by Mark Henshaw
“Probably a safe bet,” Mitchell admitted. “Sorry you’re going to have to find a new station chief. Makes me wonder why they didn’t pick me up.”
“They’re still trying to pull apart the entire network, most likely,” Barron said. “We don’t know how long he’s been under surveillance. They could have been watching him for a year now, for all we know.”
“We can’t leave him hanging, boss,” Mitchell pleaded, his voice rising. “Twenty-five years has gotta count for something. We’ve gotta get him out.” His own emotion surprised him. He wasn’t a young man and thought he had mastered the art of keeping his feelings out of the way of his professional judgment a long time ago. It was a dangerous weakness and it disturbed him to see it in himself.
“It counts for a lot. We won’t hang him out to dry,” Barron said.
“I want to run the exfil to get him out.”
“No promises,” Barron said. “We don’t play the game stupid. When in doubt, get out. Live to fight another day.”
Mitchell frowned. The mantra had sounded smart the first time he’d heard it. Now it felt like a coward’s motto. “Words to stay out of jail by,” he said, not feeling the truth of them.
On the other side of the world, Barron nodded. Mitchell wasn’t a stupid man. He was always professional. “We’ll make sure Pioneer stays that way. I don’t care what anyone says, yes or no, we owe him. I’ll talk to Cooke.”
REPUBLIC OF CHINA SHIP (ROCS) MA KONG (DDG–1805)
TSO YING NAVAL BASE
KAOHSIUNG CITY, TAIWAN
Captain Wu Tai-cheng stared down at the bow of the Ma Kong, sucked in a lungful of the cold open air, and enjoyed the swell of pride that rose in his chest. The ship was lit up by the dockside lights, and the hard metal structures of the vessel’s radar masts made for a frightening image illuminated against the black sky as he turned his head to look up. His pride was entirely justified. This was a vessel to be feared. He knew it and the Chinese knew it. There were only four Kidd-class destroyers in the entire world, Taiwan owned them all, and he commanded one of them. The Americans had built them for the shah of Iran, but that corrupt old tyrant had lost his throne to the mullahs before taking delivery. So their builders had put them to use, calling them the Ayatollah-class as a joke. Wu’s ship had once been called the USS Chandler before the Taiwanese government bought it and its sister ships years before.
Ma Kong was not as capable as the Arleigh Burke–class destroyers that the Americans wouldn’t sell out of fear that the Chinese would be upset, but it was a deadly vessel in its own right. Its engines were quiet enough that it could hunt submarines, it carried the Harpoon missiles that could crack an enemy surface ship in half, and any plane within range of Ma Kong’s RIM-66 missiles and Phalanx guns lived only by Captain Wu’s good graces. Together, the four ships gave his country a considerable defense against the PLA’s air and naval forces. It irked Wu that the Americans still refused to sell his country its very best weapons, but Ma Kong still made the Chinese think twice, he was certain.
As Wu stared out past the dockyard perimeter toward the city lights, an entirely different emotion rose up inside him. Fools, he thought. The PLA had taken Kinmen in a day and the stupid fools who ran his country were cowering in their comfortable offices, dithering about what to do. “President” Liang—the man didn’t deserve the title in Wu’s opinion—was a fool. His arrogance had cost his people dearly, and now his fear of the Chinese was just raising the price they would have to pay to free their countrymen.
The dock to the ship’s port side was busy as the workers loaded ammunition, fuel, and other supplies aboard, but the process was going far too slowly. It had taken too long for even those orders to come down from Navy General Headquarters. Ma Kong should be in the Strait already, he thought, churning through the water at thirty knots toward that sacred island with her sisters and planes overhead to lay waste to any Chinese soldiers they could catch out in the open. He had ordered his chief engineer to fire up the ship’s four General Electric turbines in anticipation of that very order, which had yet to come. The other captains in port were acting more cautiously, but Wu was not such a man. The order would come, he was sure. It had to come. To let the Chinese have Kinmen without a fight would be inexcusable.
And if the order didn’t come before, the Americans would come to Taiwan with one or more of their carrier strike groups and then the order would come. With American ships and planes strengthening the rubber spines of the government bureaucrats, Ma Kong would finally put to sea and lend her strength to the US Navy’s strike groups, fighting alongside her former family of ships, and then the PLA would see the terrible mistake they had made.
He turned his back and walked aft toward the ship’s stern, stepping in and around the crates that were stacked up on the deck. He passed through the maze, enlisted men and junior officers parting before him to let him pass without a word, and finally arrived at the helipad, where deckhands were securing one of the ship’s two helicopters for transport, this one a Sikorsky S-70B Seahawk. Two of the Ma Kong’s RIM missile launchers were just beyond with a pair of engineers checking and double-checking them. Wu had told his crew in plain terms that very morning that their lives depended on those weapons in more ways than one. Wu set his course for them.
The deck was noisy tonight and so he didn’t hear the whistling sound until the last second. And then the night was lit up as the ship bucked underneath, tossing him across the deck along with boxes, crates, ropes, and bits of the men that were once part of his crew.
Wu crashed down flat on his back, almost at the stern, lucky his spine hadn’t broken, and it took him several seconds to realize that he could hear nothing. His eardrums were ruptured and his ears and nose were bleeding in a gusher. He pushed himself onto his side, mildly surprised that his arms were still working, and he tried to stagger to his feet. It took him three tries and he succeeded only when his blind groping led him to the stern railing. Then he managed to open his eyes.
The explosion had erupted amidship, just forward of the helipad, starboard side, tearing a hole in Ma Kong so large that he thought it might have ripped the ship almost in half. A fire blazed out of the hole, smoke rolling skyward into the deck lights, but he knew that wouldn’t last long. Part of the hole was below the waterline. Ma Kong was flooding. He prayed that the crew below was closing the watertight doors and starting the pumps, if they still worked. He couldn’t hear his own men screaming as they moved around the deck. He tried to yell an order but no one responded. Wu couldn’t hear his own voice and he wondered if the rest of his men were as deaf as he was.
He staggered forward and fell to his knees. His sense of balance was destroyed along with his eardrums, and he wondered whether Ma Kong wasn’t listing. If she had taken on that much water that fast, then she was surely dying, on her way to the bottom of the harbor, and some of his men caught below would drown. He pushed himself back to his feet and tried to move forward again to help the wounded, to organize the damage control parties or give the order to abandon ship. Then he began to fall forward again. An ensign caught him as he dropped to one knee.
The second explosion lifted them into the air and sent them both over the rail into the water. Wu managed to grab a quick breath of air before he plunged into the cold, black harbor. He found his mind strangely focused not on his own survival but on that of his ship. Had munitions on the deck cooked off? Did a fuel drum under pressure explode from the fire’s heat? Wu didn’t know. After a few seconds, something inside his mind told him to push for the surface, but he realized that he didn’t know where the surface was. His sense of balance told him nothing. He opened his eyes and managed to turn his head until he saw the dim light of the fire above the water. He tried to push up for that. His clothes were heavy with water and his broken bones made him want to pass out when he moved, but he finally managed to push his head above the surface.
Ma Kong’s entire aft section was burning. The Sikorsky helicopter was
a flaming wreck and everything else on the deck was engulfed. Wu saw that the men on the bow were throwing lines to the wounded in the water.
Wu’s head slipped under the water for a moment and he kicked his one good leg to surface. He managed to wave an arm and he saw one of the crew point in his direction. Then he went under a third time and found he didn’t have the strength to rise above the water again.
I’m going to drown.
A hand plunged into the water and grabbed his arm. Captain Wu Tai-cheng of the now-dead ROCS Ma Kong broke the surface of Tso Ying harbor and sucked in the cold salt air. His first thought was to question whether President Liang had another reason to be afraid of the Chinese that he hadn’t shared.
CHAPTER 9
MONDAY
DAY NINE
THE WHITE HOUSE
Truman called the Oval Office the “crown jewel of the American prison system,” but unlike most federal inmates, every president of the United States is allowed to decorate his cell to his personal tastes at the considerable expense of the taxpayers. Harry Stuart had been more frugal than most in that regard. The office now satisfied the colonial tastes that stemmed from his heritage as the eighth president from Virginia, but a few pieces were constants that carried over through administrations. The Resolute desk sat in its usual place at the room’s south end, flanked by Old Glory and a Seal of the President flag with gold curtains behind framing the window to the South Lawn. Stuart had raided the Smithsonian for Lincoln and Washington portraits and a Churchill bust. Any piece of artwork in the office would have fetched hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, on the open market. The furniture could have paid for the BMW Cooke almost never got to drive. The room was a fine museum of American history in its own right. The CIA director would have liked more time to study the pieces, but the commander in chief had given her less than five minutes before ordering his staff to place a call to the president of the People’s Republic of China.
“This attack is not in the best interests of your people, Mr. President.” Stuart was not given to fits of temper, but he was a man who did not enjoy surprises. No president did. Those who sat in the Oval Office all prayed for an orderly world, even the ones who were not religious despite their public image, and they rarely got it. Surprise was one of the few constants of the job and the PLA attack on Kinmen had set the new standard for it. That particular patch of soil in the South China Sea was so small that it wasn’t labeled on most maps, but it now had the undivided attention of the United States’ commander in chief.
“Mr. President, is it not the policy of the United States that Taiwan and all her territories are part of China?” Tian’s voice was smooth over the speakerphone. Cooke knew that Tian Kai had been a government functionary his entire adult life, but the man was debating like a trained lawyer. He certainly was smart enough never to ask a question for which he didn’t already know the answer.
“It is our policy that we oppose any unilateral change in the relations between China and Taiwan.” Stuart was on the defensive. “Your attack on Kinmen is just such a change. Your attack on the Ma Kong is just such a change—”
“And what evidence do you have that we sank the Ma Kong?” Tian interrupted.
Stuart stopped short, surprised that Tian would ask such a question under the circumstances. He looked over to Cooke, who shook her head. It was a request—she couldn’t give orders to this man—not to reveal classified information to his Chinese counterpart. “Are you trying to tell me that you didn’t sink it?” Stuart asked.
Good, Cooke thought. Deflect a question with a question.
“I question the separatists’ ability to maintain the military equipment that you have been selling them,” Tian said. A nonanswer.
“Yes, Mr. President, we built those Kidd-class destroyers, so I can promise you that they don’t just spontaneously explode anchored at the dock, good maintenance or not.” Ingalls Shipbuilding of Pascagoula, Mississippi, did fine work, he was sure.
Tian didn’t respond and Stuart let that silence hang pregnant in the air for a few moments before continuing. “Your government made certain decisions without any prior consultation, no bilateral or multilateral negotiations of any kind, or any effort to resolve your dispute through the UN Security Council. We object to that.” It was a hard thrust back at the Chinese president to regain the initiative.
“Mr. President, the UN has no role here,” Tian answered in a blunt parry. “We are suppressing a potential rebellion, as your President Lincoln did when your southern states tried to secede. I ask you to respect our sovereign right to maintain the ‘domestic tranquility,’ as you call it, of our union.” Tian’s English was perfect, if accented, his grammar and diction exact, and Cooke found it unnerving to hear the shades of a British accent coming from the mouth of a Beijing-born oligarch.
“Mr. President, it seems to me that it’s the PLA who’s disturbing your domestic tranquility at the moment, not the Taiwanese,” Stuart said, his frustration starting to show.
“Not so,” Tian answered. “Liang is trying to save his political career by fomenting insurrection in the province. We cannot allow him to succeed. China’s long-standing position is that Taiwan will not be allowed to declare independence.”
“The United States respectfully disagrees with your assessment of President Liang’s intentions.” It was a weak rebuttal and Stuart knew it.
“You are entitled to your own interpretation of events,” Tian said. “However, as this is an internal security matter, it is our interpretation that matters here, sir. Liang would not have set himself on this present course if he did not believe the United States would intervene. And so the People’s Republic of China formally asks the United States not to interfere in our domestic affairs. There are no American interests at stake and our military action has been quite restrained.”
Restrained? Cooke thought. Hardly.
“Mr. President, restrained is not the word I would choose,” Stuart said, echoing the CIA director’s thought. He leaned in toward the telephone mic. “Your attacks were unprovoked. The senior military officer on Kinmen and his wife were shot in their home. Yes, we know about that, and don’t bother asking me how because I won’t tell you. The power grid is wrecked. The airport is a smoking ruin. The Ma Kong was cut in half, sitting at the bottom of her dock, and a number of her crew went down with her. None of that, by definition, is restrained. But in case there was any question, peace and stability along the Pacific Rim have always been and continue to be American interests, even if they are no longer yours.”
All done being diplomatic, Cooke thought. She decided that she preferred Stuart that way.
“Of course they remain ours,” Tian said, refusing to take Stuart’s bait. “We have chosen to demonstrate our resolve and our capabilities on a limited scale. Kinmen is hardly worth our notice or yours. It is our sincere hope that by our seizing this minor spit of land, President Liang will have to face the reality of his situation and choose to back down. But our strategy of restraint can only work if the United States does not offer Liang false hope by intervening. Any show of support from you, Mr. President, could only prolong the conflict and cause unnecessary suffering.”
It was a neat trap. Do nothing and China wins. Act aggressively and get painted as a scapegoat, Cooke thought. She guessed that Stuart wanted more time to think, and he wasn’t going to get it sparring with a Chinese president who’d had days to practice this conversation. Doubtless, there was nothing Stuart could say for which Tian didn’t already have an answer . . . nothing diplomatic, anyway.
Stuart proved her right. “President Tian, thank you for taking my call,” he said abruptly. “I do hope that this can be resolved swiftly and without unnecessary loss of life, or any interruption in trade between our two countries.”
“Of course. We are committed to stability and the preservation of our trade relationship with the United States. Your economic well-being is in our interest, as you know, as ours is in yours. We h
ave invested in so many of your government securities and we do not wish to see them devalued,” Tian replied. “Your servant, sir.”
And the line went dead.
Stuart fell back into his chair and clutched the armrests with a frustrated grip. “We just got caught with our pants down and our laundry still hanging on the line.”
“You didn’t exactly strip the paint off the walls,” the secretary of defense observed. General Lance Showalter (USMC, retired) stood a head taller than Cooke, half again as wide at the shoulders. The observation was kinder than the one running through Cooke’s mind, but generals had to be diplomats as much as State department officers.
“Tian was right,” Stuart said. “We don’t have any evidence that the PLA took out the Ma Kong. We know they did it, but we can’t prove it, and without that my hands are tied.” He looked at his CIA director. “Any information on that?”
“Unfortunately, no,” Cooke replied. “Nothing on radar and this definitely wasn’t a Chinese sapper team. Security at the Tso Ying Naval Base is too good to let that happen. Navy Intelligence thinks that a Chinese submarine must’ve slipped through the Taiwanese sonar nets and put a torpedo into her.”
“That would be one quiet submarine,” Showalter said.
“Agreed,” Cooke said. “Not to mention it begs the question why they would only take out the Ma Kong. There were a half-dozen other vessels in port, including the Kee Lung, which is another Kidd-class destroyer. The Kidds are a cornerstone in Taiwan’s air defense network, so if this attack was the precursor to an invasion, the Chinese would take both ships out if they could. If the PLA Navy could get a submarine that close, they could’ve turned this into Taiwan’s Pearl Harbor. So why take out one ship and not the others?”
“So is this the prelude to invasion or not?” Stuart asked.