the fists of a mob, or bullets before a wall, or a rope. No, it would be bullets. That was how his country executed people. Probably preferable to the beheading sword of old. What if the swordsman missed his aim, after all? It must have been a horrid mess. He only had to look around the table to see that everyone here had similar thoughts, at least those with enough wit. All men feared the unknown, but now they had to choose which unknown to fear, and the choice was yet another thing to dread.
“So, Qian, you say we risk running out of things because we can no longer get the money we need to purchase them?” Premier Xu asked.
“That is correct,” the Finance Minister confirmed.
“In what other ways could we get money and oil?” Xu asked next.
“That is not within my purview, Chairman,” Qian answered.
“Oil is its own currency,” Zhang said. “And there is ample oil to our north. There is also gold, and many other things we need. Timber in vast quantities. And that which we need most of all—space, living space for our people.”
Marshal Luo nodded. “We have discussed this before.”
“What do you mean?” Fang asked.
“The Northern Resource Area, our Japanese friends once called it,” Zhang reminded them all.
“That adventure ended in disaster,” Fang observed at once. “We were fortunate not to have been damaged by it.”
“But we were not damaged at all,” Zhang replied lightly. “We were not even implicated. We can be sure of that, can we not, Luo?”
“This is so. The Russians have never strengthened their southern defenses. They even ignore our exercises that have raised our forces to a high state of readiness.”
“Can we be sure of that?”
“Oh, yes,” the Defense Minister told them all. “Tan?” he asked.
Tan Deshi was the chief of the Ministry of State Security, in charge of the PRC’s foreign and domestic intelligence services. One of the younger men here at seventy, he was probably the healthiest of them all, a nonsmoker and a very light imbiber of alcohol. “When we first began our increased exercises, they watched with concern, but after the first two years, they lost interest. We have over a million of our citizens living in eastern Siberia—it’s illegal, but the Russians do not make much issue of it. A goodly number of them report to me. We have good intelligence of the Russian defenses.”
“And what is their state of readiness?” Tong Jie asked.
“Generally, quite poor. They have one full-strength division, one at two-thirds, and the rest are hardly better than cadre-strength. Their new Far East commander, a General-Colonel Bondarenko, despairs of making things better, our sources tell us.”
“Wait,” Fang objected. “Are we discussing the possibility of war with Russia here?”
“Yes,” Zhang Han San replied. “We have done this before.”
“That is true, but on the first such occasion, we would have had Japan as an ally, and America neutralized. On the second, we assumed that Russia would have been broken up beforehand along religious lines. Who are our allies in this case? How has Russia been crippled?”
“We’ve been a little unlucky,” Tan answered. “The chief minister—well, the chief adviser to their President Grushavoy is still alive.”
“What do you mean?” Fang asked.
“I mean that our attempt to kill him misfired.” Tan explained on for two minutes. The reaction around the table was one of mild shock.
“Tan had my approval,” Xu told them calmly.
Fang looked over at Zhang Han San. That’s where the idea must have originated. His old friend might have hated capitalists, but that didn’t stop him from acting like the worst pirate when it suited his goals. And he had Xu’s ear, and Tan as his strong right arm. Fang thought he knew all of these men, but now he saw that his assumption had been in error. In each was something hidden, and sinister. They were far more ruthless than he, Fang saw.
“That is an act of war,” Fang objected.
“Our operational security was excellent. Our Russian agent, one Klementi Suvorov, is a former KGB officer we recruited ages ago when he was stationed here in Beijing. He’s performed various functions for us for a long time and he has superb contacts within both their intelligence and military communities—that is, those segments of it that are now in the new Russian underworld. In fact he’s a common criminal—a lot of the old KGB people have turned into that—but it works for us. He likes money, and for enough of it, he will do anything. Unfortunately