Ultimatum

by Matthew Glass

  The president looked around. There was an exasperated, confused shaking of heads.

  “Mr. President,” said Olsen, “all I can say is, if we do this, we’re the ones who are blinking. We’re the ones backing down. And we don’t need to. What we’re doing is working.”

  “They’re not moving their forces, sir,” said MacMahon. “I agree with Larry.”

  “Maybe they’re still preparing,” said Ball.

  Enderlich shook his head. “They’re ready. We know their numbers.”

  “We need to stand firm,” said Olsen. “Keep our forces in position, ready to fight. If we’re ready to fight, we won’t have to.”

  “And what if we have to fight?” said Benton.

  “Then we will,” said MacMahon.

  The president nodded. “I’ve had the statement drawn up.”

  Ben Hoffman got up and handed out a set of papers.

  “What is this?” said Olsen. “Who have you been consulting?” He started to read his copy. “You’re really going to put this out?”

  “They need a way out and this is going to give it to them without any bloodshed,” said Benton.

  “Except the bloodshed when they take over twenty-six million people on Taiwan,” muttered MacMahon.

  “Who said there’ll be bloodshed?”

  “They’re not exactly best friends, Beijing and Taipei.”

  “Well, frankly, I’ll take my chances with that. Any day of the week, I’ll trade whatever happens there for the welfare of millions of Americans whose lives are going to be destroyed if we can’t get agreement on Carbon.”

  “And what if—”

  “I’ve said this is it!” Benton slammed the table. “There are a thousand what-ifs. I’ve decided this is what I’m going to do. I’m going to call President Tan and let him know, and then Jodie’s putting this statement out. Now I want you all to look at it and tell me if you think we need to change anything.”

  “I just think this is the biggest mistake we can make,” said Larry Olsen.

  “Noted.” Joe Benton looked around at the others to see if they had anything to add. “Okay. I know you’ll all do your best to support it.”

  Three hours later, the statement was issued. Overnight, an American F-42 was blown out of the sky over the South China Sea. The Chinese authorities claimed the plane had entered Chinese airspace and failed to turn back after repeated warnings. They described it as aggression amounting to an act of war.

  No one knew whether that was Beijing’s response to Benton’s statement or the lucky shot of a trigger-happy pilot.

  ~ * ~

  Thursday, October 27

  Family Residence, The White House

  Joe Benton sat on the edge of the bed. He was haggard, exhausted. He felt as if he hadn’t slept in a month. He stared at the floor, at his feet in their blue slippers.

  He could feel himself being dragged into war. It seemed inexorable. It was like a nightmare, a closed, stifling nightmare world of briefings and intelligence and speculation and escalating incidents with the Chinese that somehow he couldn’t bring to an end. What did they want? No matter what he did, what he said, they wouldn’t stop. UN Secretary-General Nleki had offered to mediate, but China refused to recognize the right of the UN to involve itself in events concerning Taiwan. The Chinese had said they would boycott a Security Council debate that was scheduled for Friday. At home, everywhere Benton looked, there was division and acrimony. In Congress, in the press, among his own advisors. On Capitol Hill, there was talk of a Democrat-backed resolution urging restraint on the president and a Republican-backed resolution demanding defense of Taiwan. Half the media seemed to be consumed by war lust, as if Taiwan was the fifty-first state. The other half excoriated him for even having troops in the region.

  His presidency wasn’t supposed to be like this. It was supposed to be about setting policy and getting legislation sponsored and cajoling congressmen and all the stuff he’d seen from the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue for so many years. It was supposed to be about dealing in a civilized fashion with civilized leaders from other countries. It wasn’t meant to be about launching an attack on China.

  He couldn’t come to grips with it, how he had got to this point. It was so hard to step outside it and understand. Where had he gone wrong? Had he gone wrong? Maybe he had been too much influenced by Larry Olsen. Olsen and Ball, he understood from John Eales, were barely on speaking terms outside meetings. They were barely on speaking terms in meetings, either. If he hadn’t invited Olsen into his administration, he felt, he wouldn’t be in this position. He would still be talking with the Chinese, with everybody, in some kind of Kyoto preparatory process. And everyone would still be temporizing. At what point would he have concluded that he had to do something radical? If it was coming to a clash now, then at some point it would always have had to come to a clash. Or would it? Maybe a more skillful president would have handled it better. Might have skirted this abyss that was opening at his feet.

  A series of foreign leaders had been on the phone to him over the last two days, urging him to withdraw American forces from East Asia and promising him they were speaking to the Chinese government and asking them to pull back their forces as well. That was another thing that was making him wonder. Maybe they were right and he was wrong. Maybe he’d lost his judgment, lost his bearings over the past weeks. He continued to question whether he was up te the job. A few times, he had wondered whether he should resign. That would leave Angela Chavez in charge. Would Angela do a better job? He had put her on the ticket largely for the Latino vote, but she was shrewd and competent. Yet these foreign leaders who were talking to him, telling him to withdraw, they were the same leaders who had refused to take his calls after he announced the Carbon Plan. And still they slipped and slithered when he asked for a commitment. It wasn’t the content they disputed, they said, it was the manner in which he had presented it. Well, one thing Joe Benton knew for certain, the Carbon Plan was right. That was about the last thing he knew absolutely, the one thing he could hold onto while everything else seemed to be spiralling crazily away. So how could he back down now if he couldn’t get the commitment of any other leader? How much more desperate did things need to be before they’d understand?

  But he would have to launch an attack. That was what was going to happen. He knew it.

  Heather watched him. “Joe?” she said.

  He looked around at her.

  “Honey, are you okay?”

  The president shrugged. The burden felt heavy. Too heavy.

  “Is there anything you could have done differently?”

  So many things. “It’s ironic. Everyone used to think there’d be wars over resources. Remember? Everyone used to say, the oil’s going to run out, we’ll end up fighting China for it. We should have realized, the clash wasn’t going to be over the resources, but over the emissions.”

  “Are we going to fight them?” asked Heather quietly.

  Benton was silent.

  “Are you going to Congress?”

  “Erin doesn’t think I need to. Not yet. There’s ambiguity in the wording of the War Powers Act, and anyway, the executive has never accepted Congress’s rights under the bill. They were supposed to clear it up after Iraq, remember? But they never got around to it.”

  “Shawcross got approval for Colombia, didn’t he?”

  “Doesn’t mean I have to now, not for what we’re planning.”

  Heather nodded. “Can I ask what that is?”

  Benton heaved a troubled sigh. “Something limited. It’s not a war. A strike, something aimed at a military target. A runway, a hangar. We’re not looking for casualties. I’ve hauled back hard on MacMahon and Enderlich, but we have to do something. Our forces are being attacked in international airspace. There are incidents every few hours now. One man’s dead, another three are missing. We can’t let that go unanswered.”

  “What about the UN?”

  “We need to deal with this with
force. On this, I’m on Enderlich’s side.”

  Heather nodded. “So we attack. What happens then?”

  “One all. They back down, so do we.” The president’s voice was despondent as he said it.

  Heather’s face was grim. “What if they don’t?”

  “We scuffle. It draws to some kind of close. They make a noise about having protected their homeland. We make noise about having prevented aggression against Taiwan. Both sides get to slant it as a win.”

  “Don’t they attack Taiwan?”

  “It doesn’t look like it.” Joe Benton frowned. “I really don’t know what’s going on inside their heads. They’ve had days. They’ve waited so long, our troops are just about as close as they can be without physically hanging out in downtown Taipei. It doesn’t look like they want to invade.”

  “Yet they want to mess with us?”

  Benton shrugged. “It’s crazy.”

  “What if we get bogged down? Like a Vietnam? Like an Iraq?”

  “You can’t get tied down against a country like China. You just skirmish. Going all out is too horrible for anyone to contemplate.” Benton paused. “There’ll be more loss of life somewhere along the line, Heather. We’ve got to be prepared for that. But I think the American people will accept it if our forces are being attacked. And they are being attacked, genuinely.”

  Heather shook her head. “It seems pointless.”

  “I agree.” Benton sighed deeply again. “Well, I guess it’s not pointless if it allows us to come back and make something happen. It won’t be in vain if we get them signed up to the plan. When this little scuffle is over we come back, offer them Taiwan again in response to them doing the deal on emissions. By then, hopefully, when other leaders have seen how far this has gone and how determined we are, that’ll be enough. Maybe we just have to be prepared to go to the brink to make them see it. I’m talking to Gorodin again tonight. If we can get Gorodin on board, that’s the difference. Turn off the lights in China and it’s over. He just needs to see this is really a matter of life or death for us. For all of us. Maybe our action is going to make them all see that. I don’t know. Maybe this is what it takes.”

  Heather frowned, deeply disturbed. “You’ve decided, then?”

  “I’m going to try to get one more message to Wen.”

  “Will he take a call?”

  “No. I’ll have to use another channel. I keep thinking about Kennedy and Khrushchev during the missile crisis. That’s seventy years ago, but we have exactly the same problem. Communication.”

  Heather looked at him in alarm. “There isn’t a nuclear risk here, is there?”

  “It’ll be conventional. They know the kind of retaliation we’d launch. Complete devastation. That’s the doctrine, and they know it.”

  “Is that what would really happen?”

  Benton shook his head wearily. “Only if I’m disabled. I have sixty minutes to decide on how much and how quickly we retaliate. Otherwise, there is an automatic, all-out response. But they don’t know that. They think it’s predetermined, all or nothing. One strike, ten strikes, a hundred, we respond the same. Massive, overpowering.”

  “But we don’t?” said Heather. “Not necessarily?”

  “Not necessarily, but that’s not what we say. You’d have to be a hell of gambler to test it.”

  ~ * ~

  Friday, October 28

  Oval Office, The White House

  F. William Knight looked ill. Thinner than the last time Joe Benton had seen him. He was gaunt, his eyes haunted.

  He listened to what the president had to say. Ben Hoffman and John Eales watched him closely. It was possible that Knight would refuse to go through with it. It was possible he felt too resentful toward the president, who seemed to have precipitated this crisis.

  But they knew no one who had a better chance of getting to Wen.

  “Tell me if you’re prepared to go,” said the president.

  “I haven’t seen President Wen since…” Knight cleared his throat.

  “Since he refused to see you last time?”

  Knight nodded.

  “But it’s still possible for you to let him know you want to see him?”

  “I think so.”

  “How do you do that, by the way?”

  “There’s a number,” replied Knight.

  “You call a number?”

  “That’s right. I call a number and I leave a message.”

  “You’re kidding,” said Ben Hoffman.

  Knight cleared his throat.

  “Maybe I should try that,” said the president. “Get around Ben here.”

  “What if he’s changed it?” asked Hoffman.

  “No,” said Knight. “Very few people have this number.”

  “I don’t suppose I could have it?” asked the president, only half jokingly.

  Knight cleared his throat. “I’ll try, Mr. President. I can’t tell you whether he’ll see me.”

  “We’ll put a plane at your disposal,” said Hoffman.

  “I’ve got my own.”

  “Let me give you an idea of the message you’ll be carrying,” said Benton.

  Knight looked at him, coolly, without a trace of emotion on his drawn features.

  “I’ll be saying to President Wen that the door is open for him. The emissions deal on the table is exactly the deal his people agreed before Ding turned up in Oslo. If he pulls his troops back—if he goes back to the Manila Understanding—and if he announces China will go with the Carbon Plan, we pull our troops back as well, and we will sit down and talk about Taiwan with a view to resolving the issue.”

  “I’m sorry, Mr. President,” said Knight. “What does that mean, resolving the issue? If you don’t mind telling me.”

  The president took a deep breath. “It means we’ll agree to the restoration of Chinese sovereignty to the island.”

  “The sovereignty of the People’s Republic,” said Hoffman.

  Knight cleared his throat. “What if he says no?”

  “You bring that message back to me.”

  “No, does your message tell him what will happen if he says no? Is it some kind of ultimatum?”

  The president looked at Eales.

  “We want to focus on how we can solve this crisis,” said Eales, “not on what happens if we can’t. We’re giving him an offer, a way to resolve this without bloodshed.”

  “If he wants to get Taiwan back,” said the president, “this is the way to do it. He won’t get it through aggression. You can tell him that, if he asks what I said. Is he likely to ask?”

  Knight nodded.

  “Then tell him that. If he wants Taiwan, there is a way, but not by force. The United States can’t let that happen.”

  Knight cleared his throat. “If you’ll excuse me, sir, it sounds like you’re holding him to ransom.”

  “How so?”

  “Well, you say he can have Taiwan, but he can have it only if he does something he doesn’t want to do.”

  “Mr. Knight, China has to be part of the Carbon Plan. None of us on the planet is immune from this. This isn’t about Taiwan. President Wen has to sign up whatever happens with that. But what I’m saying is, okay, the People’s Republic does have a legitimate historic issue over Taiwan, and having to do what we have to do on carbon is an extraordinarily difficult thing, it’s also a historic thing, so if we can come to some kind of agreement to allow a smooth and peaceful integration of Taiwan... if that helps him get his people on board with the Carbon Plan, okay, we’ll help him out. But the Carbon Plan’s the primary issue. Taiwan’s a sideshow.”

  “Not for him.”

  “It is for us. And that’s why we’re prepared to be flexible on this. But there’s no room for flexibility over the Carbon Plan. The Carbon Plan’s core.”

  There was silence.

  “All right,” said Knight.

  “You’ll take the message?”

  “I’ll try.”

  Joe Benton pi
cked up an envelope from his desk. Inside was a letter he had written in his own hand.

  F. William Knight took it. A car drove him to Reagan, where his plane was waiting. For the next thirteen hours, he was in the air to Beijing.

  For the next thirteen hours, Joe Benton was in meetings. The Joint Chiefs presented their plans, starting with a limited strike on the airbase in Guangxi province from which had come the plane that shot down an American pilot two days previously. They presented targets for additional strikes, should they prove necessary. There were three levels of escalation illustrated on maps in the situation room. The Joint Chiefs also talked through plans for defending Taiwan, should the president choose to order it. Joe Benton wondered whether an identical meeting was taking place somewhere in Beijing. He wondered what the maps there were showing.