Steve Martini - The Enemy Inside

There is already a pile of bags inside the barred-off area for luggage at the bottom of the stairs. We lug the two rollers and toss them on top. Then we climb the stairs to the passenger area on the upper level. I walk down the aisle, Harry following behind me. There’re only four people in the car, lots of open seats. But Harry and I don’t take any of them. By the time we reach the front of the car one of the conductors is climbing the steps coming up the other way toward us. When I see him I smile. “I wonder if you could help us?”

“If I can, monsieur.”

“Is this the train to Zurich?”

“No, no, the train to Zurich is over there.” He points toward the other side of the platform.

“Ah, stupid Americans,” I tell him.

“No, not at all.” He smiles.

He steps to one side and Harry and I quickly brush past him, down the stairs and across the platform.

Six minutes later we watch through the windows from our seats as one of the German shepherds goes apeshit trying to eat our bags over on the other train. The cop trying to hold him on the leash looks like he’s about to go waterskiing behind the beast.

“Catnip for dogs,” says Harry.

I’m praying the animal doesn’t bite through the ballistic fabric on the outer bag. If he does, the blizzard of white powder will have them shutting down the entire station.

Our train suddenly lurches, cars bump together. It starts to move, slowly at first. It rolls along the platform picking up speed, moving past the pillars that support the transparent arches of the roof high overhead. As the train accelerates the pillars begin to look like pickets on a fence until they suddenly disappear.

We roll out of the station and through the rail yard. Harry wipes the sweat from his forehead. “Next stop, Zurich, and the plane ride home. Do me a favor,” says Harry. “The next time I say let’s not go, let’s not go.”

After decades of isolation, broader economic opportunity finally came knocking at China’s door. It was 1972, détente, what the Americans called “Nixon’s opening of China.” People in the United States were euphoric. The first real signs of warming in the Cold War.

Cheng realized even then, as a lowly officer in Chinese intelligence, that Americans as a group were naive. Chinese leaders politely nodded, smiled, and showed the man they called “Tricky Dick” the Great Wall.

There were times during American trade missions to China during the last two decades when things were so bad, so obvious, that Cheng and his subordinates hoped they weren’t caught blushing. As when entire air wings of the US Air Force found themselves grounded for lack of parts that were back-ordered from Chinese factories. Even then US leaders failed to take notice, or if they did, they took no action.

The quaint theory that all America had to do was demonstrate its pluralistic democratic republic with its freedoms and liberty, coupled with America’s massive engine of industry, and the world would follow was to Cheng the great American lie.

Americans had been told so often by their leaders that it was this, the tale of freedom and success that brought down the Iron Curtain and toppled the Soviet Empire, the mystique of Ronald Reagan. That if they waited long enough, it would do the same to China.

What ended the Soviet Union was precisely the trail that America was on now, a financially bloated central government and a faltering domestic economy that could no longer support it.

The Americans had clung to the railing longer than the Soviets for one simple reason. Unlike the now-worthless Soviet ruble, the Americans could print more dollars and the world would still accept them. The US dollar was, after all, the world’s reserve currency. But its days were numbered. To Cheng, America was living on Chinese money and borrowed time.

The man known to his subordinates as the Creeping Dragon could only hope that he was not. This morning Cheng’s fears concerning Joe Ying were compounded. A series of four cables-two from a cultural attaché at the Chinese embassy in the Philippines, one from London, and one from the Chinese embassy in Washington-painted a picture with an ominous image.

Ying had been seen coming out of the Presidential Palace in Manila not just once, but on three separate occasions during the last four months. If this wasn’t enough, Chinese agents had photos of him dining with a gentleman named Raymond Ochoa. Mr. Ochoa was an undersecretary of energy in the Philippine government.

Ochoa’s name appeared prominently in the second cable from the Chinese embassy in Manila. Two weeks earlier he had awarded a competitive tender to an Indonesian firm known as Petrobets, Ltd.

The tender allowed Petrobets to explore for oil and gas in a region known as Area Seven. These were waters near the Spratly Islands, waters that China claimed as its own, even though they were almost seven hundred miles from the nearest point of undisputed Chinese territory.

What Beijing and much of the world called the South China Sea, the government in Manila called the West Philippine Sea. The Chinese military didn’t care what anybody called it. They were too busy building aircraft super-carriers, two of them, both nuclear powered, and capable of matching anything the United States had in their Nimitz Class carrier fleet.

American intelligence knew about it. How do you hide two aircraft carriers, each more than three hundred and seventy meters in length? But the current administration in Washington kept it under wraps.

Russia was eating everybody’s lunch in the Ukraine. Islamic radicals were running wild through the Middle East, promising to bring their jihad to Europe and the United States. This while they rattled the nerves of America’s oil-producing allies in Arabia and Kuwait.

The last thing the American president needed was news that China was about to erase his airpower edge in the Western Pacific.

Cheng knew about problems. At the moment he had one of his own. It was the third cable, the one from their embassy in London, that started to light a blaze in his belfry.

An obscure British holding company headquartered in Bermuda, Aeries International, had just purchased a sizable interest in Petrobets, Ltd., the oil and gas concern that was gearing up to poach in Chinese waters off the Spratlys.

Researchers at the London embassy were still trying to run down the names of all the investors in the Aeries firm. But on the list of known shareholders there was one name that jumped out and grabbed Cheng by the throat-Cormac Llewellyn Grimes.

He looked at it several times, checked the rest of the names, and then came back to it again. Joseph Ying had connections with an American politician, a prominent member of the US Senate. Her name was Maya Grimes. It was the only name that Cheng was ever able to extract from Ying regarding Ying’s contacts. It came as a result of a slip of the tongue during one of their conversations.

Ying guarded this information jealously. He once referred to her as the fastest horse in his stable. Grimes and her husband were wealthy in their own right, and powerful.

The second he got her name, Cheng had some of his people begin to collect information for a dossier.

Grimes’s husband was a noted capitalist, an investor who went by the initials C. L. Cheng was looking at the open dossier on the computer screen in front of him. This was too much to be mere coincidence.

Cheng went to one of the search engines on the computer and ran the word “Aeries,” the name of the holding company in Bermuda.

What came back on the screen was not what he was expecting. “Aeries Student Information System-Eagle Software. . ” He was about to scroll down the page when the word hit him, like a bullet, right between the eyes.