The Bear and the Dragon

Annapolis and been playing ever since. Says he kicks the President’s backside every time they go out.” He’d never been to the Willow Glen Country Club either, and wondered if the club had any black members. Probably not. Mississippi hadn’t changed quite that much yet, though Tiger Woods had played at a PGA tournament there, and so that color line had been breached, at least.

“Well, he’d probably whip me, too. Next time he comes down, maybe we can play a round.” Patterson’s membership at Willow Glen was complimentary, another advantage to being pastor of a well-to-do congregation.

And the truth of the matter was that, white or not, Gerry Patterson was not the least bit bigoted, Reverend Jackson knew. He preached the Gospel with a pure heart. Hosiah was old enough to remember when that had not been so, but that, too, had changed once and for all. Praise God.

For Admiral Mancuso, the issues were the same, and a little different. An early riser, he’d caught CNN the same as everyone else. So had Brigadier General Mike Lahr.

“Okay, Mike, what the hell is this all about?” CINCPAC asked when his J-2 arrived for his morning intel brief.

“Admiral, it looks like a monumental cluster-fuck. Those clergy stuck their noses in a tight crack and paid the price for it. More to the point, NCA is seriously pissed.” NCA was the code-acronym for National Command Authority, President Jack Ryan.

“What do I need to know about this?”

“Well, things are likely to heat up between America and China, for starters. The trade delegation we have in Beijing is probably going to catch some heat. If they catch too much, well. .” His voice trailed off.

“Give me worst case,” CINCPAC ordered.

“Worst case, the PRC gets its collective back up, and we recall the trade delegation and the ambassador, and things get real chilly for a while.”

“Then what?”

“Then-that’s more of a political question, but it wouldn’t hurt for us to take it a little seriously, sir,” Lahr told his boss, who took just about everything seriously.

Mancuso looked at his wall map of the Pacific. Enterprise was back at sea doing exercises between Marcus Island and the Marianas. John Stennis was alongside in Pearl Harbor. Harry Truman was en route to Pearl Harbor after taking the long way around Cape Horn-modern aircraft carriers are far too beamy for the Panama Canal. Lincoln was finishing up a bobtail refit in San Diego and about to go back to sea. Kitty Hawk and Independence, his two old, oil-fired carriers, were both in the Indian Ocean. At that, he was lucky. First and Seventh Fleets had six carriers fully operational for the first time in years. So, if he needed to project power, he had the assets to give people something to think about. He also had a lot of Air Force aircraft at his disposal. The 3rd Marine Division and the Army’s 25th Light based right there in Hawaii wouldn’t play in this picture. The Navy might bump heads with the ChiComms, and the Air Force, but he lacked the amphibious assets to invade China, and besides, he wasn’t insane enough to think that was a rational course of action under any circumstances.

“What do we have in Taiwan right now?”

“Mobile Bay, Milius, Chandler, and Fletcher are showing the flag. Frigates Curtis and Reid are doing operations with the ROC navy. The submarines La Jolla, Helena, and Tennessee are trolling in the Formosa Strait or along the Chinese coast looking at their fleet units.”

Mancuso nodded. He usually kept some high-end SAM ships close to Taiwan. Milius was a Burke-class destroyer, and Mobile Bay was a cruiser, both of them with the Aegis system aboard to make the ROC feel a little better about the putative missile threat to their island. Mancuso didn’t think the Chinese were foolish enough to launch an attack against a city with some U.S. Navy ships tied alongside, and the Aegis ships had a fair chance of stopping anything that flew their way. But you never knew, and if this Beijing incident blew up any more. . He lifted the phone for SURFPAC, the three-star who administratively owned Pacific Fleet’s surface ships.

“Yeah,” answered Vice Admiral Ed Goldsmith.

“Ed, Bart. What material shape are those ships we have in Taipei harbor in?”

“You’re calling about the thing on CNN, right?”

“Correct,” CINCPAC confirmed.

“Pretty good. No material deficiencies I know about. They’re doing the usual port-visit routine, letting people aboard and all. Crews are spending a lot of time on the beach.”

Mancuso didn’t have to ask what they were doing on the beach. He’d been a young sailor once, though never on Taiwan.

“Might not hurt for them to keep their ears perked up some.”

“Noted,” SURFPAC acknowledged. Mancuso didn’t have to say more. The ships would now stand alternating Condition-Three on their combat systems. The SPY radars would be turned on aboard one of the Aegis ships at all times. One nice thing about Aegis ships was that they could go from half-asleep to fully operational in about sixty seconds; it was just a matter of turning some keys. They’d have to be a little careful. The SPY radar put out enough power to fry electronic components for miles around, but it was just a matter of how you steered the electronic beams, and that was computer-controlled. “Okay, sir, I’ll get the word out right now.”

“Thanks, Ed. I’ll get you fully briefed in later today.”

“Aye, aye,” SURFPAC replied. He’d put a call to his squadron commanders immediately.

“What else?” Mancuso wondered.

“We haven’t heard anything directly from Washington, Admiral,” BG Lahr told his boss.

“Nice thing about being a CINC, Mike. You’re allowed to think on your own a little.”

What a fucking mess,” General-Colonel Bondarenko observed to his drink. He wasn’t talking about the news of the day, but about his command, even though the officers’ club in Chabarsovil was comfortable. Russian general officers have always liked their comforts, and the building dated back to the czars. It had been built during the Russo-Japanese war at the beginning of the previous century and expanded several times. You could see the border between pre-revolution and post-revolution workmanship. Evidently, German POWs hadn’t been trained this far east-they’d built most of the dachas for the party elite of the old days. But the vodka was fine, and the fellowship wasn’t too bad, either.

“Things could be better, Comrade General,” Bondarenko’s operations officer agreed. “But there is much that can be done the right way, and little bad to undo.”

That was a gentle way of saying that the Far East Military District was less of a military command than it was a theoretical exercise. Of the five motor-rifle divisions nominally under his command, only one, the 265th, was at eighty-percent strength. The rest were at best regimental-size formations, or mere cadres. He also had theoretical command of a tank division-about a regiment and a half-plus thirteen reserve divisions that existed not so much on paper as in some staff officer’s dreams. The one thing he did have was huge equipment stores, but a lot of that equipment dated back to the 1960s, or even earlier. The best troops in his area of command responsibility were not actually his to command. These were the Border Guards, battalion-sized formations once part of the KGB, now a semi-independent armed service under the command of the Russian president.

There was also a defense line of sorts, which dated back to the 1930s and showed it. For this line, numerous tanks-some of them actually German in origin-were buried as bunkers. In fact, more than anything else the line was reminiscent of the French Maginot Line, also a thing of the 1930s. It had been built to protect the Soviet Union against an attack by the Japanese, and then upgraded halfheartedly over the years to protect against the People’s Republic of China-a defense never forgotten, but never fully remembered either. Bondarenko had toured parts of it the previous day. As far back as the czars, the engineering officers of the Russian Army had never been fools. Some of the bunkers were sited with shrewd, even brilliant appreciation for the land, but the problem with bunkers was explained by a recent American aphorism: If you can see it, you can hit it, and if you can hit it, you can kill it. The line had been conceived and built when artillery fire had