USAFRICOM C-21, Atlantic Ocean
November 11, 5:00 P.M.
Traveling eastward, toward night, Williams was reminded of all the jet-lag journeys he had taken, often in big, rattling C-130s which seemed to exist in their own perpetual twilight.
The small, slick, ivory-white C-21 was not that. The passengers felt every bump and nudge of turbulence, though that did not stop Rivette from napping, Grace from reading Daoist texts or meditating, and Breen from reading about the South African health minister and everyone associated with her. One thing Williams had learned about the major was that, like any great attorney, he liked to be prepared.
Williams had been following Berry’s almost continuous stream of updates and forwarded intelligence reports. The latest was that a Chinese corvette had made itself at home off Prince Edward Island and a helicopter had landed. Then there was a photo with this caption from the National Reconnaissance Office:
The PLAN troops are armed and all in hazmat masks.
Berry called a few minutes later. “Beijing’s got balls, I’ll say that.”
“You have said it, many times.”
“Yeah, but dicking around with Taiwan and Japan or even India isn’t the same as planting a flag so far from their shores.”
“It’s not the same, but it was inevitable. Geographically, the islands in the South Indian Ocean are in the path of their westward expansion. Militarily, they want to control whatever is loose on that island.”
“That can’t be allowed, Chase.”
“No? Anyone who approaches, other than South Africa—who will be no match for them—risks a showdown. My white papers at Pacific Command, which no one read, suggested remedies for just this kind of creeping expansion.”
“What did you suggest doing about it?”
“Boosting our financial ties with the nations in that region before China could make them dependent, and quickly boosting their military capabilities.”
“An arms race and investment, multi-pronged escalation,” Berry said. “A recap of what we did with NATO and in Eastern Europe.”
“It broke the USSR,” Williams said. “Forty years later, Russia and the republics are still near bankruptcy.”
“True, though it’s too late for us there, now,” Berry pointed out.
Williams laughed. Once. “I know that tone. What’s your solution?”
“I have what may be a terrible notion, but let’s see how it plays out. What if you and the major were to go see this Barbara Niekerk while Rivette and Grace took a trip to Prince Edward?”
Williams’s mouth twisted. He had not seen that sneak attack. In his mind, Black Wasp and Yemen was an aberration. A terrorist on the run had to be stopped. Rules did not apply. Now, as then—and with a lifetime in the military clinging stubbornly—his mind was still in the old Op-Center way of doing things. That meant relying on the Joint Special Operations Command, a small cell of special operators who were combat ready at any moment. But there was a big difference. They were seconded to Op-Center by a secret memorandum of understanding between the White House, the Department of Defense, and Op-Center. They had a command structure and rules of engagement.
Black Wasp had no restraints.
“My initial reaction?” Williams said. “It’s an effective use of Black Wasp. But baked into that is the uncertainty factor of two young people who like to fight and overreach.”
“They wouldn’t be there otherwise,” Berry said. “They’d sure surprise the hell out of the Chinese.”
“Matt, I’d consider this very carefully,” Williams said, then was silent for a moment. “Dammit. You have, haven’t you? This isn’t a ‘notion.’”
“What the hell is Black Wasp about, if not this exact kind of scenario?”
“I’ll ask another way. Do you want them taking out Chinese troops?”
“Do you want Beijing to create a weaponized microbe that could be exponentially more lethal than the anthrax they currently have?”
“That’s a stupid question.”
“To which the answer is ‘no’?”
“You are talking about a military with massive resources in the region, and the will to use them—”
“We don’t know that, Chase. No one’s seriously challenged them yet.”
“Then why not send in the Carl Vinson and move other naval assets into the region? Blockade the island, nothing in or out.”
“Because the president is concerned, as am I, that the Chinese may not need arms to punch their way out,” Berry said. “If one corvette can use a microbe to upend the U.S. Navy, the balance of power shifts globally, instantly.”
“Until we get the bug. Or a cure. Or both.”
“From the bodies of dead seamen on a ghost ship? No. That’s a new Vietnam, a Desert One, a defeat that lasts for generations.”
Williams had known it was a losing argument from the start. The way Berry had described things was the way they were going to be played. Rivette and Grace in guerrilla warfare against the People’s Liberation Army Navy.
Christ.
“What’s your endgame?” Williams asked. “You want this—what’s your best-case scenario.”
“I don’t know how we stop the Chinese from obtaining whatever is out there, but we need it too.”
“What, we swap electron microscope photos? Mutual assured destruction?”
“Something along those lines. We both develop warheads, we both develop cures, we wait for the arms race to go somewhere else.”
“And if Black Wasp is caught?”
“They’ll be in civvies,” Berry said. “They’ll have no ID and the Chinese have no imagination. Ideally, they’ll take one of them to be local, the other as somewhat local.”
“And not ideally?”
“It still works for us. The Chinese haven’t been shy about fly-by and sail-by near collisions with every military power in the region, including us. Imagine the game changer this could be. They have a hive mentality in the military. Wasp buzzing in their military ear? That will shake them up.”
“The legacy of the Midkiff administration,” Williams said. “A final attempt to rattle Beijing.”
“You think this is a Hail Mary? It’s not. It’s a tactic we’ve been considering for over a year, since we authorized Black Wasp. This is part of what commanders in chief are supposed to do. Stay ahead of an enemy. I didn’t think I had to explain that to you.”
“You don’t. But part of my job is not to send troops on suicide missions.”
“That’s what your job was,” Berry reminded him. “I never told you what the code name for this project was before we settled on ‘Black Wasp,’ did I?”
“You did not.”
“‘Loose Cannons,’” Berry said. “The president had grave reservations about this idea, as he should have. The Intrepid attack forced our hand. The election is forcing it again. How long will it take for President Wright to get up to speed? Six months? A year? In that time, China can control the Indian Ocean. To the north, Russia can reclaim more of its old empire. We need to show them what the United States is doing to define twenty-first-century counter-aggression. We’ve got Space Force above, Black Wasp below—maybe a whole nest of them before long—and the rest of our streamlined, armed-to-the-gills military in between.”
“Sounds good in the telling.”
“You know as well as I do that nothing is guaranteed,” Berry said. “Except doing nothing. That’s certain failure.”
Williams had no rebuttal. His concern was his team—now. Back when he was combatant commander for both Pacific Command and Central Command, he made these same pronouncements, tacitly okayed dangerous special ops missions. Some other officer, who knew the faces, had to worry about their safety.
“Work it out,” Williams said. “I’ll tell the team.”
“Thank you,” Berry replied.
“Sure,” Williams said. “All I have to do is figure out what advice to give them, not that they’ll take it.”
“How about ‘don’t screw up’? They will know exactly what that means.”
Berry was being glib but he was right. When Williams gathered the others around and laid out the situation, he expressed deep concern about the ambiguous mission plan.
Grace was untroubled. Apart from her martial arts skills, her deeply etched belief system showed why she had been selected for the Black Wasp experiment.
“The Chinese neigong philosophy of the Five Positions offers guidance,” she said. “In any situation there are only five things one can do. Progress, regress, stay, expect, and fix. If a fix is not clear, you do one of the others. If it is, you act.”
Major Breen was unconvinced. “What if your fix, in that moment, is clear—say, surviving by killing a Chinese naval officer—but it risks a larger conflagration?”
“That risk is already present,” she said.
“I saw this movie about General Patton, right?” Rivette said. “He wanted to fight Russia while he already had an army in Europe instead of having to go home and come back when the enemy was even stronger. Isn’t that what happened, in Eastern Europe, in Ukraine?”
Williams chuckled. Breen was not amused by that or by the unified militancy of the younger members.
“I guess it’s pointless to ask what happened to diplomacy,” the major said.
“Never stopped a gang war back in L.A., ever,” Rivette said. “I don’t know about all this Shaolin stuff, except what I saw in the movies, but I know that if you let a street fall, then a block fall, then a neighborhood fall—you got Detroit or Watts. No, Major. You stop a bully, you stop a war.”
Breen looked at the clean carpet with its gold and blue pattern. No grime anywhere around the bolts that held the seats to the floor. It was cleaned and maintained by the military. It was done right because there was order. Just like the laws he was sworn to preserve.
“No one can have certainty about anything,” Breen said. “Maybe that’s why I trust in regulations and guidelines. No knock intended, Lieutenant, but to me that means something a little less vague than ‘fix.’” He shrugged. “Maybe I just don’t understand the Five Positions. But I’ll say this. What happened in Yemen was lawless. If we repeat that, and make a habit of repeating that, and forget what it’s like to be civilized, then we haven’t fixed anything.”
The meeting broke up and Williams went back to think about what he and Berry had set in motion.
No one is wrong, he said. The problem is, it also doesn’t necessarily make anyone right.
Fortunately, Williams’s concerns were less subtle, less complex.
All he had to do was try and stop whatever contagion had been let loose in the world.