say that," Cathy observed quietly. "That's when I look up for the falling sandbag."
   "Not here, ma'am," Lewendowski promised. "Here things are under control."
   That's nice to hear, President Ryan thought, but what about the rest of the fucking world?
 
   "Eduard Petrovich, this is not a happy development," Golovko told his president.
   "I can see that," Grushavoy agreed tersely. "Why did we have to learn this from the Americans?"
   "We had a very good source in Beijing, but he retired not long ago. He's sixty-nine years old and in ill health, and it was time to leave his post in their Party Secretariat. Sadly, we had no replacement for him," Golovko admitted. "The American source appears to be a man of similar placement. We are fortunate to have this information, regardless of its source."
   "Better to have it than not to have it," Eduard Petrovich admitted. "So, now what?"
   "Secretary of State Adler will be joining us in about three hours, at the Americans' request. He wishes to consult with us directly on a 'matter of mutual interest.' That means the Americans are as concerned with this development as we are."
   "What will they say?"
   "They will doubtless offer us assistance of some sort. Exactly what kind, I cannot say."
   "Is there anything I don't already know about Adler and Ryan?"
   "I don't think so. Scott Adler is a career diplomat, well regarded everywhere as an experienced and expert diplomatic technician. He and Ryan are friends, dating back to when Ivan Emmetovich was Deputy Director of CIA. They get along well and do not have any known disagreements in terms of policy. Ryan I have known for over ten years. He is bright, decisive, and a man of unusually fine personal honor. A man of his word. He was the enemy of the Soviet Union, and a skilled enemy, but since our change of systems he has been a friend. He evidently wishes us to succeed and prosper economically, though his efforts to assist us have been somewhat disjointed and confused. As you know, we have assisted the Americans in two black operations, one against China and one against Iran. This is important, because Ryan will see that he owes us a debt. He is, as I said, an honorable man, and he will wish to repay that debt, as long as it does not conflict with his own security interests."
   "Will an attack on China be seen that way?" President Grushavoy asked.
   Golovko nodded decisively. "Yes, I believe so. We know that Ryan has said privately that he both likes and admires Russian culture, and that he would prefer that America and Russia should become strategic partners. So, I think Secretary Adler will offer us substantive assistance against China."
   "What form will it take?"
   "Eduard Petrovich, I am an intelligence officer, not a gypsy fortuneteller ..." Golovko paused. "We will know more soon, but if you wish me to make a guess ..."
   "Do so," the Russian president commanded. The SVR Chairman took a deep breath and made his prediction:
   "He will offer us a seat on the North Atlantic Council." That startled Grushavoy:
   "Join NATO?" he asked, with an open mouth.
   "It would be the most elegant solution to the problem. It allies us with the rest of Europe, and would face China with a panoply of enemies if they attack us."
   "And if they make this offer to us ...?"
   "You should accept it at once, Comrade President," the chief of the RSV replied. "We would be fools not to."
   "What will they demand in return?"
   "Whatever it is, it will be far less costly than a war against China."
   Grushavoy nodded thoughtfully. "I will consider this. Is it really possible that America can recognize Russia as an ally?"
   "Ryan will have thought this idea through. It conforms to his strategic outlook, and, as I said, I believe he honestly admires and respects Russia."
   "After all his time in CIA?"
   "Of course. That is why he does. He knows us. He ought to respect us."
   Grushavoy thought about that one. Like Golovko, he was a Russian patriot who loved the very smell of Russian soil, the birch forests, the vodka and the borscht, the music and literature of his land. But he was not blind to the errors and ill fortune his country had endured over the centuries. Like Golovko, Grushavoy had come to manhood in a nation called the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, and had been educated to be a believer in Marxism-Leninism, but he'd gradually come to see that, although the path to political power had required worshiping at that godless altar, the god there had been a false one. Like many, he'd seen that the previous system simply didn't work. But unlike all but a small and courageous few, he'd spoken out about the system's shortcomings. A lawyer, even under the Soviet system when law had been subordinated to political whim, he'd crusaded for a rational system of laws which would allow people to predict the reaction of the state to their actions with something akin to confidence. He'd been there when the old system had fallen, and had embraced the new system as a teenager embraced his first love. Now he was struggling to bring order– lawful order, which was harder still—to a nation which had known only dictatorial rule for centuries. If he succeeded, he knew he'd be remembered as one of the giants of human political history. If he failed, he'd just be remembered as one more starry-eyed visionary unable to turn his dream into reality. The latter, he thought in quiet moments, was the more likely outcome.
   But despite that concern, he was playing to win. Now he had the gold and oil discoveries in Siberia, which had appeared as if gifts from the merciful God his education had taught him to deny. Russian history predicted—nay, demanded—that such gifts be taken from his country, for such had always been their hateful ill luck. Did God hate Russia? Anyone familiar with the past in his ancient country would think so. But today hope appeared as a golden dream, and Grushavoy was determined not to let this dream evaporate as all the others had. The land of Tolstoy and Rimsky-Korsakov had given much to the world, and now it deserved something back. Perhaps this Ryan fellow would indeed be a friend of his country and his people. His country needed friends. His country had the resources to exist alone, but to make use of those resources, he needed assistance, enough to allow Russia to enter the world as a complete and self-sufficient nation, ready to be a friend to all, ready to give and to take in honor and amity. The wherewithal was within his reach, if not quite within his hand. To take it would make him an Immortal, would make Eduard Petrovich Grushavoy the man who raised up his entire country. To do that he'd need help, however, and while that abraded his sense of amour propre, his patriotism, his duty to his country required that he set self aside.
   "We shall see, Sergey Nikolay'ch. We shall see."
 
   "The time is ripe," Zhang Han San told his colleagues in the room of polished oak. "The men and weapons are in place. The prize lies right before our eyes. That prize offers us economic salvation, economic security such as we have dreamed of for decades, the ability," he went on, "to make China the world's preeminent power. That is a legacy to leave our people such as no leader has ever granted his descendants. We need only take it. It lies almost in our hands, like a peach upon a tree."
   "It is feasible?" Interior Minister Tong Jie asked cautiously.
   "Marshal?" Zhang handed the inquiry off to the Defense Minister.
   Luo Cong leaned forward. He and Zhang had spent much of the previous evening together with maps, diagrams, and intelligence estimates. "From a military point of view, yes, it is possible. We have four Type A Group armies in the Shenyang Military District, fully trained and poised to strike north. Behind them are six Type B Group armies with sufficient infantry to support our mechanized forces, and four more Type C Group armies to garrison the land we take. From a strictly military point of view, the only issues are moving our forces into place and then supplying them. That is mainly a question of railroads, which will move supplies and men. Minister Qian?" Luo asked. He and Zhang had considered this bit of stage-managing carefully, hoping to co-opt a likely opponent of their proposed national policy early on.
   The Finance Minister was startled by the question, but pride in his former job and his innate honesty compelled him to respond truthfully: "There is sufficient rolling stock for your purposes, Marshal Luo," he replied tersely. "The concern will be repairing damage done by enemy air strikes on our rights-of-way and bridges. That is something the Railroad Ministry has examined for decades, but there is no precise answer to it, because we cannot predict the degree of damage the Russians might inflict."
   "I am not overly worried about that, Qian," Marshal Luo responded. "The Russian air force is in miserable shape due to all their activity against their Muslim minorities. They used up a goodly fraction of their best weapons and spare parts. We estimate that our air-defense groups should preserve our transportation assets with acceptable losses. Will we be able to send railroad-construction personnel into Siberia to extend our railheads?"
   Again Qian felt himself trapped. "The Russians have surveyed and graded multiple rights-of-way over the years in their hopes for extending the Trans-Siberian Railroad and settling people into the region. Those efforts date back to Stalin. Can we lay track rapidly? Yes. Rapidly enough for your purposes? Probably not, Comrade Marshal," Qian replied studiously. If he didn't answer honestly, his scat at this table would evaporate, and he knew it.
   "I am not sanguine on this prospect, comrades," Shen Tang spoke for the Foreign Ministry.
   "Why is that, Shen?" Zhang asked.
   "What will other nations do?" he asked rhetorically. "We do not know, but I would not be optimistic, especially with the Americans. They become increasingly friendly with the Russians. President Ryan is well known to be friendly with Golovko, chief advisor to President Grushavoy."
   "A pity that Golovko still lives, but we were unlucky," Tan Deshi had to concede.
   "Depending on luck is dangerous at this level," Fang Gan told his colleagues. "Fate is no man's friend."
   "Perhaps the next time," Tan responded.
   "Next time," Zhang thought aloud, "better to eliminate Grushavoy and so throw their country into total chaos. A country without a president is like a snake without a head. It may thrash about, but it harms no one."
   "Even a severed head can bite," Fang observed. "And who is to say that Fate will smile upon this enterprise?"
   "A man can wait for fate to decide for him, or he can seize the foul woman by the throat and take her by force—as we have all done in our time," Zhang added with a cruel smile.
   Much more easily done with a docile secretary than with Destiny herself, Zhang, Fang didn't say aloud. He could go only so far in this forum, and he knew it. "Comrades, I counsel caution. The dogs of war have sharp teeth, but any dog may turn and bite his master. We have all seen that happen, have we not? Some things, once begun, are less easily halted. War is such a thing, and it is not to be undertaken so lightly."
   "What would you have us do, Fang?" Zhang asked. "Should we wait until we run out of oil and wheat? Should we wait until we need troops to quell discord among our own people? Should we wait for Fate to decide for us, or should we choose our own destiny?"
   The only reply to that came from Chinese culture itself, the ancient beliefs that came to all of the Politburo members almost as genetic knowledge, unaffected by political conditioning: "Comrades, Destiny awaits us all. It chooses us, not we it. What you propose here, my old friend could merely accelerate what comes for us in any case, and who among us can say if it will please or displease us?" Minister Fang shook his head. "Perhaps what you propose is necessary, even beneficial," he allowed, "but only after the alternatives have been examined fully and discarded."
   "If we are to decide," Luo told them, "then we must decide soon. We have good campaigning weather before us. That season will only last so long. If we strike soon—in the next two weeks—we can seize our objectives, and then time works for us. Then winter will set in and make offensive campaigning virtually impossible against a determined defense. Then we can depend upon Shen's ministry to safeguard and consolidate what we have seized, perhaps to share our winnings with the Russians ... for a time," he added cynically. China would never share such a windfall, they all knew. It was merely a ploy fit to fool children and mushy-headed diplomats, which the world had in abundance, they all knew.
   Through all this, Premier Xu had sat quietly, observing how the sentiments went, before making his decision and calling for a vote whose outcome would, of course, be predetermined. There was one more thing that needed asking. Not surprisingly, the question came from Tan Deshi, chief of the Ministry of State Security:
   "Luo, my friend, how soon would the decision have to be made to ensure success? How easily could the decision be called back if circumstances warrant?"
   "Ideally, the 'go' decision would be made today, so that we can start moving our forces to their preset jumping-off places. To stop them—well, of course, you can stop the offensive up to the very moment the artillery is to open fire. It is much harder to advance than it is to stay in place. Any man can stand still, no matter where he is." The preplanned answer to the preplanned question was as clever as it was misleading. Sure, you could always stop an army poised to jump off, about as easily as you could stop a Yangtze River flood.
   "I see," Tan said. "In that case, I propose that we vote on conditional approval of a 'go' order, subject to change at any time by majority vote of the Politburo."
   Now it was Xu's turn to take charge of the meeting: "Comrades, thank you all for your views on the issue before us. Now we must decide what is best for our country and our people. We shall vote on Tan's proposal, a conditional authorization for an attack to seize and exploit the oil and gold fields in Siberia."
   As Fang had feared, the vote was already decided, and in the interests of solidarity, he voted with the rest. Only Qian Kun wavered, but like all the others, he sided with the majority, because it was dangerous to stand alone in any group in the People's Republic, most of all this one. And besides, Qian was only a candidate member, and didn't have a vote at this most democratic of tables.
   The vote turned out to be unanimous.
   Long Chun, it would be called: Operation SPRING DRAGON.
 
   Scott Adler knew Moscow as well as many Russian citizens did, he'd been here so many times, including one tour in the American Embassy as a wet-behind-the-ears new foreign-service officer, all those years before, during the Carter Administration. The Air Force flight crew delivered him on time, and they were accustomed to taking people on covert missions to odd places. This mission was less unusual than most. His aircraft rolled to a stop at the Russian fighter base, and the official car rolled up even before the mechanical steps unfolded. Adler hustled out, unaccompanied even by an aide. A Russian official shook hands with him and got him into the car for the drive into Moscow. Adler was at ease. He knew that he was offering Russia a gift fit for the world's largest Christmas tree, and he didn't think they were stupid enough to reject it. No, the Russians were among the world's most skillful diplomats and geopolitical thinkers, a trait that went back sixty years or more. It had struck him as sad, back in 1978, that their adroit people had been chained to a doomed political system—even back then, Adler had seen the demise of the Soviet Union coming. Jimmy Carter's "human rights" proclamation had been that president's best and least appreciated foreign-policy play, for it had injected the virus of rot into their political empire, begun the process of eating away their power in Eastern Europe, and also of letting their own people start to ask questions. It was a pot that Ronald Reagan had sweetened—upping the ante with his defense buildup that had stretched the Soviet economy to the breaking point and beyond, allowing George Bush to be there when they'd tossed in their cards and cast off from the political system that stretched back to Vladimir ll'ych Ulyanov, Lenin himself, the founding father, even the god of Marxism-Leninism. It was usually sad when a god died . . .
   . . . but not in this case, Adler thought as the buildings flashed by.
   Then he realized that there was one more large but false god out there, Mao Zedong, awaiting final interment in history's rubbish heap. When would that come? Did this mission have a role to play in that funeral? Nixon's opening to China had played a role in the destruction of the Soviet Union, which historians still had not fully grasped. Would its final echo be found in the fall of the People's Republic itself? That remained to be seen.
   The car pulled into the Kremlin through the Spaskiy Gate, then proceeded to the old Council of Ministers Building. There Adler alighted and hurried inside, into an elevator to a third-floor meeting room.
   "Mr. Secretary." The greeting came from Golovko. Adler should have found him an eminence gris, he thought. But Sergey Nikolay'ch was actually a man of genuine intellect and the openness that resulted directly from it. He was not even a pragmatist, but a man who sought what was best for his country, and would search for it everywhere his mind could see. A seeker of truth, SecState thought. That sort of man he and America could live with.
   "Chairman. Thank you for receiving us so quickly."
   "Please come with me, Mr. Adler." Golovko led him through a set of high double doors into what almost appeared to be a throne room. EAGLE couldn't remember if this building went back to the czars. President Eduard Petrovich Grushavoy was waiting for him, already standing politely, looking serious but friendly.
   "Mr. Adler," the Russian president said, with a smile and an extended hand.
   "Mr. President, a pleasure to be back in Moscow."
   "Please." Grushavoy led him to a comfortable set of chairs with a low table. Tea things were already out, and Golovko handled the serving like a trusted earl seeing to the needs of his king and guest.
   "Thank you. I've always loved the way you serve your tea in Russia." Adler stirred his and took a sip.
   "So, what do you have to say to us?" Grushavoy asked in passable English.
   "We have shown you what has become for us a cause for great concern."
   "The Chinese," the Russian president observed. Everyone knew all of this, but the beginning of the conversation would follow the conventions of high-level talk, like lawyers discussing a major case in chambers.
   "Yes, the Chinese. They seem to be contemplating a threat to the peace of the world. America has no wish to see that peace threatened. We've all worked very hard—your country and mine—to put an end to conflict. We note with gratitude Russia's assistance in our most recent conflicts. Just as we were allies sixty years ago, so Russia has acted again lately. America is a country that remembers her friends."
   Golovko let out a breath slowly. Yes, his prediction was about to come true. Ivan Emmetovich was a man of honor, and a friend of his country. What came back to him was the time he'd held a pistol to Ryan's head, the time Ryan had engineered the defection of KG B chairman Gerasimov all those years before. Sergey Nikolay'ch had been enraged back then, as furious as he had ever been in a long and stressful professional life, but he'd held back from firing the pistol because it would have been a foolish act to shoot a man with diplomatic status. Now he blessed his moderation, for now Ivan Emmetovich Ryan offered to Russia what he had always craved from America: predictability. Ryan's honor, his sense of fair play, the personal honesty that was the most crippling aspect of his newly acquired political persona, all combined to make him a person upon whom Russia could depend. And at this moment, Golovko could do that which he'd spent his life trying to do: He could see the future that lay only a few short minutes away.
   "This Chinese threat, it is real, you think?" Grushavoy asked.
   "We fear it is," the American Secretary of State answered. "We hope to forestall it."
   "But how will we accomplish that? China knows of our military weakness. We have de-emphasized our defense capabilities of late, trying to shift the funds into areas of greater value to our economy. Now it seems we might pay a bitter price for that," the Russian president worried aloud.
   "Mr. President, we hope to help Russia in that respect."
   "How?"
   "Mr. President, even as we speak, President Ryan is also speaking with the NATO chiefs of state and government. He is proposing to them that we invite Russia to sign the North Atlantic Treaty. That will ally the Russian Federation with all of Europe. It ought to make China take a step back to consider the wisdom of a conflict with your country."
   "Ahh," Grushavoy breathed. "So, America offers Russia a full alliance of state?"
   Adler nodded. "Yes, Mr. President. As we were allies against Hitler, so today we can again be allies against all potential enemies."
   "There are many complications in this, talks between your military and ours, for example—even talks with the NATO command in Belgium. It could take months to coordinate our country with NATO."
   "Those are technical matters to be handled by diplomatic and military technicians. At this level, however, we offer the Russian Federation our friendship in peace and in war. We place the word and the honor of our countries at your disposal."
   "What of the European Union, their Common Market of economic alliances?"
   "That, sir, is something left to the EEC, but America will encourage our European friends to welcome you completely into the European community, and offer all influence we can muster to that end."
   "What do you ask in return?" Grushavoy asked. Golovko hadn't offered that prediction. This could be the answer to many Russian prayers, though his mind made the leap to see that Russian oil would be a major boon to Europe, and hence a matter of mutual, not unilateral, profit.
   "We ask for nothing special in return. It is in the American interest to help make a stable and peaceful world. We welcome Russia into that world. Friendship between your people and ours is desirable to everyone, is it not?"
   "And in our friendship is profit also for America," Golovko pointed out.
   Adler sat back and smiled agreement. "Of course. Russia will sell things to America, and America will sell things to Russia. We will become neighbors in the global village, friendly neighbors. We will compete economically, giving and taking from each other, as we do with many other countries."
   "The offer you make is this simple?" Grushavoy asked.
   "Should it be more complicated?" the SecState asked. "I am a diplomat, not a lawyer. I prefer simple things to complex ones."
   Grushavoy considered all this for half a minute or so. Usually, diplomatic negotiations lasted weeks or months to do even the simplest of things, but Adler was right: Simple was better than complex, and the fundamental issue here was simple, though the downstream consequences might be breathtaking. America offered salvation to Russia, not just a military alliance, but the opening of all doors to economic development. America and Europe would partner with the Russian Federation, creating what could become both an open and integrated community to span the northern hemisphere. It stood to make Eduard Petrovich Grushavoy the Russian who brought his country a full century into the present/future of the world, and for all the statues of Lenin and Stalin that had been toppled, well, maybe some of his own likeness would be erected. It was a thought to appeal to a Russian politician. And after a few minutes, he extended his hand across the low table of tea things.
   "The Russian Federation gladly accepts the offer of the United States of America. Together we once defeated the greatest threat to human culture. Perhaps we can do so again—better yet, together we may forestall it."
   "In that case, sir, I will report your agreement to my president."
   Adler checked his watch. It had taken twenty minutes. Damn, you could make history in a hurry when you had your act together, couldn't you? He stood. "I must be off then to make my report."
   "Please convey my respects to President Ryan. We will do our best to be worthy allies to your country."
   "He and I have no doubts of that, Mr. President." Adler shook hands with Golovko and walked to the door. Three minutes after that, he was back in his car and heading back to the airport. Once there, the aircraft had barely begun to taxi when he got on the secure satellite phone.
 
   Mr. President?" Andrea said, coming up to Ryan just as the plenary session of the NATO chiefs was about to begin. She handed over the secure portable phone. "It's Secretary Adler."
   Ryan took the phone at once. "Scott? Jack here. What gives?"
   "It's a done deal, Jack."
   "Okay, now I have to sell it to these guys. Good job, Scott. Hurry back."
   "We're rolling now, sir." The line went dead. Ryan tossed the phone to Special Agent Price-O'Day.
   "Good news?" she asked.
   "Yep." Ryan nodded and walked into the conference room.
   "Mr. President." Sir Basil Charleston came up to him. The chief of the British Secret Intelligence Service, he'd known Ryan longer than anyone else in the room had. One odd result of Ryan's path to the Presidency was that the people who knew him best were all spooks, mainly NATO ones, and these found themselves advising their chiefs of government on how to deal with America. Sir Basil had served no less than five Prime Ministers of Her Majesty's Government, but now he was in rather a higher position than before.
   "Bas, how are you?"
   "Doing quite well, thank you. May I ask a question?"
   "Sure." But I don't have to answer it, Jack's smile added in reply.
   "Adler is in Moscow now. Can we know why?"
   "How will your PM react to inviting Russia into NATO?"
   That made Basil blink, Ryan saw. It wasn't often that you could catch this guy unawares. Instantly, his mind went into overdrive to analyze the new situation. "China?" he asked after about six seconds.
   Jack nodded. "Yeah. We may have some problems there."
   "Not going north, are they?"
   "They're thinking about it," Ryan replied.
   "How good is your information on that question?"
   "You know about the Russian gold strike, right?"
   "Oh, yes, Mr. President. Ivan's been bloody lucky on both scores."
   "Our intel strike in Beijing is even better."
   "Indeed?" Charleston observed, letting Jack know that the SIS had also been pretty much shut out there.
   "Indeed, Bas. It's class-A information, and it has us worried. We're hoping that pulling Russia into NATO can scare them off. Grushavoy just agreed on it. How do you suppose the rest of these folks will react to it?"
   "They'll react cautiously, but favorably, after they've had a chance to consider it."
   "Will Britain back us on this play?" Ryan asked.
   "I must speak with the PM. I'll let you know." With that, Sir Basil walked over to where the British Prime Minister was chatting with the German Foreign Minister. Charleston dragged him off and spoke quietly into his ear. Instantly, the Prime Minister's eyes, flaring a little wide, shot over to Ryan. The British PM was somewhat trapped, somewhat unpleasantly because of the surprise factor, but the substance of the trap was that Britain and America always supported each other. The "special relationship" was as alive and well today as it had been under the governments of Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill. It was one of the few constants in the diplomatic world for both countries, and it belied Kissinger's dictum that great nations didn't have friendships, but rather interests. Perhaps it was the exception proving the rule, but if so, exception it was. Both Britain and America would hurl themselves in front of a train for the other. The fact that in England, President Ryan was Sir John Ryan, KCVO, made the alliance even more firm. In acknowledgment of that, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom walked over to the American chief of state.
   "Jack, will you let us in on this development?"
   "Insofar as I can. I may give Basil a little more on the side, but, yeah, Tony, this is for real, and we're damned worried about it."
   "The gold and the oil?" the PM asked.
   "They seem to think they're in an economic box. They're just about out of hard currency, and they're hurting for oil and wheat."
   "You can't make an arrangement for that?"
   "After what they did? Congress would hang me from the nearest lamppost."
   "Quite," the Brit had to agree. BBC had run its own news mini-series on human rights in the PRC, and the Chinese hadn't come off very well. Indeed, despising China was the new European sport, which hadn't helped their foreign-currency holdings at all. As China had trapped themselves, so the Western nations had been perversely co-opted into building the wall. The citizens of these democracies wouldn't stand for economic or trade concessions any more than the Chinese Politburo could see its way to making the political sort. "Rather like Greek tragedy, isn't it, Jack?"
   "Yeah, Tony, and our tragic flaw is adherence to human rights. Hell of a situation, isn't it?"
   "And you're hoping that bringing Russia into NATO will give them pause?"
   "If there's a better card to play, I haven't seen it in my deck, man."
   "How set are they on the path?"
   "Unknown. Our intelligence on this is very good, but we have to be careful making use of it. It could get people killed, and deny us the information we need."
   "Like our chap Penkovskiy in the 1960s." One thing about Sir Basil, he knew how to educate his bosses on how the business of intelligence worked.
   Ryan nodded, then proceeded with a little of his own disinformation. It was business, and Basil would understand: "Exactly. I can't have that man's life on my conscience, Tony, and so I have to treat this information very carefully."
   "Quite so, Jack. I understand fully."
   "Will you support us on this?"
   The PM nodded at once. "Yes, old boy, we must, mustn't we?"
   "Thanks, pal." Ryan patted him on the shoulder.