365: Chapter 365 The US's Ears in the Gulf of Thailand

He tucked the pencil into his pocket.

"Next."

Naypyidaw, the underground archives of the Presidential Palace.

This archive room did not appear on any structural diagram of the surface buildings. Its entrance was hidden behind a bookshelf in the President's study, requiring triple verification of iris, fingerprint, and voiceprint to open. The elevator descended twelve meters, passing through a reinforced concrete blast door over two meters thick, before reaching the true archive—a rectangular space illuminated as bright as day by cool-colored LED lights, its four walls embedded with electronic screens and encrypted server cabinets.

Zhang Cheng sat at the central console, the main screen before him scrolling through all the intelligence intercepted by the "Vega" system over the past seventy-two hours. He had been sitting there for three hours, and the coffee by his hand had been refilled four times.

On the screen, an intelligence summary labeled "Top Secret - For President's Eyes Only" was flashing. The title of the summary was: "Secret Agreement on Defense Cooperation between Cambodia and Japan—Full Draft Text."

Old K stood behind him, hands clasped behind his back. "This document was intercepted at two o'clock this morning. The encryption level is very high—the 'Shion' cipher system used exclusively by the Japanese Ministry of Defense. We used the Vega's quantum decryption module to crack it; it took seventeen minutes."

"Seventeen minutes?" Zhang Cheng flipped through the pages of the document. "That's four minutes longer than it took to crack the US Navy's code last time."

"The Japanese encryption habits are more tedious. They added a layer of pseudo-random noise before and after the formal ciphertext, and embedded twelve fake key identifiers in the body—we had to strip them out one by one."

Zhang Cheng did not respond. He was reading the draft text line by line.

The document was written in both Japanese and English, totaling twenty-four pages. The core terms included: the Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force would establish a "Joint Training Center" at the Ream Naval Base in Cambodia, with no fewer than two hundred permanent personnel; the Japanese side would provide two P-3C anti-submarine patrol aircraft and supporting maintenance facilities, with a patrol range covering the Gulf of Thailand and the western section of the Strait of Malacca; the Japan Ground Self-Defense Force would dispatch a mountain warfare advisory group to the Cambodian Army, with an initial batch of thirty people stationed in Anlong Veng, sixty kilometers north of the Preah Vihear Temple on the Cambodia-Thailand border; in exchange, Cambodia granted "full immunity" to Japanese Self-Defense Force personnel while performing official duties within Cambodia and allowed the Japanese side to build independent communication and intelligence processing facilities at the Ream base.

The last page of the document was a hand-drawn expansion plan for the Ream base. On the map, a new deep-water pier was being extended, with the label "Japanese Dedicated Berth - Capable of Docking Helicopter Destroyers" above the pier. The date in the bottom right corner of the plan was three days ago.

Zhang Cheng finished the last page and pushed the document back toward the screen. "This is more than just a 'training center.' This is Japan's first overseas military base in Southeast Asia—and it's being built right on our doorstep."

He pulled up an electronic map and traced an arc westward from the location of the Ream base—two hundred kilometers away was Myeik, a coastal city in the Tanintharyi Region of the Federation of Myanmar. "A P-3C taking off from Ream has a cruising speed of six hundred kilometers per hour; it can be over Myeik within twenty minutes. Its magnetic anomaly detector can scan the underwater tracks of our submarines, and its sonar buoys can blockade the entire channel. If a Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force Izumo-class helicopter destroyer docks at the Ream pier, its anti-submarine helicopter group will have a coverage radius of over three hundred kilometers—the entire Gulf of Thailand would be under its control."

He paused, then added: "Our YJ-18 shore-to-ship missiles are launched from the direction of Myeik. If the Japanese build a monitoring station in Ream, they'll be able to collect our every launch parameter, every radar frequency, and the coordinates of every mobile position."

Old K nodded. "Even more lethal is this." He pulled up an intercepted communication log on the screen. The sender was the Defense Intelligence Headquarters of the Japanese Ministry of Defense, and the receiver was a Japanese liaison officer at the Ream base, dated one week ago.

"Per the sharing agreement with the US side, all acoustic intelligence collected by your unit in the Gulf of Thailand will be synchronized in real-time to the Pacific Fleet Intelligence Center in Hawaii and the National Security Agency in Fort Meade, Maryland. Priority surveillance targets: Federation of Myanmar Navy submarines and shore-to-ship missile deployments."

"Real-time synchronization." Zhang Cheng repeated those two words. "So Ream isn't a Japanese base—it's an ear the US has planted in the Gulf of Thailand using Japan's hand."

He stood up and paced back and forth in the archive room. His leather shoes clicked against the concrete floor, making a monotonous and dull sound.

"The US had two destroyers taken out in the Persian Gulf, and their carrier was breached; they need to rebuild their intelligence advantage against anti-ship missiles. They've already had their acoustic monitoring network in the First Island Chain thoroughly mapped out by us, so they must find a breakthrough in a new direction—Ream is that breakthrough." He stopped pacing. "The Japanese are willing to be pawns. They think that by hiding under the US's nuclear umbrella, they can plant their flag in Southeast Asia again. They've forgotten how the Empire was beaten back to those few small islands the last time they tried to plant a flag in Southeast Asia."

Old K pulled another piece of intelligence from the encrypted folder. This source was not an electronic intercept but human intelligence—an informant developed by Erika's Team in Phnom Penh, a major working in the Secretariat of the Cambodian Ministry of Defense.

The intelligence was a transcript of a recording. In the recording, Yasuo Tanaka, the Chief Representative of the Japanese Ministry of Defense in Cambodia, was talking with Cambodian Deputy Prime Minister Tea Banh. Tanaka said: 'The strategic value here far exceeds that rock at Preah Vihear Temple. Once the Ream base is completed, joint Japan-US maritime patrols will regularly cover the Gulf of Thailand. By then, Myanmar's submarines will have nowhere to hide, and their shore-to-ship missiles will no longer be a secret—this is an effective hedge against Myanmar's "successful experience" in the Red Sea and the Bab el-Mandeb Strait. Please understand that our country's security commitment to your nation is based precisely on this strategic value.'

Zhang Cheng did not speak immediately after hearing this. He walked back to the console, picked up his cup, and took a sip—the coffee inside was stone cold.

"I want to see the editorial from the Phnom Penh Times," he said suddenly.

Old K pulled it up on the screen. This article was published this morning; it was the front-page headline of the only Chinese-language newspaper in Cambodia. The title was printed in bold Song typeface: "The Final Revelry of the 'Remnants of Northern Myanmar Warlords'—A Critique of the Expansionist Ambitions of the Zhang Cheng Regime."

The article was published under the name of "Special Commentator Chen Feng." The main text was accompanied by an old photo of Zhang Cheng—it was taken while he was speaking at the Pangkham oath-taking rally, showing him in camouflage fatigues with a background of tank formations ready to deploy. The caption for the photo was: "A Contemporary Model of a State Built on Drug Money."

Zhang Cheng read down line by line.

"The so-called 'Federation of Myanmar' is nothing more than a sandcastle built on the ill-gotten gains of telecom fraud, drug trafficking profits, and the blood money of human trafficking. Its leader, Zhang Cheng, originally a wanted fugitive from the Dragon Kingdom, fled to Northern Myanmar and rose through illegal armed violence. In a very short time, he completed the leap from 'piglet' to 'local tyrant.' In this process, how much blood and how many tears of innocent people became the mortar under his throne? How many broken families achieved the cold glint of the pistol at his waist?"