“A few minutes?” he pleaded.
“No. After.”
“After?” Moh snorted. “
“You always say that.” She was out of bed and, though the same age as Moh, moved with the energy of a much younger person. Opening the door, her voice rose above the roar of the black sea. “If I had a mushroom for every time you said you’d be dead, I’d be so rich we wouldn’t have to pick them.”
Moh turned away grumpily, cursing the necessity of picking the damned mushrooms between five and seven every morning, the two-hour slot affording the right temperature and humidity for coaxing the valuable fungi from their dark sheds to their prime market size, no more than an inch in diameter. Any later than seven and the mushrooms would be worth much less at the market in Shihmen. Mumbling at his wife’s rebuttal of his sexual advances, Moh, who was a little hard of hearing, now pretended to hear nothing she said, blaming the unending crashing of the surf against the rocky shore a quarter mile down from the village that nestled in a small, wind-blown dell at the northernmost end of the island. The high surf there marked the tail end of the most recent typhoon, one of the many hurricanes that periodically assailed the island and battered its spectacular east coast. Here, enormous cliffs dropped from wild, bird-filled skies sheer to the violent creamy-edged sea, absorbing most of the typhoons’ power in the form of torrential rains and winds, which, after lashing the island’s mountain spine, were less ferocious when they reached the more habitable and heavily industrialized lowlands of the west coast.
Even there, however, the prevailing easterlies of the typhoons were still strong enough to favor Taiwan’s daily leaflet-filled balloon and loudspeaker war against the mainland, a propaganda battle that had continued every odd-numbered day since 1958, Mao’s mainland Chinese having built the world’s biggest speakers in an attempt to outshout their wind-favored Nationalist enemies entrenched on the hills and coast of Kinmen Island. The latter’s name meant “Gate as if Made of Gold,” for it was seen as the gate controlling the adjacent seas off the Chinese mainland. The island, formerly known as Quemoy, bristled, as did Matsu, with updated U.S. Patriot surface-to-air missiles. The ferocity of the Communists on the mainland who wanted to regain Taiwan and all its islands could be measured by the fact that on Matsu and Kinmen the Nationalists still felt obliged to enforce martial law and maintain the presence of their 150,000 Taiwanese troops. So self-sufficient and self-contained were these islands, which served as early warning radio and radar listening posts for Taiwan, that in addition to enough food, water, ammunition, and medical provisions to last months without resupply, they even had their own currency.
As Moh Pan reluctantly dragged himself out of bed at a few minutes after six, he glimpsed what he thought were metallic glints at the gray edge of the world, about forty miles due north of Shihmen. At that moment on Kinmen, 173 miles westward across the Taiwan Strait, the military headquarters was abuzz with consternation over what night vision binoculars on Kinmen’s western side had revealed was a flotilla of Communist PLA navy fast- attack Houxin and Huangfen patrol boats heading eastward toward Kinmen. Though capable of thirty-two and thirty-five knots respectively, the Communist attack boats were approaching the Nationalist island slowly, only to make a U-turn back toward the mainland at high speed, leaving clearly visible wakes of phosphorescence in the plankton-rich sea. Meanwhile, Matsu HQ was receiving frantic inquiries from Taiwan’s Tsoying Naval Base, a hundred miles eastward, which in turn was receiving urgent inquiries from the U.S. State Department and the Washington intelligence community. The latter, despite their eye-in-the-sky spy satellites and other gizmology, couldn’t figure out exactly what the hell was going on.
Walking to market, pulling the cart full of mushrooms, Moh Pan looked north again to see whether he could see any ships, or had it been the glint of aircraft? Perhaps he should call Shihmen’s Civil Defense Office. “Do you have your cell?” he asked his wife.
“Battery’s dead,” she answered. “You forgot to recharge.”
“Of course,” he countered. “And I suppose I’m to blame for the typhoon too?”
She refused to answer. He just wanted to start a fight. He was giving her the evil eye.
Paying no attention, his wife tightened her scarf against the rising wind.
On Kinmen, where Moh Pan’s son, Ahmao, was doing his National Guard service in the army, the Nationalist garrison was completely nonplused. Did the sudden maneuvering by the Communists patrol boats presage an attack? Or were the Communists merely taunting the Taiwanese as they had so many times during their so-called “military maneuvers,” using elements of their PLA navy and PLA air force fighters, mere seconds from Matsu and Kinmen and only eight minutes from Taiwan itself? Such maneuvers, in this case by attack patrol boats from China’s East Fleet, were no doubt designed not only to rattle the nerves of the Nationalists, but to serve as a constant reminder to the Taiwanese that Beijing believed Taiwan was nothing more than a renegade province that sooner rather than later would be forced to rejoin the Communist mainland. And on that day, Taiwan would be forced to give Beijing back the enormous treasure Chiang Kai-shek, Mao Tse Tung’s mortal enemy, had taken with him and his Nationalist Army across the straits in 1949. Beijing had been encouraged since 1978 in its dream of reunification when U.S. aid to Taiwan and U.S. recognition of Taiwan as an independent nation ended, and then a year later, in 1979, when the U.S.-Taiwan national defense treaty died. Even so, every President from Harry Truman, who, despite his reservations about Chiang Kai-shek — whom he called “Cash My Check”—to Bill Clinton in 1996, had at times dispatched a CBG, carrier battle group, up into the Taiwan Strait to keep the uneasy peace between the two antagonists. And now the President and his advisors thought it prudent to repeat his predecessors’ cautionary move, as one of the first questions every President asked in times of impending crisis was, “Where are the carriers?”
The carriers, thought to be outmoded in twenty-first-century war, were floating U.S. air bases that were now more important than ever before, given the number of U.S. overseas bases that had been closed once the Cold War had ended, a war in which the U.S., like the Soviet Union, had made many an unsavory deal with a tin pot dictator in order to prevent one another from gaining an advantage in the other’s hemisphere. The current occupant of the White House had quickly discovered that in the war on terrorism, which involved so many different flashpoints, even the might of the U.S. Navy was stretched thin. America’s twelve CBGs were spread far and wide, standing off “the powder keg of the Middle East”—Afghanistan, Iran, as well as the new Iraq, to say nothing of the far-flung U.S. missions to combat terrorists and their myriad bases throughout Central and South America and amid thousands of islands of the Indonesian and Philippine archipelagos. Then there were missions in Pakistan and throughout the Africas, where American citizens were being kidnapped, murdered, or threatened.
In all this, the carriers served as stand-ins for all the land bases the United States had lost in post — Cold War client countries that now felt they could go it alone. Especially troublesome to the U.S. Navy, however, was the loss of the huge complex at Subic Bay in the Philippines. And so it was that this President, with a mandate to continue waging the war on terrorism until the terrorists were beaten, knew more than any President since JFK about where his twelve carrier groups were at any one time.
“Eleanor, all of our carriers are overextended,” the President said over the phone. “Do we have any available in dock?”
She didn’t know. A quick call to the CNO’s office in Washington, the transit coding causing a delay of only 1.5 seconds, gave her the answer. There was one in Bremerton, Washington State’s big maintenance yard. It was the USS
“The
“Yes, sir. In for overhaul.”
“What’s its completion date?”
Eleanor, phone still in hand, relayed the question to CNO, then informed the President, “Estimated time of completion, five days.”
The President shook his head. “No. Tell them they’ve got twenty-four hours. I want the
And it was so ordered. The
“The
“He doesn’t have to like it. He only has to do it.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Get me the
