Razing Beijing: A Thriller

by Elston III, Sidney

  As she began the same routine, Emily’s thoughts wandered through a more recently troubling consideration. What had been her father’s role in Deng Zhen’s organization? If the CIA knew, they certainly were not telling her. They had refused to acknowledge more than only humanitarian interest in aiding his defection. The more she thought about it, the more she realized there should be similarities in the application of CLI’s software to the particle physics of her father’s work.

  “There’s something else I should tell you, Thack. It’s going to sound, well, strangely coincidental.”

  “Strange? I can handle strange. Coincidence scares the shit out of me.”

  “This might scare you then. My father is a physicist, actually a highly respected one. It’s possible that he was involved in developing this satellite.”

  Thackeray stopped what he was doing and looked at her.

  “He never actually told my mother and me specifically what his responsibilities were, other than to admit working on classified military secrets. But if he was involved, it can only increase the odds that what we’re dealing with here is definitely not some sort of benign Chinese commercial venture. Ironic, isn’t it, that his own daughter might be struggling to undo it?”

  “I’d say the odds of such a coincidence are pretty remote.”

  Not as remote as you think, she silently lamented, her expression becoming dark. “It infuriates me that as good and decent a person as I know my father to be, they are able to bend such men to their bidding.”

  “And then throw him in jail,” observed Thackeray. He remained quietly thoughtful for several moments. “Didn’t Stu say he was leaving you those Baltimore stadium samples?”

  82

  Monday, July 6

  DEPUTY INSPECTOR JOSEPH CICCONE of the New York Police Department looked at the snarl of vehicles stretching as far as he could see. He quietly swore. Out over the Hudson River and a mile or so away, an NYPD helicopter hovered just about level with the pinnacles atop the suspension structure of the George Washington Bridge. Murphy’s Law number twenty-four, Ciccone mused, was that if an automobile was on the verge of a breakdown, it was bound to occur during rush hour. With luck it would not be anything worse.

  Traffic along the southbound lane of the Major Deegan Expressway ground to a halt.

  Ciccone depressed the button on his radio for the pre-set frequency and hailed the chopper pilot.

  The pilot confirmed his suspicion. “Roger, we got a breakdown or a fender-bender on the GW southbound lower tier. Traffic is stalled all the way up 95, 9A, in fact all the GW feeders. Royal mess. Out.”

  Ciccone determined that the transit authority who monitored bridge vehicular traffic had already dispatched a tow-truck. Upon learning that his was the patrol car nearest the scene, Ciccone flipped on his pursuit strobes and began motoring slowly along the highway shoulder.

  After twenty minutes and several blasts of his siren, his patrol car crawled onto the lower tier and the bridge’s breakdown lane. He beat the tow truck to the scene and found a Buick sedan, trunk-lid open and two men kneeling to replace the driver’s side rear tire—a single disabled vehicle, after all. One of the men stood and waved his arms at the approaching police car.

  Ciccone stopped twenty yards behind the disabled vehicle. He immediately regretted his conditioned response to seeing men of apparently Middle Eastern extraction—a consequence, certainly, of all the publicity surrounding the Islamic jihadists terrorizing the country. Off the top of his head the officer could recall the Arabic names of two of the department’s most decorated cops. His own brother-in-law was from Syria, and their children played on the same high school soccer team. Like many Americans, he could draw on personal experience to know that radical Islam was an entirely different animal.

  After Ciccone had radioed in the New York State license plate number, along with a description of the two men and the car, the dispatcher reported back that the owner and vehicle were clean. The Buick Lucerne was registered to one Mohammad Rahmani, an employee of Security Solutions in Paterson, New Jersey, and a Brooklyn resident with no prior arrest record.

  Ciccone climbed out of the squad car. Seeing the police officer approach had the effect of speeding the men’s efforts to replace the rear tire. Each was dressed in shirt and tie; professionals, Ciccone saw. Off to the side of the lane was the damaged wheel with the worn-out tire flattened and shredded around the rim. He wondered about the delay just to replace a flat tire.

  The mustachioed and more muscular of the two stood and identified himself simply as ‘Rahmani.’ The man was very apologetic. “We are sorry for all the trouble, officer,” said Rahmani, his accent thick. He nervously explained that their problem developed as they traveled in the left-hand lane where there was no place to stop.

  Ciccone acknowledged the difficulty in crossing four lanes of cranky Midtown commuters with a crippled car. He also noted that the Buick was partially blocking the right-hand lane—the men had done a singularly sloppy job of getting the car and themselves clear of traffic. That probably explained why Rahmani seemed a little on edge. Nerves would get frazzled merely trying to avoid being struck by passing vehicles, whose drivers—despite the presence of a police uniform and flashing strobes—blasted their horns while waiting to merge into the flow, and finally gunned their engines testily to escape the snarl of traffic.

  Officer Ciccone walked to the rear of the car and inspected the open trunk; it was empty. There was a cell phone laying on the front passenger seat and a briefcase on the floor. He watched the man’s companion kneeling to torque the lug nuts with a speed wrench. The job looked nearly complete.

  Ciccone cast an annoyed glance at the traffic crawling by. In doing so he more fully understood Rahmani’s jitters. A stream of scowls and obscene gestures were being hurled from passing motorists toward the olive-skinned men.

  Ciccone said to the owner of the car, “They’ve called in a tow truck.” He nodded toward the other man’s grease-smeared hands fumbling to tighten the wrench before lowering the wheel to the ground. “Looks to me like you’re not going to need one.”

  Rahmani smiled sheepishly. “In fact, we are going to need the assistance. I am afraid our spare tire has not any air.”

  83

  TOSSING BACK the last of his whiskey, Stuart reclined his business-class seat aboard the United Airlines 777-200 IGW, outbound Chicago for Tokyo. The cabin lighting was dimmed to encourage sleep, something he realized for him was unlikely to come.

  Minutes ticked slowly into the twelve-hour flight. Stuart frequently glanced from his newspaper to gaze out the window. Individual lights around the cabin began to go out. After awhile a flight attendant stooped over and, flashing friendly green eyes, she asked if he would like another Maker’s Mark.

  “Port, if you have any,” Stuart replied.

  The well-traveled passport inside his coat pocket displayed his own photograph and the name of Randolph Pedersen, a Cleveland businessman for whom, McBurney assured him, there existed a sufficiently verifiable background. Pedersen was traveling to Tokyo with the hope of rubbing elbows with attendees of the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation forum, hosted this year by the Japanese Ministry of Trade. At least there would be no tedious hobnobbing with international trade representatives. If not without elements of uncertainty, Stuart’s—Pedersen’s—task should be relatively straightforward. To hear McBurney describe it, what was expected of him amounted to nothing more than enlightening discourse between two mutually respected acquaintances.

  The flight attendant returned with Stuart’s port and a small porcelain bowl of mixed nuts.

  McBurney was insistent on one point, that their being discovered and apprehended could not be permitted to happen. An advance entourage of operatives even now were assessing the layout of the Japanese Diet and working to determine at which of the neighboring hotels the Beijing delegation would be staying, dining, and socializing. The operation would be choreographed every step of the way, each minu
te planned in advance and then monitored, deviations taken into account and adjustments made going forward. At least, this is what McBurney had tried to assure him.

  As someone who had always prided himself on being open and direct, he simply disliked the air of coercion underlying the whole slick affair. How was Deng Zhen going to react to such a revelation, delivered by a virtual stranger? Who was he to drop a personal bomb for the purpose of manipulating the man? And how could they be sure he wouldn’t be noticed in the process? Stuart could only hope that the CIA had considered such things. McBurney’s plan was logical, even intriguing when viewed from afar. As one of the players, it was easy to find reasons that made it unlikely to work—one exception being that it should easily dovetail into his plan. Stuart assumed that, when the time came, he would figure out how to secure his privacy with Deng...

  Again he had come full circle, as he had every time that he thought the thing through. Staring down at the scattered lights of British Columbia glistening through the wispy layer of clouds, Stuart drifted off to sleep.

  84

  Tuesday, July 7

  9:37 P.M. Beijing, China

  THE INCOMING SHIFT at Beijing Security Center settled into their posts behind their terminals. The two outgoing Defense Intelligence communications specialists had reported monitoring only spurious transmissions from a joint US-ROK naval exercise in its second day off the coast of Inch’on. There had been chatter of Chilean military aircraft coordinating recovery after a crash in the Andes. Nothing to disrupt the normal routine.

  Routine would not be the watchword for the departing shift officers heading down the corridor, ostensibly to leave for the night. Recently promoted and the envy of their command, the two men left the terminal area with their heads held high and purpose to their stride. Tonight the customary cigarette that capped the end of their monotonous work would have to wait. The People’s Liberation Army lieutenant accompanied his next-in-command into the basement-level elevator. Checking that the corridor behind them was empty, he depressed the button not to ascend two stories to Iron Lion Lane, but up the additional four to the recently renovated floor atop the building.

  The top floor was in fact off-limits to all personnel. The ground floor security guard would fastidiously record the two men’s failure to depart the building at the regular time, were it not for his sudden reassignment to Tianjin. The reassigned guard’s replacement was a bright, ideological woman in her mid-twenties who, like her two PLA colleagues, was also recently promoted. The pneumatic groan announced the elevator’s burdensome rise and the young woman watched the annunciator digits above the elevator doors. She tracked the car’s progress past the lobby and all the way to the top floor. Then, she dutifully noted the time and logged the officers’ departure from the building.

  The two young men exited the elevator and stepped to the security door that led into the new facility. The lieutenant glanced around the alcove as his subordinate keyed in the password. The floor was still bare concrete; the air smelled of fresh plaster and paint. An overhead surveillance system would soon be installed. Along with storage closets and a small, unfinished kitchen for extended duty, the facility occupied the building’s entire uppermost floor. Encasing the facility on all sides was the security ‘moat,’ a two-meter void between false walls that contained multiple layers of metallic sheathing and white noise interference equipment.

  The air inside was alive with the malignant buzz of electronic instrumentation. Red and blue panel diodes cast a dim glow of idle readiness until one of the men hit the breaker for the overhead lights. The procedure was familiar to both men. Little conversation was necessary as they assumed their positions behind separate terminals. The junior officer typed a series of start-up commands into his keyboard to activate the ground-site operating system.

  Several minutes later, a video monitor snapped to life and verified satellite acquisition—an embedded program automatically conducted a satellite systems control interrogation, a simulated command sequence that verified all ground and orbiting systems were properly operating and ready for inputs.

  The security protocol to prevent unauthorized use involved two thresholds; Lieutenant Bo had the necessary clearance to perform them. The first was an authentication step for arming the system, the second for fire control. The satellite weapon communications module was actually programmed with a common link encryption algorithm, selected by the Chinese engineers for both its robust reliability and their interest in holding to schedule. This modest vulnerability was mitigated by their selection of an 80-bit encryption key, requiring up to 20 billion billion computational tests by anyone attempting a brute-force search to replicate it. When authentication from the ground carried the duplicate key, the satellite’s on-board targeting and fire command modules were activated; the system became armed. In practice, the authentication sequence was virtually impossible to decrypt, guaranteeing that the Beijing ground site was the only facility capable of arming the weapon.

  This first threshold, then, the lieutenant achieved by typing in several simple commands. What the weapon system required next were the targeting instructions.

  Lieutenant Bo removed a sealed envelope from inside his coat and tore it open. Reading from the single sheet of paper inside he began entering the firing instructions to be up-linked by ground computer. These designated the terrestrial target’s global position coordinates as well as approximate volumetric and compositional data. The instructions would be used during Phase I of the attack by directing the satellite to acquire the target with an initializing raster-scan. Phase II of the attack required no additional instructions; even at the speed of light, the time-of-flight required to transmit trillions of bits of data required that these be ‘hard-wired’ into the microprocessors aboard the satellite.

  But transmitting the firing instructions required that the final security threshold be met. The format was somewhat conventional. The young officers acknowledged their readiness, left their terminals and walked to opposite ends of the long bank of instruments. Each removed a key from around his neck and inserted it into a lock on identical security consoles designed for the purpose. Lieutenant Bo reaffirmed the twelve-digit authentication password and, seeing that his partner was ready, began the countdown sequence: “Three, two, one, now”—each officer rotated his key ninety degrees.

  Through one of China’s three geostationary data and relay communications satellites, the ground computer up-linked the firing instructions in a sixty-microsecond digital burst to the orbiting leviathan. A low-pitched hum sounded; columns of characters appeared on the video monitor with the announcement, “SYSTEM FULLY CHARGED—TARGET ACQUISITION SOLUTION ONE-HOUR FORTY-EIGHT MINUTES TWENTY-EIGHT SECONDS.” A digital counter at the top of the screen updated each second.

  Less than an hour after entering the People’s Defense Satellite Center, the officers climbed into Lieutenant Bo’s glistening Mercedes-Benz S-Class, where they finally took the time to light up their cigarettes. It was not as though there was any real stress involved in destroying an unknown target; naturally, the men were curious to know the objective of tonight’s GPS coordinates. Were it not for snippets of Xinhua news reporting, they might never have learned that their first attack had targeted a pair of enemy navy vessels. For now, dusk was yielding to a crisp star-lit sky and they were eager to get home to their wives.

  85

  MCBURNEY AND THE REST OF his jet-lagged contingent had staggered their arrivals to the lobby of the Okura Hotel; two of his staff were scheduled to arrive later that evening on a flight connecting through Brussels. Robert Stuart, a.k.a. Randolph Pedersen of Cleveland, checked in several blocks away at the Capitol Tokyu where the Chinese trade delegation was staying. McBurney’s parting instructions to Stuart were dine in your room, sleep alone, don’t answer the phone or a knock at the door unless you’re expecting it. We’ll page you if we need you, otherwise stay put and try to relax.

  His team had agreed to convene for a planning sessio
n at ten o’clock over a late evening meal. McBurney meanwhile flopped onto the bed in his hotel room for a few hours sleep. Falling victim to the insomnia of jet lag, he realized it wasn’t to be. “I can sleep all I want when I’m dead,” he muttered aloud in frustration.

  McBurney turned the light on over the room’s desk and began perusing the information prepared for him by the embassy staff. He flipped through routine operations stuff until he came to the section summarizing the APEC activities. There he found individual profiles of the Chinese delegation, which he took time to browse. Most of it seemed to be information routinely compiled and disseminated by the State Department for the edification of trade representatives on hand for the summit. He tossed the folder aside.

  It wasn’t jet lag alone that kept him awake. Notwithstanding the potential intelligence bonanza, a difficult rendezvous wasn’t the sort of clandestine operation that he could easily warm up to. Preparations had been rushed. That it was taking place in a friendly country only marginally improved the odds for success. The usual measures would be taken by the Chinese to ensure that a man as important as Deng didn’t defect, get kidnapped, or simply become injured. What were the odds of seating such a man down in strict isolation, with not only a foreigner, but an American? Not just any American—for all he knew, Chinese State Security already suspected this particular American of engaging Deng in his traitorous liaisons. Stuart seemed to be carrying with him his own baggage of uncertainties. McBurney’s proposal to use Stuart withstood the logic test—but was it too risky? Burns’s parting advice to not ‘fuck it up this time’ was somehow less than encouraging.

  Ninety minutes later, McBurney awoke as if from the dead. Following a sufficiently convoluted series of subways and taxicabs, he sat cross-legged on the floor over dinner at an Akasaka restaurant called the Seven Lilies while sipping a cup of mercifully strong coffee. Seated beside him in the private dining room were Carolyn Ross and four other intelligence officers assigned to the task. George Mekler and Ian Sorensen had between them several decades of covert operations experience, unfortunately none of it in Asia. But McBurney had worked with each of them and insisted that the DCI free them up for the job. Price O’Connell and Gary Nomura were the embassy staff officers responsible for advance preparations, both of whom were American-born ethnic Japanese. At 10:35 Tuesday evening Tokyo time, jet lag and fatigue weighed heavily on the shoulders of the recent arrivals.