by Fritz Galt
She glared across the city at the area where the government buildings sat. “Yes, it’s got to be someone in government and outside the China News Agency. I’ll have to find out more from Kevin Yew.”
“Natalie.”
“Yes.”
“Just drop it.”
The torrent of thoughts came to a sudden halt. She fell back into her chair. Mick was right. He was smart to advise staying clear of such delicate matters. She should shut up and stick to her job before she made things worse.
“Honey,” she said, trying to change the subject. “Where’s our car?”
Paul Townsend caught Secretary of State Zenia Armbruster’s attention at the end of the mid-week staff meeting.
Instead of her telling him what to do, as she tended to do, he was making a request.
A petite black grandmother with a stern face and a passion for humanitarian causes in the Third World, Zenia wasn’t likely to give a China hand more than a few seconds of her time.
“Madam Secretary, I just heard from our director in Taiwan, and he’s extremely worried about a recent incident there.”
“Aren’t we all.”
“I mean, one of his staff let some comments slip.”
“And the thing blew up in her face,” she completed his thought. “The press is reporting a change in American policy.”
“How did you know—”
“So advise me. What should we do?”
“I was thinking that President Damon should be made aware. Perhaps he could reiterate our commitment to Taiwan’s defense in some public statement.”
“He’s going to Philadelphia to inaugurate a community center today. Would that be an appropriate venue to bring it up?”
“Not exactly.” He thought fast. “Maybe you could mention it to the national security advisor.”
“Draft me remarks,” she said. “I’ll pass them along.”
And she was out of the room.
Natalie took a deep breath and tried to relax. Her eyes fell on gray clouds churning on the southern horizon. Mick was no longer answering her questions.
“Mick?”
“New subject, I hope?”
“You might think I’m getting in over my head, but how about Alec?”
“What about Alec?”
“For instance, who tried to kill him?”
He shifted uncomfortably. “Someone tried to kill Alec?”
“Come on. Don’t give me that poker face. I know you briefed the director on it.” She sat up and downed another gulp of his Coke. “Professor Lien says it’s a man from the mainland.”
“You talked with Professor Lien?”
She stared straight through his large, brown eyes.
He relented with an enormous sigh. “Here, read this.” He folded the paper to the third page, the local news.
A brief article described a climbing accident in Yangmingshan National Park. The victim was identified as an illegal alien from China’s Fujian Province.
“In truth,” he explained, “two men attacked Alec, and he inadvertently sent one of them flying off a cliff. He didn’t mean to do it, but the men seemed intent on—”
“Why didn’t you tell me this before?” She recalled the previous evening when he had called off a romantic dinner over a Mongolian hot pot and rushed off to AIT for one of his secret rendezvous.
“I didn’t mention it for the same reason you didn’t mention your speech. I didn’t think it was a big deal.”
“Big deal? An attempt on your brother’s life isn’t a big deal?” She took a deep breath to calm down. “What do the men have against him, anyway?”
“He has no idea and neither do I.”
A slight breeze stirred the newspaper in her hands. She lowered it and closed her eyes.
The abrasive noise of a steam shovel competed with a jackhammer. Across the street, old veterans sat along the sidewalk, laughing. Scooters beeped and roared by. Something ominous was in the air, and yet most people seemed unaware of it.
“Okay, listen,” she finally said. “Professor Lien came to AIT today. He was all shaky. He’s worried about another one of those nebulous mainland connections. He said that Alec’s diving expedition may be another mainland operation.”
“I don’t know anything about it.”
She was still bewildered by the professor’s secretive behavior. “I didn’t know that Lien was one of ‘your’ guys.”
He nodded. “Off the record, he used to be more active. Strange that he’s suddenly back in business. He probably doesn’t know who to turn to.”
She dropped the newspaper and rested her forehead in her hands. “All these old fossils seem to be crawling out of their graves. It scares me. It’s like an invasion of the walking dead.”
“They were the ones who tore apart their families and their lives to evade the Communists. They carried the national treasures to Taiwan on their backs. They fought on the front lines both there and here. They defended this island from the Reds. They’re the last generation to remember all the hardship and loss.”
“But I’m afraid that their thinking is slightly out of step with the times.”
“We’ll see who gets elected governor of Taiwan Province next month. The old-timers may garner more votes than anyone expects.”
“I just can’t tell how much is paranoia, how much is hype and how much is for real,” she said.
“I don’t know either. But paranoia has driven foreign policy here since 1949.”
“Even if I can’t justify it,” she said, searching his distracted eyes. “I think Alec should take the threat seriously for his own sake. Can you contact him?”
“Sure. I’ll talk to him.”
She felt a steady breeze from the east. The wind would sweep all the pollution out of the city and bring the people bright sunshine and relief. But that was usually a precursor to a typhoon.
Mick took her by the hand. She felt she had gotten everything off her chest for the day, so she jumped back into his lap.
He bobbled the newspaper, then let it drift to the tile floor.
The haze and smog had already cleared, and they were set for a spectacular sunset. The dormant volcano named Reclining Buddha Mountain was already a black silhouette to the west.
“Know what that peak reminds me of?” he said, also staring at the mountain.
“No. What?”
His hands slipped under her T-shirt and began to explore.
The red sun hung low over a hazy Victoria Harbour. Its rays stretched the shadow of Johnny Ouyang against his study wall into a taller and taller man. Then the telephone rang.
He grabbed it. “Wei?”
“It’s me,” the voice said.
It was his business partner, André. This time he was calling from a quiet room.
“I’ve got the authorization letter here in front of me,” the voice said. “It doesn’t have a dollar figure, but it does have General Li’s signature and the transaction number on it.”
“That’s enough to start the transactions,” Johnny said.
“It’s enough to blackmail Taiwan’s general for life.”
“That’s your business,” Johnny said, and checked his watch. It was fourteen hours before the bank opened. “Send the letter to me by overnight courier. Then tomorrow morning, I’ll access his HongkongBank account and divide it into twenty separate accounts, each under different names in different banks with different account numbers and different access codes to activate the transfers.”
“Why so complicated?”
“How else can you hide three hundred million dollars?”
There was a pause on the other end.
Finally the voice returned, this time sounding less sure. “That much?”
National Security Advisor Vic Padesco waited for everybody to clear out of the president’s cabin aboard Air Force One, en route to Philadelphia.
Finally he was alone with the president. “Think ‘China’ for a moment,” he said.
; He knew that the president’s mind was not on international affairs and defense matters at the moment. He would be cutting a ribbon that day and proposing a major new initiative for funding community-led projects in inner cities.
Vic, a rumpled, former general who treated Washington like an exercise in street warfare, had learned to pick his moments carefully. Jim Carroll, the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, had just left the private cabin to hobnob with reporters at the back of the plane. The gray-haired president’s broad red face seemed fresh and alert.
A marine colonel with combat experience in the Vietnam War, President Charles Damon had a predilection for international and defense related issues. The fact that Vic would have outranked him as a former four-star general gave them an awkward relationship, but mutual respect.
“Here’s a report from Taiwan, sir.”
“Taiwan?” The president gave a surprised growl. “I thought you said China.”
“Yes, the island—”
“Well be clear. There’s a big difference between China and Taiwan. I remember flying into Taipei one night and boy did I wake up the airwaves.”
“Why’s that, sir?”
The president had switched back to international relations with surprising speed. It seemed to come naturally to him.
“It was a routine mission from Japan, and by mistake I took the wrong approach flying into the American military airfield. It seems I flew right over Chiang Kai-shek’s personal residence. While he was home.”
“An inauspicious moment in your diplomatic career?”
“In fact it turned out to be quite auspicious. The old general invited me over for tea. Wanted to know who the hell had the balls to buzz his grounds. He also wanted to know about holes in his air defenses.”
Vic laughed. The president had at least one relevant anecdote for every country in the world.
“He had a nice wife, too,” the president went on.
“She’s still alive—”
“I see her whenever I get up to New York. Her place on Long Island is another fortress. Maintains a bit of her former glory and represents her people well. Damn well for a ninety-year-old lady.”
Vic studied the large, graying widower, the man who, out of sheer historic experience, commanded his nation’s respect. Taiwan was more of a personal issue with him than he thought.
“Well,” Vic said. “This report has something to do with maintaining Taiwan’s strong defenses.” He let the president scan the assistant secretary’s report on the press blooper.
“How seriously should I take this?” the president asked when he finished reading the report.
Vic scratched the back of his head. Any story about China and Taiwan was a thorny issue. Washington’s relations with Beijing were presently weak, communication not very frank.
“I don’t like sending up smoke signals, sir,” Vic said. “They’re always open to misinterpretation. I believe in strong messages.”
“To China, I take it.”
“That’s right, sir. Zenia Armbruster put it this way to me. ‘We don’t want another invasion of Kuwait on our hands.’”
“Damn right.”
For a moment, the president seemed committed to a course of action.
Just then, Jim Carroll strode into the cabin beaming broadly. The secretary of HUD was rubbing his hands with glee.
“This is going to be a big day, sir.”
SEA WARNINGS
Thursday
Chapter 13
Alec left the Lan Yu Resort on Orchid island before dawn. It felt wonderfully irresponsible to leave newspapers unread and cable news unwatched and head off to sea.
By 9:00, he stood on a dive platform with no land in sight. Small waves sprayed against his feet as he and another man played out an air hose.
A hundred feet below the surface, black-suited men with yellow scuba tanks spiraled downward with the hose.
The scuba divers were only allowed half an hour of bottom time, whereas the man in the diving helmet could last slightly longer and return to the surface more quickly. The downside was that the guy at the end of the oxygen hose had the mobility of a patient in traction.
It had been a hectic few weeks leading up to that dive. The remotely operated vehicle (ROV) had passed a battery of tests by engineers in the university swimming pool. They never got a chance to test her in seawater before Dr. Hu May-lin had made a command decision to take the ROV to sea and commence mapping.
Rover, as Alec and the crew affectionately dubbed her, moved steadily underwater. In her first hour, she had conducted several sweeps of the target area looking for natural pockets of geomagnetism, which would indicate a volcanic dome.
Trailing three nuclear magnetic resonance magnetometers behind her, Rover silently swam back and forth over a mile-long grid of the ocean floor, reporting magnetic anomalies back to the control ship, Dolphin.
Alec glanced at the Dolphin as she floated calmly several meters away. From inside the research vessel, May-lin and engineers would be huddled over controls, flying Rover at a depth of one hundred feet, viewing the progress through Rover’s single forward eye, a video camera.
Squinting in the early morning sunlight, Alec made out three white buoys that formed a huge triangle to pinpoint Rover’s location. The buoys carried transponders to sense sound pulses transmitted ten times a second by Rover. The control ship measured the time it took a signal to reach each transponder and triangulated Rover’s exact location and depth based on these measurements.
Although Rover and the tracking equipment didn’t represent a technological breakthrough, the scientists back at National Taiwan University who had designed and assembled them could be justifiably proud.
He looked across the dive platform, where his partner played out the air hose. He noticed a pale cast to the young grad student’s lips. The ocean’s surface was mildly turbulent that morning, but would not effect the operation below.
He smiled reassuringly at the young man, then turned to study the watery horizon. Things were working so smoothly, Rover could probably map the entire volcanic ridge off the east coast of Taiwan within a year.
Although previous magnetometer readings had produced a rough map of the magma brewing below the submerged mountain ridges, this baby’s readings were far more precise and sensitive. Since she operated underwater, often within several meters of the ocean floor, Rover could detect as little as three hundred pounds of iron embedded as deep as one mile in the earth’s crust.
Soon a picture of the dangerous fault line would emerge.
“Thanks anyway,” Mick said, and hung up the phone.
The Lan Yu Resort receptionist had assured him repeatedly that she would leave a message for Alec to call him as soon as he returned to the hotel.
With Natalie at work and a golf date on his calendar, Mick had a moment to relax. He sat down at the kitchen table to scan the local English-language paper. His story and Natalie’s were printed side by side. His headline read: “Murderer Eludes Taxis.” Hers read: “China Welcomes Warming in U.S. Relations.” Below that was a smaller headline: “Super Typhoon Ivan Zeros In.”
It looked like a bad news day. But he had to focus on his own case.
A large color photo showed several city blocks clogged with taxis. Below that, the article described a high-speed chase on the Sun Yat Sen Freeway and eventually into the busy Ming Shueng district. According to the story, taxi drivers had exhorted others around the city to join in pursuit.
An official cab company representative said, “It’s our civic duty to stop criminals in their tracks.”
Yeah, right. It was the exhilaration of the chase, not some sense of duty that got half the cabbies in Taipei involved. Revenge for a brother’s death had become briefly fun.
Rocky Ouyang, the owner of a pirate radio station that served as a voice for cab drivers, was quoted observing how strange it was that police had shown up only at the end of the chase.
The jab at the police w
as predictable. Rocky was well known on the island for more than his illegal radio station. He was also the most vocal champion of the opposition party.
A tinkling melody distracted Mick. It came from his closet. Then he remembered: he had left his mobile phone in his jacket.
Groping in the darkness, he found the phone.
A familiar female voice from MOFA, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, was on the line. “Tony wants to see you at his office.”
What did Tony have that wasn’t in the papers?
Also, Tony had Mick’s car. “Ma’am, I can’t get to MOFA withoug my car.”
“A driver will bring it around shortly.”
He would have to squeeze in some business before golf.
Natalie sat in Bronson Nichols’ office being chastised. Other chiefs of section at AIT sat in stony silence.
She yawned and waited for the director to finish his tirade.
“China has just issued a press release,” he said gruffly, “and I quote: ‘applauding the change in American thinking and welcoming Taiwan’s forthcoming steps toward rejoining the Motherland.’”
Larry Winters, a rational mid-career officer and head of the political section, shook his head. “What a fiasco.”
Natalie’s biggest fear was that the story would get the higher levels of the U.S. Government involved, thus blowing the whole thing out of proportion.
“Any reaction from the White House?” she asked.
She could visualize the president’s press secretary issuing a retraction or somehow countering the claims in the Chinese press release.
Bronson winced painfully. “Not even from the secretary of state.”
She let out a private sigh of relief. Someone in the White House was levelheaded enough not to overreact. Or were they simply indifferent?