420: Chapter 420 Three hours until the flight begins

Burns took off his reading glasses, pinched the bridge of his nose with his thumb and forefinger for a long time before letting go, then picked up the red encrypted phone on the desk. "Put me through directly to Barrett." When he said this to his secretary, his throat felt like it was filled with sand.

Forty meters beneath Manhattan, in the secret chamber of Council of Elders. The atmosphere of this gathering was completely different from the last—no cigars, no whiskey, no mockery of President Te.

On the round table sat only glass bottles of mineral water and a freshly printed draft of the front page of The Wall Street Journal. Every word of the headline felt like fingernails scratching a chalkboard: "CIA Station Chief in Africa Confesses Publicly, Admits Assassination Plot Against President of Mozambique Was Ordered by US High-Level Officials—White House Denies, Department of Justice Intervenes to Investigate."

When Barrett walked into the conference room, he didn't throw his coat over the back of his chair as he usually did. He sat down, pushed the water bottle aside, and flipped the headline of The Wall Street Journal in front of him to the other side. Only two people were sitting at the table—Abramovich and Raytheon director Haskins. The other seats were empty.

Abramovich spoke first. "Of the seven core members scheduled to attend tonight's quarterly dividend meeting, four have canceled at the last minute—not by phone, but by synchronizing their messages through their usual encrypted legal counsel channels, all with the exact same wording: 'Need to reassess the risk of exposure of ties with Council of Elders.' They didn't say they were quitting, but they didn't say they would be coming back either."

Haskins placed a printed combat sequence report at Barrett's side, his fingertip tapping on the bolded satellite dispatch anomaly code for the Changi Naval Base in Singapore. "The Seventh Fleet updated its deployment posture early this morning. The USS Dwight D. Eisenhower battle group has withdrawn from the Mozambique Channel and is turning east towards Madagascar. The 'Ford' remains stranded in Maldivian waters for engine room repairs; the off-duty time was initially marked as 'forty-eight hours,' but it has just been changed to 'to be assessed.' The 'Reagan's' scheduled date to take over the Persian Gulf patrol was quietly canceled by Central Command early this morning."

He opened the report, revealing a handwritten note personally annotated by the Chief of Naval Operations—the handwriting was messy but the tone was direct: "The survival probability of carrier battle groups facing DF-17s under combat conditions is unacceptable; it is not recommended to continue forward deployment."

Barrett picked up the paper, read it at a glance, and put it back on the table. These data points—without a single missile landing on a deck—were more lethal than the Persian Gulf-3 that had penetrated the uss carl vinson in the Red Sea—because it had penetrated 120 years of naval faith in aircraft carriers.

"And then there is our domestic situation." Abramovich took two documents out of his briefcase: one was a report submitted by the American Bankers Association to Congress regarding the impact of the Asian Digital Currency Agreement on the US dollar's settlement share; the other was an assessment of cross-border transaction data completed in three seconds by the Shuguang Cloud blockchain clearing system, reprinted by the Financial Times this morning—the conclusion provided by Morgan Stanley was: If the Federal Reserve does not urgently launch a digital dollar to directly interface with it, the US dollar's settlement share in Asian commodity trade will fall below twenty-five percent.

Barrett didn't look at the second document. He just pointed to the cover of the first one and said: "Tell me the results at the back directly."

"The total share of the US dollar in commodity settlement has fallen from 41% six months ago to 29%, and it is expected to fall below 25% next quarter. The energy, mineral, grain, and industrial product trading pools covered by the Asian Digital Currency Agreement—equivalent to 37% of the total global commodity trade scale—have completely bypassed SWIFT. American banks can't even touch the transaction fees for this money. Meanwhile, Shuguang Heavy Industry is simultaneously building AI-driven automated ports in Southeast Asia, East Africa, and South America, with each port defaulting to embedding Shuguang Cloud's clearing nodes. These nodes don't use the US dollar and don't connect to SWIFT. Containers enter the port, are weighed on platform scales, clear customs via AI quarantine, and digital currency is automatically cleared—the entire process doesn't require a single American bank to handle it."

Barrett listened, unscrewed his pen cap and screwed it back on, without responding. He was calculating a different account in his mind—just last month, three more ASEAN central banks privately inquired through Singapore about the conditions for joining the Asian Digital Currency Agreement, two of which were the most stable buyers of US Treasury bonds for decades. The demand for Treasury auctions was softening, and the credit of the US dollar was collapsing faster than he had expected after the failure of military deterrence. (He had, of course, seen the report on the evaporation of those twenty billion dollars earlier, but that was just one company.) And the Kra Canal was officially opening for navigation today; Malacca was no longer the only channel. He rubbed the shriveled vein on the back of his hand, suddenly remembering what he had said to Abramovich— "From the time the Puritans set foot on North America until now, four hundred years, and it took less than five years to lose to this extent." He had thought that was the end. Now he knew, that was just the beginning.

"When does the canal open for navigation?" Barrett asked.

Haskins looked at his watch. "Nine o'clock this morning Yangon time—three hours left."

Barrett stood up and walked towards the north wall of the conference room. Hanging on the wall was a reproduction of the oil painting from four hundred years ago showing the Puritans landing on the North American continent; the sails bore a faded cross, and beneath the coastal rocks was a line of golden English text— "A City upon a Hill". He pulled a thin cord next to the picture frame, and the electronic display embedded in the wall lit up. The satellite image provided by the Pentagon's National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency zoomed in, showing the Kra Isthmus being pierced by a straight waterway. The second image was a live feed of the port—a 200,000-ton LNG carrier of Long Kingdom nationality, its bow already pointed towards the canal entrance, less than three hours away from opening.

He gazed at the blue signal flag directly above the first lock, and after a long time, he finally spoke: "What can we do now?"

No one answered him. In the conference room, there was only the faint sound of mineral water bottle caps being unscrewed and sporadic bubbles rising.

At the same time, Myanmar Prime Minister Li Lanzhi was at the scene of the Kra Canal opening ceremony. In the command room of the control tower at the eastern end of the canal in Ranong Province, she looked down through the bulletproof glass at the first LNG carrier of Long Kingdom nationality waiting to pass through the canal; the rollers on the deck cranes were already sliding slightly. On the main screen of the canal control center, a line of large green characters was counting down: 2 hours and 57 minutes until navigation opens.

She opened the canal's technical parameter file for a third review, scanning through them one by one—the ship types allowed to pass were not restricted by Malacca's width limits; the entire line was equipped with AI intelligent formation scheduling, compressing the average time from entering the lock to exiting to within two hours; the LNG receiving terminal at Kyaukpyu Port, connected to the western end of the canal, had an annual receiving capacity of 15 million tons, and the supporting pipeline loop to Southern Yunnan of the Long Kingdom had completed pressure testing; the eastern end connected directly to the South China Sea, and the deep-water terminal built at the estuary could simultaneously dock four 200,000-ton cargo ships. All parameters matched reality completely—it was even completed three months ahead of schedule.

She closed the folder and looked up. On the other end of the communication link, Zhang Cheng was sitting in the Presidential Palace in the same statue-like posture—in front of him were three holographic screens: the real-time image of the main canal waterway, financial data on global shipping index changes, and the statement just released by the White House spokesperson at 8:45 AM— "The United States does not recognize any international waterway that unilaterally changes the status quo and will take all measures to uphold freedom of navigation." The wording was identical to the "Southeast Asia Freedom of Navigation Act," but this time it did not mention a sanctions list, had no specific countermeasures, and the last paragraph even left a suggestive clause.