Third World War (36 page)

'Sure, but he wasn't citing statistics just for the hell of it.'

'I'm not sure I'm with you, Mary.'

Newman leant back and stretched her arms behind her head. 'I said it was a rambling academic analysis, and to be honest I don't know where it leads us, but my gut instinct is that we have to read underneath what both those guys said. I wouldn't trust them to stay with us on this one inch.' She brought her right hand down in front of her face. 'Not even one inch. Not even a millimetre,' she said, moving her thumb and forefinger closer and closer together until they touched.

'You know what they were saying,' she said, not bothering to hide her tiredness. 'Song was saying: "We're better than you." Kozlov was saying: "If you make us choose, we're with China."'

'And what about Mehta, his great ally?'

Newman laughed coldly. 'Mehta's in a quagmire, isn't he? He's expendable. Let him be our great twenty-first-century nuclear weapons experiment. No one wants to touch him.'

The words of Jamie Song in the ride back from the helicopter returned to West, echoing from Song's unreadable oriental face in pure Bostonian English. You don't get it, do you, Jim? Song speaking as if he was addressing an American simpleton.*

*****

'Thank you for frankness, Mary, however unpalatable it might be,' said West, shooting a look towards the door as it opened, light spilling in from the hall. Brock stepped in, followed by Pierce and Patton, who was speaking on a mobile phone. 'Do we have thirty minutes? . . . Good . . . I'm with the President.' He closed the call, flipped shut the phone and said, 'I'm sorry, Mr President, but I need an instruction on this now.'

Patton pulled up a hard chair. His heavy chin jutted forward and his eyes flickered across a file he rested on his lap. The others found seats around the room. Newman fetched a fresh bottle of water from the kitchen and poured them all a glass.

'I want you to bear with me, Mr President,' said Patton. 'I'll tell it straight through. We have time. Then you can decide.'

'Very well,' said West. The room had been transformed. For a moment it had been a sanctuary, but now it had suddenly exploded back into reality. He would have much preferred to have listened to Newman's late-night theories. Instead, he had Tom Patton with a new and real threat to America.

'Two days ago, a Cuban fishing boat landed at Key West,' began Patton. 'The skipper was found tied up in the cabin. Straight away the coastguard recognized it as anything but a routine alien-smuggling run. It was a hijacking - something completely different. On the boat were three Cuban fisherman, four if you count the captain. Their fishing permits and licences were in order. There were also two defectors, a husband and wife. Until a couple of weeks ago, Ernesto Tomas Morera, aged forty-eight, ran Cuba's air traffic control service. The wife, Elena Blanco Morera, aged forty-two, was a fairly high-ranking officer in Cuba's intelligence agency, Direccion General de Inteligencia or DGI. Both of them check out with our records. Elena's job was China.'

West, suddenly alert, looked across at Patton. 'Go on.'

'Why did they want to defect?' asked Patton rhetorically. 'Because suddenly the government had asked them to do things they knew they couldn't. Ernesto was told he had to go head up a neighbourhood committee in some place called Campechueta right at the other end of the island. Elena walked into work one day to find her in-tray filled with visa applications from West Africa.'

He paused for some water and drained the glass. West refilled it for him.

'It was Elena who spotted what had happened. A completely coincidental oversight had linked her job with Ernesto's in an area so sensitive that the DGI decided they would have to be separated. Over the next week, Elena dutifully issued visas for Africans. Ernesto made a show of preparing to take up his new job. But they also tracked down a boat crew, paid them some money and arranged the boat to get out. The crew omitted to let on that they would have to overpower the skipper.' He shrugged. 'But that's by the by. At the weekend, they made their escape and I've just come from hearing and corroborating their story.

'Over the past two weeks, according to Ernesto, there've been two flights by Chinese transport aircraft into Havana, using the Russian-built Antonov 225 - the biggest mother of a transport aircraft - flying across the Atlantic from Dakar in Senegal. Elena's China desk had been handling a deal, struck about ten years ago, that gave Cuba medium-range Chinese missiles in exchange for electronic eavesdropping facilities to listen in on the eastern American seaboard. If you remember, the Russians made a final pull-out from Cuba as part of their new relationship with us after Nine Eleven. The Chinese moved into the vacuum. The missile part of the deal has begun to be implemented now.'

Patton stopped for a moment to make sure that West and all in the room understood what he was saying. 'The missiles, according to Elena, include the DF-15, the DF-3 and the DF-21. Which ones are actually there now, she doesn't know.'

'You got any corroboration?' asked West. Patton took out of his briefcase a sheaf of photographs stamped with the circular logo of the National Imagery and Mapping Agency which handled satellite and surveillance imagery. 'As soon as we heard, we bought in the latest commercial satellite imagery over Cuba,' he said.

'We didn't have our own?' queried West.

'Most of it's tasked over Asia,' said Brock.

'The Ikonos satellite came up with this. It only has 0.75 metre resolution,' explained Patton, handing a photograph to West. Newman leant over to see. Brock and Pierce looked from over the back of the sofa. 'Our analysts reckon this is the Antonov 225 at Havana's main civilian airport. It's the only one that will take an aircraft so big. Now see this--' He pointed to a blurred oblong shape by the side of the aircraft. 'We believe this is a missile container. See its size against the aircraft. It's big. Very big.' Patton pulled out another image. 'We sent up the Global Hawk. It works with images like a computer search engine works with words. We told it what we were looking for, and a few hours later, after mapping the whole of Cuba, it came up with this. The main road between Havana and Pinar del Rio. See here. The road is closed for repairs. A convoy of three trucks: on the back of each is the same image picked up by the Global Hawk, matching the container seen by the Antonov 225.'

Even in a room of close friends, Jim West wanted to give nothing away about the thoughts running through his mind. The heated air in the room suddenly felt oppressive, and a sense of dread, like when his wife had bravely told him the diagnosis of her impending death, spread through his whole body, until it swept across his face and settled into a grey, controlled dullness emanating from his eyes.

'Someone fill me in on what these missiles do.'

Chris Pierce stood up and walked round to the window. Realizing that the President was looking at him against the backlight of the wall lamp, he moved further in and stood with his back to the fireplace. 'The DF-21 has a range of about 1,200 miles; the DF-15, 400 miles; and the DF-3, about 2,000 miles, which produces an arc to Tucson, Denver, Minneapolis/St Paul, Chicago and the eastern seaboard. The Chinese themselves can hit Los Angeles, Phoenix, Salt Lake City, so they've got us on both sides, covering the whole of the United States.'

West shook his head in disbelief. 'They're doing under our noses what we went to the brink of nuclear war to stop the Soviets doing in 1962? Did they believe we wouldn't find out?'

'According to our defectors, the deal was struck in January 2002,' said Patton. 'Elena Morera confirms that the first missiles only arrived two weeks ago. What we don't know is why has it taken so long to put it into action - and given the strengthening of our relationship with China, why now?'

'It's in blatant violation of every arms proliferation agreement,' said Newman.

'Pakistan, Korea, now China and Cuba,' said Pierce. 'I can give you military plans and scenarios, Mr President, but what's really needed is heavy diplomacy. We've just got too many fronts coming in on us.'

Patton cleared his throat. 'Except, right now, there's a Chinese transport plane on its way to Havana. It's halfway across the Atlantic, three hours from landing.'

'Bring it in,' said West without hesitation. 'Land the son of a bitch down into Guantanamo. Strip it out. I want to know every nut and bolt that it's carrying.'*

*****

Outside, away from the lit pathways between the chalets, Jamie Song and Andrei Kozlov trudged through rain which fell in fine drops, slicing into the snow. They meandered through shrubs and clusters of trees, their shapes softened by streaks of light refracted through rain splashing on to pathway lamps. Sometimes they disappeared altogether, absorbed into an empty, sooty darkness in the woods.

On the Camp David surveillance video, they were only filmed properly when they greeted each other on the crossroads of two paths and Jamie Song said, 'When I talked of us meeting soon, I didn't expect it would be in the grounds of Camp David.' That was according to experts who later read his lips. They pulled up the collars of their coats, lifted the earflaps of their hats, and headed off, heads lowered, away into the grounds where no one could know what they were saying and only occasionally would their hunched, slow-walking figures be caught on camera.

Had the night been clear and cold with white falling snow, it might not have been unusual to walk off a good dinner. But this was a damp, windy and unpleasant night, where two men would only be out talking if they felt nowhere else was safe to do so.*

*****

In the morning, a Lincoln Town Car limousine pulled up outside Jamie Song's chalet. The Chinese President gave his hand luggage to the driver who put it in the boot. Lying on the back seat was a copy of the Washington Post, with a brief final-edition front-page story about a US air and naval military exercise in the Caribbean. As the limousine pulled out away from the trees around the chalet, Song had a long, clear view of the mountains. The wintry morning light had brought a drop in temperature, and fresh snow covered the dirt which had been brought in by the rain. Song's overcoat was still damp.

The limousine did not head out towards the main gate but swung round to Aspen where Jim West raised a friendly hand in greeting. When the car stopped, he opened the back door himself and got in. Secret service chase cars pulled out in front and behind the Lincoln and motorcycle outriders flanked the convoy as it set off.

'Thought I'd ride with you,' said West, with a brief smile. Unlike Song who wore his coat, West was dressed only in a dark-blue denim shirt and jeans. 'Something's cropped up which I thought we could sort out.'

'I hope it's a pleasant surprise,' said Song, moving the newspaper to clear the seat for West.

'We'll see,' said West, looking at Song curiously. Here was a man who had been educated in America, had become rich through America, who spoke and maybe could think like an American, but who was turning against everything American. West couldn't bring himself to believe Jamie Song would authorize sending missiles to Cuba. What he needed to know was whether Song had the power to stop it.

'Last night, after you had left,' said West, 'Chris Pierce, my Defense Secretary, dropped by. We've been carrying out military training in the Caribbean over the past couple of days with live firing and all that. A Chinese transport plane flew right into the exercise area. Unfortunately, the pilot didn't answer our radio signals. He claims he doesn't speak English or French, if you can believe that, considering the plane had come from Senegal. So we sent up some fighters. It got a little dangerous for a while, but eventually we brought the plane down into Guantanamo Bay.'

Song glanced across sharply, but didn't say anything. West looked straight ahead at the bullet proof screen sealing the back seat from the driver and bodyguard in front.

'You guys did a similar thing some years back, I remember, with one of our EP-3 surveillance planes.'

'Before my time,' said Song dryly. His hands were on each knee and he kept his eyes on West.

'The crew is fine. Nobody's hurt. No equipment is damaged. But we did look inside the plane.' West stopped there. Song appeared completely secure in what he was hearing, his eyes fixed unfalteringly on West.

'And what was the plane carrying, Jim,' he asked softly, 'that has brought you into my car on this cold morning?'

'A missile that could strike the United States,' said West, his deadpan delivery matching Song's. He detected a flicker of reaction. It could have been shock, possibly anger, but it was suppressed immediately with a quick, thin smile and a slight shifting of the hands. From the top pocket of his shirt, West pulled out a sheet of folded paper, unfolded it and passed it to Song. The photograph had been taken inside the plane, showing a case prised open, its wrapping unfurled, and the fin of a rocket.

'I'm told it has a range of 400 miles,' said West, 'and that three other types are on order. The most powerful has a range of 2,000 miles.'