Threat Vector

by Tom Clancy

  “Absolutely.”

  THIRTY-THREE

  President of the United States Jack Ryan opened his eyes, focused them quickly in the darkness, and found a man standing over him at his bedside.

  This would startle the average person, but Ryan merely rubbed his eyes.

  It was the night-duty officer, a uniformed member of the Air Force, in this case. He stood uncomfortably over Ryan, waiting for him to wake up.

  Presidents are rarely woken because something so wonderful has happened that the night officer just had to pass it on, so Jack knew this would be bad news.

  He did not know if the man had shaken him or called out to him. These guys always looked like they worried about imposing on the President’s sleep, no matter how many times Ryan told them he wanted to be made aware of important news and not to worry about something as inconsequential as a middle-of-the-night “shake and wake.”

  He sat up as quickly as he could and grabbed his eyeglasses from the bedside table, and then he followed the night-duty officer out of the bedroom and into the West Sitting Hall. Both men moved silently so that they wouldn’t wake up Cathy. Jack knew she was a light sleeper, and their years in the White House were filled with his late-night rousings, which, more often than not, disturbed her sleep as well.

  There were nightlights on the walls, but otherwise the hall was as dark as the master bedroom.

  “What’s up, Carson?”

  The Air Force officer spoke softly: “Mr. President, Secretary of Defense Burgess asked me to wake you and let you know that roughly three hours ago, Chinese PLA forces landed an engineering battalion as well as an element of combat troops in the Philippines’ Scarborough Shoal.”

  Jack wished he were surprised by the act. “Was there resistance?”

  “A Philippine coastal patrol boat, this according to the Chinese, fired on the landing craft. The vessel was sunk by a Chinese Luda-class destroyer. No word yet on casualties.”

  Jack blew out a tired sigh. “All right. Tell SecDef to come on over; I’ll be in the Situation Room in thirty minutes.”

  “Yes, Mr. President.”

  “I want Scott Adler, PACOM Jorgensen, Ambassador Li, DNI Foley either there in the meeting or attending via video-conference. And”—Ryan rubbed his eyes—“Sorry, Carson. Who am I forgetting?”

  “Uh . . . the vice president, sir?”

  Jack gave a quick nod in the low light of the Sitting Hall. “Thanks. Yeah, alert the veep.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  —

  President Ryan sat at the conference table and took his first sip of what he knew would be many cups of coffee. The adjoining Situation Room was bustling, and the conference room had filled before he arrived.

  Bob Burgess and several of his military minds from the Pentagon had just arrived. They all looked like they had been up all night. Mary Pat Foley was here as well. Arnie van Damm was in the room, but the commander of the Pacific Fleet, the vice president, and the secretary of state were out of town and attending remotely, though men and women from their offices stood along the walls.

  “Bob,” Ryan said. “What’s the latest?”

  “The Philippines say there were twenty-six sailors on the boat that sank. They are fishing some out of the water alive, but there will be fatalities. There are other Philippine warships in the area, but they are heavily outgunned and probably won’t engage the Chinese.”

  “And Chinese troops are on Philippine soil?”

  “Yes, sir. We have satellites overhead, and we’re collecting images. The engineering battalion will already be fortifying positions.”

  “What do they want with the shoal? Is there any military objective at all, or is this about fishing rights?”

  Mary Pat Foley said, “It’s simply to increase their footprint in the South China Sea. And to gauge reaction, Mr. President.”

  “My reaction.”

  “Indeed.”

  President Ryan thought for a moment. He then said, “We need to send an immediate message, let them know we aren’t wringing our hands just watching their actions over there.”

  Scott Adler spoke on the monitor across the room. “The submarine that made the call in Subic Bay a couple of weeks ago. The Chinese will claim that provocation had something to do with this.”

  Jack said, “I do not believe for a moment that we are the ones driving this thing. Short of us opening fire on the Chinese, they are going to make their moves on their time frame.”

  Adler said, “But we don’t want to fall into the trap of giving them an out. An excuse to inflame the situation.”

  “Point taken, Scott, but no response is also an out. That will look like an all-clear from us. I’m not giving them an all-clear.”

  Ryan looked to Burgess. “Suggestions, Bob?”

  Bob turned to Admiral Jorgensen on the monitor. “Admiral, what assets are we prepared to move quickly into the area? Something to show them that we are serious?”

  “The Ronald Reagan is in the East China Sea, heading up Carrier Strike Group Nine. We can move it and its elements west today. Put it off the coast of Taiwan by the end of the week.”

  “I recommend against that,” said Adler.

  Arnie van Damm seconded that motion. “I do, too. You’ve been getting hammered in the press for antagonizing the people who own our foreign debt.”

  Ryan reacted angrily. “If Americans want to subjugate themselves to the Chinese, then they need to put somebody else in here to oversee that.” Jack ran his fingers through his gray hair as he calmed himself. He then said, “We aren’t going to war over the Scarborough Shoal. The Chinese know that. They will expect us to move carriers closer to our allies. We’ve done it before. Do it, Admiral. And make sure the carrier group has everything they need.”

  Jorgensen nodded, and Burgess turned to one of the other Navy officers against the wall and began conferring.

  Jack said, “This is not the endgame. This battalion taking the shoal is just one tiny step. We protect Taiwan, we reach out to our friends in the SCS, and we stress to China that we aren’t going to take anything lying down. I want information about their intentions and their capabilities.”

  The men and women in the Situation Room conference room had their instructions. It was going to be a long day.

  —

  Valentin Kovalenko liked Brussels in the fall. He’d spent a little time here when working for the SVR, and he found it beautiful and cosmopolitan in a way London could not quite reach and Moscow could not even imagine.

  When Center ordered him to Brussels he’d been pleased, but the reality of this operation had kept him from enjoying the city.

  Right now he sat in the back of a hot van full of crypto gear, looking out the rear window, watching well-heeled lunchtime patrons enter and exit an expensive Italian eatery.

  He tried to stay on mission, but he could not help but reflect back to a time in the not-too-distant past when he would have been inside the restaurant, enjoying a dish of lasagna with a glass of Chianti, and he would have made some other bastard sit in the van.

  Kovalenko had never been much of a drinker. His father, like many men of his generation, was a world-class consumer of vodka, but Valentin preferred a glass of fine wine with dinner or an occasional aperitif or digestif. But since his experience in the Moscow prison and the pressure of working for his shadowy employer, he’d picked up the habit of having a few beers in the refrigerator at all times or a bottle of red that he tipped each evening to help him sleep.

  It did not affect his work, he reasoned, and it helped keep his nerves settled.

  Valentin looked over at his partner today, a sixtyish German technical assistant named Max who had not said one word all morning that was not mission-critical. Earlier in the week, when they met in a parking lot at the Brus
sels-Midi train station, Kovalenko had tried to draw Max into a conversation about their mutual boss, Center. But Max would not play. He just held up a hand and said he’d need several hours to test the equipment and their safe house would need to have a garage with ample electrical outlets.

  The Russian sensed the mistrust in the German, as if Max thought Valentin somehow would report whatever he said back to Center.

  Valentin assumed Center’s entire enterprise maintained organizational security on the principle of mutual distrust.

  Much like Valentin’s old employer, the SVR.

  Right now Valentin could smell the garlic wafting out of the entrance of the Stella d’Italia, and it made his stomach rumble.

  He did his best to push it out of his mind, but he hoped like hell his target would finish soon and head back to his office.

  As if on cue, just then an impeccably dressed man in a blue pinstripe suit and cherry wingtips stepped out through the front doors, shook hands with two other men who’d come out with him, and then began heading to the south.

  Valentin said, “That’s him. He’s heading back on foot. Let’s do it now.”

  “I am ready,” confirmed Max with his typical brevity.

  Kovalenko hurriedly crawled past Max, through the van and toward the driver’s seat; around him electronics buzzed and hummed and warmed the still air. He had to push himself all the way against the wall for part of the crawl, as a metal pole jutted up into the ceiling of the van. The pole contained wiring that attached to a small antenna that extended out over the roof, and could be directed by Max in any direction.

  Valentin made his way behind the wheel and began following his target at a distance down Avenue Dailly, turning slowly behind him as he made a left on Chausée de Louvain.

  The man, Kovalenko knew, was the acting assistant secretary for public diplomacy of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, or NATO. He was Canadian, in his mid-fifties, and he was in no way, shape, or form a hard target.

  Though he worked for NATO, he possessed no military bearing. He was a diplomat, a suit, a political hire.

  And though Valentin had not been informed of this by Center, the assistant secretary was about to be Center’s access into NATO’s secure computer network.

  Kovalenko did not understand the technology humming and buzzing in the van behind him; he had Max for that. But he did know that the tiny roof antenna could pinpoint and then receive leaking radio signals off a mobile phone or, more specifically, the chip in the mobile phone that performs the encryption calculations that make the device secure. By taking these leaked signals, received initially as a series of peaks and valleys in the radio waves and then converted by the computer in the van into the 1’s and 0’s that make up any electronic signal, the phone’s encryption key could be deciphered.

  As they followed the assistant secretary, Kovalenko was happy to see the man pull his phone from his jacket pocket and make a call.

  “Max. He’s on.”

  “Ja.”

  As Kovalenko drove, he listened to Max flip switches and type on his keyboard. “How long?” he called back.

  “Not long.”

  The Russian was careful to stay close enough to the target for the antenna to pick up the signal and far enough back to where any odd glance over the shoulder would not alert his target to the presence of an ominous-looking beige van rolling slowly at his five-o’clock position.

  The assistant secretary ended his call and put his phone back in his pocket.

  “Did you get it?”

  “Yes.”

  Valentin turned to the right at the next intersection and left the neighborhood behind.

  They parked in a lot by the train station and Kovalenko climbed into the back to watch the technician at work.

  The smart phone, Kovalenko knew, used a common cryptographic algorithm called RSA. It was good, but it wasn’t new, and it was easily breakable with the tools at the technician’s disposal.

  Once the German had the key, the software told him that it could now spoof the device. With a few clicks, he opened the website for NATO’s secure Brussels command network, and then sent the encryption information taken from the Public Diplomacy Department man.

  He then impersonated the smart phone with his software and logged on to the NATO Communication and Information Systems Services Agency’s secure network.

  It was the responsibility of Max and Valentin to get into the network, just to test the access. They would do no more, other than return to the safe house and e-mail the encryption information for the diplomat’s smart phone to Center. The German would leave immediately, but Valentin would take a day or two to break down the van and sanitize the safe house, and then he would get out of Brussels.

  Easy work, but that was nothing new. Kovalenko’s job, he had determined over the past month, was little more than child’s play.

  He would bide his time for now, but before much longer, Valentin Kovalenko had decided he would make a break. Leave Center and his organization behind.

  He still had friends, he was certain of it, in the SVR. He would reach out to someone at an embassy somewhere in Europe, and they would help him out. He knew better than to go back to Russia. There the government could pick him up and “disappear him” with little trouble, but he’d reach out to an old friend or two working at a foreign posting, and he’d start laying the groundwork to allow for his return.

  But this travel and this waiting would take money, and for that Kovalenko would continue to work for Center until he was ready to make his move.

  Though he’d been warned by the Russian mobster that Center would have him killed, he was not worried. Yes, Center contracted out the unpleasantness at Matrosskaya Tishina prison, but Kovalenko felt that staying out of Russia would keep him relatively safe from those thugs.

  This was an organization of computer hackers and technical surveillance specialists. It’s not like the Center organization were killers themselves, after all.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  Captain Brandon “Trash” White looked away from his instruments, turned his attention outside his canopy, and saw nothing other than the black night and the streaking raindrops lit up by the lights of his aircraft.

  Somewhere out there, off his eleven o’clock and several hundred feet below him, a tiny postage stamp of deck in the middle of the sea bobbed up and down on heaving swells. He closed on it at one hundred fifty miles an hour, except when the swirling winds at this altitude slowed him down, sped him up, or knocked him left and right.

  And in just a couple of minutes he would, God willing, land on that erratically moving postage stamp.

  This was a Case Three landing, night ops, and this meant he’d been “flying the needles,” watching the Automatic Carrier Landing System needles projected on the heads-up display in front of him. He kept his aircraft lined up in the center of the display as he neared the carrier, which was easy enough, but he was about to get passed off from radar control to the landing signals officer for the last few hundred feet to the deck, and he almost wished he could fly around up here in the shit a little while longer to compose himself.

  The winds were said to be “down the angle” at deck level, meaning blowing from bow to stern, and this would help things a bit as he got lower, but up here he was getting knocked all over the damn place and his hands were sweating inside his gloves from the effort of keeping lined up.

  Still, it was safe up here, and it was dicey as hell down there on the deck.

  Trash hated carrier landings with a white-hot passion, and he hated nighttime carrier landings a hundred times more. Adding awful weather and an angry sea to the equation ensured that White was having one hell of a shitty evening.

  There. Down there past all the digital information projected on his heads-up display, he saw a tiny row of green lights wit
h a yellow light in the middle. This was the optical landing system, and it grew in brightness and size in his HUD.

  A voice came over his radio an instant later, loud enough to be audible through the heavy sound of his own breathing coming through the intercom. “Four-oh-eight, three-quarter mile. Call the ball.”

  Trash pressed his transmit key. “Four-oh-eight, Hornet-ball, Five-point-niner.”

  In a calm and soothing voice the LSO answered, “Roger ball. You’re lined up left. Don’t go any higher.”

  Trash’s left hand drew the throttle back just a hair, and his right hand nudged the stick a touch to the right.

  Marines on carriers. Why? Trash thought to himself. He knew the answer, of course. Carrier integration, they called it. Marines had been flying off carriers for twenty years as a result of some bright idea thought up by some officer sitting motionless at a desk. It was a manifestation of the thinking that anything Naval Aviation could do Marine Corps Aviation was supposed to be able to do as well.

  Whatever.

  As far as Trash White was concerned, just because the Marine Corps could do it, it didn’t necessarily mean the Marine Corps should do it. Marines were meant to fly off flat runways cut out of jungles or deserts. They were meant to sleep in tents under camo netting with other Marines, to walk through the mud to their aircraft, and then to take off and support their fellow jarheads in battle.

  They were not meant to live on and fly off of a damn boat.

  That was Trash’s opinion, not that anyone had ever asked him for it.

  —

  His name was Brandon White, but no one had called him that in a long time. Everybody called him Trash. Yes, it came from a play on his last name, but the Kentucky native wasn’t really what anyone but the most blue-blooded Northerner would call white trash. His father was a doctor with a successful podiatry practice in Louisville, and his mother was a professor of art history at the University of Kentucky.

  Not exactly trailer-park material, but his call sign was part of him now, and, he had to admit, there were worse call signs out there than Trash.