One of these days, he thought. One of these days that sort of thing is going to land us in a world of hurt.
22 May 2029: Expediency Council Offices, Tehran
The concrete office building was indistinguishable from hundreds of others in central Tehran, gray and water-streaked, with curtained windows turning blind eyes to the surging traffic below. Every reference to the building in print or on the internet assigned it to a minor religious charity funded by the Islamic Republic of Iran; it would not be prudent for infidels to know where the Expediency Council, the effective center of power in the more than Byzantine complexities of Iranian government, held most of its meetings.
Inside, in a tightly guarded meeting room, the ayatollahs, bureaucrats, and military officers who made up the Council listened attentively as Ayatollah Husayn al-Jahrami, president of the Council, read the message from China aloud. After he was finished, he set the paper down on the low table in front of him, and said, “I trust no one has any doubts about the point of this request.”
“No,” said General Farzad Zardawi, the commander of the Revolutionary Guards, who sat next to Jahrami. “None at all—though I admit I am surprised.”
“Why?” This from another officer, in the uniform of the regular army. “The Chinese are going to have to challenge the Americans sooner or later; everyone knows that. This is as good an opportunity for them as any.”
Jahrami held up a hand. “Whatever their reasons, the Chinese are going to fight, and wish to use our airspace to get their planes to East Africa. You are all aware of the risks we would run by accepting their request—and of the potential advantages.”
“To see the Great Satan humbled,” said the regular army officer, “it would be worth taking a great many risks.”
Zardawi considered him, nodded. “I am inclined to agree.”
Jahrami glanced around the room. The oldest of the ayatollahs present, Saif al-Shirazi, a white-bearded veteran of the Khomeini years, cleared his throat. “It is not,” he said, “as though we have not been taking such risks all along. The United States will threaten us again, or maybe send cruise missiles or bombers, as they did when we humbled them in Syria. So? Those who are killed will see heaven—and those of us who are still living, we may see something almost as enticing.”
“The Americans humiliated?” Jahrami was smiling.
“Or more than that,” said Shirazi. “Possibly much more than that.”
24 May 2029: PLA facility 2821, Beijing
“The crucial detail,” Fang explained, “is the targeting of each blow.”
The conference room was small, barely large enough for the eighteen PLA officers who were to be briefed on the overall strategy of Plan Qilin, and located in an out-of-the-way military base in the western suburbs of Beijing. Everyone except Fang, Liu, and the eighteen officers had been told that the afternoon briefing was on the latest inservice training program the PLA was providing for its officers.
“You will all be familiar with the old debates over the proper goal of military action: whether the target is the enemy's will to resist, the mind of the opposing commander, and so forth. All such theories are partly right and partly wrong, as different nations and different eras have their own distinctive strong and weak places. The question is what target is most relevant in any specific case—and with the Americans, that has an unexpected answer.”
He clicked the control in his hand, and an image appeared on the screen behind him: a US Navy aircraft carrier with jet fighters taking off from it. “The American military is the most technologically complex in history. The vast majority of American military personnel spend their days operating technologies of one kind or another. That gives them immense advantages, but every advantage comes with a corresponding vulnerability.
“It's one thing to be empowered by technology. It's quite another thing to be dependent on it. The Americans long ago crossed the line that separates those two. Every aspect of their military doctrine and practice depends on the relatively smooth functioning of dozens or hundreds of highly complex technological systems, and most units have no training at all in how to keep fighting should a number of those systems fail.”
He clicked the control again, bringing up a map of western Venezuela. “How many of you remember the battle of Maracaibo, early on in the Venezuelan war?” Nods answered him. “Good. The American strategy was predicated on using drones for battlefield reconnaissance and precision strikes. They failed to consider the possibility that some other power might have worked out a way to interfere with the drones’ communication links—or that such a thing might be handed to the Venezuelans. It took days for the Americans to regroup, and by then the Venezuelans were able to get forces into the highlands to the west, putting the Americans in an untenable position.
“That was one interference with technology. The plan I have proposed does not stop with one.” Fang paused. “Before I go on, are there any questions?”
“The technology of theirs that concerns me most,” said one of the officers, “is the one you showed a moment ago. An American carrier group is not a small challenge.”
“True,” said Liu, who was sitting in the back of the room. “Nonetheless we have certain options there as well. I'll be going to Taiyuan in a few days to see just how ready one of them is to deployment.”
25 May 2029: Dar es Salaam
McGaffney sniffed the air, caught the familiar tang of tear gas. Around him, protesters hurried past, wet bandanas over their faces and improvised weapons in their hands. It was going to get ugly right quick, he knew, and crossed the street.
Directly after that first riot in Stone Town, protest marches on the mainland followed like clockwork—marches that turned violent as soon as the police showed up, and it wasn't the police who started the violence, either. There were plenty of ordinary Tanzanians marching, but the professional rioters were easy enough to spot if you'd seen a few canned insurgencies, and McGaffney had been on the spot for more than a dozen. Plenty of hired thugs, and plenty of money going on other things as well: full-color posters accusing Mkembe and the CCM of selling out Tanzania to the Chinese were all over the place.
“Look in the right place, and you will see the future before it happens.” An old man in a Johannesburg slum, probably a healer, a sangoma though nobody in the neighborhood quite got around to saying the word, told McGaffney that most of a decade ago, and it was good advice. Now, for example: look on the right websites and you'd learn that the USS Ronald Reagan had gone steaming out of the Mediterranean via Suez with carrier group in tow. The official version was that they were going to make threatening noises at the Iranians over their involvement in the civil war in Kurdistan. The Iranians had been up to their armpits in Kurdistan for the last three years, like the Turks, the Saudis, and everyone else with an interest in the Kirkuk oil fields, and they hadn't done anything out of the ordinary this summer. There wasn't any real doubt where the carrier group was actually headed and what it would do when it got there.
More protesters ran past him, heading toward the center of town where the action was. Off that way, a dull whump sounded, and over the next few minutes the smell of tear gas got stronger. Time to move, McGaffney knew.
He started down a narrow side street as more tear gas grenades sounded behind him. The fast drum-sounds of a ’copter in flight followed, and then another, sharper noise that rang off the walls of the buildings around him: gunfire. McGaffney looked back over his shoulder, saw clouds of tear gas billowing down the street he'd just left, and dim figures running through it, still heading toward the trouble. A moment later, a lone figure came hurrying down the side street, wiping his eyes with a wet bandana.
“G'day, Hafiz,” McGaffney said, turning to face him.
The al-Jazeera stringer blinked, grinned. “What a surprise to see you here, Tommy.”
McGaffney laughed. “Sure thing. Anything in the Quran about getting struck by lightning for telling lies?”
“Close enough.”
Hafiz finished wiping his face. “I don't recommend standing here, though. Some of the protesters opened fire on the police, and they returned the favor with interest.”
“I bet.” They started walking. “A hundred yuan says Weed makes a speech this week denouncing the government here for shooting unarmed civilians,” McGaffney said.
“I can't think of a safer bet,” said Hafiz. “You've heard about the Ronald Reagan?”
McGaffney nodded. “Straight out of the playbook. You wonder why everyone in the world doesn't already know what's going on.”
26 May 2029: CIA headquarters, Langley, Virginia
The analyst frowned, scooped up the photos and walked over to his supervisor's desk. “Jamie? If you've got a moment…”
“Sure thing. What is it?”
He handed her the photos. “These just came in from NRO.” The National Reconnaissance Office was the branch of America's sprawling intelligence establishment that received and processed data from the nation's spy satellites. “It's the PLAAF base at Kashi.”
“Western Xinjiang?”
“That's the one. Look at the planes.”
She did. “They've got some J-20s forward based out there.”
“Not that many, and not these planes. Look at the tail numbers in this one.” He tapped one of the photos, a blowup of an angle shot that allowed the serial numbers on the planes’ vertical tails to be read. “Those planes are Fourth Fighter Division, out of Liaoyang. Any idea what they're doing on the other side of the country?”
She considered that for a moment, picked up the phone and dialed. After a moment: “Fred? Yeah, it's Jamie. Can you come over here when you have time?”
He walked up to the desk three minutes later. “What've you got?”
“Do you know any reason why J-20s from the PLAAF's Fourth Fighter Division would be in western Xinjiang right now?”
He blinked, and then broke into a broad grin. “You guys are on the ball. Yeah, we just got the decrypts. Beijing's gearing up for a big exercise with the Russians and the rest of the SCO in Kazakhstan, air and ground both.”
She nodded after a moment. “Okay. I figured it was worth asking.”
“Oh, no question. Good job catching that.” He turned and walked away. She gave the analyst a silent thumbs-up; he grinned, went back to his cubicle, and put the photos into a folder in a locked filing cabinet.
At that same moment, on a different floor of the same building, another analyst in another CIA directory pushed a stack of papers across a table. “This is the fourth one this week,” he said to the three others in the conference room. “Three from our people in Tanzania, one from South Sudan. Groups of young Chinese men, civilian IDs, civilian cover stories—”
“PLA tattooed all over ’em,” the section head said, nodding. “Go on.”
“Thirty-one of them that we're sure of, and we've probably missed some. Arriving by commercial airlines, no two with the same itinerary.”
“The Chinese aren't dumb,” said the section head. “They've got to have some sense of what's coming down in Tanzania. The question is what they plan on doing about it.”
“I can think of two possibilities.” The analyst tapped the table with a finger. “One, they might be military observers out to get a good look at our tech and operational doctrine in action. In their place we'd jump at the chance to do that.”
“Granted. And the other?”
“They might be there as technical advisers to the Tanzanian military. They know who's going to win—as you say, they're not dumb—but they might want to make it messier and more expensive for us.”
The section head considered that. “Unlikely, but you're right that it's possible.” He pushed back his chair. “I want all three of you to track this, and get our people on the ground following up on it. If these guys are talking to the Tanzanian military, we need to know that right away. If not—hey, if they want to see just how hard the US kicks ass, let ’em.”
Over the days that followed, more J-20s appeared in China's far west and more young Chinese men surfaced in various corners of East Africa. None of the latter showed any sign of contacting the Tanzanian military, so no one at Langley gave them a second thought.
28 May 2029: Military aerospace testing facility, Taiyuan, Shaanxi Province
“This is—” Liu found himself briefly at a loss for words. “Impressive.”
“Thank you, General,” the facility head said, beaming. “We are of course grateful for the constant support the Commission has given to this project.”
The cruise missile in front of him was five meters long, and every millimeter of it from the bulbous nose to the angular geometries of the tail fins was shaped to evade radar and fly at supersonic speeds. Stubby wings amidships folded into the body until launch. Liu raised his eyes from the missile to the one behind it, and the next, and the next: there were more of them in the cavernous hangar than he could count.
“Truly a revolutionary weapon,” said the facility head. “Every major power these days has supersonic cruise missiles. But a supersonic cruise missile that can be unloaded from a shipping container, armed and targeted in a few minutes using satellite data, and launched from any flat surface? That is quite another matter.”
“My one concern,” Liu said, “is the targeting process. How safe is that from detection?”
“That's the beauty of it, General.” The facility head's smile broadened. “There are no signals from the missile at all—not during targeting, not in flight. One burst of encrypted data from a satellite or a drone, and the onboard and launch site computers do the rest.”
Liu considered the missiles again, began to nod. “And active radar countermeasures?”
“One missile in ten contains those instead of an explosive warhead—we used the same countermeasure device that's in the Yingji-90 cruise missile. Size and weight limits don't allow us to put both in the same weapon, not if it's going to have carrier-killing potential, but we've calculated that one radar-countermeasure missile per nine warheads will keep losses to antimissile fire within acceptable levels.”
“Very good.” Liu turned to the man. “How many of them can you have operational within two weeks?”
“We can provide…” The facility manager pursed his lips. “If needed, up to two hundred seventy-two missiles in that time, fully operational and loaded in shipping containers. Possibly six more, depending on how readily we can get certain parts.”
“You'll have them. Get them ready at once; my staff will contact you to arrange the transport.”
The man's eyebrows went up. “All of them, General?”
“Yes.” Liu glanced back at the missiles. “We will be confronting the world's best navy. We can't afford to leave anything to chance.”
28 May 2029: 33rd Fighter wing headquarters, Eglin air force base, Florida
Colonel Melanie Bridgeport came into the meeting room with a binder tucked under one arm. The other lead officers of the 33rd were already there—Brigadier General Michael Mahoney, the wing commander; Colonel Ed Watanabe, who headed the Operations Group, which ran the flying squadrons of the wing; Colonel Arnie Biederman, in charge of the Combat Support Group, which included engineers, communications people, and other ancillary services. She closed the door behind her, nodded greetings to the others, crossed to her usual chair.
“It's our baby,” Mahoney said as soon as she was seated. “Officially, we're still going to Nellis for the Red Flag exercises next month. In fact, we'll be in Kenya, running air cover for this business in Tanzania. The orders just came in: they want two squadrons there and the third here on standby.”
“Anything out of the ordinary?” Watanabe asked.
“Nope. SEADS—” The acronym meant Suppression of Enemy Air Defense Systems. “—and air strikes against government and military infrastructure, then air support for the Army as they go in. If everything goes according to plan, we'll be home sometime in August.” Mahoney turned to Biederman. “They've got a Red Horse
battalion in Kenya already, but you'll want to get your own people over there soonest to make sure we get what we need on the ground.”
Biederman made a skeptical noise down in his throat. “Shared base?”
“Yeah, with the Army. At least it's the 101st.”
“Good. I can work with those guys.” Biederman made a note on his yellow pad.
“Mel—” The general turned to Bridgeport. “What about the planes?”
“Two squadrons won't be a problem,” she said. “Three might be. 58th and 59th Squadrons are good to go, but we've still got field mods to finish on nine of the 60th's planes, and some of the parts are backordered at the factory. Binghamton has everyone he's got working on that.”
“The usual,” said Mahoney.
“Pretty much. If we need another squadron in a hurry, you may have to get one chopped from another unit.”
“If possible,” Watanabe, said, “not Lardbuckets.”
Mahoney scowled, but didn't argue. “We've got the world's best pilots here at Eglin,” he liked to say, and it was true, or close enough as didn't matter. What the 33rd didn't have was the world's best planes. Lined up on the concrete a short walk from the HQ building were sixty-two F-35s, the current problem child of American military aviation.
Mahoney was still in the Academy in Colorado Springs back when the F-35—they called it the Joint Strike Fighter then—was being pitched to the media as the next great revolution in military aviation: one plane that could carry out the whole range of air combat and ground support missions, and do them all better than anything else that flew. He'd been based out of Bahrain, flying F-16 patrols over the Persian Gulf and waiting for the Iranians to try something stupid, when troubled flight tests and spectacular cost overruns started casting a shadow over the program. He'd been dodging ground-to-air missiles in an F-22 over Syria when the first F-35s were delivered to training squadrons stateside, and turned out to be—well, not a bad plane, but not a good one: too heavy to be really fast, too low a thrust-to-weight ratio to be really maneuverable, too loaded with cutting-edge technology to be as reliable in service as a frontline fighter needed to be. The attempt to make it a jack-of-all-trades had succeeded in making it the master of none.
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