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“They’re still there, stretched out in a skirmish line,” he says. “Not moving. Lin, check out the kitchen, there’s a window looking to the rear. Want to make sure we don’t have another group coming up that way.”
“All right,” Lin says. She goes to the small kitchen, peers out the small rear window over the sink. “All clear back here.”
Liam waits.
Benjamin walks up to him. “Well?”
“Still waiting. Is there such a thing as a South African standoff?”
“If there is, we’re about to find out.”
A black Mercedes-Benz sedan comes up the dirt road, parks behind the line of Range Rovers. The four doors open and three well-dressed men look out, and then a fourth man steps out. There’s a brief conversation and the fourth man starts walking alone up the dirt road.
All four men are Chinese.
“Lin?” Liam asks. “Borrow you for a moment?”
Lin comes into the living room and Liam hands over the set of binoculars.
“Check out that man coming our way,” Liam says. “Know him?”
She puts the binoculars up to her eyes, and then quickly lowers them.
“That’s Han Yuanchao,” she says. “The intelligencerezidentat our embassy in Johannesburg. My boss.”
Liam nods. “That’s damn awkward.”
CHAPTER 126
THE SECOND SCARIEST event in Tucker Wyman’s life was when he was in the 82nd Airborne, and his main chute tangled up during a night drop over the Holland Drop Zone at Fort Bragg. He worked hard to get the lines free but it wasn’t working, then the damn reserve chute was jammed somehow, and in the darkness all he knew was that he was approaching the unforgiving earth with just seconds to spare.
One more tug and the reserve popped open, late but still good enough to let him land and survive, with one broken foot and one broken ankle.
That had been some scary shit.
But that was fun and games compared to what he’s seeing in the National Military Command Center at the Pentagon, now as General Tucker Wyman, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
The phones are ringing, the display boards are lit up, and more support staff are streaming in as he and others on the Joint Chiefs of Staff are trying to figure out why in hell China is on the move this morning.
The NMCC is a labyrinth of rooms and conference centers deep into the basement of the Pentagon. General Wyman is in theCurrent Actions Center, where the latest information from the DoD’s elaborate network of surveillance ships, aircraft, and satellites feed through in real time.
The information this morning is coming quick at him and the members of the J-3 (Operations) Directorate. A woman Navy commander comes up to him and says, “Sir, it looks like everything the Chinese can fly, float, and drive are heading out of port, bases, and airfields. I’ve never seen anything like it, even in simulations.”
Wyman says, “Do we have contact with the SecDef?”
“No, sir,” she says. “Communication problems in his aircraft over Japan. Might be electronic interference from the Northern Lights … there’s a heavy solar storm screwing up transmissions. The deputy secretary is on his way here.”
Wyman hears the low voices, the tapping of the keyboards, the ringing of the phones, but his experienced eyes are up on the screens, showing a massive Chinese exodus of military forces from their bases.
The vice chairman of the JCS, Marine General Wade Thompson, comes to him and says, “Never seen anything like it, sir.”
“What in hell prompted this? Do we have any action reports? Aircraft encounters? Ship collisions? Inadvertent missile firing?”
“Nothing,” he says.
“Any of our surveillance aircraft go off course?”
“No, sir,” he says.
