GWOT VII - Took A Little Trip

GWOT VII - Took A Little Trip

Miniaturizing a problem can make it just as dangerous as the monstrosity it was before.

Problem: US and China gonna throw the Big Bags of crap at each other. They've gone to corners, licked their wounds, and are gonna come out shooting.

Minaturized problem: me, wandering through China with a covert weapon of mass destruction and an escort of three, surrounded by State Security police troops.

We'd tried to talk to decision makers in America, I'd been briefed. It had not gone well. Some of our operatives had not come back.

We'd tried to talk to decision makers in China. They hadn't answered their doors.

Thus my opposite of the diplomatic approach. Even Mohammad must come to the mountain.

(Not Mohammed. If there is a God that I must therefore despise for existing, I hope it's Allah, just so he has a place to rest. His son won't speak to me; I can't blame him.)

Over bowls of rice and not exactly mystery meat at the roadhouse, George was politely horrified.

Go driving around pre-Firecracker Jersey and tell the local gestapo that you are on your way to a meeting in New York with oh, Rudi Giuliani or Donald J. Trump. Driving a beat up 1960s Summer of Love minivan. You'll likely get a better reaction.

I'd long ago worked out my method for getting iced tea out of a Chinese restaurant. Order tea and a glass of ice. Pour one into the other. Be prepared for their horrified glances at El Barbariano.

I was pleased to see that it worked in mainland China too.

For my next trick...

George reluctantly acknowledged that what I suggested might be physically possible.

I'd had to make a hard decision. Leave the McGuffin in the vehicle unattended? Bring it in with us and call attention to it?

Or merely look paranoid and make the guards take turns sitting in the jeep instead of fully enjoying their meal break.

Strategic Defense Force - masters and mistresses of stupid boring security tricks.

This would be a diplomatic trick. But I have to explain something about China first.

China's always had emperors and bureaucracy. But they don't do much and their word doesn't carry far, even when they could order executions. (Still can.)

What you want is imperial rank cabinet officials, mandarins, kingmakers, and nowadays ... men of wealth and influence. Businesspeople who buy and sell Fortune 500 corporations. Warlords with armies of accountants, not soldiers - although if they really need any, they can get a division on speed dial.

It was one of them to whom I had to make this pitch. Government would dither, but far more importantly, leak. The timing was short, but not so short that a leak wouldn't kill us all. For broad definitions of 'us.'

Yet superstars of this magnitude do not meet with you just because you want them to. As the rock song says, "Leave a message with your number, maybe I'll call."

You can't really go and knock on their door, either. As a security manager, I knew that. You would bounce off their outer perimeter, if some underling didn't interrogate you for your temerity.

People who knock on the dragon's door tend to get eaten.

I knew this. George knew this. Major Rize did not know this, above her pay grade. The SDF troopers certainly didn't.

George excused himself to make the most important phone call of his life. And maybe mine.

He returned wooden.

"Mr. Zhou will see you tomorrow. He has asked that you accept the hospitality he has arranged."

In the next city over. A hotel, a high rise in fact. Luxury views, isolation from the ground, impossible to escape. And necessary separation from the jeep.

I nodded and thanked him, and asked him to thank Mr. Zhou when that would be appropriate.

Late afternoon meal break over. Now we drive.

###

"How are you going to keep things chill separated from our vehicle?" Major Rize asked.

"We are going to travel together as a four-pack. All you need to do, as a team, is give me fifteen seconds. Less if we're ready for it."

Long enough to reach into the duffel and give the power supply for the Cube a nice hearty yank.

A California ferret satellite was watching the region for what would happen next. If the satellite survived, it would report on three of the four possible scenarios.

Scenario 1: an explosion destroys the Cube, myself, my companions, and some percentage of the elite shock troops trying to take the Cube from us. If the detonator for the shock charges triggered before the Cube went funky. Likely, but not guaranteed.

Scenario 2: China loses another city, and has to decide who to blame. Case Zulu on a faster fuse. Most likely of the unlikely scenarios. We think.

Scenario 3: China is devastated. No nuclear war, because America already one. A breathing space and a resting period before we have to take her down in turn. Pause Case Zulu, maybe for weeks, maybe for years. Depends on how much nuclear winter we get from losing a continent.

Scenario 4: neither the ferret sat nor California are able to communicate with each other, because neither exists any more. The human story ends. Idiot monkeys playing with matches on a gasoline dump.

One of the SDF guards - the one who had faced down the Ambassador - asked if she could put on her music. I agreed.

They didn't know it, but the SDF crew would not be driving. They were the meat, hands and backs and eyes to lighten the load on me.

We hit rush hour traffic coming into the city. Our People's Police escort took point and rolled code. Sirens and lights, get the fuck out of the way. Other escort vehicles followed us.

Into the hotel parking garage. Smooth dismount, SDF troopers with their submachine guns on slings, hand on grip and safeties off. High threat defense protocol.

Slightly shocked crowd, but I was so used to that.

I had my valise of mass destruction. Rize had her personal gear backpack. Both of us wore pistols. I'd borrowed a single grenade from Rize.

There's nothing like a hand grenade to put people on notice. Fuck with us and you will not live through.

The bellhops handled our other baggage. That was fine. But we traveled together in one elevator with George and a token People's Police officer in case a wayward guest or hotel employee needed help shitting their pants.

As I trusted it would be, the enormous penthouse hotel suite was thoughtfully laid out. Our SDF troopers got the outer room, Rize and I got the bedroom with the commanding view of the river.

No doubt, teams of weary countersnipers were already on overwatch. I decided that someone at least could take a break.

"Close the drapes, if you please," I asked. Rize tipped the porters afterwards.

George dismissed the guard to stand watch outside our door. Without asking, he borrowed a nice deep plushy chair.

"Thanks," I said, and meant it. There was a well stocked hotel bar, which I would not touch.

There was a limit to our paranoia. I was not going into Secret Service levels of defense in depth. We'd posted no guard in the roadhouse kitchen, and would have to trust that if we sipped a beer from the hotel minibar, it would not kill us.

I just don't drink. Rize brought me an imitation cola, and popped a weak beer for herself. I waved a hand in permission and one of the two SDF guards did the same.

They would keep trading off, awake and asleep, on duty and off, wordlessly. For the rest of the deployment. Weeks, months, years.

I felt a sudden pang of nostalgia for Brooke. This would have been a sweet gig for her.

But I needed all my attention for the most dangerous man in the room.

"So, we have at this point aimed quite a number of devices at whatever you have in that valise. It is not nuclear, or none of us would have left the elevator alive. If it is chemical, it is not lethal enough to be of interest. If it is a biological, your dispersal plan is ass and if worst came to worst, we could seal off a kilometer radius and condemn it. It is a communications device, but it is not just communications."

I mouthed the word "Vienna." I didn't even have to say it any more.

"You have full diplomatic immunity, as do your personal effects and your entourage. But the elevator has kindly informed me that whatever is in that valise is over eighty kilograms. Enough for an atomic demolition munition. Not enough to shield one from radiation sensors. But far more than conventional explosives would require."

Damn. Elevator. Of course. WIth the weight of our luggage, George, his man, estimates for the four of us...what goes up can be weighed on the way.

"It is a demonstrator. Is this suite bugged?"

George sighed.

"Of course."

"Mr. Zhou will want to have control of who learns about this. I hope that he will deign to be present. I know, because he is not a fool, that only his most trusted persons will become aware before he does. I don't know whether he trusts you."

"We have had much time to think about that item. There is a curse that Europe and Asia both share. 'May no new thing arise.' I fear that this is a genuinely new thing."

I nod. Confirmation, if he needed it.

"There is another new thing in America. One you asked physicists to come look at."

"California," I corrected firmly.

"Yes, at your lab in Downey. It is big. This is very small. Perhaps a communications device."

"Stop," I urged. "This room cannot be secure from the Americans."

He cocked his head.

"Your stubborn insistence that Taiwan is not part of China, or that California is not part of America, deeply confuses us."

Then he stopped himself.

What would Taiwan do, if needled and prodded and murdered the way California has been?

If the two are truly inseparable ... exactly what Taiwan attempted in the early days of the Firecracker War.

Hostile takeover.

George was beginning to get it.

If the clock on Case Zulu hadn't been ticking, it sure as hell was now.