“No,” Teguina replied, struggling through Yin’s sentence and struggling to compose a reply. “You are my guest and are to be welcomed.”
“As a conquering hero?”
Teguina made a sideways glance at the receding wall of people around the bed — none were within hearing range, and probably did not understand Chinese in any case — then at di Silva, and then back at Yin. “If you have the strength, Admiral, we will speak of it,” Teguina replied.
“I will speak of nothing until I am reunited with my officers and receive report from them on the status of the men under my command,” Yin said. His words were obviously too much for Teguina, who shook his head, and Yin motioned for Tran to translate.
“You will have what you wish, Admiral Yin,” Teguina said. He smiled evenly. “Then, we will speak of the future of the Philippines — and of
General Wilbur Curtis and the other Joint Chiefs of Staff were seated around the triangular table in their Pentagon conference room, the Tank, listening to Navy Captain Rebecca Rodgers give her morning briefing.
Since the nuclear device had been detonated, things had still not cleared up. If anything, save for the fact that no
“The Chinese government continues to deny any knowledge or claim any responsibility for. the nuclear blast,” Rodgers told the assembly. “The official announcement from Beijing stated that People’s Liberation Army Navy Forces came under sustained and unprovoked attack by Philippine naval and air forces, and that an F-4E attacked their flagship in the vicinity of ground zero before the blast. They claim that the attack was a retaliation by President Mikaso for the patrol action against the so-called illegal oil-drilling platform in the Spratly Island neutral zone. The Premier denies that Chinese warships carry nuclear devices, but they do point to the presence of nuclear weapons at several former American bases in the Philippines…”
“That’s bull,” General Falmouth of the Air Force retorted. “We took all special weapons out of the Philippines years ago.”
“I know, Bill, I know,” Curtis said. “We’ve got inspection records from the United Nations and from the Soviet START Treaty inspection teams to verify it — the President will authorize disclosure of those inspection reports soon. Let Captain Rodgers finish.”
Captain Rodgers continued. “ASEAN, the Association of South East Asian Nations — the Philippines, Brunei, Thailand, Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, and most recently Vietnam, who are, in effect, a counter-Chinese economic and military coalition — have not made a comment on the disaster. But they are meeting tomorrow in Singapore in emergency session to discuss the issue.”
While the Joint Chiefs weren’t surprised at China’s denial of launching the warhead, they were surprised how readily others in power, namely the President and his advisers, were willing — for the time being — to accept it.
Whatever was going on, and whoever was behind it, one thing Curtis knew without a doubt was that the situation was going to escalate. In fact, it seemed to have already…
Captain Rodgers, standing at the end of the triangle behind the podium, kept going. She informed the Joint Chiefs that in accordance with the 1991 START Treaty, the Soviet Union had activated six mobile ICBM battalions in Central Asia, a response to the United States’ DEFCON Three status. Along the Chinese and Mongolia borders, the Soviet Union had activated four missile battalions, equaling forty missiles, and were generating nuclear-capable forces at four bomber bases in south-central Russia. Although eleven hundred other known main, reserve, dispersal, rail-mobile ICBM, and cross-country road-mobile ICBM sites were under manual or satellite surveillance, it didn’t appear that the USSR was gearing up for a major counteroffensive — at least with long-range nuclear forces.
Rodgers switched to an enlarged chart of the mainland of China. “The source of continuing tensions in the past forty- eight hours continues to be the buildup of Chinese tactical forces in deployments along the Mongolian and Soviet border,” Rodgers said. “This is being done, according to the Chinese, as a response to the Soviet buildup.”
General Curtis and the others listened as Captain Rodgers rattled off the Chinese deployment numbers: nineteen total active divisions, four reserve divisions, four hundred thousand troops along a two-thousand-mile front in the north and north-central provinces. The units included twenty-one infantry divisions, seven mechanized divisions, one heavy missile division, four air defense divisions…
There was an uneasy rustle among the Joint Chiefs. Captain Rodgers was talking about a force that was almost as large as America’s and the Soviet Union’s combined.
