China Sea (53 page)

And yet more. He knew now that to lead contained a hard contradiction. It was to love those others to a degree surpassing self … and yet to be ready, if necessity so ordered, to place the mission before your career, your life, your men's lives, and the very existence of your ship.

For that was why the people of the United States sent fleets out to the seas and straits of the planet: to have a sharp tool ready, against the hour of mortal need.

Command was not a reward. It was not a perk. It was not just another step in a career at sea. It was not a lark, though there were times when it held as deep a pleasure as he'd ever felt. For the first time, he'd found a task that demanded everything he had in him, every ounce of professional skill, every gram of courage, every grain of insight and patience, integrity and character, self-control and wisdom. He did not know if he would ever be called to it again. But he was glad to have been there, if only for a little while.

“I relieve you, sir,” said Chandvirach, lifting his hand briefly to his cap. Dan returned the salute, then reached out to shake the other man's hand.

He said, “I stand relieved.”

BEIJING

THE swarthy, barrel-chested officer in blues sat watching the bare snow-dusted streets pass by. Pleasant as it was in summer, Beijing was a murderous post in January, with the Siberian winds keeping the temperatures somewhere between zero and minus thirty Centigrade. When the embassy Citation turned off Baishiqiao at North Circular Road, Jack Byrne flipped the collar up on his bridge coat. Stood for a moment on the pavement after he got out, looking around. It was a habit he'd picked up from years in the USSR and Eastern Europe. Take your time. Be aware of your environment. Always have an escape route.

When he felt secure, he followed the signs and the straggling crowd toward the exhibition hall.

Tonight's event had not been scheduled in the reddish-gold blaze of the Forbidden City. The Youyi Binguan lay in the direction of the Summer Palace, but the “Friendship Guest House” had none of the suffocating late Qing ostentation of that resort of the final Manchu empress. It was not a “house,” either. The acres of hotel blocks, apartment blocks, auditoriums, and meeting halls, mostly of reinforced concrete, had been built in the 1950s to house Russian advisers and their families.

But at least, he reflected, it had not been “purified” with hammers during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.

The main exhibit hall was thronged with smiling Westerners and expressionless Chinese in uniforms and blue business suits. Banners proclaimed corporate allegiances above tables and booths: IDS, IBM, Wang, Hughes, Westinghouse, Lotus, Microsoft, Intel, Apple, GE, Lockheed, Oracle, Acme, Ventura, Compaq, Systems Bull, Osborne. A banner more enormous than all the rest together, hung from one side of the hall to the other, announced in English and French,
Welcome to the Annual Beijing Computer-Electronics Exhibition.

Jack Byrne slowly took off his dark glasses, polished them, and slipped them inside his service dress blue blouse. He accepted a brochure from a Japanese woman wearing a Toshiba button, checked the schedule of events, and headed across the exhibition floor—Leading Edge, Hewlett-Packard, Adobe, MicroPro, XyQuest—and down a short hallway.

The reception room was considerably more luxurious, and warm enough that he could leave his coat at the check table. Buffet tables held a selection of California delicacies, and older men clustered around them and around a small bar. On second glance, he saw they were staring at a television behind it. The set was connected to an astonishingly small satellite dish, not much bigger than the serving plate he held in his hand. A placard behind it; some vendor had had the bright idea of setting up in here. As he approached, he saw it was tuned to CNN. Wolf Blitzer was holding forth, interspersed with images of a darkened city naked under the night sky. Streams of tracers clawed skyward, the gunners groping desperately for an enemy that eluded their grasp with ease.

He recognized it. Baghdad, reprised images from the opening of the Desert Storm air war, the night before.

He was holding a plastic-stemmed glass of
sudashui
when he saw the cherub-faced man in gray civilian suit smoking a cigarette near the buffet. He glanced around, then drifted toward him.

“Admiral Mi. Nice to see you, sir.”

The Chinese blinked. “Captain Byrne.”

“Your aide's not with you?”

“I don't take him everywhere,” Mi said. His eyes slid past Byrne, toward the buffet table. The attaché turned gracefully, suggesting with his body that they proceed in that direction, but the admiral did not stir.

Instead Mi nodded toward the screen. “Have you been watching CNN?”

“The bombing of Baghdad. Very impressive.”

“Saddam depends too much on Soviet-style weaponry. No one will make that mistake again. The technological supremacy of the West is quite clear now.”

Mi's face had hardened as he spoke, watching the images of a heavily armed but helpless city. Suddenly he swung away, toward the bar. Byrne glanced round again and followed him. But halfway there the senior officer swung his bulk sideways and stopped. He and a bald husky European in a blazer exchanged several sentences in German. Byrne waited patiently, smiling, till Mi was free again, then said, “I understand the South Sea Fleet was recently engaged off Hainan.”

Mi's eyes flickered, but only for a microsecond. He said evenly, “Only certain elements of that fleet, deployed on a peaceful mission. They were treacherously attacked, without warning, and the survivors abandoned with great cruelty and loss of life.”

“Tragic. Any idea who was responsible?”

“Pirates.”

“Pirates! How terrible. I have heard they are a serious problem in certain quarters of the China Sea.”

“They have been for many centuries,” said Mi. The Chinese attendant had a drink waiting when he reached the bar. The admiral devoured it in one bite.

“What is the Chinese Navy's view of that incident?”

“Of the incident off Hainan?”

Byrne nodded. Mi turned his eyes away, then back. “We must suppress these bandits of the sea,” he said at last. “All of them. They threaten us all.”

Byrne looked slowly around at the chattering salespeople, at the banners touting faster RAM chips and Ethernet connectivity. “You know, it's all too easy to believe commercial interests are all that matters to the West,” he said. “But that's not the whole story.”

“You first came to China as pirates,” said Mi.

“We came in many roles, as I understand it,” said Byrne. “As pirates and adventurers, certainly, but also as traders, as missionaries, as those genuinely extending the hand of friendship. I can imagine it must have been difficult for the rulers of those days to distinguish among them. To sort out those who merely wanted to profit, with no thought beyond that, from those who had more fundamental interests and would defend them. All the more so since their governments, too, did not always convey a consistent attitude.”

Mi nodded thoughtfully, lighting another cigarette. He said nothing more, simply staring at the screen, so after a moment Byrne excused himself and got a drink, now that the business of the evening was over, now that he'd made the point he wanted to make.

For just a moment, holding a pale golden wine, he allowed himself to wonder if it had been worth it. He knew not only what Mi knew—National Security Agency intercepts of certain transmissions after the sinking of the cruiser had made interesting reading—but he knew also what those higher officers to whom he himself reported thought. He knew their doubts as to whether the mission might succeed and their caution in dissociating themselves from any hint of official sponsorship.

He nodded slowly, realizing Mi had said the right things. Very cautiously, he allowed himself to hope that the message had been received. But he also knew what all diplomats learned sooner or later: that no message ever meant to the hearer exactly what the sender intended. What the oligarchs of the New China made of this one remained to be seen. But it had been transmitted. Until matters developed further, his responsibility, and that of the U.S. Navy, could be considered at an end.

Only time would tell if the game had been worth the candle, or if history and politics and the ineradicable streak of something not quite sane in the human heart meant a titanic struggle still lay ahead. He himself did not believe in inevitable conflicts. He hoped what they'd done had pushed the possibility of this one a little further away.

Drinking off the rather-too-sweet wine, he grimaced and set the glass down. And a moment later, lost himself in the crowd.

 

Read on for a sneak preview of David Poyer's next exciting book

 

BLACK STORM

 

Now available from St. Martin's Paperbacks

1

0100 18 FEBRUARY 1991: THE SAUDI DESERT

No one spoke after the helicopter lifted off. There wouldn't have been any point, even if they'd wanted to; the engine noise was deafening. The deck shuddered, tilting as the pilot pulled into a hard bank. Beyond the windshield, beyond the open doors where crewmen sat hunched over the pintle mounts for the M60s, impenetrable night hurtled by as they gathered speed.

The winter of the war was cold and rainy, the worst in thirty years. The desert stars had been sealed off for days by an overcast that opened now and again to loose spatters of sooty, oil-smelling, dust-gritty rain over the half million men who waited, scattered far and wide across the western desert, for the word to go.

The helo steadied, dropping till it hurtled onward barely a hundred feet above the desert.

Seven dark figures lay tumbled together in the crew compartment, where they'd hauled themselves in during the thirty seconds the Navy Combat Search and Rescue HH-60 had touched down at the pickup point. The compartment was too low to stand up. There weren't any seats, just bare aluminum-walled space lit by faint green lights to port and starboard. Their camouflage uniforms had no rank insignia and no unit patches. They lay on top of their gear and rucks and weapons and each other, mingled like a composite organism that had only just begun to gain consciousness of itself.

The pilot tilted his head back, peering beneath his night vision goggles when a brilliant line of evenly spaced blue-white lights lifted over the horizon. The pipeline road stretched parallel to the border twenty-five miles north. It was lit all night long. Both lanes were filled with double columns of tanker trucks and tank transporters heading slowly west. The lights passed beneath them, and fell quickly aft. As darkness retook the world he looked through the goggles again. And suddenly the scene shifted from inchoate and unrevealing darkness to a strange green-on-black world of barren sand-ridges and blasted wadis, a dry undulating sea of sand and sand and sand, and close above it the haloed green flare, pulled from the deep infrared by the circuitry of the heavy goggles, of the hot exhaust of another larger aircraft.

The black helicopter ahead was an Air Force Pave Hawk bird. It had better avionics and weapons, including a sophisticated terrain-avoidance radar, but the Navy helo had better navigation. The pilot tracked it through the NVGs, rising when it rose, dropping when it dropped. When he had the rhythm he said softly into the intercom, “Team leader, you on the line yet? Slap a cranial on him, Minky.”

“Six team leader on the line,” said a voice. “This the pilot?”

“Welcome aboard, I'm your taxi driver tonight. Crawl up here and tell my copilot where you want to go.”

A faint green light clicked on, focused on an air chart. Across the lower quarter a dotted stripe zagged from left to right, gradually angling down. North of it was a series of carefully hand-drawn threat circles. They grew denser and more closely spaced toward the top of the chart, and many of them overlapped.

A gloved finger reached out and pressed a point west of a blue-tinted scatter of lakes and marshland. It was covered by two of the circles, which marked the location and effective radius of Iraqi antiair missile batteries.

After a moment the copilot said, “I was afraid that's where you wanted to go.”

“What is this, sir? You were at the briefing, weren't you?”

“I'm just pulling your chain. Just making sure we're on the same sheet of music.”

“Just get us there,” said the team leader.

*   *   *

The team leader looked closely at the map, going over the route and the plan for the hundredth time in his mind. Turnaround and jumpoff, Point Charlie, Point Delta, objective. In an hour and a half they'd be on the ground a hundred and forty miles inside Iraq. Once landed, they'd link up with an advance party, exchange information, then start the mission. The turnover had to go fast. They'd be inserting close to powerful enemy forces enraged by being bombed for weeks without being able to strike back.

The air war had been underway since the UN deadline expired on 17 January. The Air Force and Navy had been pounding the Iraqis for four weeks now, starting with air defenses, command and communications nodes in downtown Baghdad, and then shifting to the ground forces dug in around Kuwait. Some of the briefers had said they were decimated. Others said the Republican Guard was dug in so deep the bombing barely scratched them. He knew the fog and overcast and rain hadn't helped.

But he'd seen what happened when you underestimated your enemy. As a private, hot off the griddle at Parris Island. Night after night on the perimeter in Beirut, listening to the crackle of gunfire as the Syrians, the Israelis, the Palestinians, the Hezbollah, and practically every other terrorist faction in the Middle East fought it out. Someone with a direct line to God had set the Marines down on the airfield in the middle of it. He'd thought the locals understood they were protecting them. Till he'd been awakened one October night in '83 by an enormous explosion.