SOAR: A Black Ops Novel

The summit and subsequent treaty signing was a one-day event. The president, wary of providing the Chinese with more than a limited diplomatic success, had insisted that his visit be brief. And so, Air Force One landed at Beijing’s international airport at precisely eight in the morning. The big plane would depart at six for New Delhi, and a two-day summit with Naresh Chowdhery, the Indian prime minister. By ten past eight, Pete Forrest, accompanied by the first lady and the secretary of state and his wife, had begun the forty-five-minute motorcade into the city through the acrid, yellow-tinged air that gave most first-time visitors a mild case of bronchitis.

Sam Phillips, Ritzik, and Wei-Liu touched down nineteen minutes after the president along with the rest of the White House and State Department staff on the big silver-and-blue 747 that served as a backup plane for Air Force One. Once they’d run a gauntlet of Chinese officials and received their summit credentials (which were laminated inside in bright red plastic sleeves emblazoned with gold and intertwined with U.S. and PRC flags), they — and the traveling press corps — were herded onto a half-dozen boxy diesel buses. It took more than an hour and a half to creep through the morning rush-hour traffic into the gridlocked center of the Chinese capital, despite the fact that the convoy had a motorcycle escort of Chinese national police outriders shepherding them to the west side of the hundred-acre Tiennanmen Square, where the Great Hall of the People was located.

Pulling up just beyond the wide portico, the three were struck by the sheer, incredible, gargantuan scale of the place. The Great Hall—Renmin Dahiutang in Chinese — was designed in the Soviet neoclassical monumental style. According to Sam Phillips, who’d done the most homework, the Great Hall had been built in only ten months, from October 1958 to the end of August 1959, during the time known as Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward. The building and its immediate grounds covered thirty-seven acres. The main auditorium, where Wei-Liu, Ritzik, and Sam Phillips would watch the signing ceremony, could hold just over ten thousand people on the vast floor and tiered balconies. The huge, domed ceiling with its immense red Communist star soared more than a hundred feet. Below the star, row upon row of curved wooden desks held earphones for simultaneous translation of speeches.

On either side of the main entrance were hung huge red-and-white banners, pledging, according to Sam, eternal friendship and an endless supply of cross-training footgear from the slave labor of China, to benefit the proletarian masses of the United States. Wei-Liu, highly dubious, checked with one of their Chinese minders, who explained that the banners were five-year-old exhortations to increase domestic production and exports. Sam insisted the minders had been brainwashed and were not to be trusted.

The Americans made their way inside through an oversized polished brass revolving door. The wide, shallow staircase leading to the first floor was carpeted with Ming-dynasty antique rugs and lined with eight-foot-high cloisonné vases dating from the mid-nineteenth century. Above them hung a series of intricate crystal chandeliers two yards across. At the top of the stairs, the delegation was led into a lounge slightly smaller than the Rotunda of the U.S. Capitol, where they were served a late breakfast while Pete Forrest and Wu Min, the Chinese leader, held the first of their two one-on-one meetings.

1547. The senior American delegates were ushered into the Great Hall’s main auditorium to the polite applause of the nine thousand Chinese government apparatchiks recruited as window dressing for the treaty signing. Ritzik scanned the rows of men in olive green and the big uniform hats reminiscent of Rittenhouse Square doormen for Major General Zhou Yi, whose face he’d memorized from a DIA briefing book. Zhou Yi was nowhere to be found. But his rival, Yin Zhong Liang, the commander of the Beijing Military District, was prominently positioned among the Chinese dignitaries. Ritzik spent a few minutes watching Yin. The general was obviously in a jovial mood, reflected by his animated expression, smiling and laughing as he sat with his Politburo colleagues waiting for the ceremony to begin.

And then, the murmuring stopped and there were perhaps five or six seconds of absolute silence as the Chinese and American presidents began the long march across the patterned beige-and-green carpet onto the wide platform. Before they’d gone three paces the ten thousand spectators in the big auditorium erupted into applause.