Razing Beijing: A Thriller (54 page)

“No plans to hang around and bathe in the aura of
accomplishment?”

The general secretary had already given his approval of
Deng’s post-leadership role. Rong’s inquiry had a disturbing ring to it. Deng
was suddenly impatient to return to his work. “I expect to continue my role in
international trade activities and so forth. Consulting for the commission
whenever it’s needed, that sort of thing.”

Rong strolled back from the windows wearing a contemplative
expression. “One should never underestimate one’s utility.” He took a sip from
his water and sat down heavily in his chair. “The future may belong to youth,
but you have much experience and wisdom that youth will need to build upon. You
don’t consider your age and experience a handicap, do you?”

Deng forced a grin. “I don’t see your point.”

“Our culture has always been somewhat dismissive of the
potential of the handicapped. Take, say, the historic valor of Zheng He. Here
was a man whose accomplishments are as yet unmatched—voyaging out over the
oceans, scouring the hemisphere on behalf of the Middle Kingdom, centuries,
dynasties before we would ever again give a damn about the rest of the world,
let alone rebuilding our blue-water navy. Did you know that China once claimed
over 6,500 sailing vessels?”

If for some reason Rong wished to indulge in a history debate,
Deng was willing to oblige him. “The Ming emperor lost interest in trade, and
the knowledge of how to build such ships was subsequently lost.”
What
handicap...?

“Precisely! Then you see the analogy?” A smile.

Deng suddenly remembered that Admiral He Zheng was known as
the Three Jeweled Eunuch, a man castrated before earning the emperor’s trust. He
rose from his chair. “I have a flight back to Xichang this afternoon.”

“Thank you for taking time from your very busy schedule. Perhaps
you and your family would enjoy an evening at dinner, attending the theater?”

“That’s thoughtful, but no.”

“Don’t forget that the commission has a villa at your
disposal in Bedhaie. You and your family must use it.”

“Perhaps after our successful demonstration.” Deng proceeded
to leave, determined not to reveal the slightest indication of a limp.

“Comrade Deng?”

Deng stopped and turned.

“Your son keeps an interesting circle of friends.”

Deng felt a chill pass over him.

“But I would really like to hear sometime of your grandson.
I am told he’s a very bright boy. I hope you are planning to aim high for his
education.”

Without a word, Deng turned and headed out the door.

THROUGHOUT HIS FLIGHT
later
that evening, Deng vacillated between placing the call and leaving the man out
of it. In the end, he had the driver deliver him directly to the Xichang
apartment complex. As he had hoped, a light was still burning inside. He
decided it was probably okay to knock.

“Commissioner Deng?” The renowned physicist answered the
door looking startled but awake—and fully dressed, Deng saw, at 12:12 in the
morning.

“I’m sorry if I disturbed you.”

“Not at all.” Zhao invited him in.

“I do not want to wake-up your wife. Would you prefer we go
for a stroll...?”

“My wife is not presently home. Please, come in.”

Upon entering the modest flat, Deng noted that Zhao had not
asked why he was there. Zhao motioned them toward the sofa.

“It is late and so I will simply get to the point. I have
been troubled with the explanation of your recent whereabouts.” Deng studied
Zhao’s haggard face. “How are you feeling?”

“What is not to understand? Would you care to inspect my
medical records?”

Deng knew well that records could be falsified. “I am
asking you directly where you were.”

“Please...what do you hope to achieve by this?”

“I am chief administrator of the most security-sensitive
project in China. It is my business to know where the country’s top particle
physicist disappeared to, and as it happens, during the most critical...” He
waited with surprise as Zhao held his face in his hands.

“You don’t understand,” said Zhao softly, whose lowered
hands revealed his anguish. “If I am not cooperating, then...”

“Then perhaps you’d better cooperate.” Deng glanced quickly
around the small studio. A moment later he handed the back of a used envelope
and a pencil to Zhao, who scribbled out a few words:
They have my wife. I just
came from there, she is still very sick. They threaten to stop importing her
medicines.

Deng read the words with alarm. He handed the envelope back
to Zhao. “Very well, if you insist on being stubborn. But please remember that
I am not in a position to tolerate your further dereliction of duty. We do have
a schedule to keep, and I expect to see you in early.” On his way to the door,
Deng placed a consoling hand on Zhao’s shoulder.

Wednesday, June 24

South China Sea

IN AN ERA OF ELECTIVE
plastic surgery among teenage youth, Clifford Gooey’s flirtation with a
welterweight boxing career need not have left either his nose or the concha of
his ears permanently deformed. But as the damage was done, the rebellious son
of a prominent Canberra barrister had used the personal bludgeoning as a convenient
means of thwarting the respectable courtroom career expected of him. Now a
senior officer in the Australian Secret Intelligence Organization, his scars
precluded all but a supervisory role in clandestine field operations. This was
alright by him, though approaching seven weeks away from a wife he adored and
two young boys of his own, it occurred to Clifford Gooey that perhaps he
should’ve taken his father’s advice. Worse yet, the blasted American warship
was gyrating like an amusement ride; even six-hundred feet and 9600 tons of
steel was no match for the frothy fury of a following sea. As a salt-sipping
Australian, Gooey was accustomed to mountainous rollers—but
not
the
isolation of the combat information center, a dark and windowless box where he
and his navy charges spent most of their time, where every object not a
computer display or button to push was painted the same pale,
sensory-deprivation green.
Well
, Gooey reminded himself,
at least I’m
not wasting away in a courtroom
.

Another rogue wave drove the hull of the cruiser
USS
Cowpens
into a gut-wrenching corkscrew and Gooey reached for a handhold. His
movement caught the eye of the radar systems controller, Petty Officer
Third-class Kevin Stayner. Stayner slid back his headset, cranked his neck
around and looked up into the pale face staring down at him. “You feeling okay,
Mr. Gooey?”

Gooey detected the hint of a smile. “Why the fuck shouldn’t
I?”

The United States and Royal Australian navies had long
shared a stabilizing presence in the South China Sea’s critically important
‘sea lanes of communication.’ Every sovereign nation on Earth had an economic
stake in seeing them free and open. Even supertankers were susceptible to
piracy in the SLOC, as the distress signal early that morning had shown. Petty
Officer Stayner was among the few aboard
Cowpens
briefed on Clifford
Gooey’s actual mission. Stayner’s responsibility as radar systems controller
was to designate contacts of interest and hand them off for tracking and
surveillance. Designated ‘targets’ were tracked by the AN/SPY-1D(V) phased
array and monitored by a team assigned to the Aegis tactical display. As
Cowpens
was conducting routine shipping lane surveillance, there were presently
twenty-three such targets. Stayner called up a page on his interactive display
and scrolled down to those of interest to Gooey. On the screen beside each, he
pressed the tip of an electronic wand.

Both men looked toward the wall-size display to their
right. Highlighted there beneath two alpha-numeric designations was a summary
of what Gooey had resignedly stumbled into the CIC to observe. Target
Echo-Five-Alpha
was identified as a commercial freighter, cruising a leisurely sixteen nautical
miles abeam of
Cowpens
. The freighter put to sea several days earlier
from the North Korean port of Namp’o; Gooey and a handful of others believed it
to be enroute to Bandar e Abbas, Iran. Working with US Naval Intelligence,
Gooey had persuaded the captain of
Cowpens
to shadow the ship all the
way through the Strait of Malacca to the Bay of Bengal, whereupon it was
Gooey’s desire that
USS Shiloh
or another such Aegis-equipped warship
take over surveillance. He hoped by then to convince the appropriate command
that his freighter carried more than the petroleum pipeline supplies listed on
its manifest.

There was the matter of Stayner’s other highlighted target.
Echo-Niner-Foxtrot
was identified as a diesel electric submarine
belonging to the People’s Republic of China, a
kilo
class acquired by
the PLA years ago from the Russian Federation and already catalogued by the
United States Navy. An American spy satellite, and subsequently
Cowpens
towed sonar array, had monitored the sub after putting to sea out of Shantou,
China, south of the Taiwan Strait.

“Niner-Foxtrot’s holding a fairly steady 31,000 yards
behind our wake. Question is, who are they following?”

“Well I guess that’s always the question,” Gooey replied. There
was actually little question in Gooey’s mind that the sub would follow the
North Korean on through the SLOC and into the Indian Ocean. Confirmation might
lend credence to the accuracy of intelligence regarding her cargo. Exactly why
the Chinese were choosing to follow was not nearly as clear.

A related concern had influenced the decision for
Cowpens
not to tail the freighter through the Strait, the captain choosing instead to
shadow its progress from east of the Taiwan coast. Whether or not they had
tricked the freighter’s captain could not be known.

“Mind giving a shout if anything changes?”

Stayner nodded. “I’ll be certain to, sir.”

“Oh. I wouldn’t let this rolling motion get to you. It’s
liable to stop in a day or two.”

Stayner laughed. “Thank God for that, sir.”

Gooey slapped the young man on the shoulder and
straightened to leave. How Stayner, along with the dozen or so sailors who
monitored the ship’s various sensors, withstood the room’s pitching and
rolling, he hadn’t a clue. While entering the hatchway he nearly ran into the
slender young woman whom he knew to be the command systems controller. She pressed
a note into Gooey’s hand.

“Blast,” Gooey muttered upon reading it.

Bounding up the ladder topside, already Gooey heard the
descending pitch of the turbines that powered the ship. He found relief in
neither the invigorating breeze nor the steady horizon while marching toward
the hatchway into the bridge.

Gooey found who he was looking for, a U.S. naval
intelligence officer by the name of Lieutenant Anthony Scianni, seated beside
the ship’s captain.

“We had an EP-3 perform a fly-by.” Scianni jutted his chin
toward a folder. “You’re not going to like what they found.”

Gooey opened the folder and spread out on the table a
series of plots, which at first glance meant little to him. There were several
photographs of the North Korean freighter steaming under its Liberian flag and
large, white oriental characters over her transom, which translated to English
as
Silver Wind
. He was noticing something odd when Scianni reached to
arrange one of several data plots with two of the photographs taken beneath the
same cumulous cloud-covered sky.

“These were all collected within the last couple of days,”
Scianni confirmed.

“Magnetometer data,” Gooey observed.

“Yep. We’ve been building a database using the Aries’
cesium magnetometer for a few years,” Scianni explained. “We observe each ship
as close to empty as possible in order to establish a baseline.”

“Some never sail really all that empty,” Captain McCardle
added, “but most of them have, including your North Korean.”

Gooey closely examined the odd photograph of the set—the
freighter appeared high in the water compared to those more recently taken. “The
plots go together with these?”

“Notice anything strange?” asked McCardle.

He did. The magnetometer plots were nearly identical, yet
the photographs clearly indicated displacement; she had cargo aboard. Gooey
looked up to find the two men studying him closely. “How discerning is this
magnetometer of yours?”

“It’s actually pretty good. The freighter’s empty
displacement—what’s it say?” Scianni glanced at the ‘empty cargo’ magnetometer
plot in front of Gooey. “The magnetometer specs out better than a quarter per
cent accuracy, so at sixty-five hundred tons...call it plus or minus eight
tons.”

Gooey absently squeezed the soft and flattened bridge of
his nose. “Must be a mistake. Look at the photo—this tub’s laden down. Surely
you know to measure the displaced difference, and estimate—”

“Judging by her waterline now, we figure she’s hauling
maybe one-forty to one-sixty tons.” Scianni shook his head. “Your source said
missile components intermixed with petroleum pipeline supplies? Whatever’s
weighing her down, ferrous it ain’t.”

Gooey’s source had provided him with two grainy photographs
taken by the stevedore dockside in Namp’o, revealing small but unmistakable
slivers of an engine nozzle cluster. The data had cost the Australian taxpayers
a personal fortune, at least in North Korean terms. “My sources say the
manifest lists pipeline supplies, but that they only loaded a single container
of it in the event of boarding inspection.”