The Art of War: A Novel (40 page)

Sally changed channels, got a local station, which was airing footage shot from a helicopter of massive traffic jams on the interstates leading to the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel and the tunnel under Hampton Roads. She and her mother stood mesmerized watching the camera pan from a height of perhaps five hundred feet.

Cars jammed the roadways as far as the camera could see. A breathless local announcer confirmed that people were fleeing the area as quickly as the roads allowed. Hospitals and nursing homes were demanding transport for patients. Now the camera depicted a demonstration that was almost a riot in front of Norfolk City Hall by a mixed-race crowd. One demonstrator, a fat woman, demanded the authorities transport people from the area who didn’t own cars. “Get some buses,” she shouted into the camera. “Get some city buses and get us out of here! Don’t leave us to die like you did to the poor people during Katrina.” Katrina was the last big hurricane to slam New Orleans.

There was more of the same on other channels.

Bedlam. Mass panic.

Sally turned off the audio of the idiot tube and poured two glasses of wine.

“What does it mean?” Mrs. Chan asked, fingering her glass.

“I don’t know,” Sally answered. She sat on a bar stool to drink hers.

“The Chinese again!” Mrs. Chan said with contempt. “Why do they always blame the Chinese? We are good Americans. We work hard and send our children to college and pay our taxes. We are good Americans, as good as anybody.”

Sally wasn’t listening. She was thinking about Choy Lee, supposedly retired from California high tech, yet he never talked about California or his life or work there. Perhaps there was a failed love affair, but why had he crossed the country to live here, and why did he do nothing? Except fish.

Then there was Zhang Ping, who spoke essentially no English. Why was he here? A pal from California, Choy said. Yet Zhang said little, even to Choy, except to occasionally ask him to pass along a compliment on the excellence of the family’s food. He fished, too.

In the light of the almost unbelievable accusations about diabolical Chinese intentions at the naval base, all these little things became larger, more ominous. Who were Zhang and Choy?

If they weren’t spies, why were they here?

But the whole thing is ridiculous,
Sally Chan told herself.
A Chinese attack on the Norfolk naval base? That would start World War III. Wouldn’t it?

Torn by indecision, she watched the news. After a bit the local station stopped showing traffic jams and stories about panicked old people at nursing homes and poor people in the ghetto, and showed a photo of five carriers and two amphibious assault ships at the carrier piers during the Christmas holidays two years ago.

So how many carriers were going to be here this Christmas?

According to the television news person, someone had asked that question of the Pentagon, and had been rebuffed. “We never talk about future ship movements,” a man in a blue uniform said on camera.

Sally Chan decided to call Choy Lee. She dialed his cell … and the call didn’t go through. She tried again. Nothing. The fourth time his phone rang. After five rings the call rolled to his voice mail.

“Call me when you can,” she said, trying to keep the panic out of her voice.

*   *   *

The superstory of the day hit the Chinese embassy in Washington like an incoming missile. No one there knew anything about the voyage of
Ocean Holiday
or the mission of Lieutenant Commander Zhang Ping, both of which were tightly held military secrets.

The staff put out a press release denying the rumors as vicious smears, and reported all this to Beijing in encrypted flash messages. Of course, the Chinese foreign ministry there had their own Internet sources, so they knew all about it.

The answer came back to the Chinese embassy in Washington thirty minutes after it was sent. The ambassador was to announce that he was going to Norfolk to tell everyone that China was being foully smeared by outrageous Internet lies, and to reassure the citizens there. And then he was to go. Immediately.

In the meantime, the embassy press officer was to point out to the American media that an outrageous slander like this one about the Americans would never be allowed on the Internet in China.

*   *   *

While all this was going on, Zhang Ping started his boat toward the mouth of the Elizabeth River. He had to use the channel over the Hampton Roads tunnel. The radar reflectors at each side of the channel showed nicely on his radar screen. As he closed the distance, Choy Lee pointed out the traffic backed up on the access road to the tunnel on Willoughby Spit. Zhang used his binoculars.

He could see that traffic was stopped. Trucks, cars, vans, everything. Flashing lights on police cars. A helicopter—no, two helicopters—hovering near the tunnel entrance.

He passed the binoculars to Choy, who focused, scanned the scene, then handed them back. “An accident in the tunnel,” Choy explained. “This happens often. Last week the cars sat for an hour before a wrecker could get through from the other end to remove the cars.”

Zhang recalled the incident. “Americans have too many cars,” he said dismissively, and turned his binoculars to the amphibious assault ship and her escorting destroyers, which were ahead of him going through the channel over the tunnel. A harbor patrol craft was following the procession. Its machine gun was unmanned. Zhang wondered how long it would take for the crew of the patrol boat to go to action stations and man the weapon, if they were told to do so.

Choy Lee turned on his cell phone. It refused to log on to the cellular network.
Another day in America,
he thought.

CHAPTER
TWENTY-TWO

A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.

—Winston Churchill

It was early in the morning in China when Admiral Wu was summoned to the capital to meet with the Paramount Leader at a session of the Central Military Commission. The staff was monitoring the media reaction in the United States to the Internet rumors, of which they had translated quite a sample.

The plan had not included a contingency for the Americans getting advance warning of the Chinese stealth attack on their ships, only two of which were actually at the carrier piers.

Tomorrow, the eighteenth of December in America, the men gathered around the table were told, the third one was scheduled to arrive. The final two would arrive on the twentieth and twenty-second. All three were in the Atlantic with their task forces bound for the entrance to the Chesapeake.

The choices were obvious: Abort the attack, detonate the bomb as soon as possible, or await the carriers and detonate it then.

“Does the American navy know the weapon is there?” the Paramount Leader asked the head of the intelligence service, who was in attendance.

“We have received no indication that they know, or even suspect. They are checking the waters around the base, have tightened security, but we knew they would do that. There is no indication they are doing anything that we didn’t think they would do. However, the local cell towers around Norfolk are out of service. A technical problem, the telephone companies said.”

“Could these Internet rumors convince them that there is a weapon there?”

The intelligence chief didn’t think much of that possibility. In his experience, the American military and political leaders used facts to make their decisions or what they thought were facts. Frightened people who knew nothing sending texts and e-mails and making Facebook and Twitter posts wouldn’t sway them. “The Internet there is totally open,” the spy chief explained. “People routinely use the Internet to accuse the political leaders of every crime known to man, everything up to and including treason, every hour of every day. The people in government ignore all that. The media ignore it. Their attitude is that if one ignores the Internet, it doesn’t matter what is on it.”

The Paramount Leader didn’t share that viewpoint; nor did the other officials in the room. In China an open Internet could easily undermine support for the party, they thought. People who slandered the party in any forum were public enemies. Yet, he realized, this enormous gust of cyber-wind was happening in America, not here.

“Admiral Wu, your opinion.”

“As long as the United States Navy doesn’t believe a bomb is really there, the ships will come in to their berths at the carrier piers. If the admirals believe a bomb is there, the ships will be diverted elsewhere. We are monitoring their naval traffic and the internal naval traffic in the Pentagon. So far, we have seen nothing to that effect.”

“So your recommendation is to wait.”

“At least until the third carrier berths. Then we can reevaluate. But I say to you now, the repercussions of our attack will be vast. Our position must be that an American weapon accidentally exploded. The Americans never admit that nuclear weapons are aboard their ships, and everyone knows that they are. Their evasions will help destroy their credibility. The presence of our ambassador and his death will help sell the story of an accident. Nothing that has happened in America, or will happen, leads me to believe the current administration will ask Congress to declare war.”

“No one declares war anymore,” the Paramount Leader said unequivocally.

“War declared or undeclared would cause the current American administration to be thrown from office,” Admiral Wu insisted. “
They know that. It will be the pole upon which all their thinking turns.
Two carriers are a small return for our effort and the risk. Three would be better. Five would make the gamble worthwhile. Let us not forget why this mission was authorized.”

“What do your men in Norfolk say?” the Paramount Leader asked the admiral.

“We have heard nothing from them—there are two agents there—except routine Internet posts. The latest was yesterday. We cannot get through to them today since the cellular network around Norfolk is out of service. Temporarily. The telephone company says it is severely overloaded jammed with Internet traffic. So it has been temporarily shut down.”

A chuckle went around the room.

The Paramount Leader didn’t chuckle. “Could the Americans have captured the agents and be playing us?”

“To what end?” the intelligence chief asked. “That would be illogical. After all, if they have the men and the weapon, nothing will happen. Our attack will be a nonevent. We are sitting here wasting our time.”

The chairman lit a cigarette and smoked it in silence. Everyone in the room sat silently, too.

A war with America would stop the Chinese economy dead in its tracks. Even an embargo of Chinese exports to America would be devastating. An embargo of all China’s imports and exports would be something less than total war, but it would cause the nation to run out of oil and food. Yet there was small chance it would ever come to that. Even if the Americans
knew
the Chinese had pulled the trigger, they could plausibly deny that they knew. Could and probably would.

On the other hand, the Chinese people wanted China to be a major regional power. China needed the oil, natural gas and fish from adjacent seas. Its people demanded that other nations in the region respect them, their flag, their achievements and their ambitions. If
that
didn’t happen, the rot would eventually set in and the future of the party would be in doubt. Lead or get run over.

When he stubbed out his cigarette, the Paramount Leader spoke conversationally to everyone in the room. “We will wait another day.”

*   *   *

As the marine helicopter flew the 125 nautical miles south from the Pentagon helipad to Chambers Field at Naval Base Norfolk, Jake Grafton ignored the crew chatter on the intercom. He was thinking about the Chinese. If they planted a bomb in Norfolk and it did indeed explode, he thought they had seriously underestimated the reaction of the American people afterward.

The Japanese certainly did when they planned the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, lo those seventy-some years ago. A large segment of the American population then was willing to exterminate the Japanese race from the planet. Admiral “Bull” Halsey caught the mood when he said, “Before we’re through with them, the Japanese language will be spoken only in hell.”

Total war. Absolute total war. At the least, the Communist Party would be finished in China, and chaos would once again cause the death of millions, tens of millions, hundreds of millions. In China.

That explosion would irrevocably transform America. Into what, Jake didn’t know, but his head and heart told him the republic that had lasted since 1789 would probably not survive.

When the chopper settled on the tarmac, he roused himself from his meditations. Finally the engines died and the rotors stopped. He followed the admiral, his two aides, and Sal Molina down the little stairway to the concrete. One of the CNO’s aides, a woman, was a rear admiral; the other was a captain.

Captain Butler Spiers and the admiral in charge of Fleet Forces Command, Sherman Fitch, were waiting to salute McKiernan. Inside the little Operations Building, Spiers led his visitors to a conference room, where one of the news networks was playing on a television.

Admiral Fitch grabbed the remote and killed the television audio. “The situation is totally out of control,” he said. “Here and clear to Richmond. Everyone within a hundred miles is trying to get the hell out of here, including half our sailors. I have never in my life seen anything like it. Did you see the highways as you flew in? The interstates are giant parking lots, creep and go, for a hundred miles in every direction. Accidents everywhere. Riots in downtown Norfolk, Portsmouth, Suffolk and Newport News. Looting has started. The police can’t control the mobs.”

“None of that is our problem,” McKiernan said. “Our problem is a bomb. Have you found it?” He addressed that question to them both.

“Every ship has been searched,” Fitch said. “A quick going-over. Now they are emptying the storerooms and inspecting the bilges. Every ship in my command. Nothing that shouldn’t be there except some marijuana and a couple of stills running on fruit juice.”