The Mandarin Club (41 page)

The Chinese pounded the base as expected. But then they stopped abruptly. The anticipated wave of paratroopers never materialized. An invasion was unnecessary. The Chinese military, Alexander later explained, could accomplish virtually all conflict objectives without landing a single solider on Taiwan’s soil. It was quite remarkable. All Taipei’s preparations to defend against amphibious troop landings or paratroop assaults against Taiwan’s airfields went for naught.

Taiwan did undertake a couple of half-hearted missile strikes against the Fujian Province launch facilities. In turn, the Chinese briefly moved to expand their targeting of missiles against Taiwan’s ports and energy facilities. But the PRC chose to limit destruction of the valuable economic assets they would soon possess. PRC post-war planners were not eager to have Taiwan emerge from the conflict with a nineteenth century economy.

American military might proved to be of minimal consequence to PRC’s plans. U.S. naval forces in the region were drained by Persian Gulf actions, and only a handful of U.S. warships arrived before the fighting stopped. U.S. planes out of Okinawa eventually circled the region, but found few attractive targets to engage. U.S. military capabilities were spread far too thin by the twin engagements in Iraq and Afghanistan. Overnight polls showed American voters opposing by a more than three-to-one margin any direct military involvement in the Taiwan Strait conflict.

Congressional voices proved strident. A faction of members had long clamored for greater interoperability between U.S. and Taiwan military forces—these legislators now assailed the Chinese and the Pentagon alike for the fiasco. They were especially irate about friendly fire casualties. In their confusion, Taiwan inadvertently hit American and Taiwanese assets. Accidental casualties among the limited U.S. military personnel in the region proved predictable, though regrettable, collateral damage. Before the shooting stopped, American pilots had inadvertently killed more than a dozen Taiwanese, and vice versa. An American carrier force did not even reach the Taiwan Strait until after the shooting had been halted and the United Nations was in full debate mode.

The swift Chinese escalation had forced geo-strategists and financiers to plead with the United Nations to propose an immediate cease-fire. Global markets had tanked. Wall Street suspended trading for hours, and the Treasury Department’s deficit-financing bond sales were cancelled for the week once it was clear China—and many other nations—would take a pass.

From their Security Council perch, Beijing insisted that they would brook no interference in what the Chinese maintained was an internal affair. They had been provoked, they argued, by renegades in denial—the last remnants of a seventy-year-old civil war. Most General Assembly nations subscribed to the PRC’s assessment.

The wording of the subsequent UN resolution was quite clear. The authorities on the island of Taiwan were invited forthwith to meet with Chinese officials to discuss a broad agenda. It included not just an enduring cease-fire, but also, quite ominously, “issues unresolved since 1949 relating to unification of China.” In other words, as Alexander summed it up, “Taiwan’s democratically elected officials were now welcome to negotiate with Communist Party authorities in Beijing the terms of their own surrender.”

The Beijing leadership had much to point to in the way of “progress” on the long troublesome Taiwan issue. As with China’s tough stance in previous negotiations to return Hong Kong and Macao to Communist control, the hard-liners had convinced their colleagues to gamble in assailing Taiwan. The People’s Republic of China had won the battle, and they had won the lightning-quick war. Taiwan’s days of political autonomy and de facto independence were over. It was left only for the diplomats to sort out and confirm the new status quo on the ground, and for journalists like Alexander to explain how it all had come to pass.

Even as he filed his stories, Alexander was haunted. A line had been crossed. Like that day he had slipped Booth an advance copy of his missile export exclusive, he was complicit. His emotional distance—that journalistic reserve his profession so revered—was gone. His politics, and his personal prejudices, all became part of the story.

As he worked his sources, Alexander’s days were frantic. His nights were restless, his body supercharged with adrenaline and slow to calm. His friends seemed distant. That first week, Branko was stuck at his Langley command post around the clock. Rachel was withdrawn, viewing the events from a safe distance the way a mortified rubber-necker would maneuver around a bloody car wreck. Mickey was incommunicado.

For Alexander, the gruesome story was the culmination of his life’s work. He poured himself into his pieces with great passion, sharing all his accumulated insight and expertise. But late at night, when he reflected upon the experience, he wondered at the consequences. Was his entire career as a journalist on the Asian diplomatic beat really just a preparation for
this
? He felt soiled for having witnessed the slaughter. In his darkest moments he was, he concluded, a modern day vulture, just another media voyeur.

“I
n the end, nobody at the State Department gave a rat’s ass about Taiwan,” one senior legislator told his Senate colleagues. “Having a tiny democratic island out there in a Communist sea became an enormous historical inconvenience.”

Jake Smithson was the cooperative—if chagrined—source of that anonymous quote, which became Alexander’s lead for one of his stories. The observation perfectly framed his five part post-mortem series on the E-War. Smithson had leaked the vignette from a meeting inside the Majority Leader’s office: all the Senate’s senior leaders had gathered to consult over the wording of a Congressional resolution deploring the Chinese assault.

At the height of the crisis, Smithson had pressed his colleagues for a vigorous response to China’s perfidy. The California senator assailed the weakness of the consensus approach—it was “nothing but a wordy resolution full of gobbledygook,” he argued, imploring legislators to adopt a stronger stance. But his fellow committee chairs demurred. Abraham Gubin of New Hampshire ended the private debate with the colorful line Alexander cited. It ably summarized the hard realities confronting the Taiwanese. They were simply outnumbered. American legislators could give their outraged speeches. But there was a new reality on the ground; Taiwan was left largely to its own devices. Its capital fled and its people anxiously awaited the outcome of negotiations over some type of coerced “confederation” with Beijing.

Alexander’s articles dissecting Washington decision-making were immediately embraced by his editors. They gave the series page one treatment daily, with an unlimited space budget for those who could follow the
Times
’ endless jump pages beyond the computer and automobile ads.

Rachel read Alexander’s pieces with the same detachment that had infected her since her return from China. As a professional woman, she had been paddling against the tide for months, ever since the April day she had awoken in an ambulance. After two of her largest clients walked, the knives were out around the office. Her efforts to share her management responsibilities with some of her colleagues were met with suspicion, particularly by some of the more aggressive career climbers amongst the office sisterhood. The Taiwan conflict stunned her and she couldn’t help taking it all personally.

Rachel was further discombobulated when Barry announced shortly after her return from Beijing that he was moving to New York. Whatever her many suspicions about their estrangement over the years—his distance, his incessant travels, his resistance to intimacy—their revealing conversation preceding his departure completely unnerved her.
What next?

She would sit in her office and stare at the growing mounds of paper, trying to figure out what really mattered. She was off the Beijing beat, what with the contract cancellations and U.S.-China relations in a deep freeze. Her disengagement from the events swirling around her was thoroughly disconcerting. She glanced at the TV news with disinterest, as if it were reporting events from an imaginary world. Unread issues of the
Post
began to pile up alongside unopened mail. Sorting through the stack one Sunday, she found a notice for past due property taxes, the utility bill, and a copy of the final divorce agreement awaiting her signature. She was ready to pack her and Jamie’s bags and head out of town for an extended holiday.

The last Friday before they set out for her August vacation, she sat for a full hour on the back porch of her Arlington home, breathing slowly and sipping iced tea. She felt like a traveler at a border crossing, lightening her load, now aware she needed only a fraction of the baggage she had been carrying. The rest could be shed—left at the roadside, never to be missed.

Returning to her Wyoming roots, she found renewed pleasures in the natural world. She and Jamie became great hikers, walking the ridges of the Absaroka Range east of Yellowstone. Setting out early from her parents’ cabin in Sunlight Basin, they would pick wildflowers and watch in wonder as impressive cloud formations overpowered the blue ceiling overhead. They could go an entire morning without seeing another soul. They could go an hour without speaking, the communication of mother and son often subsisting on a simple gesture.

Jamie was naturally contemplative. He flourished in the silences away from the video games and televised blather that often mesmerized his contemporaries. He would track small animals, humming little ditties as he walked. He kept a careful longhand journal of his sightings: one day, a moose, another, an eagle in soaring flight near Dead Indian Pass.

Rachel would ponder, building her reserves like an animal fattening against winter’s coming storms. She was healing a second time, taking inventory of her resources once more. She was completing a process of renewal she had failed to finish after the tragic events that spring. Her body had mended, her strength was returning.

Back in the Washington area near the end of the month, they continued their natural explorations, walking in the Blue Ridge Mountains above the Shenandoah, and along the Potomac River cliffs at Great Falls. Soon, it would be time to empty the poncho and compass out of Jamie’s backpack and reload it with sharp pencils and a binder. Rachel often used Meg Greenfield’s line, the one about Washington being just like high school. The boys and girls would soon be back in session on Capitol Hill, with their new clothes and summer stories, as surely as Jamie’s fifth grade would reconvene at Jefferson Elementary.