Authors: Patrick Robinson
“Ah, Jicai. You are ever the tactician, ever the strategist. Always the battle commander. You see things very clearly, the immediate crunch, the immediate aftermath.”
“Well, don’t you?”
“I used to, when I was C-in-C of the Navy. But I must be political now, and I have changed my perspectives. I am trying to look at a wider picture.”
“I think, my Yushu, you will face a very wide picture indeed if an American tanker should collide with one of those Russian mines in the Strait of Hormuz.”
Admiral Zhang smiled, sipped his tea, grimaced and said softly, “Do you think they accepted my plan? Do you think Hossein will call back with the agreement of his government?”
“I am quite sure they accepted it. You can be very persuasive toward people who want to be convinced.”
“That’s part of my strategy, Jicai. I know that deep in the soul of every Iranian military officer there beats the heart of a revolutionary. Oh yes, they would like to make colossal sums of money from a world oil crisis. But what they really want is to strike a violently disruptive blow against the Great Satan, particularly one with the potential to cause widespread chaos in the everyday lives of ordinary Americans.”
“I am afraid you read them accurately, Yushu. And I am afraid your plan will take place. The minefield will be laid. But I am very afraid of the consequences. The Americans are likely to turn up in the gulf with guns blazing. Possibly against our own warships, and we are not really a match for them….”
“There you go again, my good Jicai. The immediate crunch. The immediate aftermath. Soon I will ask you to raise your sights. But not quite yet…not until we are given an affirmative answer by the Iranians. Then all will be revealed to you.”
“I look forward to that immensely, Yushu…but we have been in this room for almost twelve hours now. I think we should go and find some dinner together.”
The two men traveled up in the elevator to the central floor of the Great Hall, and an eight-man military escort took them to the main doors, beyond which lay the dark, freezing Tiananmen Square. A long black Mercedes, its engine running, awaited them, and the guard escort remained in formation until its tires had creaked out across the fresh, uncluttered snow, bearing its two high commanders north. North along the west side of the square, toward the Forbidden City, the old guardian of the Dragon Throne, and still, in the eyes of most Westerners, the symbol of the might of Communist China.
The great portrait of the unforgotten Mao Zedong, staring out, somehow shy, and cold, may not have formed a secret smile through the falling snow, as the Admirals’ Mercedes swept past Tiananmen Gate. But it should have. Mao, above all other men, would have loved Zhang Yushu’s as yet unspoken plan.
2100 (local). Same day
.
NSA. Fort Meade, Maryland
.
Admiral Borden had gone home. A new shift of U.S. surveillance operators was working through the night. Only one member of the day staff was still on duty: Lt. Jimmy Ramshawe was in his office, still working, behind closed doors, poring over maps of Asia, pulling up charts on his computer, trying to ascertain where the giant Antonov-124, with its lethal cargo of ship-killing high explosives, could be headed, and where, more importantly, it would have to refuel.
Those four big D-18Ts have gotta guzzle up more than ten tons of fuel per hour—which gives it a range of two thousand six hundred miles maximum. The bastard’s gotta stop somewhere. And it’s gotta stop soon
.
Jimmy’s thoughts were clear and accurate. He thought the aircraft would have to land around five hours after takeoff. Twice he checked with the CIA’s Russian desk at Langley, but there was nothing new. Three times he checked with MENA, Fort Meade’s Middle East North Africa desk, and they knew nothing either.
Lieutenant Ramshawe, however, had a stubborn streak the size of Queensland, and he had resolved to sit right there until someone told him precisely where the world’s biggest cargo aircraft had landed.
The hour 2200 came and went. Then 2230. And right after that the phone rang, secure line from Langley. No one was telling him where it had landed. But the news was definite. The Antonov had just taken off from a guarded airfield outside the remote central Kazakhstan city of Zhezkazgan. The interesting part was the name of the airfield, Baykonur—top-secret home base of the Russian space program. The CIA had always had a man in there.
“Very nice and quiet, old mate,” muttered Jimmy Ramshawe thoughtfully to the air traffic controller 7,000 miles away in central Asia. “Very nice indeed.”
Then he pulled up his computer maps again, and tried once more to assess the destination of the 120 sea mines. He checked the routes southeast to India, and gazed at the great high-peaked mass of the Himalayas, but in the end there was only one conclusion: The mines were on their way to China.
“And since the bastards only work underwater,” he murmured, “a mighty intellect like mine would conclude they might be going all the way to the ocean, possibly Shanghai, or maybe one of the Chinese Naval bases in the south.”
Either way, he decided, the Antonov would certainly have to be refueled again. But that would probably happen at a remote Chinese military base in the western part of the country.
In which case, I’m going home to bed, he thought. But twelve hours from now, a little before midday tomorrow here, I’m looking for a report that it’s landed on the shores of the China Sea—probably near a Naval base
.
Still, there’s no point getting excited since the new bloke I work for wouldn’t give a kangaroo’s bollocks for my opinions
. And he walked, somewhat disconsolately, through the huge main room, the dimly lit National Security Operations Center (NSOC), heading home.
Thus Lt. Jimmy Ramshawe, like his boss, was sound asleep when the Antonov touched down to refuel on northwest China’s remote and forbidden airstrip—the one on the edge of the pitiless Taklamakan Desert, at Lop Nor, home of China’s nuclear weapons research and testing facility.
The Taklamakan is China’s largest desert, 1,200 miles long, uninhabited for vast areas. Its name means “the desert one enters, but never leaves.” The Antonov, being Russian, completely ignored that, and one hour after landing, took off again with full tanks, heading southeast for another 1,700 miles to the headquarters of Admiral Zu’s Southern Fleet.
Seven weeks later. March 13, 2007
.
Southern Fleet Headquarters. Zhanjiang,
Province of Guangdong
.
The dock lights along the jetties did their best to illuminate the gloomy late evening. But rain from the west swept across the sprawling Naval base under low cloud and cold, drifting mist. Out on Jetty Five a black Navy staff car, its engine running, headlights on, windshield wipers fighting the downpour, was parked in the shadows.
Its two occupants, Admirals Zhang and Zu, were watching the departure of, probably, the first Chinese
blue-water fleet to depart these shores for a foreign mission beyond home waters since the treasure-ship voyages of the eunuch Admiral Zheng He in the first half of the fifteenth century.
Back then, the seven epic voyages of Admiral Zheng, across the Indian Ocean, to the Persian Gulf and the coast of Africa, were acclaimed as the highest achievements of the greatest Navy the world had ever seen. And it was a great Navy. At its zenith there were 3,500 ships, 2,700 of them warships, based in a network of major Navy bases and dockyards along China’s eastern coast.
Admiral Zheng took more than 100 ships and almost 30,000 men to the east coast of Africa, to Kenya, to Arabia, way up into the Red Sea, right into the gulf, through the Strait of Hormuz, anchoring and trading their silks and porcelain for advanced Arab medicines, and the Egyptians’ preservative, myrrh. Pearls, gold and jade were taken on board from Siam en route home.
Admiral Zheng’s own flagship was a massive 400-foot-long nine-master, almost five times the size of Christopher Columbus’s
Santa Maria
, 60 years later. The Chinese Navy’s great explorer beat Vasco da Gama to the coast of East Africa by 80 years, and it was just as well they did not arrive at the same time because the massive warships of Admiral Zheng would surely have obliterated the “tiny,” 85-foot-long Portuguese caravels that struggled around the Cape of Good Hope.
Whatever possessed the Ming Dynasty Emperor to willfully eliminate his mighty fleet a few years later can only be guessed at: China’s endless suspicion of foreigners, all foreigners? Its view of itself, and its ancient feelings of superiority? Perhaps its own melancholic sense of isolation?
It is possible that the death of the immortal Admiral Zheng He, halfway across the Indian Ocean during the final homeward voyage in 1433, may have left a gap in the high command of the Chinese Navy that was just too large to fill.
But perhaps the ultimate truth of the amazing decision to ban entirely overseas Naval adventures may be found in the words of the young Ming Emperor Zhu Zhanji, who presided over many of Zheng’s momentous journeys.
“I do not,” he once said, “care for foreign things.”
He was not of course referring to sweet crude oil from the vast fields of Kazakhstan. And now, fast-forward in the long winter of 2007, Admiral Zhang Yushu could not afford to ignore foreign things. And he was about to reverse almost 580 years of Chinese Naval policy: policy from which that huge nation had not departed. Not until World War I were the giant battle fleets of the Ming Emperors matched, either in size or relative firepower, by any of the world’s great powers.
Zhang Yushu stared through the windshield of the Navy car, watching them cast off the lines of the 1,700-ton guided-missile frigate
Shantou
, a warship that would have been dwarfed by Zheng He’s
Pure Harmony
.
“She’s going, Jicai. And it’s a historic moment in the long records of our sea power…. Just think of it…that little Type 053 Jianghu frigate is steaming off in the wake of our ancestors of five hundred years ago. The same old sea-lanes, from the most glorious days of our history…just like the Silk Road. They’re going back as the main power in the Persian Gulf, in a sense to conquer the trading world all over again.”
“I’m not sure the Americans would be appeciative of your phrasing, Yushu. They think they have rights to the gulf and its waters anytime they see fit.”
“Ah, yes. So they might. But remember we were there as welcome guests and trading partners with the Arabs half a millennium ago, and longer. Remember, too, in recent years Chinese porcelain from the Ming Dynasty has been discovered along the shores of Hormuz. We have long historic roots in that area, and the Persians want us back to help them in the struggle against the West….
Oh yes, Jicai. We belong in those ancient waters of our forefathers.”
“And we’re taking a lot of high explosives to prove it. Eh, Yushu?”
Shantou
eased out into the main channel, the driving rain gleaming on her big surface-to-surface guided-missile launchers. Her six twin 37-millimeter gun houses stood stark against the shore lights. Her five-tubed fixed antisubmarine mortar launchers could still be seen through the rain squalls.
What could not be seen, however, were the principal weapons of her forthcoming voyage, the 60 Russian made sea mines, secluded under heavy tarpaulin from the prying eye of the American satellite that had passed overhead two hours previously.
Out on the pitch-black horizon, there waited
Shantou
’s two Shanghai-built sister ships,
Kangding
and
Zigong
. They were in company with the first of China’s new $400 million Russian destroyers, the 8,000-ton, 500-foot-long Sovremenny Class,
Hangzhou
, with its supersonic guided missile, the Raduga SS-N-22 Sunburn.
But the
Hangzhou
was not there to engage in surface-to-surface warfare. Her mission was strictly clandestine. She would lead her three frigates on the 6,000-mile journey to Hormuz, essentially to carry 40 more mines, but also because in the event of a confrontation she was best equipped to fight the little fleet out of trouble—though she would be no match for a determined U.S. commanding officer in a big cruiser.
Their voyage would take them down the South China Sea, up through the Malacca Strait into the Bay of Bengal, where they would immediately rendezvous with the 37,000-ton Chinese tanker
Nancang
, operating out of their new Navy base on Haing Gyi Island, at the mouth of Burma’s Bassein River, across the wide, flat, rice-growing delta, west of Rangoon.
Haing Gyi Island had occupied many a sleepless night
for the American President’s National Security Adviser, Admiral Morgan, who was suspicious of Chinese motives at the best of times. The creation of a big Chinese fueling base, and Naval dockyard in Burmese national home waters, sent a shiver right through him. Particularly since the Chinese had constructed a railroad from Kunming, the 2,000-year-old capital of Yunnan Province, straight across the Burmese border to the railhead city of Lashio, from where heavy military hardware could easily join the rest of the $1.4 billion worth of weaponry China had already shipped into Burma.
Back on the rainswept dock at Zhanjiang, Admiral Zhang pulled his greatcoat around him and stepped out to watch the
Shantou
heading out toward the black shape of the harbor wall, and beyond to the South China Sea.
“Don’t you get a thrill from this, Jicai? Just seeing our great modern Blue Water Navy moving into action on this dark night, bound for a major foreign adventure, the first for more than five hundred years?”
“I suppose so, Yushu. I’ll let you know more when we discover how seriously infuriated the Americans are by the exercise.”
But even the wise and experienced Jicai looked quizzical at the non sequitur that served as a reply from his lifelong friend.
“A mere diversion, my Jicai. The merest diversion.”
1200 (local). March 13
.
The White House. Washington, D.C.
“Now where the hell are they going?” demanded Admiral Morgan, staring at the grainy, poor-quality satellite photographs taken through the rain clouds above the Chinese coast. “Looks like three frigates and a Sovremenny destroyer, going south. What the hell for? And how far? And who the hell’s going to refuel ’em? Answer that.”