Winston shrugged. "Theoretically, they could ride this out with minimal difficulties, but that depends on how they make up the shortfall. Their national industrial base is an incredibly muddled hodgepodge of private- and state-owned industries. The private ones are the efficient ones, of course, and the worst of the state-owned industries belong to their army. I've seen a.n.a.lyses of PLA operations that look like something out of MAD magazine, just impossible to credit on first reading. Soldiers don't generally know much about making things-they're better at breaking them-and tossing Marxism into the mix doesn't exactly help the situation. So, those 'enterprises' p.i.s.s away vast quant.i.ties of cash. If they shut those down, or just cut them back, they could kiss this little shortfall off and move on-but they won't."

"That's right," Adler agreed. "The Chinese People's Liberation Army has a lot of political clout over there. The party controls it, but the tail wags the dog to a considerable extent. There's quite a bit of political and economic unrest over there. They need the army to keep things under control, and the PLA takes a big cut off the top of the national treasure because of that."

"The Soviets weren't like that," POTUS objected.

"Different country, different culture. Keep that in mind."

"Klingons," Ryan muttered, with a nod. "Okay, go on."

Winston took the lead. "We can't predict the impact this will have on their society without knowing how they're going to react to the cash shortfall."

"If they squeal when it starts to hurt, what do we do?" Ryan asked next.

"They're going to have to make nice, like reinstating the Boeing and Caterpillar orders, and doing it publicly."

"They won't-they can't," Adler objected. "Too much loss of face. Asian mind-set. That won't happen. They might offer us concessions, but they'll have to be hidden ones."

"Which is not politically acceptable to us. If I try to take that to Congress, first they'll laugh at me, then they'll crucify me." Ryan took a sip of his drink.

"And they won't understand why you can't tell Congress what to do. They think you're a strong leader, and therefore you're supposed to make decisions on your own," EAGLE informed his President.

"Don't they know anything about how our government works?" POTUS asked.

"Jack, I'm sure they have all sorts of experts who know more about the const.i.tutional process than I do, but the Politburo members are not required to listen to them. They come from a very different political environment, and that's the one they understand. For us 'the people' means popular opinion, polls, and ultimately elections. For them, it means the peasants and workers who are supposed to do what they're told."

"We do business with these people?" Winston asked the ceiling.

"It's called realpolitik, George," Ryan explained.

"But we can't pretend they don't exist. There's over a billion of them, and, oh, by the way, they also have nuclear weapons, on ballistic launchers, even." Which added a decidedly unpleasant element to the overall equation.

"Twelve of them, according to CIA, and we can turn their country into a parking lot if we have to, just it'll take twenty-four hours instead of forty minutes," Ryan told his guests, managing not to get a chill when he said it. The possibility was too remote to make him nervous. "And they know that, and who wants to be the king of a parking lot? They are that rational, Scott, aren't they?"

"I think so. They rattle their saber at Taiwan, but not even much of that lately, not when we have Seventh Fleet there all the time." Which, however, burned up a lot of fuel oil for the Navy.

"Anyway, this cash problem won't actually cripple their economy?" Jack asked.

"I don't think so, unless they're pretty d.a.m.ned dumb."

"Scott, are they dumb?" Ryan asked State Department.

"Not that dumb-at least I don't think so," State told the President.

"Good, then I can go upstairs and have another drink." Ryan rose, and his guests did the same.

This is lunacy!" Qian Kun growled at Fang half a world away, discussing what turned out to be the same set of issues.

"I will not disagree with you, Qian, but we must make our case to the rest of our colleagues."

"Fang, this could mean ruin for us. With what shall we buy wheat and oil?"

"What are our reserves?"

The Finance Minister had to sit back and think about that one. He closed his eyes and tried to remember the numbers on which he got briefed the first Monday of every month. The eyes opened. "The harvest from last year was better than average. We have food for about a year-a.s.suming an average harvest this year, or even a slightly short one. The immediate problem is oil. We've been using a lot of that lately, with the PLA's constant exercises up north and on the coast. In oil, we have perhaps four months in reserve, and the money to purchase another two months. After that, we will have to cut back our uses. Now, we are self-sufficient in coal, and so we'll have all the electricity we need. The lights will burn. The trains will run, but the PLA will be crippled." Not that this is an entirely bad thing, he didn't add. Both men acknowledged the value of the People's Liberation Army, but today it was really more of a domestic security service, like a large and well-armed police force, than a real guarantor of their national security, which had, really, no external threats to deal with.

"The army won't like that," Fang warned.

"I am not overly concerned with their likes and dislikes, Fang," the Finance Minister countered. "We have a country to bring out of the nineteenth century. We have industries to grow, and people to feed and employ. The ideology of our youth has not been as successful in bringing this about as we were educated to expect."

"Do you say that . . . ?"

Qian shifted in his chair. "Remember what Deng said? It doesn't matter if the cat is black or white as long as it catches mice. And Mao exiled him soon thereafter, and so today we have two hundred million more mouths to feed, but the only additional funds with which we do it came to us from the black cat, not the white one. We live in a practical world, Fang. I, too, have my copy of The Little Red Book, but I've never tried to eat it."

This former railroad engineer had been captured by his bureaucracy and his job, just like the last one had been-he'd died at the relatively young age of seventy-eight, before he could be expelled from his Politburo chair. Qian, a youthful sixty-six, would have to learn to watch his words, and his thoughts, more carefully. He was about to say so when Qian started speaking again.

"Fang, people like you and me, we must be able to speak freely to one another. We are not college students full of revolutionary zeal. We are men of years and knowledge, and we must have the ability to discuss issues frankly. We waste too much time in our meetings kneeling before Mao's cadaver. The man is dead, Fang. Yes, he was a great man, yes, he was a great leader for our people, but no, he wasn't the Lord Buddha, or Jesus, or whatever. He was only a man, and he had ideas, and most of them were right, but some of them were wrong, some of them don't work. The Great Leap Forward accomplished nothing, and the Cultural Revolution, in addition to killing off undesirable intellectuals and troublemakers, also starved millions of our people to death, and that is not desirable, is it?"

"That is true, my young friend, but it is important how you present your ideas," Fang warned his junior, non-voting member of the Politburo. Present them stupidly, and you'll find yourself counting rice bags on a collective farm. He was a little old to go barefoot into the paddies, even as punishment for ideological apostasy.

"Will you support me?" Qian asked.

"I will try," was the halfhearted answer. He had to plead Ren He-Ping's case as well this day, and it wouldn't be easy.

They'd counted on the funds transfer at Qian's ministry. They had contracts to pay for. The tanker had long since been scheduled, because they were booked well in advance, and this carrier was just now coming alongside the loading pier off the coast of Iran. She'd load four hundred and fifty-six thousand tons of crude oil over a period of less than a day, then steam back out of the Persian Gulf, turn southeast for the pa.s.sage around India, then transit the crowded Malacca Strait past Singapore and north to the huge and newly built oil terminal at Shanghai, where she'd spend thirty or forty hours offloading the cargo, then retrace her journey back to the Gulf for yet another load in an endless procession.

Except that the procession wasn't quite endless. It would end when the money stopped, because the sailors had to be paid, the debt on the tanker serviced, and most of all, the oil had to be bought. And it wasn't just one tanker. There were quite a few of them on the China run. A satellite focused on just that one segment of the world's oil trade would have seen them from a distance, looking like cars on a highway going to and from the same two points continuously. And like cars, they didn't have to go merely between those two places. There were other ports at which to load oil, and others at which to offload it, and to the crews of the tankers, the places of origin and destination didn't really matter very much, because almost all of their time was spent at sea, and the sea was always the same. Nor did it matter to the owners of the tankers, or the agents who did the chartering. What mattered was that they got paid for their time.

For this charter, the money had been wire-transferred from one account to another, and so the crew stood at their posts watching the loading process-monitoring it mainly by watching various dials and gauges; you couldn't see the oil going through the pipes, after all. Various crew members were on the beach to see to the victualing of their ship, and to visit the chandlers to get books and magazines to read, videoca.s.sette movies, and drink to go with the food, plus whatever consumable supplies had been used up on the inbound trip. A few crewmen looked for women whose charms might be rented, but that was an iffy business in Iran. None of them knew or thought very much about who paid for their services. Their job was to operate the ship safely and efficiently. The ship's officers mainly had their wives along, for whom the voyages were extended, if rather boring, pleasure cruises: Every modern tanker had a swimming pool and a deck for tanning, plus satellite TV for news and entertainment. And none of them particularly cared where the ship went, because for the women shopping was shopping, and any new port had its special charms.

This particular tanker, the World Progress, was chartered out of London, and had five more Shanghai runs scheduled until the charter ran out. The charter was paid, however, on a per-voyage basis, and the funds for this trip had been wired only seven days before. That was hardly a matter of concern for the owners or the ship's agent. After all, they were dealing with a nation-state, whose credit tended to be good. In due course, the loading was completed. A computerized system told the ship's first officer that the ship's trim was correct, and he so notified the master, who then told the chief engineer to wind up the ship's gas-turbine engines. This engine type made things easy, and in less than five minutes, the ship's power plant was fully ready for sea. Twenty minutes after that, powerful harbor tugs eased the ship away from the loading dock. This evolution is the most demanding for a tanker's crew, because only in confined waters is the risk of collision and serious damage quite so real. But within two hours, the tanker was under way under her own power, heading for the narrows at Bandar Abbas, and then the open sea.

Yes, Qian," Premier Xu said tiredly. "Proceed."

"Comrades, at our last meeting I warned you of a potential problem of no small proportions. That problem is with us now, and it is growing larger."

"Are we running out of money, Qian?" Zhang Han San asked, with a barely concealed smirk. The answer amused him even more.

"Yes, Zhang, we are."

"How can a nation run out of money?" the senior Politburo member demanded.

"The same way a factory worker can, by spending more than he has. Another way is to offend his boss and lose his job. We have done both," Qian replied evenly.

"What 'boss' do we have?" Zhang inquired, with a disarming and eerie gentleness.

"Comrades, that is what we call trade. We sell our goods to others in return for money, and we use that money to purchase goods from those others. Since we are not peasants from ancient times bartering a pig for a sheep, we must use money, which is the means of international exchange. Our trade with America has generated an annual surplus on the order of seventy billion American dollars."

"Generous of the foreign devils," Premier Xu observed to Zhang sotto voce.

"Which we have almost entirely spent for various items, largely for our colleagues in the People's Liberation Army of late. Most of these are long-term purchase items for which advance payment was necessary, as is normal in the international arms business. To this, we must add oil and wheat. There are other things which are important to our economy, but we will concentrate on these for the moment." Qian looked around the table for approval. He got it, though Marshal Luo Cong, Defense Minister, and commander-in-chief of the People's Liberation Army-and lord of the PLA's sizable industrial empire-was now looking on with a gimlet eye. The expenditures of his personal empire had been singled out, and that was not calculated to please him.

"Comrades," Qian continued, "we now face the loss of much, perhaps most, of that trade surplus with America, and other foreign countries as well. You see these?" He held up a fistful of telexes and e-mail printouts. "These are cancellations of commercial business orders and funds transfers. Let me clarify. These are billions of lost dollars, money which in some cases we have already spent-but money we will never have because we have angered those with whom we do business."

"Do you tell me that they have such power over us? Rubbish!" another member observed.

"Comrade, they have the power to buy our trade goods for cash, or not buy them for cash. If they choose not to buy them, we do not get the money we need to spend for Marshal Luo's expensive toys." He used that word deliberately. It was time to explain the facts of life to these people, and a slap across the face was sure to get their attention. "Now, let us consider wheat. We use wheat to make bread and noodles. If you have no wheat, you have no noodles.

"Our country does not grow enough wheat to feed our people. We know this. We have too many mouths to feed. In a few months, the great producing countries, America, Canada, Australia, Argentina, and so forth, they will all have wheat to sell-but with what shall we buy it? Marshal Luo, your army needs oil to refine into diesel fuel and jet fuel, does it not? We need the same things for our diesel trains, and our airlines. But we cannot produce all the oil we need for our domestic needs, and so we must buy it from the Persian Gulf and elsewhere-again, with what shall we buy it?"

"So, sell our trade goods to someone else?" a member asked, with rather surprising innocence, Qian thought.

"Who else might there be, comrade? There is only one America. We have also offended all of Europe. Whom does that leave? Australia? They are allied to Europe and America. j.a.pan? They also sell to America, and they will move to replace our lost markets, not to buy from us. South America, perhaps? Those are all Christian countries, and we just killed a senior Christian churchman, didn't we? Moreover, in their ethical world, he died heroically. We have not just killed. We have created a holy martyr to their faith!

"Comrades, we have deliberately structured our industry base to sell to the American market. To sell elsewhere, we would first have to determine what they need that we can make, and then enter the market. You don't just show up with a boatload of products and exchange it for cash on the dock! It takes time and patience to become a force in such a market. Comrades, we have cast away the work of decades. The money we are losing will not come back for years, and until then, we must learn to live our national life differently."

"What are you saying?" Zhang shot back.

"I am saying that the People's Republic faces economic ruin because two of our policemen killed those two meddling churchmen."

"That is not possible!"

"It is not possible, Zhang? If you offend the man who gives you money, then he will give you no more. Can you understand that? We've gone far out of our way to offend America, and then we offended all of Europe as well. We have made ourselves outcasts-they call us barbarians because of that unhappy incident at the hospital. I do not defend them, but I must tell you what they say and think. And as long as they say those things and think those things, it is we who will pay for the error."

"I refuse to believe this!" Zhang insisted.

"That is fine. You may come to my ministry and add up the numbers yourself." Qian was feeling full of himself, Fang saw. Finally, he had them listening to him. Finally, he had them thinking about his thoughts and his expertise. "Do you think I make this story up to tell in some country inn over rice wine?"

Then it was Premier Xu leaning forward and thinking aloud. "You have our attention, Qian. What can we do to avert this difficulty?"

Having delivered his primary message quickly and efficiently, Qian Kun didn't know what to say now. There wasn't a way to avert it that these men would accept. But having given them a brief taste of the harsh truth, now he had to give them some more: "We need to change the perception of American minds. We need to show them that we are not what they consider barbarians. We have to transform our image in their eyes. For starters, we must make amends for the deaths of those two priests."

"Abase ourselves before the foreign devils? Never!" Zhang snarled.

"Comrade Zhang," Fang said, coming carefully to Qian's defense. "Yes, we are the Middle Kingdom, and no, we are not the barbarians. They are. But sometimes one must do business with barbarians, and that might mean understanding their point of view, and adapting to it somewhat."

"Humble ourselves before them?"

"Yes, Zhang. We need what they have, and to get it, we must be acceptable to them."

"And when they next demand that we make political changes, then what?" This was the premier, Xu, getting somewhat agitated, which was unusual for him.

"We face such decisions when and if they come," Qian answered, pleasing Fang, who didn't want to risk saying that himself.

"We cannot risk that," the Interior Minister, Tong Jie, responded, speaking for the first time. The police of the nation belonged to him, and he was responsible for civil order in the country-only if he failed would he call upon Marshal Luo, which would cause him both loss of face and loss of power at this table. In a real sense, the deaths of the two men had been laid at his place, for he had generated the formal orders on the suppression of religious activity in the PRC, increasing the harshness of law enforcement in order to increase the relative influence of his own ministry. "If the foreigners insist upon internal political changes, it could bring us all down."

And that was the core issue, Fang saw at once. The People's Republic rested absolutely upon the power of the party and its leaders, these men before him in this room. Like n.o.blemen of old, each was attended by a trusted servant, sitting in the chairs against the wall, around the table, waiting for the order to fetch tea or water. Each had his rationale for power, whether it was Defense, or Interior, or Heavy Industry, or in his particular case, friendship and general experience. Each had labored long and hard to reach this point, and none of them relished the thought of losing what he had, any more than a provincial governor under the Ching Dynasty would have willingly reverted to being a mere mandarin, because that meant at least ignominy, and just as likely, death. These men knew that if a foreign country demanded and got internal political concessions, then their grip on power would loosen, and that was the one thing they dared not risk. They ruled the workers and peasants, and because of that, they also feared them. The n.o.blemen of old could fall back upon the teachings of Confucius, or Buddha; on a spiritual foundation for their temporal power. But Marx and Mao had swept all that away, leaving only force as their defense. And if to maintain their country's prosperity they had to diminish that force, what would then happen? They didn't know, and these men feared the unknown as a child feared the evil monsters under his bed at night, but with far more reason. It had happened, right here in Beijing, not all that many years before. Not one of these men had forgotten it. To the public, they'd always shown steadfast determination. But each of them, alone in his bathroom before the mirror, or lying in bed at night before sleep came, had shown fear. Because though they basked in the devotion of the peasants and workers, somehow each of them knew that the peasants and workers might fear them, but also hated them. Hated them for their arrogance, their corruption, for their privilege, their better food, their luxurious housing, their personal servants. Their servants, they all knew, loathed them as well, behind smiles and bows of obeisance, which could just as easily conceal a dagger, because that's how the peasants and workers had felt about the n.o.bles of a hundred years before. The revolutionaries had made use of that hatred against the cla.s.s enemies of that age, and new ones, they all knew, could make use of the same silent rage against themselves. And so they would cling to power with the same desperation as the n.o.bles of old, except they would show even more ruthlessness, because unlike the n.o.bles of old, they had no place to run to. Their ideology had trapped them in their golden cages more surely than any religion could.

Fang had never before considered all of these thoughts in toto. Like the others, he'd worried a lot when the college students had demonstrated, building up their "G.o.ddess of liberty" out of plaster or papier-mche-Fang didn't remember, though he did remember his sigh of relief when the PLA had destroyed it. It came as a surprise to him, the realization of how snared he was here in this place. The power he and his colleagues exercised was like something shown before a mirror that could be turned on them all instantly under the proper circ.u.mstances. They had immense power over every citizen in their country, but that power was all an illusion- -and, no, they couldn't allow another country to dictate political practices to them, because their lives all depended on that illusion. It was like smoke on a calm day, seemingly a pillar to hold up the heavens, but the slightest wind could blow it all away, and then the heavens would fall. On them all.

But Fang also saw that there was no way out. If they didn't change to make America happy, then their country would run out of wheat and oil, and probably other things as well, and they would risk ma.s.sive social change in a groundswell from below. But if to prevent that, they allowed some internal changes, they would just be inviting the same thing on themselves.

Which would kill them the more surely?

Did it matter? Fang asked himself. Either way, they'd be just as dead. He wondered idly how it would come, the fists of a mob, or bullets before a wall, or a rope. No, it would be bullets. That was how his country executed people. Probably preferable to the beheading sword of old. What if the swordsman missed his aim, after all? It must have been a horrid mess. He only had to look around the table to see that everyone here had similar thoughts, at least those with enough wit. All men feared the unknown, but now they had to choose which unknown to fear, and the choice was yet another thing to dread.

"So, Qian, you say we risk running out of things because we can no longer get the money we need to purchase them?" Premier Xu asked.

"That is correct," the Finance Minister confirmed.

"In what other ways could we get money and oil?" Xu asked next.

"That is not within my purview, Chairman," Qian answered.

"Oil is its own currency," Zhang said. "And there is ample oil to our north. There is also gold, and many other things we need. Timber in vast quant.i.ties. And that which we need most of all-s.p.a.ce, living s.p.a.ce for our people."

Marshal Luo nodded. "We have discussed this before."

"What do you mean?" Fang asked.

"The Northern Resource Area, our j.a.panese friends once called it," Zhang reminded them all.

"That adventure ended in disaster," Fang observed at once. "We were fortunate not to have been damaged by it."

"But we were not damaged at all," Zhang replied lightly. "We were not even implicated. We can be sure of that, can we not, Luo?"

"This is so. The Russians have never strengthened their southern defenses. They even ignore our exercises that have raised our forces to a high state of readiness."

"Can we be sure of that?"

"Oh, yes," the Defense Minister told them all. "Tan?" he asked.

Tan Deshi was the chief of the Ministry of State Security, in charge of the PRC's foreign and domestic intelligence services. One of the younger men here at seventy, he was probably the healthiest of them all, a nonsmoker and a very light imbiber of alcohol. "When we first began our increased exercises, they watched with concern, but after the first two years, they lost interest. We have over a million of our citizens living in eastern Siberia-it's illegal, but the Russians do not make much issue of it. A goodly number of them report to me. We have good intelligence of the Russian defenses."

"And what is their state of readiness?" Tong Jie asked.

"Generally, quite poor. They have one full-strength division, one at two-thirds, and the rest are hardly better than cadre-strength. Their new Far East commander, a General-Colonel Bondarenko, despairs of making things better, our sources tell us."

"Wait," Fang objected. "Are we discussing the possibility of war with Russia here?"

"Yes," Zhang Han San replied. "We have done this before."

"That is true, but on the first such occasion, we would have had j.a.pan as an ally, and America neutralized. On the second, we a.s.sumed that Russia would have been broken up beforehand along religious lines. Who are our allies in this case? How has Russia been crippled?"

"We've been a little unlucky," Tan answered. "The chief minister-well, the chief adviser to their President Grushavoy is still alive."

"What do you mean?" Fang asked.

"I mean that our attempt to kill him misfired." Tan explained on for two minutes. The reaction around the table was one of mild shock.