up the steps into their airplane for the ride home. SURGEON was not surprised to see her husband disappear into the aircraft’s upper communications level, along with the Secretary of State. She suspected that her husband might have stolen a smoke or two up there, but she was asleep by the time he came back down.
For his part, Ryan wished he had, but couldn’t find a smoker up there. The two who indulged had left their smokes in their luggage to avoid the temptation to violate USAF regulations. The President had a single drink and got into his seat, rocking it back for a nap, during which he found himself dreaming of Auschwitz, mixing it up with scenes remembered from Schindler’s List. He awoke over Iceland, sweating, to see his wife’s angelic sleeping face, and to remind himself that, bad as the world was, it wasn’t quite that bad anymore. And his job was to keep it that way.
Okay, is there any way to make them back off?” Robby Jackson asked the people assembled in the White House Situation Room.
Professor Weaver struck him as just one more academic, long of wind and short of conclusion. Jackson listened anyway. This guy knew more about the way the Chinese thought. He must. His explanation was about as incomprehensible as the thought processes he was attempting to make clear.
“Professor,” Jackson said finally, “that’s all well and good, but what the hell does something that happened nine centuries ago tell us about today? These are Maoists, not royalists.”
“Ideology is usually just an excuse for behavior, Mr. Vice President, not a reason for it. Their motivations are the same today as they would have been under the Chin Dynasty, and they fear exactly the same thing: the revolt of the peasantry if the economy goes completely bad,” Weaver explained to this pilot, a technician, he thought, and decidedly not an intellectual. At least the President had some credentials as a historian, though they weren’t impressive to the tenured Ivy League department chairman.
“Back to the real question here: What can we do to make them back off, short of war?”
“Telling them that we know of their plans might give them pause, but they will make their decision on the overall correlation of forces, which they evidently believe to be fully in their favor, judging from what I’ve been reading from this SORGE fellow.”
“So, they won’t back off?” the VP asked.
“I cannot guarantee that,” Weaver answered.
“And blowing our source gets somebody killed,” Mary Pat Foley reminded the assembly.
“Which is just one life against many,” Weaver pointed out.
Remarkably, the DDO didn’t leap across the table to rip his academic face off. She respected Weaver as an area specialist/consultant. But fundamentally he was one more ivory-tower theoretician who didn’t consider the human lives that rode on decisions like that one. Real people had their lives end, and that was a big deal to those real people, even if it wasn’t to this professor in his comfortable office in Providence, Rhode Island.
“It also cancels out a vital source of information in the event that they go forward anyway—which could adversely affect our ability to deal with the real-world military threat, by the way.”
“There is that, I suppose,” Weaver conceded diffidently.
“Can the Russians stop them?” Jackson asked. General Moore took the question.
“It’s six-five and pick ’em,” the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs answered. “The Chinese have a lot of combat power to unleash. The Russians have a lot of room to absorb it, but not the combat power to repel it per se. If I had to bet, I’d put my money on the PRC—unless we come in. Our air-power could alter the equation somewhat, and if NATO comes in with ground forces, the odds change. It depends on what reinforcements we and the Russians can get into the theater.”
“Logistics?”
“A real problem,” Mickey Moore conceded. “It all comes down one railway line. It’s double-tracked and electrified, but that’s the only good news about it.”
“Does anybody know how to run an operation like that down a railroad? Hell, we haven’t done it since the Civil War,” Jackson thought aloud.
“Just have to wait and see, sir, if it comes to that. The Russians have doubtless thought it over many times. We’ll depend on them for that.”
“Great,” the Vice President muttered. A lifelong USN sailor, he didn’t like depending on anything except people who spoke American and wore Navy Blue.
“If the variables were fully in our favor, the Chinese wouldn’t be thinking about this