“We might be able to do something if we can mount a few racks onto the lower three beams of the rotary launcher,” Cheshire replied. “If we can, that’ll give us at least six CBUs per launcher. Unfortunately, there’s not enough room to mount racks and bombs on the entire launcher, only the bottom three stations. We’re pretty certain we can do a ‘straight six’ arrangement and put six CBUs on the lower and inboard stations of the wing weapon pods — that’s another twelve. With both launchers full, we can carry as many CBUs as six Taiwanese F-16s.”
“Great news,” Patrick said.
“This is even better news, I think,” Cheshire said. “We downloaded this off the satellite communications terminal — an incoming message, addressed to you”
“Incoming?” Patrick remarked with surprise. “Is it from Sky Masters? They’re the only ones that we’ve been talking to.”
“Nope, it’s not from Arkansas… it’s from Louisiana,” Cheshire said, wearing her broad, Cheshire cat smile. Patrick stopped short as he read… and he too began to put on a broad smile.
“Nancy, I want power on the airplane, and—”
“You got power and the SATCOM terminal’s fired up,” Cheshire said, but Patrick didn’t hear her — he was trotting, now running, toward the EB-52 Megafortress, to reply to the incredible message he’d just received.
“This madness must stop, Mr. President,” Foreign Minister Qian Quichen said via an interpreter on the hot-line phone from Beijing. The foreign ministers voice in the background betrayed his agitation and anger. “The people of China are clamoring for war, sir! They want revenge for the bloodthirsty sneak attack on our cities. President Jiang is going to make a personal appeal for calm on national television this morning, but he is under tremendous pressure from the military, the Congress, and the Politburo to retaliate against your naked aggression.”
“I’m sorry, Minister Qian, but I’ve told you twice already — the United States had nothing to do with any of those alleged attacks against your cities,” President Kevin Martindale said. With him in the Oval Office were his closest advisors: Ellen Whiting, Arthur Chastain, Jeffrey Hartman, Jerrod Hale, Philip Freeman, and Admiral George Balboa. An Army military intelligence officer fluent in Mandarin Chinese was interpreting and making notes for the President. “None of our bombers or attack planes were involved. Do you understand me, Minister Qian? No bombers of any kind under my command were involved in any attacks.”
“Then you… you are not being truthful,” the halting response came from Beijing.
“He said you are a liar,” the Army-Chinese language specialist interjected. “He said you are a ‘damnable liar.’ His exact words, sir.”
“That son of a bitch” the President swore half aloud, taking his fingers off the phones “dead-man switch” so Qian could not hear his curses. “Who the hell does he think he’s talking to?” He reactivated the handset once again, “Minister Qian, lets all compose ourselves and act like civilized men,” he said, forcing every bit of calm he could into his voice. “You can call me a liar, you can believe me or not believe me, I don't care. But here are the facts as we know them, sir: you launched ten intermediate-range ballistic missiles on an American military installation and destroyed it with a nuclear warhead. Do you dispute those facts, Minister Qian?”
“We do not dispute the fact that we launched rockets,” Qian said through his interpreter, “but the rockets were not attack rockets, and they contained no nuclear warheads, only meteorological data packages.”
“Minister Qian, our satellites and radar stations tracked those missiles from the moment they were launched to the instant they hit Guam,” the President said angrily. “The ten missiles that you launched from your launch sites in Ningsia and Inner Mongolia Provinces were the ones that were tracked heading for Guam. We detected the warhead separation and tracked each individual warhead as it reentered the atmosphere — we even tracked the one missile that destabilized and crashed into the Pacific Ocean, and with luck we’ll recover pieces of it and prove to the world that it was a Dong Feng-4 ballistic missile with a nuclear warhead, as we believe it is. We have incontrovertible evidence of a Chinese nuclear attack on Guam, Minister Qian. The question now is, what is China going to do next?”
“Mr. President, the weather satellite rockets launched a few hours ago that you say you tracked were not responsible for the unconscionable devastation on your colonial island,” Qian said. “We have data to show the exact trajectory of our weather satellites that were inserted into low Earth orbit by those rockets, and we will be most happy to send that data to you. The satellites are still in orbit, a fact that any capable government can check on its own. As for the warheads that you say separated from our rockets, we cannot say. Your equipment or your analysis was obviously faulty. We had no reentry vehicles on our rockets, especially not nuclear warheads.”
Unfortunately, Qian was partly telling the truth, the President reminded himself. Three of the rockets launched among the ten inserted had later been identified by space surveillance cameras as visual- and infrared-spectrum photo weather satellites. As far as anyone could determine, these three satellites were harmless — and their presence afforded a weak but defensible explanation for the multiple Chinese rocket launch. It still could not erase all of the other evidence that China had attacked Guam with nuclear weapons, but now the possibility, however slim, that China had not shot rockets with nuclear weapons on board had to be carefully investigated. And that would take time.
“Minister Qian, I would like you to pass along a message to President Jiang and to the other members of your government,” President Martindale said firmly. “Tell him that I am going to speak to the leaders of both houses of Congress about going to the full Congress and the American people and asking for a declaration of war against China. ”
Even the interpreter, trained not to react emotionally to anything he heard or said, gasped at the announcement and had trouble providing a translation both of the President’s message and of Qian’s response: “You… you must not, sir!” Qian’s translator said in a quivering voice. “Mr. President, we are at odds only with the Nationalists on Taiwan, not with the United States of America. Please, sir, stop your support of this illegal and disruptive society, and assist the world community with reuniting all of China, and we promise that China will work tirelessly to strengthen the ties between our two nations.”
“Please pass along my message to President Jiang, Minister Qian,” the President said stonily. “I will be ready any time of the day and night to receive his reply. Good day to you, sir.” The President handed over the phone to Jerrod Hale with a grim expression on his face.
“You want a drink, Mr. President?” Hale asked. “I could sure go for one.”
“Not now, Jerrod,” the President said testily. He ran a tired hand over his eyes. “Christ, I feel like a cornered animal, with no other option but to lash out at anyone and everyone in front of me.”
Secretary of Defense Arthur Chastain got off the phone near the coffee table in the informal conference area of the Oval Office. “Pentagon reporting a firefight across the DMZ, near Changdan. A North Korean special forces team blew up a tank maintenance facility. No reports yet on casualties or damage. Several artillery rounds were also fired towards Seoul, probably a probe. The USAF reports one F-16 anti-radar patrol fighter shot down five miles south of the DMZ by a surface-to-air missile; North Korea claims it was flying in the north. Pilot’s believed to be a casualty. ”