“Yes, sir. I am. But something urgent has just come to my attention that I need to speak to you about.”
Langford looked outside again at the ever slowing traffic. “I appear to have plenty of time.”
President Carr looked up from his copy of Lawton’s write-up and back to Admiral Langford with raised eyebrows. “Is this real?”
“We believe it to be authentic, Mr. President.”
“Jesus Christ!” He put the paper down in front of him and looked at the high-resolution pictures again. “How the hell did the Chinese find out about this?”
Vice President Bailey put down his own copy. “And how did they convince Guyana to just roll over for it?”
Miller answered. “We don’t know who or how they found it. But it appears they convinced the government of Guyana the old fashioned way.”
“They bought them off,” Baily acknowledged.
Carr smirked. “You say that as if we wouldn’t have done the same thing.” He rubbed his forehead absently. “How can we be sure about the implications this Commander Lawton is laying out here? I mean, how many scientific discoveries do we hear about every day that end up meaning nothing? Not everything pans out.”
“That’s true,” agreed Secretary of State Bartman, from across the table. “If I had a nickel for every medical or technological advancement that promised to be a breakthrough, I’d be a rich man.”
Next to Miller, Langford shrugged. “The fact is, sir, we don’t know.”
“How long have we been testing this thing, forty-eight hours?” Bartman asked, with a hint of sarcasm. “Look, I’m not saying this isn’t what she claims, but how on earth can we be sure after just forty-eight hours? Other advancements have turned out to be nonviable after months, even years.”
The Admiral sat motionless, listening. Finally, he frowned and scratched his cheek. “Well, the Chinese have had months to study it, maybe longer. And they sent a warship to go get it.”
The others became silent.
Langford shrugged. “We can sit here and debate how viable this is, and we can decide to wait until we’ve tested more. But all the while, there’s a fully armed Chinese ship scooping up this plant by the truckload, and it’s doing it as quietly as possible. Maybe we should consider the logistics of what it would take for us to do something like that, while trying to keep it secret at the same time. That’s a lot of moving pieces, and the Chinese appear to have moved on it awfully fast. If you ask me, I don’t think we should be spending our time discussing the odds of this being real. I think we need to be considering the ramifications if it is.” Langford looked at Carr. “How wrong are we willing to be, Mr. President?”
“And what if we’re wrong, Admiral?” the Vice President asked. “What do you recommend, a blockade? Our relationship with China is already on delicate footing. What if we rush in and manage to elicit a situation that escalates into something even bigger? How would we feel starting up a military conflict with them, come to find out this big ‘secret’ discovery turns out to be a fascinating new toothpaste?!”
President Carr nodded his head solemnly. “Ramifications can go both ways, gentlemen. The Chinese and the Russians continue to strengthen their alliance. Considering our problems with Russia, this certainly doesn’t help matters. The last thing we need to do is to inflame the relationship even more.”
The room was silent again, allowing Secretary of State Bartman the opportunity to interject. “Let’s assume for a moment that this discovery is as important as you say. And we don’t try to stop them. Why not send our own team in to retrieve specimens? Hell, even if we don’t, we can steal whatever secrets the Chinese derive from this plant. If they document anything, we can eventually get it.”
“We’re starting to add a lot of ‘ifs’ to our thinking,” Miller noted.
“That may be, but I think it’s less risky than inadvertently creating a geopolitical conflict.”
The President turned to National Security Advisor Griffith, sitting quietly in his seat. “Stan? Thoughts?”
Griffith was leaning forward with his chin perched on his palm. He blinked and looked up. “Espionage is never a sure thing. And it often causes more long-term damage than one would expect. Look at the NSA and their surveillance snooping. We lost a lot of credibility after that, not to mention some important allies. I do agree that risk is less about the odds of something happening and more about the ultimate ramifications.” He picked up and examined his own set of pictures again. “How much do we know about Commander Neely Lawton?”
“She graduated cum laude and one year early from Harvard before getting her Masters,” Langford replied. “After joining the Navy, she was part of a team, who two years ago, discovered an algae capable of cleansing toxic metals from polluted water five times faster than any other known method. An algae that several corporations are now working to commercialize. She’s as sharp as anyone I’ve met in the field.” He looked around the table before concluding, “And she thinks this plant the Chinese have found is a pretty damn big deal.”
Sam Johnston, the Commandant of Marines, leaned forward onto the table with hands interlocked. “It seems to me the one thing we don’t want to do is to try second guessing how important this discovery may ultimately be. We should be focused on getting someone in there to find out exactly what the Chinese team is doing. There’s a lot of speculation on what’s actually happening at the top of that mountain. I suggest observation be our first priority.”
“We can still get ships in the area if we need them, without making anyone nervous,” added the Chief of Naval Operations, sitting next to Johnston.
“If it’s that important,” Griffith added, turning toward the President, “we can put a non-military team on the ground and stake a claim without screwing around with that corvette.”
The President thought it over. Everyone knew the Chinese had been stockpiling virtually every essential commodity for years: gold, silver, copper, iron ore, and a dozen more. They were preparing for something. Yet even with all the other commodities, they had never moved as quickly as they had in Guyana. They knew something, something that no one else did.
“Mr. President, Commander Lawton believes this may just be the tip of the iceberg on what the Chinese have actually found. If that’s true, to what lengths do you think they will go to keep it?” After a pause, Langford added with a grave tone, “What lengths would any of us go to?”
46
The streets were virtually empty. The pollution in Beijing was worse than normal and most people remained indoors. The few who did venture outside covered their faces with white masks and walked briskly from building to building.
The growth of China over the last four decades had been tremendous, raising the country from a veritable third world status to the second largest superpower in the world. It was a level of growth like nothing the modern world had seen. Hundreds of new cities with gleaming skyscrapers and endless shopping malls now littered China’s eastern seaboard. The country was now home to a faster growing number of millionaires and billionaires than any other country in the world, including the United States. And they had just overtaken Russia’s ranking for the second largest military on the planet.
Yet the explosive growth of China’s modern industrial gold rush came at a price. Production remained in overdrive as their factories worked to keep up with both a global and now domestic demand for goods. It also meant a lack of standards and every incentive to cut corners. Regulations were nowhere close to keeping up with production. Not to mention they came without any semblance of safety, particularly with incentives for fraud and corruption oozing from every public office. It was unsustainable. Their red-hot economy was going to have to slow eventually. When it did, the impact would be harsh.