by Jeff Edwards
“We don’t know yet, sir,” the National Security Advisor said. “But right now, we’ve got a bigger question. What are we going to do about it?’
“I’ve spoken to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs about this,” the Secretary of Defense said. “He’s preparing a full tactical briefing now. He can go over the details then, but in broad strokes, he recommends that we get an aircraft carrier on scene up there as quickly as possible. The idea is to establish a presence, and—hopefully—to act as a stabilizing force in the region.”
The president nodded slowly. “Who’s in the best position?”
The Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Robert Casey, cleared his throat. “Mr. President, that would be the USS Midway strike group, based out of Yokosuka, Japan.”
The president turned to look at the CNO. “And the Midway is ready to deploy?”
“Yes, sir,” the CNO said. “The Midway is our ready-carrier at the moment. She’s got a full complement of escorts, and they can be underway in a matter of hours.”
“Alright,” the president said. “Do it. Get those ships moving. We’ll figure out the details while they’re on the way.”
He stared at the wall-sized master display screen with its overwhelming array of strange symbols, and he began to wonder if this would be the day that everything came apart.
CHAPTER 12
BARKHOR SQUARE
LHASA, TIBET
SATURDAY; 23 NOVEMBER
9:24 AM
TIME ZONE +8 ‘HOTEL’
No matter what the Chinese government or news services might say later, it was not a riot.
Reverend Bill McDonald watched from the window of his second story hotel room, as people began gathering in the square below. At first it was a small group of purple-robed monks, and he wondered if they had come to pray, or meditate, or simply to meet and talk near the gates of the famous Jokhang temple.
But the monks were soon joined by people dressed in street clothes, and more people were streaming into the square, appearing from alleys and side streets. The small group quickly grew to a large group; and the large group blossomed into a burgeoning crowd. Still, the flow of humanity showed no signs of diminishing. As the throng continued to swell, the red, blue, gold, white, and green colors of the Tibetan snow lion flag began to appear—sometimes held overhead as a banner, sometimes draped around someone’s shoulders like a cloak.
When the flags were revealed, McDonald knew that he was witnessing something unusual. The snow lion flag was a symbol of Tibetan independence and a rallying point for the separatist movements.
Introduced by the 13th Dalia Lama in 1912, the flag had remained the official banner of Tibet until the 14th Dalia Lama had escaped from the Chinese occupation in 1959, and fled to India. Now, more than a half-century later, the flag was an emblem of Tibetan sovereignty—a reminder of the days before the Chinese invasion, and a token of the freedom that might lie in the future.
The Chinese treated the Tibetan flag as an insignia of terrorism and anarchy. They had outlawed possession of the flag by anyone within the borders of Chinese-controlled territory, including all of Tibet. Public display of the flag was punishable by imprisonment, or worse.
But Bill McDonald could see at least fifty of the forbidden flags from his window. The crowd in Barkhor Square was openly defying the longstanding ban. McDonald knew that he was witnessing a major act of protest. There must be nearly a thousand people in the square by now, and still more were coming.
His window was closed, but he could hear the crowd now, hundreds of voices chanting in unison. Not ranting or screaming. Not shouting ultimatums. Chanting together in one voice, like an oddly disharmonic choir, all singing from the same sheet of music. It was eerie—mournful and powerful, but utterly peaceful.
McDonald’s presence in Tibet had nothing to do with politics or journalism. He had not come to document the conditions of the Tibetan people, or even to question the continuing Chinese occupation of the once-independent nation. Beyond expansion of his own consciousness, he had come with no agenda at all. He was here simply to study with the Buddhist monks, to learn how (and if) their path to enlightenment could shed any illumination on his own spiritual journey.
During the Vietnam War, he had served as a door gunner and Crew Chief in the U.S. Army’s 128th Assault Helicopter Company. He’d flown more combat missions than he could count, usually perched in the open door of a Huey gunship with an M-60 machine gun between his knees. He’d been shot down twice, wounded once by enemy fire, and—of greater importance than either—he had been transformed.
Bill McDonald had come out of Vietnam with a Distinguished Flying Cross, a Bronze Star, fourteen Air Medals, and a Purple Heart. But on his flight back to the United States, he had carried something much more important than the medals stowed neatly in his Army duffle bag. He had carried a profound sense of his personal spirituality.
Amid the horror of war, he had discovered his own connections to the mystical forces of the universe. He had become what he liked to call a ‘spiritual warrior.’ He no longer thought in terms of victory over military enemies. Instead, he concentrated on mastering his own mind, and exploring his place within the spiritual realm.
The events unfolding outside his window were at least partly—if not mostly—political in nature. If he knew anything at all about the mindset of the Chinese government, the reaction of the local authorities would be both rapid and brutal.
He’d spent the last several decades trying to avoid politics and violence, and he now had an unwitting ringside seat to an event that threatened to hold both of these corruptive influences in large measure.
Part of him was tempted to turn away from the window, and not allow himself to be drawn into the coming clash, even as an onlooker. But another part of him knew that the search for enlightenment is also the search for truth. Whatever happened in Barkhor Square this morning, the Chinese government would apply its colossal influence to controlling public opinion after the fact.
Like it or not, Reverend William H. McDonald was about to become the witness of history. If any truth at all was going to emerge from today’s events, it would be up to him to draw it forth.
Bill fumbled with the window latch, and then spent several seconds wrestling the balky window open a few inches. As the gap widened, the chanting voices of the crowd became louder and easier to make out.
He found his cell phone, and scrolled through the icons until he located the one that activated the phone’s video camera. Even through the window panes, the images on the screen of his phone were sharp and clear. He wasn’t sure if the phone’s tiny built-in microphone was sensitive enough to record the sounds drifting up from the street below. He didn’t know how to check, or how to adjust the audio levels (if such a thing were possible).
He decided to add a bit of personal narration, to provide some context for the video, in case the audio was too low or muffled to be intelligible.
“My name is William H. McDonald,” he said. “It’s approximately nine-thirty in the morning, on Saturday the twenty-third of November. I’m standing at the window of my second story room, in a guest house overlooking Barkhor Square, in the Tibetan city of Lhasa.”
He panned the camera phone right and left, taking in as much of the crowd as he could manage. “As you can see, a large group of people—I’m guessing that it’s somewhere between several hundred and a thousand—are gathered in the square. They are chanting, but I only know a handful of Tibetan words, so I’m not sure what exactly they’re saying. But I want to make it perfectly clear that this is a peaceful gathering. There have been absolutely no signs of violence or unruly behavior. This is not a mob. If this is a rally or a protest, it’s calm and orderly.”
He paused for several seconds, trying to decide whether or not to add anything else.
“I don’t know if my camera is recording their voices,” he said. “I hope it is, because this chant, or song… whatever it might be… is beautiful. I’ve ne
ver heard anything like it.”
His voice fell silent again, but he continued to move his little camera around to cover the crowd from every angle he could get from his limited vantage. He thought about going down into the square, to capture some of this from street level, but he decided against it. He probably had a better view of the crowd from up here, and if the police showed up—when they showed up—they would take away his phone the instant they recognized it for what it was. If he stayed up here, out of the way, he thought he had a fairly good chance of getting his phone and the video recording out of the country intact.
The reaction forces were not long in coming, and McDonald was careful to record their arrival.
“I see three trucks converging on the square,” he said. “Each truck contains thirty—maybe fifty—armed men, dressed in what appears to be riot gear. I can’t tell if these are soldiers, or some kind of police tactical squads, but they are definitely loaded for bear.”
“They’re climbing out of the trucks now, deploying in three positions. Doesn’t look like they’re trying to form a perimeter, or surround the crowd.”
McDonald’s narration halted again. He listened for several seconds to the unbroken chanting of the crowd. The people in the square had seen the armed squads arrive and deploy, but there was no move to fight or escape.
The crowd seemed to huddle more tightly together, as if drawing courage and determination from one another. The pitch of the chanting seemed to waver, but it didn’t quite falter. The singsong cadence continued, regaining its strength.
McDonald was about to comment on this, when he heard the thumps of the first gas grenades. He saw several smoking canisters arc into the crowd, and watched the protesters recoil from the billowing clouds of white vapor.
Teargas. He had encountered it during chemical warfare defense training in Army boot camp, and he had seen it used several times in Nam. He recognized the retching, face-clutching motions as every person who caught even a whiff of the stuff tried to stagger blindly away from the source of their sudden pain. The orderly crowd disintegrated into a chaos of lurching, frightened individuals.
“They’re using gas,” McDonald said. “I’m guessing that it’s teargas. Whatever it is, it’s certainly doing the trick. I think…”
But he never recorded his next thoughts, whatever they were, because his attention was shattered by the sound of gunfire, followed instantly by screams of terror and pain.
He felt a flash of nausea as adrenaline surged into his veins, broadcasting and amplifying the ancient chemical reflex to flee from danger. He could feel his palms begin to sweat, and a strange ringing in his ears that had nothing to do with the after-echo of gunshots.
He looked around quickly, trying to identify the source of the shots. He spotted several members of the riot control squad with their rifles unslung. He jerked his cell phone camera around in time to catch at least a dozen of the uniformed men firing directly into the milling throng of civilians. Sharp staccato muzzle reports, in three-round bursts—assault rifles configured for combat shooting.
All thoughts of narration were gone from Bill McDonald’s brain. He saw some of the protestors—a lot of them—jerk and stagger under the impacts of bullets. Blood flew; people fell to the ground, all to the accompaniment of rapid gunshots and screaming voices. This wasn’t riot control. It was a massacre. But why was it happening?
Not all of the soldiers or policemen were firing. In fact, most of them weren’t. Did that mean that they’d been ordered to fire, but many of them had disobeyed the command? Or maybe they hadn’t been ordered to fire, and some of them had taken the decision into their own hands.
That didn’t make sense. Or did it?
McDonald remembered something in the news about an attack on a trainload of Chinese soldiers a few days ago. Was this some kind of retaliation for that? Either official retribution, or spontaneous revenge, carried out by angry Chinese soldiers who suddenly found themselves with Tibetan protesters in their crosshairs?
The more Bill McDonald thought about it, the more likely this last idea seemed. This protest had been going on for less than an hour. That wasn’t a lot of time for senior Chinese decision-makers to consider and approve a plan to use deadly force against the crowd. Also, the assault, or intervention, or whatever had begun with teargas. That pretty much guaranteed that the crowd would break up quickly. If the plan had been to mow the protestors down, it would have been smarter to corral them together, to allow for greater concentration of firepower.
McDonald continued to sweep the square with his camera. It was nearly empty now, except for the people who were down, and not going anywhere. After the shooting had started, the riot force had made no attempt to stem the escape of fleeing protestors. That also seemed to support the idea that the shooting had been unplanned, carried out in the heat of anger and the flush of violence.
This was the thing he had turned away from in his own quest for enlightenment. The world’s problems could not be solved through the barrel of a gun, the bodies in the square below—maybe eighty or a hundred of them—were proof of that.
Even the soldiers looked stunned by what had happened. They milled around for nearly a minute before they began to shamble toward the downed protestors, to check for signs of life in the bloody unmoving bodies.
McDonald shut off his phone camera, and backed away from the window. In a very short time, maybe only a few seconds from now, the soldiers were going to shake off their disbelief and start looking around for any witnesses to the shooting. A foreigner with a digital video camera would not fare well if they happened to spot him.
He slipped the camera into his pocket, and left the hotel by an exit that opened on an alley opposite the square. Ten minutes later, he was six blocks away, poking through the wares of a shop that catered to tourists. He didn’t need or want any souvenirs, but it gave him plenty of separation from the scene of the incident, and he was determined to stay off the streets until the cleanup was completed and the riot force was long gone.
His hands were still shaking, so he shoved them into his pockets. The plastic form of the phone was smooth and warm against the back of his right hand. No one but him had any idea what was recorded on the phone’s memory card. He planned to be well and safely out of Chinese territory before he revealed the ugly little chunk of history stored on that flat wafer of digital circuitry.
His first instinct was to arrange the first possible flight out of this place, but that might not be a smart move. It was probably wiser to wait three days, and follow the itinerary he’d already established. If he changed his travel plans without warning, the Chinese authorities might wonder why this American tourist was suddenly in such a hurry to depart their sphere of influence. Better to be patient. Safer that way.
By the time he was back on friendly soil, the People’s Republic of China would have implemented their information-control strategy. Based on past history, it seemed likely that the Chinese government would try to cover up the incident completely, deny that this bloodbath had ever taken place. If they did admit that the shootings had occurred, they would probably try to minimize the size of the protest, and the number of casualties. They might claim that all reports of injuries and deaths were fabricated by untrustworthy dissidents. They might even try to blame everything on the protestors, falsely accusing them of acts of violence against police or military forces.
Whether they resorted to outright denial or spin control, it was a near certainty that the Chinese government would do everything within its power to hide the ugly truth of what had happened here today. The video recording on Bill’s phone was absolute proof. It would shatter their denials and evasions. If they found out about it, he had little doubt that they would go to extreme lengths to silence him.
His plans to distance himself from politics didn’t seem to be working out too well at the moment, but perhaps that was part of the greater plan of the universe. Perhaps—at this point in his existence—his purpose was not t
o set himself apart from the affairs of man. Possibly, it was his destiny to become the agent of truth.
He would mediate and pray on the matter. That would usually bring him clarity of thought and unity of purpose.
But even if prayer and meditation didn’t yield the answers, he had a strong feeling that the universe was about to let him know what it had in mind.
CHAPTER 13
FINAL TRAJECTORY:
A DEVELOPMENTAL HISTORY OF THE CRUISE MISSILE
(Excerpted from working notes presented to the National Institute for Strategic Analysis. Reprinted by permission of the author, David M. Hardy, PhD.)
In 1915, Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels established a small panel of inventors to help the United States military prepare for possible involvement in the Great War in Europe—what we now refer to as World War I. Daniels observed that the technologies of combat in the early 1900s were evolving at an unprecedented rate, and he was concerned that the U.S. military was not properly armed or trained for mechanized warfare.
The resulting organization, the Naval Consulting Board, was comprised of 24 inventors whose charter was to provide ‘machinery and facilities for utilizing the natural inventive genius of Americans to meet the new conditions of warfare.’ Floundering under this lofty but somewhat vague mission statement, the board had no legal status, no funding, and no staff for the first year of its existence. In August of 1916, Congress appropriated an operating budget of $25,000, and the Naval Consulting Board was finally in business.
Despite the high hopes of Josephus Daniels, the board accomplished very little of note beyond approving camouflage paint schemes for civilian ships. One of the more significant exceptions was the development of the so-called aerial torpedo.
The brainchild of Elmer Sperry, one of the pioneers of practical gyroscope applications, the aerial torpedo was intended as an unmanned flying bomb, capable of attacking distant targets without human guidance or intervention. Sperry was fascinated by the remarkable potential of such a weapon, and he hoped that such awesome destructive power might actually deter countries from starting wars.