Lieutenant Wu and the other junior officers secured Top Secret files after a meeting of Sheng’s general staff. Colonel Li stood by the door casually overseeing the process. Each set of files and notepads — used or not — went into a “DESTROY” bag. The irreversible plastic ties at the mouths of the bags were pulled tight with audible clicking sounds. The instructions on the side read, “Class One Incineration Required.”
Like the other lieutenants and captains, Wu worked his way around the table dropping files and papers into the sacks. He pulled the sacks closed and handed them to fellow officers, who hustled them to a cart. Wu had to wait for someone to return before he could even touch the papers at the next place. That was the rule. Always two people. Never one. It reduced the odds of spying.
Finally, Wu’s partner — a captain — returned. Wu bagged more files and briefing books and handed the sack over. The captain left the quiet room. Wu moved down to the head of the table — to General Sheng’s place — and waited.
There was, just then, absolutely no one in the room. It was a major breach of security. Colonel Li had disappeared. The other teams disposing of files had finished their work. Wu’s partner had not yet returned. There was only one set of files left on the table: the commanding general’s.
Wu looked down. That act alone — the cast of his gaze — was suspicious enough for counterintelligence to send a staff officer like Wu to the front. The red, stamped wax seal on Sheng’s file was broken. Wu reached down and opened the file: an offense punishable by death.
The file was neatly divided into sections. On the first page of each section was a picture of an American and a caption bearing a name. The first three appeared to be publicity photos. Portraits of subjects neatly framed by the camera. A man wearing glasses in a professional business suit. “Hamilton Asher,” read the caption. An American air force general with close-cropped silver hair. “Martin Latham” was his name. “Thomas Leffler,” a rotund old man whom Wu recognized to be a senior American politician. But on the last page Wu found not a portrait, but a crude video capture of an attractive American woman putting on sunglasses leaving the White House. Beside it was a picture of the same woman — years younger, maybe in her twenties — at an outdoor restaurant in a Chinese city. “Dr. Clarissa Leffler,” Wu read, mouthing but not speaking her name.
Wu let the file fall closed and waited, staring at the far wall as if at attention.
Colonel Li happened by the open door and looked in. “Ah! Lieutenant Wu? Has everyone run off and left you?” He casually strolled into the room.
“Apparently so, Colonel Li.”
Li took Wu’s sack and held it open. Wu deposited General Sheng’s file and briefing book into the bag, which Li closed with a clicking sound. “I’ll take this to document security on my way back upstairs,” Li said helpfully.
“Yes, sir,” replied the ramrod straight lieutenant.
Li smiled.
When Wu returned to his luxurious quarters in an antebellum southern home, he got undressed in the dark and crawled into his tall four-poster bed. The rocking mattress caused Shen Shen to stir. He lay on his back, and she curled up against him. Her bare skin was warm against his.
“Hi,” she said sleepily, in English, before she began kissing her way down his body. Why would Sheng leak that particular information to me? Wu tried to decipher before he finally succumbed to the mechanical but effective ministrations of General Sheng’s secretary.
7
President Baker tossed newspapers and magazines onto the long conference table one at a time, allowing the slaps of paper to speak for themselves. The New York Times, Time, the Wall Street Journal, and Newsweek all had articles criticizing the army’s tactic of choice, which was bunkering.
“I’ve got a prime-time news conference in an hour and a half,” Baker said, “where I’m gonna be asked fifty times by fifty people in fifty different ways why we chose to re-fight World War I in the Twenty-First Century.” There were stern looks from the ground pounders, none sterner than on the face of U.S. Army General Adam Cotler, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Baker picked up Time magazine. Its cover juxtaposed black-and-white pictures of haggard doughboys in trenches with similar color images from the Savannah River. “It’s a legitimate question,” the president opined. “One that I’m beginning to ask myself after none of the three successive lines we have prepared have succeeded in stopping the Chinese for even one week. Have you read in here, General Cotler, what your now retired predecessor wrote?” Baker thumbed for the page.
“I’ve had a long talk with him about it, sir,” Cotler replied. “Yes, sir, I’ve read it.”
Baker read an excerpt nonetheless. “‘The principal strength of static defenses is their ability to bring intense firepower across their front from covered positions. Their principal drawback is that, once breached, the immobile defenders are unable to reorient themselves to repel attacks against their flanks. You cannot pick up and move a trench or a concrete bunker.’ ” Baker looked up at Cotler. “That sounds like pretty levelheaded commentary to me. I’m going to be asked by a rabid White House press corps why, after half a century of planning for mobile warfare, America has chosen to return to the trenches of Verdun? What would your answer be, General?”
Cotler squared his jaw either in anger or grim determination, or perhaps both. “Military technology swings the advantage, Mr. President, from the offense to the defense and back again. We are now squarely in a defensive phase of the technological cycle both on land and in the air. All-threat weapons give crews attached to infantry squads — both Chinese and American — the capability of blindly firing a missile into the air and killing a tank over the horizon up to twelve miles away, or — by raising the weapon’s elevation and spinning a dial — killing a supersonic jet fighter at sixty thousand feet, all with the same missile. They have virtually cleared the battlefield of armored vehicles and close air support. What’s left is infantry and artillery.
“Modern artillery, Mr. President,” Cotler continued, “is devastating when employed against unprotected infantry. A single 155 mm self-propelled Howitzer can fire twelve rounds,” he held up his forearm at a 45-degree angle — fingers extended straight like a gun barrel — steadily lowering its angle to the table in a dozen jerky motions, “depressing the elevation to time it so that all twelve rounds land on target simultaneously. That gives every gun the firepower of an entire battery of artillery. If each shell were loaded with cluster munitions and dropped on a Chinese infantry company maneuvering in the open to attack our positions, all 150 enemy soldiers would die.”
“Then why hasn’t that been happening?” Vice President Sobo asked.
“It has,” Cotler replied. “Over, and over, and over.”
“Then why hasn’t that stopped the Chinese?” she pressed.
“The Chinese have a lot of infantry companies,” came the general’s terse answer. He turned back to Baker. “Estimates are that we have killed — in five weeks of combat — one million Chinese troops. That’s twice as many as they lost in the entire six-month Indian Campaign. The wounded probably number another three million. While some of those wounded return to duty after a couple of weeks to a month, they’re still losing almost seven hundred thousand troops a week.”