Prologue
Zhongnanhai, Beijing, China
EVER SINCE TAKING OFFICE, President Liao Qigang's sleeping habits had become erratic. Stress had been his ever-present companion, stalking him every waking moment, and nightmares haunted his dreams. On a good night, he'd get six hours of sleep, but those were few and far between. Most nights, he would get four to five hours, and then there were the nights when he got no sleep at all—like tonight. The prospect of invading Taiwan and the international repercussions, including the likelihood of war with America and its allies, weighed heavily on him as he waited for the call from General Xia, who was in charge of the operation.
And if the threat of war was not enough to keep Liao in a constant state of despondency, the reports about severe flooding in the Kwei Zhou area in the southwestern part of the country were making a generous contribution to his acute dyspepsia.
The benefit of state-controlled media is that the state determines what information is released to the public. The flood was labeled as ‘lots of rain.’ The number of people displaced was quoted as half a million, while the actual number was about three times that. The number of dead, which was actually more than 100,000, was reported to be 40,000.
Even so, the president couldn’t dare to visit the stricken area because that would make it look as if there really had been a major disaster.
Though that kind of disingenuous reporting helped keep the populace's stress and anxiety levels down, it did nothing for the president’s.
Liao felt the knot in his stomach as he looked at the information about the threatening disaster posed by the overflowing of the Three Gorges Dam. The City of Wuhan had already been flooded. Two major lakes on both sides of the Yangtze River functioned as natural draining reservoirs for excessive water flowing down the river. The Por Yang Hu Lake on the northern side of the Yangtze, normally about 3,000 square miles, had in three days grown to more than 4,000 square miles. If the Three Gorges Dam gave way, 450 million, one-third of China’s total population, would be negatively impacted, and as many as 45 million people would either die or suffer from severe health issues.
He took a long deep breath and let it out slowly and noisily.
At the break of dawn, with no call from Xia and no breaking news out of Taiwan on any of the news channels, he knew the operation must've run into some kind of problem.
He felt relief washing over him. China would not be going to war today. “But there are things worse than war—famine. I can only hope that we will never fall over that cliff into the hellish abyss of food insecurity and starvation,” he mumbled softly.
He took a hot shower and put on a clean suit, then ordered his favorite breakfast of congee (rice porridge), pancakes with eggs, and a pot of tea.
By 8:00 a.m., when Mao Xinya, the Minister of Agriculture and Rural Affairs, entered his office, Liao felt almost rejuvenated.
***
IT WAS WITH NO small measure of trepidation that Mao Xinya arrived at Zhongnanhai. Messengers bearing bad news were not usually at peril for merely conveying the message. But Mao Xinya was no ordinary messenger; he was the Minister of Agriculture and Rural Affairs, a position he had held for more than a decade.
In the world's fourth-largest and most populous country, his responsibilities were vast: agriculture and environmental issues relating to agriculture, fishery, consumer affairs, animal husbandry, horticulture, animal welfare, foodstuffs, hunting and game management, as well as higher education and research in the field of agricultural sciences.
To be concise, Mao Xinya carried the ultimate responsibility for the production of the food that the 1.4 billion citizens of China put on their tables every day.
For almost four weeks, Mao and his advisors worked meticulously and slept very little to collect and verify data, analyzed same, made projections, and wrote their conclusions down in a report—the fount of Mao's disquiet—currently in his briefcase.
During the Great Chinese Famine of 1959 to 1961, thirty million had starved to death. In addition, miscarriages due to malnutrition and abortions because there was no food for babies, claimed another thirty million.
Mao was about to tell the President that the country was facing another famine—this one would make the Great Famine pale in comparison.
Bringing Professor Lei Hai, senior agronomist and grain specialist, to answer the technical questions he was bound to be asked provided little comfort.
Whether the fact that he was distantly related to the great Chairman Mao Tse-tung would count in his favor, he would know shortly.
Chapter 1
First day on the job
CIA Headquarters, Langley, Virginia, USA
IT WAS MONDAY MORNING shortly before eight when John pulled up in his designated parking space at Langley. He switched the engine off and looked at his wife, Christelle. “This is it, your first day on the job. Excited?”
She smiled and nodded. “Just like old times.” Christelle was a tall woman with an athletic build, green eyes, and blond hair that didn’t come out of a bottle—she was a head-turner. She was formally dressed in a charcoal pantsuit. Attentiveness and intelligence radiated from her persona.
John chuckled. “Yep, except now we’re up against the Chinese communists instead of the Russians, we’re forty years older, and we have a service dog to watch over us.”
Said service dog was in the backseat. Her name was Cupcake, a seven-month-old, short-haired, brindle-colored Dutch Shepherd. She was a gift to them from Rex and Catia when John got out of the hospital after brain surgery five months ago.
“I don’t feel forty years older. I barely feel forty.”
“And you don’t look a day older,” said John with a big smile.
“Flattery will get you everywhere, my dear.”
John stood at six-foot-two in his socks. A handsome man with gray hair and hazel eyes, stately comportment, and in excellent shape for someone of seventy-four years.
Christelle, a former deputy director of the DGSE, the French equivalent of the American CIA, had worked with John on a few joint missions in their younger days during the Cold War. There was a romantic spark between them back then, but the Atlantic Ocean and work had put an end to it. More than thirty years after their last joint mission, they caught up again. The old flame was rekindled, and two months after Christelle’s retirement, she and John were married.
They had plans to settle on the Ranch, a 20,000-acre property in Yavapai County, in the western part of Arizona, CRC’S headquarters and training facility. However, they had to change their plans when they were on their way back to the Ranch after their honeymoon in Vietnam. Richardson contacted Brandt and asked him to divert the flight and come to Langley to discuss a very urgent matter. The pressing issue was the Operation Middle Kingdom Plan.
Since then, John and Christelle had been living in an apartment fifteen minutes’ drive from CIA headquarters.
It had been nearly three months since the defection of Flat Arrow, the codename for a senior computer programmer working for China’s foremost military hacking outfit, Unit 61398, a subdivision of the Information Operations and Information Warfare division, the cyberwarfare arm of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA).
The insider knowledge about Unit 61398’s activities brought over by Flat Arrow was a significant haul for the US intelligence community. It helped them to identify and rectify the vulnerabilities in their own computer networks, and it enabled them to exploit the vulnerabilities in the PRC’s networks.
But it was the details of Operation Middle Kingdom, delivered by Flat Arrow, that shook the foundations of the US intelligence community.
Soon dubbed the MK Plan, it was the blueprint conceived by a top-secret power group, who called themselves the Trustees, which included the Chinese President and ten senior generals from the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) to dethrone America as the world’s only superpower and achieve Mao Tse-tung’s hundred-year plan—the entire world under Chinese communist rule by 2049—twenty-five years ahead of time.
There was no ambiguity in the MK Plan—China was on the verge of instigating a series of actions that would bring them into direct conflict with most of their neighbors and the USA. It was equally clear that unless China was dissuaded from its chosen course, a world war was inevitable.
Within days of receiving the MK Plan, the CIA had obtained presidential authorization to launch Operation Peregrine, a Cold War-like strategy aimed at containing China’s expansionist ideals and prevent an all-out war, which would, without doubt, see the use of nuclear weapons.
After reading the MK Plan, Martin Richardson, the deputy director in charge of CIA operations, persuaded John Brandt to take control of Operation Peregrine. John was a veteran of the Cold War who left the CIA in 1995. Six years later, in 2001, after the 9/11 attacks, he had established CRC (Crisis Response Consultancy), a private military contractor specializing in black operations on behalf of the CIA and other US security agencies.
Christelle opened the rear passenger door for Cupcake, took her leash, and hooked her arm into her husband’s as they approached the front entrance of the George Bush Center for Intelligence colloquially known as the CIA Headquarters.
For the past three months, since John took charge of Operation Peregrine, despite being newlyweds, Christelle hadn’t seen much of him. She and Cupcake had visited every noteworthy, and some not so noteworthy, statue, museum, and historical and contemporary building in the Langley and DC areas, including the White House and the Capitol Building.
After a lifetime in the spy business, she knew what was at stake, and intelligence officers seldom had the luxury of nine-to-five shifts. She supported and encouraged John, and she never complained, but that didn’t prevent her from getting bored and a little frustrated with her dreary daily routine and lack of intellectual stimulation.
John took notice and had been thinking about a solution when he got home one night and found her working on a large petit point tapestry. She might as well have said, “John, I’ve had enough of museums and statues and art galleries.” The next morning John spoke to Richardson.
Richardson took the matter to Howard Lawrence, the director of the CIA. Lawrence thought it was a matter for the Commander in Chief to decide. Therefore, he went to see the president, whose response was, “Bloody hell. You’ve got a senior Cold War veteran, a former deputy director of the DGSE, no less, sitting around idle, making tapestries, and keeping a dog company?”
“I’m afraid so, sir. I’d like her to join the Peregrine team, but we don’t have any precedents for it.”
“Well, if I understand you correctly, she’s been working on joint missions with us since the Cold War and on another handful of missions over the past few years. And she knows as much about Peregrine as her husband knows. In other words, there’s no trust issue?”
“None at all, sir.”
“So, what’s the holdup? Put her to work already. And if your French counterpart has any issues, let me know, I’ll give their president a call. I presume the French hate the idea of a Chinese flag flying over France just as much as we hate the idea of it flying over America.”
It was Friday afternoon, and John went home early to take his lovely wife out for dinner.
At the restaurant that evening, after placing their orders, it didn’t take long before Christelle said, “John, you’ve got something on your mind. I’d like to hear it.”
He managed to keep an impassive composure. “Well, I’ve got a vacancy on the Peregrine team, and I’m at a loss as to whom I should recruit.”
“What’s the job description?”
“I need someone with Cold War experience.”
“Okay, but what specialty?”
“Strategic thinking, planning, managing agents and such—”
“And you don’t know anyone like that?”
John shook his head. “The thing is, it must be a woman; she must be over sixty-five, and she must be very beautiful—”
Christelle leaned forward, “What’s—”
John interjected, “Oh, and she must also be French and the former deputy director of the DGSE—”
“John!” Christelle had the most beautiful smile. “How did you pull that off?”
“Howard Lawrence got the president’s permission—”
“You mean the President of the United States?”
“Uh-huh.”
“But what about the DGSE? My terms of employment stated that I can’t work for another country’s intelligence service without explicit permission from the director—”
John held his hand up. “Don’t worry, Lawrence called him. He says it was an easy sell once he gave your former boss a summary overview of the MK Plan. He agreed on the proviso that we share information pertaining to France with them.”
“When do I start?”
“Monday morning.”
“We’ll have to get someone to take care of Cupcake while we’re at work—”
John chuckled. “She’s part of the deal. Her job description is to provide aid and comfort to you and me and anyone else on the team who might need it.”
Christelle’s face was beaming, and her eyes were sparkling.
And twelve time zones away, the Chinese intelligence agencies were totally unaware of the formidable former spymaster who had joined the ranks of their adversaries.
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