“No white flag,” Wells yelled to Hughley.
“You were expecting one?”
“Surrender’s not part of their playbook. They’d rather die.”
“Let’s help ‘em, then.”
1935. THE BLACK HAWKS REACHED the landing zone. The men in the cabin leaned forward, poised to unhook their harnesses and rappel down. Side by side, the Black Hawks descended — a hundred feet, ninety, eighty—
Whoosh! An RPG sailed between the helicopters, exploding against the side of the mountain. On the plateau below, guerrillas fired AK-47s, the rounds clattering off the Kevlar floor mats that protected the Black Hawk’s cabin. The Black Hawk’s gunners perched over the mini-guns, firing back in controlled bursts. The brass jackets from spent machine-gun rounds poured out of the guns and into the night. The helicopter lurched downward, leveling out fifty feet above the ground. The lead gunner raised his left fist, the signal to drop.
“Now!” Hughley screamed above the turbines. “Now!”
12
THE BANQUET HAD BEGUN HOURS BEFORE, but the tables remained spotless, the linens pressed, the buckets of champagne chilled just so. Tuxedoed waiters changed plates and filled glasses with perfect efficiency.
From the outside, the banquet hall looked as drab as every other building in Zhongnanhai, the walled compound in Beijing where China’s leaders lived and worked. But inside, the hall — officially called Huairentang, the Palace Steeped in Compassion — seemed to have been transported directly from Versailles. Mirrors gilded with twenty-four-karat gold lined the walls. Orchids and lilies flowed out of a red ceramic pot, a priceless fourteenth-century treasure. Behind a screen a pianist played Chopin on a Stein way grand. Oversized crystal chandeliers dangled from the ceiling, beaming soft light on the hard faces of the men who sat at the table.
The food, too, was superb: moist dumplings of sweet potatoes and ginger; fresh steamed lobsters, their meat basted with a sweet-spicy chili; the choicest cuts of lamb, sizzled in a slightly bitter soy sauce; shark-fin soup, a Chinese delicacy, the fins succulent and chewy.
Yet the nine men at the table, China’s supreme leaders, had manners more suited to an all-you-can-eat buffet. They ate greedily, lifting slabs of foie gras into their mouths, sucking loudly on giant Alaskan king crab legs. At first glance, the nine could hardly be distinguished. Oversized wire-rim glasses and helmets of black hair framed their faces. They wore black suits and white shirts and red ties knotted tightly around their throats. All but one smoked, sucking deeply on Marlboros and Hongtashans, stubbing out their cigarettes on the sterling silver ashtrays around the table.
They could have been a family of undertakers, very successful undertakers. They were the nine members of the Politburo Standing Committee. And only history could explain their frenzied eating. Even the youngest of them remembered the Cultural Revolution, the decade beginning in 1966 when Mao and the Red Guards upended China. Four of these men had spent their twenties in reeducation camps, brutal places where they spent their days dragging hoes through rocky soil and their nights confessing their sins at “struggle sessions.” All nine had known family members and friends who didn’t escape the camps, who died from pneumonia or famine or beatings by the Red Guards.
No one in this room ever talked openly about those years. But they remembered. And all nine had learned the same lesson that the Cultural Revolution taught everyone in China — though the lesson wasn’t the one that Mao had hoped to teach. Or maybe it was. Take what you can, while you can. Because no matter how secure you think you are, you’ll lose everything if the Party turns on you.
AMONG THE LOOK-ALIKES at the table, Li Ping, the defense minister, stood out. Unlike the rest, he didn’t smoke. He couldn’t avoid drinking. To have skipped the toasts would have been impolite. But he sipped his wine while the others guzzled.
And where the other eight were paunchy, Li was trim, thanks to his workouts. Li wasn’t modest about his physique. He challenged army officers half his age to work out beside him and smirked when he left them behind. “It’s the fat pig that feels the butcher’s knife,” he told them.
The others on the committee called him “The Old Bull,” emphasizing the “old,” not-so-subtly implying that he ought to act his age. Li didn’t care. Exercise kept him strong. He wanted to distinguish himself from the men around him, whose bodies and minds were equally corrupt.
To the world outside Zhongnanhai, Li was a “conservative,” a “hard-liner.” He knew his reputation. He couldn’t read English, but each morning his deputies gave him translations of CNN and foreign newspapers. The foreigners didn’t understand him or China, he thought. He wasn’t conservative. He didn’t want to undo the progress of the last two decades. But unlike the “liberals” who ran the Party, he didn’t care about getting rich. His ambitions ran deeper.
China’s elite was composed mainly of technocrats, engineers, and economists who spent their lives doing the Party’s bidding. They rose slowly, running villages, cities, then provinces. Along the way they proved their loyalty to their bosses while building power bases of their own. Li had followed a different path. He’d come up through the Army, the only real soldier in the Party’s top ranks.
Li had served with distinction in China’s last major war, its invasion of Vietnam in February 1979. As a young captain, he’d commanded a company that was among the first units over the border. The war was not even an asterisk in the twentieth century’s bloody history, but Li had never forgotten it.
The Vietnamese had known the Chinese were coming. Their soldiers and militiamen were battle-hardened from a decade of war with the United States. China sent in a huge army, hundreds of thousands of soldiers. But its men were underequipped and unready, peasants who’d received only a few weeks of training before being sent to the border. Some could barely load their rifles.
Li’s company was in the vanguard of a division attacking Lao Cai, a town just south of the border. His unit came under constant fire from the Vietnamese militias. The ground was soft and spongy and the mines were everywhere. The Vietnamese especially liked simple explosives that the Americans called “toe poppers,” pressure mines with just enough power to blow off a man’s foot. Making matters worse, Li’s only medic was killed by a sniper in the battle’s first hours. After that he’d had to leave injured men where they lay. Taking care of the wounded was a luxury the Chinese army couldn’t afford.
In the first two days of fighting, he’d lost fifty men, a third of his soldiers. But somehow he and Cao Se, his first lieutenant, kept his company together even as the units around them collapsed. Finally, facing the prospect of a devastating defeat, the People’s Liberation Army brought up heavy artillery. The big guns surprised the Vietnamese and turned towns near the border into rubble. By the time Li’s unit limped into Lao Cai, only dogs and amputees were left.
Three weeks later the Chinese pulled back across the border, proclaiming the invasion successful. They’d taught Vietnam a lesson, they said. Li had learned a few lessons himself. At first the suffering of his men had stunned him. But over the years, he reconsidered. Strategically, the war had put the Vietnamese in their place. Afterward they treated China with more respect. War ought to be avoided, but sometimes it was necessary, he thought.
For him, too, the war had been a success. The near-disaster in Vietnam frightened the People’s Liberation Army into professionalizing its officer corps. For the first time in decades, fighting skill, not ideological purity, became the most important factor behind promotions. The change helped Li. His abilities had been obvious from the first days of the Vietnam invasion. He intuitively knew how to position his soldiers, when to concentrate fire and when to disperse. He thumped other commanders in the war games at the National Defense University. He rose quickly. By 2004, he’d become chief of staff. Two years later, he was named defense minister and commander of the army.