Jack Ryan 11 - Bear And The Dragon (103 page)

“This just came in.” Ambassador Lewendowski handed over the fax. “Is this as bad as it looks?” The fax was headed EYES-ONLY PRESIDENT, but it had come into his embassy.

Ryan took the pages and started reading. “Probably. If the Russians need help via NATO, will the Poles throw in?”

“I don't know. I can ask.”

The President shook his head. “Too soon for that.”

“Did we bring the Russians into NATO with the knowledge of this?” The question showed concern that stopped short of outrage at the violation of diplomatic etiquette.

Ryan looked up. “What do you think?” He paused. “I need your secure phone.”

Forty minutes later, Jack and Cathy Ryan walked up the steps into their airplane for the ride home. SURGEON was not surprised to see her husband disappear into the aircraft's upper communications level, along with the Secretary of State. She suspected that her husband might have stolen a smoke or two up there, but she was asleep by the time he came back down.

For his part, Ryan wished he had, but couldn't find a smoker up there. The two who indulged had left their smokes in their luggage to avoid the temptation to violate USAF regulations. The President had a single drink and got into his seat, rocking it back for a nap, during which he found himself dreaming of Auschwitz, mixing it up with scenes remembered from Schindler's List. He awoke over Iceland, sweating, to see his wife's angelic sleeping face, and to remind himself that, bad as the world was, it wasn't quite that bad anymore. And his job was to keep it that way.

“Okay, is there any way to make them back off?” Robby Jackson asked the people assembled in the White House Situation Room.

Professor Weaver struck him as just one more academic, long of wind and short of conclusion. Jackson listened anyway. This guy knew more about the way the Chinese thought. He must. His explanation was about as incomprehensible as the thought processes he was attempting to make clear.

“Professor,” Jackson said finally, “that's all well and good, but what the hell does something that happened nine centuries ago tell us about today? These are Maoists, not royalists.”

“Ideology is usually just an excuse for behavior, Mr. Vice President, not a reason for it. Their motivations are the same today as they would have been under the Chin Dynasty, and they fear exactly the same thing': the revolt of the peasantry if the economy goes completely bad,” Weaver explained to this pilot, a technician, he thought, and decidedly not an intellectual. At least the President had some credentials as a historian, though they weren't impressive to the tenured Ivy League department chairman.

“Back to the real question here: What can we do to make them back off, short of war?”

“Telling them that we know of their plans might give them pause, but they will make their decision on the overall correlation of forces, which they evidently believe to be fully in their favor, judging from what I've been reading from this SORGE fellow.”

“So, they won't back off?” the VP asked.

“I cannot guarantee that,” Weaver answered.

“And blowing our source gets somebody killed,” Mary Pat Foley reminded the assembly.

“Which is just one life against many,” Weaver pointed out.

Remarkably, the DDO didn't leap across the table to rip his academic face off. She respected Weaver as an area specialist/consultant. But fundamentally he was one more ivory-tower theoretician who didn't consider the human lives that rode on decisions like that one. Real people had their lives end, and that was a big deal to those real people, even if it wasn't to this professor in his comfortable office in Providence, Rhode Island.

“It also cancels out a vital source of information in the event that they go forward anyway -- which could adversely affect our ability to deal with the real-world military threat, by the way.”

“There is that, I suppose,” Weaver conceded diffidently.

“Can the Russians stop them?” Jackson asked. General Moore took the question.

“It's six-five and pick 'em,” the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs answered. “The Chinese have a lot of combat power to unleash. The Russians have a lot of room to absorb it, but not the combat power to repel it per se. If I had to bet, I'd put my money on the PRC -- unless we come in. Our airpower could alter the equation somewhat, and if NATO comes in with ground forces, the odds change. It depends on what reinforcements we and the Russians can get into the theater.”

“Logistics?”

“A real problem,” Mickey Moore conceded. “It all comes down one railway line. It's double-tracked and electrified, but that's the only good news about it.”

“Does anybody know how to run an operation like that down a railroad? Hell, we haven't done it since the Civil War,” Jackson thought aloud.

“Just have to wait and see, sir, if it comes to that. The Russians have doubtless thought it over many times. We'll depend on them for that.”

“Great,” the Vice President muttered. A lifelong USN sailor, he didn't like depending on anything except people who spoke American and wore Navy Blue.

“If the variables were fully in our favor, the Chinese wouldn't be thinking about this operation as seriously as they evidently are.” Which was about as obvious as the value of a double play with the bases loaded and one out in the bottom of the ninth.

“The problem,” George Winston told them, “is that the prize is just too damned inviting. It's like the bank doors have been left open over a three-day weekend, and the local cops are on strike.”

“Jack keeps saying that a war of aggression is just an armed robbery writ large,” Jackson told them.

“That's not far off,” SecTreas agreed. Professor Weaver thought the comparison overly simplistic, but what else could you expect of people like these?

“We can warn them off when we start seeing preparations on our overheads,” Ed Foley proposed. “Mickey, when will we start seeing that?”

“Conceivably, two days. Figure a week for them to get ramped up. Their forces are pretty well in theater already, and it's just a matter of getting them postured -- putting them all near their jump-off points. Then doing the final approach march will happen, oh, thirty-six hours before they start pulling the strings on their field guns.”

“And Ivan can't stop them?”

“At the border? Not a chance,” the general answered, with an emphatic shake of the head. “They'll have to play for time, trading land for time. The Chinese have a hell of a long trip to get the oil. That's their weakness, a huge flank to protect and a god-awful vulnerable logistics train. I'd look out for an airborne assault on either the gold or the oil fields. They don't have much in the way of airborne troops or airlift capacity, but you have to figure they'll try it anyway. They're both soft targets.”

“What can we send in?”

“First thing, a lot of air assets, fighters, fighter-bombers, and every aerial tanker we can scrape up. We may not be able to establish air superiority, but we can quickly deny it to them, make it a fifty-fifty proposition almost at once, and then start rolling their air force back. Again it's a question of numbers, Robby, and a question of how well their flyers are trained. Probably better than the Russians, just because they have more hours on the stick, but technically the Russians actually have generally better aircraft, and probably better doctrine -- except they haven't had the chance to practice it.”

Robby Jackson wanted to grumble that the situation had too many unknowns, but if there hadn't been, as Mickey Moore had just told him, the Chinese wouldn't be leaning on their northern border. Muggers went after little old ladies with their Social Security money, not cops who had just cashed their paychecks on the way home from work. There was much to be said for carrying a gun on the street, and as irrational as street crime or war-starting might be, those who did it were somewhat reflective in their choices.

Scott Adler hadn't slept at all on the flight, as he'd played over and over in his mind the question of how to stop a war from starting. That was the primary mission of a diplomat, wasn't it? Mainly he considered his shortcomings. As the prime foreign-affairs officer of his country, he was supposed to know -- he was paid to know -- what to say to people to deflect them from irrational actions. At base that could mean telling them, Do this and the full power and fury of America will descend on you and ruin your whole day. Better to cajole them into being reasonable, because in reasonableness was their best salvation as a nation in the global village. But the truth was that the Chinese thought in ways that he could not replicate within his own mind, and so he wasn't sure what to say to make them see the light. The worst part of all was that he'd met this Zhang guy in addition to Foreign Minister Shen, and all he knew for sure was that they did not look upon reality as he did. They saw blue where he saw green, and he couldn't understand their strange version of green well enough to explain it into blue. A small voice chided him for possible racism, but this situation was too far gone for political correctness. He had a war to stop, and he didn't know how. He ended up staring at the bulkhead in front of his comfortable glove-leather seat and wishing it was a movie screen. He felt like seeing a movie now, something to get his mind off the hamster wheel that just kept turning and turning. Then he felt a tap on his shoulder, and turned to see his President, who motioned him to the circular staircase to the upper level. Again they chased two Air Force communicators off their seats.

“Thinking over the newest SORGE?”

“Yep.” EAGLE nodded.

“Any ideas?”

The head moved in a different plane now. “No. Sorry, Jack, but it just isn't there. Maybe you need a new SecState.”

Ryan grunted. “No, just different enemies. The only thing I see is to tell them we know what they're up to, and that they'd better stop.”

“And when they tell us to shove it up our collective ass, then what?”

“You know what we need right now?” SWORDSMAN asked.

“Oh, yeah, a couple hundred Minuteman or Trident missiles would work just fine to show them the light. Unfortunately...”

“Unfortunately, we did away with them to make the world a safer place. Oops,” Ryan concluded.

“Well, we have the bombs and the aircraft to deliver them, and -- ”

“No!” Ryan hissed. “No, God damn it, I will not initiate a nuclear war in order to stop a conventional one. How many people do you want me to kill?”

“Easy, Jack. It's my job to present options, remember? Not to advocate them -- not that one anyway.” He paused. “What did you think of Auschwitz?”

“It's the stuff of nightmares -- wait a minute, your parents, right?”

“My father -- Belzec in his case, and he lucked out and survived.”

“Does he talk about it?”

“Never. Not a single word, even to his rabbi. Maybe a pshrink. He went to one for a few years, but I never knew what for.”

“I can't let anything like that happen again. To stop that -- yeah, to stop that,” Ryan speculated aloud, “yeah, I might drop a B-83.”

“You know the lingo?”

“A little. I got briefed in a long time ago, the names for the hardware stuck in my mind. Funny thing, I've never had nightmares about that. Well, I've never read into the SIOP -- Single Integrated Operation Plan, the cookbook for ending the world. I think I'd eat a gun before I did that.”

“A whole lot of presidents had to think those things over,” Adler pointed out.

“Before my time, Scott, and they never expected them to happen anyway. They all figured they'd smart their way through it. 'Til Bob Fowler came along and damned near stumbled into calling in the codes. That was some wild Sunday night,” Ryan said, remembering.

“Yeah, I know the story. You kept your head screwed on straight. Not many others did.”

“Yeah. And look where it got me,” POTUS observed with a grim chuckle. He looked out a window. They were over land now, probably Labrador, lots of green and lakes, and few straight lines to show the hand of man on the land. “What do we do, Scott?”

“We try to warn them off. They'll do things we can see with satellites, and then we can call them on it. Our last play will be to tell them that Russia is an American ally now, and messing with Ivan means messing with Uncle Sam. If that doesn't stop them, nothing else will.”

“Offer some danegeld to buy them off?” the President wondered.

“A waste of time. I don't think it would work, but I'd be damned sure they'd see it as a sign of weakness and be encouraged by it. No, they respect strength, and we have to show them that. Then they'll react one way or another.”

“They're going to go,” Jack thought.

“Coin toss. Hope it comes up tails, buddy.”

“Yeah.” Ryan checked his watch. “Early morning in Beijing.”

“They'll be waking up and heading in for work,” Adler agreed. “What exactly can you tell me about this SORGE source?”

“Mary Pat hasn't told me much, probably best that way. One of the things I learned at Langley. You can know too much sometimes. Better not to know their faces, and especially their names.”

“In case something bad happens?”

“When it does, it's pretty bad. Don't want to think what these people would do. Their version of the Miranda warning is, 'You can scream all you want. We don't mind.'”

“Funny,” SecState thought.

“Actually it's not all that effective as an interrogation technique. They end up telling you exactly what you want to hear, and you end up dictating it to them instead of getting what they really know.”

“What about the appeals process?” Scott asked, with a yawn. Finally, belatedly, he was getting sleepy.

“In China? That's when the shooter asks if you prefer the left ear or the right ear.” Ryan stopped himself. Why was he making bad jokes on this subject?

The busy place in the Washington, D.C., area was the National Reconnaissance Office. A joint venture of CIA and the Pentagon, NRO ran the reconsats, the big camera birds circling the earth at low-medium altitude, looking down with their hugely expensive cameras that rivaled the precision and expense of the Hubble space telescope. There were three photo-birds up, circling the earth every two hours or so, and passing over the same spot twice a day each. There was also a radar-reconnaissance satellite that had much poorer resolution than the Lockheed- and TRW-made KH-11s, but which could see through clouds. This was important at the moment, because a cold front was tracing across the Chinese-Siberian border, and the clouds at its forward edge blanked out all visual light, much to the frustration of the NRO technicians and scientists whose multibillion-dollar satellites were useful only for weather forecasting at the moment. Cloudy with scattered showers, and chilly, temperature in the middle forties, dropping to just below freezing at night.