Code of Honor

8

The Chinese heart is well versed in quiet, seething hate — and General Song Biming was more accomplished than most. The ill-informed might believe that General Song hated Bai for personal reasons. While it was true that Bai had stolen Song’s girl all those years ago, there was much more to it than that. In Song’s mind, it was as simple as up and down or black and white. Bai was evil and Song was good. Was not good supposed to hate evil? If a child drew a picture of an evil man, fat and frowning Bai Min would have provided a likely model. Where Song was tall and fit, with salt-and-pepper hair and a ramrod-straight military bearing, Bai was a head shorter and as round as a steamed meat bun. Song had once read that the ex-lover of a heavyset British MP had described sex with the man as like having a very large wardrobe with a small key fall on top of her. Certainly an apt assessment of anything to do with Bai Min. Song took perverse pleasure in the fact that the onetime object of his affection had chosen someone so foul with whom to spend her life.

Among his more disgusting qualities was the fact that he steadfastly refused to trim his wild eyebrows. This only added to the troll-like visage of his prune of a face. Of course, he had not always been so. Somehow he’d been handsome and gallant enough to win Ling’s hand. He was already a powerful general by the time the weight of his backstabbing had stooped his shoulders and twisted his face. By then it did not matter. In fact, Song had heard that President Zhao preferred his generals to be less handsome than he was. Bai’s status had seen to it that Ling was able to shop at good stores and live in nice apartments. Still, her once beautiful face held a perpetual look of astonishment at how ugly her husband had turned out, as if someone had just blown a puff of air into her eyes. She surely knew, as did Song, that General Bai was up to his neck in something rotten.

Song leaned back in his creaking leatherette chair and took a sip of tea.

He and Bai were both general officers, but as a lieutenant general, Bai had line-item authority over the furnishings and maintenance budget at the shared war-simulation facility run by the Science and Technology Commission of the People’s Liberation Army. Apart from elite party members and a few department heads, furniture used by Chinese government officials tended toward the utilitarian, but the tightfisted bastard Bai went out of his way to see that all the desks on the south side of the complex were secondhand, surely stained with the tears of the minions who had occupied them before. Song’s assistant, a short major with a broad smile and an even broader wife, had a desk that looked as if it had been used as part of a barricade to fend off some guerilla army. Where the south wing was tattered and sprung, every chair and sofa in the north wing was shiny and plush. Normally, such trivialities would have mattered little to Song, but events were not going his way. He sipped his tea and looked grimly at the floor-to-ceiling world map projected on the far wall. Flashing icons showed the location of both Chinese and enemy aircraft, ships, mechanized units, and ground troops in various locations from Japan to the Philippines. Three Chinese Type 094 Jin-class submarines prowled the waters of Hawaii and the West Coast of the United States.

Song took another drink of tea and watched the light representing the submarine nearest San Diego, California, flash, then disappear from the screen.

The outcome of this scenario was not his fault, but he would be blamed for it nonetheless. The rank of general was lonely at best, but Song did little to engender good feelings from his comrades — the men who would normally have watched his back during these perilous times. He drank in moderation — surely a reason not to be trusted — and despised parties. He steered clear of side “investments.” There was no private villa for him with a live-in mistress in the mountains outside Beijing. Men with bent or broken morals felt judged whether one judged them or not, and Song Biming found himself a pariah at staff meetings, where discussions always seemed to turn to growing bank accounts and manly prowess with nubile young women. Song had no stories — or at least none of interest to the other generals. None of those men wanted to hear about how Song’s buxom but slightly chubby wife of thirty-one years made the best pork buns in all of China. He listened politely to their whore stories, noting that though most of the exploits had to be highly embellished, sex with his wife sounded vastly superior to any of their imagined escapades. His wife was a good woman, enough of a natural expert in that realm to keep him more than satisfied. She was inquisitive about his work, interested but not nosy, and ambitious enough to push him when he needed to be pushed. She’d resigned herself early on to the fact that she was not his first choice for a wife — and was fine with that, as long as she was his last. So far, he’d kept his end of that bargain. She’d given him more than three decades of unquestionable support, and a fine daughter, who had, in turn, given them a beautiful granddaughter, Niu, who was the light of his life — and the only thing that could take his mind off the tragedy of his work.

Song was a proud man. One did not get to be a general in the People’s Liberation Army without having a certain measure of gravitas and ego. But this downward spiral of fortune made him feel sorry for his family. His wife had been nothing but faithful, pinning all her hopes and dreams on his career. She certainly didn’t deserve this. Any semblance of status he’d ever had was rapidly slipping away — in no small measure because of General Bai Min. Something had to be done — and soon.

Song’s hand began to tremble with rage and he set the cup down on his desk in a puddle of spilled tea. Bai, that deceitful old dog, would find much pleasure in the results playing out on the screen. China was losing this simulation — as she always did eventually, when correct data was used in the program. Unlike war games involving actual troops, the enemy in this simulation did not lay down arms at the appropriate moment to make China look good. Computers did not lie — unless they were told to, and even then they spat out the only truth they knew. Song was ever exacting in his requirements that his programs be realistic and accurate to the nth degree, running thousands of permutations for each battle. He was privy to the latest intelligence data — which he insisted be raw, not preanalyzed or, as the Americans said, spun to suit PLA purposes. He’d stupidly thought that his mandate from Chairman Zhao for a true representation of fighting outcomes would be used to improve China’s capabilities. Instead, the computer-generated losses had been used to beat him over the head — principally by General Bai, his old foe since their days at the National University of Defense Technology, China’s premier military academy, when Bai had stolen his woman.

Religion took the blame for a great many wars; God was merely an excuse. The root of most conflict boiled down to two things: territory or women. President Zhao craved territory, not enough to start a war, not yet. No, the next conflict would only appear to be fought over territory. If a war with the West happened in the near future, it would be Song and Bai’s feud that started it.

Song breathed deeply, regaining enough control to pick up his tea. He needed to return to the matter at hand — watching his computer program demonstrate how the West would soundly beat China. Light after light blinked out, one after another on the screen, signifying the loss of Chinese assets. Computer simulations unfolded much faster than they did in real time, adding to Song’s misery. What was that quaint American saying? That was it. The Americans were handing them their asses.

The motherland did well at the beginning of each scenario — but she always lost in the end. And Song always had to watch.

Formerly a PLA training hall, the moldering bunker sloped downward from the entry toward the wall with the map where the instructor’s lectern would have been. Twenty-two uniformed subordinates sat in near darkness at two rows of desks in the amphitheater-like room, facing the map as they pecked on computers or mumbled into their radio headpieces. Most of them were conscripts, forced into doing their bit.

The light signifying the last submarine off the California coast went dark. Song set the teacup on the desk again, forcefully enough to cause the young woman a row in front of him to look up at the clatter. She looked away as if she’d seen something frightening. A phlegmy cough rattled over Song’s shoulder.

“Rubbing Chinese noses in the dirt again, I see,” General Bai observed, hands resting pompously on the top of his round belly. His aide-de-camp and toady, Chang, stood beside him. Pale and scaly, Chang sifted flakes of dandruff wherever he walked. It was off-putting, to say the least, but it also had the effect of making people think Chang far more benign than Song knew him to be.

Song stood. As a lieutenant general, Bai outranked him.

“The scenarios offer no benefit if they do not unfold without intervention.”

“Perhaps,” Bai mused, eyes squinting over fat cheeks at the screen. “Or perhaps battle cannot be reduced to ones and zeros. Your children’s games fail to take into account the heart and spirit of our Chinese countrymen.”

Song closed his eyes, steadying himself. “And your war games offer more reality?”

“Exercises,” Bai corrected. “Exercises carried out with flesh-and-blood players, not to mention actual weapons and technology. Surely you would agree that that is a much better predictor of outcomes than lines of computer code.” He nodded toward the flashing map and chuckled. “Your pretend games are doing so well, perhaps one day you will receive a pretend promotion.”

Song clenched his jaw, fighting the urge to smash Bai in the face with his teacup. Bai had won the girl — all those years ago. There was no reason for him to gloat. But he did. A lot.

“So, Comrade General,” Song sighed, dripping with sarcasm. “To what do I owe the pleasure of this visit?”

“An invitation,” Bai said.

“In that case I will save you the trouble and decline in advance.”

“This is not the kind of invitation one can decline,” Bai said. “We are summoned to meet with President Zhao and explain our programs. I am to give him a full brief on the victories and lessons learned from our latest exercise off the Korean coast. You will tell him how the same PLA Navy that won handily is always beaten by the end of your computer games.”

What do you think?” Bai asked his bagman, Chang, five minutes after they’d left Song’s game room and were safely back on their own side of the building. Bai wouldn’t have put it past the old dog to bug the walls outside his office. Bai had done just that, which was why there wasn’t much chatter in the halls of the north wing.

“General Song is tireless in pursuit of his mission,” Chang said. “He knows he is right, and that shows on his face.”

“A dangerous combination.” Bai grunted, half to himself. “Moral superiority and a work ethic.”

“Difficult to stop a man like that,” Chang conceded, scratching his chin.

“Nonsense,” Bai said. “I said dangerous, not invincible.” He waved sausage fingers at his aide. “And anyway, we do not need to stop him. We are ahead. I merely want to make sure Chairman Zhao does not buy into his fatalistic beliefs before we have everything in place.”

Chang nodded. “The software is everything we had hoped for and more. I would like to continue with a few more tests, but—”

“Continue with whatever tests you wish,” the general said. “But I want FIRESHIP moving forward. It is ready, is it not?”

“I believe so, General Bai,” Chang said. “But—”

“You believe?” Bai clenched his fists, looking around as if he needed something to strike. “I do not need belief. I need certainty.”

“A few more tests,” Chang said. “Then I will be certain.”

“If we go forward and fail, the chairman will put our backs against a concrete wall and shoot us in the heart.”

The major kept his voice low and calm, an engineer under pressure, too focused on his task to realize how great the threat truly was. “My people are running diagnostics as we speak. This software is…” He shook his head. “Extremely volatile.”

“Volatile?” Bai said. “It is a computer program. A virus.”

“No, General,” Chang said. “It is not a virus. Though it can behave as one. It has a mind of its own. We must take extra precautions to be certain that the program is contained until we want it not to be. Otherwise the outcome could be like a science-fiction movie.”

“That sounds very much like a virus to me,” Bai said. “And that is exactly what I want it to be.” His head snapped up. “I want to be able to brief Chairman Zhao at once.”

“I would advise against it.” Chang’s itch had apparently moved to his forearm. “There is still too much we do not understand about the software’s behavior. Many specifics of our plan could prove to be problematic.”

General Bai tossed off the warning with a shrug. “We’ll give him generalities, then. FIRESHIP buys me no goodwill if the chairman does not know it is happening. There are promises I wish to make, and this is a way to back them up.”

Chang opened his mouth as if to say more, but the expression faded to a closed-mouth grin. He sighed. “We will know more after the tests, then I will be certain. Until then, I remain confident.”

Bai relaxed his fists, getting control of his emotions. “Very well,” he said. “You must do what you must do. That said, it would be better if you did it sooner rather than later.”

“Of course, General,” Chang said. “But the software is only part of the operation. We still do not have a door into the system.”

Now it was Bai’s turn to smile. His jowly cheeks all but eclipsed his eyes. “That is true, but without Calliope, there would be no FIRESHIP. Put together the data so I can brief the chairman.”

“General—”

Bai held up an open hand, letting his major know the conversation was over. “As for the doorway into the Americans’ system, I can assure you, it is being handled.”