The Ascendant: A Thriller

by Drew Chapman

  Yes, yes, he knew that could not happen. Absolutely could not.

  The military called next, before Soo Park had a chance to catch his breath. They were scrambling four MiG-21s to intercept the plane. Soo Park was ordered to tell the 777 not to land here, no matter what the emergency. Yes, he would do that. Right away.

  Soo Park hung up the phone and picked up his radio. “United 8-9-5! Do not land! Do not land Pyongyang. Must not land Pyongyang!”

  The American captain came back on the radio immediately. “Negative, Pyongyang. We are experiencing thick cabin smoke. Must land Pyongyang. This is a mayday. Mayday situation. Please open FNJ runway 35 Right.”

  “No, no, no!” Soo Park yelled. “Cannot do this! Must not! Must not!”

  “We have 277 souls on board this aircraft. We need to get on the ground right away. It is imperative.”

  Soo Park latched on to one word he understood. “Seoul! Yes. You go Seoul! Very close. You go Seoul!”

  “No sir, souls. People. Two hundred seventy-seven. All will die if we do not land at Sunan International, FNJ. We are four minutes from wheels down, coming in hard. Please have emergency personnel on hand. We may have injuries.”

  Now all three phones were ringing in the cramped air traffic control room. Soo Park picked them up one after the other. First was radar, screaming, second was the military, third was the Central Party boss for the southern airport sector. Everyone was saying the same thing—tell that American plane to go somewhere else!

  “I have tried,” Soo Park pleaded with each of them in turn. “They say they have an engine fire and a fire in the cockpit. They will not turn around. I told them, but they will not listen.”

  Each of the callers hung up, furious and panicked in turn. Soo Park threw down his radio headset, shoved open the door to the air traffic control room, and ran up the two flights of dingy stairs to the main deck of the airport control tower. There, hovering over the ancient command and control radios that passed for ground-to-plane radar in North Korea, two of his fellow air traffic controllers stood wide-eyed and horrified at the broad window that gave them a view of Sunan International’s main runway, 35 Right.

  In the distance, barely visible, was a 777, coming in low and fast, followed tightly by a squadron of North Korean People’s Air Force fighters. A thin trail of white smoke seemed to be billowing from the nose of the plane.

  It was coming in for a landing. Right square in the middle of his airport.

  77

  SOUTHEAST WASHINGTON, D.C., APRIL 18, 10:01 PM

  Garrett watched the news feed as it appeared on the AP wire. First reports were in: United wide-body jet forced to make emergency landing, Pyongyang, North Korea. All passengers reported safe. No injuries.

  Garrett let out a long, relieved breath. There had been a very real possibility the North Korean Air Force would shoot the plane down before it could land. Garrett figured they wouldn’t, that they’d pull back at the last second, but he couldn’t completely dismiss the risk, so they had stocked half the plane with ex-military officers, State Department contractors, and federal volunteers, all with cover stories.

  Garrett scrolled quickly through the falsified passenger manifest, checking the names and their purported places of residence. He signed off on it, then forwarded it to Patmore. He waved the Marine lieutenant over.

  “Call everyone on your media list, starting at the top: the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN. Blanket coverage,” he said. “You are an airline employee, and you are leaking the passenger manifest. Then hang up.”

  “Yes sir,” Patmore answered.

  Garrett’s eyes scanned the news screens on his computer terminals. Sites were picking up the AP release. The story would top the news cycle for the next twenty-four hours, until the next explosion of news would bump it from that perch. But twenty-four hours was plenty of time for Garrett’s purposes. Asian stock markets were all open now; news of the plane incident would begin to reach traders in about ten minutes. Uncertainty was poison to an exchange; volatility would start to climb. It would be off the charts in a few hours. And that was just the beginning.

  Garrett walked out of the darkened computer room and into the meat locker. The room was cold. It smelled faintly of old food. Garrett stood over the paralleled computers that Mitty and Bingo had set up, the ones with the Russian shell intrusion software on it. They were humming quietly. He plugged an ethernet cable into a port in the back of one of the machines. It was connected to the Web now. Whatever it had on its hard drive was milliseconds away from being loosed on the world. That would be step two.

  He executed the program and waited for the show to start.

  78

  BEIJING, APRIL 19, 10:48 AM

  Xu Jin, director of the Ministry of State Security, was having trouble understanding the news. An American commercial jetliner had made an emergency landing in Pyongyang? That was the closest airport? Couldn’t they have flown the extra hundred miles to Seoul? By landing in North Korea they had placed themselves squarely in an international incident. Had the pilot no sense at all? What a fool. And what a headache for the Chinese. Already the American ambassador had called twice to demand Chinese intervention with the North Korean government.

  As if we control those lunatics in Pyongyang! Xu Jin scowled and lit a Zhonghua cigarette, the most expensive brand in China. They were a hundred dollars a carton. Not that Xu Jin ever bought his own cigarettes: they were given, as were a constant stream of gifts, by groveling supplicants and party underlings. As the old saying went: The people who buy Zhonghua don’t smoke it, and the people who smoke Zhonghua don’t buy it.

  The phone rang. It had been ringing since Xu Jin had walked into his office an hour ago.

  “Yes?” he barked, irritated.

  “Director Xu, we have a problem.” It was one of the functionaries in the Internet Subdivision. His name was Yuan Gao. Or something like that. Their offices were in a warehouse in Beijing’s Haidian district, mixed in among the university students and IT workers. The place smelled of sweat and fried pork. Xu Jin avoided the computer techs whenever possible.

  “What is it? You know I have other things to deal with.”

  “Yes, Director Xu, I know this. But there is a problem with Golden Shield.”

  Xu Jin exhaled a great ball of gray cigarette smoke and growled. There was always a problem with Golden Shield, the censorship wall that the ministry had erected around all of China’s incoming and outgoing Internet traffic: the wall was porous; the computer servers were down; there was a virus, and it was malicious; the virus was from inside China—no, it was foreign, from Russia, or the U.S. It was constant din, and Xu Jin understood almost none of it.

  Every time they tried to tighten the specifications of Golden Shield, making it harder for Chinese citizens to access subversive or antigovernment information, another crack appeared in the wall someplace else. There were too many hackers with time on their hands—like that greasy moron Gong Zhen—always sticking their adolescent fingers where they didn’t belong, usually into the gears of the Chinese government. Although, Xu Jin had to admit, Gong Zhen and his hacking team had done a masterful job with the American power-plant virus. That had succeeded beyond his wildest expectations.

  “So,” Xu Jin growled. “What is the problem?”

  “A worm has slipped through the wall,” the Internet functionary bleated.

  “There is always a worm or a virus,” Xu Jin interrupted. “Just fix it. Deal with it. I have an incident in North Korea to deal with.”

  “That’s just it, Director Xu. I cannot fix it.”

  Xu Jin stubbed out his cigarette in the Italian marble ashtray on his desk. “Why can’t you fix it? And why should I care?”

  “I can’t fix it because it is too widespread.”

  Xu Jin narrowed his eyes in frustration; this was how it always went with the Internet toads. Everything was “beyond their control,” “too complicated,” “of major importance”: as if the Internet
were the only thing that mattered in the world. What about reality? What about people walking the streets? Cars, or birds, or airplanes—airplanes that for some idiotic reason landed in the middle of North Korea?

  “Explain,” Xu Jin said, lighting another cigarette. It was a multicigarette morning. “And fast.”

  “Malicious computer code has breached the firewall. Many users downloaded it. It was attached to a video of, well, sir, one of your speeches. The one you gave at the conference in Hong Kong last fall. About Internet safety.”

  Xu Jin blanched. Was this somebody’s idea of a bad practical joke? He would personally find that person and destroy them: ruin their reputation, have them fired, kicked out of school, have their head separated from their puny body. Xu Jin didn’t care. This was beyond what was acceptable.

  “Who did it?”

  “We think it came from America. Or Europe. We can’t be sure yet.”

  “Well, find it, destroy it, make it better.”

  “That’s the problem, Director Xu. We cannot. The worm has taken over computers inside the firewall. Thousands of computers. Maybe millions. We don’t know for sure.”

  “Taken them over to do what?”

  “It turned them into zombie machines. It made them attack our servers. Golden Shield’s servers. Wave upon wave of attacks. It has shut them down.”

  Xu Jin held his breath. His office, with its broad windows looking out onto the courtyard of the party headquarters in Zhongnanhai, in central Beijing, was silent. A battery-powered clock with a picture of Mao on its face ticked from the desk. A wisp of smoke from his newly lit cigarette curled toward the ceiling. Xu Jin breathed again.

  “You mean Golden Shield is not working?”

  “No. More than not working. It no longer exists.”

  That caused Xu Jin’s heart to trill alarmingly. He put a hand on his chest to calm himself. He searched for a reasonable response.

  “Well, then, turn off the entire Internet. Pull the plug. On the whole thing.”

  “Sir, that is not possible,” the toad named Yuan said. “There are too many lines of data coming in. And anyway, now the worm has taken control of the servers. That seems to be its secondary purpose: to keep the trunk lines open.”

  “You mean the purpose of the virus is to open up the Internet? Anyone can read anything they like on their computers? Right now?”

  “Yes, Director Xu.”

  “But . . . how do we stop it?”

  There was no answer on the phone line. Director Xu Jin barked, louder this time: “Yuan Gao! Answer me!”

  “My name is Le Lin, Director Xu.”

  “I don’t give a shit what your name is,” Xu Jin roared. “I only care how we are going to stop this. Tell me now! How are you going to put Golden Shield back up?”

  “Director Xu,” Le Lin said, the words catching in his throat, “I have no idea.”

  79

  SOUTHEAST WASHINGTON, D.C., APRIL 18, 11:25 PM

  The room was humming with activity. Cell phones were ringing, computers were beeping, text alerts were dinging softly in the darkness. Garrett let his fingers run across the keyboard, calling up different windows on his half dozen screens, delving deeper and deeper into the data recesses of the planet’s information flow.

  Internet traffic was beginning to spike in and out of the Far East. That meant that users in China were discovering that they suddenly had access to a whole new world of Web content. Word would spread fast. Traffic would grow all day, peaking in the afternoon as people logged on in the office towers of Shanghai and Tianjin.

  Garrett’s eyes flickered over the small TV screens on his left. CNN and Fox were doing stand-ups on the North Korean plane incident, with their respective reporters posed outside the White House. It was night. Late. The TV frame was dark. The BBC was also beginning to cover the story, breathlessly, with talking heads already spinning out possible scenarios on the fate of the American passengers: jail, soft captivity, bargaining chips? Would the Chinese get involved? Could anyone sway the North Korean government?

  He scoured the wires for news out of Beijing. Nothing yet about the Golden Shield hack; but, then again, Garrett hadn’t expected anything. The party would do its best to cover up the whole thing. Didn’t matter, because Garrett had already leaked word to the New York Times and the Washington Post. They would be all over it. That story would start to blow up in just a few minutes.

  Garrett let the data wash over him. Screen upon screen, window within window. There were charts and graphs and numbers; there were faces on the TV and voices from those faces. Garrett let his mind wander over the information, let his eyes distinguish the outlier data from the median numbers, let his ears tune into the key words: diplomacy, China, pressure. He settled back into his chair, fingers energetically working the keyboard, eyes darting left and right, high and low, while his body sank into the soft cushion of the leather seat.

  The patterns will come. Their direction will become clear. And Garrett would nudge them. Here. There. Up. Down. He raised his hand over the front edge of a computer screen and pointed to Bingo in the corner of the room.

  Bingo nodded, knowing exactly what Garrett meant—time to release the next pack of hounds.

  80

  FOURTH STREET NE, WASHINGTON, D.C., APRIL 18, 11:54 PM

  Mitty Rodriguez knew she wasn’t the world’s hottest bikini babe: yes, she was a few pounds overweight; and, no, she hadn’t had a professional haircut in a year, but at least she showered regularly. These video-editing dudes, they smelled like homeless people. All three of them. The Motel 6 room where she met them? Management was gonna have to hire a carpet-cleaning service after their visit.

  Garrett had told her to fly them down from New York to D.C., on the last shuttle of the day out of LaGuardia. He called them Moe, Curly, and Larry, said he had worked with them once, back in the day, when he was doing gaming in L.A. She flew them down on the ten-thirty flight, told them to take a cab to the motel in the District’s southeast side. They were all in their twenties; one was bald, one had a Jew-fro, and the other just looked dense. But Mitty had to admit, stinky as the threesome were, those boys could edit. And compile. And Photoshop.

  Mitty sipped her Mountain Dew as the one called Moe—the bald one—blathered on about the video clip. He had a Brooklyn accent and wore his Yankees cap backwards, as if he were some kind of OG badass, which he clearly wasn’t.

  “See, look at this bunch of dudes right there, top right corner of the frame,” Moe said as he pointed to the seventeen-inch laptop he’d set up on the motel bed. The video still frame was of a city street, shot from above, from a second- or third-story balcony. It was hard to tell exactly; the camera had been shaky up until the freeze frame, and the lens was a wide-angle one. In the top right of the screen stood a mass of people—maybe two dozen or so—all with their arms raised high, as if about to throw something. A few were screaming. Many had bandanas wrapped around their faces. The ones whose faces could be made out were clearly Asian. Mitty could see that for certain.

  “I see ’em,” Mitty said.

  “Those motherfuckers are Koreans,” Moe said proudly. “I took ’em off this news footage I stole from work at Channel Five News. From the archives. Some Korean protest about some shit. I don’t know. They’re always protesting over there. Know what I mean?”

  “Sort of.”

  “And these jokers down here.” Curly did the pointing this time. His accent was only slightly less thick. “These guys are from all that crazy shit that went down in Egypt. You know, the Arab Spring? Those guys are Muslims, which is fucked up, right?”

  “I guess,” Mitty said, squinting to see if she could tell that the rear wave of protestors in the video—all the way in the back of the frame, barely recognizable as people at all, much less Arabs—were not Chinese. No, not possible. They just looked like angry protestors. “And the street? That’s a street in China?”

  “Guaranteed, one hundred percent Chinese street, or yo
ur money back,” Moe said, smiling gleefully. “Got it off YouTube. A video about crazy Chinese drivers.”

  “Play it for me. From the beginning.”

  “Sho ’nuff, boss,” Moe said, restarting the short digital video in his computer editing program. On the screen, a phalanx of black-uniformed riot police charged down a street. They wore black metal helmets with hard plastic visors, and carried baseball-bat-sized truncheons, which they waved menacingly at arm’s length.

  “Those are Chinese police?”

  “From a riot in Tibet. A monk-ass dude filmed them. Only I doubled up the number, and changed their body movements a little, so it looks like different people.”

  The police were suddenly met with a hail of rocks and bottles. They hoisted shields and arms above their heads. A few of the policemen fell to their knees. But before you could see what happened to the injured policemen, the jittery camera panned down the street to the protestors. Now, not stop-frame, but live and continuous, the army of protestors seemed huge and enraged. They chanted and howled and lobbed bricks and road stones at the police.

  “And that’s from a bunch of different protests?” Mitty asked.

  “Top-speed, high-res rendering, baby. I can make the normalist shit look totally crazy. You know how long it took me after you called? Four hours. Four hours, bitch.”

  Mitty stared at Moe. “You call me bitch again,” she said, her voice dropping an octave, “I’ll tear out your rectum with my fingers.”

  Moe’s face fell momentarily. “Sorry,” he said weakly. “Just an expression.”

  On the screen, the protestors surged forward, breaking the ranks of the police. A few riot policemen were trampled underfoot, lost from the screen; other police fled in the face of superior numbers. And suddenly, the video stopped. Mitty looked over at Moe: “What happened?”