Admiral Thornton — the new CNO — had appeared visibly shaken when he’d given Baker the navy’s dismal news. America had been left with only four carriers split between the East and West Coasts. The Chinese had sixteen supercarriers in the Gulf. They could land anywhere along America’s Third Coast that they wanted. Baker had turned to the chief of staff of the air force, but General Latham had informed him that China deployed 4800 carrier-based aircraft in the Gulf and another 4000 on runways in Cuba. Latham couldn’t send his few thousand remaining combat pilots on suicidal attacks against the Chinese without robbing America’s own air defenses of an integral and critical component. For while high-altitude Chinese missiles and aircraft were downed by ground-based American SAMs, most stealthy, low-and-slow, air-breathing cruise missiles were intercepted by pilots firing guns.
Baker hadn’t bothered asking the marine commandant for help. The Corps had lost the 1st and 2nd Marine Divisions, and the 3rd was stranded in Hawaii. The 4th—a reserve unit — anchored fixed defenses around New Orleans. After the losses in the Carribean, all the marines had left were three 10,000-man Marine Expeditionary Brigades. Replacement 1st and 2nd Marine Divisions, plus the new marine divisions numbered 5th and 6th, had not yet been raised at Camps Pendleton and Lejeune. They would be ready to go to sea behind the fire power of the arsenal ships… if only America could hold on long enough to launch them.
Baker had turned then to the defender of last resort: the United States Army. It is possible, General Cotler had advised, that we could stop the Chinese on the beach. But repulsing their first attack won’t stop their second, third, or fourth, and committing our reserves to do that may be exactly what they want. “It could shorten the war, Mr. President,” Cotler had said, chilling Bill to the bone.
Baker had thus been forced into his third major decision. “I want decisive engagement,” he had told the Joint Chiefs. “Since America can’t take the war to the Chinese, the Chinese will have to come to us.” Baker had known that the uniformed doubters who stared back at him had never once in their careers contemplated the loss of territory to invasion, and they promptly opened fire on Baker’s plan. What if the Chinese land ten million troops? “Then we’ll draft mothers of young children and old men,” Bill had replied. What if the Cuban buildup is a strategic deception and they come ashore in New Jersey or California? “Then we’ll fight in the Sierra Nevadas and Appalachians,” Baker had answered, “and I want a contingency plan to do just that.”
That night, after silencing the dissent in his NSC, Baker had lain awake half the night thinking, What the hell do I know? He had been a bit actor in male adventure movies whose name and face had won him a vacant senate seat. His political career had remained undistinguished until the China thing had caught fire. His marriage to Rachel Roberts, a star-struck co-ed nee Rachel Bachman, had been a total disaster. Because a second divorce would have made Bill virtually unelectable, he had shied away from any romantic entanglements since.
The result: Bill Baker now lived in his own private hell — alone under the crushing weight of the office. Just the night before, he had lain awake again till the early hours of the next day, wondering when the unthinkable had become the inevitable? Was it last spring when he had toured the South inspecting antimissile silos and heard the near constant thunder of sonic booms from Gulf-bound interceptors? Or was it on that clear, early summer night on the deserted beach in southern Florida watching the final sea battles from the Straits of Havana flash like lightning over the horizon? Or when announcing to the people at the port of Charleston that the navy would one day return, then later that night viewing the body of the first confirmed Chinese soldier in America — a commando who had been killed in a shoot-out with local police? No, he had decided as the dawn shown around thick curtains, he had long feared the vague menace of the Chinese resurgence. For the nation that Baker led was bounded by three thousand miles of undefended coastline. When America had lost control of the sea, the oceans surrounding her had gone from being her greatest asset to being her possibly fatal liability.
2
Clarissa Leffler waited outside the Situation Room before her first ever briefing of the National Security Council. At the relatively young age of thirty-five, she had just become the head of the State Department’s now all-important China Desk. Most in her position would have been nervously rehearsing what she was going to say in front of the president of the United States. But Clarissa was an expert on her subject — Chinese politics — and was also at ease around powerful politicians. So instead she spent her time reflecting on the irony of having chosen treason in the name of patriotism.
The night before, her father — the Republican Speaker of the House — had hinted of a possible military coup. “Certain stalwart generals,” he had said, “may seize extra-constitutional control and go nuclear in a truly biblical way!” In the last few years, American politics had taken a dramatic shift to the right, and her father, Tom Leffler, had ridden the conservative crest. Bill Baker’s plan to defeat the Chinese using only the lives of draftees was not only heartless, it was doomed to failure.
She would never have dreamed that Baker would betray his country like that! In graduate school, Clarissa had cried futilely about China’s threat to world peace to people who saw only fortunes to be made in trade. Then Baker had rocketed to office, trumpeting warnings of Chinese aggression. Clarissa had done low-level, back-office work on Baker’s presidential campaign with her father’s very willing permission. But now, how could the man she’d so ardently supported shrink from using nuclear arms when the survival of their nation was at stake?
Clarissa knew that historic roles lay ahead for certain, chosen people. A chance to make a real difference. The entire “extraconstitutional” undertaking was probably being planned with military precision, but in her imagination the presidential succession would unfold like an opera. The general story of the coup would be obvious to all, but the high drama of the actual event would be masked behind a language at whose precise meaning you could only guess. What part might she play in the patriotic overthrow of Bill Baker? Would she even see it coming? Would somebody tell her? Maybe ask her for help? And what about afterwards? Would counterplotters abound? Would loyalists refuse her father’s commands? After all, though it had remained unspoken in their conversation, her father — third in line to become president — would be the plotters’ obvious choice. And her father’s new administration, she reasoned calmly, would need trustworthy officials after the coup.
After the coup… echoed the sobering thought. As happened every time that Clarissa imagined what would follow her father’s oath of office, her stomach tightened as if it had been punched. Clarissa had always possessed a highly imaginative mind, but nuclear war on American soil to her still seemed completely and totally unimaginable. Surely there’s another way, came her only solace every time that she contemplated such a dismal fate.