Red Shark

Deng Zemin peered through the Kilo’s raised night-vision periscope and saw a curtain of rain slanting over Matsu Shan. The scene was rendered an acid green by the NV optics. Still, he could identify the high, rocky bluff topped by the Sino-baroque villa and below it, in the mouth of the channel, the anchored White Dragon.

“Forward and aft up ten degrees,” Zemin ordered the planesmen.

The deck tilted up; the Kilo rose slightly. Zemin twisted the focusing handle’s detent into high magnification and was catapulted past the White Dragon to a motor launch tied up at a pier illuminated by a string of dim lights. Zemin counted five men standing on the pier and two more in the launch’s stern sheets. Next he examined the villa, with its gaily lighted interior and silhouetted figures behind curtained windows. Perhaps Fat was entertaining his visitor, Zemin thought. Someone important. Someone very important.

11

Key Largo, Florida

The president toweled off after doing fifty laps in his pool. The first lady, clad in a skintight white maillot, lay in a lounge chair with a gin and tonic in hand.

Diamond-hard Florida sunlight slashing through palm fronds and crepe myrtle almost blinded Paul Friedman, the president’s national security advisor, as he approached the pool after having concluded a video conference inside. A sheer curtain billowing out the sliding glass door to the pool snagged on Friedman and wrapped him up like a mummy until a Secret Service agent set him free.

The first lady, a former actress, gazed listlessly over lowered pink-framed sunglasses and saw Friedman approaching. He was dressed in baggy shorts and a colorful Hawaiian shirt on which a bevy of scantily clad girls played beach ball. A head of thick, unruly hair exploded over his ears and collar.

“Darling,” said the first lady, sotto voce to her husband, “it’s Paul. Hello, Paul.”

“Hello, Mim,” said Friedman, using the first lady’s nickname, which she preferred to Cole, her real name, which she hated even though she’d used it on the screen.

The president, looking grim, absently seesawed the towel around his neck. “Drink, Paul?”

“Coke, please, sir.”

The president, shod in zoris, flapped to the bar, popped a can, and poured it over crackling ice cubes.

“Karl tell you the latest out of Pyongyang?” asked the president.

As was her habit, the first lady departed when discussions turned serious and were necessarily classified. As she strode toward the open glass doors, Friedman remembered to tear his gaze from her long legs and snaking buttocks, made all the more luscious, he thought, by the white maillot clinging to silky, satin-black skin.

“Yes, sir, we discussed the latest threats coming from the NK Central News Agency. It’s nothing but bullshit, an NK temper tantrum. We’ve heard it all before.”

“And the satellite photos of Tongchong?”

“Right, the NK nuclear storage facility. Karl thinks they want us to see activity there to give us something to worry about.”

“I know what Karl thinks; I know what Defense thinks; I know what the joint chiefs think; I even know what my wife thinks. Now I want to know what you think.”

Friedman, heavyset, his wiry hair more unruly than normal from the Florida Keys’ towering humidity, flicked moisture from his chin. “Well, they did everything but wave at our KH-12s and at the UN’s surveillance cameras surrounding the area. The KH-12s recorded the thermal signatures the weapons give off when they’re on alert status. This was after the NKs broke the UNSCOM inspectors’ seals and entered the storage facility. That’s forbidden under the treaty Kim signed, which is now worthless. We know they have twenty nuclear warheads in that mountain cave complex of theirs, and I don’t think they’re doing an inventory. Like I said, Jin’s trying to scare us by making us think he’s willing to go to the brink of nuclear war. But I don’t believe he’s got the balls for it.”