LEVIN: Here’s an option I wonder if anyone has pondered. We could send out peace feelers to Beijing. Maybe it’s time to end this war. Let’s call it even.
HAROLD: No! That is unacceptable. After witnessing Chinese perfidy these past three years, America cannot stomach a China-allied or China-friendly Mexico. We must drive China out of Mexico and then we must humble the Chinese, hurt them badly. We must teach them and the world what it means to attack us.
LEVIN: Are you suggesting another Mexican civil war, with Colonel Valdez’s expanded army as the kernel?
HAROLD: That would be a third tier option, not a first.
LEVIN: Then I don’t understand. Director, General McGraw, I agree with the analysis about America being at an impasse. We cannot allow the Chinese in Mexico, and yet we cannot pay the butcher’s bill to drive them out of the country. Peace seems like the only solution.
HAROLD: You’re forgetting the best option of all.
LEVIN: Which is?
HAROLD: That we knock China out of the war by defeating her utterly, by forcing her into a supine position.
LEVIN: (laughs). If driving Chinese soldiers out of Mexico is beyond our strength, how do you expect to defeat the Chinese in their own country? Can we ferry an amphibious force to the Chinese coast?
ADMIRAL O’HARA: I admit we still have transports—if we scrape every port and call home those ships that have remained in foreign harbors these last three years. We may even have several destroyers for escort duty. But that’s not enough to ferry an amphibious force big enough to take China. Hell, we’d be lucky to have enough to storm Taiwan. Not that they’d make it there—the Chinese navy would sink them before that.
LEVIN: Then invading China is impossible, which means knocking it out of the war… is a pipe dream.
HAROLD: By ourselves, yes. We need allies, the Indian League or the Slavic Coalition, or preferably both.
LEVIN: How could you persuade either power bloc to do this?
HAROLD: The key is food, which means reviving the old Grain Union.
LEVIN: The Chinese captured Australia and the Brazilians overran Argentina. Without those two countries, we and Canada are the totality of the Grain Union.
HAROLD: Obviously. That’s one of the reasons we’re holding secret talks with the South American Federation. If the SAF exits Argentina, we will return their POWs, over one and a half million men.
LEVIN: Your results?
HAROLD: So far, we haven’t convinced the junta leaders. Australia looks more promising.
LEVIN: I don’t see how. Chinese troops garrison the continent.
HAROLD: I’m sure you’ve read the latest intelligence reports. Chairman Hong is in the process of pouring vast number of troops into Mexico. He has to get them from somewhere. We believe the PAA forces sustained over two million casualties during the spring and summer offensives and the Red Dragon attack. The bulk of those losses were Chinese soldiers, not Japanese or Vietnamese. Hong has raised new levies, of course, but less than one million in number. The rest of the soldiers are coming from China’s strategic reserve and from their various occupation forces. These troops were stationed in Siberia, Kazakhstan, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, Indonesia, the Philippines, Australia and New Zealand.
LEVIN: That’s interesting, certainly. How many PAA soldiers are in Australia now?
HAROLD: There used to be three hundred thousand A-category troops. Now it is closer to one hundred and fifty thousand.
LEVIN: He took half out of the country?
HAROLD: Why not? China controls the Pacific. According to our estimates, Hong has also shifted five hundred thousand A-category forces to Burma, raising the numbers to one and a half million, possibly two million.
LEVIN: You’re suggesting we make an amphibious invasion of Australia?
HAROLD: A liberation, let’s call it. As one of our moves, yes.
LEVIN: How? China controls the Pacific, remember?
HAROLD: A stealth invasion coming up from Antarctica to hit the bottom of Australia. We would bypass the Pacific and Indian Oceans.
LEVIN: That would be a pure gamble, a wild throw of the dice.
HAROLD: Not altogether—General McGraw, if you would tell them, please…
MCGRAW: Gentlemen, we have reached a new era in war. In part for us, it’s because we must. Our boys have fought hard for three years, and we’ve taken bitter losses. The young ones who joined up to take the veterans’ places don’t have the same stomach for a fight, nor are they as skilled. To encourage our divisions to keep driving this summer, we had to supply them with more artillery tubes per one hundred thousand soldiers than ever before. I should point out, that’s a common feature of protracted warfare. It even happened to Napoleon Bonaparte and his Grande Armee.
What that means for us is that we need to go high tech to defeat the Chinese. We’re going to comb our divisions and take our best soldiers, concentrating them into elite formations. We’re also working on several new technologies. One of them is the hypervelocity missile. Tests suggest that they would fly too fast for lasers to knock them down. The laser beam could not stay on target long enough to impart enough heat to destroy the missile.
LEVIN: That sounds like a war-winning weapon to me.
MCGRAW: Unfortunately, the hypervelocity missiles are only in the first experimental stages, so we cannot count on them just yet. What we are doing as of now is increasing our number of THOR missiles. Nothing can knock them down once they’re raining toward Earth. I should add, though, the Chinese are hard at work on stealth satellite detection and killer satellites of their own to take out our THOR launch vehicles once they find them in orbit. Still, if we can manufacture enough THOR missiles and get them over the battlefield, we should be able to destroy any critical enemy component at precisely the right time to do the most damage.
LEVIN: The Chinese will have other countermeasures you haven’t thought of yet.
MCGRAW: That’s another reason we have to find other baskets.
LEVIN: Excuse me?
MCGRAW: Don’t put all your eggs in one basket.
LEVON: Oh, of course.
MCGRAW: Clearly, the THOR missiles point the way. We must gain control of orbital space and learn to use it with pinpoint accuracy.
LEVIN: It sounds as if you already have systems in mind.
MCGRAW: I do. It also happens to be one of our key inducements we could offer any allies, be they Russian or Indian.
LEVIN: I feel I should point out that Premier Konev is engaged in secret talks with Chairman Hong. They have come to an accord.
HAROLD: I realize that. But the Russians have also received German Dominion AI Kaisers. It seems the new European Union people don’t like those smart tanks and want to send the entire stock of them as far away as possible. Perhaps as interesting, the Europeans have released General Mansfeld, sending him to the Russians.
LEVIN: All true. Yet that is a long way toward convincing Konev to fight China. While the Russians would like to regain Siberia, they must realize the cost in blood would be too high.
HAROLD: It’s one of the reasons we’re working so closely with the Indian League. Still, we cannot leave any stone unturned. Which is why we need your help, Doctor. I realize the CIA knows much more about Russia and India’s internal workings than Homeland Security does. We’re gathering a team. I—we plan to send a Presidential representative to Moscow to offer Konev whatever American help it will take to get him to move.
LEVIN: Who’s your representative?
HAROLD: An old colleague of yours, Doctor. Anna Chen.