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snazzy-looking polished wooden box on his desk. He walked slowly around the room, nodding formally at the portrait of Admiral Nimitz. He clipped the end of his cigar, and ignited it with a gold Dunhill lighter, a gift from a Saudi Arabian prince who thought, wrongly, that he might study in the U.S. to become a submariner.
    “Lemme lay a few facts on you, Joe. Get one of those cigars, if you want one, but listen. By the year 2000, we actually knew the Chinese had stolen top-secret design information for our most advanced thermonuclear weapons, and had transferred ballistic missile technology to Iran and Libya, among others. Beautiful, right?”
    “Beautiful.”
    “They had also stolen our top missile guidance technology. They’ve got three thousand corporations in the US of A, probably half of ’em with lines to Chinese military intelligence, and you can’t trust politicians one fucking inch to do the right thing. Jesus, Joe, Clinton’s attorney general denied the FBI permission to wiretap the fucking Chinese spy’s phone, and then the President himself went on television and told a barefaced lie, denying he even knew about the leaks when he plainly did. Then they hushed up half the Cox report in order to save his ass.
    “Clinton made it possible for the goddamned Chinese to get their hands on American technology no one shouldsee , and what’s worse, they’re still in here, stealing and lying.
    “Joe, five years from now the People’s Liberation Army/Navy is gonna consist of around three and a half million people. They are no longer especially concerned with a major ground war doctrine. They are, for the first time in five hundred years, becoming expansionist, and have formally recognized their massive Navy as their Senior Service.
    “Right now more than a third of the entire Chinese military budget is going into Navy research, development and production. They’ve finally managed to get four Russian-built Kilo-class submarines, despite my best efforts. They have this brand-new Xia-class SSBN, they have a production line of new Song-class SSKs, two new six-thousand-ton Luhai-class destroyers, they have a land-attack cruise missile program, they’re aiming for two big aircraft carrier battle groups inside the next eight years—one for the Indian Ocean, one for the Pacific.
    “And how about this Burma bullshit? The Chinese have piled nearly two billion dollars’ worth of military hardware into that country, updating all the Burmese naval bases, which they of course will be utilizing. That adds up to a permanent Chinese presence in the Indian Ocean. Christ, Joe! These guys are on the move, I’m telling you. And I’m not proposing we make moves to stop ’em. Not yet, anyway. But I do seriously want to know if the little pricks can hit L.A. with a ballistic missile fired from the South China Sea. Is that too much to ask, for Christ’s sake?”
    The President’s National Security Adviser faced the U.S. Navy Chief, and for the first time the two men were silent. Admiral Mulligan took a deep swig of coffee. Admiral Morgan drew deeply on his cigar, and then he spoke again, with equal care.
    “Joe, China supports twenty-two percent of the world’s population on only seven percent of its arable land. Because of their grotesque mismanagement of theirfarming areas, they’re losing millions of acres a year. In the next fifteen years their population is going to one and a half billion, and sometime in the next five years they’re gonna have an annual shortfall of two hundred and eighty-five million tons of grain, which is a lot of cookies.”
    “Yeah, I know the feeling…we’re a bit short in here as well.”
    Admiral Morgan grinned but ignored him. “Joe, we’re looking at a nation that sooner or later is going to have to raise a gigantic sum of money every year to buy grain and rice to feed its people. Either that, or they’re gonna steal it. Or at least frighten someone into selling it to ’em cheap. And