The Bear and the Dragon

morning-and perhaps to give the Defense Minister the chance to make good his words. Xu did a head count and stood.

“Very well. We adjourn until this afternoon.” The meeting broke up in an unusually subdued manner, without the usual pairing off and pleasantries between old comrades. Outside the conference room, Qian buttonholed Fang again.

“Something is going badly wrong. I can feel it.”

“How sure are you of that?”

“Fang, I don’t know what the Americans have done to my railroad bridges, but I assure you that to destroy them as I was informed earlier this morning is no small thing. Moreover, the destruction inflicted was deliberately systematic. The Americans-it must have been the Americans-deliberately crippled our ability to supply our field armies. You only do such a thing in preparation to smashing them. And now the commanding general of our advancing armies is suddenly killed-stray bullet, my ass! That tset ha tset ha Luo leads us to disaster, Fang.”

“We’ll know more this afternoon,” Fang suggested, leaving his colleague and going to his office. Arriving there, he dictated another segment for his daily journal. For the first time, he wondered if it might turn out to be his testament.

For her part, Ming was disturbed by her minister’s demeanor. An elderly man, he’d always nonetheless been a calm and optimistic one for the most part. His mannerisms were those of a grandfatherly gentleman even when taking her or one of the other office girls to his bed. It was an endearing quality, one of the reasons the office staff didn’t resist his advances more vigorously-and besides, he did take care of those who took care of his needs. This time she took her dictation quietly, while he leaned back in his chair, his eyes closed, and his voice a monotone. It took half an hour, and she went out to her desk to do the transcription. It was time for the midday meal by the time she was done, and she went out to lunch with her co-worker, Chai.

“What is the matter with him?” she asked Ming.

“The meeting this morning did not go well. Fang is concerned with the war.”

“But isn’t it going well? Isn’t that what they say on TV?”

“It seems there have been some setbacks. This morning they argued about how serious they were. Qian was especially exercised about it, because the American attacked our rail bridges in Harbin and Bei’an.”

“Ah.” Chai shoveled some rice into her mouth with her chopsticks. “How is Fang taking it?”

“He seems very tense. Perhaps he will need some comfort this evening.”

“Oh? Well, I can take care of him. I need a new office chair anyway,” she added with a giggle.

Lunch dragged on longer than usual. Clearly their minister didn’t need any of them for the moment, and Ming took the time to walk about on the street to gauge the mood of the people there. The feeling was strangely neutral. She was out just long enough to trigger her computer’s downtime activation, and though the screen was blank, in the auto-sleep mode, the hard drive started turning, and silently activated the onboard modem.

Mary Pat Foley was in her office, though it was past midnight, and she was logging onto her mail account every fifteen minutes, hoping for something new from SORGE.

“You’ve got mail!” the mechanical voice told her.

“Yes!” she said back to it, downloading the document at once. Then she lifted the phone. “Get Sears up here.”

With that done, Mrs. Foley looked at the time entry on the e-mail. It had gone out in the early afternoon in Beijing … what might that mean? she wondered, afraid that any irregularity could spell the death of SONGBIRD, and the loss of the SORGE documents.

“Working late?” Sears asked on entering.

“Who isn’t?” MP responded. She held out the latest printout. “Read.”

“Politburo meeting, in the morning for a change,” Sears said, scanning the first page. “Looks a little raucous. This Qian guy is raising a little hell-oh, okay, he chatted with Fang after it and expressed serious concerns … agreed to meet later in the day and-oh, shit!”

“What’s that?”

“They discussed increasing the readiness of their ICBM force … let’s see … nothing firm was decided for technical reasons, they weren’t sure how long they could keep the missiles fueled, but they were shook by our takeout of their missile submarine …”

“Write that up. I’m going to hang a CRITIC on it,” the DDO announced.

CRITIC-shorthand for “critical”-is the highest priority in the United States government for message traffic. A CRITIC-FLAGGED document must be in the President’s hands no less than fifteen minutes after being generated. That meant that Joshua Sears had to get it drafted just as quickly as he could type in his keyboard, and that made for errors in translation.

Ryan had been asleep for maybe forty minutes when the phone next to his bed went off.

“Yeah?”

“Mr. President,” some faceless voice announced in the White House Office of Signals, “we have CRITIC traffic for you.”

“All right. Bring it up.” Jack swung his body across the bed and planted his feet on the rug. As a normal human being living in his home, he wasn’t a bathrobe person. Ordinarily he’d just pad around his house barefoot in his underwear, but that wasn’t allowed anymore, and he always kept a long blue robe handy now. It was a gift from long ago, when he’d taught history at the Naval Academy-a gift from the students there-and bore on the sleeves the one wide and four narrow stripes of a Fleet Admiral. So dressed, and wearing leather slippers that also came with the new job, he walked out into the upstairs corridor. The Secret Service night team was already up and moving. Joe Hilton came to him first.

“We heard, sir. It’s on the way up now.”

Ryan, who’d been existing on less than five hours of sleep per night for the past week, had an urgent need to lash out and rip the face off someone-anyone-but, of course, he couldn’t do that to men who were just doing their job, with miserable hours of their own.

Special Agent Charlie Malone was at the elevator. He took the folder from the messenger and trotted over to Ryan.

“Hmm.” Ryan rubbed his hand over his face as he flipped the folder open. The first three lines jumped into his consciousness. “Oh, shit.”

“Anything wrong?” Hilton asked.

“Phone,” Ryan said.

“This way, sir.” Hilton led him to the Secret Service upstairs cubbyhole office.

Ryan lifted the phone and said, “Mary Pat at Langley.” It didn’t take long. “MP, Jack here. What gives?”

“It’s just what you see. They’re talking about fueling their intercontinental missiles. At least two of them are aimed at Washington.”

“Great. Now what?”

“I just tasked a KH-11 to give their launch sites a close look. There’s two of them, Jack. The one we need to look at is Xuanhua. That’s at about forty degrees, thirty-eight minutes north, one hundred fifteen degrees, six minutes east. Twelve silos with CCC-4 missiles inside. This is one of the newer ones, and it replaced older sites that stored the missiles in caves or tunnels. Straight, vertical, in-the-ground silos. The entire missile field is about six miles by six miles. The silos are well separated so that a single nuclear impact can’t take out any two missiles,” MP explained, manifestly looking at overheads of the place as she spoke.

“How serious is this?”

A new voice came on the line. “Jack, it’s Ed. We have to take this one seriously. The naval bombardment on their coast might have set them off. The damned fools think we might be attempting a no-shit invasion.”

“What? What with?” the President demanded.

“They can be very insular thinkers, Jack, and they’re not always logical by our rules,” Ed Foley told him.

“Great. Okay. You two come on down here. Bring your best China guy with you.”