GWOT VII - Embassy Blues

GWOT VII - Embassy Blues


At long, long last we are starting to get everything settled down.

Our embassy is half finished. We have enough working sinks, toilets and showers that we can move our folks in. Those of us who haven't been using wet wipes and porta potties, that is.

The Republic Marines have switched over to their eye catching dress uniforms. Blue. Baby blue. Recognizably NOT American Marines.

And after much frantic effort, our plane has been unloaded and cleared to depart back to the land of sunny California, carrying a load of Chinese diplomatic personnel as passengers on a California flagged aircraft.

I almost envy my peers in Collections in Sacramento. They get to sleep in a warm bed with a shower every night.

I get to meet with the Ambassador.

This is under several substantial handicaps.

I didn't get a chance to meet her prior to departure.

She hadn't met me at all prior to my assignment to diplomatic work.

I have... a bit of a reputation.

We don't have anything even vaguely resembling a secure room for us to have a secure conversation within. We've tried. We've done our best. But this building was built by someone other than us.

So we are condemned to the fishbowls.

Two bubble helmets connected by a flexible tube. Yes, it's just as nasty as it sounds.

But it is the only way to have a somewhat secure conversation, even inside a room we think we have aggressively safed.

"Colonel 18. I had some secure orders I read carefully before I left California. But it's been a busy month. What exactly do you do around here?" she said, voice muffled through the tube.

"I'm the assistant military attache."

"We don't need bubbles on our heads to talk about that. What do you really do around here?"

The Governor had been very clear with me. The Ambassador works for Pat through a couple of layers. I work for Pat very, very directly.

"A bunch of Secret Squirrel Shit."

"You have amassed quite the list of complaints about you from our host government. Multiple discharges of a firearm, sexual harassment, battery, indecent exposure, unauthorized currency transactions."

"I've taken point. My job is to be a nuisance, a foil, so as to distract Chinese counterintelligence from our real operators."

"A nice cover story, but bullshit. You were, in no particular order, the security manager for a sensitive American national security asset, the warden for an execution site, a Border sector commander, and an Expeditionary Force commander. Your talents are wasted here.

"Unless there is something I don't know about."

"Ambassador, in Iowa I played table stakes for a million lives. I am now on the high roller table, just like you."

She flinched.

"You appreciate of course that as our Ambassador you are told only those things the Governor wants you to know."

"So that I can lie clearly and convincingly to our host government?"

"That too."

I take off the helmet and put it to the side. With relief, so does she.

"Ambassador, we project that China and America will engage in unrestricted nuclear warfare within several months. Possibly sooner. California will be destroyed between them, probably taking shots from both sides."

"Thus our need to open our diplomatic relations with China."

"But they're treating you, and me, as if we are American feelers. Like a public interests section. Not really another country at all. The kind of stunts I've been pulling would get me withdrawn by an American diplomatic corps."

"And I've been told that I cannot, simply cannot, request that you be removed from this assignment. But I can ask that you act with greater discretion."

"And I will continue to require the freedom to act. Freely. And I may well be killed while doing so. And you are not even to raise an eyebrow in protest if I am."

"Why not?"

"Because I need to talk to the people who don't talk to Ambassadors. The movers, the shakers, the capitalists and warlords. And I am utterly expendable."

She doesn't believe me.

"Pat is your friend!"

"And Pat sent me to Iowa with a direct order to stop the genocide or die trying, with all my personnel. In writing.

"If Pat would sacrifice me for a million _Americans_," and my voice dripped with heavy sarcasm, "do you think she'd mind using me up on a small chance to save California?"

The Ambassador nodded, slowly.

And put the helmet back on.

So I did.

"Do you have weapons of mass destruction in my Embassy?"

"Neither confirm nor deny."

"Shit. Why?"

"Discontinue this line of discussion or I will have you shot, Ambassador."

I took off the helmet.

"How dare you?!?" I ranted. "Misusing secure communications to ask me about my _personal_ life, Ambassador? The answer is none of your business, none of your business, none of your _fucking_ business! Ma'am."

I left the room without further courtesy.

She hadn't read her briefing pack as carefully as she should have.

Would I need to have her recalled?

Or, as I threatened in all earnest, shot?

We were not playing for table stakes. Or a mere twenty million lives.

We were playing for billions.

Because the atomic bomb was invented in 1944 and first used in 1945.

Did science hold still, eighty years later?

Fission became fusion. Fusion could trigger fission again. And with big enough weapons, the cycle repeat, until you blew off the planetary atmosphere.

That was the Doomsday Device of fiction and Cold War lore.

California had two.

Russia, China and America had ... as many as they felt they needed to have.

Then there was EMP, Electromagnetic Pulse. Detonate a nuclear bomb at a certain height and you could destroy a national power grid and all its computers and electronics.

California was more vulnerable to this than either America or China. Russia had been doing a _lot_ of hardening.

China had bioweapons. Really scary stuff.

The US had flirted with using bioweapons on China. Not targeted on humans. Targeted on rice.

That would do California as well. We grew everything we could, and more rice grows in California than in Japan.

Then we get to the Secret Squirrel Shit. The stuff that has been written about in bad science fiction for fifty years.

Earthquake generators.

Weather control systems.

Death rays that could assassinate person from orbit, start fires ... or transmitters that could jam a nervous system, causing people to fall down in convulsions, or making them a drooling idiot, temporarily or permanently.

Orbital mind control lasers. Sounds far fetched? Keep thinking that.

I was the keeper of Pandora's Box.

And I was about to make one hell of an unboxing video.