Admiral Morgan growled to himself, Now who the hell wants a damn large shipment of moored PLT-3s, eh? He chewed on the roast beef and pondered silently. He did not much like it. If the goddamned penniless Russians are building several hundred expensive mines, someone’s ordered ’em. And if someone’s ordered ’em, they plan to lay ’em, right? Otherwise they wouldn’t have ordered ’em.
Where? That’s what we wanna know. Who’s planning a nice little surprise minefield?
He finished his sandwich, sipped his coffee and frowned. When Kathy came back, he’d have her call Langley and make sure he was kept up to speed on Russian mine production. And if the overheads picked up any large mine shipments leaving any Russian seaports, he wanted to know about that. Immediately.
Just don’t want some fucking despot in a turban getting overly ambitious, right? The Admiral glared at the portrait of General MacArthur that hung in his office. Gotta watch ’em, Douglas. Right? Watch ’em, at all times.
The largest government building in the world, home of the National People’s Congress, was locked, barred and bolted this Tuesday morning. All 561,800 square feet of it. Business was canceled. The public was banned. And there were more armed military guards patrolling the snow-covered western side of the square than anyone had seen since the 1989 Massacre of the Students.
Inside, there were more guards, patrolling the endless corridors. Sixteen of them stood motionless, with shouldered arms, in a square surrounding the only elevator that travels down to the brightly lit underground Operations Room, designated by the late Mao Zedong to be used only in the event of foreign attack on mainland China. The room was massively constructed in heavy cast-concrete. It was white painted, almost bare walled and functional, situated deep below the 5,000-seat banqueting hall.
Aside from the heavily armed members of the People’s Liberation Army, there were fewer than a dozen people being gently warmed by the Great Hall’s vast central heating system, designed to keep at bay the freezing outside temperatures that occasionally grip the Chinese capital at this time of year.
Today there were brutal north winds, right out of the high plateaux of the Inner Mongolian plains, and they were presently refrigerating this entire part of northern China. Snow coated the yellow roofs of the Forbidden City, out beyond the northeastern corner of the Great Hall. Sudden squalls hurled white drifts against the vermilion walls.
The Stream of Golden Water was frozen rock-solid beneath the five bridges in front of the towering Meridian Gate, the spectacular entrance once reserved for the Emperor alone. Tiananmen Square itself was under an immense blanket of white. The total absence of thousands of government workers gave the heart of Beijing a look of abandonment. It was windswept, quiet, deserted, like a great stadium after the games were over.
Inside the Ops Room there was an atmosphere of high tension. Standing at the far end of the room, next to a 10-foot-wide illuminated computer screen, was the formidable figure of Admiral Zhang Yushu, recently resigned from his position as Commander-in-Chief of the People’s Liberation Army/Navy, and now installed, by the Paramount Ruler himself, as the senior of the four Vice Chairmen of the all-powerful PLAN Council.
Eight weeks previously, Admiral Zhang had leapfrogged clean over the other three highly experienced members, and now occupied a position of such authority he answered only to the State President, the General Secretary of the Communist Party and the Chairman of the Military Affairs Commission — and that was all the same person. The Paramount Ruler had once occupied these three Highest Offices of State, and there were those who thought it was just a matter of time before Admiral Zhang himself rose to such eminence. The Paramount Ruler would hear no word against him.
And now the Admiral addressed his audience for the first time, speaking carefully, welcoming them all to the most secretive meeting ever assembled in the 48-year history of the Great Hall — a gathering so clandestine they’d shut down the entire government for the day to avoid eavesdroppers.
Admiral Zhang’s three elderly colleagues on the Military Council, all ex-Army commanders, were in attendance. The new Commander-in-Chief of the Navy, Admiral Zu Jicai, was there, seated next to Admiral Yibo Yunsheng, the new Commander of China’s massive Northern Fleet. The Navy’s powerful Political Commissar, Vice Admiral Yang Zhenying, had arrived the previous night from Shanghai in company with the Chief of the Naval Staff, Vice Admiral Sang Ye.
The most influential of the Chinese Navy’s Deputy Commanders-in-Chief, Admiral Zhi-Heng Tan, was seated next to Zhang himself at the head of the broad mahogany table. Behind them was a single four-foot-high framed print of Mao Zedong, the great revolutionary whose only wish was for a supreme China to stand alone against the imperial West. The print was a replica of the giant portrait of Mao that gazes with chilling indifference across the square from the Tiananmen Gate. Today, it served to remind the Chinese High Command in this brightly lit room precisely who they really were.
The other three men in the room were Iranian: the most senior a black-robed, bearded Ayatollah, whose name was not announced. The two Naval officers accompanying the holy man were Rear Admiral Hossein Shafii, Head of Tactical Headquarters, Bandar Abbas; and Rear Admiral Mohammed Badr, the Iranian Navy’s Commander-in-Chief Submarines.
Admiral Zhang, who stood six feet tall, was by far the biggest and the most heavily built of the Chinese. But he spoke softly, in an uncharacteristic purr, a smile of friendship upon his wide impassive face. The language was English, which all three Iranians spoke fluently. The words were translated back into Chinese by Vice Admiral Yang who had, in his youth, studied for four years at UCLA.
“Gentlemen,” said Admiral Zhang Yushu, “as you are all well aware, the new Sino-Iranian pipeline from the great oil fields of Kazakhstan will come on stream within a few weeks. Thousands of barrels will flow daily, from out of Russia, right across your great country, south to the new Chinese refinery on the shores of the Hormuz Strait.
“This, gentlemen, should herald a new dawn for all of us, a dawn of vast profits for Iran, and thank God, an end to China’s endless reliance on the West, in the matter of fuel oil. The alliance of the past ten years between our two superb nations was, indeed, made in heaven.”
Admiral Zhang paused, and opened his arms wide. And he walked around to the right side of the huge table and stood beaming at the men from the desert. The Ayatollah himself stood first and took both of the Admiral’s hands in his own, wishing everyone the everlasting peace of Allah. Then the two Admirals from Bandar Abbas stood up and embraced the legendary Chinese Navy commander.
Zhang walked back to his position at the head of the table, and glanced briefly at his notes. He allowed a flicker of a frown to cross his face, but then he smiled again, and continued: “I have no need to remind anyone of the enormous cost of building this one-thousand-mile pipeline, and the construction of the refinery. It ran, of course, into billions of U.S. dollars.
“However, as of this moment, there is but one dark cloud on our horizon…and that is the extraordinarily low cost of a barrel of oil on the world market. Last night it was down to thirteen dollars and falling toward a ten-year low. The Arab nations cannot be controlled because of their reliance on American protection and commerce. Which leaves us to sell at a half, or even a third of our oil’s true value. Now, Iran is earning twenty percent of every barrel to reach the new refinery, and at present that’s under three dollars. It will thus cost your country millions and millions in unearned revenue every month.