Act of War

CHAPTER 47

It’s called Unit 61398,” said Nicholas as he sat back from his computer screen and rubbed his eyes. “It’s one of the PLA’s best hacking groups. They’re based out of Shanghai.”

“You’re sure?” Harvath asked.

“As sure as I can be without tipping them off that we’re on their trail.”

Harvath leaned back in his chair. They were all exhausted and had caught only bits of sleep here and there. With the Chinese engaging in such risky behavior and the speed with which things were escalating, everyone was convinced the cells had likely gone operational, and whatever the attack was, it was imminent. If they didn’t catch a break soon, it was going to be game over. Nicholas’s finding was not what Harvath had been hoping for.

What Harvath wanted was a path to the handler — the person who had been watching the engineering students’ Facebook accounts from somewhere in Idaho. He had hoped that it would be the same person who had hacked the CCTV system and keypad log from the self-storage facility. That would have been a nice way to tie the strings together, but now he realized why it had been a foolish hope.

One person could never watch one storage facility around the clock, much less six. If, of course, that’s what was going on. Had Harvath had the resources the Chinese did, it was how he would have set things up. The Chinese had a billion people. They could easily afford the manpower to watch the hacked storage facility feeds and make sure that nobody was tampering with their units. He also had no doubt that their hackers could bump systems offline and erase any evidence that one of their operatives had been someplace. It made a lot of sense. It also made him think of something else.

“If the FBI is able to track down other storage facilities, how are they going to get close enough to the actual units without the PLA being able to see what they’re up to?” he asked.

Nicholas thought about that for a moment. “I suppose we could do the same thing right back at them and knock the cameras offline.”

Harvath shook his head. “Maybe that’d be plausible for one location, but anything more than that and they’d get suspicious pretty fast.”

“But suppose we’re right. Suppose that’s where they’re hiding whatever it is they plan to use in the attack. What do we care at that point?”

“That’s a big supposition. Suppose it’s wrong. Suppose that’s only where one piece is. Suppose it’s a piece they can replace from somewhere else.”

Nicholas nodded. “Good point.”

“What about looping the footage?”

“You’d need clean footage for the interior cameras.”

“Meaning?” Harvath asked.

“Meaning they’d have to be looking at something static. There couldn’t be cars and things like that going past in the background. If they notice the same car or bicycle go by twice, that’s it.”

“But it could be done.”

“Anything’s possible,” said Nicholas, “but how do you transition from a live picture to a looped one without somebody noticing?”

“You interrupt the signal somehow. Turn it off and then turn it back on.”

“You want to hit their headquarters in Shanghai? That’d be one heck of an operation. It would take months to plan.”

“Who says we have to hit them there?” replied Harvath. “It’s like two cans and a string; we just clip it at our end. But I don’t think it could just be the CCTV feeds in question. It would have to be a whole bunch of stuff. So much stuff, in fact, that it dwarfs our stuff.”

“Are you talking about turning the Internet off?”

“We don’t have to turn it off. We just jiggle the switch. Can that be done?”

“Not with this,” Nicholas said, pointing at his laptop.

“But it can be done.”

“Not only can it, it has been done.”

Harvath looked at him. “It has?”

“Not too long ago, in fact. Back in January, almost all of China’s 500 million Internet users got bumped off the Web for eight hours. We’re talking half of the world’s Internet users. It’s been called the greatest failure in the history of the Net.”

“What happened?”

“China has this vast cyber snooping and censoring system nicknamed the Great Firewall of China. Its goal is to control all of the digital traffic coming in and going out of the country. They use it to squash dissent and root out any antigovernment sentiment. The Chinese have even employed it to jail journalists and dissidents.

“Sites like Facebook and Twitter have been blacklisted. Even Bloomberg.com and the New York Times have been blocked.”

“Why Bloomberg and the NYT?”

“Because,” said Nicholas, “despite some particularly procommunist people at the New York Times, the Gray Lady still publishes unflattering stories about China’s leaders. China doesn’t like that.”

“I’m sure they don’t,” Harvath replied. “But how did the Great Firewall cause the outage?”

“If you imagine it like an old-fashioned switchboard, all the cords got plugged into one hole. Somebody screwed up and sent three-quarters of China’s Internet traffic all to one location. Ironically enough, that one location was the servers of an Internet hosting company based in Cheyenne, Wyoming. It was an epic failure.”

“And you think we could replicate that?”

“I think with the help of the computing power of one U.S. government agency in particular, I might be able to put together something similar. There’s just one problem,” said Nicholas.

“What’s that?”

“The NSA vowed a long time ago they would never let me inside any of their facilities.”

“You let me worry about the NSA,” said Harvath. “I want you to start figuring out exactly how you’re going to handle the Great Firewall.”

“You have a lot of faith in the FBI. We don’t even know if they’re going to be able to find any of the storage units, much less find them in time.”

“They’ll find them. Trust me. That’s what they do. In the meantime, start packing. I want to be wheels up within a half hour.”

The Logans had already been sent home, surveillance of the Cool Springs Marriott had been handed back over to the FBI, and Chase and Sloane were now sacked out on the couches in the hangar office. No one held out much hope that Deng was coming back to the hotel, not after everything that had happened. In fact, Harvath doubted that the man was even still in Tennessee.

They had turned over every imaginable stone. Even that gnawing discomfort Harvath had had about the photocopied driver’s license had finally clarified itself. He asked himself how, if he had been renting storage units under different aliases in different cities, he would have done it. The exercise had shaken an idea loose. It was a tiny needle in a big haystack, but it wasn’t impossible, so he had passed the idea on to the Old Man.

“Where are we going?” Nicholas asked.

“Back to D.C.”