good old time.”
The naval officer looked at his colleague in green. “Just what they’d be thinking if they wanted to head north.”
“Concur.”
“Better call this one in, Norm.”
“Yep.” And both uniformed officers headed to the phones.
“When’s the weather clear?” the lingering civilian asked the tech.
“Call it thirty-six hours. It’ll start to clear tomorrow night, and we have the taskings already programmed in.” He didn’t have to say that the nighttime capabilities on the KH-11 satellites weren’t all that different from in the daylight—you just didn’t get much in the way of color.
CHAPTER 47
Outlooks and All-Nighters
Westbound jet lag, or travel-shock, as President Ryan preferred to call it, is always easier than eastbound’s, and he’d gotten sleep on the airplane. Jack and Cathy walked off Air Force One and to the waiting helicopter, which got them to the landing pad on the South Lawn in the usual ten minutes. This time FLOTUS walked directly into the White House while POTUS walked left toward the West Wing, but to the Situation Room rather than the Oval Office. Vice President Jackson was waiting for him there, along with the usual suspects.
“Hey, Robby.”
“How was the flight, Jack?”
“Long.” Ryan stretched to get his muscles back under control. “Okay, what’s happening?”
“Ain’t good, buddy. We have Chinese mechanized troops heading for the Russian border. Here’s what we got in from NRO.” Jackson personally spread out the printouts from the photo-intelligence troops. “We got mechanized forces here, here, and here, and these are engineers with bridging equipment.”
“How long before they’re ready?” Ryan asked.
“Potentially as little as three days,” Mickey Moore answered. “More likely five to seven.”
“What are we doing?”
“We have a lot of warning orders out, but nobody’s moving yet.”
“Do they know we’re onto this?” the President asked next.
“Probably not, but they must know we’re keeping an eye on things, and they must know our reconnaissance capabilities. It’s been in the open media for twenty-some years,” Moore answered.
“Nothing from them to us over diplomatic channels?”
“Bupkis,” Ed Foley said.
“Don’t tell me they don’t care. They have to care.”
“Maybe they care, Jack,” the DCI responded. “But they’re not losing as much sleep over it as they are over internal political problems.”
“Anything new from SORGE?”
Foley shook his head. “Not since this morning.”
“Okay, who’s our senior diplomat in Beijing?”
“The DCM at the embassy, but he’s actually fairly junior, new in the post,” the DCI said.
“Okay, well, the note we’re going to send won’t be,” Ryan said. “What time is it over there?”
“Eight-twelve in the morning,” Jackson said, pointing to a wall clock set on Chinese time.
“So, SORGE didn’t report anything from their working day yesterday?”
“No. That happens two or three days per week. It’s not unusual,” Mary Pat pointed out. “Sometimes that means the next one will be extra meaty.”
Everyone looked up when Secretary Adler came in; he had driven instead of helicoptered in from Andrews. He quickly came up to speed.
“That bad?”
“They look serious, man,” Jackson told SecState.
“Sounds like we have to send them that note.”
“They’re too far gone down this road to stop,” another person said. “It’s not likely that any note will work.”
“Who are you?” Ryan asked.
“George Weaver, sir, from Brown. I consult to the Agency on China.”
“Oh, okay. I’ve read some of your work. Pretty good stuff, Dr. Weaver. So, you say they won’t turn back. Tell us why,” the President commanded.
“It’s not because they fear revelation of what they’re up to. Their people don’t know, and won’t find out until Beijing tells them. The problem, as you know, is that they fear a potential economic collapse. If their economy goes south, sir, then you get a revolt of the masses, and that’s the one thing they really fear. They don’t see a way to avoid that other than getting rich, and the way for them to get rich is to seize the newly discovered Russian assets.”
“Kuwait writ large?” Ryan asked.
“Larger and more complex, but, yes, Mr. President, the situation is fundamentally similar. They regard oil both as a commodity and as an entry card into international legitimacy. They figure that if they have it, the rest of the world will have to do business with them. The gold angle is even more obvious. It’s the quintessential trading commodity. If you have it, you can sell it for anything you care to purchase. With those assets and the cash they can buy with them, they figure to bootstrap their national economy to the next level, and they just assume that the rest of the world will play along with them