These people are barbarians, Wise thought, knowing he couldn’t say such a thing in front of the camera, and angry for that reason, but his profession had rules and he didn’t break them. But he did have a camera, and the camera showed things that mere words could not convey.
Unknown to the news crew, Atlanta had put their feed on live, with voice-over commentary from CNN headquarters because they hadn’t managed to get Barry Wise’s attention on the side-band audio circuit. The signal went up to the satellite, then down to Atlanta, and back up to a total of four orbiting birds, then it came down all over the world, and one of the places it came to was Beijing.
The members of the Chinese Politburo all had televisions in their offices, and all of them had access to the American CNN, which was for them a prime source of political intelligence. It came down also to the various hotels in the city, crowded as they were with businessmen and other visitors, and even some Chinese citizens had access to it, especially businesspeople who conducted their affairs both within and without the People’s Republic and needed to know what was happening in the outside world.
In his office, Fang Gan looked up from his desk to the TV that was always kept on while he was there. He lifted the controller to get the sound, and heard English, with some Chinese language in the background that he could not quite understand. His English wasn’t very good, and he called Ming into his office to translate.
“Minister, this is coverage of something right here in Beijing,” she told him first of all.
“I can see that, girl!” he snapped back at her. “What is being said?”
“Ah, yes. It is associates of the man Yu who was shot by the police two days ago ... also his widow ... this is evidently a funeral ceremony of some sort—oh, they say that Yu’s body was cremated and scattered, and so his widow has nothing to bury, and that explains her added grief, they say.”
“What lunatic did that?” Fang wondered aloud. He was not by nature a very compassionate man, but a wise man did not go out of his way to be cruel, either. “Go on, girl!”
“They are reading from the Christian Bible, I can’t make out the words, the English speaker is blanking them out ... the narrator is mainly repeating himself, saying ... ah, yes, saying they are trying to establish contact with their reporter Wise here in Beijing but they are having technical difficulties ... just repeating what he has already said, a memorial ceremony for the man Yu, friends ... no, members of his worship group, and that is all, really. They are now repeating what happened before at the Longfu hospital, commenting also on the Italian churchman whose body will soon arrive back in Italy.”
Fang grumbled and lifted his phone, calling for the Interior Minister.
“Turn on your TV!” he told his Politburo colleague at once. “You need to get control of this situation, but do so intelligently! This could be ruinous for us, the worst since those foolish students at Tiananmen Square.”
Ming saw her boss grimace before setting the phone down and mutter, “Fool!” after he did so, then shake his head with a mixture of anger and sorrow.
“That will be all, Ming,” he told her, after another minute.
His secretary went back to her desk and computer, wondering what was happening with the aftermath of the man Yu’s death. Certainly it had seemed sad at the time, a singularly pointless pair of deaths which had upset and offended her minister for their stupidity. He’d even advocated punishing the trigger-happy policemen, but that suggestion had come to nothing, for fear of losing face for their country. With that thought, she shrugged and went back to her daily work.
The word from the Interior Minister went out fast, but Barry Wise couldn’t see that. It took another minute for him to hear the voices from Atlanta on his IFB earphone. Immediately thereafter, he went live on audio and started again to do his own on-the-scene commentary for a global audience. He kept turning his head while Pete Nichols centered the video on this rump religious meeting in a narrow, dirty street. Wise saw the police lieutenant talk into his portable radio—it looked like a Motorola, just like American cops used. He talked, listened, talked again, then got something confirmed. With that, he holstered the radio and came walking directly to the CNN reporter. There was determination on his face, a look Wise didn’t welcome, all the more so that on the way over, this Lieutenant Rong spoke discreetly with his men, who turned in the same direction, staying still but with a similar look of determination on their faces as they flexed their muscles in preparation for something.
“You must turn camera off,” Rong told Wise.
“Excuse me?”
“Camera, turn off,” the police lieutenant repeated.
“Why?” Wise asked, his mind going immediately into race mode.
“Orders,” Rong explained tersely.
“What orders?”
“Orders from police headquarter,” Rong said further.
“Oh, okay,” Wise replied. Then he held out his hand.
“Turn off camera now!” Lieutenant Rong insisted, wondering what the extended hand was all about.
“Where is the order?”
“What?”
“I cannot turn my camera off without a written order. It is a rule for my company. Do you have a written order?”
“No,” Rong said, suddenly nonplussed.
“And the order must be signed by a captain. A major would be better, but it must be a captain at least to sign the order,” Wise went on. “It is a rule of my company.”
“Ah,” Rong managed to say next. It was as if he’d walked headfirst into an invisible wall. He shook his head, as though to shake off the force of a physical impact, and walked five meters away, pulling out his radio again to report to someone elsewhere. The exchange took about a minute, then Rong came back. “Order come soon,” the lieutenant informed the American.
“Thank you,” Wise responded, with a polite smile and half bow. Lieutenant Rong went off again, looking somewhat confused until he grouped his men together. He had instructions to carry out now, and they were instructions he and they understood, which was usually a good feeling for citizens of the PRC, especially those in uniform.
“Trouble, Barry,” Nichols said, turning the camera toward the cops. He’d caught the discussion of the written order, and managed to keep his face straight only by biting his tongue hard. Barry had a way of confounding people. He’d even done it to presidents more than once.
“I see it. Keep rolling,” Wise replied off-mike. Then to Atlanta: “Something’s going to happen here, and I don’t like the looks of it. The police appear to have gotten an order from someone. As you just heard, they asked us to turn our camera off and we managed to refuse the request until we get a written order from a superior police official, in keeping with CNN policy,” Wise went on, knowing that someone in Beijing was watching this. The thing about communists, he knew, was that they were maniacally organized, and found a request in writing to be completely reasonable, however crazy it might appear to an outsider. The only question now, he knew, was whether they’d follow their verbal radioed order before the draft for the CNN crew came. Which priority came first ... ?
The immediate priority, of course, was maintaining order in their own city. The cops took out their batons and started heading toward the Baptists.
“Where do I stand, Barry?” Pete Nichols asked.
“Not too close. Make sure you can sweep the whole playing field,” Wise ordered.
“Gotcha,” the cameraman responded.
They tracked Lieutenant Rong right up to Wen Zhong, where a verbal order was given, and just as quickly rejected. The order was given again. The shotgun mike on the camera just barely caught the reply for the third iteration:
“Diao ren, chou ni ma di be!” the overweight Chinese shouted into the face of the police official. Whatever the imprecation meant, it made a few eyes go wide among the worshippers. It also earned Wen a smashed cheekbone from Rong’s personal baton. He fell to his knees, blood already streaming from the ripped sk
in, but then Wen struggled back to his feet, turned his back on the cop, and turned to yet another page in his Bible. Nichols changed position so that he could zoom in on the testament, and the blood dripping onto the pages.
Having the man turn his back to him only enraged Lieutenant Rong more. His next swing came down on the back of Wen’s head. That one buckled his knees, but amazingly failed to drop him. This time, Rong grabbed his shoulder with his left hand and spun him about, and the third blow from the baton rammed directly into the man’s solar plexus. That sort of blow will fell a professional boxer, and it did so to this restaurateur. A blink later, he was on his knees, one hand holding his Bible, the other grasping at his upper abdomen.
By this time, the other cops were moving in on the remainder of the crowd, swinging their own nightsticks at people who cringed but didn’t run. Yu Chun was the first of them. Not a tall woman even by Chinese standards, she took the full force of a blow squarely in the face, which broke her nose and shot blood out as though from a garden sprinkler.
It didn’t take long. There were thirty-four parishioners and twelve cops, and the Christians didn’t resist effectively, not so much because of their religious beliefs as because of their societal conditioning not to resist the forces of order in their culture. And so, uniformly they stood, and uniformly they took the blows with no more defense than a cringe, and uniformly they collapsed to the street with bleeding faces. The policemen withdrew almost immediately, as though to display their work to the CNN camera, which duly took the shots and transmitted them around the world in a matter of seconds.
“You getting this?” Wise asked Atlanta.
“Blood and all, Barry,” the director replied, from his swivel chair at CNN headquarters. “Tell Nichols I owe him a beer.”
“Roger that.”
“It seems that the local police had orders to break up this religious meeting, which they regard as something of a political nature, and politically threatening to their government. As you can see, none of these people are armed, and none resisted the attack by the police in any way. Now—” He paused on seeing another bicycle speed its way up the street to where they were. A uniformed cop jumped off and handed something to Lieutenant Rong. This the lieutenant carried to Barry Wise.
“Here order. Turn camera off!” he demanded.
“Please, allow me to look at the order,” Wise replied, so angry at what he’d just seen that he was willing to risk a cracked head of his own, just so Pete got it up to the satellite. He scanned the page and handed it back. “I cannot read this. Please excuse me,” he went on, deliberately baiting the man and wondering exactly where the limits were, “but I cannot read your language.”
It looked as though Rong’s eyes would pop out of his head. “It say here, turn camera off!”
“But I can’t read it, and neither can my company,” Wise responded, keeping his voice entirely reasonable.
Rong saw the camera and microphone were both pointed his way, and now he realized that he was being had, and had badly. But he also knew he had to play the game. “It say here, must turn camera off now.” Rong’s fingers traced the page from one symbol to another.
“Okay, I guess you’re telling me the truth.” Wise stood erect and turned to face the camera. “Well, as you have just seen, we’ve been ordered by the local police to cease transmission from this place. To summarize, the widow of the Reverend Yu Fa An and members of his congregation came here today to pray for their departed pastor. It turns out that Reverend Yu’s body was cremated and his ashes scattered. His widow, Yu Chun, was denied access to her home by the police because of alleged improper ‘political’ activity, by which I guess they mean religious worship, and as you just saw, the local police attacked and clubbed members of the congregation. And now we’re being chased away, too. Atlanta, this is Barry Wise, reporting live from Beijing.” Five seconds later, Nichols dropped the camera off his shoulder and turned to stow it in the truck. Wise looked back down at the police lieutenant and smiled politely, thinking, You can shove this up your skinny little ass, Gomer! But he’d done his job, getting the story out. The rest was in the hands of the world.
CHAPTER 31
The Protection of Rights
CNN transmits its news coverage twenty-four hours a day to satellite dishes all over the world, and so the report from the streets of Beijing was noted not only by the American intelligence services, but by accountants, housewives, and insomniacs. Of the last group, a goodly number had access to personal computers, and being insomniacs, many of them also knew the e-mail address for the White House. E-mail had almost overnight replaced telegrams as the method of choice for telling the U.S. government what you thought, and was a medium which they appeared to heed, or at least to read, count, and catalog. The latter was done in a basement office in the Old Executive Office Building, the OEOB, the Victorian monstrosity immediately to the west of The House. The people who ran this particular office reported directly to Arnold van Damm, and it was actually rather a thorough and well-organized measure of American public opinion, since they also had electronic access to every polling organization in the country—and, indeed, the entire world. It saved money for the White House not to conduct its own polling, which was useful, since this White House didn’t really have a political office per se, somewhat to the despair of the Chief of Staff. Nevertheless, he ran that part of White House operations himself, and largely uncompensated. Arnie didn’t mind. For him, politics was as natural as breathing, and he’d decided to serve this President faithfully long before, especially since serving him so often meant protecting him from himself and his frequently stunning political ineptitude.
The data which started arriving just after midnight, however, didn’t require a political genius to understand it. Quite a few of the e-mails had actual names attached—not mere electronic “handles”—and a lot of them were DEMANDING!!! action. Arnie would remark later in the day that he hadn’t known that so many Baptists were computer-literate, something he reproached himself for even thinking.
In the same building, the White House Office of Signals duly made a high-quality tape of the report and had it walked to the Oval Office. Elsewhere in the world, the CNN report from Beijing arrived at breakfast time, causing more than a few people to set their coffee (or tea) cups down immediately before a groan of anger. That occasioned brief dispatches from American embassies around the world, informing the Department of State that various foreign governments had reacted adversely to the story on CNN, and that various PRC embassies had found demonstrators outside their gates, some of them quite vociferous. This information rapidly found its way to the Diplomatic Protection Service, the State Department agency tasked with the job of securing foreign diplomats and their embassies. Calls went out from there to the D.C. police to increase the uniformed presence near the PRC’s various missions to America, and to arrange a rapid backup should any similar problems develop right here in Washington.
By the time Ben Goodley awoke and drove over to Langley for his morning briefing, the American intelligence community had pretty well diagnosed the problem. As Ryan had so colorfully said it himself, the PRC had stepped very hard on the old crank with the golf shoes, and even they would soon feel the pain. This would prove to be a gross understatement.
The good news for Goodley, if you could call it that, was that Ryan invariably had his breakfast-room TV tuned to CNN, and was fully aware of the new crisis before putting on his starched white button-down shirt and striped tie. Even kissing his wife and kids on their way out of The House that morning couldn’t do much to assuage his anger at the incomprehensible stupidity of those people on the other side of the world.
“God damn it, Ben!” POTUS snarled when Goodley came into the Oval Office.
“Hey, Boss, I didn’t do it!” the National Security Adviser protested, surprised at the President’s vehemence.
“What do we know?”
“Essentially, you’ve seen it all. The widow of the poor basta
rd who got his brains blown out the other day came to Beijing hoping to bring his body back to Taiwan for burial. She found out that the body had been cremated, and the ashes disposed of. The local cops would not let her back into her house, and when some members of the parish came by to hold a prayer service, the local cops decided to break it up.” He didn’t have to say that the attack on the widow had been caught with particular excellence by the CNN cameraman, to the point that Cathy Ryan had commented upstairs that the woman definitely had a broken nose, and possibly worse, and would probably need a good maxillary surgeon to put her face back together. Then she’d asked her husband why the cops would hate anyone so much.
“She believes in God, I suppose,” Ryan had replied in the breakfast room.
“Jack, this is like something out of Nazi Germany, something from that History Channel stuff you like to watch.” And doctor or not, she’d cringed at the tape of the attacks on Chinese citizens armed only with Bibles.
“I’ve seen it, too,” van Damm said, arriving in the Oval Office. “And we’re getting a flood of responses from the public.”
“Fuckin’ barbarians,” Ryan swore, as Robby Jackson came in to complete the morning’s intelligence-briefing audience.
“You can hang a big roger on that one, Jack. Damn, I know Pap’s going to see this, too, and today’s the day for him to do the memorial service at Gerry Patterson’s church. It’s going to be epic, Jack. Epic,” the Vice President promised.
“And CNN’s going to be there?”
“Bet your bippy, My Lord President,” Robby confirmed.
Ryan turned to his Chief of Staff. “Okay, Arnie, I’m listening.”
“No, I’m the one listening, Jack,” van Damm replied. “What are you thinking?”
“I’m thinking I have to talk to the public about this. Press conference, maybe. As far as action goes, I’ll start by saying that we have a huge violation of human rights, all the more so that they had the fucking arrogance to do it in front of world opinion. I’ll say that America has trouble doing business with people who act in this way, that commercial ties do not justify or cancel out gross violations of the principles on which our country is founded, that we have to reconsider all of our relations with the PRC.”