She poured him a glass of wine.
“Have you told your mother?” he asked.
“Not yet.”
The military base in the arid lands of western China was not a garden spot. Too far from the ocean to receive much moisture, its weather was dominated by the Asian continental high. In the summer the area was too hot, in the winter far too cold, and too dry all the time. High peaks with year-round caps of snow were visible to the north and southwest. And always there was the wind, blowing constantly in a vast, clear, clean, open, empty sky.
The high desert was as physically different from the humid coastal lands of China as one could possibly imagine. Still, for the Chinese, the reality of the place was determined by a far different factor, one that had nothing to do with terrain or weather: The high desert was very sparsely populated.
For people who spent their lives in densely populated urban or rural environments, surrounded by relatives and cousins and lifelong friends, life in the empty desert was cultural shock of the worst sort. The isolation marked each and every one of the soldiers. Some it broke, some it made stronger, all it changed.
The primitive living conditions at the base didn’t help. True, China had developed the high-tech industries that created the nuclear weapons and intercontinental ballistic missiles that were the reason the base existed, but the troop barracks were uninsulated and the men used latrines. The water was not purified, so minerals stained the teeth of the men who had been here for years.
Lieutenant Chen Fah Kwei hated the place. Tonight he was the duty officer in the underground bunker that housed the missile launch controls. There were six missiles in this complex, new ones outfitted with the latest fiber-optic ring-laser gyros and high-speed guidance systems. Truly it was an honor to be the soldier in charge of this arsenal of national power, but Lieutenant Chen wished his transfer to Shanghai would come through soon. He had honor enough to last a lifetime, and he wanted to live someplace with eligible women, laughter, music, books, films …
Tonight he thought longingly about these things while he inspected his teeth. He was using his knife blade for a mirror. As he studied the reflection of his open mouth in the highly polished blade, he decided that, indeed, the minerals were turning his teeth yellow. He tried to consume the minimum amount of water, swallowed it as quickly as he could, but still the minerals were ruining his teeth.
Glumly, he glanced at the monitors of the main computer, which displayed the status of the six missiles in their silos. Bored, sleepy, and homesick, he was playing with his knife when he felt the first thump, a physical concussion that actually rocked his chair.
At first he thought it was an earthquake, but nothing else happened.
He glanced at the monitor.
Missile One. The status had gone red. Silo temperature was off the scale, hot. Now the fire light began flashing.
Stunned, he stared at the monitor for several seconds while he tried to comprehend the information displayed there.
A fire! There was a fire in Silo One.
He flipped a switch on the panel before him, and instantly a black-and-white television picture of the inside of the silo appeared on a monitor mounted high in the corner of the control room.
He stared at the picture. He couldn’t see anything. The missile wasn’t there. All he could see was… was…
Flames.
Flames!
He pushed the red alarm button on his console. He could hear the distant klaxon, which was ringing here, in the barracks, and in the fire station. Men to fight the fire, that was what he needed.
He looked back at the television… and the set was blank. The fire had burned up the camera or the leads.
The computer monitor… Still getting readouts, but they were cycling. The temperature was going through thirteen hundred degrees Fahrenheit. Missile fuel and liquid oxygen must be feeding the fire. At those temperatures the concrete of the silo would burn, the cap would rupture, and nuclear material from the warhead might be ejected into the atmosphere, to be spread far and wide by the wind.
Lieutenant Chen Fah Kwei pushed another alarm button on his panel. The wail of the siren warning of a possible nuclear accident joined the blare of the klaxon.
What had happened?
The missile must have ruptured, spilling fuel all over the interior of the silo, where it caught fire.
That must be—
Even as those thoughts raced through Chen’s mind, he felt another thump in the seat of his pants.
The monitor. Silo Two!
His fingers danced across the controls, bringing up the camera.
A sea of fire.
Sabotage?
The telephone rang. Chen snagged it.
The colonel. “Report,” he demanded.
“Sir, the missiles are blowing up in the silos. Two have gone.”
Even as he spoke the third missile exploded.
“Impossible,” the colonel told him.
“The silos are on fire!” Chen screamed. “I can see the fire on the television monitors. The temperatures are unbelievable. The concrete will burn.”
“Activate the automatic firefighting system.”
“Which silos?”
“All of them,” the colonel roared.
Chen did as he was told. The firefighting system would spray tons of water into the silos as fast as the huge pumps could supply it.
The system was on and pumping as the missiles in Silos Four, Five, and Six exploded in order.
The control room was crammed with people shouting into telephones and talking to each other at the top of their lungs when Chen realized that one explanation of the tragedy was that the self-destruct circuits in the missiles had been triggered.
Of course, he had not triggered anything. The safety caps on the self-destruct switches were still safety-wired down. To destroy a missile in flight, the appropriate cap had to be forcibly lifted and the switch thrown before a self-destruct order was sent to the computer.
But what if the computer received or generated a self-destruct order without the button being pushed? Was that possible? It seemed to have happened six times!
Perhaps, Lieutenant Chen thought, the thing I should have done after the first explosion was turn off the main computer.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Ma Chao was a fighter pilot in the air force of the People’s Liberation Army. Based at Hong Kong’s new international airport at Chek Lap Kok on Lantau Island, across the runway from the main passenger terminal, his squadron was equipped with Shengyang J-11 fighters, a Chinese license-built version of the Russian-designed Sukhoi Su-27 Flanker, one of the world’s premier fighters.
Major Ma’s squadron came to Hong Kong in 1997 upon the departure of the British. For Ma Chao and his fellow pilots, the move to Hong Kong had been cultural shock of the first magnitude. They had been stationed at a typical base several hundred miles up the coast, across the strait from Taiwan. Ma Chao had grown up in Beijing and attended the military academy, where he was selected for flight training.
His first operational posting was to the squadron where he still served, almost twenty years later. When he first reported the squadron was equipped with the Chinese-made version of the Russian MiG-19, called the F-6.
The F-6 was the perfect plane for the Chinese air force. It was a simple, robust, swept-wing day fighter, easy to maintain and operate, adequately armed with three 30-millimeter cannon and two air-to-air heat-seeking missiles. Although the fuel capacity was relatively limited, as it was in all 1950s-era Soviet designs, the plane’s single engine was powerful enough to give it supersonic speed.