“Along the border with Kaz-akh-stan,” said the sifter.
“Here it is,” put in another assistant. “Jinhe — some burg ’bout eighty to ninety miles from the Chinese border with Kazakhstan. Looks like it’s on the only rail link between the two countries.”
“U.S. have anything near it?”
The sifter enlarged the computer map. Jinhe was in Kyrgyzstan, immediately below southeastern Kazakhstan. “Apparently we have a big air base there. Let’s see.” He tapped the mouse. “At someplace called Manas. Three and a half thousand of our guys.”
“Yeah, right. Base has been there since 2002—puts us in range of Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Iran…. Man, who’d believe it? Most of these Stans used to belong to the Ruskies. Two hundred and thirty million, more than one and a half times the population of Russia. Now we’ve got a
“Hey,” added the anchor during a commercial break. “Russia is now a member of NATO. Chew on that.”
“World war against terrorism,” said the sifter, by way of explanation. “Politics makes strange bedfellows.”
“The enemy of my enemy is my friend,” said someone else.
“All right,” joshed the anchor. “Enough with the proverbs. How big was this bomb attack in this Jinhe?” He glanced at his recessed computer screen.
“Our guy in Kabul,” replied the sifter, “says it blew apart the rail tracks for a mile or so.”
“Any American citizens killed or injured?” It was the news producer in the booth.
“Don’t know yet,” said the anchor, shuffling his papers, ready to move on to the next item, but not before hearing a staff member voicing his curiosity about the explosion being so large as to have taken out a mile or so of track.
Within a half hour of the predawn bomb attack on the rail link northwest of Jinhe, between China’s far northwestern province and oil-rich Kazakhstan, two Chinese Group Armies, 112,000 men — a fraction of the PLA’s three million — crossed the one-thousand-mile-long border on a three-mile front northeast of Jinhe, each army of 56,000 men with their own air engineering and artillery support. In Urumqi, Xinjiang’s drab smokestack capital of 1.5 million, 270 miles east of where the two armies were crossing into Kazakhstan, another bomb exploded in a mailbox outside the Holiday Inn, killing three people and injuring a dozen laborers on their way to work early in the morning. This bomb, authorities suspected, was probably meant to explode later, in the morning rush hour. As sirens wailed through the city, the Gong An Bu began rounding up the list of usual suspects, Muslim separatists from among the Muslim Urghurs, who made up 7.3 million of the province’s seventeen million inhabitants and had always considered the Han Chinese to be invaders, since as recently as 1955 over ninety percent of Xinjiang’s inhabitants were non-Chinese. But now over half the population were Chinese, sent westward in droves by Beijing, who wanted to secure the province, in part to use the salt lake Lop Nur, in the vast area of Xinjiang’s Turpan Basin, for further nuclear testing.
The two Group Armies dispatched from the Tacheng subdistrict in Lanzhou, one of China’s seven military regions, met only sporadic resistance in the form of AK-47-toting Muslim Urghurs. The latter used Red Arrow antitank guided missiles, which, despite multiple firings whose backblasts and burned solid-propellant blossomed and crisscrossed in the dusty air, took out only eight of the PLA’s upgunned T-69s. These Russian-made PLA tanks, with their laser-sighted 125mm cannons, decimated forty-two of the Muslim rebels’ old Russian 100mm T-55s, whose three-rounds-a-minute and thousand-meter range could not stand up to the bigger bore, six-rounds-a-minute T-69s. And this despite the fact that many of the Kazakhstanis’ old Soviet T-55s had been equipped with reactive armor. The terrorists and nationalists in the Kazakhstani forces had placed high hopes in the reactive armor, whose explosive slabs would detonate when hit by a PLA’s T-69 armor-piercing discarding sabot round. But inferior manufacture of the reactive armor meant that it failed to stop the APDS’s ten-pound, foot-long dart from penetrating the Kazakhstanis’ T-55.
In Kazakhstan’s new capital, Astana, 390 miles northwest of China’s invasion — or “policing incursion,” as Beijing preferred to call it — the ruling Communist party boss, a sullen pro-Russian leftover of the Cold War and the Soviet Union’s collapse, did not join the Muslims or the PLA, afraid of the deep and still active Muslim hatred of Russia and the PLA’s institutionalized distrust of Moscow. Besides, the Muslims made up almost half the city’s population, and the most radical elements were known to make common cause with China’s Muslim Urghurs. What the Communist party boss did do, however, was try to contact the elusive Li Kuan. The party boss had connections with old comrades in Russian nuclear facilities who had difficulty making enough money to put bread on the table.
Later that day, in Washington, D.C., the President expressed outrage at the PLA’s violation of Kazakhstan’s territorial integrity and said he had called in the Chinese ambassador. China’s two Group Armies were now fifty miles into the arid steppe of Kazakhstan and kept advancing, albeit slowly, determined to rout every Muslim terrorist out of every crack and cave. The aim was to form a buffer zone between the two countries and secure the vital oil and rail lines between the two from terrorist sabotage, which Beijing said was clearly in both Kazakhstan’s and China’s national interests.
The U.S. State Department and the White House, in rare agreement, were secretly reaching the same conclusion, despite the President’s public expression of dismay. The surge of over a hundred thousand Chinese regulars over the Xinjiang-Kazakhstan border was alarming to some of Foggy Bottom’s experts, but a state of open rebellion in China that could ensue should Beijing fail to go after the terrorists was a much worse scenario. As Eleanor Prenty, National Security Advisor, knew, in every administration — indeed in any government — stability won out against chaos every time.
“If you think Yugoslavia breaking up was complex,” she told the President, “imagine what the disintegration of Xinjiang would be like.” She paused to take out the map of Central Asia she’d had faxed over from State. “There are fourteen national minorities over there,” she continued. “Sooner or later, amid all the Muslim rioting, we’d be caught up in it because of our base at Manas in nearby Kyrgyzstan.”
“But,” said the President, always insistent on playing devil’s advocate in his decision-making, “Muslim rioting might break out across
“Granted,” conceded Eleanor. “There could be widespread rioting throughout the Stans and the Muslim world in general. But if Beijing fails to act decisively and go in now after the terrorists’ staging areas, it’d be like us sitting still and doing nothing after 9/11. That vital section of rail track destroyed by that terrorist bomb was over two miles long.” Eleanor glanced down at her SATRECON report. “Two point six miles, to be exact. And all in one hit, Mr. President — not sequential explosions. We have our problems with Beijing — the perennial human rights issues, especially in Tibet, versus our pro-China trade lobby, who keep arguing, with some merit, that the best way to improve human rights in China is to trade more with them, engage them economically. Beijing’s been careful not to announce its intention to cross the border because it would have brought out every human rights activist, and no doubt the Europeans, telling us we should step in, through the U.N.”
“And,” put in the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Sam Wentworth, “the last thing we want, Mr. President, is a war on more than one front. Afghanistan and Iraq were quite enough for us to handle. It’d be a logistical nightmare, no matter how small the operation. I’m with Eleanor on this one. It’s China’s war on terrorism. And to put it quite bluntly—”
“You ever put it any other way, Sam?” There were smiles from the other armed services chiefs.
“I guess not, Mr. President,” the chairman responded gracefully. “My point is, the PLA’s strike into Kazakhstan takes the heat off us militarily all the way to the southwest in the Hindu Kush and gives the Euros someone other than the U.S. to whine about.”
“Euros? You’re excluding Great Britain, I hope.”
“Of course,” said the chairman, it being a particular point of gratitude in the White House that Britain and most of the British Commonwealth countries, particularly Australia, had stood by America’s side in past crises.
“Well then, we’re agreed,” said the President. “We continue with normal expressions of concern. Beyond that, wait and see.”
“The Russians’ll be pissed,” warned Wentworth. “Former republic and all that.”
The President shrugged. “Do they want to be in NATO or not? Besides, they’re no fonder of terrorists than we are. They don’t like the Chinese, but they want a steady oil flow. Stability.”
