the high seas, and inspectors boarded the Yinhe. To America's great embarrassment, they uncovered only agricultural equipment - plows, shovels, and small tractors. The intelligence had been faulty.
With a grimace, Klein recalled it all too well. The episode made America look like a thug. Its relations with China, and even its allies, were strained for years.
He puffed gloomily, fanning the smoke away from the president. "Do we have another Yinhe?" he repeated. "Maybe."
"There's " remotely, and " probably. You better tell me all of it. Chapter and verse."
Klein tamped down the ash in his pipe. "One of our operatives is a professional Sinologist who's been working in Shanghai the past ten years for a consortium of American firms that are trying to get a foothold there. His name's Avery Mondragon. He's alerted us to information he's uncovered that The Dowager Empress is carrying tens of tons of thiodiglycol, used in blister weapons, and thionyl chloride, used in both blister and nerve weapons. The freighter was loaded in Shanghai, is already at sea, and is destined for Iraq. Both chemicals have legitimate agricultural uses, of course, but not in such large quantities for a nation the size of Iraq."
"How good is the information this time, Fred? One hundred percent? Ninety?"
"I haven't seen it," Klein said evenly, puffing a cloud of smoke and forgetting to wave it away this time. "But Mondragon says it's documentary. He has the ship's true invoice manifest."
"Great God." Castilla's thick shoulders and heavy torso seemed to go rigid against his chair. "I don't know whether you realize it, but China is one of the signatories of the international agreement that prohibits development, production, stockpiling, or use of chemical weapons. They won't let themselves be revealed as breaking that treaty, because it could slow their march to acquiring a bigger and bigger slice of the global economy."
"It's a damned delicate situation."
"The price of another mistake on our part could be particularly high for us, too, now that they're close to signing our human-rights treaty." In exchange for financial and trade concessions from the U. S., for which the president had cajoled and arm-twisted a reluctant Congress, China had all but committed to signing a bilateral human-rights agreement that would open its prisons and criminal courts to U.N. and U.S. inspectors, bring its criminal and civil courts closer to Western and international principles, and release longtime political prisoners. Such a treaty had been a high-priority goal for American presidents since Dick Nixon. Sam Castilla wanted nothing to stop it. In fact, it was a longstanding dream of his, too, for personal as well as human-rights reasons. "It's also a damned dangerous situation. We can't allow this ship ... what was it, The Dowager Empress?" Klein nodded. "We can't allow The Dowager Empress to sail into Basra with weapons-making chemicals. That's the bottom line. Period." Castilla stood and paced. "If your intelligence turns out to be good, and we go after this Dowager Empress, how are the Chinese going to react?" He shook his head and waved away his own words. "No, that's not the question, is it? We know how they'll react. They'll shake their swords, denounce, and posture.
The question is what will they actually do?" He looked at Klein.
"Especially if we're wrong again?"
"No one can know or predict that, Mr. President. On the other hand, no nation can maintain massive armies and nuclear weapons without using them somewhere, sometime, if for no other reason than to justify the costs."
"I disagree. If a country's economy is good, and its people are happy, a leader can maintain an army without using it."
"Of course, if China wants to use the incident as an excuse that they're being threatened, they might invade Taiwan," Fred Klein continued. "They've wanted to do that for decades."
"If they feel we won't retaliate, yes. There's Central Asia, too, now that Russia is less of a regional threat." The Covert-One chief said the words neither wanted to think: "With their long-range nuclear weapons, we're as much a target as any country." Castilla shook off a shudder. Klein removed his glasses and massaged his temples. They were silent. At last, the president sighed. He had made a decision. "All right, I'll have Admiral Brose order the navy to follow and monitor The Dowager Empress. We'll label it routine at-sea surveillance with no revelation of the actual situation to anyone but Brose."
"The Chinese will find out we're shadowing their ship."
"We'll stall. The problem is, I don't know how long we'll