Stephen Coonts - Combat

“Then, Mr. President, let’s pack our bags and get the hell out of there,” McGarvey said from across the table.

The President shot him an angry, irritated look, as if he hadn’t expected a comment like that from the CIA, and especially not from McGarvey, for whom he had a great deal of respect. “The CIA does not set policy.”

“No, sir, nor will the CIA tell this administration what it wants to hear.”

“When have you played it any differently?”

McGarvey had to smile, and there were a few chuckles around the table though the mood was anything but light. Friend and enemy alike all agreed that McGarvey never bullshitted the troops. Never.

“Okay, let’s hear the CIA’s version of the situation, because I sure as hell need the unvarnished truth before I can come to a decision that makes any sense.”

McGarvey hesitated for just a moment. He’d been in this kind of a position many times before. It never got any easier. What he wanted to do had one-hundred-to-one odds against it. But the alternatives were either losing Taiwan or going to war with mainland China. In either case tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of lives would be lost. Needlessly.

“There may be no acceptable solution, Mr. President. At least not in the ordinary sense of the word, because the Chinese themselves engineered this situation.”

The Secretary of Defense started to object, but the President held him off with a sharp gesture. “Go on.”

“First of all the Nanchong was ready for the scrap heap. We believe that she was headed for the cutting yard when she was diverted at the last minute and sent out on this mission. She was a Riga -class frigate, built in 1955 in the Soviet Union and transferred to Bulgaria in 1958. Her name at that time was the Kobchik, which made her a KGB boat. Navy ships have numbers but no names.

“The Kobchik was extensively retrofitted in ’80 and ’81, and then sold to the PRC in 1987, when she was renamed the Nanchong. By that time she was already an outdated piece of junk.”

“Like most of the Chinese navy,” SecDef Turnquist said. He was going to make a run for the presidency next election, and the rumors were already flying that he was taking Chinese soft money. But McGarvey wasn’t going to go there right now.

“The Nanchong’s skipper, a man by the name of Shi Kiyang, was convicted of treason eighteen months ago and sentenced to life in prison without parole at East Sea Fleet headquarters in Ningbo. His mother, his wife, and his two children were sent into exile to Yulin, in the far north, and all of his assets, car, bicycles, bank account, Beijing apartment, and furniture were confiscated by the state.

“But he made an amazing comeback. Six weeks ago he was released from prison and sent to Xiamen on the coast. His family was brought back to Beijing, where their old lives were reinstated.

“The Nanchong left port three days ago on her one and only mission with a skeleton crew of officers and men who had all been convicted of a variety of crimes from treason to theft of state property.”

“Goddammit, we were set up,” Admiral Halvorson said angrily. “But why? What did the bastards expect to accomplish?”

“Get our attention.”

“Are you telling us that the Chinese sank their own ship?” the President asked.

“Yes, sir.”

“They got our attention. What do they want?”

“They want exactly what they told Gene they wanted. Peter Shizong. Dead or alive.”

“They’re using the Nanchong as an excuse to punish Taiwan. I can understand that. But they want us to back off this time, and they’re willing to fight.”

“That’s the conclusion we’re drawing, Mr. President,” McGarvey said. “They’re not merely rattling their sabers this time, they’ve pulled them. The ball is in our court.”

“We have the Carl Vinson and her battle group still in Yokosuka. We could park them just offshore from Taipei. Any invasion force would have to get through us first,” Admiral Halvorson said. He was mad. “Might make them stop and think before they pulled the trigger.”

“They would only be fighting a delaying action,” Turnquist objected.

“That’s if we stuck to conventional weapons,” Halvorson countered. “We have six submarines patrolling the strait, three of them strategic missile boats. Their combined nuclear throw weight is five times that of the entire Chinese missile force.”

“Most of the Chinese missiles are ICBMs, are they not?” the President’s National Security Advisor, Berndt, asked. He was clearly alarmed. “Capable of reaching the United States a half hour from launch?”

“Our first targets would be their launch sites,” Admiral Halvorson shot back.

The President gestured for them to stop talking. “How reliable is your information, Mac?”

“We have a high confidence.”

“What do we do about it?”

“Whatever we do, Mr. President, will involve a risk — either of losing Taiwan or of getting into a nuclear exchange with China.”

“If it’s about getting into a nuclear war, Taiwan’s independence isn’t worth the price,” Berndt said. It was obvious that most of the others around the table agreed with him.

“It’s about our word,” McGarvey interjected softly.

“That’s what was said about Vietnam,” Berndt pressed. He was an academic. He’d never been out in the real world.

“Taiwan is an ally.”

“So was South Vietnam.”

“Maybe we could have won that war,” McGarvey said patiently. After twenty-five years working for the CIA, he didn’t think he’d heard a new argument in the past twenty years.

“I’ll repeat my question, Mac, what does the CIA suggest we do?”

“Play the PRC at their own game, Mr. President,” McGarvey said.

“Okay, how do we do that?”

“You’re going to lend me a Seawolf attack submarine and I’m going to sink it with all hands lost.”

Even at a distance from the air the George Washington was an impressive sight. At over a thousand feet in length, she displaced more than ninety thousand tons, carried a crew of three thousand men, women, and officers, plus another three thousand in the air wing. The carrier had ninety planes and an arsenal of Phalanx cannons, Sams and Sea Sparrow missiles, and yet her two pressurized water-cooled nuclear reactors, which needed refueling only every thirteen years, could push the largest warship afloat to speeds well in excess of thirty knots. McGarvey peered out the window of the Marine Sea King CH-46G troop-carrying helicopter that brought him and his escort, Navy SEAL Lieutenant Hank Hanrahan, down from Okinawa.

It was early morning, the sun just coming up over the eastern horizon, and the day promised to be glorious. The north coast of Taiwan was a very faint smudge on the horizon to the southeast, and arrayed for as far as the eye could see in all directions were war ships: the George Washington’s battle group of Aegis cruisers, guided-missile destroyers, and ASW frigates directly below; Taiwanese gunboats, destroyers, and guided-missile frigates to the east; and the PRC fleet along a three-hundred-mile line to the west. The George Washington’s air wing maintained a screen one hundred miles out, which of necessity brought them into very close proximity with the Chinese. And below the surface were six U.S. submarines, four Taiwanese boats and eleven Chinese submarines, three of which were nuclear-powered Han-class boats, old but deadly.

“There’re almost enough assets out there to leapfrog from Taiwan to the Chinese mainland without getting your feet wet,” Admiral Halvorson had told McGarvey after the President’s briefing. What he meant was that once the shooting started it would be impossible to control the battle or stop it until there was a clear victory. In the meantime a lot of good people would be dead for no reason.