The day started earlier than usual in Beijing. Fang Gan stepped out of his official car and hurried up the steps into the building, past the uniformed guard who always held the door open for him, and this time did not get a thank-you nod from the exalted servant of the people. Fang walked to his elevator, into it, then stepped off after arriving at his floor. His office door was only a few more steps. Fang was a healthy and vigorous man for his age. His personal staff leaped to their feet as he walked in-an hour early, they all realized.

"Ming!" he called on the way to his inner office.

"Yes, Comrade Minister," she said, on going through the still-open door.

"What items have you pulled off the foreign media?"

"One moment." She disappeared and then reappeared with a sheaf of papers in her hand. "London Times, London Daily Telegraph, Observer, New York Times, Washington Post, Miami Herald, Boston Globe. The Western American papers are not yet available." She hadn't included Italian or other European papers because she couldn't speak or read those languages well enough, and for some reason Fang only seemed interested in the opinions of English-speaking foreign devils. She handed over the translations. Again, he didn't thank her even peremptorily, which was unusual for him. Her minister was exercised about something.

"What time is it in Washington?" Fang asked next.

"Twenty-one hours, Comrade Minister," she answered.

"So, they are watching television and preparing for bed?"

"Yes, Comrade Minister."

"But their newspaper articles and editorials are already prepared."

"That is the schedule they work, Minister. Most of their stories are done by the end of a normal working day. At the latest, news stories-aside from the truly unusual or unexpected ones-are completely done before the reporters go home for their dinner."

Fang looked up at that a.n.a.lysis. Ming was a clever girl, giving him information on something he'd never really thought about. With that realization, he nodded for her to go back to her desk.

For their part, the American trade delegation was just boarding their plane. They were seen off by a minor consular official who spoke plastic words from plastic lips, received by the Americans through plastic ears. Then they boarded their USAF aircraft, which started up at once and began rolling toward the runway.

"So, how do we evaluate this adventure, Cliff?" Mark Gant asked.

"Can you spell 'disaster'?" Rutledge asked in return.

"That bad?"

The a.s.sistant Secretary of State for Policy nodded soberly. Well, it wasn't his fault, was it? That stupid Italian clergyman gets in the way of a bullet, and then the widow of that other minister-person had to pray for him in public, knowing that the local government would object. And, of course, CNN had to be there for both events to stir the pot at home . . . How was a diplomat supposed to make peace happen if people kept making things worse instead of better?

"That bad, Mark. China may never get a decent trade agreement if this c.r.a.p keeps going on."

"All they have to do is change their own policies a little," Gant offered.

"You sound like the President."

"Cliffy, if you want to join a club, you have to abide by the club rules. Is that so hard to understand?"

"You don't treat great nations like the dentist n.o.body likes who wants to join the country club."

"Why is the principle different?"

"Do you really think the United States can govern its foreign policy by principle?" Rutledge asked in exasperation. So much so, in fact, that he'd let his mind slip a gear.

"The President does, Cliff, and so does your Secretary of State," Gant pointed out.

"Well, if we want a trade agreement with China, we have to consider their point of view."

"You know, Cliff, if you'd been in the State Department back in 1938, maybe Hitler could have killed all the Jews without all that much of a fuss," Gant observed lightly.

It had the desired effect. Rutledge turned and started to object: "Wait a minute-"

"It was just his internal policy, Cliff, wasn't it? So what, they go to a different church-gas 'em. Who cares?"

"Now look, Mark-"

"You look, Cliff. A country has to stand for certain things, because if you don't, who the f.u.c.k are you, okay? We're in the club-h.e.l.l, we pretty much run the club. Why, Cliff? Because people know what we stand for. We're not perfect. You know it. I know it. They all know it. But they also know what we will and won't do, and so, we can be trusted by our friends, and by our enemies, too, and so the world makes a little sense, at least in our parts of it. And that is why we're respected, Cliff."

"And all the weapons don't matter, and all the commercial power we have, what about them?" the diplomat demanded.

"How do you think we got them, Cliffy?" Gant demanded, using the diminutive of Rutledge's name again, just to bait him. "We are what we are because people from all over the world came to America to work and live out their dreams. They worked hard. My grandfather came over from Russia because he didn't like getting f.u.c.ked over by the czar, and he worked, and he got his kids educated, and they got their kids educated, and so now I'm pretty d.a.m.ned rich, but I haven't forgotten what Grandpa told me when I was little either. He told me this was the best place the world ever saw to be a Jew. Why, Cliff? Because the dead white European men who broke us away from England and wrote the Const.i.tution had some good ideas and they lived up to them, for the most part. That's who we are, Cliff. And that means we have to be what we are, and that means we have to stand for certain things, and the world has to see us do it."

"But we have so many flaws ourselves," Rutledge protested.

"Of course we do! Cliff, we don't have to be perfect to be the best around, and we never stop trying to be better. My dad, when he was in college, he marched in Mississippi, and got his a.s.s kicked a couple of times, but you know, it all worked out, and so now we have a black guy in the Vice Presidency. From what I hear, maybe he's good enough to take one more step up someday. Jesus, Cliff, how can you represent America to other nations if you don't get it?"

Diplomacy is business, Rutledge wanted to reply. And I know how to do the business. But why bother trying to explain things to this Chicago Jew? So, he rocked his seat back and tried to look dozy. Gant took the cue and stood for a seventy-foot walk. The Air Force sergeants who pretended to be stewardesses aboard served breakfast, and the coffee was pretty decent. He found himself in the rear of the aircraft looking at all the reporters, and that felt a little bit like enemy territory, but not, on reflection, as much as it did sitting next to that diplo-jerk.

The morning sun that lit up Beijing had done the same to Siberia even earlier in the day.

"I see our engineers are as good as ever," Bondarenko observed. As he watched, earthmoving machines were carving a path over a hundred meters wide through the primeval forests of pine and spruce. This road would serve both the gold strike and the oil fields. And this wasn't the only one. Two additional routes were being worked by a total of twelve crews. Over a third of the Russian Army's available engineers were on these projects, and that was a lot of troops, along with more than half of the heavy equipment in the olive-green paint the Russian army had used for seventy years.

"This is a 'Hero Project,' " Colonel Aliyev said. And he was right. The "Hero Project" idea had been created by the Soviet Union to indicate something of such great national importance that it would draw the youth of the nation in patriotic zeal-and besides, it was a good way to meet girls and see a little more of the world. This one was moving even faster than that, because Moscow had a.s.signed the military to it, and the military was no longer worrying itself about an invasion from (or into) NATO. For all its faults, the Russian army still had access to a lot of human and material resources. Plus. there was real money in this project. Wages were very high for the civilians. Moscow wanted both of these resource areas brought on line-and quickly. And so the goldfield workers had been helicoptered in with light equipment, with which they'd built a larger landing area, which allowed still heavier equipment to be air-dropped, and with that a small, rough airstrip had been built. That had allowed Russian air force cargo aircraft to lift in truly heavy equipment, which was now roughing in a proper airlanding strip for when the crew extending the railroad got close enough to deliver the cement and rebar to create a real commercial-quality airport. Buildings were going up. Some of the first things that had been sent in were the components of a sawmill, and one thing you didn't have to import into this region was wood. Large swaths were being cleared, and the trees cut down to clear them were almost instantly transformed into lumber for building. First, the sawmill workers set up their own rough cabins. Now, administrative buildings were going up, and in four months, they expected to have dormitories for over a thousand of the miners who were already lining up for the highly paid job of digging this gold out of the ground. The Russian government had decided that the workers here would have the option of being paid in gold coin at world-price, and that was something few Russian citizens wanted to walk away from. And so expert miners were filling out their application forms in antic.i.p.ation of the flights into the new strike. Bondarenko wished them luck. There were enough mosquitoes there to carry off a small child and suck him dry of blood like minivampires. Even for gold coin, it was not a place he'd want to work.

The oil field was ultimately more important to his country, the general knew. Already, ships were fighting their way through the late-spring ice, shepherded by navy icebreakers like the Yamal and Rossiya, to deliver the drilling equipment needed to commence proper exploration for later production. But Bondarenko had been well briefed on this subject. This oil field was no pipe dream. It was the economic salvation of his country, a way to inject huge quant.i.ties of hard currency into Russia, money to buy the things it needed to smash its way into the twenty-first century, money to pay the workers who'd striven so hard and so long for the prosperity they and their country deserved.

And it was Bondarenko's job to guard it. Meanwhile, army engineers were furiously at work building harbor facilities so that the cargo ships would be able to land what cargo they had. The use of amphibious-warfare ships, so that the Russian navy could land the cargo on the beaches as though it were battle gear, had been examined but discarded. In many cases, the cargo to be landed was larger than the main battle tanks of the Russian army, a fact which had both surprised and impressed the commanding general of the Far East Military District.

One consequence of all this was that most of Bondarenko's engineers had been stripped away for one project or another, leaving him with a few battalions organically attached to his fighting formations. And he had uses of his own for those engineers, the general grumbled. There were several places on the Chinese border where a couple of regiments could put together some very useful obstacles against invading mechanized forces. But they'd be visible, and too obviously intended to be used against Chinese forces, Moscow had told him, not caring, evidently, that the only way they could be used against the People's Liberation Army was if that army decided to come north and liberate Russia!

What was it about politicians? Bondarenko thought. Even the ones in America were the same, so he'd been told by American officers he'd met. Politicians didn't really care much about what something did, but they cared a great deal about what it appeared to do. In that sense, all politicians of whatever political tilt all over the world were communists, Bondarenko thought with an amused grunt, more interested in show than reality.

"When will they be finished?" the general-colonel asked.

"They've made amazing progress," Colonel Aliyev replied. "The routes will be fully roughed in-oh, another month or six weeks, depending on weather. The finishing work will take much longer."

"You know what worries me?"

"What is that, Comrade General?" the operations officer asked.

"We've built an invasion route. For the first time, the Chinese could jump across the border and make good time to the north Siberian coast." Before, the natural obstacles-mainly the wooded nature of the terrain-would have made that task difficult to the point of impossibility. But now there was a way to get there, and a reason to go there as well. Siberia now truly was something it had often been thought to be, a treasure house of cosmic proportions. Treasure house, Bondarenko thought. And I am the keeper of the keys. He walked back to his helicopter to complete his tour of the route being carved out by army engineers.

CHAPTER 36.

SORGE Reports President Ryan awoke just before six in the morning. The Secret Service preferred that he keep the shades closed, thus blocking the windows, but Ryan had never wanted to sleep in a coffin, even a large one, and so when he awoke momentarily at such times as 3:53 he preferred to see some sort of light outside the window, even if only the taillights of a patrolling police car or a lonely taxicab. Over the years, he'd become accustomed to waking early. That surprised him. As a boy, he'd always preferred to sleep late, especially on weekends. But Cathy had been the other way, like most doctors, and especially most surgeons: early to rise, and get to the hospital, so that when you worked on a patient you had all day to see how he or she tolerated the procedure.

So, maybe he'd picked it up from her, and in some sort of perverse one-upmanship he'd come to open his eyes even earlier. Or maybe it was a more recently acquired habit in this d.a.m.ned place, Jack thought, as he slid off the bed and padded off to the bathroom as another d.a.m.ned day started, this one like so many others, too d.a.m.ned early. What the h.e.l.l was the matter? the President wondered. Why was it that he didn't need sleep as much anymore? h.e.l.l, sleep was one of the very few pure pleasures given to man on earth, and all he wanted was just a little more of it . . .

But he couldn't have it. It was just short of six in the morning, Jack told himself as he looked out the window. Milkmen were up, as were paperboys. Mailmen were in their sorting rooms, and in other places people who had worked through the night were ending their working days. That included a lot of people right here in the White House: protective troops in the Secret Service, domestic staff, some people Ryan knew by sight but not by name, which fact shamed him somewhat. They were his people, after all, and he was supposed to know about them, know their names well enough to speak them when he saw the owners thereof-but there were just too many of them for him to know. Then there were the uniformed people in the White House Military Office-called Wham-o by insiders-who supplemented the Office of Signals. There was, in fact, a small army of men and women who existed only to serve John Patrick Ryan-and through him the country as a whole, or that was the theory. What the h.e.l.l, he thought, looking out the window. It was light enough to see. The streetlights were clicking off as their photoelectric sensors told them the sun was coming up. Jack pulled on his old Naval Academy robe, stepped into his slippers-he'd only gotten them recently; at home he just walked around barefoot, but a President couldn't do that in front of the troops, could he?-and moved quietly into the corridor.

There must have been some sort of bug or motion sensor close to the bedroom door, Jack thought. He never managed to surprise anyone when he came out into the upstairs corridor unexpectedly. The heads always seemed to be looking in his direction and there was the instant morning race to see who could greet him first.

The first this time was one of the senior Secret Service troops, head of the night crew. Andrea Price-O'Day was still at her home in Maryland, probably dressed and ready to head out the door-what s.h.i.tty hours these people worked on his behalf, Jack reminded himself-for the hourlong drive into D.C. And with luck she'd make it home-when? Tonight? That depended on his schedule for today, and he couldn't remember offhand what he had happening.

"Coffee, Boss?" one of the younger agents asked.

"Sounds like a winner, Charlie." Ryan followed him, yawning. He ended up in the Secret Service guard post for this floor, a walk-in closet, really, with a TV and a coffeepot-probably stocked by the kitchen staff-and some munchies to help the people get through the night.

"When did you come on duty?" POTUS asked.

"Eleven, sir," Charlie Malone answered.

"Boring duty?"

"Could be worse. At least I'm not working the badcheck detail in Omaha anymore."

"Oh, yeah," agreed Joe Hilton, another one of the young agents on the deathwatch.

"I bet you played ball," Jack observed.

Hilton nodded. "Outside linebacker, sir. Florida State University. Not big enough for the pros, though."

Only about two-twenty, and it's all lean meat, Jack thought. Young Special Agent Hilton looked like a fundamental force of nature.

"Better off playing baseball. You make a good living, work fifteen years, maybe more, and you're healthy at the end of it."

"Well, maybe I'll train my boy to be an outfielder," Hilton said.

"How old?" Ryan asked, vaguely remembering that Hilton was a recent father. His wife was a lawyer at the Justice Department, wasn't she?

"Three months. Sleeping through the night now, Mr. President. Good of you to ask."

I wish they'd just call me Jack. I'm not G.o.d, am I? But that was about as likely as his calling his commanding general Bobby-Ray back when he'd been Second Lieutenant John P. Ryan, USMC.

"Anything interesting happen during the night?"

"Sir, CNN covered the departure of our diplomats from Beijing, but that just showed the airplane taking off."

"I think they just send the cameras down halfway hoping the airplane'll blow up so that they'll have tape of it-you know, like when the chopper comes to lift me out of here." Ryan sipped his coffee. These junior Secret Service agents were probably a little uneasy to have "The Boss," as he was known within the Service, talking with them as if he and they were normal people. If so, Jack thought, tough s.h.i.t. He wasn't going to turn into Louis XIV just to make them happy. Besides, he wasn't as good-looking as Leonardo DiCaprio, at least according to Sally, who thought that young actor was the cat's a.s.s.

Just then, a messenger arrived with the day's copies of the morning's Early Bird. Jack took one along with the coffee and headed back to read it over. A few editorials bemoaning the recall of the trade delegation-maybe it was the lingering liberalism in the media, the reason they were not, never had been, and probably never would be entirely comfortable with the amateur statesman in the White House. Privately, Ryan knew, they called him other things, some rather less polite, but the average Joe out there, Arnie van Damm told Jack once a week or so, still liked him a lot. Ryan's approval rating was still very high, and the reason for it, it seemed, was that Jack was perceived as a regular guy who'd gotten lucky-if they called this luck, POTUS thought with a stifled grunt.

He returned to reading the news articles, wandering back to the breakfast room, as he did so, where, he saw, people were hustling to get things set up-notified, doubtless, by the Secret Service that SWORDSMAN was up and needed to be fed. Yet more of the His Majesty Effect, Ryan groused. But he was hungry, and food was food, and so he wandered in, picked what he wanted off the buffet, and flipped the TV on to see what was happening in the world as he attacked his eggs Benedict. He'd have to devour them quickly, before Cathy appeared to yell at him about the cholesterol intake. All around him, to a radius of thirty miles or so, the government was coming to consciousness, or what pa.s.sed for it, dressing, getting in their cars, and heading in, just as he was, but not as comfortably.

"Morning, Dad," Sally said, coming in next and walking to the TV, which she switched to MTV without asking. It was a long way since that bright afternoon in London when he'd been shot, Jack thought. He'd been "daddy" then.

In Beijing the computer on Ming's desk had been in autosleep mode for just the right number of minutes. The hard drive started turning again, and the machine began its daily routine. Without lighting up the monitor, it examined the internal file of recent entries, compressed them, and then activated the internal modem to shoot them out over the 'Net. The entire process took about seventeen seconds, and then the computer went back to sleep. The data proceeded along the telephone lines in the city of Beijing until it found its destination server, which was, actually, in Wisconsin. There it waited for the signal that would call it up, after which it would be dumped out of the server's memory, and soon thereafter written over, eliminating any trace that it had ever existed.

In any case, as Washington woke up, Beijing was heading for sleep, with Moscow a few hours behind. The earth continued its turning, oblivious of what transpired in the endless cycle of night and day.

Well?" General Diggs looked at his subordinate.

"Well, sir," Colonel Giusti said, "I think the cavalry squadron is in pretty good shape." Like Diggs, Angelo Giusti was a career cavalryman. His job as commander of 1st Armored's cavalry squadron (actually a battalion, but the cav had its own way of speaking) was to move out ahead of the division proper, locating the enemy and scouting out the land, being the eyes of Old Ironsides, but with enough combat power of its own to look after itself. A combat veteran of the Persian Gulf War, Giusti had smelled the smoke and seen the elephant. He knew what his job was, and he figured he had his troopers trained up about as well as circ.u.mstances in Germany allowed. He actually preferred the free-form play allowed by simulators to the crowded training fields of the Combat Maneuver Training Center, which was barely seventy-five square kilometers. It wasn't the same as being out there in your vehicles, but neither was it restricted by time and distance, and on the global SimNet system you could play against a complete enemy battalion, even a brigade if you wanted your people to get some sweat in their play. Except for the b.u.mpy-float sensation of driving your Abrams around (some tankers got motion sickness from that), it conveyed the complexity better than any place except the NTC at Fort Irwin in the California desert, or the comparable facility the Army had established for the Israelis in the Negev.

Diggs couldn't quite read the younger officer's mind, but he'd just watched the Quarter Horse move around with no lack of skill. They'd played against some Germans, and the Germans, as always, were pretty good at the war business-but not, today, as good as First Tanks' cavalry troopers, who'd first outmaneuvered their European hosts, and then (to the surprise and distaste of the German brigadier who'd supervised the exercise) set an ambush that had cost them half a battalion of their Leos, as the Americans called the Leopard-II main battle tanks. Diggs would be having dinner with the brigadier later today. Even the Germans didn't know night-fighting as well as the Americans did-which was odd, since their equipment was roughly comparable, and their soldiers pretty well trained . . . but the German army was still largely a conscript army, most of whose soldiers didn't have the time-in-service the Americans enjoyed.

In the wider exercise-the cavalry part had just been the "real" segment of a wider command post exercise, or CPX-Colonel Don Lisle's 2nd Brigade was handling the fuller, if theoretical, German attack quite capably. On the whole, the Bundeswehr was not having a good day. Well, it no longer had the mission of protecting its country against a Soviet invasion, and with that had gone the rather furious support of the citizenry that the West German army had enjoyed for so many years. Now the Bundeswehr was an anachronism with little obvious purpose, and the occupier of a lot of valuable real estate for which Germans could think up some practical uses. And so the former West German army had been downsized and mainly trained to do peacekeeping duty, which, when you got down to it, was heavily armed police work. The New World Order was a peaceful one, at least so far as Europeans were concerned. The Americans had engaged in combat operations to the rather distant interest of the Germans, who, while they'd always had a healthy interest in war-fighting, were now happy enough that their interest in it was entirely theoretical, rather like a particularly intricate Hollywood production. It also forced them to respect America a little more than they would have preferred. But some things couldn't be helped.

"Well, Angelo, I think your troopers have earned themselves a beer or two at the local Gasthauses. That envelopment you accomplished at zero-two-twenty was particularly adroit."

Giusti grinned and nodded his appreciation. "Thank you, General. I'll pa.s.s that one along to my S-3. He's the one who thought it up."

"Later, Angelo."

"Roger that one, sir." Lieutenant Colonel Giusti saluted his divisional commander on his way.

"Well, Duke?"

Colonel Masterman pulled a cigar out of his BDU jacket and lit it up. One nice thing about Germany was that you could always get good Cuban ones here. "I've known Angelo since Fort Knox. He knows his stuff, and he had his officers particularly well trained. Even had his own book on tactics and battle-drill printed up."

"Oh?" Diggs turned. "Is it any good?"

"Not bad at all," the G-3 replied. "I'm not sure that I agree with it all, but it doesn't hurt to have everyone singing out of the same hymnal. His officers all think pretty much the same way. So, Angelo's a good football coach. Sure enough he kicked the Krauts' a.s.ses last night." Masterman closed his eyes and rubbed his face. "These night exercises take it out of you."

"How's Lisle doing?"

"Sir, last time I looked, he had the Germans well contained. Our friends didn't seem to know what he had around them. They were putzing around trying to gather information-short version, Giusti won the reconnaissance battle, and that decided things-again."

"Again," Diggs agreed. If there was any lesson out of the National Training Center, it was that one. Reconnaissance and counter-reconnaissance. Find the enemy. Don't let the enemy find you. If you pulled that off, it was pretty hard to lose. If you didn't, it was very hard to win.

"How's some sleep grab you, Duke?"

"It's good to have a CG who looks after his troopers, mon General." Masterman was sufficiently tired that he didn't even want a beer first.

And so with that decided, they headed for Diggs's command UH-60 Blackhawk helicopter for the hop back to the divisional kazerne. Diggs particularly liked the four-point safety belt. It made it a lot easier to sleep sitting up.

One of the things I have to do today, Ryan told himself, is figure out what to do about the Chinese attempt on Sergey. He checked his daily briefing sheet. Robby was out west again. That was too bad. Robby was both a good sounding board and a source of good ideas. So, he'd talk it over with Scott Adler, if he and Scott both had holes in their day, and the Foleys. Who else? Jack wondered. d.a.m.n, whom else could he trust with this? If this one leaked to the press, there'd be h.e.l.l to pay. Okay, Adler had to be there. He'd actually met that Zhang guy, and if some Chinese minister-type had owned a piece of this, then he'd be the one, wouldn't he?

Probably. Not certainly, however. Ryan had been in the spook business too long to make that mistake. When you made certainty a.s.sumptions about things you weren't really sure about, you frequently walked right into a stone wall headfirst, and that could hurt. Ryan punched a b.u.t.ton on his desk. "Ellen?"