The Bear and the Dragon

fact, he was a man of few convictions, able to adopt those of anyone else, if that someone-Zhang-looked about first and decided where the Politburo should go.

Xu was not a complete puppet, of course. That was the problem with people. However useful they might be on some issues, on others they held to the illusion that they thought for themselves, and the most foolish of them did have ideas, and those ideas were rarely logical and almost never helpful. Xu had embarrassed Zhang on more than one occasion, and since he was chairman of the Politburo, Xu did have real personal power, just not the wit to make proper use of it. But-what? Sixty percent of the time, maybe a little more? — he was merely Zhang’s mouthpiece. And Zhang, for his part, was largely free to exert his own influence, and to make his own national policy. He did so mostly unseen and unknown outside the Politburo itself, and not entirely known inside, either, since so many of his meetings with Xu were private, and most of the time Zhang never spoke of them, even to Fang.

His old friend was a chameleon, Fang thought, hardly for the first time. But if he showed humility in not seeking prominence to match his influence, then he balanced that with the fault of pride, and, worse, he didn’t seem to know what weakness he displayed. He thought either that it wasn’t a fault at all, or that only he knew of it. All men had their weaknesses, and the greatest of these were invariably those unknown to their practitioners. Fang checked his watch and took his leave. With luck, he’d be home at a decent hour, after he transcribed his notes through Ming. What a novelty, getting home on time.

CHAPTER 28 Collision Courses

Those sonsabitches,” Vice President Jackson observed with his coffee.

“Welcome to the wonderful world of statecraft, Robby,” Ryan told his friend. It was 7:45 A.M. in the Oval Office. Cathy and the kids had gotten off early, and the day was starting fast. “We’ve had our suspicions, but here’s the proof, if you want to call it that. The war with Japan and that little problem we had with Iran started in Beijing-well, not exactly, but this Zhang guy, acting for Xu, it would seem, aided and abetted both.”

“Well, he may be a nasty son of a bitch, but I wouldn’t give him points for brains,” Robby said, after a moment’s reflection. Then he thought some more. “But maybe that’s not fair. From his point of view, the plans were pretty clever, using others to be his stalking horse. He risked nothing himself, then he figured to move in and profit on the risks of others. It certainly looked efficient, I suppose.”

“Question is, what’s his next move?”

“Between this and what Rutledge reports from Beijing, I’d say we have to take these people a little seriously,” Robby reflected. Then his head perked up some more. “Jack, we have to get more people in on this.”

“Mary Pat will flip out if we even suggest it,” Ryan told him.

“Too damned bad. Jack, it’s the old problem with intelligence information. If you spread it out too much, you risk compromising it, and then you lose it-but if you don’t use it at all, you might as well not even have it. Where do you draw the line?” It was a rhetorical question. “If you err, you err on the side of safety-but the safety of the country, not the source.”

“There’s a real, live person on the other end of this sheet of paper, Rob,” Jack pointed out.

“I’m sure there is. But there are two hundred fifty million people outside this room, Jack, and the oath we both swore was to them, not some Chinese puke in Beijing. What this tells us is that the guy making policy in China is willing to start wars, and twice now we’ve sent our people to fight wars he’s had a part in starting. Jesus, man, war is supposed to be a thing of the past, but this Zhang guy hasn’t figured that one out yet. What’s he doing that we don’t know about?”

“That’s what SORGE’s all about, Rob. The idea is that we find out beforehand and have a chance to forestall it.”

Jackson nodded. “Maybe so, but once upon a time, there was a source called MAGIC that told us a lot about an enemy’s intentions, but when that enemy launched the first attack, we were asleep-because MAGIC was so important we never told CINCPAC about it, and he ended up not preparing for Pearl Harbor. I know intel’s important, but it has its operational limitations. All this really tells us is that we have a potential adversary with little in the way of inhibitions. We know his mind-set, but not his intentions or current operations. Moreover, SORGE’S giving us recollections of private conversations between one guy who makes policy and another guy who tries to influence policy. A lot of stuff is being left out. This looks like a cover-your-ass diary, doesn’t it?”

Ryan told himself that this was a particularly smart critique. Like the people at Langley, he’d allowed himself to wax a little too euphoric about a source they’d never even approached before. SONGBIRD was good, but not without limitations. Big ones.

“Yeah, Rob, that’s probably just what it is. This Fang guy probably keeps the diary just to have something to pull out of the drawer if one of his colleagues on the Chinese Politburo tries to butt-fuck him.”

“So, it isn’t Sir Thomas More whose words we’re reading,” TOMCAT observed.

“Not hardly,” Ryan conceded. “But it’s a good source. All the people who’ve looked at this for us say it feels very real.”

“I’m not saying it isn’t true, Jack, I’m saying it isn’t all,” the Vice President persisted.

“Message received, Admiral.” Ryan held up his hands in surrender. “What do you recommend?”

“SecDef for starters, and the Chiefs, and J-3 and J-5, and probably CINCPAC, your boy Bart Mancuso,” Jackson added, with a hint of distaste.

“Why don’t you like the guy?” SWORDSMAN asked.

“He’s a bubblehead,” the career fighter pilot answered. “Submariners don’t get around all that much. . but I grant you he’s a pretty good operator.” The submarine operation he’d run on the Japs using old boomers had been pretty swift, Jackson admitted to himself.

“Specific recommendations?”

“Rutledge tells us that the ChiComms are talking like they’re real torqued over the Taiwan thing. What if they act on that? Like a missile strike into the island. Christ knows they have enough missiles to toss, and we have ships in harbor there all the time.”

“You really think they’d be dumb enough to launch an attack on a city with one of our ships tied alongside?” Ryan asked. Nasty or not, this Zhang guy wasn’t going to risk war with America quite that foolishly, was he?

“What if they don’t know the ship’s there? What if they get bad intel? Jack, the shooters don’t always get good data from the guys in the back room. Trust me. Been there, done that, got the fucking scars, y’know?”

“The ships can take care of themselves, can’t they?”

“Not if they don’t have all their systems turned on, and can a Navy SAM stop a ballistic inbound?” Robby wondered aloud. “I don’t know. How about we have Tony Bretano check it out for us?”

“Okay, give him a call.” Ryan paused. “Robby, I have somebody coming in in a few minutes. We need to talk some more about this. With Adler and Bretano,” the President added.

“Tony’s very good on hardware and management stuff, but he needs a little educating on operations.”

“So, educate him,” Ryan told Jackson.

“Aye, aye, sir.” The Vice President headed out the door.

They got the container back to its magnetic home less than two hours after removing it, thanking God- Russians were allowed to do that now-that the lock mechanism wasn’t one of the new electronic ones. Those could be very difficult to break. But the problem with all such security measures was that they all too often ran the chance of going wrong and destroying that which they were supposed to protect, which only added complexity to a job with too much complexity already. The world of espionage was one in which everything that could go wrong invariably did, and so over the years, every way of simplifying operations had been adopted by all the players. The result was that since what worked for one man worked for all, when you saw someone following the same procedures as your own intelligence officers and agents, you knew you had a player in your sights.

And so the stakeout on the bench was renewed-of course it had never been withdrawn, in case Suvorov/ Koniev should appear unexpectedly while the transfer case was gone off to the lab-with an ever-changing set of