Zhang was right or not. And he really should. But who might? Tan of the Ministry of State Security? Shen of the Foreign Ministry? Who else? Certainly not Premier Xu. All he did was to confirm the consensus achieved by others, or to repeat the words spoken into his ear by Zhang.
Fang walked to his office thinking about all these things, trying to organize his thoughts. Fortunately, he had a system for achieving that.
It started in Memphis, the headquarters of Federal Express. Faxes and telexes arrived simultaneously, telling the company that its wide-body cargo jets were being taken into federal service under the terms of a Phase I call-up of the Civilian Reserve Air Fleet. That meant that all freight-capable aircraft that the federal government had helped to finance (that was nearly all of them, because no commercial bank could compete with Washington when it came to financing things) were now being taken, along with their crews, under the control of the Air Mobility Command. The notice wasn’t welcome, but neither was it much of a surprise. Ten minutes later came follow-up messages telling the aircraft where to go, and soon thereafter they started rolling. The flight crews, the majority of them military-trained, wondered where their ultimate destinations were, sure that they’d be surprising ones. The pilots would not be disappointed in this.
FedEx would have to make do with its older narrow-body aircraft, like the venerable Boeing 727s with which the company had gotten started two decades earlier. That, the dispatchers knew, would be a stretch, but they had assistance agreements with the airlines, which they would now activate in order to try to keep up with the continuing shipment of legal documents and live lobsters all over America.
Just how inefficient is it?” Ryan asked.
“Well, we can deliver one day’s worth of bombs in three days’ worth of flying—maybe two if we stretch things a little, but that’s as good as it’s going to get,” Moore told him. “Bombs are heavy things, and getting them around uses up a lot of jet fuel. General Wallace has a nice list of targets to service, but to do that he needs bombs.”
“Where are the bombs going to come from?”
“Andersen Air Force Base on Guam has a nice pile,” Moore said. “Ditto Elmendorf in Alaska, and Mountain Home in Idaho. Various other places. It’s not so much a question of time and distance as of weight. Hell, the Russian base he’s using at Suntar is plenty big for his purposes. We just have to get the bombs to him, and I’ve just shunted a lot of Air Force lifters to Germany to start loading First Armored’s aviation assets to where Diggs is. That’s going to take four days of nonstop flying.”
“What about crew rest?” Jackson asked.
“What?” Ryan looked up.
“It’s a Navy thing, Jack. The Air Force has union rules on how much they can fly. Never had those rules out on the boats,” Robby explained. “The C-5 has a bunk area for people to sleep. I was just being facetious.” He didn’t apologize. It was late—actually “early” was the correct adjective—and nobody in the White House was getting much sleep.
For his part, Ryan wanted a cigarette to help him deal with the stress, but Ellen Sumter was home and in bed, and no one on night duty in the White House smoked, to the best of his knowledge. But that was the wimp part of his character speaking, and he knew it. The President rubbed his face with his hands and looked over at the clock. He had to get some sleep.
It’s late, honey-bunny,” Mary Pat said to her husband.
“I never would have guessed. Is that why my eyes keep wanting to close?”
There was, really, no reason for them to be here. CIA had little in the way of assets in the PRC. SORGE was the only one of value. The rest of the intelligence community, DIA and NSA, each of them larger than the Central Intelligence Agency in terms of manpower, didn’t have any directly valuable human sources either, though NSA was doing its utmost to tap in on Chinese communications. They were even listening in on cell phones through their constellation of geosynchronous ferret satellites, downloading all of the “take” through the Echelon system and then forwarding the “hits” to human linguists for full translation and evaluation. They were getting some material, but not all that much. SORGE was the gemstone of the collection, and both Edward and Mary Patricia Foley