Читать книгу Typhoon - Charles Cumming - Страница 21

Three months earlier, a little more than 8,000 miles away on a sun-kissed Virginian golf course, former United States Assistant Secretary of Defense William ‘Bill’ Marston had stood over his Titleist Pro V1 and intoned a favourite golfing mantra.

‘The ball is my friend,’ he whispered, ‘the ball is my friend,’ and as he shook out his fattened hips and gripped the shaft of his gleaming five iron, Marston pictured the arc of the shot – just as he had been taught to do by the Turnberry professional who had charged him more than $75 an hour on a summer vacation to Scotland three years earlier – and truly believed, in the depths of his reactionary soul, that he was going to land the ball on the green.

He steadied his head. He drew back the club. He was one up with one to play. The five iron whistled through the warm spring air and connected with the Titleist in a way that felt powerful and true, but on this occasion, as on so many others throughout the course of his long, frustrating golfing life, the ball was not Bill Marston’s friend, the ball was not soaring gracefully towards the stiff red flag at the crown of the seventeenth green; the ball was his enemy, hooking violently towards the trees at the edge of the vast Raspberry Falls golf course and ending its days approximately 120 metres away in a camouflage of earth and leaves from which it would never be returned.

‘Fuck it,’ Marston spat, but managed to maintain his composure in the presence of his personal assistant, the Minnesota-born Sally-Ann McNeil who, for reasons which she was never properly able to explain, had been impelled to caddy for her boss. Sally-Ann, who was twenty-eight and college-educated, was somewhat wary of William ‘Bill’ Marston. Nevertheless, when he lost his temper like this, she knew exactly what to say.

‘Oh that’s so unfair, sir.’ The boss was already telling her to pick him out another ball and indicating to his opponent that he would be happy to drop a shot.

‘You sure about that, Bill?’ CIA deputy director Richard Jenson had sliced his own drive into the deep rough on the opposite side of the fairway. He was wearing moleskin plus-fours and preparing to attack the green. ‘You sure you don’t just wanna concede and call it all-square going up eighteen?’

‘I’m sure.’ Marston’s reply was so quiet that even Sally-Ann had difficulty making it out. Handing him a replacement Titleist – his fourth of the round – she took a step backwards, caught the eye of Jenson’s caddy, Josh, who was thirtysomething and tanned and kept looking at her, and shuddered as the man from Langley struck a faultless six iron slap-bang into the middle of the green.

‘Great shot, Dick,’ Marston shouted out, muttering ‘Asshole’ under his breath as soon as he had turned round. Sally-Ann struggled to disguise a smile. It was just after one o’clock in the afternoon. Lunch at the clubhouse was booked for two. Standing over the ball, Marston glanced quickly at his PA, as if the sight of a beautiful woman might calm him in his hour of need. Then he drew back the graphite shaft a second time and prayed for a golfing miracle.

It was the worst kind of shot. The Titleist lifted itself no more than three inches from the ground before shooting in a plumb-line across the immaculate Virginia fairway for about eighty metres, finally bobbling to rest at the edge of the green. Marston sniffed the air.

‘I can still take a five,’ he muttered. ‘Dick can three-putt,’ offering just a glimpse of his ferocious competitive spirit. You didn’t get to be one of Reagan’s favourite sons, you didn’t get to be chairman and director of Macklinson Corporation, you didn’t get to sit on the Defense Policy Board Advisory Committee by quitting when the going gets tough. Bill Marston was a winner. Bill Marston was a fighter. Bill Marston let his five iron drop to the ground so that Sally-Ann could pick it up.

He had been playing most of the round in a bad mood. In the trunk of his armour-plated Mercedes, secured under lock and key and watched over by a 250-pound former Navy SEAL chauffeur, was a leaked, top-secret copy of the Report of the Select Committee on US National Security and Military/Commercial Concerns With the People’s Republic of China – now commonly referred to as the Cox Report. Cox was a classified document until a few years ago and, strictly speaking, Marston shouldn’t have been anywhere near it. However, a disgruntled staffer in the House of Representatives had suggested to one of Marston’s senior employees that he might be able to obtain a draft copy in return for a position as a Macklinson executive in Berlin earning low six-figures after tax. Marston had agreed to the deal and had spent most of the previous evening reading the report at his home in Georgetown. The process had left him incensed to the point of insomnia.

These were the edited highlights, digested over a bowl of his wife’s notoriously insipid clam chowder:

The People’s Republic of China (hereafter the PRC) has stolen classified design information on the United States’ most advanced thermonuclear weapons. These thefts of nuclear secrets from our national weapons laboratories have enabled the PRC to design, develop, and successfully test modern strategic nuclear weapons sooner than would otherwise have been possible.

‘Fuckers,’ Marston muttered.

The stolen information includes classified information on seven US thermonuclear warheads, including every currently deployed thermonuclear warhead in the US ballistic missile arsenal. The stolen information also includes classified design information for an enhanced radiation weapon (commonly known as the ‘neutron bomb’) which neither the United States, nor any other nation, has yet deployed.

‘Jesus.’

The Select Committee judges that the PRC will exploit elements of the stolen design information on the PRC’s next generation of thermonuclear weapons. The PRC has three mobile ICBM programs currently underway, all of which will be able to strike the United States.

Since the joyful, Cold War-ending events of 1991, Bill Marston had been looking around for a new global enemy. Finally he had found one.

Jenson won the seventeenth hole with a nerveless putt from eight feet, but Marston produced a second shot onto the eighteenth green which effectively won the match when his opponent failed to escape a fairway bunker at the third attempt. Afterwards, while Josh explained to Sally-Ann that he worked in an office ‘about forty feet’ from CIA director John Deutch and wondered if she was by any chance free for dinner, the two old friends showered and met at the bar for a pre-prandial Scotch and soda. After polite exchanges with several fellow club members they got down to business.

‘What are you guys working on with China?’ Marston enquired.

‘You mean Cox?’ The Deputy Director was initially reluctant to play Marston’s game. ‘You know I can’t talk about that, Bill.’

As far as Marston was concerned, this was just standard-issue bluff. One more glass of Highland Park, a decent bottle of Californian Merlot over lunch and Jenson would be more inclined to talk.

‘What if I told you I’d heard some things on the grapevine?’

‘What kind of things?’

‘That one of our most prestigious satellite communications companies provided some much-needed technical assistance on rocket propulsion to the Chinese without obtaining the correct licences from the federal government. That this prestigious satellite communications company is now facing a multi-million dollar fine for consorting with the enemy.’

It was the one part of the Cox Report that Marston had enjoyed. While thousands of Chinese spies had been busy ripping off American nuclear secrets for the best part of two decades, Canyon Enterprises, one of Macklinson’s fiercest rivals in the field of satellite communications, had colluded with the PRC on sensitive technologies. Play their cards right and Macklinson stood to benefit from Canyon’s fall from grace, scooping up defence, electronics and system integration businesses worth billions of dollars.

‘That story is already in the public domain, right?’ Jenson said. ‘I can understand why you might be interested.’

A waiter who had worked in the clubhouse for almost seventeen years, and whose name Marston had never successfully committed to memory, approached the two men and ushered them through to the dining room. They ordered seafood cocktails and broiled Porterhouse steaks and the conversation continued.

‘What if I also told you that I’d heard about the extent of Chinese infiltration of our nuclear fraternity?’ Jenson was looking through the wine list. ‘What if I knew that thanks to American tax dollars and American scientific breakthroughs and American hard work, Beijing now has dozens of fully functioning, effectively US-made ICBMs pointed at New York, Washington and Los Angeles?’

‘Well then I’d say that nothing has changed. I’d say that Bill Marston still has great sources of information.’

‘I’m pissed, Dick.’ Marston hissed the words into a flower arrangement in the centre of the table. He had a history of heart trouble and had to watch himself when he became angry. ‘These guys have infiltrated our business environments, our scientific communities, our colleges. They’re selling American military technology to rogue states, to regimes hostile to the United States. China has sold guidance components and telemetry equipment to the Iranians, for Christ’s sakes. They’re proliferating to the Syrians, North Korea, fuckin’ Gaddafi. Are you guys on top of this? What’s happening at Langley these days? Ever since Clinton came in, everything’s gotten so goddam soft.’

‘We’re on top of it,’ Jenson assured him, though this was far from what he believed. He wanted to hit the gooks just as much as Marston did, but his hands were tied. He resorted to a flimsy soundbite. ‘Sure, we’ve been the victims of a highly successful campaign of industrial and political espionage, but let me assure you that the United States still maintains an overwhelming military and commercial advantage over the People’s Republic –’

‘I don’t give a shit about that. I know we can still kick their ass in a straight fight. I just don’t like the way they do business. I don’t like the way highly qualified Macklinson executives come to me every day complaining about the impossibility of making a decent buck in Beijing. My people in China have to get to know their clients’ families, remember birthdays, take their wives to health clubs. What are we? A fucking charity? Off the record, Dick, Macklinson is paying for six Chinese kids to go to Stanford. You have any idea what that costs? And just so some board of directors in Wuhan will guarantee the legitimacy of a telecoms contract. And these guys have the nerve to steal our technology at the same time. Who the hell do they think they are? You know, not so long ago American soldiers were fighting in Manchuria trying to stop the entire region speaking Japanese.’ Jenson felt the historical argument was somewhat strained. ‘That’s right. American boys putting their lives on the line for China’s future. And this is how they repay us.’

‘So what are you suggesting?’

Marston paused. His glass from the clubhouse bar was a pale yellow meltdown of ice and whisky.

‘What I’m suggesting is an idea.’ He had lowered his voice. Jenson was obliged to push forward in his chair and felt a muscle twitch in his lower back. ‘Off the books, if it has to be. A clandestine operation looking into ways of destabilizing Beijing. Just the same way we gave the Poles a little push. Just the same way the Agency funded Walesa and Havel. Now I know you guys already have operations out there, but this would be in conjunction with Macklinson, using our infrastructure and our people on the ground in China. Come up with something and we’ll help you.’ Jenson produced a low, enigmatic whistle. ‘Communism is a dying art, Dick, and communist China has been around too long. You’ve seen what happened in the Soviet bloc. All we’re lookin’ at is giving these guys a helping hand. Call it a push to a delayed domino effect. And when Beijing falls, I want America there picking up the pieces.’