Drone Command

THIRTY-EIGHT

Lane stood barefoot in the kitchen of his private residence, one of three in the White House. His kids and sick wife were still in bed, sound asleep. He flipped over the sizzling grilled cheese sandwich, its edges dripping with cheddar and Gouda. A real no-no in the Lane household as far as calories and fat were concerned, but exactly what the doctor ordered, especially after his phone call with President Sun.

He’d screwed up, but it was a screwed-up situation all around. He’d made an idle threat and Sun had called him on it, but he needed to say something other than pretty please. Both men knew Lane wouldn’t risk starting a war over the detention of one individual, and Sun’s reference to Pearce possibly being a spy was chilling. The Chinese didn’t coddle foreign nationals who committed crimes on their soil. They had recently executed several South Korean, Japanese, and even British citizens for drug-related offenses, even over the diplomatic protests of those governments.

Lane dumped his grilled cheese on a plate, snagged a Revolver Blood & Honey beer from the fridge, and headed for the kitchen table.

He took a bite of the hot sandwich, sucking up a long string of gooey cheese like it was a piece of spaghetti. Chewing, he thought more about his conversation with Sun, but something else was bothering him.

The labor secretary had delivered more bad news earlier in the day about current employment stats, especially labor participation rates. They were continuing to fall. More and more Americans were simply giving up looking for work, and the great middle class was shrinking. The growing income disparity wasn’t merely a social-justice issue, it was a matter of grave political and economic concern. A thriving capitalist democracy depended on a thriving middle class. A few wealthy people standing on a wide base of impoverished masses was a formula for social unrest, economic catastrophe, and maybe even revolution.

It was the Texas congresswoman Dolly Waddlington who had been giving him the most hell on the subject of the middle class in the last few weeks. The fiery little Republican was infamous for the safari trophy heads hanging on her office walls, each identified with a brass plaque listing the location and date of her kill. Her favorite was the giant snarling javelina. She claimed to have shot the four-hundred-pound charging pig between the eyes with a .357 Magnum revolver less than three yards away before it might have ripped her to shreds with those big yellow tusks. She named the fearsome beast ISIS.

But it was the political hides she’d skinned over the years on both sides of the aisle that impressed Lane. An unapologetic nationalist, Waddlington had been blistering his ear on the phone for weeks now about the pernicious Chinese trade deficit that ran in the hundreds of billions of dollars year after year. Besides locking out U.S. firms from their markets with unfair regulations, manipulating the yuan-dollar relationship, and their virulent industrial espionage program, it was cheap Chinese labor and bad American tax laws that really fueled the trade disparity. No wonder China’s economy was now the largest in the world.

As a Democrat, Lane bristled at the idea that his party continuously put the interests of multinational corporations over the average American worker, hiding behind the gilded skirts of the big labor unions who themselves should have been fighting against America’s crippling trade deficits with China and the rest of the world. But most of the big union bosses were as corrupt as many of the congressmen he’d worked with on both sides of the aisle. Some of the very biggest corporations making the most obscene profits from cheap overseas labor were the Democrats’ biggest contributors. Historically, the Democratic Party had been the champion of labor, but in the last two decades, the labor they were championing was foreign, particularly Chinese.

Many of the same millionaires and billionaires in his party who complained — rightly — about gross income inequality were partly to blame for the crisis. The middle class was being decimated by so-called free-trade agreements and, worse, the pursuit of profits at the expense of people and the nation. High-tech corporations like HP, Facebook, and Microsoft decried the shortage of American engineering talent, which simply wasn’t true. Lane had seen the numbers. Every year, twenty-five thousand freshly minted American engineering graduates couldn’t find STEM employment. But the high-tech companies kept clamoring for H-1B visas — fast-ticket entry for lower-wage technical talent from abroad — even as they were laying off tens of thousands of high-wage American employees year after year, exporting their jobs to lower-paying foreign labor markets.

Just like the Republicans, too many Democrats gladly signed on to legislation that incentivized job exports and eagerly encouraged unfettered immigration, legal and otherwise. Those two policies alone were enough to decimate the great American middle class and trap the working poor. Lane was proud to be an old-school Kennedy Democrat, the party that used to work hard for working Americans instead of working hard to get reelected. He was determined to right the ship.

Lane took a swig of his beer. The sweet bite of the Revolver’s blood orange peel was a perfect match to his savory grilled cheese.

He thought about his meeting back in the Tank. Something nagged at him. The United States was spending tens of billions of dollars every year preparing for a potential war with China. So why in the hell are we even trading with them? The answer sickened him.

By locating their operations in China for the cheap labor — and in order to avoid the labor regulations that protected American workers — too many American corporations had unintentionally helped fund China’s massive military expansion, including the Wu-14 that now threatened America’s carrier fleet, which, ironically, protected the sea-lanes that enriched those American corporations and their officers in the first place.

Lane was also the proud son of a proud Vietnam veteran. Like most thinking Americans, Lane understood that the values of communism, like those of radical Islam, threatened human rights and freedoms. Tens of millions of Chinese had died under Mao’s reign of terror, and that was no accident. Communism was to Mao what fascism was to Hitler. America would never have traded with Germany after the war if the Germans hadn’t renounced fascism, and yet the Chinese government not only had never renounced communism, but it also still actively promoted and defended it.

It was time to put a stop to all of it.

The Wu-14 situation was the first problem at hand, but that was only a symptom of a much bigger issue. It was clear to him now he had to find a way to completely transform the Sino-American relationship. Either China was a friend or a foe. It couldn’t be both. If he could somehow help Sun push through his reforms, China might become a trusted ally instead of a strategic competitor. But how could he help Sun at a time like this?

The original mission he initiated with Pearce and Myers was to secure the design of the Wu-14. But the mission profile suddenly changed in his mind. If Pearce was going to die, it needed to be for something more significant than just a missile blueprint. Unless the Sino-American relationship changed, the Chinese would inevitably build a more powerful missile in preparation for future conflict anyway.

The path was now clear in his mind. Lane wouldn’t lose the chance to change China and make America more secure in the process. He’d do whatever it took, even if it cost him the presidency. Or worse.

So be it.