Song: We need help, and that’s why I’m here, Mike. You’ve got a second video you’ve agreed to run. This was not shot by a Chinese television crew. We invited a neutral Russian crew to Lhasa. They picked their own interpreter and they were free to go anywhere.
Song fell silent and didn’t speak throughout the first minute of the video. It showed a gang of Tibetan youths, brandishing modern weapons, moving in against a row of Chinese shops. They sprayed the shop-fronts with automatic weapons fire, shattering the windows, which fell out onto the pavement. Then they lit petrol bombs and threw them inside. The shop-owners mostly lived upstairs with their families and they came stumbling out, coughing, clutching their children and helping their elderly relations. As they emerged from the smoke, they were cut down in a hail of gunfire, women, children, the old, so fierce and unrelenting that those behind turned back and fled into their burning homes. One of the Tibetans moved forward, executing the wounded with a single gunshot to the head, until he ran out of bullets. Then he took out a machete, yanked up the body of a young woman by her hair. The camera unashamedly went close up on her face, her eyes danced around, between consciousness and shock. Her hands flailed out and the Tibetan began hacking at her neck with the machete to decapitate her. The crowd cheered and the CNN presenter came back into vision, looking utterly stunned.
CNN: We apologize. We should have brought you out of that footage earlier, but these were raw pictures, just fed in over the Reuters satellite from Beijing. I think we get your point, Foreign Minister.
Song: I would like to make an appeal to your audience. Do not force China into war over Tibet. What we have just seen shows that there are no good or bad guys in a struggle like this. It is a horrible thing and both sides are capable of terrible atrocities. Yes, both the Chinese and the Tibetans. We cannot simply give Tibet away now. Thousands of Chinese who have settled there could be slaughtered. I won’t debate the rights and wrongs of that policy, because we all need to look forward. If you let us sort out the present crisis it will end soon. If you in the West interfere, there is bound to be a bloodbath even worse than the one you have just seen.
Hastings muted the television by remote. ‘That is about the most disgusting thing I have ever seen in my life,’ he said.
‘Fortunately, we don’t have treaty obligations in Tibet,’ said Holden. ‘But we do with Taiwan.’
Ennio Barber, the President’s personal adviser, had until now stayed quiet. ‘We have to get a statement out quickly,’ he said. ‘Or we’ll be finding ourselves pushed towards war by Congress.’
‘The Taiwan Relations Act is woolly about our obligation to use force to defend Taiwan,’ said Holden.
‘But the American people will expect it,’ said Barber.
‘Alvin, when can we get a carrier group into the area?’ Hastings asked his Defence Secretary.
‘The Harry S. Truman carrier group is just south of the Korean Straits heading out of the Sea of Japan. It’ll take at least a day to get anywhere near Taiwan.’
‘OK. Joan, I need to speak to Reece Overhalt in Beijing and get me Lin in Taiwan. Let’s see if this is one Asian crisis we can defuse in a few phone calls.’
China World Hotel, Beijing, China
‘The passing of the legislation we can ignore,’ said Jamie Song. ‘But if the celebrations go ahead, we will have to move in.’
‘What do you mean, “move in”?’ asked Reece Overhalt. The two men were standing on the balcony again, a sign from the Foreign Minister that the conversation was not being recorded.
‘Reece, that is out of my hands. The military run our military strategy on Taiwan. When they take it over, I will be watching it on BBC and CNN just like you.’
‘Give me your best- and worst-case scenarios, then.’
‘Best case, we will have tests with DF-15 or some such short- or medium-range missile like we did during the presidential elections in 1996. Medium case is that we’ll do that and blockade the Straits of Taiwan, throwing a cordon around the island, but not firing a shot unless attacked. Worst case is that we’ll send a missile into the Parliament building as they’re passing the independence legislation. Now tell me, what will John Hastings do?’
‘They’re sending the Harry S. Truman down from the Sea of Japan. We’ve got fighter crews on high alert in Okinawa. And that’s about it. If you can hold off, we can hold off. We can handle the missile tests. The blockade would give us all room for negotiation and if no one wants war, it won’t happen. If you send in a missile, I guess we’ll have to knock out your missile bases. But like you, Jamie, that’s not a threat. It’s a guess from a non-executive ambassador.’
Jamie Song shook his head. ‘I’ll pass that on to my president, Reece. But I’m not sure even he will be in control of the Taiwan conflict. The military will not let Taiwan go.’
Military Headquarters, Western Hills, China
General Leung Liyin, the Chinese Defence Minister, was unable to control his anger when talking to President Tao. ‘We have made it absolutely clear that if Taiwan declares independence we will attack. If we allow the declaration to go ahead, we will be weakened for generations. The Nationalists will have won the war in which our fathers fought. The Americans will increase its power in East Asia. Internal dissent will increase and the Communist Party will be lucky to stay in power. Total chaos will follow.’
‘It could mean war against America,’ said Tao softly.
Leung banged the table. ‘They won’t touch us. They know we could take out one of their cities with the DF-41. Their theatre missile-defence system cannot guarantee a missile will not get through. We are prepared to lose cities and the Americans are not. That is why we will win.’
Prime Minister’s Residence, Tokyo, Japan
Prime Minister Shigeto Wada put the telephone down from a conversation with John Hastings and thought hard, not about what the American President had said, but how he had said it. Wada’s grandfather had been an administrative official in Taiwan and Wada himself had always looked on Taiwan’s development with pride as if some of its success at least was down to the infrastructure and manner in which Japan had ruled the islands. Chinese military action against Taiwan now would not directly affect the treaty obligations the United States had with Japan. But given China’s Dragon Strike campaign of a few years back and its expansion into the Indian Ocean, it was only inevitable that the two East Asian powers would come into conflict again, possibly sooner rather than later.
His intelligence chief General Shigehiko Ogawa had already predicted a horrific Chinese onslaught on Taiwan within a few hours, certainly before the celebrations were due to start at noon. John Hastings had spoken like a man who wished the problem would go away.
‘We are talking to the Chinese and the Taiwanese about this,’ Hastings had said. ‘You can be assured we do everything to maintain peace in the Taiwan Straits.’
Wada was not convinced. He felt a tiredness in America, a sense that its days of fighting wars in Asia were over. It had given Japan and its neighbours a generous security umbrella for sixty years, and had allowed Japan two generations to grow out of the shame it felt after its defeat in the Second World War. But time had to move on. Wada also faced a more practical difficulty. As soon as China attacked, he expected the United States to use its base at Okinawa as a launching point for military action against the mainland. That would put Japanese sovereign territory under a direct threat of Chinese attack.