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powerful enough to actually defuse this latest crisis?”
    “High enough. He is the Chinese chief of naval operations.”
    Hawke smiled. “Start at the top and work your way up. Isn’t that what you’ve always told me?”
    “Indeed.”
    “And how much of a gratuity am I going to be transporting to the good admiral in return for all this assistance in defusing the global crisis from the inside?”
    “One hundred million pounds sterling. Cash. In a lockbox you’ll carry in the cockpit with you.”
    Hawke whistled and said, “That’s all?”
    “If you succeed, it’s worth every shilling. Now, let’s order some lunch and talk of more pleasant things. I understand our mutual friend, Ambrose Congreve, is to be wed next Christmas. I assume you’re to be best man?”
    “Well . . . to be honest, I don’t really know. I would assume so. But I haven’t heard from him on the subject.”
    “Didn’t mean to step into that one.”
    “Not at all. Perhaps they’ve called the whole thing off and he simply hasn’t the heart to tell me.”
    Sir David picked up his menu and began to study it intently.
    “Well. You will find an obsessively complete dossier on Operation Pacifist waiting for you when you get home to Hawkesmoor. Motorcycle courier just dropping it off with Pelham now. Memorize it and burn it. Now, then, Alex, what will you be having for lunch?”
    “Not sure, sir. What looks expensive?”

C H A P T E R   5
    The White House
    P resident Tom McCloskey stared at the live feed from the East China Sea. He was, he knew in some secret part of him, in a state of shock. Hell, all of them were in shock—McCloskey himself; his close friend since Annapolis, Vice President David Rosow; his beautiful new and wildly popular secretary of state, Kim Oakley Case; the always reliable secretary of defense, Anson Beard; and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Charlie Moore.
    And all the rest of the crisis team; every one of them had been staring at the Situation Room screens for over an hour.
    What they were seeing up there was real-time terror. Innocent American lives were being threatened half a world away, and there was not one damn thing he or anybody else in the White House or over at State, CIA, or the Pentagon could do about it. Not one damn thing.
    “Shit,” he whispered under his breath. “Shit.”
    China and her increasingly bellicose surrogate, North Korea, as of forty-eight hours ago, were staging joint naval war games in the East China Sea. North Korea had made a big show of it for the press, trotting out their latest warships. According to his most recent CIA naval intelligence briefing, and some help from British intelligence, it was clear that China had long been planning to use the North Korean navy as a pawn in this little game of their own. Test American resolve.
    But how?
    Nobody at CIA, State, the Pentagon, or any other intelligence agency had prepared him for this. This was a goddamn nightmare, and it couldn’t have come at a worse time. The whole country was coming unglued over a few inadvertent remarks he’d made at the G7 summit in Prague the week before. Jesus Christ. The media, no friends of his in the run-up to the damn election, were all over him for a couple of misstatements he’d made to Putin about China.
    The joint press event was over and done with and he’d assumed the mikes were dead. Reasonable assumption.
    They weren’t.
    What he’d said was innocent enough. The once-powerful Putin, now increasingly in danger of becoming China’s bitch, was playing hardball with the United States over China’s currency manipulations. And McCloskey hadn’t come this far to be backed into a corner by the Russian’s trumped-up tough-guy act, and he was planning to draw a line in the sand and call the Russian’s bluff. But he wasn’t going to tell Putin that, no sir. He was going to sow a few seeds of disinformation and let the Kremlin show its cards. His own wife had told him what a shrewd idea it