Piranha: Firing Point

“Why did you call me out of the men’s room? I thought we were on for two o’clock.” He swallowed, wondering if she wanted to discuss something personal he wasn’t ready for, but her face remained set in a military frown.

“The briefing has been moved to three. But I need the time to brief you on a recent development. You’ll need to know this for your presentation. Not even the chairman knows this yet.”

Chu stiffened, watching her.

“We’ve found out about an exercise being conducted by Japan in the Pacific. In ten days the Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Force will put to sea with six submarines of the new Rising Sun class. They are doing their sea trials as a flotilla, and when that is complete, they will move on to a sub-versus-sub combat simulation.”

Chu almost choked. “How do you know this? How reliable is this information? What exactly is the purpose of the exercise? Will surface ships be involved?”

Mai Sheng smiled, briefing Chu as fast as she could.

Chairman Yang Pow was now in his eighties. He was a big man, his addiction to rich food no secret to his inner circle. On a trip to the United States thirty years ago, he had first tasted a double cheeseburger, and his life had never quite been the same.

But despite his weight and age, he carried himself with the dignity and strength of an emperor from one of the dynasties long past. He walked quickly, with the inexplicable grace of the large, toward the double doors of the briefing theater. Yang had a round and open face, now beginning to show the lines of his age. Beneath his eyes were dark blotches, which had always been there, but were becoming much more pronounced. Above the dark patches Yang’s eyes were large and brown and understanding, hiding behind black horned-rimmed glasses. The lenses of the glasses were almost flat, so little did they correct Yang’s eyesight, but it was said that Yang was imitating the leaders of the past, and whether he really needed the big black glasses or not, they made him feel more comfortable.

Yang had been in power for almost eighteen years.

He had had a nice run of eight years before the imperial aggression of the Taiwanese had flared.

Led by a diabolical general named Wong Chen, the White Army of the New Kuomintang broke out of their safety on the island and made landfall in rebellious Shanghai. At first Beijing had not taken the rebellion seriously, but soon Shanghai fell to the Whites, and the port was opened to incoming equipment and ships. By the time the People’s Liberation Army could respond, the Whites had consolidated a growing beachhead on the Chinese mainland.

The war raged for six months as the Whites moved deep into Communist China, taking one city after the next. Yang, under severe pressure, rejected all recommendations to use nuclear weapons on the invading White forces, insisting that using nuclear devices on his own land would just force the people into the arms of the New Kuomintang. As the Whites, with their superior equipment and training, pushed the PLA back and north, he came under severe criticism for that stance, but to this day he stood by it, even if it had resulted in a divided China.

The end of the war had also come at his insistence, as he negotiated a truce with Shanghai, allowing them to retain their land on the east coast. He forced them to give up claims to a strip of territory to the north and west, which would have sectioned Red China into two regions, in exchange for territory as far north as Penglai at the mouth of Beijing’s Go Hai Bay. In less than a year, the White Army had seemingly won, forced Yang’s PLA back, and established a Western-oriented democracy on the Asian continent, taking China’s most wealthy cities from Hong Kong to Tsingtao.

Yang had waited for his chance to strike back. He had given the enemy time, time to get soft and complacent He would allow White China to forget about the war and the past, and when they least expected it, he would invade from the west and cast them into the sea.

Unfortunately, there was one major obstacle, and that was the damned East China Sea itself. The rest of the world would not watch and wait dumbstruck while Red China attacked White China. The West would come to help — particularly the Americans, those perpetual suckers for the underdog — and they would bring aircraft carriers and troop ships and amphibious landing ships and tanks and paratroopers and helicopters and supersonic jets.

Without a blue-water navy, without control of the seas, he would not win the war against the traitorous Whites. Many decades before a man named Alfred Thayer Mahan had written volume after volume about sea power, and over and over he had preached that the way to win a war was to control the “sea lines of communication,” the blood vessels and arteries of sea commerce.

In the dawn of the second decade of the new century, the advice held — without control of the sea, he could not control the war.