Ian Slater: Choke Point

First, his wife Elizabeth had died just two years before. Why? Charles never found out. Mandy, then seventeen, had been inconsolable. All they were told was that it had been a hit and run at night, on the rain-drenched New Jersey Turnpike. Though running late to meet Charles for Mandy’s high school graduation in Rockville, Elizabeth had apparently seen a car ahead of hers pulling off to the side, taillights flashing, an elderly woman slumped over the wheel. She pulled off to the shoulder, used her cell phone to call 911, then getting out to help was struck by another vehicle. The impact hurled her over the guardrail and thirty feet down an embankment. A witness, another motorist, said it was a Jeep that had hit her, a Jeep with a gun rack attached to the cabin, trying to pass the vehicle in front on the inside, crossing the shoulder’s safety line. In the downpour there’d been no chance for anyone to see the killer’s license number, and given the volume of graduation traffic on the turnpike, there’d been no hope of a trace. All that Charlie Riser, graduate of Yale majoring in Fine Arts, could think of then was that it had been a Jeep with a gun rack . Hunters. Guns. Violence in America. All the high school shootings. It was one of the reasons he’d applied for the Beijing posting after Mandy graduated from college, to give her a year or two abroad in another culture, without guns.

The operator came back on the line — no one from the university could be reached. The whole of China, it seemed, was asleep. The operator, however, perhaps because she felt some empathy for the Big Nose, added, “Suzhou is really under Nanjing Military District’s 12th Army.”

Charles phoned 12th Army’s headquarters and was told its commanding officer, General Chang, would not return till tomorrow. Stymied, he ran the message again. He skipped “Daddy”—it was too painful — and tried to concentrate on what he thought were the key words. “Wu Ling … loaded … as usual … told me … tralize … or … wes … kind of deal … the mill.”

Wu Ling and Chang were no mystery. One of Mandy’s friends, Wu Ling was the mistress of General Chang, a man in current disfavor in the eyes of the Chinese government because of a bungled high-seas attempt by him and rogue Russian cohorts under the Russian General Kornon to hijack the prototype of the U.S. superfast RONE computer. The attempt had been just barely thwarted by U.S. oceanographer Frank Hall and the former Special Forces SALERT buddies of General Freeman.

After Charles had been introduced to Chang during the annual Moon Festival, he discovered that Chang’s mistress, Wu Ling, just happened to be enrolled in the same international relations and language courses at BCLU as Mandy. No surprise — every American official’s kin were routinely targeted by the Gong An Bu, to be befriended in an effort to gather information about American attachés — spies — in Beijing. Riser knew, of course, that the CIA did precisely the same thing to Chinese college students in America whose parents worked in the Chinese Embassy and consulates throughout the U.S. Like his Chinese counterparts in Washington, he also forwarded anything of interest he picked up at unofficial functions. But his daughter — that was out of bounds. Thinking about the message, he wondered if “or” was part of “either or” or was “or … west” northwest? Was “mil” military? It was the first thing he thought of in the post-9/11 world. Or was it a grain “mill,” a meeting where some kind of massive trade fraud deal was about to be consummated?

Ten minutes later his phone rang and he snatched it up. It was General Chang expressing “deepest sympathy for your loss” and promising the assistance of Nanjing’s 12th Army, whose command included Suzhou, in finding the “antisocial elements responsible” for Mandy’s death. There was a terrible silence in Charles’s apartment, the home where he and Mandy had laughed and cried and held each other when, after he’d brought her to China, their loss of wife and mother sometimes overwhelmed them.

“So you believe,” Charles said slowly, “that she was murdered?”

“Of course,” replied Chang, his bluntness at once appreciated and resented by Riser. “This police report from Suzhou,” continued the general, “is — how do you Americans say? — a cover-lift?”

“Cover- up .”

“Yes, a cover-up. The Suzhou police don’t want to admit the murder of a foreigner. Bad for tourists. Suzhou depends heavily on tourists.”

Riser found himself nodding without speaking, a wave of nausea engulfing him.

Chang said, “Forgive me for prying at this time, Mr. Riser, but was your daughter carrying valuables?”

Charlie Riser was about to throw up. “A robbery? I mean, you think it was a robbery gone bad?” Somehow, not that it made any real difference, Charles found it easier to consider a robbery gone wrong than a straight-out murder.

“Suzhou says no,” answered the general, “her xue-sheng zheng ”—her green card—“was still on her, but perhaps it was still a murder for money, the thief not knowing what to do with the green card. No matter that there is much more tourism these days, the fact is, Mr. Riser, very few Chinese have ever seen a foreigner in the flesh and they would not know what the green card was. Even if they did, they would have to sell it to a foreigner. This is very dangerous.”

Chang had a point.

“Leave it to me, Mr. Riser. I will investigate further.”

“Thank you, General.”

Perhaps, he thought, Chang’s offer of assistance was purely self-serving. After Chang’s failure with the Russian Kornon to get the RONE supercomputer, the general was probably trying to rehabilitate himself in the hierarchy of Chinese intelligence, to prevent the kind of international strain the murder of an American official’s daughter would undoubtedly place on Chinese-American relations — relations which were never good at best, and worse than usual right now because of Taiwan’s ever-growing assertive industrial and military strength. Though unlike Kornon he hadn’t been “transferred”—that is, exiled to Xinjiang, China’s Siberia, as punishment for his failure to grab the latest American technological breakthrough — Chang, like Kornon, would no doubt have to do something spectacular to get back into the good graces of his superiors. Helping Beijing avoid American charges of China’s ineptitude in the matter of solving the murder of a young American woman would certainly do the trick. It might put Chang firmly back on the road toward becoming party chairman, head man of China.

In any event, Charlie Riser didn’t care about the fact Chang might be helping him just to ingratiate himself with Beijing. The point was, Chang was the one party official who was at least trying to get to the bottom of it. And for that, God bless him.

While Admiral Jensen anxiously waited for the result of Albinski’s and Dixon’s second dive, he filled in time with an unannounced inspection tour of the submarine base on Hood Canal, instructing his driver/aide Davis to begin with the “James Bond” house. He meant the huge Magnetic Silencing Facility shed built over water, at the base of which the Trident Boomers and Hunter Killer subs entered in order to be degaussed. This process wiped off their magnetic signature through rows of enormous electrical coils, thus reducing their vulnerability to enemy detection.

Jensen was also inspecting his base’s Explosive Handling Wharf, another enormous shed built over water. In this one the forty-four-foot-long, seven-foot-wide Trident D-5 missiles, with their distinctive royal-blue fiberglass protective domes, were being loaded into each of two football-field-long, 18,000-ton Tridents, or boomers. Each boomer held two rows of twelve missiles. Atop each missile sat fourteen five hundred — kiloton reentry vehicles, each housing a thermonuclear warhead. Thus, each boomer was capable of striking, over a range of eight thousand miles, 192 different targets, all of which could be hit from just one U.S. submarine. And each of these 192 bombs was ten times more powerful than the one dropped on Hiroshima. Now, of course, Japan was one of the U.S.’s most reliable allies in Asia. And China, which had once fought with the U.S. against Japan’s imperial expansionism, was considered by Washington to be its biggest single threat, notwithstanding America’s ongoing war against terrorism.