“If we pull all but two thousand troops out of Tibet, concentrating those left only in Lhasa, we could divert the rest to U¨ rümqi in the Xinjiang Province. They could be in place starting tomorrow.”
“How many?” Jintao asked.
“Say a thousand by plane in the next few hours,” Quing said. “The tanks and armored carriers have a nine-hundred-mile journey. Running them full out at forty miles an hour with refueling and such, they could be in place tomorrow this time.”
“We don’t have any troops closer?” Jintao asked.
“Airborne, we can bring them in from anywhere,” Quing noted. “It’s the armor we need—other than Tibet, the closest armored division we require is almost twice that distance away, and the trip is over rougher terrain. My aides have calculated three or four days minimum.”
Jintao sat back in his chair and stared at the ceiling. Then he turned to Legchog Raidi Zhuren, the chairman of the Tibet Autonomous Region, who had so far remained quiet.
“Will two thousand troops give you a sufficient level of security until we can replace your armor in four or five days?” Jintao asked.
“Mr. President,” Zhuren said. “Tibet has been quiet for years—I don’t see that changing any time soon. Now, if I may be excused, I should be leaving for my return to Tibet.”
Jintao turned to General Quing. “Order it done.”
Next, Jintao turned to the Chinese ambassador to Russia.
“You,” he said loudly, “figure out what the Russians have planned. If they are planning to annex Mongolia, let them know we won’t stand for that. The Mongols conquered us once—I’m not going to give them a chance to try it again.”
Within two hours of the meeting, the first Chinese transport planes began to land at Lhasa Airport and began ferrying troops north to Xinjiang Province. In the haste to counter the Russian threat, the organization of the Chinese army in Tibet would suffer. Junior officers would be placed in charge of partially staffed battalions. Weapons and ammunition would be depleted. The mission and purpose would be compromised.
CABRILLO was napping in the rear of the Gulfstream when his secure telephone buzzed.
“Go ahead,” he said, instantly awake.
“It’s me,” Overholt said, “with good news. The NSA just called the DCI, who called me. The Russian bluff is working. Transport planes are leaving the airport in Lhasa and hauling troops north. In addition, a column of tanks has just left the city and they’re traveling at breakneck speed. Everyone said it’s looking up so far.”
Cabrillo glanced at his watch. “I’ll be there in about an hour or so. Are we all set up for the meeting?”
“It’s all taken care of,” Overholt said.
“Good,” Cabrillo said. “If we reach an agreement there, I’ll continue north.”
“You really think you can sell everybody on this idea?” Overholt asked.
“This mission’s like an onion,” Cabrillo said. “Every time I peel back a layer, there’s a layer underneath.”
“That’s not the half of it,” Overholt said. “The Dalai Lama has a new plan.”
“I can’t wait,” Cabrillo said.
“I think you’re going to like it,” Overholt told him.
38
THE Oregondocked off Ho Chi Minh City. The team that would enter Tibet was transported by shore boat to land. Then they were driven in a Vietnamese air force truck to the airport, where the C-130 sat waiting. The total Corporation force would number a baker’s dozen.
Six men—Seng, Murphy, Reyes, King, Meadows and Kasim—would be tasked with the offensive operations. They would link up with the Dungkaralready inside the country and direct them in the proper targets to hit first. Crabtree and Gannon, who were already in Bhutan awaiting the team’s arrival, would handle supply and logistics. Adams and Gunderson would fly, while Lincoln was in charge of setting up and operating the Predator drones. Huxley was tasked with setting up a medical facility to treat anyone wounded or injured.
The thirteenth member was Cabrillo. He would arrive after he finished his pair of meetings.
To the untrained, the mission looked like suicide: a dozen or so against a force that was close to two thousand. Odds of one hundred and fifty-plus to one. It looked like a bloodbath in the making. A trained observer, however, would be praying for the Chinese troops. First, one had to consider the Dungkar, the shadowy underground Chinese opposition thought to number in the thousands in Lhasa. When unleashed, the Dungkarwould burn with a fever that only comes when fighting an enemy on home soil. Second was the element of surprise. The Chinese were not planning for a concentrated and expertly executed coup d’etat in the next twenty-four hours. The third was the most basic. It is almost a certainty that a well-planned offense will defeat an unplanned defense every single time.
That was where the Corporation excelled.
Already, most of the Chinese forces inside Tibet were heading north in a helter-skelter deployment that had left little time for planning and even less for preparation. The troops left around Lhasa were not the cream of the crop; they were the leftovers—the administration clerks, mechanics and painters, plodders and planners. The officers were not combat trained, would not be knowledgeable about their individual soldiers’ strengths and weaknesses, and would lack a complete picture of where all the parts fit together.
Right now in Tibet, the army was a jigsaw puzzle without a design.
KASIM walked from the truck and approached the C-130 radio operator. “What have you got from inside?” he asked.
“We have another plane circling out of sight of the Chinese deployment, capturing their signals and bouncing them here,” the operator said. “Right now, most of the communications pertain to laying fuel dumps on the road north. The tanks are outrunning the fuel supply.”
“Have you heard from the tail?” Kasim asked.
The operator, a Chinese American formerly employed by the Defense Intelligence Agency and now attached to the CIA proprietary airline supplying the C-130, scanned his notes. “As of nineteen thirty Zulu time, the rear of the convoy had passed through Naggu.”
“They’re making good time,” Kasim noted. “At this speed, they will pass through Amdo before eleven P.M. and then another two hours or so and they will make the border with Tsinghai Province.”
The operator stared at a classified satellite photograph and compared it with a detailed Defense Mapping Agency map. “The pass at Basatongwula Shan will slow them some; it’s riddled with steep mountains and tight turns. The altitude is almost sixty-one hundred meters.”
“Twenty thousand feet,” Kasim said. “That’s high. The border’s about two hundred fifty miles from Lhasa,” Kasim noted, “and our reports state these are the older Type Fifty-nine tanks. That gives them a range of two hundred seventy miles on a tank of diesel, or about a hundred more if they have the external fuel tanks mounted.”
The operator nodded. “I’ve been watching the progress. The Type Fifty-nine on a road can top out around fifty kilometers an hour or thirty-plus miles an hour. Normally, however, they cruise at something like twenty miles an hour.”
“What are you saying?” Kasim asked.
The operator smiled and reached for a pack of cigarettes. He tapped one from the pack, lit it with a Zippo lighter, then took a drag. Blowing out the smoke, he answered.
“What I’m saying is that these boys are running at nearly full speed no matter what the cost in fuel usage. They will need to stop in Amdo and fill the tanks so they can make the pass. Then they’ll have a run downhill that will take them to Kekexili for the next stop.”
“So when they reach there sometime around breakfast Easter day,” Kasim said, “they will be four hundred miles from Lhasa, with a twenty-thousand-foot pass in between them and us.”