“I still have no idea what the hell I’m doing here,” he muttered to himself. “The goddamned world’s gone quiet, temporarily. And I’m sitting here like a goddamned lapdog waiting for our esteemed but flakey leader to drag himself out of some fucking Beverly Hills swimming pool.”
Flakey. A complete flake. The words had been used about the President, over and over at that final meeting at the home of Admiral Scott Dunsmore, the wise and deceptively wealthy former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. Arnold Morgan could not understand what the fuss was about. Plenty of other NSAs had resigned, but, apparently, he was not permitted that basic human right.
Christ, everyone had been there. And no one had even informed him. He’d walked, stone-cold, into a room containing not only General Scannell, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, but two former chairmen, plus the Chief of Naval Operations, and the Commandant of the United States Marines. The Defense Secretary was there, two senior members of the Senate Armed Services Committee, including the vastly experienced Senator Ted Kennedy, whose unwavering patriotism and endless concern for his country made him always a natural leader among such men. Altogether there were four current members of the National Security Council in attendance.
Their joint mission was simple: to persuade Admiral Morgan to withdraw his resignation, and to remain in office until the Republican President’s second term was over. A few weeks previously, at the conclusion of a particularly dangerous and covert Naval operation in China, the President had demonstrated such shocking self-interest and lack of judgment that he could no longer be trusted to act in the strict interests of the USA.
The world was presently a volatile place, and no one needed to remind Admiral Morgan of that. But the man in the Oval Office was prone to appoint “yes-men” to influential positions, and now in the final two years of his presidency he tended to think only of himself and his image and popularity.
Without Admiral Morgan’s granite wall of reality and judgment in the crucible of international military affairs, the men in Admiral Dunsmore’s house that day were greatly concerned that a terrible and costly mistake might occur.
Looking back, Arnold Morgan could not remember precisely who had put into words the hitherto unspoken observation that the President was a “goddamned flake, and getting worse.” But he remembered a lot of nodding and no laughter. And he remembered their host, Admiral Dunsmore, turning to his old friend, the Senator from Massachussetts, and saying, “The trouble is he’s interested in military matters. And we cannot trust him. Talk to Arnold, Teddy. You’ll say it better than anyone else.”
He had, too. And at the conclusion of a short but moving few words from the silver-tongued sage of Hyannisport, Admiral Morgan had nodded, and said, curtly, “My resigation is withdrawn.”
And now he was “back at the factory.” And he was ruminating on the general calm that had existed in the world’s known trouble spots for the past month. The Middle East was for the moment serene. Terrorists in general seemed still to be on their Christmas break. India and Pakistan had temporarily ceased to threaten each other. And China, the Big Tiger, had been very quiet since last fall. Indeed, according to the satellite photographs, they were not even conducting fleet exercises near Taiwan, which made for a change. As for their new Xia III, there was no sign of the submarine leaving its jetty in Shanghai.
The only halfway-interesting piece of intelligence to come Admiral Morgan’s way since Christmas was a report put together by the CIA’s Russian desk. According to one of their field operators in Moscow, the Rosvoorouzhenie factory on the outskirts of the city was suddenly making large quantities of moored mines. This was regarded as unusual since Rosvoorouzhenie’s known expertise was in the production of seabed mines, the MDM series, particularly the lethal one-and-three-quarter-ton, ship-killing MDM-6, which can be laid through the torpedo tubes of a submarine.
Rosvoorouzhenie was now, apparently, making a lot of updated, custom-made PLT-3 mines, moored one-tonners, which can be laid either through torpedo tubes, or from surface ships. The CIA had no information about where the mines were going, if anywhere, but their man had been certain this was a very unusual development. Most Russian-made mines these days were strictly for export.
Admiral Morgan growled to himself, Now who the hell wants a damn large shipment of moored PLT-3s, eh? He chewed on the roast beef and pondered silently. He did not much like it. If the goddamned penniless Russians are building several hundred expensive mines, someone’s ordered ’em. And if someone’s ordered ’em, they plan to lay ’em, right? Otherwise they wouldn’t have ordered ’em.
Where? That’s what we wanna know. Who’s planning a nice little surprise minefield?
He finished his sandwich, sipped his coffee and frowned. When Kathy came back, he’d have her call Langley and make sure he was kept up to speed on Russian mine production. And if the overheads picked up any large mine shipments leaving any Russian seaports, he wanted to know about that. Immediately.
Just don’t want some fucking despot in a turban getting overly ambitious, right? The Admiral glared at the portrait of General MacArthur that hung in his office. Gotta watch ’em, Douglas. Right? Watch ’em, at all times.
0900 (local). January 23, 2007.
Renmin Dahuitang, the Great Hall of the People.
Tiananmen Square, Beijing
.
The largest government building in the world, home of the National People’s Congress, was locked, barred and bolted this Tuesday morning. All 561,800 square feet of it. Business was canceled. The public was banned. And there were more armed military guards patrolling the snow-covered western side of the square than anyone had seen since the 1989 Massacre of the Students.
Inside, there were more guards, patrolling the endless corridors. Sixteen of them stood motionless, with shouldered arms, in a square surrounding the only elevator that travels down to the brightly lit underground Operations Room, designated by the late Mao Zedong to be used only in the event of foreign attack on mainland China. The room was massively constructed in heavy cast-concrete. It was white painted, almost bare walled and functional, situated deep below the 5,000-seat banqueting hall.
Aside from the heavily armed members of the People’s Liberation Army, there were fewer than a dozen people being gently warmed by the Great Hall’s vast central heating system, designed to keep at bay the freezing outside temperatures that occasionally grip the Chinese capital at this time of year.
Today there were brutal north winds, right out of the high plateaux of the Inner Mongolian plains, and they were presently refrigerating this entire part of northern China. Snow coated the yellow roofs of the Forbidden City, out beyond the northeastern corner of the Great Hall. Sudden squalls hurled white drifts against the vermilion walls.
The Stream of Golden Water was frozen rock-solid beneath the five bridges in front of the towering Meridian Gate, the spectacular entrance once reserved for the Emperor alone. Tiananmen Square itself was under an immense blanket of white. The total absence of thousands of government workers gave the heart of Beijing a look of abandonment. It was windswept, quiet, deserted, like a great stadium after the games were over.
Inside the Ops Room there was an atmosphere of high tension. Standing at the far end of the room, next to a 10-foot-wide illuminated computer screen, was the formidable figure of Admiral Zhang Yushu, recently resigned from his position as Commander-in-Chief of the People’s Liberation Army/Navy, and now installed, by the Paramount Ruler himself, as the senior of the four Vice Chairmen of the all-powerful PLAN Council.
Eight weeks previously, Admiral Zhang had leapfrogged clean over the other three highly experienced members, and now occupied a position of such authority he answered only to the State President, the General Secretary of the Communist Party and the Chairman of the Military Affairs Commission—and that was all the same person. The Paramount Ruler had once occupied these three Highest Offices of State, and there were those who thought it was just a matter of time before Admir
al Zhang himself rose to such eminence. The Paramount Ruler would hear no word against him.
And now the Admiral addressed his audience for the first time, speaking carefully, welcoming them all to the most secretive meeting ever assembled in the 48-year history of the Great Hall—a gathering so clandestine they’d shut down the entire government for the day to avoid eavesdroppers.
Admiral Zhang’s three elderly colleagues on the Military Council, all ex-Army commanders, were in attendance. The new Commander-in-Chief of the Navy, Admiral Zu Jicai, was there, seated next to Admiral Yibo Yunsheng, the new Commander of China’s massive Northern Fleet. The Navy’s powerful Political Commissar, Vice Admiral Yang Zhenying, had arrived the previous night from Shanghai in company with the Chief of the Naval Staff, Vice Admiral Sang Ye.
The most influential of the Chinese Navy’s Deputy Commanders-in-Chief, Admiral Zhi-Heng Tan, was seated next to Zhang himself at the head of the broad mahogany table. Behind them was a single four-foot-high framed print of Mao Zedong, the great revolutionary whose only wish was for a supreme China to stand alone against the imperial West. The print was a replica of the giant portrait of Mao that gazes with chilling indifference across the square from the Tiananmen Gate. Today, it served to remind the Chinese High Command in this brightly lit room precisely who they really were.
The other three men in the room were Iranian: the most senior a black-robed, bearded Ayatollah, whose name was not announced. The two Naval officers accompanying the holy man were Rear Admiral Hossein Shafii, Head of Tactical Headquarters, Bandar Abbas; and Rear Admiral Mohammed Badr, the Iranian Navy’s Commander-in-Chief Submarines.
Admiral Zhang, who stood six feet tall, was by far the biggest and the most heavily built of the Chinese. But he spoke softly, in an uncharacteristic purr, a smile of friendship upon his wide impassive face. The language was English, which all three Iranians spoke fluently. The words were translated back into Chinese by Vice Admiral Yang who had, in his youth, studied for four years at UCLA.
“Gentlemen,” said Admiral Zhang Yushu, “as you are all well aware, the new Sino-Iranian pipeline from the great oil fields of Kazakhstan will come on stream within a few weeks. Thousands of barrels will flow daily, from out of Russia, right across your great country, south to the new Chinese refinery on the shores of the Hormuz Strait.
“This, gentlemen, should herald a new dawn for all of us, a dawn of vast profits for Iran, and thank God, an end to China’s endless reliance on the West, in the matter of fuel oil. The alliance of the past ten years between our two superb nations was, indeed, made in heaven.”
Admiral Zhang paused, and opened his arms wide. And he walked around to the right side of the huge table and stood beaming at the men from the desert. The Ayatollah himself stood first and took both of the Admiral’s hands in his own, wishing everyone the everlasting peace of Allah. Then the two Admirals from Bandar Abbas stood up and embraced the legendary Chinese Navy commander.
Zhang walked back to his position at the head of the table, and glanced briefly at his notes. He allowed a flicker of a frown to cross his face, but then he smiled again, and continued: “I have no need to remind anyone of the enormous cost of building this one-thousand-mile pipeline, and the construction of the refinery. It ran, of course, into billions of U.S. dollars.
“However, as of this moment, there is but one dark cloud on our horizon…and that is the extraordinarily low cost of a barrel of oil on the world market. Last night it was down to thirteen dollars and falling toward a ten-year low. The Arab nations cannot be controlled because of their reliance on American protection and commerce. Which leaves us to sell at a half, or even a third of our oil’s true value. Now, Iran is earning twenty percent of every barrel to reach the new refinery, and at present that’s under three dollars. It will thus cost your country millions and millions in unearned revenue every month.
“Gentlemen, I ask you. What is the solution? And I must remind you, this is a PLOT…a diabolical Western PLOT…to devalue our great economies…to allow them to dominate us, as they have always tried to do.”
Admiral Zhang’s voice had risen during this delivery. But now it fell very softly again to the calm, gentle tones of his welcome. “We have the solution, my friends. It is a solution we have discussed before, and I believe it is a solution that will find much favor with both of our governments.”
The Ayatollah looked genuinely perplexed. And he looked up quizzically.
Admiral Zhang smiled back, and without further ceremony, he said flatly, “I am proposing we lay a minefield deep in the historic, national waters of the Islamic State of Iran. Right across the Strait of Hormuz.”
Admiral Badr looked up sharply and said immediately, “My friend, Yushu, you have become a tried and trusted confidant of my nation. But I feel I must remind you we have considered many times a blockade of the Strait of Hormuz. But we have been frustrated for the same three reasons every time—one, the far side of the strait belongs to Oman, a country that is totally influenced by the American puppets in London.
“Two, we could never lay down a minefield quickly enough without being seen by the American satellites, which would surely bring down upon us the wrath of the Pentagon.
“And three, well, ultimately the Americans would clear it and paint us as lawless outcasts, enemies to the peaceful trading nations of the world. No good could come of it, not from our point of view.”
Admiral Zhang nodded, and asked for the forbearance of the meeting. “Mohammed,” he said, “all of your reasons are correct. But now times have changed. The stakes are much higher. You and I have different oil both to sell and to use. We also have an unbreakable joint interest, our own oil routes from the strait to the Far East. And you, Mohammed, have the entire backing of the People’s Liberation Army/Navy.
“Together we could most certainly lay down a minefield, using both submarines and surface ships. And we could achieve it so swiftly, no one would have the slightest idea who had done what.”
“But they would find out, surely?”
“They would not find out. Though they might guess. And they would not be in time. Because one day a big Western tanker is going to hit one of the mines and blow up, and for the next year oil prices will go through the roof, except for ours. Which will of course cost us just the same—almost nothing. But that which we sell will be worth a fortune, while the world’s tankers back up on both sides of the minefield, all of them afraid to go through. For a while, we’ll very nearly own the world market for fuel oil.”
Admiral Badr smiled and shook his head. “It’s a bold plan, Yushu. I’ll give you that. And I suppose it just might work. But my country, and my Navy, have been on the wrong end of the fury of the Pentagon before. And it is not a place we want to go again.”
“So has mine, Mohammed. But they are not invincible. And in the end they are a Godless society interested only in money. They will raise heaven and hell to free up the tanker routes to the gulf, but I think they will see it as a business problem, not cause for armed conflict. And besides they will not want an all-out shooting war in the gulf because that will just compound the oil problems and send prices even higher, and the sacred New York Stock Exchange even lower.”
“But, Yushu, if they suspect China is behind it, they may become very angry indeed.”
“True, Mohammed. True. But not sufficiently angry to want a war with us. That would send their precious stock market into free fall.
“No, my friends. The Americans will clear the minefield. Open up the tanker routes again, and send in heavy U.S. Naval muscle to make sure they stay cleared. By then we will have made vast sums of money, China and Iran. And, hopefully, many new friends, and customers, who will perhaps prefer to do business with us in future.
“One little minefield, Mohammed. Twenty miles wide. And we open a gateway to a glittering future together.”
Same day. Headquarters,
National Security Agency.
Fort Meade, Maryland.
Lieutenant Jimmy Ramshawe downloaded his computer screen for the umpteenth time that afternoon. As SOO (Security Ops Officer), his tasks included designating printouts to selected officers all over the ultrasecret labyrinth of the U.S. military Intelligence complex; a place so highly classified the walls had built-in copper shields to prevent any electronic eavesdropping.
The Lieutenant had been routinely bored by the entire procedure since lunchtime, sifting through screeds of messages, reports and signals from United States surveillance networks all over the world. But these two latest documents just in from the CIA’s Russian desk caught and held his attention:
Unusual activity in Rosvoorouzhenie mine production factory outside central Moscow. Three heavy transit military vehicles sighted leaving the plant, fully laden. Sighted again at Sheremetyevo II Airport, Moscow, two hours later. Then again leaving the airport 1400 EST, empty. Destination unknown.
From the precise same source another signal came in 94 minutes later at 1534 EST. Langley had so far offered no comment. Just the bald fact: “Russian Antonov 124 took off Moscow 2300, believed heading due east. Aircrew only, plus heavy cargo. AN-124 took 3,000 meters to liftoff. CIA field officer traces no flight plan. Inquiries continue.”
The Shark Mutiny (2001) Page 2