The young National Defence Minister Kong Zhao came in, his hair stylishly disarranged as usual. He and Wu Bai sat together opposite the old guard. Battle lines were being drawn, Kai saw, like troops with swords and muskets facing each other across a field in the Opium Wars.
The commander of the People’s Liberation Army Navy, Admiral Liu Hua, was also part of the old guard, and after paying his respects to the president he sat next to Chang Jianjun.
Kai saw that President Chen’s gold Travers fountain pen had been laid on a leather-bound notepad at one end of the oval table. Kai placed himself at the opposite end, far from the president but equidistant from the rival factions. He belonged to the liberal bloc, but he pretended neutrality.
The president moved to his seat. A moment of danger was approaching. Kai remembered Wu’s parting remark two hours ago: What we must do is stop the warriors on both sides turning this into a bloodbath.
Chen held up a document that Kai recognized as his Vulture file. ‘You’ve all read this excellent and concise report from the Guoanbu.’ He turned to the security minister. ‘Thank you for that, Fu. Do you have anything to add?’
Fu did not bother to say that he had had nothing to do with the Vulture file, and in fact had been fast asleep while all the work was done. ‘Nothing to add, Mr President.’
Kai spoke up. ‘In the last few minutes we’ve heard something – only a rumour, but an interesting one.’
Fu glared at him. Kai had shown that he was more up to speed in the crisis. That will teach him to use my wife against me, Kai thought with satisfaction. Then he had a more cautious thought: I must be careful, I shouldn’t overdo it.
He went on: ‘People in Chad believe their army stole the drone from the Americans and gave it to Salafi Jihadi Sudan, as revenge for an attempt on the president’s life. It’s just possible that the rumour is true.’
‘Rumour?’ General Huang growled. ‘It sounds to me like a feeble American excuse.’ His Northern Mandarin accent sounded especially harsh today, the ‘w’ changed to ‘v’， an ‘r’ added to the end of some words, a nasal intonation to the ‘ng’ sound. ‘They’ve done something criminal and now they’re trying to evade responsibility.’
‘Perhaps,’ Kai said. ‘But—’
Huang persisted. ‘They did the same thing in 1999, when NATO bombed our embassy in Belgrade. They pretended that was an accident; they made the ludicrous excuse that the CIA got the address of our embassy wrong!’
The old guard around the table were nodding. ‘They believe our lives are worthless,’ Kai’s father said angrily. ‘They think nothing of killing a hundred Chinese people. They’re like the Japanese, who massacred three hundred thousand of us in Nanjing in 1937.’ Kai suppressed a groan. His father’s paranoid generation never ceased to bring up Nanjing. Jianjun went on: ‘But Chinese lives are precious, and we must show them that they cannot kill us without grave consequences.’
How far back in history are we going to go? Kai thought.
Defence Minister Kong Zhao tried to bring them back to the twenty-first century. ‘The Americans are clearly embarrassed by this,’ he said, pushing his hair out of his eyes. ‘Whether the incident is something they planned that went too far, or an accident they never intended, the fact remains that they’re on the defensive – and we should be thinking about how to profit from that. We might gain some advantage.’
Kai knew that Kong would not say that unless he had a plan.
President Chen frowned. ‘Gain advantage?’ he said. ‘I don’t see how.’
Kong took his cue. ‘The Guoanbu report mentions that the chief engineer’s twin sons were killed. There must be a photograph somewhere of those two boys. All we have to do is give that photo to the media. Twins are cute. I guarantee the picture will appear in television news broadcasts and on front pages all around the world: the children killed by an American drone.’
That was clever, Kai thought. The propaganda value would be enormous. The story running alongside the photo would be a denial of responsibility by the White House – which, like all denials, would suggest guilt.
But the men around the table would not like the idea. Too many of them were old soldiers.
General Huang made a scornful noise and said: ‘International politics is a power struggle, not a popularity contest. You don’t win with pictures of kids, no matter how cute.’
Fu Chuyu spoke for the first time. ‘We must retaliate,’ he said. ‘Anything else will be seen as weakness.’