good do they look?”
Lahr shrugged. “Good enough to give the Russians something to think about, sir. On the whole, the PLA is trained up as good as I’ve ever known them to be, but they’ve been working hard for the past three or four years.”
“How many of them?” Bart asked, looking at his wall map, which was a lot more useful for a sailor than a soldier. China was just a beige shape on the left border.
“Depends on where. Like, if they go north into Russia, it’d be like cockroaches in some ghetto apartment in New York. You’d need a lot o’ Raid to deal with it.”
“And you said the Russians are thin in their East?”
Lahr nodded. “Yep. Admiral, if I was that Bondarenko guy, I’d sweat it some. I mean, it’s all theoretical as a threat and all, but as theoretical threats go, that’s one that might keep me awake at night.”
“And what about reports of gold and oil in eastern Siberia?”
Lahr nodded. “Makes the threat less theoretical. China’s a net importer of oil, and they’re going to need a lot more to expand their economy the way they plan to—and on the gold side, hell, everybody’s wanted that for the last three thousand years. It’s negotiable and fungible.”
“Fungible?” That was a new word for Mancuso.
“Your wedding band might have been part of Pharaoh Ramses II’s double-crown once,” Lahr explained. “Or Caligula’s necklace, or Napoleon’s royal scepter. You take it, hammer it, and it’s just raw material again, and it’s valuable raw material. If the Russian strike’s as big as our intel says, it’ll be sold all over the world. Everybody’ll use it for all sorts of purposes, from jewelry to electronics.”
“How big’s the strike supposed to be?”
Lahr shrugged. “Enough to buy you a new Pacific Fleet, and then some.”
Mancuso whistled. That was real money.
It was late in Washington, and Adler was up late, again, working in his office. SecState was usually a busy post, and lately it had been busier than usual, and Scott Adler was getting accustomed to fourteen-hour days. He was reading over post reports at the moment, waiting for the other shoe to drop in Beijing. On his desk was a STU-6 secure telephone. The “secure telephone unit” was a sophisticated encryption device grafted onto an AT&T-made digital telephone. This one worked on a satellite-communications channel, and though its signal therefore sprinkled down all over the world from its Defense Department communications satellite, all the casual listener would get was raspy static, like the sound of water running out of a bathroom faucet. It had a randomized 512-bit scrambling system that the best computers at Fort Meade could break about a third of the time after several days of directed effort. And that was about as secure as things got. They were trying to make the TAPDANCE encryption system link into the STU units to generate a totally random and hence unbreakable signal, but that was proving difficult, for technical reasons that nobody had explained to the Secretary of State, and that was just as well. He was a diplomat, not a mathematician. Finally, the STU rang in its odd trilling warble. It took eleven seconds for the two STU units on opposite sides of the world to synchronize.
“Adler.”
“Rutledge here, Scott,” the voice said on the other side of the world. “It didn’t go well,” he informed SecState at once. “And they’re canceling the 777 order with Boeing, as we thought they would.”
Adler frowned powerfully into the phone. “Super. No concessions at all on the shootings?”
“Zip.”
“Anything to be optimistic about?”
“Nothing, Scott, not a damned thing. They’re stonewalling like we’re the Mongols and they’re the Chin Dynasty.”
Somebody needs to remind them that the Great Wall ultimately turned out to be a waste of bricks, EAGLE didn’t bother saying aloud. “Okay, I need to discuss this with the President, but you’re probably going to be flying home soon. Maybe Carl Hitch, too.”
“I’ll tell him. Any chance that we can make some concession, just to get things going?”
“Cliff, the likelihood that Congress will roll over on the trade issue is right up there with Tufts making the Final Four. Maybe less.” Tufts University did have a basketball team, after all. “There’s nothing we can give them that they would accept. If there’s going to be a break, they’re the ones who’ll have to bend this time. Any chance of that?”
“Zero” was the reply from Beijing.
“Well, then, they’ll just have to learn the hard way.” The good news, Adler