U.S.S. Seawolf

“I didn’t even know John the Baptist was working in the Pentagon.”

“Jesus Christ, Kathy! Where the hell is he?”

Kathy’s tone changed. “Arnold Morgan,” she gritted, “I have told you five times that I have been in touch with the office of the Chief of Naval Operations and on each occasion I have been informed that Admiral Joseph Mulligan has left his office and was on his way here. Each time I have told you exactly that. I am not a traffic cop, I am not a chauffeur, I am not Admiral Mulligan’s mistress. I have no idea where he is. When he arrives I will be sure to inform you.”

Before she put down the phone, Kathy O’Brien whispered, “Good-bye, my darling, rude pig.” Slam.

“KATHY!!”

Phone rings. “What?”

“WELL, WHERE THE HELL IS HE?”

“As a matter of fact he has just walked through the door…shall I send him in?”

“Jesus Christ.”

Admiral Joseph Mulligan, the six-foot-four-inch former commanding officer of a Trident submarine, former C- in-C of the Submarine Force U.S. Atlantic Fleet (SUBLANT), and ex-Navy tight end in the 1966 Army-Navy game, came marching through the door.

“Hey, Arnie…sorry about the lateness…been sitting in the car on the phone to Norfolk for the last twenty minutes…that damned new cruiser…Jesus, it’s more trouble than it could ever possibly be worth…got any coffee?”

“Yeah, but I’m not sure you’re getting any. I’m not good at sitting around waiting for disorganized sailors.”

“Heh, heh, heh.” The big Boston Irishman who occupied the most senior position in the United States Navy chuckled. The two men had known each other for many years. Both of them had commanded Polaris submarines, and they had been through a few scrapes together. As long as Admiral Morgan was the President’s right-hand man on military and national security matters, the Navy was not going to be looking for a new CNO any time soon.

Just then Kathy O’Brien came in with fresh coffee for them both. Admiral Mulligan thanked her graciously while the boss muttered, “’Bout time…I was better looked after when I was an ensign.”

“He doesn’t get a whole lot better, does he?” said Joe Mulligan. “No wonder all his wives left him.”

“No wonder indeed,” said Kathy, smiling as she swept out of the door.

“Christ, she’s beautiful, Arnie. You better marry her while you’ve still got the chance.”

“Can’t. She’s rejected me till I retire.”

“Then you’ve both got a long wait.”

“Guess so. But I’m hanging in there.”

“Anyway, old pal, what’s on your mind.”

“China, what’s on yours?”

“Cookies. Got any?”

“Jesus, don’t they feed you at the hellhole you work in?”

“Only rarely.”

“KATHY!! COOKIES FOR THE CHIEF.”

“Okay, Arnie, tell me what’s on your mind, as if I don’t know. It’s that Chinese missile, right?”

“That’s the one, Joe. And whether anyone likes it or not, we are, in the end, gonna have to do something about it. We can’t have a bunch of fucking coolies running around with a ballistic missile that could flatten L.A.”

“Well, I agree. Not hardly. But you know, there really is no reason to think they could (a) build one that big, (b) aim the sonofabitch straight, and (c) make sure it goes off bang in Beverly Hills.”

“Joe, I know that. But you know they’ve been building a brand-new Xia-class ICBM submarine. We’ve just picked it up on the overheads. Damn thing’s conducting surface trials in the northern Yellow Sea right now. They got pictures at Fort Meade. Whatever else, you can bet they didn’t build it for nothing. They built it to carry a missile that could, if required, threaten the USA.”

“Can’t argue with that, Arnie. But they’re still a long way from firing a missile right across the Pacific Ocean.”

“Are they? And might I ask how the hell you might know that?”

“Mainly, old buddy, because they’ve never tested anything like that, and because every shred of intelligence we have says they are simply not that advanced.”

“If this new fucking Xia-class boat is any good, they won’t have to be that advanced. They could drive the sonofabitch way across the ocean and let one rip a thousand miles off our west coast.”

“Yeah, I suppose they could. If they owned such a missile.”

Arnold Morgan stood up and pulled out a cigar from a snazzy-looking polished wooden box on his desk. He walked slowly around the room, nodding formally at the portrait of Admiral Nimitz. He clipped the end of his cigar, and ignited it with a gold Dunhill lighter, a gift from a Saudi Arabian prince who thought, wrongly, that he might study in the U.S. to become a submariner.

“Lemme lay a few facts on you, Joe. Get one of those cigars, if you want one, but listen. By the year 2000, we actually knew the Chinese had stolen top-secret design information for our most advanced thermonuclear weapons, and had transferred ballistic missile technology to Iran and Libya, among others. Beautiful, right?”

“Beautiful.”

“They had also stolen our top missile guidance technology. They’ve got three thousand corporations in the US of A, probably half of ’em with lines to Chinese military intelligence, and you can’t trust politicians one fucking inch to do the right thing. Jesus, Joe, Clinton’s attorney general denied the FBI permission to wiretap the fucking Chinese spy’s phone, and then the President himself went on television and told a barefaced lie, denying he even knew about the leaks when he plainly did. Then they hushed up half the Cox report in order to save his ass.

“Clinton made it possible for the goddamned Chinese to get their hands on American technology no one should see, and what’s worse, they’re still in here, stealing and lying.

“Joe, five years from now the People’s Liberation Army/Navy is gonna consist of around three and a half million people. They are no longer especially concerned with a major ground war doctrine. They are, for the first time in five hundred years, becoming expansionist, and have formally recognized their massive Navy as their Senior Service.

“Right now more than a third of the entire Chinese military budget is going into Navy research, development and production. They’ve finally managed to get four Russian-built Kilo-class submarines, despite my best efforts. They have this brand-new Xia-class SSBN, they have a production line of new Song-class SSKs, two new six- thousand-ton Luhai-class destroyers, they have a land-attack cruise missile program, they’re aiming for two big aircraft carrier battle groups inside the next eight years — one for the Indian Ocean, one for the Pacific.

“And how about this Burma bullshit? The Chinese have piled nearly two billion dollars’ worth of military hardware into that country, updating all the Burmese naval bases, which they of course will be utilizing. That adds up to a permanent Chinese presence in the Indian Ocean. Christ, Joe! These guys are on the move, I’m telling you. And I’m not proposing we make moves to stop ’em. Not yet, anyway. But I do seriously want to know if the little pricks can hit L.A. with a ballistic missile fired from the South China Sea. Is that too much to ask, for Christ’s sake?”

The President’s National Security Adviser faced the U.S. Navy Chief, and for the first time the two men were silent. Admiral Mulligan took a deep swig of coffee. Admiral Morgan drew deeply on his cigar, and then he spoke again, with equal care.

“Joe, China supports twenty-two percent of the world’s population on only seven percent of its arable land. Because of their grotesque mismanagement of their farming areas, they’re losing millions of acres a year. In the next fifteen years their population is going to one and a half billion, and sometime in the next five years they’re gonna have an annual shortfall of two hundred and eighty-five million tons of grain, which is a lot of cookies.”

“Yeah, I know the feeling…we’re a bit short in here as well.”

Admiral Morgan grinned but ignored him. “Joe, we’re looking at a nation that sooner or later is going to have to raise a gigantic sum of money every year to buy grain and rice to feed its people. Either that, or they’re gonna