Eagle Station

“Yes, sir,” Brad confirmed. “We’re ready.”

“Well, all right, then,” John Dalton Farrell, president of the United States, told him. “You have the green light. I figure it’s time to send the powers that be in Beijing the kind of message those sons of bitches will understand.”

Two

Command Center, Central Military Commission of the People’s Republic of China, August 1st Building, Beijing

That Same Time

A brisk northerly wind had temporarily freed Beijing from its near-perpetual blanket of thick, choking smog, and the August 1st Building’s tall white walls and columns gleamed in the spring sunshine. The whole enormous edifice, with its faintly pagoda-style roofs, loomed over its neighbors in the capital city’s western reaches as a reminder of the state’s power and authority. Named for the Nanchang uprising of August 1, 1927—a bloody clash between Communist and Nationalist forces later celebrated as the founding of the People’s Liberation Army — it was the headquarters of the Chinese Communist Party’s Central Military Commission.

In a command center buried deep below the surface, the commission’s seven permanent members and an array of other senior PLA officers had gathered to control the events unfolding thousands of kilometers away in the South China Sea. In both law and current practice, the Central Military Commission exercised complete authority over China’s armed forces. Its chairman was always the Party’s general secretary, the man who also served as president of the People’s Republic. And now, more than ever, the ruling communist elite was determined to keep the levers of military power firmly in its own hands.

Several years before, the machinations of an ambitious chief of the general staff, Colonel General Zu Kai, had threatened the Party’s absolute authority over the nation. Once his coup was quietly quashed, China’s shaken civilian autocrats had tightened their control over the armed forces. Purges disguised as anti-corruption campaigns had systematically eliminated a whole generation of senior officers tainted by what was labeled “inappropriate interest in politics.”

The younger generals and admirals who survived were only too aware that their careers, and even their very lives, now rested entirely in the hands of China’s new leader — President Li Jun. He was younger, better educated, and far more ruthless than his aging and ill predecessor, Zhou Qiang. Zhou’s hold on the Party had weakened steadily in the wake of the attempted military coup and his abject kowtowing to Russia’s now-dead leader, Gennadiy Gryzlov, during yet another confrontation with the United States. Last year’s orbital battles between Russia’s Mars One space station and America’s revolutionary spaceplanes had struck the final blow. Confronted by the shattering realization that both Russia and America had leapfrogged China in critical areas of military space technology, a cadre of Party leaders organized by Li had shunted Zhou aside — sending him into retirement in permanent, guarded seclusion.

A skilled political infighter with a thorough grounding in the technologies of the future, Li Jun kept himself fit and trim. He moved with the athletic grace of a man in peak physical condition and perfect health, ostentatiously refraining from the “Western vices” of alcohol and tobacco. Part of this was from personal conviction. More of it was the result of pure, cold-blooded political calculation. Zhou’s growing illness had been the catalyst for his ouster, eventually persuading the Party’s top echelons that the old man was too feeble to threaten them. Li Jun had no intention of sending any similar signals of weakness. In the fiercely competitive and sometimes deadly sphere of China’s internal politics, it was essential that he remain the apex predator.

With that in mind, Li studied the others seated around the long rectangular table. Most of them were relatively new to their posts, handpicked by him for their loyalty, competence, and eagerness to pursue innovative weapons, strategies, and tactics. One by one they met his gaze and nodded. If any of them had doubts about what he planned, those doubts were well hidden.

Satisfied, Li turned to Admiral Cao. “The Americans have ignored our repeated warnings?”

“Yes, Comrade President,” the stocky naval officer said. “Their ships are still continuing on course into our territorial waters.”

Li shook his head in mock dismay. “Most unfortunate.”

He turned to a middle-aged army officer farther down the table. General Chen Haifeng headed the Strategic Support Force — an organization that combined the PLA’s military space, cyberwar, electronic warfare, and psychological warfare capabilities in one unified command. “Are your satellites in position, General?”