“Because that crowd reacted like Romans watching a lion eat Christians.” Cooke fell back in her chair, suddenly tired. “One aircraft carrier might not be enough.”
By her count, Laura Mitchell had been waiting for her husband for fifteen minutes when the chief of station finally settled into his seat. Her husband looked over and took a moment to appreciate his wife before he reached for her hand. Laura wasn’t a model but she was still very pretty, a fact that was lost on their Chinese hosts.
He didn’t get to see her dressed up like this nearly enough. She was a teaching specialist for autistic children at the English-speaking school near the embassy where so many diplomats’ children went, including their own son. It was a job that didn’t lend itself to dresses and heels, though she looked good to him in the polo shirts and khaki pants she usually wore. When she did wear her finest, there was no other woman as far as he was concerned, but it also left him full of regret that he’d dragged her away from the States for so many years. He didn’t deserve her patience.
“Done for the night?” she asked quietly. The nearest person was three seats away and there was a low buzz of conversation throughout the theater that would have made eavesdropping difficult, but she still knew to be careful with her words.
“I think so.”
“Any of your friends try to come?”
“A few,” Mitchell told her. “I had to disappoint them.”
“They’ll get over it,” Laura assured him. More than once, she’d come to their Moscow home and found that the Russians’ security services had vandalized it as payback for some humiliation her husband had inflicted on them. The Chinese seemed more civilized, for which she was grateful. It saved on the cleaning bills.
“I hope so,” Mitchell replied. “Given how they’ve been treating me the last few days, I’d hate to see how they behave when they’ve got their dander up.”
“Maybe they’d go easy on you if you were walking around with one of those pretty girls in your office,” Laura said. He couldn’t quite tell if she was making a joke.
“You know I don’t like to do that. Better to avoid temptation,” he said, serious. Case officers who spent their careers overseas had an appalling divorce rate. Mitchell was determined not to push the percentage up.
“You’ve got the perfect job for someone who wants to have an affair. Late nights. Long hours,” she observed. “Uncleared spouse not allowed to ask what you’ve been doing.”
“I wouldn’t do that to you,” Mitchell declared. He squeezed her hand again. “You know that, right?”
“I’m still here,” she answered.
“Sometimes I wonder why,” he said. He thought Laura didn’t sound quite convinced.
“Pure compassion,” Laura said. “No other woman could live with you.”
“I appreciate the pity you take on me.”
“It’s not for you. It’s for the rest of my gender,” she told her husband. “I didn’t say some other woman wouldn’t give you a go. I’m saving her from you.”
Mitchell laughed, let go of his wife’s hand, and put his arm around her. “You should work for us.”
“I already do, love,” Laura said. She kissed him on the cheek. “They just don’t give me a paycheck.”
CHAPTER 6
“You called?” Jonathan stood in the doorway. Morning sunlight was pouring in through the blinds, Cooke was sitting on the leather couch opposite the door, and it was obvious to Jon that the woman hadn’t slept much the night before. She had to force her eyes to focus on him, he saw, and he knew that she could turn brusque when she was wearing down. He suspected she was running on coffee or something stronger, but it wasn’t his place to say anything.
The CIA director looked at the analyst and realized that, in her tired state, she’d forgotten to tell her secretaries out front that Jon would be coming. How he’d gotten past them was something she’d have to drag out of him later when she had the patience. She also realized that he hadn’t knocked.
She ignored that fact and waved him in. “How’s Kyra?” she asked.
“Hard couple of days, I think. She’ll adjust.”
Cooke nodded. “She survived Caracas, she’ll survive you.”
“One can hope,” he said wryly. “Though I’m the least of her problems. And yours, I suspect.”
You underestimate yourself, Cooke thought, but it wasn’t time for that discussion. She held up the Red Cell report that Jonathan had delivered to her a few days previous. “I’ve been reading this. Inside Strait — How the PLA Could Invade Taiwan,” she read off the front page. “That’s terrible. How did you get this published with a title like that?”
“I presume you’re not reading for the literary merit,” Jonathan answered, sidestepping the question.
“No,” Cooke conceded. Jon was still on his feet, she realized. “Sit down please.” He obeyed. Cooke, relieved, held out the Red Cell paper over the low table in front of the couch and let it drop. “Do you think the Chinese are going to do it?”
Jonathan shrugged. “I’m sure APLAA would tell you that the smart money isn’t on invasion.”
“I’ve heard their side. They caveated everything so much I couldn’t tell what they really thought. That’s why I’m asking you.”
“Invasion, probably not,” Jonathan said. “But if the PLA took out the Tashan Power Plant, then yeah, I think they’re going to move.”
The People’s Liberation Army invasion of Jinmen Dao, known to the West as the archipelago of Kinmen, began at 0200 hours local time with the faint sounds of boots in wet sand.
The PLA put commandos ashore near Kuningtou for the second time, as their fathers had before on October 25, 1949. That battle had been fought over fifty-six hours along Kinmen’s northern coast. The PLA had landed several battalions on the beaches and suffered immediate counterattacks by the Nationalist “Kinmen Bears” riding in American M5 A1 tanks for which the Communists had no counter. Fifteen thousand men had died in less than three days. The victory left Kinmen itself a hallowed ground in the minds of the Taiwanese.
That had been almost seventy years ago. Now, the Taiwanese Army troops stationed on Kinmen had enough firepower to attack the Chinese mainland ports of Xiamen and Fuzhou — artillery range is a measure that works both ways — so the PLA could not ignore them. When the invasion of Taiwan finally began, it was thought, Kinmen’s Defense Command would be overwhelmed by superior numbers in short order. They would fight to make Kinmen a bloody win for the PLA and maybe create enough gore to make Beijing reconsider the larger endeavor. The defense would start on the beaches, then fall back into the townships, most of which had stone buildings capable of withstanding heavy fire. The Taiwanese troops would then fall back to the tunnel and bunker complexes at Tai-Wu and Lonpun Mountains, Yangchai, Tingpao, and Lan Lake. The PLA would have to spill blood for weeks assaulting narrow concrete tunnel passages, where they would close up the hallways with their dead.
When the invasion of Taiwan itself was repulsed — the Americans would surely come — reinforcements would arrive or a peace treaty would be signed, the PLA would pull back, and the defenders who had survived the siege of Kinmen would emerge from the ground and take up their watch again. It was a strategy that relied on a number of assumptions, not the least of which was that the will of Taiwan’s political leaders would be as strong as that of the soldiers deployed to Kinmen itself. Several of those assumptions would prove wrong this night.