“Oh, yeah. Real quick.”
Charlie Riser was impressed. “Anything he doesn’t know?”
“Yeah,” answered the military attaché. “How to get on with politicians and their staff. Too blunt.”
Indeed, it was the general’s prickly relationship with the present administration which was responsible for Eleanor Prenty’s delay in returning Freeman’s call to her. Besides, SATPIX taken over the darkness of the far western Pacific were coming in fast and furious, showing cluster “blossoms,” explosions of light, near the line of the South China coast, specifically in Shantou and other bases in Fukien Province. Both the NSA and CIA had alerted Eleanor, but she’d decided not to wake the President until she realized that the lat/long coordinates of these “blossoms” were actually on the Chinese coast. The explosions caught by the satellite’s zoom eye were revealed to be in Shantou, Dongshan, Xiamen, and Pingtan — all major PLA navy bases directly across the strait from Taiwan. “Sea scratches,” long white lines, could also be seen through the intermittent cloud cover offshore, the wakes indicating that the vessels were approaching the Chinese coast.
Then the red “Red” phone from Beijing rang. Zhou Zhang, the premier of the most populous country on earth, urgently needed to speak to the President of the most powerful nation on earth. Eleanor buzzed the interpreter and the President himself, and noted that it would now be early dawn in China.
“Hello, Mr. President,” was the first and last English phrase the Chinese premier used, because he knew there was no room for error, or the slightest misunderstanding. His message, a courtesy to the President, was the same message his ministers for defense and the interior were now conveying to their counterparts in Europe and Russia: The Chinese mainland was under attack by the forces of renegade Taiwan, which was obviously taking advantage of China’s preoccupation with its northwestern terrorist problem to launch a sneak attack against China’s eastern seaboard.
The President had no sooner thanked the Chinese premier for advising him of Beijing’s point of view than Eleanor handed him a decoded “Eyes Only” transmission. Both the NSA and CIA were reporting that the Nationalist government in Taipei was emphatically denying that it had ordered any attack against the Communist Chinese mainland.
“All right,” the President told Eleanor. “But how about the offshore Chinese islands? The Nationalist-held islands are within spitting distance of the mainland. What’s going on there? Every day the Communists shell the Nationalist island of Kinmen with propaganda pamphlets, and the Nationalists are bunkered in a complex you wouldn’t believe.” He took off his reading glasses, dropping them tiredly on the Oval Office desk. “Ever since 1949 they’ve been at loggerheads.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
A typhoon alert had been issued at 3:50 A.M., the typhoon expected to make landfall at Shihmen at the northernmost tip of the 240-mile-long, leaf-shaped island of Taiwan, which varies in width from its tapered five-mile-wide southern extremity up through its eighty-five-mile-wide waist, to the northern end of the leaf, where the distance from west to east coasts is about thirty-two miles.
In the small village four miles east of Shihmen, the wife of fifty-one-year-old Moh Pan awoke in the predawn darkness, foisting off her husband’s groping hands from beneath their bedroll. “No,” she said firmly. “It’s time.” It was already five o’clock.
“A few minutes?” he pleaded.
“No. After.”
“After?” Moh snorted. “After, I’ll be dead!”
“You always say that.” She was out of bed and, though the same age as Moh, moved with the energy of a much younger person. Opening the door, her voice rose above the roar of the black sea. “If I had a mushroom for every time you said you’d be dead, I’d be so rich we wouldn’t have to pick them.”
Moh turned away grumpily, cursing the necessity of picking the damned mushrooms between five and seven every morning, the two-hour slot affording the right temperature and humidity for coaxing the valuable fungi from their dark sheds to their prime market size, no more than an inch in diameter. Any later than seven and the mushrooms would be worth much less at the market in Shihmen. Mumbling at his wife’s rebuttal of his sexual advances, Moh, who was a little hard of hearing, now pretended to hear nothing she said, blaming the unending crashing of the surf against the rocky shore a quarter mile down from the village that nestled in a small, wind-blown dell at the northernmost end of the island. The high surf there marked the tail end of the most recent typhoon, one of the many hurricanes that periodically assailed the island and battered its spectacular east coast. Here, enormous cliffs dropped from wild, bird-filled skies sheer to the violent creamy-edged sea, absorbing most of the typhoons’ power in the form of torrential rains and winds, which, after lashing the island’s mountain spine, were less ferocious when they reached the more habitable and heavily industrialized lowlands of the west coast.
Even there, however, the prevailing easterlies of the typhoons were still strong enough to favor Taiwan’s daily leaflet-filled balloon and loudspeaker war against the mainland, a propaganda battle that had continued every odd-numbered day since 1958, Mao’s mainland Chinese having built the world’s biggest speakers in an attempt to outshout their wind-favored Nationalist enemies entrenched on the hills and coast of Kinmen Island. The latter’s name meant “Gate as if Made of Gold,” for it was seen as the gate controlling the adjacent seas off the Chinese mainland. The island, formerly known as Quemoy, bristled, as did Matsu, with updated U.S. Patriot surface-to-air missiles. The ferocity of the Communists on the mainland who wanted to regain Taiwan and all its islands could be measured by the fact that on Matsu and Kinmen the Nationalists still felt obliged to enforce martial law and maintain the presence of their 150,000 Taiwanese troops. So self-sufficient and self-contained were these islands, which served as early warning radio and radar listening posts for Taiwan, that in addition to enough food, water, ammunition, and medical provisions to last months without resupply, they even had their own currency.
As Moh Pan reluctantly dragged himself out of bed at a few minutes after six, he glimpsed what he thought were metallic glints at the gray edge of the world, about forty miles due north of Shihmen. At that moment on Kinmen, 173 miles westward across the Taiwan Strait, the military headquarters was abuzz with consternation over what night vision binoculars on Kinmen’s western side had revealed was a flotilla of Communist PLA navy fast-attack Houxin and Huangfen patrol boats heading eastward toward Kinmen. Though capable of thirty-two and thirty-five knots respectively, the Communist attack boats were approaching the Nationalist island slowly, only to make a U-turn back toward the mainland at high speed, leaving clearly visible wakes of phosphorescence in the plankton-rich sea. Meanwhile, Matsu HQ was receiving frantic inquiries from Taiwan’s Tsoying Naval Base, a hundred miles eastward, which in turn was receiving urgent inquiries from the U.S. State Department and the Washington intelligence community. The latter, despite their eye-in-the-sky spy satellites and other gizmology, couldn’t figure out exactly what the hell was going on.
Walking to market, pulling the cart full of mushrooms, Moh Pan looked north again to see whether he could see any ships, or had it been the glint of aircraft? Perhaps he should call Shihmen’s Civil Defense Office. “Do you have your cell?” he asked his wife.
“Battery’s dead,” she answered. “You forgot to recharge.”
“Of course,” he countered. “And I suppose I’m to blame for the typhoon too?”
She refused to answer. He just wanted to start a fight. He was giving her the evil eye.