He handed it to the guard and said, “Stick this in your office for me, will you? I’ll collect it in the morning…if my wife hasn’t killed me. We were going out to dinner.”
The guard laughed. “Okay, Carl. I’ll be gone by the time you get back. Tell the duty officer your worksheets are in my desk drawer. Here, let me stamp you out.”
The two men chatted for a few minutes more, and then the foreman walked off down the dark Sutung Chung Road toward the town, quietly humming the national anthem of the United States to himself.
Frank Reidel had no idea what the fuss was about. But Admiral Morgan had been specific. “If you get any word from Suao, let me know right away.” It had taken Carl Chimei and his CIA contact almost a day to get his message out, but they did so, from a safe house in Taipei, via Pearl Harbor, to Langley. It read simply: “Opened the box. Fur coats, hats, and boots. Cold vacation for the Dutchman.”
The message had arrived at 1800 on June 29. Reidel opened up the secure line to the White House and read the thirteen-word message to Admiral Morgan. “Beautiful, Frank,” said the NSA as he slammed down the phone and punched the air triumphantly.
“That does it for me,” he said to himself. “The Taiwanese are fucking around in Kerguelen. The distance is right. The time is right. The message from the
He stood up and roared the word “COFFEEEEEE!!” to anyone who might be listening beyond the closed oak doors to his office. Then he glanced at his watch and placed a large cigar between his teeth. He lit it up, using a gold lighter given him by his long-departed second wife. He always thought of her when he lit his early evening cigar, and sometimes he wished things had turned out differently. But that could never be, since the former Mary- Ann Morgan was now happily married to a Philadelphia lawyer whom the Admiral considered to be one of the dreariest men he had ever met. The fact that the sonofabitch had been his wife’s divorce lawyer still irked him.
He put the lighter away and turned his thoughts to the frozen island at the far end of the earth, where Boomer Dunning and Bill Baldridge had seen what was clearly the Taiwanese submarine.
“Whatever they are doing is
“Clandestine?” she said.
“Clandestine, woman, clandestine. Secret…Covert…Furtive…surreptitious…Clandestine.”
“Right,” said Kathy, a striking thirty-four-year-old divorced redhead from Chevy Chase, who adored her boss unconditionally. Not in any romantic sense, but just because she had never met anyone like him — so rude, so clever, so tough, so utterly respected by everyone. And yet he was so patient when he was explaining things. Even when he called her, in occasional fury, “the stupidest broad on the entire East Coast, including all of my wives,” it was somehow hysterical to them both. Admiral Morgan’s method of delivering the most withering insult, with just a touch of real humor, was not much short of an art form. He was abrupt, tactless, and discourteous to just about everyone. He had always been so, but only those who were oversensitive or genuinely incompetent had ever taken serious offense.
“Who’s clandestine?” asked Kathy.
“The goddamned Taiwanese.”
“Why? What have they done?”
“Nothing yet. But I don’t like ’em creeping around in a goddamned submarine when I don’t know what they’re at.”
“Well, why should you? America doesn’t own them…do we?”
The Admiral smiled and drew deeply on his cigar. “Kathy,” he said, “they are sneaky little sonsabitches.”
“Yessir…”
As she spoke two phones began ringing on her desk, and she walked quickly back through the open door. And then the President himself stopped by. “Morning, Admiral,” he said. “Unofficial visit. How’s things east of the Himalayas?”
“Morning, sir. Not too bad, I’m certain the Taiwanese are hiding something significant from us. They seem to be running submarines back and forth from the Southern Ocean. And if they’re hiding something from me, they must be doing something wrong.”
“Well, what do you think they’re doing?”
“I don’t know. But when you have a small offshore nation like Taiwan, which exports more stuff annually than the whole of the Chinese mainland, you gotta watch ’em, just because they’re so rich and potentially menacing. The place is awash with cash, and those submarines of theirs are up to something…down south, in a frozen hellhole called Kerguelen.”
“How do you know?”
“We had a couple of sightings right in the islands, sir. But Kerguelen is a place no one would be, not on a regular basis, unless they were up to something. You see, it’s so lonely down there they could not be on a military patrol, so they must be either on a supply run, or on some kind of an exploration project…I ought to know, but I don’t. Also it’s just possible they may have attacked and sunk the
“The Woods Hole research ship that vanished more than a year ago?”
“That’s the one, sir.”
“Jesus. Have you asked them about it?”
“No point. If they did it, they’ll deny it. If they didn’t, they’ll just think I’m nuts.”
“Did they do it?”
“I think so, sir. But I’m much more concerned with what the hell’s going
“What kind of thing could it be?” asked the President.
“Well, you have to try to get inside the Taiwanese mind. Here you have a hard-working people who have lived for centuries with very little. Now, thanks to the protective arm of Uncle Sam, they are mopping up riches that would have been beyond their dreams fifty years ago. Suddenly they have a whole world of their own to conserve and protect. I mean money, industry, a growing infrastructure…a population that hardly knows what poverty is. They have their own banks, their own culture, their own universities. They are ninety-four percent literate. Out of a population of twenty-one million, they have five hundred thousand students, a third of them studying engineering. They have their own armed forces. An Army and a Navy and an Air Force. They have taken their place right up there with the big hitters of the world.”
“Yes,” said the Chief Executive slowly. “When you think about it, they are in really good shape. So what are they doing creeping around in submarines?”
“Sir,” said the Admiral, gently. “As we all know, they have, just beyond their backyard, a hundred miles away, one fire-eating dragon called China, which is massively jealous of their success and would like to retake them militarily if possible, and make them once more a part of the mainland, under strict rule from Beijing.”
“Which they would hate.”
“Correct. So right there you get a people who are desperate to protect themselves, worried that America will not always look after them. In any rising nation like Taiwan, you eventually get a government that will try to work out ways to protect themselves and their wealth.”
“Like a very big bomb.”
“Yes. But less dramatically, in the event of a sudden, successful attack by China, probably by air, and then by sea, they would want to evacuate their senior politicians and military leaders. Those submarines we are attempting to track could be surveying remote areas of the world, with a view to constructing safe, luxurious hiding places. Fixing up communication systems.
“On the other hand Taiwan may have discovered China is up to something, somewhere down in the Southern Ocean, and the submarines are prowling around trying to get to the truth.
“I suppose it is possible that Taiwan is trying to develop its own nuclear deterrent, which would be impossible in their own island. Someone would find out in about three days. They may be looking for a site to open up a nuclear weapons plant. But that would be a hell of a thing to do in a place like Kerguelen, which is without power of any kind, and completely desolate…I guess if I thought about it, I could come up with a lot of schemes
