3
Niles had come back a day early, and his secretary had called Dan to come in for a brief interview. He’d gotten his blues dry-cleaned, polished his shoes, made sure his ribbons were new and in the right order, every shoelace and button squared away. Blair was still in bed as he left.
The secretary looked up expectantly in the lobby of the vice CNO’s office. He blinked past her through an open door at the green hills of Arlington. “Daniel Lenson, reporting in to—”
“Get in here, Lenson.”
His old patron, turned enemy, then reluctant rabbi again, stood at the window, broad back to Dan. Never a lightweight, Niles had gained even more poundage since they’d last met. Rongstad, his staff director, was at a long, polished, glass-topped table devoid of even the faintest specks of dust, a folded newspaper by his elbow.
The windows had all been replaced after 9/11, with blast-resistant, shatterproof, slightly green-tinted glass two inches thick. The sky tumbled with dark, driving clouds, but it was empty of incoming airliners. An I Love Me wall held photos of a hulking young Niles with Victor Krulak, with Elmo Zumwalt, with Sam Nunn, with a bent, aged, irascible-looking Arleigh Burke. A photo of Niles on the bridge of USS California, gripping binoculars. Another with a youth group, all the kids looking up at Niles, in dress blues, as to some massive and inscrutable deity.
Their relationship went back many years. Then rear admiral Niles had cherry-picked him as a project officer at Joint Cruise Missiles, troubleshooting the crash-plagued “flying torpedo” that had become Tomahawk. Dan had submitted his resignation there, despite Niles’s avuncular advice he was throwing away his career. After his fiancée’s murder, Dan had changed his mind about resigning. But by then, Niles had washed his hands of him, pegging him as mercurial, cavalier, not a team player. For years Dan had wandered in the Navy’s outer darkness. Only lately had the admiral seemed to change his mind, when they’d stumbled out of the ruins of the burning E ring together.
“I pay my debts,” he’d muttered then. Maybe, in his mind, he had, arranging Dan’s promotion to captain, then his command of Savo Island.
Who knew where that left them, or what the second most powerful officer in the Navy wanted now.
“Lenson,” Niles rumbled, clearing his throat. He turned from contemplating the view. Nodded to Rongstad, who without a word opened the Post so Dan could see the second page. The headline read: NAVY IN QUANDARY OVER ANTIMISSILE STRATEGY, POSED BY ACTIONS OF ROGUE OFFICER.
“Read it?”
“Yes sir. On the Metro. But you note, it doesn’t quote me.”
“You’re not this ‘highly placed source’?”
“No sir. They called, but I haven’t said a word. On or off the record.” He stood waiting, hands locked behind him, until Rongstad nodded at a chair. Niles lowered himself, and he faced the flag officers across the expanse of polished glass over dark mahogany.
“Actually, that’s not why you’re here,” Rongstad said.
Niles rumbled, “Remember Zhang Zurong? You were involved with him. Back when Bucky Evans and that Tallinger bastard were passing our secrets to him.”
“Yessir. I recall that.” He’d met the smooth-faced, pudgy Zhang in a Chinatown restaurant, at what had seemed at the time like a family party. But “Uncle Xinhu” had turned out to be a senior colonel in the Second Department, China’s equivalent of Defense Intelligence. Dan had turned over elevator wiring diagrams disguised as top-secret terrain guidance schematics. The NCIS and FBI had nabbed the go-between, but by the time they showed up on Zhang’s doorstep, he’d decamped, fled Washington for his homeland.
Where, by all accounts, he had prospered mightily.
Niles grunted. “General, lieutenant general, army chief of staff, then the political sidestep. Just like Putin and Bush — from chief of intelligence to president. Or at least, to chairman of the central military commission. Which, right now, is pretty much the same thing.”
“He’s always been a hawk,” Rongstad put in, drawing idle diagrams on the dustless glass. “When we saw his name show up on the State Council, we knew it meant trouble.”
Niles got up but motioned them to stay seated. He crossed to a flat-panel display on the side wall and picked up a remote. The screen glowed a stylized logo. Niles machine-gunned through PowerPoint slides, and stopped at one of a chubby face. Zhang, in a gray-green Soviet-style uniform. Niles let that burn on the screen for a moment, then went to the next image. The western Pacific.
“This is what I spend my day worrying about, Lenson. We have a strategic concept, handed down from administration to administration. Containment, until they integrate into the world trading system. But what if they don’t want to integrate into a system that we, the West, designed? At some point, we’ll lose our grip.”
Niles’s fat finger swept a scythe from Japan to Vietnam. “Think of growing national power like the shock wave in a detonating bomb. As it increases, it presses against any restraint. What Acheson called our defensive perimeter in the Pacific runs from Japan through Korea, Taiwan, and the Philippines. West of that, we have an understanding with the Vietnamese.”
Dan raised his eyebrows. “With Hanoi?”
“It’s secret, so far. Fuel and basing at Cam Ranh, if the balloon goes up, and intel support. Drone and recon flights out of Kep.
“The Chinese have never been happy with the situation, especially being kept out of Taiwan. Up to now, they’ve probed, tested, but mostly accepted it. Now Zhang’s lighting the fuze.” Niles clicked to the next screen. Arrows pushed outward from the coast of Asia. They ended in dotted lines that, as Dan hitched his chair closer, enclosed massive areas of the southern seas. “You operated here. Correct? Ten years ago, in USS Gaddis.”
Rongstad said, “Zhang calls his program ‘restoration.’ Harmless, right? But to the leadership he’s appointed, that means hegemony over the South China Sea, Taiwan, Vietnam, and South Korea, based on the cruises of Admiral Zheng He during the Ming Dynasty.”
Dan tried to look impressed. But none of this was news. There would always be threats. That was the nature of the human beast. Power expanded, until it met the increasing density of some competing power. And along that unstable, trembling fault line, all too often, war. Peace was like health: a temporary condition, maintained only by continued vigilance and lots of exercises.
Rongstad went on. “Since the Party’s embraced capitalism, but not democracy, it’s basing its claim to rule on nationalistic fervor. We’ve tried to keep the military-to-military relationship going. The SecDef and chairman went to Beijing in January, and invited Zhang to visit the U.S. We even promised him the spy charges were history. So far, no answer.”
“Do we see war coming?” Dan asked.
Niles tilted a massive head, and prowled the office like an overweight panther. Outside, past the reinforced glass, clouds rolled, darker and more threatening. It would rain soon. “War? Probably not. Significantly increased pressure? Definitely. So far Japan, Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines, are sticking with us. We’re coming to an understanding with India. The Vietnamese have always hated the Chinese. Which we should have figured out long ago… But Zhang’s busy too. He’s secured basing rights in Myanmar and Pakistan. What worries us more, though, is rice and wheat.”
Before Dan had time to frown, the controller clicked. The next screen showed climbing graphs in green, red, blue. “Rice, wheat, and oil stockpiles. Notice how last summer they hockey-sticked up. So far this year, they’ve bought over ten million tons of corn and twelve million tons of wheat, and we’re still uncovering massive rice purchases. They say it’s to ensure stable supplies, but…”