Trigger Point

by Matthew Glass

  Zhang glanced at the defense minister. Xu was blinking furiously. He must know, thought Zhang, that if he brought Fan to power, he would not last long. That was what had kept the balance of power between the three of them for the past four years. Even now, if he lost his support, he would become irrelevant. So the question Xu must be asking himself, thought Zhang, was what would cause his support to drain away? What would cause the admirals and air force generals to abandon him? Being ordered to go into battle with the Americans – or being ordered to turn around? If that was the most important question for Xu, Zhang knew, it was the most important question for him too.

  Zhang did not believe the admirals really wanted to fight the Americans. For all the talk he had just heard, he didn’t believe they thought they would win and he didn’t believe they would want to see two of their precious new carrier forces destroyed. But if the only way to avoid this was to back down, would they accept it? If he gave the order in the commission to turn the Chou Enlai and Mao Zedong around, and if Xu stood with him, would they feel that the Chinese military would lose so much face against the Americans that they would nonetheless support Fan in opposing it? Actually the question was not whether they would – but whether Xu believed that they would. It was not reality that mattered now, but perception. If Xu believed that his supporters would desert him if he agreed to back down, he would countermand the order. If he countermanded the order, then Xu would have definitively joined Fan, and the general would have won.

  Yet if Zhang did not give the order, there would be a battle off Lamu Bay that would escalate on the other side of the world even before it was finished.

  He had told the American president that the ships must be released. He had told him again and again. The only other thing he could have said was that Knowles must release the ships because he did not feel strong enough to give the order to turn the Chou Enlai and Mao Zedong around, but he could not say such a thing to the American president. Even if Knowles complied, the damage to China would be incalculable.

  Zhang did not know what he would do. There was little time left now. The Americans had to back down. If they did not, he didn’t know whether he would risk the coup or the confrontation. The confrontation, he felt sure, would escalate, but he did not know how far, and if he cracked down immediately on the opposition, domestic unrest might be contained. The coup, if he gave the order, might not happen, but if it did, the violence in China would be terrible, and the country’s enemies, inside its borders and out, would seize the opportunity to seek their own goals.

  Fan was watching him.

  ‘How long is it until the carriers arrive?’ he asked.

  ‘Thirty-six hours.’

  58

  TOM KNOWLES HAD slept very little. He got up on this last day of the year and met with Gary Rose and Marion Ellman in the Oval Office to look at the note they had drafted. Then they went to the Situation Room.

  Overnight, the Chinese and American strike groups had continued to make progress. Estimates now had them converging on Lamu Bay in around twenty-two hours. Russian naval movements had ceased and a Russian strike group and a Chinese group were holding position at a distance apart of around a thousand nautical miles, fifteen hours’ sailing time if both groups closed. On the ground in Sudan there had been sporadic exchange of small arms fire but with no casualties. Drones had visualized the arrival of further reinforcements to the troops surrounding the American soldiers. Seventy-three Americans waited in the compound, in radio communication with Pressler’s command center but unaware of developments at sea. They had seen two American drones shot down but others continued to operate above them.

  The news silence was increasingly fragile. A reporter had surfaced on a Japanese TV station with a report of Chinese naval maneuvers taking place in the Indian Ocean. Intelligence sources surmised that there had been a leak on the Chinese side about large-scale ship movements and the Chinese had had to come up with a reason and had planted the story. Defense intelligence was also aware of rumors circulating within the US military of some kind of an operation related to Jungle Peace that had gone wrong. There was strong conjecture that the operation was related to Dewy and Montez but no one yet had any details of the action. Once those rumors started it was only a matter of time before they made it out of the military and into the media. The communication ban imposed on the servicemen within the Kennedy and Bush strike groups hadn’t yet been breached but had been noticed by others in the services. No one was yet connecting them with the Jungle Peace rumor, but that was only a matter of time as well. Whether the communication blackout would hold until the strike groups met off Kenya was impossible to say.

  A screen on the wall of the Situation Room showed the updated positions of the Abraham Lincoln, the John F Kennedy and the two Chinese carriers. The triangle of ocean between them, which had been so vast when this first began, now looked disturbingly small.

  Hale briefly set out the military options again. This time a decision was needed.

  The president looked around the table. It was a meeting of the entire National Security Council. He had taken advice the previous day from the White House counsel, who advised him that the full complement of the council should be involved. Overnight, Gary Rose had briefed Susan Opitz, Marty Perez and Doug Havering, the acting Secretary of State, about the events that had been unfolding in East Africa over the previous three days. Marion Ellman was in attendance as well as all six of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

  ‘Susan, Doug, Marty,’ he said. ‘Anything you want to ask?’

  Doug Havering wanted more detail about the conversation the president had had with President Zhang. Marion knew he was probably doing that to put some kind of stamp on the fact that he was there. He had been throwing glances in her direction since the meeting started and they weren’t friendly. Havering didn’t know where Bob Livingstone’s death left him and he was less than pleased to turn up and discover that they were three days into a major crisis and that Marion Ellman, of all people, was here before him.

  Opitz had a couple of questions as well.

  ‘Okay,’ said the president after he had answered them, ‘I’ve decided what I want to do and I want to run you through it.’

  John Oakley stared at him.

  ‘Once we’re finished here, I’m going to send a note to President Zhang. In that note I’m going to say that we’re going to release the Kunming and Changchun in twelve hours’ time. An hour after that– Hold on, John, just let me finish. An hour after that, we’re going to send a force into Sudan to take out our men. I’m going to tell him that we expect to do that peacefully. We’re going to go in, pick them up, take them out.’

  ‘I can’t believe she’s actually persuaded you to do this.’ Oakley shook his head in disgust. ‘What if Zhang says no?’

  ‘I’m not asking him, John. I’m telling him.’

  ‘And he’s just going to do what you say?’

  ‘I hope so.’

  Oakley gazed at the president for a moment, then shot a glance at Marion. ‘Do you really think they’d believe that once we’ve backed down and given their ships back, we would fight them over seventy-five guys in Sudan? Are you really so naïve you think they’ll believe that, Ambassador?’

  Ellman didn’t respond. The idea for this course of action was hers, and she and Gary Rose had drafted the note overnight. It hadn’t been much fun. After long discussion on the details with her and the president, Rose had accepted there was a chance that her proposal might offer a way out of the impasse, but it was clear he didn’t like the way she suddenly seemed to have become part of the core team on this crisis.

  ‘They’d better believe it,’ said Knowles. ‘If they want to try to stop us, if they want to fight a war, we’ll fight them. But over our guys. Over something that matters, John. Not over a couple of ships.’

  ‘Mr President?’ said General Hale.

  ‘Yes, General?’

  ‘You said twelve hours. Is that twelve hours from now?�
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  ‘That’s twelve hours from 11am our time. I make that seven in the morning in Kenya.’

  ‘So that makes it eight in the morning when our guys go in?’

  The president nodded. ‘We need to do this in daylight, General. I’ll take your advice on that but I want to minimize the chance of something going wrong through a misunderstanding.’

  ‘Daylight would be best to minimize that risk, that’s true, sir. It does, however, expose our forces to significantly greater risk if the enemy chooses to fire on us.’

  ‘I understand.’

  ‘If we were going to plan this as an attack, sir, we would do it under cover of darkness. The equipment and training we have would give us a significant advantage.’

  ‘General, we’re not planning this as an attack.’

  ‘Then that’s trap number two we’re walking into,’ said Oakley.

  ‘The fact that we’re doing it in daylight,’ said Ellman, ‘is a clear signal that we’re not attacking them.’

  ‘Clear signal that they can fire at will.’

  ‘Can we do it?’ said the president to Hale, ignoring Oakley. ‘Can we have a force ready in time?’

  Hale nodded. ‘Admiral Pressler has a force ready to go. But as your military advisor, I do need to point out the greater risk that our men will face by choosing to do this in daylight.’

  ‘Understood, General. I take that responsibility.’

  ‘I also should point out – although I assume you’ve already considered this – that once we release the Kunming and Changchun we lose the leverage we have established to protect our men from attack in Sudan. This puts them in a situation of maximum vulnerability and I can only stress–’

  ‘I understand your point, General.’

  ‘Without leverage, sir, strategically we have no–’

  ‘General, I said I understand your point. I didn’t order this leverage, remember? That was a decision taken by Admiral Pressler.’

  ‘Who’s the operational commander in theater.’

  ‘Yes. In theater. And the implications now go a lot wider than the theater that he commands. According to your own plans, this precious leverage of his has put us twenty-two hours away from what might be the start of a global war. I understand the point. I’ve taken account of it.’

  ‘We’ll need clear rules of engagement,’ said Hale, as if it was some kind of threat. ‘When the forces going in can shoot, what weaponry they can use. How much provocation they’ll be expected to put up with before they’re allowed to defend themselves.’

  ‘Dr Rose will discuss that with you.’

  ‘Mr President,’ said Admiral Tovey, who had been doing some calculations on a piece of paper, ‘without reopening the question of your decision, operationally, if we were to release the Kunming and Changchun and then for one reason or another an hour to two hours later we made the choice to recapture them, perhaps because of the outcome of the mission you’re talking about, given the positions of where our respective fleets would be at that point, realistically we wouldn’t be able to recover them before we ourselves came in range of the enemy fleet. Even before that we would risk aerial engagement with aircraft from the Chinese carriers. I guess what I’m saying, sir, is once we let them go, they’re gone.’

  The president nodded. ‘That was my assumption. I also assume the Chinese will work that out as well.’ He turned back to Hale. ‘General, are there any other considerations from an operational perspective?’ He waited. ‘General?’

  ‘No, Mr President.’

  ‘Then you’ll speak to Dr Rose about the rules of engagement after this meeting and I’ll approve them when they’ve been drafted. I assume Admiral Pressler will be developing the operational plan to get our men. I’ll also approve that and speak with him when it’s done. General, let’s make sure everything in the plan is very clear. I don’t want to provoke a misunderstanding in what I am sure is a very tense situation. Please make sure Admiral Pressler understands that. If there’s anything in the plan that looks like it might lead to a misunderstanding, I will hold the admiral personally accountable.’

  ‘Mr President, are we forgetting something here?’ said Oakley. ‘What about Dewy and Montez?’

  ‘My understanding is that they’re not at that location. Is that correct?’

  ‘At the moment we don’t have a fix on their location,’ said one of the officers.

  Oakley shook his head.

  ‘What do you suggest, John?’

  ‘They were the reason we went in.’

  ‘We went in on the basis of poor information.’

  ‘John, we got suckered,’ said Rose. ‘That’s obvious.’

  ‘Yeah, and who suckered us?’

  ‘What is it, John?’ said the president impatiently. ‘Say it. Say it now and let’s have it on the table.’

  ‘We’re in the endgame here. We’ve taken it this far, and now, when it comes to the crunch, we’re going to back down and take an indefensible chance. There’s no other word for it. It’s indefensible. You may like the sound of what the ambassador said, but to me it’s fantasy.’

  ‘What?’ said Doug Havering quickly. ‘What did the ambassador say?’

  ‘And we’re betting a hell of a lot of lives on it,’ continued Oakley, ignoring him. ‘Seventy-three men on the ground plus Dewy and Montez plus the guys who’ll be going in there to get them. And I wouldn’t stake the life of one of them,’ he said, stabbing a finger hard on the table, ‘on Zhang taking your note and saying, sounds good to me, let’s let those men go. Not one.’

  ‘John,’ said the president slowly, ‘I have as much care and concern for the lives of each one of those men as you do. I’m conscious that I’m the one sending them in, just like I sent Harley Gauss and Jack Duffey. Don’t think there’s a day I’m not conscious of that.’

  ‘Tom, I’m not saying you aren’t. But I think your judgment is wrong. I think it’s dead wrong. And as Secretary of Defense I have a responsibility to tell you. The ambassador has got some rosy-eyed view of what’s going to happen if we’re nice to Mr Zhang and now is not the time for rosy-eyed views. Mr Zhang doesn’t respond to nice. He responds to reality.’

  ‘We’re not being nice. We’re being firm.’

  ‘Well, that’s the problem, isn’t it? On the one hand the ambassador would like us to believe we’re going to be seen as being tough by telling Zhang what’s going to happen. But the reality is, what’s going to happen is we’re going to back down. And that ain’t tough. And it’s pretty clear what interpretation Zhang’s going to put on it. So we’ve got this ambiguous message here and either side can interpret it like they want and the only thing you can be sure of is they’ll interpret it differently.’

  ‘Mr Secretary,’ said Ellman, ‘in a situation like this, that’s a strength.’

  ‘Yeah. It’s about as strong as General Hale here giving Pressler an order to attack and Pressler reading it as an order to retreat.’

  ‘No, sir. This is not a battle. Not yet. If we want to avoid that, it’s useful to have something both sides can interpret in the way they want. To one party it looks firm, to another it looks weak. Yes, there’s ambiguity, but that gives both sides what they need. That’s how you get yourself out of these situations, Mr Secretary. You can argue over the interpretations later when tempers have cooled.’

  ‘Ambassador, it’s arguing over the interpretations later that gets you into a war. All this is going to do is–’

  ‘John,’ said the president. ‘You can stop talking to Ambassador Ellman, because it’s not her decision, it’s mine. Now, I’ve heard what you’ve had to say. Thank you. I’ve made the call. This meeting isn’t to reopen the debate over the decision, it’s to discuss what we do to implement it.’

  Tom Knowles was conscious of the way the defense secretary was looking at him. He respected the passion in Oakley’s commitment to his point of view. And he wasn’t at all certain that the other man’s judgment was mistaken. There was a risk,
a very real risk, that this would go wrong and that many lives would be lost, both amongst those on the ground in Sudan and those who would be going in to recover them. And yet Tom Knowles had found himself having to balance those lives against those that might be saved, not only by avoidance of the sea battle – which would recur at some point, at some time, if the underlying causes that had brought the confrontation to a head weren’t resolved – but by the possibility of creating a new way of doing business with China. And the only way, he had decided, to create it, was to do it, even though that required a leap of faith so big that he himself found it hard to contemplate.

  He knew that it was possible his entire presidency would come to be judged on this decision. And in the end he had made his choice. He had barely slept all night for thinking about it, but he had made it. Perhaps it was the words Joel Ehrenreich had spoken to him, the gauntlet the bald academic had laid down. Or perhaps it was some instinct deep within him, an instinct to do the challenging thing, the striking thing, that had taken him out of a commercial law practice in Reno twenty years earlier and propelled him all the way to the White House, an instinct that had been stifled over years of campaigning and calculating and choosing what to do on the basis of what pollsters told him, but which now, at the last gasp, reasserted itself.

  If history was going to judge him on one decision, on the direction he chose to take at Lamu Bay, then let it be a bold one. That was the choice he had made. Let it be a brave choice. Let it be a decision that broke the mold – or at least tried to – not one that cowered in fear of the consequences if anything changed.