“I have to make that judgement,” he said, his voice laden with stress. “Look, I have a head-to-head with Hartle at nine a.m. tomorrow. In my office. I want you here.”
“Why?”
“It’s better if you find out then.”
“What shall I prepare?”
He smiled. “Just bring along the look you had on your face when you called me up. Use it on Al Hartle, instead of me…”
On flights into Washington nowadays, the airlines gave out smog filters and compact respiration packs, as standard to every passenger. And when Fahy reached the limo sent for her, outside the terminal building, the cloudless sky was so smoggy it was actually a little orange.
Maybe that was an omen, she thought. Titan weather, come to Earth.
Hadamard’s office was long, plush, old-fashioned, in the NASA Headquarters building.
When she arrived, Hartle was already there, with an aide, a thin officer in a sober blue uniform. He introduced himself as Gareth Deeke. He nodded curtly at Fahy, a small grin on his mouth, as if amused to see Fahy here. His eyes were hidden behind big insectile mirrored shades.
Deeke had unrolled a softscreen and plastered it over the office wall; it was filled up with a glowing, full-color map of the Pacific rim. This was, as far as Fahy could figure, some kind of military strategic briefing.
This might still be Jake Hadamard’s office, she thought, but it sure as hell wasn’t Jake’s agenda any more.
Deeke resumed his briefing.
“…This is the Asian century,” Deeke said. “Our analysts were predicting that twenty years ago, and it sure has come true. We can’t assume our geo-economic dominance is going to last a lot longer; we are going to enter a period in which we are just one of a number of players around the rim of the Pacific. We face Japan, Korea, Vietnam, several others, and the powerhouse of the whole area—”
“Red China,” Hartle said softly. “Red fucking China. Now the biggest GDP in the world, the fastest economic growth, the fastest military expansion: six million men under arms, ten thousand combat aircraft…”
Graphics of China; schematic starbursts around its periphery. Deeke said, “We know that China has a whole series of expansionist aims around its borders, by land and sea, some of which it has pursued for decades. Recently Chinese gunboats have been taking offensive action against PetroVietnam-Conoco oil rigs here, in the South China Sea, south-east of Ho Chi Minh City. I don’t need to remind you that China and Vietnam fought a border war in 1979. This whole area is crisscrossed by shipping lanes; any conflict between China and Vietnam could draw in Malaysia, Taiwan and the Philippines.
“Look up here,” he said, tapping another part of the map. “Vladivostok, the heart of what the Russians call their Pacific Maritime Territory. It was ceded by Beijing to the Russians in 1860, when the French and British were at China’s throat. Well, the Brits and the French have gone now, and China wants its province back. This is a key area. At stake is China getting hold of a port in the Sea of Japan; right now, you can see they are landlocked by Russia and Korea. And besides, the population density on the Chinese side of the border is three times that on the Russian side. It must look tempting…
“Item three,” he said, and he brought up another map. “Taiwan. The CIA thinks this is the main flashpoint area in the whole region. The Red Chinese have always claimed that any effort by Taiwan to achieve formal independence would justify them going to war. Currently the Taiwanese are pressing no such claim. But now we think the Chinese are preparing for a more significant push.
“We’ve seen exercises by the People’s Liberation Army on the mainland. Violations of Taiwanese airspace by Chinese military jets. Missile launches, impacting the ocean within Taiwanese waters. Blockades, particularly around the big ports, Keelung and Kaoh-siung… It’s a classic pattern. They did all this in the ’50s, and again in the ’90s. This time, we think they mean it. And there appears to be a faction within the senior and military Chinese leadership which believes that the U.S. would not intervene in the Taiwan Strait, no matter what happens there.”
“But why would the Chinese do this?” Fahy asked. “Why now?”
Hartle turned to her. “To see that, Miss Fahy, you have to understand the psychology of the very old men who run Red China. Have run that country for decades, in fact.”
She looked into his leathery face, the rheumy blue eyes embedded there. Nobody better placed to figure that psychology than you, General, she thought.
“The Party still has a grip on China. For now. But those wizened old dwarfs in Beijing can feel their grip slipping away. They fear koan — a return to chaos, which they see as fundamental to China’s former weakness — more than any other condition. And we have every indication that koan is indeed descending on the country.”
Deeke said, “Some of the new economic growth areas are pushing for more independence from Beijing. Nobody really knows what’s happening in the heads of the young people over there, in the new cities. And the influence of Communism in the rural areas has been waning for decades. In its place, you have all sorts of crazy cults and beliefs. There’s the cult of Wu Yangming, who was shot as a rapist fifteen years ago. He called himself a Holy Emperor, the reincarnation of Jesus Christ. Death didn’t stop him; Wu alone has a million followers. Some of these cult types are organizing using the methods Mao Zedong used during his insurrection — and his revolt worked, remember.”
Hartle said, “Think of it. A billion fucking peasants, still poor, their rice paddies drying out, all going crazy about their gods, consulting the I Ching… and organizing. What a tinderbox.”
Deeke said, “The leadership need some way to reassert their grip. A symbolic act, a show of strength. The space shots didn’t quite hack it, it seems. Maybe a war with Taiwan will do it.”
Hartle said with an almost comical darkness, “We must not allow the emergence of a great power on the Asian continent. We don’t want to spend the rest of the millennium paying tribute to the fucking Red Chinese. If the Red Chinese resent that, fuck them. But if they try to break out — go for Taiwan, for instance — we have to be ready…”
Fahy scowled. “I thought we were here to discuss the space program.”
Hartle studied her, analytically. “Here’s a quotation for you, Miss Fahy. I wonder if you recognize it: You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you. You know who said that?”
“No.”
“Trotsky. War has come looking for us, young lady.” He eyed her. “You run the Office—”
“Of Manned Spaceflight.”
“Well, there ain’t going to be any more manned Spaceflight, Miss Fahy, so I guess you’re out of a job. But we hate to lose good people. Maybe you’re just the person we need for our new program.”
“What program?”
Hartle nodded to Deeke, who tapped his softscreen once more. A new schematic came up: blown-up images of bacteria, DNA strands. Deeke launched into his new spiel. His slickness unnerved Fahy; he was like a machine, utterly subservient to Hartle, without anything to say for himself.
He said now, “The Chinese are not short of people, and have always accepted the human wave — attrition, mass slaughter — as an acceptable form of warfare. The First World War should have been a Chinese war.”
“So,” Hartle said, “we need a new deterrent.”
Hadamard frowned. “What?”
“A bio-weapon.” Hartle smiled. “Jake, Miss Fahy, we seem to have reached a plateau in mechanical engineering, but those biological lab boys have made remarkable progress in the last couple of decades. Now that the human genome map is complete, new possibilities have opened up for us. It’s possible to distinguish the DNA variation between different racial and ethnic groups. What I’m saying is, the lab boys can develop an agent which will kill only a specific group.”