Responding to these incidents, the Chinese methodically assailed the spine of Taiwan’s electronic infrastructure, crippling the island nation. The PRC forces began with a missile attack on the Yangmingshan listening post, a traditional military target. China’s missiles knocked out Taiwan’s intelligence nerve center, blinding Taipei from the outset of the crisis. Then Beijing escalated with a series of ingeniously targeted follow-up strikes. The Pulitzer committee would ultimately credit Alexander with the phrase that best captured the novel nature of the ensuing contest. It was, Alexander had explained to his readers, “The First E-War.”
Branko’s department had long been criticized for its hard-line views about the Chinese military build-up. The events in the Taiwan Strait offered some unwelcome vindication. For more than a decade, the People’s Liberation Army had been preparing for just such a high tech conflict. Alexander’s LA Times had even run stories about the nearly one hundred thousand Chinese cyber attacks on U.S. security software. “Titan Rain,” the Pentagon called these assaults on the five million DOD computers—many of the attacks emanated from the more than one hundred million PC’s in China. And like the old ABM debates about Soviet missile threats, U.S. planners were chagrined to discover that cyber war offense was much cheaper—and far more effective—than defense.
The PRC had learned from watching Desert Storm and the “no contact” wars like Kosovo and Afghanistan. Overconfident Western war gamers had assumed that Taiwan would use its technology to advantage in such a showdown. Two days in July proved them wrong. Taiwan, it turned out, had spent too many years futilely pleading with Washington to buy traditional 1980’s military hardware—ships, planes, missiles, and ammunition. But Taiwan had purchased the wrong goods. Driven by an imaginative procurement team in the PLA’s central command, the Chinese had leapfrogged a generation of technology, rolling out a computer-driven war that incapacitated much of Taiwan’s antiquated military hardware while hitting the West in its pocketbook.
The E-War was fought on a new battlefield. It rewarded ingenuity and freelancing within the Chinese military, and the general populace as well. “It mushroomed into a uniquely populist assault,” Alexander wrote, “a thoroughly modern conflict which enabled even armchair Chinese patriots to become involved. Every hacker on the mainland became a modern day Minuteman.”
It was true. PRC citizens were poised to join in from home, with every personal computer becoming a potential weapon. The new PLA dogma held that citizens could help seize the initiative to establish “electromagnetic dominance” early in any high tech conflict. The plans were put in action this time: computer viruses were exported wholesale, polluting Internet access in Taiwan. Trojan horse viruses were planted in Taiwan’s networks, unleashing destruction. Alexander stayed with his analogy of the Redcoats’ 1775 retreat at Lexington and Concord, a vivid image that captured the spirit of this element of the assault plan.
Both military and civilian air traffic control—and even Taipei’s subway trains—were frozen by the deft cyber-attacks. TV broadcast towers and electrical plants were targeted with extremely accurate missile strikes. Financial data banks were penetrated and compromised. Market records of stock trading were dumped. Commerce above the level of cash-in-the-fruit-market virtually halted throughout the country.
Dummy radio broadcasts and junk e-mail full of disinformation were tossed into the mix by the Second Directorate in a kitchen sink-load of techno-warfare. Electro-magnetic pulse bursts were detonated, disrupting the electronics of scores of Taiwan’s weapon systems, creating electrical shock waves akin to that of a nuclear blast. The information warfare assaults and the electronic weapons eroded Taiwan’s command and control, freezing many of their defensive weapons platforms. Even Branko’s command post in Langley, Virginia found communications with Taiwan a challenge, and solid data hard to come by.
Life in Taipei regressed decades in a matter of hours as fire crews rushed to rescue thousands trapped underground in subway cars. Civilian aircraft were frantically rerouted to Tokyo and Manila. One Taipei-bound plane full of tourists from Australia ran low on fuel and limped into Shanghai, making a forced landing.
Alexander’s articles in the Times chronicled the ensuing escalation in great detail. Taiwan scrambled its F-16 aircraft out of Jia-shan and flew them off from nearby Hualien Air Force Base. Emerging from hangars carved from caves in the side of the hills, the jets were a terrific sight, straight out of Battlestar Galactica. Taiwan’s military had few inviting targets for retaliation, however. An instinct for self-preservation made Taiwan’s leaders reluctant to respond to the initial Chinese attacks with any substantial targeting of the Mainland. There was little future for a Lilliputian island nation assaulting the territory of a nuclear-armed power, a Gulliver possessing an army that outnumbered Taiwan’s ten to one. Most of Taipei’s ripostes were against Chinese jet fighters and ships at sea. Here Taiwan’s military scored their greatest successes. The air-to-air and air-to-ground missiles sold to Taipei over the years by Washington proved effective, and the Chinese lost several fighter planes.
The second wave of Chinese strikes hammered more traditional Taiwanese military targets, beginning with Chiang Chuan Kang Air Base. In the 1960’s, the old U.S. Strategic Command facility had been used to launch B-52 sorties over North Vietnam. Once upon a time, the base had housed scores of American nuclear weapons to deter an Asia conflict. Now, it proved to be ground zero for a Chinese direct assault. The airfield’s defenders expected the Chinese to start up with short-range ballistic missile attacks, then after that softening-up, launch waves of F-8 fighters and Su-27 jets against the facility. War-gamers assumed it was here that Beijing would try to first seize a base to be used as a staging area for incoming airborne troops.
The Chinese pounded the base as expected. But then they stopped abruptly. The anticipated wave of paratroopers never materialized. An invasion was unnecessary. The Chinese military, Alexander later explained, could accomplish virtually all conflict objectives without landing a single solider on Taiwan’s soil. It was quite remarkable. All Taipei’s preparations to defend against amphibious troop landings or paratroop assaults against Taiwan’s airfields went for naught.
Taiwan did undertake a couple of half-hearted missile strikes against the Fujian Province launch facilities. In turn, the Chinese briefly moved to expand their targeting of missiles against Taiwan’s ports and energy facilities. But the PRC chose to limit destruction of the valuable economic assets they would soon possess. PRC post-war planners were not eager to have Taiwan emerge from the conflict with a nineteenth century economy.
American military might proved to be of minimal consequence to PRC’s plans. U.S. naval forces in the region were drained by Persian Gulf actions, and only a handful of U.S. warships arrived before the fighting stopped. U.S. planes out of Okinawa eventually circled the region, but found few attractive targets to engage. U.S. military capabilities were spread far too thin by the twin engagements in Iraq and Afghanistan. Overnight polls showed American voters opposing by a more than three-to-one margin any direct military involvement in the Taiwan Strait conflict.
Congressional voices proved strident. A faction of members had long clamored for greater interoperability between U.S. and Taiwan military forces—these legislators now assailed the Chinese and the Pentagon alike for the fiasco. They were especially irate about friendly fire casualties. In their confusion, Taiwan inadvertently hit American and Taiwanese assets. Accidental casualties among the limited U.S. military personnel in the region proved predictable, though regrettable, collateral damage. Before the shooting stopped, American pilots had inadvertently killed more than a dozen Taiwanese, and vice versa. An American carrier force did not even reach the Taiwan Strait until after the shooting had been halted and the United Nations was in full debate mode.
The swift Chinese escalation had forced geo-strategists and financiers to plead with the United Nations to propose an immediate cease-fire. Global markets had tanked. Wall
Street suspended trading for hours, and the Treasury Department’s deficit-financing bond sales were cancelled for the week once it was clear China—and many other nations—would take a pass.
From their Security Council perch, Beijing insisted that they would brook no interference in what the Chinese maintained was an internal affair. They had been provoked, they argued, by renegades in denial—the last remnants of a seventy-year-old civil war. Most General Assembly nations subscribed to the PRC’s assessment.
The wording of the subsequent UN resolution was quite clear. The authorities on the island of Taiwan were invited forthwith to meet with Chinese officials to discuss a broad agenda. It included not just an enduring cease-fire, but also, quite ominously, “issues unresolved since 1949 relating to unification of China.” In other words, as Alexander summed it up, “Taiwan’s democratically elected officials were now welcome to negotiate with Communist Party authorities in Beijing the terms of their own surrender.”
The Beijing leadership had much to point to in the way of “progress” on the long troublesome Taiwan issue. As with China’s tough stance in previous negotiations to return Hong Kong and Macao to Communist control, the hard-liners had convinced their colleagues to gamble in assailing Taiwan. The People’s Republic of China had won the battle, and they had won the lightning-quick war. Taiwan’s days of political autonomy and de facto independence were over. It was left only for the diplomats to sort out and confirm the new status quo on the ground, and for journalists like Alexander to explain how it all had come to pass.
Even as he filed his stories, Alexander was haunted. A line had been crossed. Like that day he had slipped Booth an advance copy of his missile export exclusive, he was complicit. His emotional distance—that journalistic reserve his profession so revered—was gone. His politics, and his personal prejudices, all became part of the story.
As he worked his sources, Alexander’s days were frantic. His nights were restless, his body supercharged with adrenaline and slow to calm. His friends seemed distant. That first week, Branko was stuck at his Langley command post around the clock. Rachel was withdrawn, viewing the events from a safe distance the way a mortified rubber-necker would maneuver around a bloody car wreck. Mickey was incommunicado.
For Alexander, the gruesome story was the culmination of his life’s work. He poured himself into his pieces with great passion, sharing all his accumulated insight and expertise. But late at night, when he reflected upon the experience, he wondered at the consequences. Was his entire career as a journalist on the Asian diplomatic beat really just a preparation for this? He felt soiled for having witnessed the slaughter. In his darkest moments he was, he concluded, a modern day vulture, just another media voyeur.
AUGUST
LOST AT SEA
“In the end, nobody at the State Department gave a rat’s ass about Taiwan,” one senior legislator told his Senate colleagues. “Having a tiny democratic island out there in a Communist sea became an enormous historical inconvenience.”
Jake Smithson was the cooperative—if chagrined—source of that anonymous quote, which became Alexander’s lead for one of his stories. The observation perfectly framed his five part post-mortem series on the E-War. Smithson had leaked the vignette from a meeting inside the Majority Leader’s office: all the Senate’s senior leaders had gathered to consult over the wording of a Congressional resolution deploring the Chinese assault.
At the height of the crisis, Smithson had pressed his colleagues for a vigorous response to China’s perfidy. The California senator assailed the weakness of the consensus approach—it was “nothing but a wordy resolution full of gobbledygook,” he argued, imploring legislators to adopt a stronger stance. But his fellow committee chairs demurred. Abraham Gubin of New Hampshire ended the private debate with the colorful line Alexander cited. It ably summarized the hard realities confronting the Taiwanese. They were simply outnumbered. American legislators could give their outraged speeches. But there was a new reality on the ground; Taiwan was left largely to its own devices. Its capital fled and its people anxiously awaited the outcome of negotiations over some type of coerced “confederation” with Beijing.
Alexander’s articles dissecting Washington decision-making were immediately embraced by his editors. They gave the series page one treatment daily, with an unlimited space budget for those who could follow the Times’ endless jump pages beyond the computer and automobile ads.
Rachel read Alexander’s pieces with the same detachment that had infected her since her return from China. As a professional woman, she had been paddling against the tide for months, ever since the April day she had awoken in an ambulance. After two of her largest clients walked, the knives were out around the office. Her efforts to share her management responsibilities with some of her colleagues were met with suspicion, particularly by some of the more aggressive career climbers amongst the office sisterhood. The Taiwan conflict stunned her and she couldn’t help taking it all personally.
Rachel was further discombobulated when Barry announced shortly after her return from Beijing that he was moving to New York. Whatever her many suspicions about their estrangement over the years—his distance, his incessant travels, his resistance to intimacy—their revealing conversation preceding his departure completely unnerved her. What next?
She would sit in her office and stare at the growing mounds of paper, trying to figure out what really mattered. She was off the Beijing beat, what with the contract cancellations and U.S.-China relations in a deep freeze. Her disengagement from the events swirling around her was thoroughly disconcerting. She glanced at the TV news with disinterest, as if it were reporting events from an imaginary world. Unread issues of the Post began to pile up alongside unopened mail. Sorting through the stack one Sunday, she found a notice for past due property taxes, the utility bill, and a copy of the final divorce agreement awaiting her signature. She was ready to pack her and Jamie’s bags and head out of town for an extended holiday.
The last Friday before they set out for her August vacation, she sat for a full hour on the back porch of her Arlington home, breathing slowly and sipping iced tea. She felt like a traveler at a border crossing, lightening her load, now aware she needed only a fraction of the baggage she had been carrying. The rest could be shed—left at the roadside, never to be missed.
Returning to her Wyoming roots, she found renewed pleasures in the natural world. She and Jamie became great hikers, walking the ridges of the Absaroka Range east of Yellowstone. Setting out early from her parents’ cabin in Sunlight Basin, they would pick wildflowers and watch in wonder as impressive cloud formations overpowered the blue ceiling overhead. They could go an entire morning without seeing another soul. They could go an hour without speaking, the communication of mother and son often subsisting on a simple gesture.
Jamie was naturally contemplative. He flourished in the silences away from the video games and televised blather that often mesmerized his contemporaries. He would track small animals, humming little ditties as he walked. He kept a careful longhand journal of his sightings: one day, a moose, another, an eagle in soaring flight near Dead Indian Pass.
Rachel would ponder, building her reserves like an animal fattening against winter’s coming storms. She was healing a second time, taking inventory of her resources once more. She was completing a process of renewal she had failed to finish after the tragic events that spring. Her body had mended, her strength was returning.
Back in the Washington area near the end of the month, they continued their natural explorations, walking in the Blue Ridge Mountains above the Shenandoah, and along the Potomac River cliffs at Great Falls. Soon, it would be time to empty the poncho and compass out of Jamie’s backpack and reload it with sharp pencils and a binder. Rachel often used Meg Greenfield’s line, the one about Washington being just like high school. The boys and girls would soon be back in session on Capitol Hill, with their new clothes and summer stories, as surely as Jamie’s fifth gr
ade would reconvene at Jefferson Elementary.
The Taiwan Strait war was over, the financial markets had calmed, and Rachel was going through the motions of the season, determined to meet her obligations. Back at her TPB desk, she began to work again at inserting her clients’ requests into the end-of-the-fiscal year House-Senate conference reports. She made the rounds with Congress, and set her calendar for the fall schedule of fundraisers and charity galas. She collected gossip from congressional leadership aides, getting an early edge on the office betting pool to pick the exact date and time of final adjournment. She still had the occasional noble cause to pursue for her clients, the Head Start pro bono work, the breast cancer earmark in the Defense Department appropriations bill. Operating on autopilot, she tried to help drive the TPB business, ignoring the hallway whispers that she had lost her edge.
Rachel began working out at dawn, jogging along the leafy avenues of north Arlington. She would finish with a sprint, gasping for air. Her pores were open; her senses were alive again. After two seasons of pummeling by the vicissitudes of life, she felt wiser.
Deep in the night, her dreams grew ever richer. They brought vivid images of nature’s power, Wyoming thunderheads, pounding California surf. She developed a voracious appetite for books, staying up late with a stack of fiction. She also read psychology, even some religious philosophy, studiously ignoring the temporal concerns of newsmagazines and network television. She cut off the cable TV premium service. She cancelled her subscription to People.
There was also the matter of Alexander. She kept him at a bit of a distance after her Wyoming trip, eager to center herself before she went too far, still wary of the rebound effect. He was conveniently absent for weeks. He had worked straight through to mid-August, producing his landmark pieces on the China-Taiwan conflict. Then he went off on his own vacation with a bunch of high school fishing buddies in the Sierra Nevada Mountains.
The Mandarin Club Page 29