USS Towers Box Set

by Jeff Edwards

  Bill McDonald’s exhausted brain could somehow remember the poster perfectly, and he could still see the logo at the bottom of the signboard. Amnesty International.

  That was it! As soon as those two words popped into his head, he knew he had found the solution to his problem. He might not be able to capture the attention of the major media, but a global human rights organization could. If they brought the video clip to the major media, they would be listened to. CNN and the other news networks wouldn’t dare to ignore a story this big, not if it came from Amnesty International. They wouldn’t risk being left out of what might turn out to be the biggest human rights story since Tiananmen Square.

  Amnesty International. It was the obvious answer. So simple. Why hadn’t he thought of it before?

  The video clip in his pocket had dwindled from a massively insoluble problem to a series of easily accomplished steps. It shouldn’t take more than a few quick phone calls to arrange a meeting with someone who would listen—someone whose entire job was to look for exactly the kind of evidence that Bill McDonald carried, and bring it to the attention of the world.

  He could probably get a contact number right off the Amnesty International website. And then he could…

  Before he could formulate his next step, the Reverend William H. McDonald—former Soldier, spiritual warrior, and bearer of the truth—fell asleep in Seat #31B, somewhere over the South China Sea.

  CHAPTER 20

  BEIJING, CHINA

  PREMIER’S RESIDENCE

  WEDNESDAY; 26 NOVEMBER

  1:35 PM

  TIME ZONE +8 ‘HOTEL’

  As usual, Lu Shi’s guards were stopped at the front door, and he had to enter alone.

  Lu didn’t like being forced to leave his guards behind. Not because he didn’t feel safe here; the Premier’s residence was one of the most secure buildings in China. Lu’s objection was of a more attitudinal nature. After a lifetime of careful and methodical maneuvering, he suddenly found that he was impatient with anything which resembled an obstacle.

  Having his guards held up at the entrance was an unwelcome reminder that there were certain places and circumstances in which his desires were not the deciding factor.

  He had to remind himself that he was still officially the number two man in the Chinese government. The fact that Lu effectively ran the country was an open secret, but the formal power belonged to Xiao Qishan, who was the Premier of China—at least in title.

  Lu generally tried not to think of Xiao as a figurehead. Xiao was a good man, and in his day, he had served the party well. Nevertheless, the term figurehead was not entirely inaccurate. The old man’s political clout had dwindled away to practically nothing. His leverage was gone. He had no more favors to call in.

  Xiao held office now, because Lu Shi permitted it. If Lu pulled his support, Xiao Qishan would not be sitting in the Premier’s chair a month later.

  What’s more, the old man knew it. Although neither one of them ever spoke about it directly, there was an understanding between Lu Shi and Xiao Qishan. Xiao gave speeches and held press conferences, and Lu made the major policy decisions that kept the nation moving forward.

  That made this meeting doubly annoying. Xiao Qishan had sent for him, as though Lu was a low-grade bureaucrat, or some minor political functionary. Lu Shi was not pleased. Not at all.

  He’d been tempted to ignore the summons. He could have used the opportunity to remind Xiao of where the power in China really lay. But such a blatant show of strength wasn’t necessary, and it wouldn’t harm Lu to humor the old dragon.

  Lu made a deliberate effort to smile when he was shown into Xiao’s office. The old man was seated at his desk, reading from a small book with a tattered red cover. Lu Shi recognized it instantly as hong baoshu, Quotations From Chairman Mao Tse-Tung, popularly known in the west as the ‘Little Red Book.’

  Xiao looked up, and smiled.

  Lu inclined his head—a gesture somewhere between a nod, and a minimal bow. “You sent for me, Comrade Premier?”

  Xiao closed the book, using a finger to mark his place within the pages. “Ah, Comrade Lu. Thank you for coming, old friend.”

  Lu Shi inclined his head again. “I am always at your service, Comrade Premier.” Not an accurate statement, but it sounded appropriately polite and respectful.

  Xiao waved toward a chair. Lu pretended not to see the gesture. He remained standing.

  A slight frown creased the Premiere’s brow, but he didn’t insist. “I would like to speak to you about this… situation… with our Indian neighbors. Some of our esteemed comrades on the Central Military Commission are… concerned…”

  Lu Shi’s laugh contained more bitterness than humor. “Some of our esteemed comrades are timid old women.”

  Xiao laid the red book on the desk top, his finger still marking the spot where he had been reading. “You are, of course, more familiar with our comrades on the commission than I am,” the old man said. “And perhaps some of them are overly cautious. But this seems to be an area in which caution may be prudent.”

  Lu Shi resisted the temptation to roll his eyes. “I have no problem with caution,” he said. “And prudence is a virtue in leaders. But I’m not talking about caution or prudence. I’m talking about timidity. Fear. The lack of courage.”

  He nodded toward the red book. “Comrade Premier, you are more dedicated to the words and spirit of Chairman Mao than any man I’ve ever met.”

  That much was certainly true. As Xiao’s once-formidable power bloc continued to erode, the old dragon’s thoughts were becoming increasingly buried in the past. He spent his days studying the speeches and writings of Mao, in the forlorn belief that such studies made him a wiser leader. In the process, he somehow managed to ignore the fact that his leadership was now mostly imaginary.

  But Lu Shi was not above delving into the words of Mao, in order to bring the conversation around to a more favorable angle.

  He reached for the red book, and lifted it gently from the old man’s fingers. “Do you remember what Chairman Mao had to say about communists who are too timid to make difficult decisions?”

  Xiao nodded. “Of course…”

  Lu returned the nod. “And I’m certain, Comrade Premier, that you remember what Chairman Mao wrote about those who protect the enemies of the communist revolution?”

  The old man nodded again. “I remember…”

  Lu Shi held the unopened book between his palms. “In his wisdom, Chairman Mao cautioned us to unite with our real friends, in order to attack our real enemies. He reminded us that leaders must always follow this principle, in order to avoid leading the masses astray.”

  “March, nineteen-twenty-six,” Xiao said. “The chairman was speaking about the analysis of the classes in Chinese society…”

  “Yes,” said Lu Shi. “But was Mao speaking metaphorically? Or did he mean for future leaders to put his ideas into action?”

  “He meant for us to act,” Xiao said. “He meant always for us to act.”

  “I agree,” said Lu. “If we apply Mao’s teachings to our current situation, should we consider our Indian neighbors to be enemies, or friends?”

  Xiao hesitated. “I’m not sure we have enough information to make such a stark distinction.”

  “They are deliberately sheltering known enemies of China,” Lu said. “Enemies who have destroyed billions of Yuan in property, massacred our soldiers without provocation, and killed hundreds of our citizens. Yet, our Indian neighbors welcome these terror mongers, and treat them as honored guests. Protect them from extradition, and punishment, even while they’re plotting further acts of destruction and murder.”

  Lu Shi returned the red book to the desk top, laying it next to Xiao Qishan’s hand.

  “According to our law,” Lu said, “if a man gives shelter and assistance to a criminal, that man is also a criminal. So, what must we call a man who gives shelter and assistance to our enemies?”

  This time, Xiao’s hes
itation was much longer. When he finally spoke, his voice was not much more than a whisper. “Such a man must also be our enemy…”

  Lu stared into the old man’s eyes. “And, do we hold nations to a lower standard than we hold men?”

  Xiao shook his head, slowly.

  “Then, we must ask ourselves a very simple question,” Lu Shi said. “What did Chairman Mao tell us we must do to the enemies of China?”

  CHAPTER 21

  CIA HEADQUARTERS

  LANGLEY, VIRGINIA

  THURSDAY; 27 NOVEMBER

  8:26 AM EST

  Kurt Gray yawned heavily as he worked through the multi-step process for bringing his computer on line. He slid his electronic key card into the card reader next to his monitor, and waited for the red LED on the fingerprint scanner to light up.

  Between digital tokens, biometrics, and seventeen-digit complex pass phrases, his system was encrypted about nine different ways. In recent years, the Agency had taken information security to levels of obsession approaching pathological mania. Kurt and his fellow analysts agreed that the access protocols would eventually be expanded to include DNA samples and rectal examinations.

  That was only half-funny, as there was every sign that the CIA’s cyber paranoia was continuing to escalate. Kurt yawned again as he typed in the first of his pass phrases. It probably wasn’t fair to think of it as paranoia, because there really were people trying to get their grubby little cybernetic fingers on the Agency’s databases. A lot of people. Hostile governments, foreign militaries, criminals, conspiracy theorists, nut cases, garden variety hackers, and even a few friendly governments. For that matter, there were plenty of people in the U.S. government who’d pay good money for an inside look at the CIA’s information stash.

  When the red light came on, Kurt gave the fingerprint reader the obligatory peek at his right index finger, and then punched in his second-level password. The machine responded with a satisfied bleat, and Kurt sat back in his chair while his computer shuffled its way through whatever technical voodoo it used to decrypt his local hard drive.

  He reached for his ever-handy cup of Starbucks, and took a healthy swig of hot rich coffee. Pumpkin spice latte, one of the specialty flavors that only show up around the holidays.

  Kurt lowered the warm cardboard cup from his lips, and tilted it toward the flat screen monitor in a mock toast. “Happy Thanksgiving, Mr. Computer. Hope you don’t mind working on Turkey Day, ‘cause I’m not real fucking happy about it myself.”

  He took another swallow of coffee as the report queue opened on his monitor and began populating itself with a column of filenames. The process took more than a minute. The list wasn’t short. Kurt scrolled down the line of document titles and groaned.

  The operating model of the Directorate of Intelligence had been developed in the 1960s and 1970s, before the internet—when email and search engines were unheard of, and rotating-drum fax machines were the cutting-edge of electronic information transfer. There had been no cell phone frequencies to intercept in those days, no web-servers to hack, and no flash drives for stockpiling and transporting gigabytes (or terabytes) of stolen documents. Back then, intelligence analysts had labored to piece together tiny snippets of useful intelligence, in a climate of extreme information scarcity.

  Now the Directorate of Intelligence struggled with the opposite problem: information overload. The so-called ‘information superhighway’ had become a tsunami of ever-growing and ever-mutating data. Add in video feeds from unmanned surveillance drones, signal intercepts, and actual reports from field agents, and the average intelligence analyst was inundated with more incoming files than any human could possibly assimilate. Unfortunately, about 98% of the flood was worthless, from a national security and foreign policy perspective. The trick was to reach into that ocean of crap, and pull out the 2% that actually meant something.

  That was Kurt’s job, and while it was frequently tedious and frustrating, he was good at it. He paged back to the top of his incoming file list, and began to sort.

  He had been hoping for a light load today, but he wasn’t going to get it. Still, it might not be all that bad. He could tell from the filenames that many of the documents were regional intelligence summaries. Some of those would be recaps of the previous day’s summaries. He could skip those, and he could get by with skimming most of the remaining summaries.

  “Okay,” he said softly to himself. “Let’s see what’s shaking in the far off and exotic land of India…”

  Kurt had been attached to the CIA’s South Asia Desk for three years, the last two of which he had been assigned specifically to Bhārat Gaṇarājya, the Republic of India. He could read Hindi like a native, and speak it somewhat less fluently, but his facility with the language was less useful than it might have been in other regions, as more than half of the documents coming out of India were written in English.

  Since the days of the British Raj, English had been the default language of politics and major business in India. There had been several moves to shift officially to Hindi after the country had gained its independence in 1947, but the cultural inertia of a century of British rule had left an indelible mark on the Indian government.

  As was his custom, Kurt dragged a quarter out of his pocket and flipped it briskly into the air. Heads, he would plow into the Hindi files first. Tails, he would start with the English files.

  The quarter landed on his desk top, bounced, wobbled, and came to rest with George Washington’s shining profile facing up. “Hindi it is,” he said, and he opened the first document.

  * * *

  Two hours later, and getting a bit bleary-eyed, Kurt called up one of the last files in the Hindi list. A few more, and he’d be ready to wade through the English pile.

  The document was slow in opening. When it finally appeared on the monitor, Kurt could see why. It contained at least a dozen imbedded graphics.

  Kurt glanced at the first of these, and then double-clicked it to enlarge the image. The result was a black and white architectural diagram of a large rectilinear structure, like a bridge, or maybe a train trestle. Judging from the associated scale legends, the structure had to be enormous—kilometers long, and about 200 meters high.

  Kurt increased the magnification of the image, and began trying to read the associated text boxes. The printed text was rendered in some form of Asian-looking characters that Kurt couldn’t decipher. Chinese, or maybe Japanese, or Korean. Something like that. But there were handwritten notations at various spots around the diagram, and these Kurt could read, because they were in Hindi. Several of the Hindi notes were accompanied by hand-drawn arrows and arcing lines that converged, diverged, and crossed at what appeared to be strategic points on the architectural structure.

  It took Kurt about thirty seconds to realize that the huge rectangular construction was not a bridge or a trestle; it was a dam. A gigantic hydroelectric dam, dotted by more sluice gates than he had ever seen.

  Kurt minimized the diagram, and worked quickly through the remaining images in the document with a growing sense of both excitement and dread. An idea was beginning to take shape in his mind, and it was not a pleasant thought at all.

  He stared at the monitor for several minutes, hoping for the first time in his professional career that he had not found something interesting.

  “Not good,” he said to himself as he reached for the phone. “This is definitely not good.”

  CHAPTER 22

  FINAL TRAJECTORY:

  A DEVELOPMENTAL HISTORY OF THE CRUISE MISSILE

  (Excerpted from working notes presented to the National Institute for Strategic Analysis. Reprinted by permission of the author, David M. Hardy, PhD.)

  The outbreak of World War II brought renewed interest to the search for unmanned aerial weapons.

  In 1940, British engineer Frederick George Miles proposed the development of a remotely piloted lightweight aircraft, capable of carrying a 1,000 pound bomb. Designated the Miles Hoop-la, this de
sign was not intended as a single use weapon. Instead, it would drop a bomb payload on a designated target, and then return to its home field to be refueled and rearmed for future attacks. The airspeed of the Hoop-la was estimated at over 300 MPH, but this was never verified, as the project was cancelled shortly after it reached the mock-up stage.

  In 1941, the German ReichluftMinisterium (Air Ministry) began to investigate designs for ‘composite’ aircraft, i.e. multiple aircraft which are physically connected together and flown as a single unit. Nazi interest in this concept may have derived from Soviet studies in the 1930s, in which fighter planes were attached to the fuselages or wings of large bombers, ready to launch whenever the host-bombers were threatened.

  One German scheme involved using an attached fighter plane to guide an explosive-packed unmanned Junkers Ju-88 bomber to a target. Upon reaching the designated site, the fighter pilot would aim the drone bomber toward its final objective, detach his own plane, and depart the area as the Junkers dove into the target and detonated.

  The concept met with initial resistance among senior Luftwaffe leadership, but the ReichluftMinisterium ultimately authorized project Beethoven, to build a composite flying bomb under the codename Mistel (mistletoe).

  The first operational test of a Mistel occurred in July of 1943. The control plane was a Messerschmitt Mf-109E fighter, mounted to the top of an unmanned Ju-88A bomber, and wired directly into the larger aircraft’s throttles and flight controls. The fighter pilot made a smooth takeoff, and flew the composite aircraft directly toward the target area. At the appropriate range, he detached his Messerschmitt from the bomber, allowing the Ju-88A to make its final approach on autopilot. The accuracy of the attack could not have been better, and the explosives aboard the bomber utterly destroyed the target.