Laretta nodded. “For all intents and purposes, it is. We have created a working environment in the most inhospitable place on the planet.”

“Tell me about the defenses,” Espinoza invited.

“I’ve got an eight-man security force. Well, seven men. One was killed in a Ski-Doo accident. They’re all ex-police. They patrol the camp perimeter, break up fights among the workers—that sort of thing. Then there’s the Admiral Guillermo Brown out in the bay. She’s loaded with antiship and antiaircraft missiles as well as two twenty-millimeter cannons. We also have four fixed antiaircraft missile batteries here on shore. And now we have all of you. The captain of the Brown is in overall charge of at least his ship and our missiles. I’m not sure about . . .”

“We take orders directly from Buenos Aires. The captain knows this.”

“Sorry,” Laretta said, “I don’t know much about military command. When I was a kid and other boys were playing soldier, I sat in my room and read histories of Roman engineering feats.”

Espinoza wasn’t listening. He was thinking about what a big fat target the cruiser was, just sitting out in the bay. If he were the opposing commander, the first thing he’d do after his Special Forces made contact was to hit the warship with a cruise missile from a submarine and then take out the shore-based batteries with radar-homing missiles launched from an aircraft. Not a carrier plane. Sending an aircraft carrier would telegraph their intentions. No, he’d stage the plane out of McMurdo, using aerial refueling. If need be, then, the attacking commandos could be augmented with troops flown in on C-130s like the one he himself had arrived aboard.

He needed to discuss this with his father and have it relayed to the Brown’s captain. Once the shooting starts, the ship should be moved and the shore batteries’ radars turned on only intermittently.

This was all contingent on the Western powers responding to the annexation militarily, which wasn’t a foregone conclusion. And that, he believed, was the genius of what they had pulled off. With China backing them, there was a strong chance that no one would send a force south to dislodge them and that his country had gained one of the biggest oil reserves in the world as easily as taking candy from a baby. The double threat of the Kilo-class submarine, and the ecological devastation if the base was attacked strictly by bombs and missiles and its oil spilled, was a strong deterrent to ensure they went unmolested.