“Just have a care,” said Bunty. “That’s all I’m saying.”
“I’m just thinking about work,” said Nate.
“Again with the American slang,” said Marigold.
Dust chicken drumsticks and thighs with turmeric and salt and pepper; place on baking sheet; and bake until done. In a wok, fry chili paste, tomato paste, chopped garlic, chopped ginger, curry powder, star anise, cinnamon, cloves, honey, salt, and water until fragrant. Add scallions and onions sliced into rings, and toss to coat. Add chicken and simmer until sauce is thick and onions are soft. Serve with rice.
27
Doomsday Option
The recruitment of PLARF source SONGBIRD and the subsequent intelligence stream of secret information on Chinese war-fighting capabilities triggered the usual feeding frenzy as Washington careerists and the tall poppies in Canberra sought to extract maximum political advantage from the windfall recruitment. This they did primarily by discussing the case—about which they knew nothing—around town as if they themselves had conceived, planned, and green-lighted the operation, and personally swam ashore on Hac Sa Beach at midnight with commando knives between their teeth.
CIA’s China Ops Division sought to protect SONGBIRD’s identity by compiling a BIGOT list documenting the limited number of officers, analysts, and managers who were read in to the true-name operational file. A separate reporting compartment encrypted HYACINTH was established with general intelligence on the Chinese military from a variety of sources, designed to obfuscate SONGBIRD’s specific position and access.
In Canberra, an Australian undersecretary for Domestic Security had vaguely heard about “recent exceptional information” involving Chinese submarines, and had repeated the comment at a National Day reception at the Indonesian Embassy within earshot of the New China News Agency correspondent who was trying to get through jostling diplomats mobbing the buffet table. The NCNA rep reported this to the military attaché at the Chinese Embassy the next day.
In Washington, a swarthy, puffed-up deputy national security adviser in the White House, known for his five o’clock shadow and imperious self-confidence, told his Taiwanese mistress—she was a lobbyist on the Hill for the Hyundai Motor Group—that his erectile dysfunction earlier that evening almost certainly was caused by worry over Chinese military buildup in the South China Sea. “That’s old news,” she said as she put Mr. Softy into her mouth, with no effect other than eliciting a petulant “No, it’s brand-new info, and you’d be distracted too if you read what I read.” His mistress reported his comment the next morning to her real employer,
About the same time in Macao, police arrested a local ring of young men who were caught smuggling MDMA—Ecstasy—from Guangzhou to sell to party-going patrons in the casinos. Desperate to ingratiate himself with interrogators, one of the men—a waiter at Fernando’s Restaurant on Hac Sa Beach—said he suspected Russian organized-crime gangs were already operating in Macao, and described a dinner meeting he had observed between a Chinese official with a military-style haircut, and a young Russian. Given the Russian connection, the police forwarded the transcript of the interrogation to the Guangzhou MSS office, from where it eventually made its way to headquarters.
In Beijing,
As they sifted the few leads, the Security Bureau checked all recent foreign travel by PLA general officers. Though Macao was technically Chinese sovereign territory, an investigator from the Guangzhou MSS office was directed to determine how many generals and admirals had traveled to Macao in the past six months. The list of hair-raisingly prominent names of PLA officers was so long that the independent-minded Guangzhou office decided not to report anything. SONGBIRD’s name, accordingly, never came up.
