Deterrence

A victory is only intimidating if the enemy believes you can do it again.

Photo by Blogging Guide on Unsplash

I watched the conscripts gather bodies and shove them in bags. The beach was covered with them from the high tide line on down. The bags were carried to a shipping container where more conscripts stuffed them to the back of the container. A sergeant waved a Geiger counter at the bags as they went by.

The smell was almost a physical blow. I’d been given a surgical mask but it wasn’t helping at all. I turned to my escort. “Do the masks reduce the smell at all?”

Lieutenant Colonel Wang said, “No. They keep the flies out.”

One conscript carried a body bag by himself. The sharks must not have left much of that one.

A week ago they’d taken me out in a helicopter to view the debris in the Taiwan Strait. There was nothing left of the ships. Floating corpses were rafted together like seaweed. I’d seen sharks on the surface, nosing bodies but too full to take bites.

My cameraman, Joey, finished snapping stills from the top of the dune and slid down the face to take close-ups of the corpse collection. The producer followed, carrying the rest of the camera gear.

Wang pointed to the container. “We’re collecting all the full ones at the port. When cease-fire is formalized, a ship will take them to a Chinese port so their families can collect and identify them.”

I had to wonder how much DNA would be left intact by then. China was too busy with palace coups to negotiate with Taiwan.

The biggest issue had been settled, after all.

Joey finished with the still shots and took the video camera out of its case. He took clips of the scene from several angles. The conscripts just went around him, not caring if he was in their way.

I hadn’t responded to Wang. The smell of death was sickening me, and it was all I could do to keep from vomiting.

He went on anyway. “We think this is going to be the worst of it. The observation drones see fewer bodies left at sea. Most of the ones that will wash ashore are already here.”

Swallowing helped. “It’s good to know it won’t go on forever,” I managed.

Wang was my handler. I needed to stay on his good side.

When Joey set his video camera up on the tripod, I knew he’d picked the spot for me to do my standup. I started working my way down the dune. Colonel Wang followed.

By the time I got there, Joey had marked an ‘X’ in the sand for my spot. I took my place. Looking into the camera, I could tell he had the distance right, there was no sun in my eyes, and the mike was set up to catch my words. I love Joey. He’s the perfect professional. I took the mask off and buried it in a pocket.

“This is Mary Pokeberry with the World News Network. Two weeks after The Attempt, the Taiwanese Army is still cleaning up after the casualties. The bodies of dead Chinese soldiers are washing ashore from the wreck of their invasion fleet. Young soldiers who’d expected to die fighting on the beaches are now performing the safer but less pleasant task of bagging corpses. Each body is being placed in a shipping container for return to China. Once there, they can be identified and returned to their families. With a common cultural heritage, the Taiwanese know how important that is for the Chinese mothers and fathers who lost their sons. For many of them, the boys who died in the Taiwan Strait were their only child, a devastating loss for those raised in the Confucian tradition.

“We can only hope that after so many deaths, peace will come to this troubled region.”

Joey gave me a thumbs-up.

The producer watched a replay of it on his tablet. “It’s good. First take. Nice work.”

“Great. Let’s get away from this smell.” I put my mask back on.

Going back up the dune was harder than coming down. My shoes, picked for being pretty on camera, kept slipping on the sand. Colonel Wang grabbed my arm and held me up when I would have slid down. His army boots had no trouble.

With his help I made it back up to the top. We climbed back into the Humvee and continued the tour.

The next stop was the marshaling yard where the containers of corpses were stacking up. The smell was even worse.

“Can’t you seal them up?” I demanded of Wang.

He shook his head. “The putrefaction gases would build up and rupture the seal.”

Thank God the producer didn’t want a standup here. We just had to wait while Joey took some footage of the site.

We went by the port. It was still being repaired from the battle against the Trojan Horse unit which came in on a container ship. I did a quick standup describing the repairs and praising the work crews. The place smelled of dust, welding fumes, and sea spray, which was practically perfume at this point.

With that finished, we went back to the hotel. Wang joined my crew for dinner at the hotel restaurant. I did my best to charm the colonel over dinner.

After he agreed to split a slice of cheesecake with me, I signaled the boys to skip dessert. That let me have some one on one time with Wang. When we finished the sweet, I said, “If you’d like a nightcap, I have bottle of authentic Kentucky bourbon in my room.”

Wang smiled. “Tempting. But I shouldn’t.”

My accent is normally the bland mid-American of a news professional. I let some of the Appalachian twang of my birth creep in. “Or if you want to try a real American drink, I have a flask of my uncle’s moonshine.”

“I’ve heard of moonshine. Never had a chance to try it.”

That brought him to my room. Drinking with a source is one way to soften him up to spill the good stuff.

There was another way, which I normally avoided. But I needed to get this story.

Pouring some bourbon and moonshine into the good colonel still didn’t get him spilling any secrets, but it weakened his resolve enough I could try the other approach. That took a while and didn’t allow much conversation.

In the wee hours we were lying in the bed. I ran my hand down his chest. “So how did y’all really beat the invasion?”

His arm was around my shoulders. He pulled me tight against him. “There was an underwater nuke. Two of them. Everybody knows that.”

“Yeah. Whose?”

“How should I know?”

“’Cause you’re smart. And well-connected. And know all sorts of stuff.”

He laughed at that. “Could’ve been American.”

“Bullshit. Dee-see has been shitting bricks since The Attempt. If they had the nukes ready, they wouldn’t have been flying troops in while your airports were getting missiled.”

“Japan.”

That was insulting enough to make me go up on one elbow. “They hate nukes. The population would lynch anyone who made one.” I considered the vision of a Japanese lynch mob. “Politely.”

“Israel.”

That won him a hard poke in the belly. “Be serious. They have their own problems.”

“If you know what the answer is, why are you asking me?”

“The only thing that makes sense is that Taiwan had a nuke of your own. But where did you get it?”

Colonel Wang shifted to lie on his side, facing me. “Even if that was true, nobody would tell me. I spend too much time with reporters.”

Time to be nice to him. I leaned in for a passionate kiss. “Reporters like spending time with you.”

More time wasted before we started talking again.

“So did you build it yourselves?”

Wang chuckled. “You really do want to get me court-martialed, don’t you?”

“You’d be an anonymous source.”

“Who’s just spent over a week taking you all over the country.”

“I can hold onto it until I get back to the USA. I’ll wait until I’ve been home a week. I’ll be talking to other people. I can disguise it.”

“Hmmm.” The colonel rolled onto his back and stared at the ceiling.

He must have something! He wouldn’t care so much about protecting his anonymity if he didn’t. I leaned over and worked on breaking down his resolve some more.

When Wang was catching his breath, he said, “I don’t really know anything. I just heard a rumor.”

“Rumors are fine. I can say it’s unverified.”

He sighed, and gave in. “The Soviet Union had these portable nukes. They were called backpack nukes, but really they were too big for that. The KGB kept them ready to infiltrate if they needed to destroy a city anonymously. When things collapsed, some of the KGB manipulated their way to the top of the new order. Others wanted to switch to the winning side, and were willing to trade. So we traded. Taiwan got eight backpack bombs. Some Russians received American passports, admissions to top colleges for the kids, and some cash.”

“How’d y’all get them to America?”

“The CIA likes other intelligence agencies owing them favors. Or so the story goes.”

I thought it through. It held together better than the theories my network’s talking heads had been spinning. “You still have six left, then.”

“Maybe. If the rumor is true. Neither confirm nor deny, as the Pentagon says. I don’t want to give whoever wins out in Beijing an excuse to toss some nukes at us.”

“I understand. You didn’t tell me anything. I never heard this.”

I spent the time until dawn making sure he wouldn’t regret blabbing. At least not big enough regrets that he’d report me to the National Security Bureau.

The next day was hard. I was guzzling caffeine at every chance to stay awake. I needed multiple takes to get my standups right.

It was worth it. That scoop could make my career.

That night was my last in Taiwan. I spent some time thanking Wang for his leak again, but still managed to get a good night’s sleep before our flight.

A trans-Pacific flight leaves plenty of time for thinking. I started planning how to report my scoop. There were plenty of ex-Soviet agents in America. I could interview one about the backpack nukes. It was too much to hope for that one would confess to selling one to Taiwan, but I didn’t need that. I just needed to establish they existed, and that some were unaccounted for. One of those anti-nuclear proliferation professors would be good for the second part. They were always sounding the alarm about something.

The network had several talking heads I could call on to confirm that a couple of backpack nukes would be big enough to wipe out the Chinese invasion fleet.

By the time we passed Midway Island I had a script with time tags scribbled on the notepad I’d swiped from the hotel. I wasn’t going to let my producer steal the credit for this one.

Once I was done as I could be on the plane, I ordered a celebratory glass of wine from the flight attendant. Then a second one.

A nasty idea crept into my head. Was I being used? Not that Wang was taking advantage of me, that was a normal hazard. But he didn’t need to make up a story for me. Was the Taiwanese government using me to spread disinformation?

It was a danger. If there was another source for the nukes that Taiwan wanted to disguise, they could have planted this story on me as a distraction.

What would the other source be? I’d shot down the other ones Wang had tossed out, and the logic was still sound. Maybe the nukes had been an American or Japanese covert operation. But I had no evidence for that. I had a source giving me a reasonable story.

If it was disinformation, why would Taiwan want to claim they had nukes they didn’t? Especially ones which couldn’t be put on missiles to threaten China? I thought about China’s response to the report. They’d probably go through every basement in Beijing looking for a hidden nuke.

I decided to run with it. True or false, I had my career to think of.

More stories by Karl K. Gallagher are on Amazon and Audible.