He did not explain further, and nobody asked for clarification.
The gravel path had become a skinny dirt road, then a muddy trail, and in due course they were ducking palm fronds, snapping twigs with the rearview mirrors, and spinning out in muddy sections of the road. They reached another trailhead, and Deng parked, locked the foot brake, and turned to face his passengers. Some of the men appeared bewildered, others suspicious.
Deng said, “If you continue past this point on the trail, your last payment will be immediately drawn and posted to the operation’s account. The banking information and preauthorization we required from you will be used to execute the wire transfer, and the transaction will be executed within sixty seconds of Admiral Li’s e-mail notification.” Li held aloft a BlackBerry-like device. “You could, of course, turn around and walk back to the resort and the float planes there. If you decide to do so, bear in mind that Mr. Gibson knows how to find you-and always will. Your silence is not only expected, but will be strictly enforced. In a sense, if you withdraw now, you will become as ‘disposable’ as Mr. Gibson’s labor pool.”
When no leader took the exit option, Deng steered down a brief, steep slope. He worked the buttons of a handheld key-code remote, which, as they drove past a grove of squat palms, opened a hidden, reinforced steel door. He made a sharp turn to the left, and with Li following in the cart behind, the two loads of dignitaries found themselves in Mango Cay’s transport tunnel, an eight-foot-wide passageway with muddy gravel beneath the wheels of the carts. Timbers-not unlike those found in a mine shaft-spanned the ceiling at fifteen-foot intervals. They came shortly to another reinforced steel door. Deng stopped his cart, and Li did the same.
“Behold,” Deng said, “the supreme weapon of the Revolution. Though I, of course, prefer to use its code name: ‘Operation Blunt Fist.’ ”
He punched another code on the remote keypad and the door slid open to admit the procession into a vast cavern, its wide expanse carved by the hand of God but outfitted with man-made artifacts including at least two hundred ceiling-mounted floodlights and, most notably, forty-two white-and-black pillars of steel. Uniformed mercenaries, roving the facility in pairs, appeared from time to time behind one missile or another.
Each missile had its own freestanding silo, resembling scaffolding, reaching halfway to the cavern’s domed ceiling. There was a series of what looked like storm drains in the ceiling immediately above each silo, and numbers were painted on the cavern floor, the numbers climbing in sequence across each row of missiles from 1 to 42.
“All forty-two missiles in this cavern,” Deng said over the translation headsets, “will be operational within the week. The replica C-4s will-even upon detonation-be indistinguishable from authentic U.S. Navy-issue C-4 Trident I ICBMs. We have purchased metals from the supplier for Lockheed, stolen and duplicated guidance system components from Martin Marietta, constructed the warheads using uranium and plutonium with a signature matching that produced in Los Alamos. We have even used the same brand of paint for the exterior markings. There will be no accountability.”
The dignitaries followed Deng through the maze of silos, most of them dumbfounded that, at least by all appearances, he had actually succeeded with his plan.
Deng described the targeting strategy in general terms, naming a number of American military installations, and finished by saying, “The American military-industrial complex will be rendered impotent for at least months, and possibly years. As though struck,” he said, “by a blunt fist.” Deng liked this part, so he repeated it, trusting that in some form the translation would take:
“As though struck,” he said, “by a blunt fist.”
Deep in the cavern, near the back, stood a guest who had for-gone the walking tour. He leaned against a wide opening in the wall of the cave where, behind him, there stood the calm waters of an underwater docking bay. The conning tower of a medium-size submarine bereft of national insignia protruded from the water in the bay.
This man, like the others, wore a headset. He had been following the tour on audio, but had only come as far from his submarine as the position he occupied now.
In the world of the communist brotherhood Deng had recruited, there were few VIPs, and even fewer men-including those found throughout history-who qualified to function as royalty. The man leaning against the cavern wall, however, was to these men, as Deng well knew, quite literally a symbol of revolution itself.
An aging fossil of defiance in the face of capitalism, friend to all Marxist-Leninist regimes, the man had now, thanks to Vice Premier General Deng Jiang, inherited the role of royal mascot for the next phase of the revolution. As Deng’s tour came around the forty-second silo, the man stepped forward and raised a hand to his brethren. One by one, the faces of the other dignitaries in the procession registered precisely the look Deng had sought: a combination of shock, awe, and self-satisfaction. The man’s beard was thick and gray-even unruly-but he didn’t look nearly as old as most of the dignitaries had pegged him for.
At that point the mascot from Cuba grinned through teeth yellowed from too many years of gluttonous cigar consumption and joined his comrades for the conclusion of the tour.
29
Pete, you stay for a bit?”
The remainder of CIA’s senior staff departed the conference room adjoining Lou Ebbers’s executive suite, leaving Peter M. Gates alone with the DCI. Gates replaced his ass in the seat he’d held for the past two hours as Ebbers stood at the head of the table and waited for the last deputy director to leave.
When the door had closed, Ebbers slid a photocopy of a letter across the table.
“Inquiry from Senator Kircher,” Ebbers said. “Came to me.”
Ebbers was a man who looked more virile at sixty than he had at twenty-five. He had a stripe of gray stretching back from each temple but was otherwise bald. A pair of wire rims rested high on his nose.
“Copied the president,” Ebbers said, “and most of the NSC. It’s a request, as you can see, for a ‘comprehensive summary of all CIA intelligence related to China’s readiness and/or intention to annex Taiwan.’ Wants it in a week, report to remain classified, his eyes only. No committee review. He’ll accept a blacked-out version.”
Gates immediately understood the letter to be a warning shot intended for the president. When requests like this were made, it usually meant the congressman in question already had the goods, and sought either verification of what he already knew or, more likely, to make a point. Kircher, in copying the administration, was telling the nation’s chief executive he knew something the president didn’t, or that he knew something the president hadn’t wanted him to find out about. Either way, Kircher was going back-channel to fight a skirmish the senator was confident he would win, Gates hearing it in the trademark accent of the ubiquitous guest star of prime-time cable debate shows: Just puttin’ it out there, Mr. President-lettin’ you know a conversation’s comin’.
The way Kircher was playing it, Gates guessed the senator intended to pressure the president into backing out of his proposed U.S.-China corporate-partner initiative, which Kircher opposed, though the senator could have been shooting for any of a number of benefits serving the citizens of the great state of North Carolina.
None of this was out of the ordinary-routine Beltway activity. What disturbed Gates was the topic of the inquiry.
Could he possibly have so grossly underestimated her?
Following his reprimand, had Julie Laramie gone off-rez and handed classified intel to a senator known to be the president’s arch-rival? If so, he’d slap a treason investigation on her ass so fast her head-and career-would spin.