As the delegation was led into the presidential mansion, Len concentrated on what he would say. The videolink conference room, he decided, would be the room in which he would receive the Japanese. There they could be filmed unobtrusively, the video cameras mounted in the fabric of ornate and ancient oil paintings depicting wars on land and at sea. He could use the disk to keep the Japanese honest.
The intercom buzzed and Nakamoto was finally announced.
Len nodded at Lee Chun Wah, and together they left the office and walked briskly down the hall to the conference room. Lee opened the door for President Len, who proceeded in.
The room was painted a deep shade of green to the railing, which was stained a dark brown and varnished to a glowing shine. Above the railing the huge oil paintings hung, the bloody scenes of battle shocking at first, then soon ignored. The room had no windows, its only furniture a wooden conference table with dark green leather set into the surface, several chandeliers casting a mellow light throughout the room. The place would be ideal for poker, an American ambassador had once joked. He had not known how close he was to the truth.
Against the front wall stood Nakamoto and his aides.
The Japanese ambassador, elderly and deeply wrinkled, broke into a grin, revealing uneven teeth protruding outward on top, inward on the bottom. He required only round wire-rimmed glasses, it occurred to Len, to complete the caricature of a Japanese from an old Allied World War II poster. Nakamoto began to bow, deeply, and Len wondered how he could go so far down without falling. Len continued to stand upright, refusing to bow, having decided to throw cold water on Nakamoto from the start. The Japanese were not going to steamroll him with their polite rituals, disarming their opposition and walking away winning the negotiation. That might work with certain naive American presidents, but not a former battlefield commanding general.
“Please state your business, Nakamoto.”
Nakamoto looked at the Greater Manchurian president with no change in his expression. “Honorable President Len Pei Poom, we have come to discuss a matter of urgency and concern to the Japanese people—”
Len sat down, not drawing his chair up to the table, as if he was about to leave momentarily. He looked pointedly at his watch and said nothing.
The Japanese ambassador sank slowly into a seat.
“Your nuclear missiles, Honorable Mr. President.”
“What?” Len sounded more indignant than surprised. In fact, he had suspected as much.
Nakamoto proceeded to open an envelope and spread out several black-and-white photographs of the inside of the Tamga facility, one of them showing the inside of the bunker. “These were taken from inside your facility.”
Len refused to look down at the photographs. The Japanese gave him no chance to accuse them of spying. They began by acknowledging it. Clever. Nakamoto might look like a caricature, but that was clearly only on the surface.
“You admit it,” Len said slowly, trying to recover.
“I merely advise you of a fact. The prime minister is gravely concerned.”
“He has no need to be.”
“We do not agree. We wish control of the Tamga facility to ensure our security. We will keep this private. We understand you have Russia and the Chinas to contend with. But we have, as I say, our concerns. The Japanese Self Defense Force will send a small force to guard the missiles. We must agree before you ever use them, and a Japanese team will fire the missiles for you if—”
Len allowed himself to laugh, although he saw nothing amusing. These people were serious.
“Sir, our only objective is to insure that Greater Manchuria not threaten Japan.”
“My answer is that you go back to your embassy. Mr. Lee, see these gentlemen to their car.”
“Wait, please, Honorable Mr. President Len. I request that you let me make a call to Tokyo. I have a satellite phone cell that will put me in video contact from here, if you will but allow it. Let me but put this matter to Tokyo.”
Len began to shake his head, but an old saying by Daniele Vare, an Italian diplomat, came to mind: “Diplomacy is the art of letting someone else have your way.”
“Ambassador Nakamoto, you may make your call. I will be in my office chambers. When you are ready to talk again, pick up the phone in the corner and I will be back.”
The rocky coastline approached rapidly and the missile climbed to forty meters in anticipation of a small cliff.
The cliff approached at 600 kilometers per hour. At one instant the missile was flying over the sea, the next it was navigating over the rocky terrain of the Greater Manchurian wilderness. The missile continued on, following its programmed trajectory, dodging small mountains and trees and outcroppings of rocks, the land flying toward the video view at a dizzying speed.
Every few minutes the missile transmitted a burst communication to the Galaxy satellite, the transmission composed of video images of the previous five minutes along with missile-status parameters. The transmission was triple encrypted, meaningless tones to a hostile receiver, the first encryption by the computer onboard, the second encryption done by varying the transmission frequency across the spectrum in planned jumps so that a receiver could pick up the entire transmission only if he knew what frequency to skip to. And the frequency skips took place at random times, essentially making for a third encryption. The final precaution was the random-minute transmission intervals, so that a receiving station could not detect the telemetry during the outages between transmissions. The random transmission intervals were done so that a listener would not detect a transmission pattern and be waiting for a burst communication every five minutes, which would be too regular. The integrated system was highly stealthy and amounted to a full data exchange under conditions that normally would dictate radio silence.
The missile flew on, the afternoon sun beginning to sink in the sky. By sunset, the mission would be long over.
Back in his office Len looked at Lee Chun Wah.
“What are the Japanese doing? Their offer seems almost deliberately insulting. They want my missiles. A Japanese team to make sure I don’t play with my own toys, so to speak. And now they’re on the phone. What are they thinking?”
“Only they know for sure. A not uncommon phenomenon for them.”
“Any way of accessing the video cameras in the conference room? Getting an early read?”
“Afraid not, sir. We can get the disk in from the computer once the session is over, but we can’t tap into the room now.”
“Make a note — I want those cameras tied into my personal closed loop video. We may need to do this in the future.”
“Yes, sir.”
The phone rang. Lee Chun Wah picked it up.
“They are ready sir. And Nakamoto sounded shaken.”
“Ambassador Nakamoto. What has Tokyo told you?”
Nakamoto looked up from the table to the standing form of Len Pei Poom. Len’s directness seemed to be contagious. “Honorable Mr. President, Tokyo has decided to protect our nation. We must be rid of your threatening missiles.”
Nakamoto pointed to the display of a notebook computer on the table. The display showed land flying toward the video eye, trees and hills passing by at a tremendous speed.
“With a nominal five minute delay, this is the view out the targeting camera of one of the missiles we have launched at your Tamga facility. It will be arriving at the facility in approximately two minutes. We have one last chance to stop the missiles.