The current incarnation of the presidential briefing room was done in dark cherry wood, the wall paneling and the massive conference table and chairs surrounding it. Its carpeting was blue, and the only diversions from the room’s Edwardian elegance was the discreet systems workstation in one corner and the single large flatscreen display inset into each wall. The superb air-conditioning and temperature control didn’t even hint at the fact they were twenty feet underground.
“There’s another aspect to that as well, sir,” Van Lynden added. “When the Chinese civil war went hot, the Taiwanese went on a heightened state of military alert. Then, over the past six months, their government has been reporting a series of provocative actions taken by the Reds. Aggressive jamming of communications and early-warning radar. Patrol boats and aircraft fired on. That kind of thing.
“In response, they instituted a partial mobilization of reserves and tied on a series of major readiness exercises and war games. Given the unsettled state of affairs in their neighborhood, these appeared to be reasonable precautions. No doubt they buried a lot of their invasion preparations inside all of this other military activity.”
“That was pretty god damned convenient for certain people,” Sam Hanson said.
With a ramrod spine and a steel-gray brush cut, Presidential Security Adviser Sam Hanson still looked and sounded very much the marine he had been for thirty years. With the advent of the Childress administration, he had stepped directly across from the chairmanship of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to this slot on the president’s cabinet.
“We might want to go back and have another look at some of those ‘actions.’”
“I don’t think that would accomplish very much, Sam,” Ashley said. “We know that many elements of the People’s Liberation Army have rebel sympathizers operating within them. It would have been easy enough to arrange incidents from the inside.”
“Or they could have been genuine,” Van Lynden interjected. “The Red Chinese have a history of attempting to intimidate the Taiwanese. Maybe they were trying to bluff the Nationalists out of an involvement in the war, and it backfired. Either way, I don’t think it makes all that much difference now.”
“Good point, Harry,” Childress said. “I guess Monday morning quarterbacking isn’t going to gain us much ground. Let’s see what’s going on now, then we can decide what we’re going to do about it. Director Ashley, I believe you have a situational update for us.”
“Yes, sir.”
The NSA woman nodded to the systems operator seated at the workstation. “First image, please.”
The conference room’s indirect lighting dimmed. The Large Screen Display at the far end of the room activated, filling with a computer graphics map of mainland China and its environs.
Along the coast south from Shantau to the Vietnamese border and inland to Szechwan Province, the map glowed yellow. Manchuria and north-central China were marked in solid red, as was the major offshore island of Hainan. The western provinces were a swirled mottling of both colors.
“This is our current best estimate of the situation in China as of July fourteenth. We know that the rebels — or United Democratic Forces of China, as they refer to themselves — hold the southeast, with their core power base being the Canton-Hong Kong area. The Communists maintain control of Beijing and the northeast.”
“The old cultural dividing line between the bread eaters and the rice eaters,” Van Lynden commented.
“Essentially so,” Ashley agreed. “In the western provinces, things are more complicated. What has been a more or less straightforward civil war in the east has collapsed into a mass of localized conflicts and insurgencies between a large number of different ethnic factions, political groups, and plain, old-fashioned warlords. Most voice allegiance to one side or the other, but most also are operating with their own agenda.
“We don’t think that even the Chinese know what all’s going on out there. In the Trans-Gobi region, contact has been completely lost with some provinces. Since we’re talking about hundreds of thousands of square miles here, it might take years to get communications reestablished. When we do, we might find we have some entirely new nations to deal with.”
“The ones that we have are more than enough for the moment.” President Childress grunted. “Continue, Ms. Ashley.”
“The overt phase of the Chinese civil war began approximately two years ago with an outbreak of large-scale civil protests in the Canton-Hong Kong area. The point of contention being both the replacement of locally born administrators with northern Chinese and the increasing bleed-off of profits from the Canton Special Economic Zone by the Beijing government.
“When the PLA Local Force units were ordered to suppress the rioting, there was a mass mutiny within the district command, a ‘of the colonels’ that led to most of the troops siding with the rioters. The leadership of the United Democratic Forces of China surfaced shortly thereafter to serve as the ad hoc government of the area in rebellion.
“The revolt spread from there. Most of the Main Force divisions have apparently sided with the Beijing government, as have the majority of the surviving air force and naval units, and the Armed People’s Police. The PLA Local Force elements and the People’s Militia have generally sided with the rebels.
“This has led to a kind of strategic stalemate, with the UDFC’s greater numbers being counterbalanced by the Communists’ superior mobility and firepower. As a result, the battle lines in the eastern provinces have been essentially static for the past six months. That changed last night. First overlay, please.”
The map graphics altered. Now, on the eastern Chinese coast, opposite Taiwan, there was a patch of orange notched into the red zone like an inflamed wound.
“I believe Mr. Hanson has the operational end for us.”
Hanson nodded an acknowledgment and picked up the thread of the briefing.
“The show started during the early-morning hours with multiple air and cruise missile strikes. It was a classic tasking template, laying fire in on airfields, air-defense sites, command-and-control nodes. We’ve got something here that will show how things went down. The recon footage, please.”
A second screen lit off and filled with an almost supernaturally clear video overview of a low, hilly farmland, taken from what looked like about a thousand-foot altitude.
Van Lynden recognized the feel of the area as coastal Asia.
“How was this imaged, Sam?” he inquired.
“A microwave link with one of our Aurora strategic reconnaissance aircraft. We’re flying a relay of them out of Tonopah to supplement our reconsat coverage. At the time this was taken, this flyboy was over Fujian Province at about a hundred and twenty thousand feet. He’s going to be taking a look at the military air base at Fuzhou here in a second.”
The video image panned around smoothly as the aircraft banked and came in on target. Hanson removed a laser pointer from his inside suit pocket. As they began to “drag the line” down the main runway at Fuzhou, he utilized the bright star projected by the pointer to catalog the destruction.
“See those pale streaks running across the runways and taxi ways, the places where it looks like the ground’s boiled up? Runway breaker submunitions dropped from aircraft mounted scatter packs did that. Bet there are some airdropped land mines in there, too … Over there, ‘side the runway, that’s a bomb crater … now. At one time, though, from the look of the wreckage around it, it was an antiaircraft emplacement. Hangars gone … tower and admin buildings gone … Those aircraft revetments didn’t do much good. Barn, barn, barn, a whole squadron of F-8 Finbacks blown away … Probably fragmentation airbursts steered in over target by laser guidance.”