Jew who lived five centuries later. It’s time, Sergey. It’s fucking time,” Ryan said forcefully.
“I hope you are right. You Americans, always so madly optimistic…”
“There’s a reason for that.”
“Oh? What would that be?” the Russian asked.
Jack fixed his eyes on his Russian colleague. “In my country, all things are possible. They will be in your country, too, if you just allow it. Embrace democracy, Sergey. Embrace freedom. Americans are not genetically different from the rest of the world. We’re mongrels. We have the blood of every country on earth in our veins. The only thing different between us and the rest of the world is our Constitution. Just a set of rules. That’s all, Sergey, but it has served us well. You’ve been studying us for how long?”
“Since I joined the KGB? Over thirty-five years.”
“And what have you learned of America and how it works?” Ryan asked.
“Obviously not enough,” Golovko answered honestly. “The spirit of your country has always puzzled me.”
“Because it’s too simple. You were looking for complexity. We allow people to pursue their dreams, and when the dreams succeed, we reward them. Others see that happen and chase after their own dreams.”
“But the class issues?”
“What class issues? Sergey, not everybody goes to Harvard. I didn’t, remember? My father was a cop. I was the first guy in my family to finish college. Look how I turned out. Sergey, we do not have class distinctions in America. You can be what you choose to be, if you are willing to work at it. You can succeed or you can fail. Luck helps,” Ryan admitted, “but it comes down to work.”
“All Americans have stars in their eyes,” the Chairman of the SVR observed tersely.
“The better to see the heavens,” Ryan responded.
“Perhaps. Just so they don’t come crashing down on us.”
So, what does this mean for us?” Xu Kun Piao asked, in an entirely neutral voice.
Zhang Han San and his premier had been watching the CNN feed in the latter’s private office, complete with simultaneous translation through headphones now discarded. The senior Minister Without Portfolio made a dismissive wave of the hand.
“I’ve read the North Atlantic Treaty,” he said. “It does not apply to us at all. Articles Five and Six limit its military application to events in Europe and North America only-all right, it includes Turkey, and, as originally written, Algeria, which was part of France in 1949. For incidents at sea, it applies only to the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea, and then only north of the Tropic of Cancer. Otherwise, the NATO countries would have been compelled to join in the Korean War and Vietnam on the American side. Those things did not happen because the treaty did not apply outside its defined area. Nor does it apply to us. Treaty documents have discrete language and discrete application,” he reminded his party chief. “They are not open-ended.”
“I am concerned even so,” Xu responded.
“Hostilities are not activities to be undertaken lightly,” Zhang admitted. “But the real danger to us is economic collapse and the resulting social chaos.
“You are very confident.”
The minister nodded. “Yes, Xu, I am, because I have studied the West for many years. The way they think is actually very predictable. The purpose of this treaty might be to frighten us, I suppose, but it is at most a paper tiger. Even if they wished to provide military assistance to Russia, they do not have the ability to do so. And I do not believe that they have that wish. They cannot know our plans, because if they did, they would have pressed their advantage over us in terms of currency reserves at the trade talks, but they did not, did they?” Zhang asked.
“Is there no way they could know?”
“It is most unlikely. Comrade Tan has no hint of foreign espionage in our country at anything approaching a high level, and his sources in Washington and elsewhere have not caught a sniff of such information being available to them.”
“Then why did they just broaden NATO?” Xu demanded.
“Is it not obvious? Russia is becoming rich with oil and gold, and the capitalist states wish to partake in the Russians’ good fortune. That is what they said in the press, isn’t it? It is fully in keeping with the capitalist ethos: mutual greed. Who can say, perhaps in five years they will invite us into NATO for the same reason,” Zhang observed with an ironic leer.
“You are confident that our plans have not been compromised?”
“As we come to a higher alert level and begin moving troops, we may expect some reaction from the Russians. But the rest of them? Bah! Tan and Marshal Luo are confident as well.”
“Very well,” Xu said, not entirely persuaded, but agreeing even so.
It was morning in Washington. Vice President Jackson was de facto boss of the crisis-management team, a place assured by his previous job, Director of Operations-J-3-for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. One nice thing about the White House was the good security, made better still by bringing people in via helicopter and car, and by the fact that the Joint Chiefs could teleconference in from their meeting room-“the Tank”-over a secure fiber-optic link.
“Well?” Jackson asked, looking at the large television on the wall of the Situation Room.
“Mancuso has his people at work in Hawaii. The Navy can give the Chinese a bad time, and the Air Force can move a lot of assets to Russia if need be,” said Army General Mickey Moore, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. “It’s the land side of the equation that has me worried. We could theoretically move one heavy division-First Armored-from Germany east, along with some attachments, and maybe NATO will join in with some additional stuff, but the Russian army is in miserable shape at the moment, especially in the Far East, and there’s also the additional problem that China has twelve CSS-4 intercontinental ballistic missiles. We figure eight or more of them are aimed at us.”
“Tell me more,” TOMCAT ordered.
“They’re Titan-II clones. Hell,” Moore went on, “I just found out the background earlier today. They were designed by a CalTech-educated Air Force colonel of Chinese ethnicity who defected over there in the 1950s. Some bone-head trumped up some security charges against him-turned out they were all bullshit, would you believe-and he bugged out with a few suitcases’ worth of technical information right out of JPL, where he was working at the time. So, the ChiComms built what were virtually copies of the old Martin-Marietta missile, and, like I said, we figure eight of them are aimed back at us.”
“Warheads?”
“Five-megaton is our best guess. City-busters. The birds are bitches to maintain, just like ours were. We figure they’re kept defueled most of the time, and they probably need two to four hours to bring them up to launch readiness. That’s the good news. The bad news is that they upgraded the protection on the silos over the last decade, probably as a result of what we did in the Iraq bombing campaign and also the B-2 strikes into Japan on their SS-19 clones. The current estimate is that the covers are fifteen feet of rebarred concrete plus three feet of armor-class steel. We don’t have a conventional bomb that’ll penetrate that.”
“Why not?” Jackson demanded in considerable surprise.
“Because the GBU-29 we cobbled together to take out that deep bunker in Baghdad was designed to hang on the F-111. It’s the wrong dimensions for the B-2’s bomb bay, and the 111 s are all at the boneyard in Arizona. So, we have the bombs, okay, but nothing to deliver them with. Best option to take those silos out would be air- launched cruise missiles with W-80 warheads, assuming the President will authorize a nuclear strike on them.”
“What warning will we have that the Chinese have prepared the missiles for launch?”
“Not much,” Moore admitted. “The new silo configuration pretty well prevents that. The silo covers are massive beasts. We figure they plan to blow them off with explosives, like we used to do.”
