Threat Vector

FORTY-SIX

Dr. Tong Kwok Kwan stood in his new glass-enclosed office, looking out over the massive floor of low cubicles, and he decided that he was satisfied with his reconstituted, if temporary, Ghost Ship. He left his office, walked down a short hallway, and exited a locked door that opened to a twelfth-floor balcony. Here, breathing smoggy air that was not nearly as humid as the air he had left behind in Hong Kong, he looked out over a sprawling city, flat and wide around a river that snaked from the southeast to the northwest.

Below him in the parking lot were armored personnel carriers, machine gun emplacements, and troops patrolling on foot and in jeeps.

Yes, he thought. This arrangement will do for now.

Dr. Tong and his entire operation had moved from Hong Kong’s Mong Kok neighborhood to Guangzhou’s Huadu district, some one hundred miles to the northwest. They were within the borders of mainland China now, safe from the CIA, and it was clear to Tong that the PLA had spared no expense to protect them and provide them with whatever they needed.

The Ghost Ship had spent the last two years operating under the pretense that it was not part of China’s cyberwarfare infrastructure. The MSS would have liked to keep it that way, but the event in Hong Kong — the exposure of Zha Shu Hai by the CIA and his kidnapping by an American special-mission unit — had necessitated a quick change of plans. Tong had been ordered to move his entire operation up to the mainland and then to increase his cyberkinetic attacks on the United States immediately.

The 14K Triads had failed to keep his operation safe in Hong Kong, and now the 14K were wondering what the hell had happened to their cash cow. Four nights earlier, some sixty Chinese paramilitaries of the Guangzhou Military Region’s “Sharp Sword of Southern China” unit were dispatched into Mong Kok in a dozen civilian vehicles. There was a short standoff at the Mong Kok Computer Centre between the soldiers and the 14K, but a phone call from the colonel leading the unit to the head of the 14K in his suite at a casino in Macau made clear to the man that, unless his street goons walked away immediately, there was going to be another bloodbath in the streets, and, for the second time this week, the 14K would be supplying the majority of the blood.

The 14K backed down; they assumed that PLA forces had recaptured Tong and would take him and his people back to the mainland to be tried and executed.

In fact, the entire Ghost Ship — personnel, computers, communication gear, everything — was moved to a large China Telecom building just a few blocks away from the PLA’s Technical Reconnaissance Bureau in Guangzhou, one of the hubs of the Army’s cyberwar capability. All of China Telecom’s operations were relocated, which meant mobile phone service in the Guangzhou area would be spotty or nonexistent for a few days, but the PLA’s wishes took precedence over the needs of the citizenry.

Here Tong and his people were guarded by Guangzhou Military Region Special Forces Units 24/7, and in less than four days they were back in business, pressing the attack against the United States.

It was a temporary solution. Eventually the PLA wanted Tong and his facility protected by a hardened bunker, but there were no available facilities anywhere in China in possession of both the networking resources and the structural requirements, so until something suitable was built, the China Telecom building surrounded by crack troops would have to suffice.

Tong stepped back through the doors and off the balcony. His quick break was over; it was time to get back to work. In his office he sat at his new desk and opened a file sent to him by one of the controllers he had monitoring CIA cable traffic. Tong scrolled through the transcript of a CIA cable and found what he was looking for.

He tapped out a preprogrammed number to a voice-over-Internet phone currently in the United States. He sat silent and still, waiting for the call to be answered.

“This is Crane.”

“Crane, Center.”

“Go ahead.”

“Prosper Street, number 3333, Washington, D.C.”

A pause. Then, “Do you have any more information on the location and disposition of forces there?”

“I will have the local controller tasked to obtain and provide more intelligence in advance of your arrival. That will take a day, so prepare to act within two days. Time is of the essence.”

“Very well. What is the target at that location?”

Center replied instantly, “Your target is every living thing at that location.”

“Understood. Will comply.”

“Shi-shi.”

Tong hung up and put the matter out of his mind. Now he checked his messages from his controllers. He glanced at a few, ignored a few others on subjects in which he was not interested, and then settled on a subject that he found extremely interesting.

Hendley Associates, West Odenton, Maryland, USA.

Tong had tasked a new controller on this case, and ordered that a field asset be brought in to supplant his understanding of just what this company had to do with the American CIA. He had watched Hendley Associates months earlier when they began tracking a team of Libyan ex — intelligence officers one of his controllers had hired to do some ad hoc work in the Istanbul area. The Libyans were not terribly competent and were responsible for getting discovered, so when the controller told Tong that one of his proxy teams of field personnel had been compromised, Tong ordered his controller to take no action other than to monitor the attack and find out more about the attacking force.

Soon it became clear that men from the American company Hendley Associates were involved.

It was a strange company, Hendley. Tong and his people had been interested in them for some time. The President’s own son worked there, as had, until just weeks prior, John Clark, the man involved in the Jack Ryan affair during the election the previous year. A former U.S. senator named Gerry Hendley ran the organization.

A financial management firm that also assassinated people and seemed to support the CIA. Of course, killing the Libyans in Istanbul had been a curiosity to Tong; it did not slow his operation down in the slightest. But their participation in the kidnapping of Zha the previous week was deeply concerning to Tong.

Tong and his people had their eyes and ears on hundreds of companies around the world that were on a contract basis for intelligence organizations, militaries, and other secretive government bureaucracies. Tong suspected Hendley Associates was some sort of deniable off-the-books operation set up with the knowledge of the U.S. government.

Much like Tong and his Ghost Ship.

He wanted to know more, and he was investigating Hendley via different avenues. And one of those avenues had just opened up. This new report in his hand explained that the virus implanted on the Hendley Associates network had reported for business. Within the next very few days the manager on the project expected to have a better understanding of just what Hendley’s role was in the American intelligence community. The IT director of the company — Tong scanned down to see the man’s name again, Gavin Biery, strange name — had been evaluated by Tong’s coders, and they had determined him to be highly competent. Even though their RAT was in the network, it would take more time than normal to carefully exfiltrate information.

Tong very much looked forward to that report.

He had considered just dispatching Crane and his men to terminate Hendley’s operation. If he had known they would come and help the CIA take Zha from him, he would have done just that, either in Istanbul or at their offices in West Odenton. But now Tong considered them “the devil he knew.” He was inside their network, he could see who they were, what they were doing. With visualization of their operation he could control them.

Of course, if Hendley Associates became problematic again to his operation, he could always send Crane and the other men of the Divine Sword.

The speech by Chairman of the Central Military Commission Su Ke Qiang was delivered to students and faculty of the Chinese Naval University of Engineering in Wuhan, but the men and women in the audience were just props. The message was clearly intended for international consumption.

Unlike President Wei, Chairman Su had no interest in presenting himself as charming or polished. He was a big man, with a big chest full of medals, and his projection of personal power mimicked his plans for his nation and his aspirations for the ascendance of the People’s Liberation Army.

His opening remarks extolled the PLAN, the People’s Liberation Army-Navy, and he promised the students he was doing everything in his power to make sure they had all the equipment, technology, and training they would need to meet China’s future threats head-on.

Those watching in the West expected yet another Chairman Su speech, full of bluster and vague ominous warnings to the West, thinly veiled threats about Chinese territorial claims without any concrete details.

The same speech, more or less, he had been giving since he was a three-star in the General Staff Department shortly after the war with Russia and the USA.

But today was different. Today he drew specific lines.

Reading from a printed page and not a teleprompter, he discussed the recent air-to-air encounters over the Taiwan Strait, framing them as inevitable results of America’s sending warplanes into a crowded but peaceful part of the world. He then said, “In light of the new danger, China is hereby excluding all international warships from the Strait of Taiwan and the South China Sea other than those in national-border waters or those with permission to traverse Chinese territory. All nations other than those with national boundaries in the SCS will be required to apply to China for permission to pass through its territory.

“This, of course, includes all undersea warships, as well.

“Any warship entering this exclusion zone will be considered an attacking vessel, and it will be treated as such. For the good of peace and stability, we encourage the world community to oblige. This is China’s sovereign territory I am speaking about. We will not steam our ships up the Thames River into London or up the Hudson River to New York City; we only ask that other nations offer us the same courtesy.”

The students and faculty present at the Naval University of Engineering cheered, and this led to an extremely rare event. Chairman Su looked up from his speech and smiled.

Excluding non-indigenous warships from the South China Sea created immediate difficulties for a few nations, but none more so than India. India was two years into a contract with Vietnam to conduct exploration for oil and natural gas in a part of Vietnam’s Exclusive Economic Zone in international waters off their coast. To date, the exploration had not been particularly fruitful, but India had two corvettes, the Kora and the Kulish, as well as the Satpura, a larger frigate, protecting more than one dozen exploration vessels in the South China Sea only one hundred thirty miles from the Chinese coast.

PLAAF aircraft flown from Hainan Island, on the southern tip of China, began flying low and threatening over the Indian ships the day after Chairman Su’s speech, and three days after the speech a Chinese diesel sub bumped the Kulish, injuring several Indian sailors.

India did not take this provocation lying down. New Delhi announced publicly that one of their aircraft carriers had been invited by the Vietnamese to make a port call at Da Nang, Vietnam’s third-largest city. The carrier, already off the western coast of Malaysia, would enter through the Strait of Malacca along with a few support vessels, and then head up the coast of Vietnam.

The infuriated Chinese immediately demanded the Indians keep their carrier out of the SCS, and a second bump of an Indian corvette by a Chinese sub indicated that the PLAN meant business.

In Washington, President Ryan saw nothing good coming out of India’s carrier cruise of the South China Sea, and he sent his secretary of state, Scott Adler, to New Delhi to implore the prime minister of India to cancel the action and to move their other naval vessels in the SCS into Vietnamese territorial waters until a diplomatic solution to the situation could be found.

But the Indians would not back down.