His assistant, Mapes, had suggested this as a likely reason for Gatt’s urgent message, but Krieger had resisted accepting it. Gatt knew better. Or should have. He wasn’t just a fixer. Gatt was an investor. Krieger got to his feet. That was the problem with wharf rats: you had to either get used to them or kill them.

•   •   •

Later that week Krieger sat in his office on board his superyacht, Raptor. He closed his laptop and looked through the ship’s sliding glass doors onto the Sulu Sea. The Philippine sky was crystal clear. A light breeze caressed the curtains. If things went as planned, he could have his meeting this morning and still join his family, who were on nearby Cebu Island, diving with whale sharks.

To Raptor’s west was Palawan Island, and beyond that was the strategic heart of the maritime Orient: the South China Sea. Unless he was wrong, man’s next civilization-altering conflict would take place not in the deserts of the Middle East, or in the skies over North Korea, but out there on Asia’s most strategically important body of water. When the great conflict would kick off was very much up in the air. Maybe it would start tomorrow. Maybe it would not begin until after Krieger was dead. Tomorrow was too soon, and dead was too late. It was coming, and if it was coming, he wanted it to happen on his watch. History, he decided, needed scheduling.

In some ways he had already accomplished the hardest part. He had secured China as a client. “China can build overseas, Terry. But she cannot yet put her boots or weapons there,” China’s general secretary, Ho Jianming, had confided during a visit to Krieger’s hunting property in Africa.

“The longer your reach, Mr. President,” Krieger had replied, “the more vulnerable are your fingers.” Perseus Group was now China’s overseas security firm, the billion-dollar glove to protect China’s trillion-dollar fist.

Both men agreed on the importance of the South China Sea to China’s future. Beneath its waters lay more oil and natural gas than was possessed by any single nation on earth, as well as important deep-sea channels for China’s ballistic missile submarines. Unfortunately for China, above those resources rumbled the second most trafficked military and commercial sea-lane in the world. Day and night, half the world’s merchant tonnage and a third of its sea traffic, including tankers, freighters, warships, and fishing vessels, traversed the sea’s waters. The South China Sea was a marginal sea, surrounded by seven other countries so that it was more of a lake, each of which claimed rights to exploit the waters. Extracting wealth from such an active sea was like hunting for a lost contact lens in Tiananmen Square.