Seawolf Class

PROLOGUE

Fireworks lit the night, a stuttering, popping, thunderous display of light and color flashing and strobing across the sky to the southwest. Vasili Andreevitch Mikhailin sat on the veranda of the main embassy building with his guest, sipping strong black tea and pretending to admire the celestial spectacle. The portly man sitting to his left, Admiral Li Guofeng, was all smiles and camaraderie, but Mikhailin didn't trust him further than he could throw him. Given their respective differences in size, he thought wryly, that was not very far at all.

"A new age beginning, Comrade Mikhailin," Li said in badly accented Russian, raising his own cup in a toast. "To our business partnership, and to our glorious future!"

"To our future," Mikhailin replied, but with an enthusiasm he could not feel. He did not point out that Li's continued use of the honorific "Comrade" was not only dated, but in decidedly poor taste. Didn't this fool know, wasn't he aware, that the world had changed?

Mikhailin hated Beijing. He'd hated it when he'd been a military attache here at the embassy fifteen years ago, and he hated it even more now. Beijing was a grand-looking sprawl of a city, to be sure, with its miles of museums, monuments, boulevards, temples, and people's halls, but it remained a lie all the same, a gleaming facade masking the wretched poverty of the people both beyond the capital precincts and within the twisting back streets and alleyways of the city itself. It was rumored that the Beijing government had turned off the hot water for most of the city's inhabitants for the duration of these festivities; the pollution pouring from the local coal-fired power plants was not something that visiting foreign dignitaries should be allowed to see.

Throughout that week, he and others of the Russian Special Trade Delegation had been feted by their opposite numbers in the PRC Defense Ministry. That morning they'd been taken to the Beijing Zoo, a squalid collection of tiny cages and flea-bitten animals crowded between the Olympic Hotel and the Beijing Exhibition Center. Mikhailin loved animals, loved nature and the outdoor wilderness. The sight of those miserable creatures sweltering and pacing in their filthy cages had moved him more than the squalor he remembered of the peasants out in the country beyond the capital sprawl. The two giant pandas just inside the front gate were mangy and half dead.

The conditions — worse, the lack of empathy for the poor beasts — appalled him. Visitors to the zoo could actually buy toy guns that fired plastic pellets for the express purpose of letting their children shoot at the helplessly caged and tormented animals; at one point he'd watched a gang of adolescents hurling rocks at the monkeys while guards stood impassively by…and felt a small stab of vengeful amusement when the shrieking monkeys retaliated with fistfuls of their own feces.

The experience had soured Mikhailin completely. You could not trust a people, he reasoned, who treated their own natural inheritance in so callous a manner. Resources, money, neighbors, allies, all were mere assets to be used until they were used up. Granted, China was a country with extraordinary problems, not least of which were a population approaching 1.2 billion and a geography that had lost something like a fifth of its agricultural land to desertification and soil erosion in the past fifty years.

Still, to Mikhailin's way of thinking the People's Republic was a giant slowly strangling on its own filth.

"This day is only the beginning, comrade. By returning our territory to our rightful possession, the western imperialists have acknowledged that we are a world power, and one to be reckoned with!"

"Indeed, Comrade Admiral," Mikhailin replied with a blandly polite smile. "There can never be a question of that. The whole world knows and respects the might of the People's Republic of China."

"The surrender of Hong Kong to our sovereign jurisdiction," Li continued, "is only the first step. We shall soon regain control over our renegade twenty-third province in the east, and of our territorial islands in the South China Sea. And you and your people at Krasnaya Sormova, Comrade Mikhailin, will be instrumental in effecting that change."

Another crackle and rumble of explosions sounded from the sky to the southwest, above Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City. Mikhailin could also hear, beneath the concussions, the heavy beat of music accompanying a troupe of ribbon dancers. Beijing was going all out to celebrate this day and Britain's long-awaited return of Hong Kong to the sovereign rule of the People.

"Our business agreement will be of immense benefit to both of us, Comrade Admiral," Mikhailin replied. "What you do with our…product is, of course, entirely up to you."

"With ten of your Varshavyanka and two of your new Barrakuda in our service, plus the might of our own growing fleet, the People's Republic will again become a maritime nation to be respected and feared. We will fear no foreign power, no trespass on our territorial sovereignty."

A particularly dazzling spray of red and green sparks cascaded across the sky. Mikhailin leaned back, watching the avalanche of light, and wondered how long it would be before the Russian Federation regretted its shortsighted marketing policies.

Ever since the final collapse of the Communist state, the new Federation's economy had been struggling along, never quite, as the Americans liked to say, making ends meet. Desperate for hard currency, Moscow had begun aggressively selling arms of all types to anyone with cash and the desire to play catch-up in the world arms race. MiG fighters, T-80 tanks, munitions, automatic rifles… the worldwide demand, fortunately for Russia's financial problems, was insatiable.

Perhaps the most lucrative trade item in Moscow's marketplace, however, was the diesel-electric submarine known as the Varshavyanka class. Small, superbly silent, and a real bargain at only $300 million dollars apiece, the efficient little hunter-killer had proven to be one of Russia's most sought-after exports. And as for the nuclear-powered Barrakuda…

Mikhailin sighed. How long before these deficit-balancing trade goods were turned against the rodina? he wondered. Moscow, he feared, had lost sight of the dangers in the quest for income. The People's Republic of China might be primarily interested in Taiwan and the Spratly Islands for now, but he could not forget that Beijing had longstanding territorial claims in Siberia as well. A fleet of ten Varshavyankas and a couple of the deadly Barrakudas could easily blockade Vladivostok and the approaches to the Sea of Okhotsk, cripple the weakened Soviet Far East Fleet, and perhaps even force the surrender of the Maritime Provinces.

It seemed unlikely, though, that the Americans would allow the People's Republic to take over Taiwan without a fight. Perhaps, in the long run, Moscow would find itself in a kind of strange and highly improbable alliance with Washington against the machinations of the Beijing militarists. He would need to discuss the matter with his contacts in the State Security Service upon his return home.

Home. He missed her. It would be good to be home when this round of negotiations was completed. Good to be with Masha again, and the kids and their families. He was getting too old for these international junkets, no matter how important they were supposed to be to the national economy.

"It is nearly time, Comrade Mikhailin," Li said, glancing at his watch. "We should leave."

Mikhailin nodded. Another banquet, more dancers, more fireworks.

At least he could inform his superiors that the deal, worth some thirty trillion rubles over the next ten years, had gone through as planned. Russia would get the money she so desperately needed in order to continue pretending that she was no longer a third-world country.

And China would receive a fleet of the deadliest warships known to man, and a free hand at last with her old enemies across the Taiwan Strait.