Threat Vector

by Tom Clancy

  A moment later, Trash got a radar lock on the J-10s, still forty miles away. He immediately fired an AMRAAM missile.

  “Fox three.”

  He doubted his missile would hit the Chinese fighter. The pilot of the enemy aircraft would have a hell of a lot of defensive tricks up his sleeve that he could deploy easily with such a distance between them, but he wanted to give the attacker something to focus on other than killing the Taiwanese F-16.

  His AMRAAM might not knock the Chinese jet out of the sky, but it would screw with the pilot’s attack.

  The attack worked as he had hoped, one J-10 disengaged, but they were not in time to save the Taiwanese pilot. The ROC F-16 was hit by a short-range missile and blown to bits over the western coast of Taiwan.

  The two Chinese planes immediately turned and raced back to the mainland before Trash and Cheese could engage them.

  The two Marine F/A-18s were low on fuel, so they flew west, then lined up behind a refueler on station over Taipei to gas up before heading back to the carrier. Trash felt the tremors in his hand as he delicately jockeyed his aircraft in position behind the refueling drogue.

  He chalked the shakes up to pure exhaustion and leftover adrenaline.

  When they were back on the carrier, when their aircraft were chocked and chained and their parking brakes were set, when both men had climbed out of their cockpits, climbed down the stepping platforms on the side of the fuselage, returned to their ready room, and shed the survival gear off to reveal flight suits soaking wet from sweat, only then did the two men shake hands and hug.

  Trash’s knees shook now, but he felt good. Happy to be alive, mostly.

  They learned only when they got back to the ready room that up and down the Taiwan Strait there had been several air-to-air encounters. Nine ROC aircraft had been shot down, versus five PLAAF fighters.

  Trash and Cheese recorded three of those five kills, with Trash getting two Super 10s and Cheese shooting down one Su-33.

  No one understood the audacity or aggression of the Chinese, and the squadron commander told his pilots that they could expect to be back up in the skies in combat within hours.

  The Marines on the boat treated Trash and Cheese like heroes, but when the two men made it back to their quarters, Major Stilton could tell something was bothering Captain White.

  “What’s wrong, man?”

  “I should have done better. That phone booth I was in, the second engagement . . . I can already think of about five things I could have done differently to take that guy down faster.”

  “What are you talking about? You got him, and your situational awareness out there this afternoon was outstanding.”

  “Thanks,” Trash replied.

  But Cheese could tell he was still brooding.

  “What’s really bothering you?”

  “We should have nailed those other two J-10s before they wasted the F-16s. We took too long with our bandits, and the ROC guys got wasted. We come back here to the Reagan and everybody is acting like we’re fucking rock stars. Those two ROC pilots are dead, and I’m just not feeling the joy.”

  Cheese said, “We did damn good today, bro. Were we perfect? Nope. We’re just men. We do our best, and our best today took down a couple of enemy aircraft, saved our own asses, and showed the Chinks that they don’t own the skies over the strait.” He reached over and flipped off the light to their quarters. “That’s going to have to be enough.”

  Trash closed his eyes and tried to go to sleep. As he lay there he realized he was still trembling. He hoped like hell he’d be able to get some rest before he headed back into the unfriendly skies tomorrow.

  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.

  FORTY-SEVEN

  Melanie Kraft and Jack Ryan, Jr., had enjo
yed their first night out together in more than a week. She had been working late into the evening at ODNI and he had been out of town. He’d told her he was in Tokyo; he’d been there on business before, and it seemed like it would explain his slight jet lag upon his return.

  Tonight they’d eaten at one of Jack’s favorite restaurants, the Old Ebbitt Grill, right next door to the White House. Ryan had come here often with his family when he was younger, and it became a weekly get-together place for him and his friends when he was at Georgetown. This evening the food was just as good as he remembered it, perhaps even more so because in Hong Kong he’d not had the opportunity to sit down and enjoy a good meal.

  After dinner Jack invited Melanie back to Columbia, and she’d readily agreed. As soon as they were back at his place they went to the sofa. They watched TV for a while, which for them meant making out through fifty percent of the programs and one hundred percent of the commercials.

  Around eleven, Melanie excused herself to go to the bathroom. She took her purse with her, and when she was alone she reached in and removed the small drive with the iPhone connector on the end. The device was no larger than a matchbook, and Lipton had explained that she need not do anything but attach Jack’s phone to the device, and then the upload would happen automatically in about thirty seconds.

  Her hands were perspiring with nerves and her mind was nearly overtaken with guilt.

  She had had a week to think about this and to justify what she was doing. She recognized that having a locator on his phone would be preferable to having an entire surveillance team following him twenty-four hours a day, and since she did not believe he was involved in anything illegal or even unethical, she knew nothing would come out of a few days of tracking that led nowhere.

  But in those moments of guilt when she allowed herself to be honest, she recognized fully that she was doing this for her own self-preservation.

  This was not something she would do were she not being coerced and threatened by her past.