Painkiller

8

Forty miles north of Beijing, an unmarked stretch limousine wound its way up a ribbon of highway. At the wheel sat a portly old driver in standard-issue People’s Liberation Army fatigues-his knuckles, exposed in two clumps on the steering wheel, as gnarled as the trees flashing past the limo along the road. It was eight in the morning, and already there was a muggy weight to the air.

At the top of the hill the highway transitioned to a dirt road. A guard shack materialized, and a soldier wearing similar fatigues emerged from the booth. He spoke in Mandarin.

“Proceed, old man,” the soldier said.

The driver steered into a parking lot, the limo kicking up dust as he parked it behind a row of wooden stables. He locked the parking brake, got out, stood with his back to the car, and fired up a black-market Winston.

He made sure nobody saw him do it.

As the team worked the ball around and dished it ahead of him, General Deng Jiang spurred his horse into a dash. He corralled the pass and came around with a looping swing. Crack-mallet on ball. As usual, he scored; Deng did most of the scoring here.

The majority of his teammates were People’s Liberation Army deputy ministers, but there were others-an admiral, a few captains, even a pair of bureaucrats who’d kissed sufficient ass to get an invite. Feeling good about himself, Deng ignored the fact that most of these players weren’t simply ten or twenty years younger but also ten or twenty grades his junior and working for him-meaning they were out here letting him hog all the glory and win at will. Any other result and the opposing players were destined for a prison camp in Tibet; in any case, few of them had any interest in being here to begin with. Most had never even heard of the sport before Deng’s summons delivered them to his private polo field.

During the days that followed his weekly contests, Deng found himself better equipped to travel back down to Beijing and endure the intolerable-base closures, project cancellations, the retirement of loyal, old-guard soldiers. After his private game he could do these things with greater purpose, Deng getting at least a semblance of that old feeling back, the sense that he still commanded the military of the greatest nation in the history of mankind. That he wasn’t merely the grim reaper with a budget ax, a treasonous bean counter shaving away a new layer of the people’s heritage with every dab of the pen.

The morning’s farce concluded and a servant arrived to assist his dismount. Deng looked for and found his driver, seeing the man leaning against the limousine behind the stables. Deng watched as the old man flicked away the cigarette and did his best to look busy, whipping out a rag and polishing one of the limo’s fenders. The driver had been loyal to him through twenty years of service, and remained so, even now, in retirement; Deng allowed him the slack he would never grant others under his charge.

The old servant was getting ready to take Deng back to reality. Past the gnarled trees, down the hill, and into the abyss of deteriorating military might. Despite the satisfaction brought on by the game, this was when Deng typically began to feel the slow burn of anger-the quiet rage of a man returning to the coal mines for another miserable day along the journey to death.

Today, however, was not a typical day.

Changing into fatigues in his private dressing room, Deng checked the date on the face of his watch for what might have been the hundredth time. It was true, as he had confirmed it to be true all morning.

Today was, in fact, the day he had been waiting for.

Today, he would catch a glimpse of tomorrow.

The blades of the PLA Z-9 helicopter thopped against the humidity, its landing skids settling on the tarmac of the Shandong PLN base. Deng rode in the rear, reclining on the leather seats of his airborne military limousine. He held on for nearly three minutes before giving the order to open the door-he would make them wait, encourage these men to think about who it was who was about to exit the airship. He peered through the bulletproof window beside his seat; the window afforded him an awesome sight.

Shoulder to shoulder, back to front, stretching the length and width of an entire military airstrip, there stood in formation some twenty-five thousand troops. Behind the first few thousand men were hundreds of vehicles-tanks, trucks, armored cars, jeeps-and, behind these, dozens of additional helicopters, rotors blazing, plus a score of fighter jets.

Standing at the front of the formation, elbow locked in salute with the others, was Rear Admiral Li Zhu. Li’s breast and shoulders gleamed with medals; his skin was of a much darker complexion than most of the soldiers behind him, his expressionless face angular and lean-a career soldier who hadn’t let himself go. As loyal, Deng thought, as his driver, and entrusted with more secrets than he ought to be. Li was fifteen years his junior and, in Deng’s estimation, about half as quick on a horse. The general almost felt guilty about beating Li on the polo grounds, so easily did victory come.

As the rotors of the airborne limousine lost steam, Deng waved one of his elite guards to the door. The guard saluted, slid the door open, and rolled out a modular stairwell. A second sentry accompanied the first out the door and each took his assigned position at the base of the stairwell.

Deng came out, stoic, pausing on the last stair before descending to the tarmac. He knew the medals adorning his uniform to be blinding in the sun, easily dwarfing Li’s; it was good to let the soldiers admire them. At length he stepped down to the runway and crossed the twenty meters of asphalt between himself and Admiral Li, who held his salute until Deng, passing, dismissed it with one of his own. Over the rotors, turbines, and diesel engines, it was hard for Deng to make out the words as Li spoke, but it sounded to him as if the admiral said something about how honored he and his men were to receive such a great leader as their comrade general and State Council vice premier here at Shandong’s humble naval base.

Deng acknowledged Li’s comments with a halfhearted nod and continued walking.

They had a hundred-meter walk to the first in a convoy of jeeps; once they climbed aboard, the procession jerked to life. The head jeep leading the way, it was only a matter of seconds before the convoy vanished into the sea of troops.

Deng called it the War Room. It was one of seven he’d personally designed, ultimately ordering six built as impenetrable underground bunkers beneath China’s six largest military installations, and a seventh aboard a People’s Liberation Navy nuclear attack submarine. The technical name for these installations was Military Operations Oversight Facility, but the way Deng saw it, he could run a war out of any one of these rooms, so he’d gone ahead and fallen back on the default term.

Given the method by which military powers had come to engage in war, Deng’s War Rooms offered the ultimate control seat. He had spared no cost, not in construction budgets or, more important, the spy operations that fed the engineering effort behind the construction. PLA technology, represented best by that which was fed into these War Rooms, had nearly matched that of the American military-industrial complex, mainly due to the fact that Chinese army intelligence had stolen most of the significant technological innovations developed by American military contractors.

From his War Rooms, Deng could watch everything imaginable related to any armed conflict conducted by his troops. Any image that could possibly be generated in the field was projected on massive plasma screens; he could control every aspect of war with the flip of a switch, from ordering blood work on a soldier taken ill in Kazakhstan to the launch of biological warheads in the European theater. All he had to do was whisper a command to the technicians manning the main keyboard.

The land-based War Rooms were built deep underground, shielded behind twenty-foot-thick walls of titanium, concrete, and lead, designed to deflect the electromagnetic pulse of an adjacent fifty-megaton nuclear explosion. The power supply was quadruple-redundant. Any military action China was capable of undertaking, Deng could activate it from his War Room throne, and virtually no one could stop him from doing whatever he chose to do while he was planted there.

Admiral Li led the general out of an elevator and down a bright hallway. At the end of the hall, the admiral ushered him through an immense vault door, where a fresh duo of military police snapped off salutes and the two MPs who had escorted them thus far turned and left.

Inside, it was dark, though not pitch-black. The room possessed a luminescent glow-similar, Deng liked to think, to the glow of a beach under the light of the moon. Deng could hear the familiar orchestral cacophony: the clatter of keyboards, the whirring of computer fans, murmured conversations of a hundred hushed voices. Li led him up a stairwell to a room resembling a film projection booth: the Control Box-Deng’s throne, from which he beheld the glory of his creation.

Spread in a crescent before him, built precisely two meters below the level of the Control Box, lay the heart of the War Room-a deep amphitheater sprawling under vaulted ceilings, the room about the size of a polo field. A staff of more than a hundred men scurried back and forth in the air-conditioned darkness; endless rows of workstations, radar and sonar monitors, electronic map displays, telecommunications and video conferencing systems, and the halogen reading lamps positioned throughout the room combined to form the glow Deng had observed upon entering. A pair of technicians manned the Control Box, a room resembling the cockpit of a commercial airliner; an opening at the front of the cockpit, six meters wide by two tall, offered the view to the main floor and could be sealed, Deng knew, by a soundproof, one-way-mirrored glass shield at the touch of a button.

Deng and Li were shown to their seats by one of the technicians and handed a pair of wireless headsets. Deng pulled his over his ears.

Li bowed. “You’ll be presented with a time-lapsed but otherwise complete presentation of the invasion simulation exercise.” He waved to one of the technicians. “Begin!”

Commencing an instant later, and for the next fifty-one minutes, Deng’s senses were assaulted by war. He watched a campaign waged from sea to land, primarily through the images on the multiple high-def plasma screens-views from spy planes; angles from tanks, personnel carriers, helicopters, aircraft, soldiers’ helmets; enlarged images of radar screens depicting opposing troops; reports from embedded foreign correspondents assessing the strategy and carnage. Incoming status reports blasted across a loudspeaker system; in addition to the full media coverage, the simulation included the meticulous replication of calculated diplomatic responses from world leaders. Strategic decision making was displayed via security-camera angles eavesdropping on senior staff meetings held at the command bunker.

If he didn’t know that the exercise depicted had already taken place, Deng would not have been able to tell the difference; for all intents and purposes, the simulation was nothing short of real war.

At the conclusion of the presentation, Li tugged off his headset.

“You’ll find we surpassed your objectives in every aspect of the exercise.” He reached across the desk and handed Deng a thick report.

Deng’s eyes found the report on the desk, and Li beside him. He stared at Li for longer than he wanted, knowing his eyes were lit with a sort of euphoric lunacy-something he didn’t particularly want Li observing. No matter: he had seen a slice of tomorrow, and he liked the way it looked. He broke eye contact and stood.

“It is upon us,” he said.

Li rose to proffer a salute, but Deng had already reached the exit hall, so the gesture encountered only empty air.

The general had seen what he’d come to see.