"The enemy," Halstead replied.
"Yeah, but who's the fucking enemy?" Kirkpatrick insisted.
Halstead shrugged and concentrated on a forkful of slider. "Does it matter?" he replied. "Dead is dead."
Which ended that particular conversation very nicely.
19
Stevens punched up the data on Garrett's monitor— several hundred meg of photographs, charts, and documents brought along in his sealed canister. Rather than storing the data on a CD or a set of floppies, it resided on a specially designed hard drive, one that would in true spook fashion fry into a useless chunk of carbonized circuits if anyone tried to access it without certain key programs running. He'd come to Garrett's closet-sized office right after he'd finished eating, and connected the hard drive to an IEEE port on the office computer.
"China," Garrett said, reading the first few document pages. He nodded. "I thought so."
"Why?" Stevens asked him. "The Chinese have been playing this one very close to the vest. It took us a good two weeks of digging to figure it out. How do you know it's the Chinese?"
"Style," Garrett replied. "That attack on us this morning… whoever was behind the sights on that other boat was a pro. He was well trained, and he was experienced. Somehow, he picked us up and tailed us… not an easy thing to do. And he caught us when we were vulnerable and took his shot." Garrett shook his head. "We were damned lucky he didn't connect. The point is, he didn't act like an amateur. The only people around this part of the world with that degree of skill — and balls — are the Chinese."
"Mmm. Keep reading."
A moment later, Garrett looked up, obviously surprised. "Pakistan?… "
Stevens nodded. "Not Pakistan per se, but a cabal within the Pakistani navy that supports al Qaeda. We think the rogue boat is Pakistan's latest purchase from our former playmates in Moscow, S-137, which they've named Al Saif. The Sword."
"Huh." Then he shook his head. "I don't buy it. Some of the Pakistani officers have a fair amount of experience, but they haven't been in a shooting war for some time, now. India is their enemy of choice, and the last war between them was, when? The early seventies?"
"In '71," Stevens said, nodding. "Though they started openly clashing again over Kashmir in 1983. But things have been a little calmer since both countries exploded test nukes in '98. Mutual assured destruction, y'know?"
"But no naval action since the seventies," Garrett said. "Mr. Stevens, Virginia was up against a pro this morning. I don't buy the Pakistan connection."
"We have that connection on very good authority," Stevens said. "What authority?"
Stevens considered the question. The nature of intelligence work demanded compartmentalization and the sharing of information on a strictly need-to-know basis. The fact that the CIA had received information leaked to them by a high-ranking member of the Chinese naval bureau was not for casual dissemination.
"How much do you know about Chinese politics, Captain?" Stevens asked.
Garrett shrugged. "That it's pretty rough-and-tumble sometimes. Why?"
"Suffice to say that there is within the Chinese military hierarchy a small group of men who oppose their government's current adventurism. We call them 'the Conservatives.' Traditionally, China has been interested in keeping its own borders secure, and intervening beyond their borders only when they feel directly threatened — as they did in Korea. Some of the younger up-and-comers see China's future as a major player in the region and want her to have a military role to match. We call them the Expansionists. The Conservatives see this as the short road to hell, at least until they can match us at sea. Some of them might be helping us to help their own cause in Beijing."
"Makes sense. You're talking to some of the Conservatives, then?"
"There are times," Stevens said, sidestepping the direct question, "when a government will deliberately leak information in order to pass a message to the other guy. We're still examining this leak carefully to see if it's misinformation, a fancy bit of political back-stabbing, or the real McCoy. But right now, this looks like it's either real, transmitted by an idealist, or real, transmitted by someone trying to hurt a political rival. Either way, we're taking it seriously."
Garrett kept reading. "Okay," he said after a time. "This is all very interesting, but it's not telling me what I need to know. Is my finger on the trigger, or not?"
"It's on the trigger, Captain. Washington intends to send a rather pointed message of its own. We will hunt down and destroy terrorist cells wherever we find them, and we will not tolerate any nation's support of those cells. At the same time, however, we don't want another Iraq."
"Meaning an open war?"
"Exactly. Bush took us to war against Iraq three years ago not because of those infamous weapons of mass destruction everyone was harping about— though the DOD's suspicions about that was a factor. It was because we had hard evidence of Iraq's support of al Qaeda… but it was evidence we couldn't make public without compromising our sources. So we publicly focused on the WMDs."
"Which were never found."
"Right. We took a PR hit on that one in order to deal with the terrorist issue."
Garrett snorted. "The hell with public relations."
"A warrior's response, Captain. But the decisions are made by politicians."
"And rightfully so. It doesn't make it any saner." He studied the document a moment more. "So… what all this is saying is that the Chinese — for reasons of their own — are covertly supplying help to a Pakistani submarine that has gone rogue, and is now operating at the behest of al Qaeda."
"That's it."
"What do the Chinese get out of this alliance? They don't do something like this without a considerable payback."
"Plausible deniability when the rogue hits Vietnamese and Filipino interests in the Spratly Islands. The Expansionists want to make the Spratly group a solidly Chinese bastion, both as an overseas site for naval facilities and for future access to possible oil reserves in the region. The Spratlys' strategic location astride the sea lanes between Singapore and Japan is a factor too. There's also this."
Reaching across the desk, he brought up a new page on the intelligence briefing. Garrett read it. "Shit," he said. "This is hard?"
"It's hard. We were pretty sure that one Chinese submarine, one of their new Kilos, had left Darien a month ago. They tried to hide it with a decoy, but wood and fiberglass don't reflect the ultraviolet in sunlight the same way steel does. We spotted that one right off. Three days ago, the rest of these subs sailed from Hainan. They must be in the region by now."
"For what purpose? I thought you said the Chinese are letting the AQ take the heat for this one?"
Stevens sighed. "I wish we knew for sure. Intelligence work is mostly guessing, you know. But one good guess has it that Beijing is expecting us to overreact to the AQ sub's attacks. We send in the Seventh Fleet, shooting up everything in our way. And they have a fleet of very quiet submarines waiting to take us down a notch. Our… informant suggested that one of their targets might be the Roosevelt."
"A supercarrier would be a pretty impressive notch on their gun," Garrett agreed.
"Yup. And they could still plausibly deny involvement, and say the AQ did it. But the loss of an asset like the Roosevelt would make us think twice and maybe three times about overextending ourselves in the South China Sea. Beijing could become the preeminent power in the region almost by default."