Ghost Fleet Read online

  “No, there was no time to shop,” said Admiral Wang.

  “Yes, sir, I’ll take care of it,” said the aide, hearing the unspoken order to find appropriate gifts for the women in the admiral’s life.

  The two climbed into the back of a Geely military SUV that drove with its lights off.

  “And what news of General Feng?” said Wang.

  “First, they took him to —” the aide began.

  “I do not need those details. Did they kill him yet?” said Wang.

  The aide nodded.

  “Good,” said Wang. “He thought that he could sell a hundred tons of small arms to that beast who runs North Sulawesi at twice the agreed price without us finding out. The perception of greed is what provides our Indonesian instability program’s deniability. When Feng’s greed became real, he became a liability . . . Let me see the papers they gave you,” said Wang.

  The SUV pulled up to a traffic circle just inside a cavernous hangar built into the side of the mountain. The island itself was now no more than a camouflage netting of dirt and stone above the Directorate’s largest submarine and air base.

  “They said not to open that until you are underground,” said the aide.

  “Did they?” said Wang, ripping open the envelope. “We are underground, by my definition. If I am going to be shot because General Feng wanted a second apartment, I deserve to know as soon as possible.”

  The aide fumbled to get a small red penlight out so Wang could read the message.

  “The entire Presidium? Here?” said Wang.

  The aide nodded. “The jets keep coming and coming,” he said.

  “And these others, whose are they?” said Wang. He couldn’t help but notice that the parking area included eight new Chinese-modified versions of the IL-76 transport plane and a single older one, an original model of the Russian aircraft.

  “I must apologize, the air force was not kind enough to share the manifests, Admiral,” the aide responded, emphasizing Wang’s naval title.

  Wang chuckled at his aide’s flash of frustration, warming up as the adrenaline that went with such uncertainty overcame the weariness of the long flight.

  The SUV drew to a halt, and Wang got out. He looked back inside the vehicle at his aide, who hadn’t budged.

  “I’m sorry, sir. I was told I could not accompany you any farther.”

  “See what you can learn,” said Wang. “I will find a way to bring you below. You deserve to be part of this . . . especially if they plan to shoot me.”

  “I doubt it will come to that,” said the aide as Wang got out of the vehicle.

  “We have fed the beast so long, at some point we have to set it off the leash,” responded Wang. “Or it will bite us back.”

  Wang strode over to a waiting electric cart, barely glancing at the row of oversize diesel-electric military cargo trucks parked nearby. The shielding and blast-proofing of the subterranean base seemed to swallow all sound; not even his footsteps resonated.

  The driver of the cart said, “Admiral, I am Lieutenant Ping Hai. It is an honor to escort you.” He said it slowly, as if he had memorized it.

  “Thank you, Lieutenant,” said Wang. “But I’d prefer to walk. All I’ve done is sit for the past eighteen hours.”

  “Sir?” said Ping, confused by the admiral going off the planned script. “Walking here is very difficult.”

  “Why don’t we give it a try?” said Wang.

  Wang started following the luminescent markers at the edge of the four-lane road that curved gently downward. After he’d walked ten paces, the cart pulled alongside, its electric engine faintly humming. With the cart his sole command responsibility, the young officer apparently could not fathom leaving it behind. The admiral glared at the expectant lieutenant, who interpreted the look as a green light to begin chattering.

  “Admiral, I read your ‘Third Island Chain’ essay with great interest last year,” said Ping. “It was very bold. Visionary. I did not find it controversial at all.”

  Wang felt his desire for silence grow with every step. But he knew the nervous lieutenant would keep talking no matter his response.

  “A welcome assessment,” said Wang. If anyone ever needed a reason for why the Directorate had ended the one-child policy, this lieutenant was it, thought Wang. The young officer prattled on. His accent was at first difficult to place, but the more he talked, the more his country roots showed. Hubei Province. Was sending this idiot chaperone a message? Why was Wang’s own aide kept aboveground while a fool like this was allowed to take him to the Directorate’s inner sanctum?

  “Just stop,” said Wang. “I will get into the cart. You are right, there is no time to waste.”

  The lighting brightened to daylight levels as the electric cart entered a waiting elevator that could have swallowed two fighter jets.

  “Admiral, our journey ends here,” said Ping, capping a rambling disquisition on his strategic vision for force dispositions along the northern border.

  “Thank you,” said Wang. “You have given me much to think about. And for that, you deserve this.”

  The young officer took the challenge coin Wang had gotten from the U.S. chief of naval operations with reverence. He was, at last, speechless.

  Wang remembered an old adage: In wartime, even idiots can be useful.

  Presidium Briefing Room, Hainan Island

  Wang discreetly allowed himself a single stim tab as he exited the elevator. He normally avoided taking such performance modifiers, knowing how they also tricked one’s emotions. But the flight had left him exhausted, and he knew he needed to be as sharp as possible.

  The quartet of naval commandos escorting him were assaulters, big-shouldered beasts in their signature formfitting blast-resistant uniforms. Their liquid body armor’s exterior looked as if it were made from sharkskin. He took their presence as a positive, a reassuring sign the navy’s influence remained strong here.

  At the entry to the large briefing room, Wang began his scan, just as he would study the horizon for threats while on a ship’s bridge. He saw Admiral Lin Boqiang with a cluster of other senior naval officers. Lin, the overall commander of the fleet, was among the most influential in the Presidium, the Directorate’s joint civilian and military leadership council. At the other side of the room, a cluster of army officers stood around General Wei Ming, the land forces commander. The two services rarely interacted, even in meetings. To Wang, though, the difference was simple. Wei and the army had the numbers in China, but as part of a force that dealt with distance, Wang and his fellow navy officers understood politics and power better.

  More notable was the number of civilian suits in the military command room. The Presidium members rarely met in person, the civilian and military sides protective of their respective turf. The original deal had been hastily hammered out in a hotel conference room during the Shanghai riots, but it had held firm since, each faction having autarchy to run its own economic and security spheres to maximum efficiency, with a mutual goal of growth with stability.

  Admiral Lin approached and greeted Wang with a haphazard salute that had not changed since their academy days.

  “I must apologize for cutting your trip short, but you can now see that this is the general meeting you have long sought.”

  “Yes, when I was first summoned, I thought I might come down here and never be seen again, like our friend General Feng,” said Wang, speaking every word with a purpose, mentioning the executed officer to test the waters.

  “While Feng’s diversions were lamentable,” Lin observed, “the goal of your operation to destabilize the south was met. But now, the Presidium needs to hear your larger message. Your views have been most persuasive inside our service, but the civilians need to hear from you now.” He turned away from Wang and motioned to an aide to dim the ligh
ts, the signal for the meeting to begin. The Presidium members took their seats at a U-shaped table made from black marble.

  The introduction was brief, focusing on Wang’s key role in reorganizing the Directorate’s command structure, clearly an attempt to establish his trustworthiness for the civilians. Wang knew that his efficiency at purging the old PLA’s Communist Party apparatchiks in the General Political Department was what had gotten him to this position, but he wished Lin had highlighted his reputation as a leading thinker and a capable naval commander as well.

  “I am an admiral, as you know,” Wang said, “but today I would like to begin with a quote from a general: ‘On terrain from which there is no way out, take the battle to the enemy.’

  “That is from Sun-Tzu’s Art of War, written just before the Warring States period of our history. I first used that wisdom as a young man almost twenty-five hundred years after it was written, citing it in my thesis on Master Sun’s texts at what used to be called PLA National Defense University.”

  The reminder of their ancient and recent past was another deliberate choice to set the scene for where he wanted to take them next.

  Wang pulled an imaginary trigger with his right pointer finger, and the smart-ring on it transmitted a wireless signal that initiated the presentation visuals his aide had sent ahead. Behind him, a 3-D hologram map of the Pacific appeared. Glowing red lines moved across the map, marking the history of China’s trade routes and military reach through the millennia. The lines moved out and then back in. Toward the end, a blue arc appeared, showing the spread of U.S. trade routes and military bases over the past two centuries. Eventually the blue lines reached across the globe. Then, as the decades closed in on the present, the red lines pushed back out, crossing with the blue. Wang didn’t need to explain this graphic; everyone knew its import.

  “I began with Master Sun’s ancient wisdom to remind us that while we all would like to think that we have regained our historic greatness, in reality we face a situation in which there is ‘no way out.’ Indeed, the Americans had an apt phrase to describe a situation like ours, where your strength grows but your options become ever more limited: Manifest Destiny.

  “Destiny drives you forward but ties your hands, for them, as for us. Indeed, their own great naval thinker Alfred Thayer Mahan foretold how their rise to great power gave them no choice. As their economy and then their military began to grow to world status, he told his people that, whether they liked it or not, ‘Americans must now begin to look outward. The growing production of the country demands it.’

  “Must. Demands. These are words of power, but also responsibility. We now must face the demands that shape our own destiny. The Americans’ destiny led them to seek land, then trade, then oil, but they refuse to understand that the new demands of the age are now upon us as well. Even though they no longer need the foreign energy resources they once reached out and grasped, we must still endure their interference in our interests in Transjordan, Venezuela, Sudan, the Emirates, and the former Indonesia.

  “We most recently experienced this in our waters to the east, where they interfered in matters that are far from them, but close to us.”

  The map zoomed down to the South China Sea, and an image appeared of a U.S. Navy LCS warship escorting a Philippine coast guard vessel that had been damaged in the Red Line skirmishes right after the Dhahran bombing.

  “As you will recall, we debated then how to respond to their navy interposing itself into a regional matter, daring us to act. But for all our arguments, it was a situation of ‘no way out,’ as Master Sun said in his text. That it took place in the midst of our own domestic transition meant we had no choice but to acquiesce.”

  The image then shifted to scenes of the Dalai Lama speaking at the Lincoln Memorial to a cheering crowd and then to the new U.S. president shaking hands with the last Communist Party foreign minister, who in exile had somehow transformed himself into a human rights activist.

  “But their interference does not stop at the water’s edge. Their failure to understand our new strategic and domestic reality gives us no choice, as it threatens what we in this room have built. Even now that we are once more whole, their Congress threatens energy sanctions at the slightest whim, waving about an economic sword like a drunken sailor.”

  The image plunged deep into a projection of the Mariana Trench, then drove straight through the rocky walls of the side to reveal the full extent of the COMRA research vessel’s find, laid out in glowing red; after that, it pulled back to show its massive scale compared with the rest of the world’s known gas fields.

  “What we have found here determines not just our nation’s future but the arc of the world economy and, thus, our ultimate security and stability,” said Wang. “What we have located, in a place where nobody else thought it possible and that we alone can reach, gives us a new way to think about the future, a future where we chart our own course.”

  A hologram of Xi Jinping, the old Communist Party leader, appeared behind him, accompanied by a recording of a speech he’d given to the old party congress in 2013: “However deep the water may be, we will wade into the water. This is because we have no alternative.” The image of the long-dead president elicited a nervous murmur in the room.

  “Many of you are familiar with this speech, what Xi called the ‘Chinese Dream.’ The old party leaders were wrong in many things, but in this they were right. America’s rise came first with its ensuring control of its home waters and then extending its global economic presence. And then the country had no choice but to assume its new responsibilities, including protecting the system from the powers of the past that would threaten it. I mentioned their thinker Mahan. Soon after he laid out the new demands upon the United States, war with Spain followed, as you remember, and the Americans reached across the Pacific, thousands of miles beyond their home waters, extending to the Philippines, patrolling not just our ports but even our very rivers. Just as Mahan told them, we similarly have no choice but to meet these demands.”

  Wang took in the room, searching for signs of understanding but also dissent.

  A civilian on the far side of the room took the pause as an invitation. Chen Lisan was the chairman of Bel-Con, China’s top producer of consumer electronics, which had been formed by the merging of dozens of firms during the most recent crisis. His role on the Directorate’s Presidium, though, was an extension of his reputation as a strategist and visionary in business, something that perfectly fit the Directorate’s hybrid of military authority and market-inspired efficiency.

  “Admiral, you began with a quote from the Art of War, so I will match you: ‘Those who know when to fight and when not to fight are victorious.’ ” He paused. “I do not see your logic here. We always have choices. Does your old vision of power actually matter anymore in a world where we can choose to buy anything, anywhere? These notions you describe risk all that we have accomplished.”

  Admiral Wang nodded. “Then this failing is mine, and mine alone, if I have not made the case properly.” He turned to the map, pausing to collect his thoughts. Along the wall, the naval commandos stood unnervingly still and held their weapons at the ready. Wang smiled at them and continued.

  “All of us here who first formed the Directorate acted to pull order back from chaos. We chose to act. But we acted because there was no other choice in the end,” he said. “In turn, who can argue that this is not the purpose of the Directorate? Thousands of years have brought us to this point. We protected China from the party leaders who held the country back, and we should not grow meek on the brink of the next great step.”

  A young woman’s voice cut through the room. “Desire and ability are not the same thing, Admiral,” said Muyi Ling. Muyi was not yet thirty, but thanks to her father’s wealth, she now ran Weibot, the largest manufacturing consortium. “Didn’t General Sun also say, ‘Avoid overconfidence, as it will lead to d
isaster’?”

  Damn those viz glasses. While the old man might have known Sun-Tzu by heart, Wang doubted Muyi did. He noticed the Directorate commando closest to him shift his weight slightly. Maybe they were not naval commandos at all, despite the uniforms. Could they be from the 788th Regiment, which protected the Presidium? Were they letting him hang himself, word by word, for threatening the status quo that so many in the Presidium had profited from?

  “That is always a concern. But as Sun also said, ‘Make no assumptions about all the dangers of using military force. Then you won’t make assumptions about the benefits of using arms either.’ ”

  She smiled, but he saw her eyes scanning her glasses rather than looking directly at him. She was likely researching a retort. He realized that he had to move the discussion beyond the level of trading quotations. Wang turned to the wider group.

  “Of course, we are all aware of the reasons given for why it will never be our time. Our population demographics are not optimal, they say. Our trade routes are too vulnerable, they say. Our need for outside energy is too great, they say. These statements are all true. And they will always be true if we turn our backs on our duty to make our destiny manifest. The worst thing we can do is fear our own potential.”

  His finger clicked one last time, and around them played the famous scene of the tank in People’s Square crushing the old Communist Party’s riot-control truck, the crowd of protesters’ initial looks of surprise and then their celebration as they realized that the military was on their side. He saw a few instinctively nodding their approval, reliving the moment when they had remade China into their vision.

  “I have abused your time, so I will end my presentation with three questions. First, just as we acted then to meet the people’s true expectations of their nation’s leaders, we must ask, What do the people expect of us now? Second, what do you expect the Americans to do once they learn of our energy discovery? Third, and most important, is a simple question of the arc of history: If now is not the time, then when?