The Taiwanese would be a more difficult nut to crack. I needed more than mere approval from them. I needed their best equipment, their active intelligence collaboration. Most importantly, I needed them to get me into China.
“Good news!” I tried not to be annoyed at the sound of Douglas’s Scottish brogue, which had roused me from needed sleep. I had been flying for pretty much two days straight.
“Your third wife divorced you?”
The Scotsman’s laugh boomed from the other side of the planet. “No, I’ve picked us up two recruits. Good hard bastards who have been around the block.”
“Where are they from?”
“Germany. And, uh, the West Bank.”
I rubbed my eyes. “Why the hell did you get a Palestinian?”
“He’s a damn good operator. Worked with him in the Iran-Israel War, I did.”
“What the hell was he doing working with you?”
“Well, he was Fatah and didn’t want Iranian chemical weapons going off in Jerusalem and taking out all his friends and family, so he helped me smoke out Hamas and Revolutionary Guard teams. He’s reliable, I’ll vouch for him.”
“You say so.”
I could hear the frown on the other end of the line. “You told me I could pick whoever I thought would work well for us. Now, were you full of shite or are you going to live up to our bargain?”
I sighed. “Just don’t pick any current terrorists.”
“I will live by that rule, boss. And with that, I will get some sleep, unless you’ve got anything else for me.”
I glanced at my watch, saw that it was 7:00 PM Washington time. The clock on the wall of my hotel said it was 9:30 AM.
“Where the hell are you anyway, Douglas?”
“Zimbabwe. Wanted to talk to one of my employees in person about the opening. Where are you?”
“Australia. Figuring out logistics.”
“Sounds like we’re both holding up our ends. Good night, boss.”
I hit the end button on the phone and looked out the window of my suite at the Crowne Plaza Darwin. I had asked for a room on the top floor so that I could look out onto Port Darwin for myself and see the ships.
Darwin is right about in the middle of the north coast of Australia. It’s the capital of Australia Northern Territory, but its primary importance derived from its port.
China's growth had always been a boon to Australia's economy. Australia, rich in natural resources, sold a bewildering variety of metals, minerals, and foodstuffs to China and, in return, imported finished consumer goods. Darwin, perched on the northern coastline, was in just the right place to benefit from that trade.
The port's growth accelerated even more rapidly after Exxon started developing oil fields in the East Timor Sea. As the focal point for trade with the largest economy in the world and a major facility for the world's largest oil company, Darwin's growth had staggered the once sleepy provincial city.
With the advent of war, a new industry had cropped up in town: military shipping.
Australia hadn’t declared war on China, but it didn’t take a genius to figure out which side they should be on. If China won its war and seized the mighty Taiwanese high-tech industries, Australia would start looking like a mighty tempting economic dessert.
For precisely that reason, Australia needed Taiwan to win its war or, at least, make China pay dearly for its victory. Australia had opened its ports to the vast fleet of Taiwanese merchant ships that were continuing to bring food, medicine, and military supplies to the beleaguered island. And Port Darwin was ground zero for that effort.
I looked out over the port from my penthouse suite. A dozen merchant ships were in port right now, an army of cranes surrounding them. The cranes loaded the vessels rapidly in never-ending cycles, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. I could see one ship heading out, its hull low in the water under the weight of thousands of shipping containers.
My cell phone rang. “Ding Cortez.”
“Ding, Ralph here. Get your ass downstairs, I’m waiting in the restaurant.”
I laughed. “I’ll be right down. But it’s too damn early.”
“You never did show up to classes on time. See you in a few.”
He was, in fact, early. Our meeting wasn’t scheduled to start for 15 minutes. I wouldn't complain, however. Setting up the meeting had taken two days. Most of that time had been spent bribing American government officials just to find out the correct Taiwanese government official to talk to about my enterprise. Money and pressure had solved that problem, and so I had flown out to Australia, slept four hours, and then prepared for my meeting.
When Ralph called, I was already dressed in a fresh suit and shirt. I brought nothing with me to the meting, not even my phone, following the strict instructions Ralph's people had forwarded to me.
When I strode into the Crowne Plaza’s restaurant, I saw Ralph Chen, Taiwanese Ambassador to Australia, sitting at a table sipping coffee and sending messages out on his phone.
“Ralph, next time use that little gadget of yours to give me some warning when you’re going to be early.”
He looked up with a smile. “You might have expected it, Ding. I still live by the slogan.”
Of course, I knew the slogan of Ralph’s shipping company, Lightning: “There Before You Know It.” He had chosen the slogan well before he had ever created the company. When he was my college roommate, he had been freakishly devoted to finding a better, faster way to solve problems. Unbidden, he redesigned the university's mail delivery system to reduce the amount of gasoline used by postal trucks. He picked among core curriculum classes based on an algorithm that minimized his walking distance. When faced with the necessity of finding someone to go to the senior formal dance with him, he had built a data mining tool and released it on Facebook to determine the probability of each girl saying yes to his invitation.
He founded Lightning ten years after graduating, and ten years after that, its market share was second only to the behemoth Federal Express, and it was gaining on them fast.
I looked Ralph over. He looked clean and rested, which told me something important. Just days before, the U.S. Navy had suffered a horrific defeat. The Intrade prediction market odds of Taiwan winning the war had gone from forty percent to seventeen percent. No Taiwanese government officials anywhere in the world should have been happy enough to be clean and rested.
And yet, here Ralph was.
Cutting right to the chase, I said, “That slogan is why Duan made you the ambassador to Australia when the war broke out. And it’s why I arranged this meeting.”
Ralph smiled. “Why don’t we take a walk on the waterfront instead of staying cooped up in this crappy restaurant?”
We walked out of the hotel, into the warm morning sun. April meant late summer heat in Australia, but it was a dry heat, and at this time of the morning, it was still perfectly pleasant.
Ralph led me across the street to Bicentennial Park, a strip of land a couple-hundred yards long right on the water. Near the entrance to the park stood the ANZAC Memorial, an old monument to the soldiers from Australia and New Zealand who died in World War I.
As we walked around the memorial, Ralph said, “Sorry about the precaution. I’m no spy, but my people tell me we can’t be too careful. We never really know what places Chinese spies might have bugged. But now that it’s just us and the birds, tell me your plan.”
I spent ten minutes outlining everything Douglas and I had concocted to that point. I concluded, “We need three things to make the plan work. First, transport into China. They've shut down international travel for the duration of the war, and I haven't found a reliable way in yet.
“Second, we need whatever technological edge Taiwan can give us. We're going to be heavily outnumbered in a modern country where every major city is under constant surveillance.