“You memorize the membership rolls of foreign committees?” Cooke asked, slightly stunned.
“Would it impress you if I said yes?” he asked.
“Frighten more than impress,” the CIA director told him.
Kyra stared at him until a slight twitch at the corner of his mouth gave away the game. “You ran a search on their names as a group,” she said, accusing.
Jonathan looked sideways at the young woman. “You have no sense of humor whatsoever.”
Gotcha. “When did the Chinese start the program?” she asked.
“Nineteen ninety-five. Taiwanese President Lee Teng-hui took some not-so-subtle shots in public at the Chinese government during a visit to the US that the Chinese opposed. Jiang Zemin took it badly and the PLA made some threatening moves,” Jonathan said. “Bill Clinton sent the Nimitz into the Taiwan Strait to calm everyone down. Jiang asked his military advisors what they could do about it and the short answer they gave him was ‘nothing.’ Jiang pounded the table and ordered the PLA to develop ‘an assassin’s mace to use against the Americans.’”
“Nice bit of history, but that doesn’t help me,” Cooke said.
Jonathan raised an eyebrow. “I just gave you a logically defensible bit of strategic warning that the Chinese might have a carrier killer.”
“Strategic warning gets me into the Oval Office,” Cooke said. “Tactical warning keeps me from getting thrown out. Telling the president that the Chinese have a black program targeting our carriers isn’t exactly going to rock his world. But telling him exactly what it is will get his attention.”
“The curse of genius is that people begin to expect it on demand,” Jonathan deadpanned. “I can tell you what it’s not. There are five major classes of strategic weapons that can hit a carrier at sea. Submarines, ships, missiles, aircraft, and weapons of mass destruction. It won’t be a submarine or a ship because the PLA Navy is still buying last-generation Kilos and Sovremennys from the Russians. The Russians built the one carrier they do have, and the PLA Navy is still trying to figure out how to use the thing. It won’t be a weapon of mass destruction because the Chinese aren’t stupid enough to set off a nuke that close to their own coastline, and carriers are hardened against biological and chemical weapons. That leaves missiles and aircraft.”
“Missiles worked for you in that war game,” Kyra noted.
“They did,” Jonathan agreed. “The Dongfeng missile can hit a carrier from nine hundred miles away in theory, but the tracking systems are iffy. The Chinese bought Shkvals from the Russians a few years back. It’s a rocket-propelled torpedo that creates a layer of air bubbles from the nose and skin to eliminate drag and friction in the water. Top speed is around two hundred knots but the warhead is small to keep the speed up, maybe too small to do serious damage to a carrier. And the PLA would still also have to get close enough to use it. The maximum range is about maybe seven miles.”
“One of their subs snuck up on the Kitty Hawk about ten years ago,” Kyra observed.
“True. You know recent military history. Your usefulness just went up,” Jonathan said. Cooke raised an eyebrow. The Red Cell analyst had just offered one of his higher compliments.
“What about planes?” Cooke asked.
Jonathan stood and moved to the National Geographic map of the Chinese coast he had pinned to the wall. “The PLA has two air bases directly across the Strait and nine more in range. That’s a few hundred planes, but they’ve only got maybe a hundred fifty modern types, Su-27s and -30s.”
“I’d bet money the PLA wouldn’t mind sacrificing a few hundred old planes if it meant winning the Battle of the Taiwan Strait,” Kyra observed.
“Given the money that the PLA has spent on exotic technologies, I would hope that the Assassin’s Mace is something more interesting than just sending out cheap cannon fodder. But we can’t disprove anything yet,” Jonathan replied. He turned to Cooke. “If you want something more defensible than my impeccable logic, we’ll need to do some actual research.”
“Take your time,” Cooke said.
“Meaning?” Jonathan asked.
“Meaning you get twenty-four hours,” Cooke said. “Less if the Taiwanese refuse to give up Tian’s men and the PLA gets rowdy again.”
“Any word on how that Taiwanese SWAT team is doing?” Kyra asked.
“Two dead,” Cooke said. “They assumed room temperature this morning. The third officer is still listed as critical.” Another page came out of the manila folder, this one from the Office of Medical Services. “Whatever was in that canister torched his lungs. He’s suffering from”—she had to read the language directly from the page—“‘severe inhalation injury with persistent postburn refractory hypoxemia.’ That means he’s got second- and third-degree chemical burns of the trachea and lungs. Oxygen can’t diffuse across the lung membranes into his bloodstream. The ‘refractory’ part means nothing that they’re trying is helping him. He’ll be intubated and paralyzed with drugs to keep him from fighting the doctors, but it’s just a question of when he’s going to die, not if.”
“What about that dead American?” Kyra asked.
“FBI is still trying to run down which Lockheed division he worked for. The company isn’t moving very fast. They’re not excited about the idea that one of their employees was committing espionage.” She checked her watch. “Tian’s going to give his speech in an hour. Start pulling your research together and then come back and join me.”
Cooke’s television couldn’t do justice to the Great Hall of the People. The camera, owned and operated by China Central Television, pulled back to a wide-angle shot and panned left to right, showing the breadth of the massive room that held thousands of seats. The People’s National Congress had three thousand delegates, and the Great Hall held them all with room to spare. The cavernous amphitheater was an engineering feat. It had been constructed in a mere ten months all by “volunteers,” though Cooke wondered whether the Chinese hadn’t played fast and loose with that term. Either way, Cooke had no doubt that the construction workers had not been paid, but their work was exquisite. The massive chamber was arranged like an orchestra hall, with two elevated semicircular tiers stretching the hall’s full width for seating above the ground levels. There were no support columns under either balcony to block the view of the vast stage. An expansive red banner framed the Politburo and other senior party members seated on the wide dais, with ten towering Chinese flags lining the wall behind them. It was an image meant to convey the full grandeur of the state and it managed to do that quite well, even for those like Cooke who knew enough about the state to keep their awe in check.
The acoustics of the hall were remarkable given its size, but the room was quiet. Cooke watched as Tian stood from his seat and approached the podium in front. He looked the room over, his face fixed in a look of tranquility.
“It makes the Senate Chamber on Capitol Hill look like a high school auditorium. It’s like having a stadium devoted to politics,” Kyra said.
“Whoever invented the saying that politics is a blood sport was Chinese,” Cooke replied.
The president of the People’s Republic of China looked down at his text and began to speak in measured tones. Elsewhere in the hall, translators wearing headphones and sitting in closed booths looked down at their own portfolios and began to translate in sync with Tian as his Mandarin cadence came through their headphones. Central China Television had dedicated its CCTV 4 English-only international channel to the speech nominally for the benefit of Westerners living in the country.