by David Poyer
He was there already, in their room.
They went to the beach bonfire, almost the only guests there. The wind-whipped flames blazed in the darkness. Sparks snapped and whirled up into the dark. Surf crashed with a long, dull, withdrawing roar. Slow, long-period waves, born deep in the far Pacific.
She and Teju stole away into the night. He drew the blanket over them, and she dug her head back into the sand, gasping as they drove together to the blazing hearts of the stars far above.
When they lay apart, yet with legs still entwined, he murmured, “So. What happens now?”
The question she’d been dreading. “Now? I have to go to sea,” she whispered. “To war. There’s just no way around that.”
“Yeah. I know. You’re the fucking captain. So, this is it? We just … say so long?”
“You’re married. After the war, you’ll be back with your family.”
“If there is an ‘after the war.’ If the Chinese don’t nuke us all.”
She couldn’t say anything to that. Because it was all too possible.
“And you?” he murmured.
“I don’t know,” she confessed. “But I don’t think I’ll still be in your life then, Tej.”
He turned his face away. “Do you want children?”
Thank God, she didn’t chuckle. “I don’t know. I did once. But the war … my husband … I might’ve with Eddie. Now, I just don’t know.”
“So I’m a gap filler. No … I didn’t mean that the way it sounded—”
She couldn’t help snorting, but quickly sobered. “It was great, Tej. I’ll always remember you. But we’re, you know, ships in the night. We both understood that, right? That’s what war does. Makes it … hard to plan anything.”
“But if you could, if we could … if we didn’t have commitments…”
What the hell? There was only one possible answer. Whether she felt it herself, or not. She mustered a white lie. “Then I’d be yours. Heart and soul. You know that. Forever.”
She wrapped her arms around him, and drew him down, in the sandy darkness, once more. He was so cute. And at this moment, so very hard. She caught her breath again. Ow. Ow. The sand … But she let him press on with what he so obviously wanted.
After all, it was the last time.
20
Central Intelligence Agency, Langley, Virginia
ONCE, again, a meeting. But not in the National Military Command Center. Nor with the Chiefs, but with a small ad hoc working group. Addressing a single topic.
Blair took a seat near Denson Hui, of the Missile Defense Agency, and nodded to those she knew. Haverford Tomlin, from SAIC, Strategic Plans and Policy Division. Rick Ackert, the general from Wright-Pat who’d nearly crashed into Los Alamos with her. Shira Salyers, she noted, had not been invited, nor anyone else from State.
Most of the rest of the men and women gathered in the second-floor office were young, in casual dress, even T-shirts, except for one man. Dark hair was slicked back from a sharp-chinned face. He wore gray slacks, a button-down shirt, and a blue blazer with a U OF MARYLAND crest on the pocket. When he sauntered over to shake hands, she glanced down at high-arched, hand-tooled cowboy boots. Well, he needed the extra height.
“Blair Titus? Charles Anthony Provanzano. With the Directorate of Operations. Old friend of your husband.”
“Good to meet you. But I don’t think he’s mentioned you.”
“I’m glad we’ve finally met.” He uncapped a white tube and stuck it into one nostril, half turning away. She smelled koala bears. “Vicks, in case you’re wondering.” He sniffed, then did the other nostril. Coughed. “Habit I picked up in Afghanistan. From the dust. Sorry.”
“No offense taken.”
“Dan and I were orcs there together. He helped us with CIRCE.” She must have looked puzzled, because he added, “A stochastic modeling agent reasoning framework. Which, actually, it’s good he never told you about.”
“There’s a lot we don’t share.”
“I hope that includes what we’re going to talk about today.” Provanzano waved to the younger people, who fell silent. “All here? T team? Let’s get started.”
The first slide up quieted everyone. Smoke and fire streamed from a mesa crest. The next slide showed collapsed buildings, flames, fire trucks playing hoses over the wreckage of some large machine. Then bodies laid out in rows, with radiological-suited, masked responders rolling more onto litters.
“The attack on Los Alamos,” Provanzano said, tone steely. “Where the warheads were being assembled for the long-range standoff cruise. The fallout plume reached Amarillo. Two million people are being evacuated.
“The next pictures are from Sandia Laboratories, in Albuquerque.”
Buildings on fire.
Wrecked factories.
More bodies, many still in white smocks or the hoods and clean-room suits used to work on microchips.
One of the T team, whatever that stood for, summarized the damage. He concluded, “Only fifteen percent of the emergency modernization program was complete. Essentially, the attack denies us achievement of nuclear parity. For at least a year, we continue to operate from a position of strategic weakness.”
She lifted her head. “You’re not counting the sea-based deterrent?”
Denson Hui said soberly, “The submarine-based leg of the triad may be essentially all we have left, Dr. Titus. With the heavy throw weights and tight CEPs of Zhang’s new missiles, even our hardened silos are vulnerable to a first strike. That’s one reason why we were so constrained in responding to their attack on Hawaii. And their air defenses deny access to our bombers. That was why we accelerated deployment of the enhanced-range standoff Gorgon.”
“Which we now have no warheads for,” someone else put in.
The CIA officer nodded and the projector went dark. “Correct, and their guidance was one of the other projects Sandia had in hand: the GPS-independent, firewalled navigation system for the hypersonic standoff. Fortunately, they missed the assembly building for the boosted penetrator.”
The T-team briefer resumed. “Here’s what we know. First, this hijacking occurred simultaneously across eight airborne platform types. Second, the enemy attacked our strategic center of gravity—our nuclear development and strategic missile sites.
“They obviously knew our programs in intimate detail. Assembly points. Airframe and rocket engine factories. Chip fabricators. That’s what they targeted.”
Provanzano said, “I know the tech types think this is a digital war, and the military types think it’s a military war. But it’s really an intelligence war.”
He spread his hands. “Fifteen aircraft cyberjacked. Eight hit their targets. One that didn’t was Dr. Titus’s.” He nodded to Blair. “Who barely escaped. She’s also read into what we know about the enemy’s main cyberweapon. Which is why she’s at this briefing.”
He sat back. “All right … Dr. Nadine Oberfoell is from the Office of Cyber Security. Doctor, what do we know about Jade Emperor?”
A small, bent, rotund woman, almost a dwarf, stood with evident difficulty. “More than we did last year. But not much more.”
“Start at the beginning. Not everybody here’s read in.”
Blair expected her to start with the origin of the name. The “Jade Emperor” was a legendary figure in Chinese history. Overthrowing an army of evil demons through his great wisdom, he had become the supreme overlord of both men and gods.
Instead, Oberfoell began with the technology. She described a massively capable artificial intelligence somewhere in the Chinese interior. Even before completion, it had been able to infiltrate internet data packets anywhere in the world. It had been behind the takedowns of the financial markets, the brownouts in the U.S. West and Midwest, thermal and nuclear power plant failures, remote industrial sabotage, cell service disruption, and breakdowns in satellite communications.
“We gradually learned it could penetrate our most secure high-side command networks.
Our NATO allies confirmed this during the Ukraine campaign, when they discovered Beijing was sharing their internal deliberations with the Russians. We feared that when fully operational, Emperor would become even more dangerous. Able to not just interfere with, but reroute and control industrial processes, financial networks, communications, and power. Invisibly to us, working deep within the codes that control these highly digitized systems.”
Oberfoell bent at the waist, as if easing a pain in her spine. “That fear is now coming true.”
“But we have a counterweapon,” Blair put in.
“Ma’am, we did. A DARPA-chartered project by Archipelago Systems, a merger of the blue-sky departments of Alphabet, Facebook, Intel, and Amazon. It too was a massive self-programming neural network, intended to dominate the digital battlespace. It showed early promise. We were able to degrade North Korean missile guidance, and decode encrypted Chinese submarine cable traffic.”
Blair remembered the first time she’d heard about Battle Eagle. She’d almost laughed. But every war brought new technologies forward. Bombing aircraft had been a fantasy in 1913. Atomic weapons had been science fiction in 1939. Now, instead of teams of human hackers, two titanic programs were locked in mortal combat, deep in the stygian labyrinths of cyberspace.
“Unfortunately,” Oberfoell was saying, “our AI seems to have been penetrated and taken over by theirs very early in the development process. We had to shut down large portions to seal off the infection. This reduced Battle Eagle’s power to see through its opponent’s stratagems.
“Plus, in many ways, the Chinese economy is still not as digitally dependent as ours. Making us more vulnerable to sophisticated hacking.”
Provanzano flickered his fingers in the air. “The bottom line, Nadine.”
“Of course. Which is, that in instances such as the takeover of the airliners, we thought we had safeguards in place. But not only couldn’t we prevent it, we actually—our human teams—don’t understand how it was done even now.”
Oberfoell looked down. “The first stage of AI was to assess and integrate information to help humans make decisions. The second, to make those decisions on its own, replacing a human, though humans could still understand its processes.
“Jade Emperor is third-generation. It’s too fast and too intelligent for us even to understand what it did, or how. And it’s moving beyond our capabilities to protect ourselves.
“That’s what this aircraft takeover is really telling us.”
For a few moments, no one spoke.
At last Provanzano said, “Thank you, Doctor. Not encouraging news. We’re being dominated in cyberspace. And now, relegated to second place in strategic weapons.” He looked at a younger man in a PROTESTANTS AGAINST POTPOURRI T-shirt, who had squirmed and fidgeted during the briefings. “But I think the T team has something positive for us. Art?”
“Yes, sir. There’s one bit of good news.”
When the T-shirted man rose, a new slide came up: a sharp, detailed overhead shot. Desert. Mountains at the top of the picture. Amid miles of undulating brown sand hills, a single arrow-straight road led to a sprawling construction site.
The T-shirted guy said, “This was taken before the war started. This is the Taklimakan Desert, in western China. At first we thought it was a brine evaporation facility. Then we noticed solar arrays.” The picture vanished; a fuzzy, canted one replaced it. “This is from a MICE overfly three days ago. Unfortunately, we don’t get great imagery from their tiny cameras. But you can see the difference.”
The photo showed nearly pristine desert. Blair frowned. Ackert said, “Where’d it go?”
Provanzano nodded, clicking a laser pointer. “Good question, General. Where indeed? You can just see, here”—an arrow appeared, tracing a faint line—“where the road used to run. Or may still, beneath the sand. But as you can see, the solar arrays have vanished. Construction, parking, cooling ponds, all gone.”
Art said, “We think the facility’s been buried. Probably just bulldozers pushing the dunes over it, sculpting them to look like their previous conformations. If the wind didn’t do it naturally.
“Here’s the same area, in infrared, on the next pass.”
An even fuzzier picture, but dotted with blobs of glow beneath the dunes. “There’s something giving off a lot of heat down there. Fortunately, just now it’s winter, or it might not show at all. One more thing: there’s a lot of drone activity over that area. In fact, it’s the largest concentration of UAVs in China.”
Provanzano thanked the analyst and pointed him back to his seat. “All right, let’s cost out our options. Their system has a robust instinct for self-preservation. Archipelago tried to run a virus in. It came back out improved, and targeted at us. We lost ten percent more of Battle Eagle before we blocked it. The Army and NSA’s cyberteams both had a go. The Army came away with fifty ruined routers. NSA blocked the counterpunch, but had no success penetrating the defenses. Essentially, we’ve exhausted our nonkinetics.”
“But there’s a kinetic solution.” Ackert said. “Now we’ve located it.”
“We’re on the same page, General. Unfortunately, it won’t involve the U.S. Air Force. With the demise of the Gorgon, and the concentric rings of Russian-contracted air defenses, the only way we can reach that deep into Asia would be a ballistic strike.”
“Which would bring on massive retaliation,” Blair said.
“Correct. So: what assets could penetrate a hidden facility, deep in the desert interior?” Provanzano turned to the techs and support personnel. “Principals only from here on, please.”
When the room was cleared one man remained sitting along the wall. Up to now, he’d said nothing. Had barely moved, though he’d followed the discussions with rapt attention. Provanzano beckoned him to the central table. “Let me introduce Andres Korzenowski,” he said.
“Mr. Korzenowski is a former Ranger, now with the Special Operations Group, Special Activities Division. As a paramilitary operations officer he specializes in raids, sabotage, ambushes, unconventional warfare behind enemy lines. Andres.”
Blair examined high Slavic cheekbones, dark stubble, and a receding hairline, though the operative couldn’t be more than thirty. Deeply hooded eyes. A straight, thin nose. Jeans, combat boots, and a maroon turtleneck under a tactical vest. His interlocked hands rested on the table in front of him.
Korzenowski inclined his head and stood. “Thank you, sir.
“For the past months, we’ve been in contact with a guerrilla group operating in the fringes of the Tien Shan. The rebel force is small but growing. We were supplying arms and equipment. Mainly, to harass the enemy’s interior security, and provide a focus for Islamist discontent with Han rule in Xinjiang. Eventually, we hoped to mature it into a significant resistance movement.
“However, we’ve recently redirected it to a more narrowly focused mission.”
He explained, and the attendees shifted in their seats. When he was done no one spoke for a few seconds.
Ackert shifted in his chair. “It sounds … risky for these, um, rebels.”
“We expect it to be, yes sir,” Korzenowski said quietly. “They will be outnumbered and outgunned.”
“Losses?” Blair said, though she already knew the answer.
Korzenowski turned to her. “Probably heavy, ma’am. But bear in mind, they’re not U.S. nationals, or even Allied troops. We have very little investment in them, except for their weapons and one noncommissioned U.S. liaison.”
“And what do we need to do here?” the Missile Defense Agency director asked. “Are we approving this operation, or what? Because it seems to me—”
Provanzano stood, pushing back his chair. “No sir, Mr. Hui,” he said quietly. Respectfully, but with utter implacability. “You are not required to approve. This is an Agency operation. And it is already under way. It may win the war for us. Or not. This is for your information only. So we all can prepare for the next step. In case we fail.”
* * *
AN hour later she stood outside waiting for her car, reading the printed-out daily intelligence summary, the same one the CIA had provided for the president that morning. More strikes in the defense factories. Draft riots in Detroit, Boston, and New York.
But though no one had mentioned it in the meeting, there was good news too. Israeli antitank weapons and U.S. air support from Da Nang had finally stiffened the Vietnamese People’s Army enough to halt the Chinese advance.
Also, Hong Kong was in revolt. An all-too-brief treatment speculated it had been triggered by hope of a U.S. landing after the strike on Hainan.
The final item on the brief described new rumors out of China, about some form of sonic operations on rebels’ brains to render them more pliable.
She grimaced. That was all the enemy needed, a way to turn human beings into obedient robots. It would make Zhang’s control unshakable. And the Party’s philosophy had long ago discarded any “bourgeois” ethical restraints.
The gray Lincoln pulled up and she slid into the back.
The streets were deserted. If people still had jobs, they slept at work, bicycled, or walked. Many had left for less threatened areas, deep in the country or high in the hills.
Alone in the backseat, staring at the shaven skull of the driver, she worried. Everyone had expected a short war. But after years, it still hung in the balance. The Allies had made progress in the South China Sea and in space. Maintained the blockade, and raided the enemy mainland. But with the loss of nuclear and cyberspace dominance, the alliance was in mortal danger.
The radio was on. The Liberty Broadcasting System, the only network still on the air, though now with censored news. No one would hear about strikes or draft riots there. As far as the public knew, the Allies were winning on all fronts.
But the truth was, destruction was creeping nearer both homelands.
And no one could yet envision how this war could be won, or even terminated, before it escalated into a massive thermonuclear exchange.
Feeling her chest tighten, she counted her breaths in and out, slowly, trying to stave off a panic attack.
