All in all, it took less than ninety seconds to turn 29th Type A Group Army into a thinly spread junkyard and funeral pyre.
"Holy God," Ryan said. "Is this for-real?" "Seeing is believing. Jack, when they came to me with the idea for J-SOW, I thought it had to be something from a science-fiction book. Then they demo'd the submunitions out at China Lake, and I thought, Jesus, we don't need the Army or the Marines anymore. Just send over some F-18s and then a brigade of trucks full of body bags and some ministers to pray over them. Eh, Mickey?"
"It's some capability," General Moore agreed. He shook his head. "Damn, just like the tests."
"Okay, what's happening next?"
"Next" was just off the coast near Guangszhou. Two Aegis cruisers, Mobile Bay and Princeton, plus the destroyers Fletcher, Fife, and John Young, steamed in line-ahead formation out of the morning fog and turned broadside to the shore. There was actually a decent beach at this spot. There was nothing much behind it, just a coastal-defense missile battery that the fighter-bombers had immolated a few hours before. To finish that job, the ships trained their guns to port and let loose a barrage of five-inch shells. The crack and THUNDER of the gunfire could be heard on shore, as was the shriek of the shells passing overhead, and the explosions of the detonations. That included one missile that the bombs of the previous night had missed, plus the crew getting it ready for launch. People living nearby saw the gray silhouettes against the morning sky, and many of them got on the telephone to report what they saw, but being civilians, they reported the wrong thing, of course.
It was just after nine in the morning in Beijing when the Politburo began its emergency session. Some of those present had enjoyed a restful night's sleep, and then been disturbed by the news that came over the phone at breakfast. Those better informed had hardly slept at all past three in the morning and, though more awake than their colleagues, were not in a happier mood.
"Well, Luo, what is happening?" Interior Minister Tong Jie asked.
"Our enemies counterattacked last night. This sort of thing we must expect, of course," he admitted in as low-key a voice as circumstances permitted.
"How serious were these counterattacks?" Tong asked.
"The most serious involved some damage to railroad bridges in Harbin and Bei'an, but repairs are under way."
"I hope so. The repair effort will require some months," Qian Kun interjected.
"Who said that!" Luo demanded harshly.
"Marshal, I supervised the construction of two of those bridges. This morning I called the division superintendent for our state railroad in Harbin. All six of them have been destroyed-the piers on both sides of the river are totally wrecked; it will take over a month just to clear the debris. I admit this surprised me. Those bridges were very sturdily built, but the division superintendent tells me they are quite beyond repair."
"And who is this defeatist?" Luo demanded.
"He is a loyal party member of long standing and a very competent engineer whom you will not threaten in my presence!" Qian shot back. "There is room in this building for many things, but there is not room here for a lie!"
"Come now, Qian," Zhang Han Sen soothed. "We need not have that sort of language here. Now, Luo, how bad is it really?"
"I have army engineers heading there now to make a full assessment of the damage and to commence repairs. I am confident that we can restore service shortly. We have skilled bridging engineers, you know."
"Luo," Qian said, "your MAGIC army bridges can support a tank or a truck, yes, but not a locomotive that weighs two hundred tons pulling a train weighing four thousand. Now, what else has gone wrong with your Siberian adventure?"
"It is foolish to think that the other side will simply lie down and die. Of course they fight back. But we have superior forces in theater, and we will smash them. We will have that new gold mine in our pocket before this meeting is over," the Defense Minister promised. But the pledge seemed hollow to some of those around the table.
"What else?" Qian persisted.
"The American naval air forces attacked last night and succeeded in sinking some of our South Sea Fleet units."
"Which units?"
"Well, we have no word from our missile submarine, and-"
"They sank our only missile submarine?" Premier Xu asked. "How is this possible? Was it sitting in harbor?"
"No," Luo admitted. "It was at sea, in company with another nuclear submarine, and that one is also possibly lost."
"Marvelous!" Tong Jie observed. "Now the Americans strike at our strategic assets! That's half our nuclear deterrent gone, and that was the safe half of it. What goes on, Luo? What is happening now?"
At his seat, Fang Gan took note of the fact that Zhang was strangely subdued. Ordinarily he would have leaped to Luo's defense, but except for the one conciliatory comment, he was leaving the Defense Minister to flap in the wind. What might that mean?
"What do we tell the people?" Fang asked, trying to center the meeting on something important.
"The people will believe what they are told," Luo said.
And everyone nodded nervous agreement on that one. They did control the media. The American CNN news service had been turned off all over the People's Republic, along with all Western news services, even in Hong Kong, which usually enjoyed much looser reins than the rest of the country. But the thing no one addressed, but everyone knew to worry about, was that every soldier had a mother and a father who'd notice when the mail home stopped coming. Even in a nation as tightly controlled as the PRC, you couldn't stop the Truth from getting out- or rumors, which, though false, could be even worse than an adverse Truth. People would believe things other than those they were told to believe, if those other things made more sense than the Official Truth proclaimed by their government in Beijing.
Truth was something so often feared in this room, Fang realized, and for the first time in his life he wondered why that had to be. If the Truth was something to fear, might that mean they were doing something wrong in here? But, no, that couldn't be true, could it? Didn't they have a perfect political model for reality? Wasn't that Mao's bequest to their country?
But if that were true, why did they fear having the people find out what was really happening?
Could it be that they, the Politburo members, could handle the Truth and the peasantry could not?
But then, if they feared having the peasantry get hold of the Truth, didn't that have to mean that the Truth was harmful to the people sitting in this room? And if the Truth was a danger to the peasants and workers, then didn't they have to be wrong?
Fang suddenly realized how dangerous was the thought that had just entered his mind.
"Luo, what does it mean to us strategically," the Interior Minister asked, "if the Americans remove half of our strategic weapons? Was that done deliberately? If so, for what cause?"
"Tong, you do not sink a ship by accident, and so, yes, the attack on our missile submarine must have been a deliberate act," Luo answered.
"So, the Americans deliberately removed from the table one of our only methods for attacking them directly? Why? Was that not a political act, not just a military one?"
The Defense Minister nodded. "Yes, you could see it that way."
"Can we expect the Americans to strike at us directly? To this date they have struck some bridges, but what about our government and vital industries? Might they strike directly at us?" Tong went on.
"That would be unwise. We have missiles targeted at their principal cities. They know this. Since they disarmed themselves of nuclear missiles some years ago-well, they still have nuclear bombs that can be delivered by bombers and tactical aircraft, of course, but not the ability to strike at us in the way that we could strike at them-and the Russians, of course."