April 5: A Depth of Understanding (38 page)

They were all done, Heather and Dakota tired and ready to go sleep when Jeff got a call and listened for awhile, just saying OK, OK...

"Chen says I should meet him at my office, he says something is happening in China. I'll see you guys tomorrow.

"I'll come with you," April said right away. They all got up and parted ways. Jeff and April were out the door first, stepping much livelier.

"Chen will be waiting for us. He was on the way when he called me."

"He has access to your office now?" April asked surprised.

"Yes, I depend on him for a number of things. I've come to trust him," Jeff said. He let a bit of time go by as they walked before he added. "Not that I share passwords with him and they aren't in the machine, I have them memorized. So the risk is limited."

That made April feel better. Some things she didn't want to go beyond the three of them.

Chen was sitting at the com console with most of China on the big wall screen. It was a composite of visible light from a satellite, a map overlay and infrared. It was early morning in eastern China. There was a sprinkling of freckles, little gold circles about three millimeters in diameter, all over the map, but heavier near the coast and big cities. A very few places they clustered.

Jeff went right to the other seat and settled in. Chen stood and offered his seat to April, but she waved him back and got a folding chair to sit behind them. She could see between them just fine. She reached up unbidden and massaged Jeff's shoulder. He leaned into it. so it must feel good. Gunny sat further back and just nodded hello at Chen.

"What are all the little rings?" April asked before Jeff could.

"Thermal sources. They are odd because they are almost all small, single dwellings, often residential and they all happened within an hour of each other. China has five time zones, although the far western one doesn't concern us much, but they all started close together. There are enough of them that the fire fighters can't possibly get to all of them. And some of them we can see from our satellite imaging nobody is fighting them. A few we see trucks at the fire but no activity and a few we definitely see bodies in the street."

"This is deliberate action then," Jeff agreed. "What do they have in common? Anything that you can tell with the resolution we have available?"

"Oh yes, even without a lot of detail they are high end residences. Some in gated communities for high officials and some on military bases for general staff."

"Before they left for work this morning," April guessed.

"Yeah, most of them got caught that way for sure," Chen agreed. "There are always a few workaholics who are there before the sun comes up, if not still there from last night."

"Do you think this is the coup our defector suggested was in the works?" Jeff asked.

"Maybe, it hasn't gotten that serious yet. If we see armor or aircraft moving I'd think it might be. This could be a decapitation event, but it will take more than removing a few high level officials and commanders to bring down the government," Chen insisted.

On the coast, near Taiwan, the white flare of a nuclear explosion overwhelmed the screen.

"It just got serious," April said.

"That's Dongguan," Chen said, zooming in, but the cloud and debris lofted quickly obscured some of what was underneath. "Well, near Dongguan," he corrected himself. "North towards Guangzhou, but there really isn't much open country between them."

"What would be a target there?" April asked.

"I don't know. What can possibly be a rational target for a nuclear weapon in a civil war? It seems insane to nuke your own territory. The damage will be so widespread. Maybe the weapons themselves were what they were fighting over," he guessed.

"Look to the west of Dongguan," he pointed out. "There is a cluster of fires there. It looks like maybe they set a single fire or a few and they got out of control and merged. That's a huge fire they got there. It must be really windy to spread like that."

"Anything else you want to see here before I zoom back out?" Chen asked. They shook their heads no. There were a lot more little circles than when they had zoomed in.

"That's a different infrared signature at Shuimen there, near Taiwan," Chen observed. He played with the setting trying to refine it. "Ah, see how the cluster is moving and heading east now? It appears they are a large force of aircraft, at least a hundred, headed for the straights."

"It looks like they are going to attack Taiwan," Jeff said, uncertainly.

"Yes, no other possibility," Chen agreed.

"But
why
?" Jeff asked.

Chen shrugged, looking upset. "Maybe there is a breakdown in communications. Maybe they blame Taiwan for the nuclear strike. Maybe the commander of the airbase always thought they should re-take Taiwan and now that he isn't getting direction and control from above he's doing what he wants. The decapitation effort, if that's what it is, may have succeeded. And sometimes when you create chaos you don't get the result you want. Crud, there go the long range SAMS to meet them and the Taiwanese are putting their own jets up."

They watched the swarms of tiny dots, some approaching each other, some headed for targets on either side of the straights. Two other Chinese bases started launching aircraft. One of the bases in Fujian province suddenly displayed a huge infrared signature, not the white glare of a nuke, but big.

"I've never seen one, but I suspect that was an air-fuel explosion," Chen said.

"They bombed the base?" April asked.

"Not with an aircraft. It wouldn't have had time to reach there from when this all started happening. More likely a ballistic missile."

"Doesn't Taiwan have nukes?" April asked.

"That's a really interesting question," Chen said. "When I was spying for China some thought they had them, some thought they didn't and some thought they didn't but planted all sorts of false clues and fake radiological traces to make us
think
they did. If this keeps escalating I think we'll find out soon. An air-fuel explosive will level several square kilometers with just as much energy yield as a small nuke. That base is pretty much gone. And there goes another one," he said, as a thermal flare showed on the screen. "And two more. OK, three bases gone. There is no way this is going to deescalate until somebody has the upper hand."

"How about leaving the big wall screen zoomed out and look at details with the main com console screen?" Jeff suggested. "I wonder what we're missing when we lose the big view."

"Sure," Chen switched images around and went off to use the lavatory.

Two more Chinese bases were crushed under missile fire. Some of the jets might not have anywhere to return even if they weren't shot down and that was happening to both sides now, as the jets met over the coast and the straights. Then a Taiwanese target vanished under the flare of a small nuke. Nothing like the size of the one over China, but the white glare couldn't be anything else. Jeff didn't know what had been there, but he marked it on the screen to ask Chen.

"Anything happen while I was away?" Chen asked.

"They nuked there on the Taiwan coast, where I circled it with red. Not as big as the last one. I'm sort of assuming it was the Chinese. Oh and two more Chinese air bases got hit with air fuel bombs."

"There's a lot more planes taking off to the west," April pointed out.

"Yes, but those are too far away to be involved with Taiwan," Chen assured her."They don't have the range to reach the coast much less loiter and do anything. They have to have local targets, probably ground targets because I don't see anything going aloft to meet them. Of course if..." Chen stopped and drew a sharp breath in. On the screen there was a scintillating mass of nuclear detonations all close together, one after another, further down the coast from Taiwan. Then a similar display of detonations to the north. April thought she counted eight in the last barrage, but she wasn't sure.

"Are you OK Chen?" She was concerned for him. His color looked bad and he seemed to be having trouble breathing.

"No, I'm not well at all. It may take me a bit to, adjust. I can't look at the screen right now. Do you have something stronger than this coffee?" he asked Jeff.

"Of course," Jeff got in his desk drawers and found a bottle of bourbon, half-full and gave it to Chen with a fresh mug.

Chen turned his back on the wall screen, pulling his chair to the side and poured a drink. His hands were shaking and he sat with the mug in both hands, but instead of drinking he just held it and wept quietly. There was quite a bit of activity on the screen, but neither of them felt free to comment on it, certainly not to ask Chen anything about it. He was obviously too upset to bother further. He finally did sip a little of the whiskey.

"That first big bombardment was Guangzhou, you might know it as Canton. People still speak of Cantonese food for example. I lived there for awhile as a boy. I have memories of parks and shops and places we'd go eat. All gone now."

"Do you think that was an answer to the nuke on Taiwan?" April asked.

"Oh, yes. They used conventional weapons until some idiot probably decided the detonation on the mainland had to be Taiwan's fault. It probably wasn't. The timing is too suspect. Taiwan's main naval base gets hit and within a few minutes both Guangzhou and Shanghai
are thoroughly destroyed. It wasn't as spectacular as one of Jeff's weapons, but it probably did just as much actual destruction, it just didn't dig a big crater too."

"But it happened so fast. Could even a ballistic missile get there that quickly?" April asked.

"Probably not. Maybe a sub sitting right off the coast could lob them in on that short of a notice, but I doubt they'd keep two on station like that. No, both targets were on the water, they probably placed the bombs years ago by sub or remote vehicle, sneaking them up the rivers. Then they just set them off by remote command. There are fifty million people who live on the Pearl River delta. Shanghai...well, I don't remember, a
lot
. I wouldn't be surprised if half of them are gone. For nothing. I don't believe for a minute that Taiwan set off the first one. Somebody over-reacted."

A few more flares marked the map on the screen, a few out in the ocean. Neither of them said anything to Chen, but he read it on their faces and grimaced. A nuclear flare lit up the open ocean half way to Japan. That worried April deeply.

Jeff's phone vibrated and he looked surprised. When he took the call he quickly looked angry. He got up and started to pace. April only could catch a word here and there, then he cut the other person off with harsh words and hung up, fingers working the phone, probably to reject any more calls from this person, she guessed.

When he looked up at April he realized he was scowling and took a deep breath and tried to relax his face. It helped.

"That was Joan Morgan, we met in the cafeteria recently. She has taken a position with the BBC, not staff, but sending them stories as a stringer. She informed me they are about to run a breaking news story that Home or I have resumed bombarding China and wanted to give me opportunity to explain why. When I denied being involved with any bombardment she asked me to
prove
that, given I had done so before. I pointed out proving a negative is impossible, that her very question contained all sorts of assumptions, that when I previously bombarded China I neither denied it nor apologized for it and if I found it necessary to do so in the future I'd do so the very same way, with regrets but no apologies. I also pointed out our weapons were of a different physical nature and all the Earth governments would know the source of the detonations in days, at which time it would be obvious they were not ours, but nobody at BBC would care they were wrong as long as they were first with the story, since there would be no consequences to being wrong."

"The woman is an idiot," April decided.

"The
profession
is idiotic," Gunny injected.

"She asked me if I didn't want to seize the opportunity to influence the public's opinion of me? I told her no, that most of what she calls the public doesn't have the capacity to form an opinion and she wasn't demonstrating any better thinking ability herself. I believe she may have taken offense at that."

"The woman is an Earthie, in every way that offends me."

"If it offends her she can always call you out," April said.

"Can she? She's new. I don't know if she has assumed citizenship. That's the question the fellow who Dakota accosted in the corridor raised. I think when he doesn't show tomorrow she'll ask to bring it before the Assembly."

"I don't know if Muños will even call an Assembly for a non-citizen. I'm hoping he ignores it and after a night's sleep she has some sense and drops it."

Chen got himself under control again sufficiently to look at the map again. "This is going from bad to worse. The computer says we have over eight hundred separate large thermal events. Some of those are multiples that have merged and we have a lot of aircraft up running sorties on who knows what as targets. We have low level thermal images that suggest armor is being moved and civilian airliners have grounded themselves, some on short fields they probably can't take off from again, but they sat down to get out of danger in the air. I see a lot of road traffic leaving the cities. A few places the roads are gridlocked and the vehicles abandoned. Other places they have pulled off the road. Probably stopped by local authorities. This isn't going to sort out in a day. It's going to be a weeks before most of it can be unraveled even if everybody stood down right now."

"I'm not going to stay up late and get so fatigued I can't make good decisions," Jeff said. "I made that mistake before, but fortunately April and Heather had the good sense to stop me. I want you to record
everything
we are sensing. Lease or buy memory or on station storage if this goes on days. You shouldn't run yourself ragged either. I can get my man Louis to come sit the board. I'll text him right now. He has experience at this sort of a crisis watch. He won't wake me up unless I really need to see something, or act. Has Eddie said anything?" he asked Chen.