Threat Vector Read online

  Wei was almost overcome by all the rhetoric. He lost his train of thought for a moment. Su was known as a firebrand, not as an orator, but Wei felt the man had just manipulated time and space in order to win his argument.

  “The cyberattack against America—”

  “Have no connection to China.”

  Wei was surprised. “Are you saying we are not involved?”

  Su smiled. “I am saying they cannot be connected to us.”

  Wei hesitated again.

  Su took the opportunity to add, “Within the past hour my naval intelligence service has notified me that the Ronald Reagan carrier group has begun moving to the northeast.”

  Wei cocked his head in surprise now. “And we think this is a reaction to our demand that they move back to three hundred nautical miles?”

  Su said, “I am certain of it.”

  This brightened President Wei immediately. “So Jack Ryan can be reasoned with, after all.”

  Su fought to keep a calm gaze. No, of course Ryan could not be reasoned with. He could only be threatened or beaten. But Wei chose to look at this military brinksmanship as some sort of moment of détente.

  Idiot, Su thought.

  “Yes,” he said. “President Ryan only wants what’s best for his country. Quitting the region is what’s best for him as well as us. He is learning slowly, but moving the Reagan shows us he is learning.”

  And with that, Wei’s anger seemed to dissipate. He talked for the next half-hour about his plans for the future of the economy. About potential state-run enterprise opportunities in the SCS and his hope that the transition in Taiwan back to mainland rule would be even quicker and more painless than his greatest hopes.

  Su parroted Wei’s ambitions, and struggled not to look at his watch.

  Finally Wei drew the meeting to a close. But before Su left Wei’s quarters, the president regarded the chairman for a long moment. Clearly he hesitated to ask the next question. “If the circumstances change. If we decided the time is not right . . . will we still be able to stop this?”

  “Stop China’s growth? China’s only prospect for growth?”

  Wei vacillated. “I mean the most extreme military measures. Some of the larger cyberattacks you hinted at in our earlier discussions and the naval attacks and air attacks.”

  “Are you thinking of stopping this?”

  “I merely asked the question, Chairman.”

  Su smiled thinly. “I am at your service, General Secretary. I can do whatever you wish. But I will remind you, there is much at stake. The way forward was never going to be without roadblocks.”

  “I understand.”

  “I hope you do. Adversity is part of the process. As I said before, the enemy gets a vote.”

  Wei nodded, his face solemn now.

  Su, on the other hand, smiled. He said, “But Comrade, remember, America voted today, and they voted to get out of our way.”

  —

  The five men working at the CIA safe house at 3333 Prosper Street in Georgetown were enjoying a mid-morning break, but they were not enjoying it as much as the young man locked in the soundproof room on the second floor.

  Three of the five were armed security, one kept his eyes out the kitchen window toward Prosper Street, and a second stayed on a chair moved to a second-floor bedroom that looked through a magnolia tree and down to the old carriage lane converted into an alley that ran behind the property.

  The third security officer stayed downstairs. He was positioned at a kitchen table with a bank of monitors, and here he monitored the radio and the home’s robust security system. He kept his eyes on the monitor showing the feed from the four security cameras.

  The other two men stayed upstairs, either with their subject or in a small office where they met to plan the next “interview” with their subject. Several times a day, one or the other of the men would enter the soundproof room with a recording device and a notepad and pen, and he would go through a long list of questions that, so far, the subject had done his best not to answer.

  Zha Shu Hai had not been tortured in any physical sense, but he’d been kept awake through the night and subjected to dozens of rounds of interrogations at all hours. Different people asked him the same things in different ways so many times that Zha could not even recall most of the conversations.

  He felt certain, however, that he’d said nothing at all about Tong, the Ghost Ship, the UAV hacking, or his breaking into the classified government networks.

  He knew he could not hold out indefinitely, but he felt confident he would not have to.

  He’d asked for a lawyer at least two hundred times since arriving here in the United States, and he could not understand why one had not been given to him. He’d done time in prison here in America before, and it wasn’t bad at all, really, but he knew that was a minimum-security facility and he was now likely in a hell of a lot more trouble because of the UAV attack.

  But he was in trouble only if they managed to make the charges against him stick, and Zha had spent enough time in the U.S. system during his previous trial and incarceration to know that right now they didn’t have anything on him nearly as explosive as everything he had on them. The illegal kidnapping, the shooting of the 14K guys in Hong Kong, the sleep deprivation, and so on, and so on.

  Zha Shu Hai knew he had to hold out for only a little longer, to use his superior intelligence—the benefit of coming from a superior race—and then the Americans would determine he would not crack.

  Zha was exhausted, but that was just a nuisance. He was better than these fools, and he would beat them; he only had to keep his mouth shut. They wouldn’t beat him or kill him. These were Americans.

  One of the interrogators came back into the room and beckoned Zha to the table. As he climbed off his sleeping mat and reached for the plastic chair, all the lights in the room flickered and then went dark.

  “Shit,” said the interrogator as he stepped backward to the door, keeping his eyes on his subject in the dim. He pounded on the door with his fist.

  Zha Shu Hai’s heart began beating with excitement. He sat down at the chair, placed his hands flat on the table.

  He did not expect this. Despite himself, he smiled brightly.

  “What’s so funny?” asked the interrogator.

  Zha had not spoken yet that day, but now he could not hold his tongue. “You will see what is so funny.”

  The man did not understand, but he banged again on the locked door to the soundproof room. He knew the locks were mechanical, not electrical, so there was no reason why his partner wouldn’t let him right out.

  After a third time banging against the door, the interrogator went to the one-way observation window. He could not see out, of course, but his partner should have been looking in.

  He waved back and forth, and then he heard the bolt lock of the door disengage.

  The door opened.

  The interrogator began walking out. “Did we blow a fuse, or is the whole neighborhood—”

  An Asian man in a black jacket stood in the doorway; a suppressed handgun was extended out in front of him. He looked down through the sights with cold black eyes.

  “What the—”

  Crane shot the CIA interrogator through the forehead. His body landed with a muted thud on the floor of the soundproof room.

  Zha was careful to keep his hands on the table. He bowed quickly. “Crane, I have not spoken. I have not said a—”

  “Center’s orders,” Crane said, and he shot Zha Shu Hai through the forehead as well.

  FastByte22’s body tumbled out of the plastic chair and onto the floor. He came to rest facedown next to his interrogator.

  FIFTY-ONE

  Valentin Kovalenko was walking back to his apartment from the liquor store when he realiz
ed that multiple sirens were blaring to the southwest. It occurred to him that they had not just begun; maybe they had been sounding even before he stepped into the tiny soul food café to pick up some carry-out lunch prior to stopping at the liquor store for a fresh bottle of Ketel One.

  Almost immediately he had a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach. He did his best to shake it off as he continued down 17th Street, but well before he turned onto Swann Street he heard helicopters in the air.

  “Nyet,” he said to himself. “Nyet.”

  He kept a leisurely pace up Swann Street to his basement apartment, but once inside the door he shot across the living room to the television, dropped his bottle and the take-out food on the sofa, and turned the TV on to a local station.

  A soap opera was playing. He switched the channel to another local station and saw a commercial.

  He sat down on the couch, his eyes riveted to the screen, waiting for the noon news, which was coming up in five minutes.

  While he waited he listened to the distant sirens’ wail, and he poured two fingers of lukewarm Ketel One into a glass he’d left on the coffee table the night before.

  He chugged it down and poured another.

  He almost made himself believe his fears had been unfounded. Until the news began, and they opened with a live helicopter shot over Georgetown. Valentin saw the smoke pouring out of the home on the wooded lot on Prosper Street.

  The news anchor knew little, except there were fatalities, and neighbors reported the sound of gunshots from inside the house and a mysterious van.

  Kovalenko’s first inclination was to drink, and he did so, straight from the bottle this time. His second inclination was to run. To just get up and go, to make tracks in the opposite direction of the sirens.

  But he fought this urge, stood, and went to his laptop. His hands were shaking as he typed into Cryptogram: “What have you done?”

  He was surprised by how fast the green letters appeared on the black window in front of him: “Explain your question.”

  Explain my question? Kovalenko’s hands hovered over the keys. Finally he typed, “3333.”

  The delay was only a few seconds, then, “You and your work have not been compromised.”

  The thirty-six-year-old Russian looked to the ceiling in his room and shouted, “Fuck!” He typed, “Who did you kill?”

  “That is not connected to you. Stay focused on your daily instructions.”

  Kovalenko typed furiously: “Fuck you! You had me go over there!!!! I could have been seen. I could have been filmed. Who was in the house? Why? Why?” He grabbed the Ketel One bottle and hugged it close to his body as he waited for an answer.

  Now there was a long pause for the response. Valentin pictured Center waiting to send a message just to give the angry man on the other end of the connection time to calm down.

  Finally, “I am monitoring police and other official traffic. There has been no mention of you. I assure you there were no CCTV recordings of you or your rented vehicle anywhere around Prosper Street. You do not have anything to worry about, and I do not have time to placate every one of my agents.”

  Kovalenko wrote, “I live less than two miles away. I will have to relocate.”

  “Negative. Stay where you are. I need you near Dupont Circle.”

  Kovalenko wanted to ask why, but he knew he needn’t bother.

  Instead he drank for a minute, felt the effects of the vodka calming him somewhat, and then asked, “The people at 3333? Who were they?”

  No response came.

  Valentin typed: “It will be on the news soon enough. Why not just tell me?”

  “One was a problem.”

  That told Valentin nothing. He started to type a line of question marks, when a new line of green type flashed on the screen.

  “The other five were employees of the Central Intelligence Agency.”

  Kovalenko just stared at the screen blankly, his mouth slightly open.

  He whispered, “Ni huya sebe”—Oh, fuck—and held the vodka bottle tight against his heart.

  —

  Jack Ryan learned directly from CIA’s Intelink-TS network that the biggest news story of the month in D.C., the murder of six men that morning in Georgetown, would have been an even bigger news story if the truth got out.

  Traffic between CIA and NSA revealed 3333 Prosper Street to be a CIA safe house, and communications confirmed that five of the dead were CIA employees and the sixth was the main suspect in the UAV attack.

  FastByte22, the guy Jack Ryan and his colleagues helped identify and capture.

  Needless to say, Ryan had the entire Campus operational and managerial staff convene in the conference room so he could disseminate the news.

  Chavez could not believe the audacity of the crime. “So the Chinese really have the balls to send a wet team into Georgetown to kill CIA officers?”

  “I don’t know that it was actually the Chinese who did it,” Director of Analysis Rick Bell said as he walked into the conference room. “We just intercepted a CIA message to U.S. Cyber Command at Fort Meade. In one of FastByte’s interrogations, apparently one where he was severely sleep-deprived, he mentioned the name Tong Kwok Kwan as the true identity of Center. Maybe Center did it as punishment for giving up his real name.”

  “What do we know about this Tong guy?” Granger asked.

  Ryan said, “That’s Dr. K. K. Tong. Adam Yao said he was the father of China’s cyberwarfare community.”

  Granger couldn’t believe it. “What the hell was he doing in HK working with FastByte and the hackers? He should be in Beijing or in a military installation somewhere.”

  Ryan shook his head. “He had a falling-out with them. He’s a wanted man in China.”

  Chavez said, “Maybe they kissed and made up and he’s working with the Chinese again. The PLA. I can’t believe for a second that some ad hoc computer hacking organization is doing all this just for their own murky objectives. This act today sounds like it has state sponsorship, just like the UAV hack.”

  Gerry said, “Whoever they are, they had to kill Zha to silence him.”

  Jack said, “But they did not silence him. Gavin has Zha’s computer, and you can bet we’ll hear a lot from Zha when Gavin reveals what’s inside.”

  —

  As elite Marine fighter pilots, Major Scott “Cheese” Stilton and Captain Brandon “Trash” White had experienced much more in their lives than average thirty-one- and twenty-eight-year-olds, but neither man could say he had ever experienced anything like what they had been up to for the past twenty-four hours.

  Just over one day earlier, both men were awakened in the middle of the night by Naval intelligence officers, and then led, bleary-eyed, into the squadron room with the rest of their squadron as well as another squadron of Marines on the Reagan. The twenty-four pilots stood at attention when a lieutenant commander entered from the Office of Naval Intelligence. He asked them to sit back down, then told them they would all be flying to Japan at first light, air-refueling along the way. The squadron would land at Marine Air Corps Station Iwakuni, and there they would receive further instructions.

  To a man the Marines were both angry and disappointed. The action had been out here in the middle of the East China Sea and the strait, not all the way over in Japan. But the Reagan was pulling back, out of range of the strait, which Trash saw as a retreat. And now they had been ordered to leave the carrier altogether and go even farther from the action.

  None of the pilots liked leaving the Reagan, but all these young men had been in the Marine Corps long enough to know military orders did not need to make a damn bit of sense to be lawful, so they sat there, waiting to be dismissed.

  But the lieutenant commander surprised them again when he told them that they would need to volunteer to go on a
n extremely dangerous mission. They would learn more details in Iwakuni, and then further details at their final destination.

  Confused, intrigued, and excited, every man in the room volunteered.

  They landed in Iwakuni before lunch, and as soon as they climbed out of their flight gear they were handed civilian clothing and led into a briefing room. Here Trash, Cheese, and the rest of the two squadrons found themselves in front of a Defense Intelligence Agency civilian who did not offer his name.

  Trash was floored when the man told them they would all be issued packed luggage and false passports, and they would climb in a helicopter and be flown to the international airport in Osaka. There they would board a commercial flight to Taipei, Taiwan.

  Trash and his squadron were going to sneak onto Taiwan, an island with no U.S. military presence.

  The Taiwanese Air Force had recently taken delivery of two dozen F/A-18 Hornets. The Marines would be sent to Taiwan, placed in the airplanes, and they would then run combat air patrols in the Taiwan Strait.

  The United States had not placed military fighting forces on Taiwan since 1979, as it would have been seen by the mainland Chinese as an overt provocation to do so. The conventional wisdom had always been that U.S. forces on Taiwan would freak the PRC out enough for them to launch missiles at the tiny island and forcibly repatriate it. America did not want to give China such an excuse, so America had stayed away.

  The Marines, the DIA man told the pilots, had been chosen because they were versatile, able to operate with less support than Navy forces, and all the men in the room had spent the previous two weeks going head-to-head with the PLAAF in the strait.

  They were battle-hardened, as it were.