Tom Clancy - The Bear and the Dragon

“I remember, George. It kinda started a little shooting war in which some people got killed,” POTUS observed dryly. Worst of all, perhaps, it had begun the process that had ended up with Ryan in this very room.

SecTreas nodded. “True, but it’s still the law, and it was not a bill of attainder meant only to apply to Japan. Jack, if we apply the same trade laws to China that the Chinese apply to us, well, it’ll put a major crimp in their foreign-exchange accounts. Is that a bad thing? No, not with the trade imbalance we have with them now. You know, Jack, if they start building automobiles and play the same game they’re playing on everything else, our trade deficit could get real ugly real fast, and frankly I’m tired of having us finance their economic development, which they then execute with heavy equipment bought in Japan and Europe. If they want trade with the United States of America, fine, but let it be trade. We can hold our own in any truly fair trade war with any country, because American workers can produce as well as anybody in the world and better than most. But if we let them cheat us, we’re being cheated, Jack, and I don’t like that here any more than I do around a card table. And here, buddy, the stakes are a hell of a lot higher.”

“I hear you, George. But we don’t want to put a gun to their head, do we? You don’t do that to a nation-state, especially a big nation-state, unless you have a solid reason for doing so. Our economy is chugging along rather nicely now, isn’t it? We can afford to be a little magnanimous.”

“Maybe, Jack. What I was thinking was a little friendly encouragement on our part, not a pointed gun exactly. The gun is always there in the holster-the big gun is most-favored-nation status, and they know it, and we know they know it. TRA is something we can apply to any country, and I happen to think the idea behind the law is fundamentally sound. It’s been fairly useful as a club to show to a lot of countries, but we’ve never tried it on the PRC. How come?”

POTUS shrugged, with no small degree of embarrassment. “Because I haven’t had the chance to yet, and before me too many people in this town just wanted to kiss their collective ass.”

“Leaves a bad taste in your mouth when you do that, Mr. President, doesn’t it?”

“It can,” Jack agreed. “Okay, you want to talk this over with Scott Adler. The ambassadors all work for him.”

“Who do we have in Beijing?”

“Carl Hitch. Career FSO, late fifties, supposed to be very good, and this is his sunset assignment.”

“Payoff for all those years of holding coats?”

Ryan nodded. “Something like that, I suppose. I’m not entirely sure. State wasn’t my bureaucracy.” CIA, he didn’t add, was bad enough.

It was a much nicer office, Bart Mancuso thought. And the shoulderboards on his undress whites were a little heavier now, with the four stars instead of the two he’d worn as COMSUBPAC. But no more. His former boss, Admiral Dave Seaton, had fleeted up to Chief of Naval Operations, and then the President (or someone close to him) had decided that Mancuso was the guy to be the next Commander in Chief, Pacific. And so he now worked in the same office once occupied by Chester Nimitz, and other fine-and some brilliant-naval officers since. It was quite a stretch since Plebe Summer at Annapolis, lo those many years before, especially since he’d had only a single command at sea, USS Dallas, though that command tour had been a noteworthy one, complete with two missions he could still tell no one about. And having been shipmates once and briefly with the sitting President probably hadn’t hurt his career very much.

The new job came with a plush official house, a sizable team of sailors and chiefs to look after him and his wife-the boys were all away at college now-the usual drivers, official cars, and, now, armed bodyguards, because, remarkably enough, there were people about who didn’t much care for admirals. As a theater commander Mancuso now reported directly to the Secretary of Defense, Anthony Bretano, who in turn reported directly to President Ryan. In return, Mancuso got a lot of new perks. Now he had direct access to all manner of intelligence information, including the holy of holies, sources and methods-where the information came from, and how we’d gotten it out-because as America’s principal executor for a quarter of the globe’s surface, he had to know it all, so that he’d know what to advise the SecDef, who would, in turn, advise the President of CINCPAC’s views, intentions, and desires.

The Pacific, Mancuso thought, having just completed his first morning intel brief, looked okay. It hadn’t always been like that, of course, including recently, when he’d fought a fairly major conflict-“war” was a word that had fallen very much out of favor in civilized discourse-with the Japanese, and that had included the loss of two of his nuclear submarines, killed with treachery and deceit, as Mancuso thought of it, though a more objective observer might have called the tactics employed by the enemy clever and effective.

Heretofore he’d been notified of the locations and activities of his various submarines, but now he also got told about his carriers, tin cans, cruisers, and replenishment ships, plus Marines, and even Army and Air Force assets, which were technically his as a theater commander-in-chief. All that meant that the morning intel brief lasted into a third cup of coffee, by the end of which he looked longingly to the executive head, just a few feet away from his desk. Hell, his intelligence coordinator, called a J-2, was, in fact, an Army one-star doing his “joint” tour, and, in fairness, doing it pretty well. This brigadier, named Mike Lahr, had taught political science at West Point, in addition to other assignments. Having to consider political factors was a new development in Mancuso’s career, but it came with the increased command territory. CINCPAC had done his “joint” tour along the way, of course, and was theoretically conversant with the abilities and orientation of his brother armed services, but whatever confidence he’d had along those lines diminished in the face of having the command responsibility to utilize such forces in a professional way. Well, he had subordinate commanders in those other services to advise him, but it was his job to know more than just how to ask questions, and for Mancuso that meant he’d have to go out and get his clothes dirty seeing the practical side, because that was where the kids assigned to his theater would shed blood if he didn’t do his job right.

The team was a joint venture of the Atlantic Richfield Company, British Petroleum, and the largest Russian oil exploration company. The last of the three had the most experience but the least expertise, and the most primitive methods. This was not to say that the Russian prospectors were stupid. Far from it. Two of them were gifted geologists, with theoretical insights that impressed their American and British colleagues. Better still, they’d grasped the advantages of the newest exploration equipment about as quickly as the engineers who’d designed it.

It had been known for many years that this part of eastern Siberia was a geological twin to the North Slope region of Alaska and Northern Canada, which had turned into vast oil fields for their parent countries to exploit. The hard part had been getting the proper equipment there to see if the similarity was more than just cosmetic.

Getting the gear into the right places had been a minor nightmare. Brought by train into southeastern Siberia from the port of Vladivostok, the “thumper trucks”-they were far too heavy to airlift-had then spent a month going cross-country, north from Magdagachi, through Aim and Ust Maya, finally getting to work east of Kazachye.