“Tory Graves,” says Harry.
“That’s it.”
“You know him?”
“Oh, yes.”
“He came to visit me,” says Korff.
“No, what a small world.”
“Yes. He was very interested in what was happening. In particular, where this money came from and how they would be able to use it.”
“Yes, we’d be interested in that as well,” says Harry. He pours more beer.
“Sure,” says Korff. “I will tell you.”
THIRTY-EIGHT
Cheng settled into the seat on the Chinese Army executive jet as it sped toward the Dabie Mountains. He was halfway along on his journey, the two-and-a-half-hour flight from Hong Kong back to Beijing.
As he looked down on the sprawling foothills he could see another dam under construction, one in a vast series of projects.
China had come a long way. Cheng may have been a godless bureaucrat, but he knew that his nation had been blessed more than once by Joss, the ancient Chinese god of good fortune. They had but one great adversary left in the world, America, and to Cheng’s thinking, based on every measure available to him, America was in decline.
While the United States was distracted with its Mideast adventures and its myopic focus on terrorism, China was busy investing in long-term infrastructure and industry, grabbing up critical global resources-oil, metals, and rare earth among others. Even the fabled iPhone and the Apple computer were assembled in China.
As America’s wars dragged on with no long-term political solution, voters grew weary. Cheng’s analysts in the Bureau predicted this result years before it actually occurred. They based their predictions on an earlier model, the war in Vietnam. The perceived American enemy was different, but the result was the same.
America, once in a war stance, had a tendency to perceive its enemy as a vast unified monolith. Cheng couldn’t be sure whether this was driven by military strategy or political ideology. But he and his analysts could see its effect. In Vietnam the monumental enemy was international communism, toppling dominoes that would consume the world if Vietnam was lost. In fact what was being waged was a war of nationalism by a country the size of California with an economy that was struggling to become third world.
Now the United States was gripped by an Islamic wave of jihad, hostility that transcended national boundaries, launched by a multitude of splintered subnational groups, many of them with different motives and grievances. There were so many of these that they defied identification. Even here, in the tribal chaos and ancient feuds of the desert, America had managed to inflate the balloon of a large unified enemy, an army of Islamic radicals. The violence was real, but the army, if it existed, was unified by only one thing-its hatred for the West, Europe and America. To Cheng and to China, this was a huge boon. They couldn’t have invented anything this beneficial if they had designed it themselves.
Cheng had to wonder if decades from now historians might look back and realize that what was actually in play were numerous wars of nationalism being waged across an entire region in the Middle East. Cheng suspected that this was the result of artificial boundaries drawn by the Western powers in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles at the end of World War One. These boundaries had completely ignored ethnic, religious, and tribal factions. Instead, colonial spheres of influence were carved out of the desert for the Western powers who won the war so that they could plunder the oil reserves just then being discovered. In a place where tribal blood feuds were millennial in duration, this was like planting the seeds of poison to be harvested in the future.
In America, after more than a decade of desert warfare in Afghanistan and Iraq, the party out of power won election and took control. America reversed course and withdraw its forces. Chaos ensued.
The American faction now out of power claimed that the winner so hastily abandoned the field and withdrew that they were now the authors of anarchy in a growing number of places in the Middle East. America’s partisan divide went global. Its allies began to question US resolve. From everything Cheng could see, all of this played into China’s hands. American allies who already had doubts concerning US military and political resolve began to double up on them, including many of the Asian nations that were China’s neighbors, its competitors in the race for the Spratly Islands.
One of these was the Philippine Islands. It was to this that Cheng now turned his attention. He was troubled by a report he had just received, the cable still in his hand.
Cheng knew that Joe Ying possessed his own private jet. It was a modern Gulfstream G650, a plane costing almost sixty million US dollars. It had a range exceeding eight thousand miles. More than enough to fly nonstop from Hong Kong to the American West Coast.
And yet upon leaving Hong Kong, Ying’s Gulfstream didn’t fly to California. Chinese radar and overhead surveillance showed the plane diverting to the Philippines. Cheng wondered why.
He alerted the Chinese embassy in Manila, and two agents were dispatched to see what was happening. As it turned out, Ying wasn’t topping off the Gulfstream with fuel. Instead, a limousine picked him up at the airport and transported him to one of the five-star hotels in downtown Manila.
Ordinarily this might have been a matter of little or no consequence, except for the fact that two hours later another dark Town Car was seen chauffeuring Ying to Malacañang, the white gingerbread building on the Pasig River that served as the Presidential Palace.
This was no coincidence. The Philippines had become China’s most serious rival in the increasingly contentious and sometimes heated conflict to win the Spratly Islands.
There was never any doubt among Chinese leaders that the government in Washington coveted the Spratlys because of their rich treasures. US oil and gas interests salivated at the thought. America no doubt regretted the fact that it had not claimed the islands as part of its vast Pacific “protectorate” in the days immediately after the Second World War, when American power went unchallenged. But at that time no one knew their value.
Now the United States was hobbled by new realities: the government in Beijing was a rising power, the waters around the islands were becoming a Chinese lake, and Washington could make no colorable claim to the islands due to their location remote from any US territory or possession.
For this reason they needed a game piece. Chinese intelligence, Cheng’s bureau, now believed that the Philippine government in Manila had become just that-America’s pawn in the battle for the Spratlys. If the United States could muscle the islands into Philippine hands, they would no doubt receive their share of the treasures.
Ying knew that his own intended prize, a generous slice of the rich oil and gas concessions, required that he be on the winning side. If he backed the loser, he stood to gain nothing.
The stakes in this contest were sufficiently high that Cheng couldn’t afford to take a chance. What was Ying doing at Malacañang Palace? If the United States prevailed, and it was later determined that Ying played a hand, Cheng’s association with him would be more than enough to take the dragon down. He would end his days chopping wood in some mountainous frozen gulag, or worse, tied to a concrete post already pockmarked by bullets.
It was near midnight. Proffit was back in L.A., lying in bed wide awake, listening to his wife snore through the wall in the adjoining bedroom. Home two days and he was already missing his liaisons with Vicki Preebles. The supple secretary may have been manipulative, but she didn’t snore.
Yet that wasn’t the reason Proffit couldn’t sleep. He was wondering whether to tell his wife about the phone call he received earlier in the day. He was afraid if he did, she would rip his head off. More than that, he was petrified that whatever he was now caught up in might take the firm down, or himself. He knew it had to do with Serna, but how? Until he had the answer to that, he had no choice but to keep it to himself.