But despite his weight and age, he carried himself with the dignity and strength of an emperor from one of the dynasties long past. He walked quickly, with the inexplicable grace of the large, toward the double doors of the briefing theater. Yang had a round and open face, now beginning to show the lines of his age. Beneath his eyes were dark blotches, which had always been there, but were becoming much more pronounced. Above the dark patches Yang’s eyes were large and brown and understanding, hiding behind black horned-rimmed glasses. The lenses of the glasses were almost flat, so little did they correct Yang’s eyesight, but it was said that Yang was imitating the leaders of the past, and whether he really needed the big black glasses or not, they made him feel more comfortable.
Yang had been in power for almost eighteen years.
He had had a nice run of eight years before the imperial aggression of the Taiwanese had flared.
Led by a diabolical general named Wong Chen, the White Army of the New Kuomintang broke out of their safety on the island and made landfall in rebellious Shanghai. At first Beijing had not taken the rebellion seriously, but soon Shanghai fell to the Whites, and the port was opened to incoming equipment and ships. By the time the People’s Liberation Army could respond, the Whites had consolidated a growing beachhead on the Chinese mainland.
The war raged for six months as the Whites moved deep into Communist China, taking one city after the next. Yang, under severe pressure, rejected all recommendations to use nuclear weapons on the invading White forces, insisting that using nuclear devices on his own land would just force the people into the arms of the New Kuomintang. As the Whites, with their superior equipment and training, pushed the PLA back and north, he came under severe criticism for that stance, but to this day he stood by it, even if it had resulted in a divided China.
The end of the war had also come at his insistence, as he negotiated a truce with Shanghai, allowing them to retain their land on the east coast. He forced them to give up claims to a strip of territory to the north and west, which would have sectioned Red China into two regions, in exchange for territory as far north as Penglai at the mouth of Beijing’s Go Hai Bay. In less than a year, the White Army had seemingly won, forced Yang’s PLA back, and established a Western-oriented democracy on the Asian continent, taking China’s most wealthy cities from Hong Kong to Tsingtao.
Yang had waited for his chance to strike back. He had given the enemy time, time to get soft and complacent. He would allow White China to forget about the war and the past, and when they least expected it, he would invade from the west and cast them into the sea.
Unfortunately, there was one major obstacle, and that was the damned East China Sea itself. The rest of the world would not watch and wait dumbstruck while Red China attacked White China. The West would come to help — particularly the Americans, those perpetual suckers for the underdog — and they would bring aircraft carriers and troop ships and amphibious landing ships and tanks and paratroopers and helicopters and supersonic jets.
Without a blue-water navy, without control of the seas, he would not win the war against the traitorous Whites. Many decades before a man named Alfred Thayer Mahan had written volume after volume about sea power, and over and over he had preached that the way to win a war was to control the “sea lines of communication,” the blood vessels and arteries of sea commerce.
In the dawn of the second decade of the new century, the advice held — without control of the sea, he could not control the war.
There was no solution, not in the near term, Yang thought. And he was old now, feeling his age as his bones grew weak and his body infirm. His father and his father’s father lay in their graves, and both would be deeply disappointed and saddened by his yielding of land to the rebels. He had consoled himself with the knowledge that White China was temporary, but now he was beginning to doubt himself. Could it really be that he would go down in history as the chairman who had allowed China to be partitioned and violated?
Two steps behind and to his left walked Lieutenant Mai Sheng, his personal aide, an intelligence officer of the People’s Liberation Army. Mai had been with him since her first assignment on the Suchow front during the civil war. She had been deployed on the front lines as the White Army tank battalions had forced the PLA back. Mai had been in intelligence even then, and had been captured and injured during the battle. She had proved herself a vicious and resourceful fighter, full of high spirits and fresh ideas. Yet she was much more than that. Yang had known Mai’s beautiful and lonely mother, Xu Meng, over twenty-five years ago. Though no one but he and Xu knew of their relationship, gossips had noticed that Mai Sheng looked much like her mother and eerily like Yang himself.
Yang had sworn a dual oath. First, that he would protect Mai’s life and her career, and second, that no one would ever know that he was protecting her. But his caution had seemed scarcely necessary, because Mai was at once icily competent and fiercely independent. Protection of her career had never been a problem, but protection of her life had. He had insisted that her orders be cut to be his personal aide, and for the first year she had accepted it, but lately she had shown a desire to return to a combat company. He would not be able to keep her much longer, and perhaps it was time to let her fly with her own wings. But Mai’s problems would now have to take a backseat to the matter at hand, the briefing being given by Commander Chu Huafeng.
Yang had decided to allow the briefing on his schedule, not because of its importance but because Mai had insisted.
On Yang’s right was PLA General Feng Xuk, commander in chief of the People’s Liberation Army. On his left was Admiral Loen Dun, the supreme commander of the People’s Liberation Army Navy, or what was left of it. When the White Army had taken control of the east coast, there had been only one port to return to— Lushun, the old Port Arthur in the north of Go Hai Bay. That had effectively bottled up the fleet behind the Lushun-Penglai Gap. Since then few of the ships had been used or maintained. The frontline destroyers, frigates, and helicopter carriers had lain tied up, rusting and decayed. There was no longer any point in even thinking there was any form of PLA Navy.
At the door to the briefing theater, the two Red Guard troops came to rigid attention, both saluting, then one opening the door. Yang and the others walked into the dimness of the theater, the temperature some ten degrees below that of the corridor. As the door shut behind him, Yang found himself in complete darkness.
At first he blamed the darkness on the infirmity of his aging eyes, but then he realized that he truly was standing in a blacked-out room.
Suddenly a single spotlight burst to life, shining down on a huge machine towering over his head. It was some kind of boat or submarine. Then Yang realized what the briefing was about — the submersible that the young navy officer Chu had once briefed him on long ago.
A second spotlight flared up on a smaller form of the submersible, but this one cut in half to reveal the interior.
As a musical fanfare trumpeted in the back of the room, both spotlights dimmed and the screen came to life, the only view on the screen a photo of the deep blue sea. The view backed up to reveal that the sea was seen through the front view screen of a large airplane.
Yang was led by the elbow to a large armchair, sinking deeply into the upholstery while mesmerized by the vision of the seaplane landing. The camera and microphone must have been mounted on the mission commander’s head, since all the views seemed to come from the commander’s viewpoint.