Read Tipping Point: The War With China - the First Salvo (Dan Lenson Novels) for Free Online Page A

Another with a youth group, all the kids looking up at Niles, in dress blues, as to some massive and inscrutable deity.
    Their relationship went back many years. Then rear admiral Niles had cherry-picked him as a project officer at Joint Cruise Missiles, troubleshooting the crash-plagued “flying torpedo” that had become Tomahawk. Dan had submitted his resignation there, despite Niles’s avuncular advice he was throwing away his career. After his fiancée’s murder, Dan had changed his mind about resigning. But by then, Niles had washed his hands of him, pegging him as mercurial, cavalier, not a team player. For years Dan had wandered in the Navy’s outer darkness. Only lately had the admiral seemed to change his mind, when they’d stumbled out of the ruins of the burning E ring together.
    “I pay my debts,” he’d muttered then. Maybe, in his mind, he had, arranging Dan’s promotion to captain, then his command of Savo Island .
    Who knew where that left them, or what the second most powerful officer in the Navy wanted now.
    “Lenson,” Niles rumbled, clearing his throat. He turned from contemplating the view. Nodded to Rongstad, who without a word opened the Post so Dan could see the second page. The headline read: NAVY IN QUANDARY OVER ANTIMISSILE STRATEGY, POSED BY ACTIONS OF ROGUE OFFICER.
    “Read it?”
    “Yes sir. On the Metro. But you note, it doesn’t quote me.”
    “You’re not this ‘highly placed source’?”
    “No sir. They called, but I haven’t said a word. On or off the record.” He stood waiting, hands locked behind him, until Rongstad nodded at a chair. Niles lowered himself, and he faced the flag officers across the expanse of polished glass over dark mahogany.
    “Actually, that’s not why you’re here,” Rongstad said.
    Niles rumbled, “Remember Zhang Zurong? You were involved with him. Back when Bucky Evans and that Tallinger bastard were passing our secrets to him.”
    “Yessir. I recall that.” He’d met the smooth-faced, pudgy Zhang in a Chinatown restaurant, at what had seemed at the time like a family party. But “Uncle Xinhu” had turned out to be a senior colonel in the Second Department, China’s equivalent of Defense Intelligence. Dan had turned over elevator wiring diagrams disguised as top-secret terrain guidance schematics. The NCIS and FBI had nabbed the go-between, but by the time they showed up on Zhang’s doorstep, he’d decamped, fled Washington for his homeland.
    Where, by all accounts, he had prospered mightily.
    Niles grunted. “General, lieutenant general, army chief of staff, then the political sidestep. Just like Putin and Bush—from chief of intelligence to president. Or at least, to chairman of the central military commission. Which, right now, is pretty much the same thing.”
    “He’s always been a hawk,” Rongstad put in, drawing idle diagrams on the dustless glass. “When we saw his name show up on the State Council, we knew it meant trouble.”
    Niles got up but motioned them to stay seated. He crossed to a flat-panel display on the side wall and picked up a remote. The screen glowed a stylized logo. Niles machine-gunned through PowerPoint slides, and stopped at one of a chubby face. Zhang, in a gray-green Soviet-style uniform. Niles let that burn on the screen for a moment, then went to the next image. The western Pacific.
    “This is what I spend my day worrying about, Lenson. We have a strategic concept, handed down from administration to administration. Containment, until they integrate into the world trading system. But what if they don’t want to integrate into a system that we, the West, designed? At some point, we’ll lose our grip.”
    Niles’s fat finger swept a scythe from Japan to Vietnam. “Think of growing national power like the shock wave in a detonating bomb. As it increases, it presses against any restraint. What Acheson called our defensive perimeter in the Pacific runs from Japan through Korea, Taiwan, and the