The Bear and the Dragon

“The Boeing order.”

“Well, Boeing will have to sell its airplanes to somebody else this year,” Rutledge said.

“Really? What about the interests of all those workers we’re supposed to represent?”

“Mark, at this level, we deal with the big picture, not the little one, okay?” Rutledge was actually getting angry with this stock trader.

“Cliffy, the big picture is made up of a lot of little ones. You ought to go back in there and ask if they like selling things to us. Because if they do, then they have to play ball. Because they need us a fucking lot more than we need them.”

“You don’t talk that way to a great power.”

“Are we a great power?”

“The biggest,” Rutledge confirmed.

“Then how come they talk that way to us?”

“Mark, this is my job. You’re here to advise me, but this is your first time to this sort of ball game, okay? I know how to play the game. It’s my job.”

“Fine.” Gant let out a long breath. “But when we play by the rules and they don’t, the game gets a little tedious.” Gant wandered off on his own for a moment. The garden was pretty enough. He hadn’t done this sort of thing enough to know that there was usually a garden of some sort for diplomats to wander in after two or three hours of talking at each other in a conference room, but he had learned that the garden was where a lot of the real work got done.

“Mr. Gant?” He turned to see Xue Ma, the diplomat/spook he’d chatted with before.

“Mr. Xue,” TELESCOPE said in his own greeting.

“What do you think of the progress of the talks?” the Chinese diplomat asked.

Mark was still trying to understand this guy’s use of language. “If this is progress, I’d hate to see what you call an adverse development.”

Xue smiled. “A lively exchange is often more interesting than a dull one.”

“Really? I’m surprised by all this. I always thought that diplomatic exchange was more polite.”

“You think this impolite?”

Gant again wondered if he was being baited or not, but decided the hell with it. He didn’t really need his government job anyway, did he? And taking it had involved a considerable personal sacrifice, hadn’t it? Like a few million bucks. Didn’t that entitle him to say what the hell he thought?

“Xue, you accuse us of threatening your national identity because we object to the murders your government-or its agents, I suppose-committed in front of cameras. Americans don’t like it when people commit murder.”

“Those people were breaking our laws,” Xue reminded him.

“Maybe so,” Gant conceded. “But in America when people break the law, we arrest them and give them a trial in front of a judge and jury, with a defense lawyer to make sure the trial is fair, and we damned sure don’t shoot people in the head when they’re holding a goddamned newborn infant!”

“That was unfortunate,” Xue almost admitted, “but as I said, those men were breaking the law.”

“And so your cops did the judge/jury/executioner number on them. Xue, to Americans that was the act of a barbarian.”

The “B” word finally got through. “America cannot talk to China in that way, Mr. Gant.”

“Look, Mr. Xue, it’s your country, and you can run your country as you wish. We’re not going to declare war on you for what you do inside your own borders. But there’s no law that says we have to do business with you either, and so we can stop buying your goods-and I have news for you: The American people will stop buying your stuff if you continue to do stuff like that.”

“Your people? Or your government?” Xue asked, with a knowing smile.

“Are you really that stupid, Mr. Xue?” Gant fired back.

“What do you mean?” The last insult had actually cracked through the shell, Gant saw.

“I mean America is a democracy. Americans make a lot of decisions entirely on their own, and one of them is what they spend their money on, and the average American will not buy something from a fucking barbarian.” Gant paused. “Look, I’m a Jew, okay? Sixty-some years ago, America fucked up. We saw what Hitler and the Nazis were doing in Germany, and we didn’t act in time to stop it. We really blew the call and a lot of people got killed unnecessarily, and we’ve been seeing things on TV about that since I was in short pants, and it ain’t never going to happen again on our watch, and when people like you do stuff like what we just saw, it just sets off the Holocaust light in American heads. Do you get it now?”

“You cannot talk to us in that way.”

Again with the broken record! The doors were opening. It was time to head back inside for the next round of confrontational diplo-speak.

“And if you persist in attacking our national sovereignty, we will buy elsewhere,” Xue told him with some satisfaction.

“Fine, and we can do the same. And you need our cash a lot more than we need your trade goods, Mr. Xue.” He must have finally understood, Gant thought. His face actually showed some emotion now. So did his words:

“We will never kowtow to American attacks on our country.”

“We’re not attacking your country, Xue.”

“But you threaten our economy,” Xue said, as they got to the door.

“We threaten nothing. I am telling you that my fellow citizens will not buy goods from a country that commits barbarities. That is not a threat. It is a statement of fact.” Which was an even greater insult, Gant did not fully appreciate.

“If America punishes us, we will punish America.”

Enough was goddamned enough. Gant pulled the door open halfway and stopped to face the diplomat/spook:

“Xue, your dicks aren’t big enough to get in a pissing contest with us.” And with that, he walked on inside. A half hour later, he was on his way out again. The words had been sharp and heated, and neither side had seen any purpose in continuing that day-though Gant strongly suspected that once Washington heard about that morning’s exchanges, there wouldn’t be any other day.

In two days, he’d be totally jet-lagged but back at his office on 15th Street. He was surprised that he was looking forward to that.

Anything from WestPac?” Mancuso asked. ”They just put three submarines to sea, a Song and two of the Kilos the Russians sold them,” BG Lahr answered. ”We’re keeping an eye on them. La Jolla and Helena are close by. Tennessee is heading back to Pearl as of midday.” The former boomer had been on patrol for fifty days, and that was about enough. ”Our surface assets are all back to sea. Nobody’s scheduled to get back into Taipei for twelve days.”

“So, the Taipei hookers get two weeks off?” CINCPAC asked with a chuckle.

“And the bartenders. If your sailors are like my soldiers, they may need the relaxation,” the J-2 replied, with a smile of his own.

“Oh, to be young and single again,” Bart observed. “Anything else out there?”

“Routine training on their side, some combined air and ground stuff, but that’s up north by the Russian border.”

“How good do they look?”

Lahr shrugged. “Good enough to give the Russians something to think about, sir. On the whole, the PLA is trained up as good as I’ve ever known them to be, but they’ve been working hard for the past three or four years.”

“How many of them?” Bart asked, looking at his wall map, which was a lot more useful for a sailor than a soldier. China was just a beige shape on the left border.

“Depends on where. Like, if they go north into Russia, it’d be like cockroaches in some ghetto apartment in New York. You’d need a lot o’ Raid to deal with it.”