Sandecker raised his eyebrows, puzzled. "I can certainly see, Mr. President, where INS and the Coast Guard fit into the picture, but what does unlawful immigration have to do with the National Underwater and Marine Agency? Our work is based on underwater research. Chasing down Chinese smugglers is out of our territory."

"We're in dire need of any source that can help us," said Duncan Monroe. "With congressional budget cuts, INS is overstretched far beyond our capacity. Congress appropriated a sixty-percent increase in INS border-patrol agents, but provided no funds for expanding our investigations division. Our entire department has only eighteen hundred special agents to cover the entire United States and foreign investigations. The FBI has eleven hundred agents in New York City alone. Here in Washington twelve hundred Capitol police patrol an area that is measured in city blocks. Simply put, there are nowhere near enough INS criminal investigative assets to put a dent in the flow of illegal immigrants."

"Sounds like you're operating with an army of patrolmen on the beat but few detectives to back them up," said Sandecker.

"We fight a losing battle as it is with illegals pouring across our border with Mexico, many who come from as far away as Chile and Argentina," Monroe continued. "We might as well hold back ocean surf with kitchen sieves. People-smuggling has grown into a multibillion-dollar industry that rivals arms and drug smuggling. Moving human cargo in an underworld apathetic to borders and political ideologies, people-smuggling will be the major crime of the twenty-first century."

Harper inclined his head. "To make matters worse, large-scale alien smuggling from the People's Republic of China is reaching epidemic proportions. Smugglers, with the blessing and support of their government, who are looking to decrease their tremendous population any way they can, have launched a program to export tens of millions of their people to every corner of the globe, especially to Japan, the U.S. and Canada, Europe and South America. Strange as it sounds, they're even infiltrating the whole of Africa from Capetown to Algiers."

Harper continued for his boss. "The smuggling syndicates have organized a complex labyrinth of transportation routes. Air, sea, and land are all used to smuggle human cargo. Over forty advanced staging and dispersion areas have been set up throughout Eastern Europe, Central America and Africa."

"The Russians are especially hard hit," added Monroe. "They see massive, uncontrolled migration of Chinese nationals into Mongolia and Siberia as a threat to their security. The intelligence directorate of the Russian Defense Ministry has warned their leaders that Russia is on the verge of losing its Far Eastern territories because the flow of Chinese is already accounting for a greater part of the population in the region."

"Mongolia is already a lost cause," said the President. "Russia has allowed her power base to slip through her fingers. Siberia is next."