Knowles could have beaten his head against the table.
‘China does not want conflict with the United States.’
‘Then let us both act to prevent it. What about this? You release our men, we’ll release your ships at the same time. We’ll show you that trust.’
‘China does not hold your men, President Knowles.’
‘Sudan holds them. And you have–’
‘That’s correct, President Knowles. Sudan holds them.’
‘And you have enough influence with Sudan to make them release them.’
‘So you say.’
‘Your troops were on the ground! We have proof. We have three of them.’
‘So you say.’
Knowles looked at Rose and Abrahams in exasperation. The two men, by their expressions, had no idea how to break the deadlock.
‘President Zhang, if our ships come together, I fear greatly there will be conflict. I fear that we will see a terrible battle. We shouldn’t take such a risk. Turn your ships around. Release our men and we will release your ships.’
‘Release our ships. Believe me, President Knowles, you must release those ships. There is no other way.’
‘President Zhang, please do not mistake what I’m saying. There will be conflict. If we do not find the way out of this, I fear greatly that there will be conflict.’
‘There is a way out. You must release those ships.’
‘The way out is for you to release our men.’
‘Our ships, President Knowles.’
Knowles took a deep breath. ‘Okay. President Zhang, it doesn’t look like we’re getting anywhere.’
‘I have told you what you must do. You must release those ships.’
Knowles paused. He didn’t know what else to say. ‘I think we should stay in touch on this.’
‘Yes,’ said the Chinese president.
Knowles hesitated for a moment. ‘Good day.’
‘Good night, President Knowles.’
Knowles put the phone down. He glanced at the interpreter and thanked him. The young man gathered up the notes he had taken and left the office.
Knowles was silent. That was an awful conversation. It had been like butting heads. Just butting heads.
‘He’s going to take it to the wire,’ murmured Abrahams.
The president looked at him.
‘If he wanted to get out of this, you just gave him a way.’
‘Do you think he got the message?’
‘How could he not? You said it ten times. He lets our men go, everyone goes home.’
‘If it comes to the point,’ said Rose, ‘they’ll lose half their carrier fleet.’
‘Might be a price they’re prepared to pay,’ said Abrahams. ‘No one has stood up to US military power in a set-piece battle since World War Two. Just the act of standing up to us, in their eyes, in the eyes of lots of countries, that would be something.’
‘Even if they get smashed?’ said Rose skeptically.
‘This time. In ten years they’ll be the biggest economy in the world. Ten years after that …’ Abrahams shrugged.
‘That still doesn’t mean they’re prepared to–’
‘I don’t want to smash anyone,’ said the president curtly. He shook his head in frustration. ‘You know, the thing I don’t understand is, what’s this about? It’s not about those damn ships. We took those ships because they took our men. Why do they want our men? What do they get out of it?’ He turned to Rose. ‘We’re sure it’s them, right? We’re sure it’s not the Sudanese by themselves?’
‘Absolutely. When Hale told the Chinese military we were coming in to get out the wounded, they let us do it, clean as a whistle. We told the Chinese, not the Sudanese. China’s in control.’
‘So what do they want with seventy-five US soldiers? What good does it do them? He must know we need our guys back. He must know we can’t just leave them. It’s a damn dangerous thing to do. It just complicates the hell out of everything.’ Knowles frowned, trying to understand it. ‘And he must know I had to take action on the economy. He must know we can’t allow our markets to be manipulated or even look like they’re being manipulated. What the hell do they
want
?’
‘Whatever it is,’ said Gary Rose, ‘we can’t let them have it.’
Suddenly Knowles remembered the conversation with Marion Ellman in the graveyard at Jefferson City. It was only yesterday, but Bob Livingstone’s funeral seemed a long time ago. The president hadn’t had a minute to think about it since he had got news of the operation in Sudan. It had gone clear out of his mind.
That was the last thing she had said to him. She stood there and pointed her finger and said: You’d better figure out what the Chinese want. But not, Knowles knew, so as to avoid giving it to them. That was the opposite of what she had meant.
‘Mr President,’ said Rose, ‘General Hale is going to present a range of operational plans for what we might need to do. We need to decide how we contain this and be aware of the possible scenarios for how it might develop. If it comes to the point, we can be fairly certain it won’t stay confined to the Indian Ocean.’
The president nodded. He was only half listening, still pondering that conversation in the graveyard.
Rose continued. ‘We have a meeting set for nine tomorrow morning to go through the options with the Joint Chiefs.’
IN BEIJING, ZHANG
watched his interpreter leave the room.
‘They have three of our men,’ he said to Qin.
His advisor nodded. ‘Apparently.’
General Fan hadn’t told him that. Zhang wasn’t particularly surprised to discover that he hadn’t. He was sure there was a lot more that Fan hadn’t told him as well. If it had been up to him, he would never have allowed the Americans to be attacked. There was nothing he wanted more than to give them back now.
‘Do you think President Knowles got the message?’
‘You said it many times.’
Zhang nodded. He had said it as often as he could. There was only one way that Fan might be persuaded to hand back the men, and that was if he had his victory, if the Americans looked as if they had backed down under the threat of the Chinese strike groups. That would also hand Fan a victory against him – but that was preferable to a major battle with the Americans. If such a battle happened, there was no telling what the army would do.
But Zhang couldn’t say any of that out loud to the American president. He couldn’t reveal his weakness. He had said as much as he dared.
‘What do you think they will do if our ships arrive?’
Qin shook his head. ‘If our ships arrive, it means they will not have released the
Kunming
and
Changchun
. After your message, if they have not released the
Kunming
and
Changchun
, it means they are ready to fight.’
‘Will we fight?’
Qin didn’t reply. He had no better idea than Zhang. The aircraft carrier fleets were loyal to Xu. The defense minister was playing his usual game, going along with both sides for as long as he could. He was keeping Fan happy by sending the fleets to Kenya. What he would do when they got there would depend on what he thought the carrier fleet admirals were prepared to do and what would be in his own interest at the time.
There was a knock on the door. One of Zhang’s aides came in.
‘President Zhang,’ he said, ‘it is time to leave for the meeting of the Central Military Commission.’
53
THE MORNING DAWNED
misty and grey in Washington. At 8am a feeble light was filtering in through the windows of the White House. In southern Sudan, it was four in the afternoon of a hot, tense day. The American marines holed up in the compound gazed out at the remains of three blackened Chinooks in a clearing outside and looked for signs of the forces encircling them beyond. Five hundred miles away, off Lamu Bay, a swell had risen and a squall was approaching from the southeast. The two Chinese destroyers rode the waves, surrounded by four of the ships from the
Abraham Lincoln
strike group. Through binoculars, far off, the Chinese captains could see the long, grey bulk of the carrier itself. Further distant, across hundreds of miles of open ocean, the carrier strike groups of the
Mao Zedong
and
Chou Enlai
and the
John F Kennedy
and
George HW Bush
were converging.
In the Situation Room, Admiral Tovey projected charts to show their positions. Running slightly slower than projected, but with calm conditions predicted for the route, the arrival of the Chinese carriers off the coast of Kenya was now estimated to coincide roughly with that of the
Kennedy
, in approximately fifty hours. The head of defense intelligence gave an update. He showed images taken from drones above the compound in Sudan to demonstrate the disposition of forces, highlighting features that appeared to be emplacements of surface to air missiles and concentrations of military vehicles. The wider world was still unaware of what was happening but military intelligence communities in a number of countries had detected the movements of the Chinese and American carriers through their own satellite surveillance. The Russians had started to move a carrier strike group that was at sea off Kamchatka southwards east of Japan. In an apparent response, the Chinese had sent one of their remaining two carrier groups north. The Japanese Maritime Self Defense Force, as the Japanese navy was called, had mobilized two groups of destroyers and destroyer escorts. If the Russians and Chinese kept moving, the Sea of Japan was set to get uncomfortably crowded. The small but efficient Taiwanese navy was fully mobilized around Taiwan. The Japanese and Taiwanese had been told there were US maneuvers taking place in the Indian Ocean. The same message had been given to other Nato allies who had become aware of the movements of the US fleets. The British and French, with their own satellite imagery, must have realized that something more was happening.
General Hale outlined four plans for the president to consider. The going-in assumption was that, in the event of a major Chinese defeat, action by the Chinese military would likely be initiated elsewhere against the US or its allies and that action against China might be initiated by Russia or India in disputed border areas.
The first plan was for an immediate repulse by the
Lincoln
strike group as soon as the Chinese carrier groups were within range, preceded by the pre-emptive neutralization of the
Kunming
and
Changchun
. The logic was that an aggressive posture and early hits would strike a psychological victory. The second plan, a variant of the first, was for a repulse by the combined
Lincoln
and
Kennedy
strike groups once the
John F Kennedy
arrived. In the event that the Chinese forces arrived before the
Kennedy
, Pressler would hold off on action unless the Chinese admirals chose to try to take advantage of their temporary superiority in numbers and he was forced to defend. The third plan called for the US force to adopt a watchful posture with an overwhelming response if the enemy opened hostilities. The risk in this plan was the high probability of an incident setting off a confrontation at a time and disposition not of US choosing. The fourth plan, and the most aggressive, was a pre-emptive aerial attack on the Chinese strike groups while en route in the Indian Ocean, delivered by stealth B3 bombers out of Diego Garcia.
‘If we take that course of action,’ said John Oakley, who had scrutinized the plans in detail with the Joint Chiefs before the meeting, ‘we would need to issue an ultimatum and define the no go line at which we will take action. This would be in international waters. We would have to say that crossing that longitude towards a US force of lesser capability with belligerent intent would constitute a hostile act and would justify our pre-emptive action in self defense.’
‘We’d need to get legal advice on that,’ said Rose.
Hale nodded. ‘It’s clean operationally but that’s when the complications start. In our opinion, Mr President, this is the course of action most likely to lead to a widening of the conflict. We would anticipate retaliation by the Chinese against our forces anywhere they could reach them, which is principally the East Pacific area. Attacks by submarine on our navy in international waters should also be expected. We see a good chance of an escalation to a short but vicious naval war fought anywhere our forces are in contact. We should remember also that China has the capability to go nonconventional. It could strike at our satellites, with a probability we estimate of thirty to fifty per cent of taking one or more out. It could also launch a nuclear strike against us. The Chinese military know that a nonconventional attack would lead us to retaliate in massive force. We don’t think they’d be that dumb.’
‘We can’t be sure though,’ said the president. ‘That’s right, isn’t it?’
Hale didn’t reply.
There was silence.
‘In a naval war, sir,’ Hale continued, ‘Taiwan would be a likely target for Chinese aggression and they would be able to mobilize an overwhelming superiority of force in that theater. We would likely lose Taiwan.’
The president nodded.
‘Coming back to our plans, from the military perspective, focusing narrowly on this one engagement off Lamu Bay, a pre-emptive aerial attack is the most attractive in the sense that it deals with the threat to the
Abraham Lincoln
before the enemy gets anywhere near our ships. In relation to the wider picture, however, in that it’s most likely to lead to a scenario where there’s an immediate widening of the conflict, it clearly has drawbacks. Mr President, we should talk through the follow-on scenarios in more detail.’
Hale went through them. The scenarios didn’t vary greatly from one plan to the next. The differences were largely in the probabilities, with the last plan, as the general had explained, creating the greatest risk of a wider conflagration. But apart from the varying details of the local battle off Kenya, each plan involved scenarios with escalation spreading to other potential fronts of confrontation, involving the US, Taiwan, Japan and Nato allies, as well as the risk of opportunistic action by China’s regional rivals at a moment when they considered China to be vulnerable. The greater the scale of the defeat imposed on China, the more likely, it was assumed, that China would retaliate elsewhere and the more likely would be its rivals to try to exploit the opportunity. There was also the risk of internal unrest in China caused by military failure and dramatic loss of prestige to the regime. Zhang’s instinct would be to launch a severe pre-emptive crackdown. Paradoxically, if this failed to eliminate the opposition at the first sweep, it might worsen the unrest, which would provoke further repression and possibly a military takeover, which was only narrowly avoided in 2014.