Threat Vector

FIFTY-ONE

Valentin Kovalenko was walking back to his apartment from the liquor store when he realized 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 an 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.

The covert squadron would be getting some support staff, mechanics, and flight operations personnel from here in Iwakuni, but the bulk of the ground crew would be Taiwanese Air Force men and women secretly moved to the base.

Trash knew he and twenty-three other guys were not going to fight off the Chinese if they attacked Taiwan. He wondered if this entire exercise was nothing more than politics, showing the ROC government that even though the Reagan and the other carrier in the Pacific weren’t getting too close to the danger, the United States was willing to stick a few of its own boys right there in the middle of the strait.

It pissed him off to think of himself and his friends as pawns in a geopolitical chess match, but he had to admit, he was glad for the opportunity to get back in the action.

The flight to Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport went without incident, other than the fact twenty-four American men, age twenty-six to forty-one, all with military haircuts, sat in ones and twos throughout the cabin and ignored one another. On the ground they passed breezily through customs, and then met up in the lobby of an airport hotel.

A couple of guys whom Trash took for DIA operatives led them to a bus, which shuttled them to a closed portion of the big international airport.

They flew in a ROC C-130 transport aircraft from Taipei to Hualien Airport, a commercial airport in the middle of an active military base on Taiwan’s eastern shore. The ROC Air Force flew F-16 fighters off the runway year-round, and the civilian portion of the airport had been closed indefinitely for “military training maneuvers.” Trash and the other Marines had been told they would be kept away from the vast majority of base personnel to minimize the possibility of leaks.

A Hawkeye owned by the ROC Air Force was also staffed with American air combat officers, and it provided command and control for the flights.

The Americans were ushered into a large bunker built into a hillside near the runway, where they found twenty-two used, but in good condition, F/A-18C Hornets, as well as living quarters and operational areas set up for the Americans.

Thirty-three hours after being awakened in the middle of the night on the Ronald Reagan, Captain Brandon “Trash” White and Major Scott “Cheese” Stilton walked out of the secure area with their helmets over their heads, following the operational security orders given to them by the DIA.

On the tarmac they both inspected their aircraft one last time, and Trash climbed into the cockpit of “his” Hornet, 881. Cheese climbed up the ladder and stepped into the cockpit of his assigned aircraft, 602.

Soon they were back in the air, flying CAPs over the strait, and — and this was the best part for Trash and the other Marines — returning after their mission to land on a real runway — a long, wide, flat, unmoving piece of asphalt, not a bobbing postage stamp in the middle of the ocean.