Without warning

Ritchie didn’t need to consult his notes or an aide. He’d been living Operation Uplift for nearly three weeks. ‘Ninety per cent complete, General,’ he answered. ‘TRANSCOM has moved eighty-three thousand US citizens from India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh to reception facilities in Australia and New Zealand. We’re still shifting up to a thousand a week, but the flow has really tapered off.’

‘Anybody who’s not out soon is going to get turned into an x-ray,’ said Franks. ‘We’ve done what we can. I don’t want our people there in large numbers when one of those fools presses the button. I think we might put a deadline of this Friday local time for Uplift. After that, anyone dumb enough to hang around will be on their own. That timing sound right to you, Maccomb?’

‘It’s tight,’ replied the briefer. ‘The Indians have begun to prepare their launch sites. A lot of embassies are already shutting up and getting out. The Brits and Aussies have upgraded their travel advisories to the highest level, warning of immediate interstate conflict.’

‘Okay. Wednesday – midnight. That’s the end of it for us. Go on.’

‘China.’ Maccomb paused briefly as if that was all that was needed on the subject. ‘While the People’s Republic does not suffer from some of the ethnic division present in France, on our reading of the current situation its future is just as bleak. The economy hasn’t imploded, it just ceased to be. There were already imbalances and rigidities building up before 14 March. Thousands of state-run enterprises were being propped up just to keep the rural poor fed and housed. Now, hundreds of millions of people have no income, and in the cities, no means of supporting even a subsistence level of existence. China was a net food importer when the Disappearance hit. It cannot feed itself. The PLA, which had begun to deploy some force projection assets around the Taiwan Strait, is now fully engaged within the country’s borders. The government has imposed a media blackout and expelled all but a handful of foreign journalists, and their movements are tightly controlled. Most of our in-country assets were managed from CONUS and are of little use now. But we do have some access to British and Russian intel, and they are convinced that a schism has opened both between the army and the Communist Party, as well as within those institutions. At 0230 hours this morning, the FSB’s Beijing station was reporting that major combat had broken out within the city between elements of the People’s Armed Police and at least two divisions of Army Group 6, including armoured and artillery units. Admiral Ritchie will have more on this, in a few minutes.’

Ritchie felt the weight of everyone’s attention fall on him.

Franks met the admiral’s gaze. ‘Very quickly, Jim. You think they’re going to turn this inwards, or out, on the rest of us?’

‘Inwards,’ he replied without hesitation. ‘At least in the short term. Command and control of the Chinese state is failing – has failed. This is about re-establishing that control, but it won’t be simple or easy, or something that happens very quickly. Like the colonel said, they have hundreds of millions of people who might well starve to death in the next few weeks. Jumping across the Taiwan Strait will not change that. It’ll simply make dealing with it all the more difficult, and at any rate, the chain of command is broken. They can only fight among themselves, for now.’

‘Okay,’ said Franks. ‘That’ll do for the wrap-up. Let’s start grinding our way through the to-do list, shall we?’

* * * *

They met privately during a break in the all-day conference, Franks joining Ritchie in his office to share a cup of powdered coffee. There wasn’t a drop of the real stuff to be had on the islands.

‘This French business, we’re gonna have to do something about it,’ Franks told him. ‘I wouldn’t have believed it when you first told me, but this latest intelligence from the Brits nails it. We have to get that girl out, Jim.’

Ritchie drained the last of his lukewarm Java and pondered the view out of his window. Another beautiful Hawaiian day. It seemed perverse, given the state of the world, but he knew that even out there, things were going badly. Most of the islands’ nonresidential population had already been moved on to resettlement facilities elsewhere in the Pacific. Almost none had volunteered to return to the mainland.

‘Well, it explains a lot,’ said Ritchie. ‘Especially about what Blair has done, I suppose. How are we going to get her? She’s dropped off the grid.’

Franks shook his head. ‘We’ve found her again. Sarkozy’s people grabbed her an hour ago.’

* * * *

37 SEATTLE, WASHINGTON