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-mâché—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 grounds well 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 goldfield. 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 th
eir 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.”