Ghost Fleet : A Novel of the Next World War (9780544145979) (6 page)

BOOK: Ghost Fleet : A Novel of the Next World War (9780544145979)
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A hologram of Xi Jinping, the old Communist Party leader, appeared behind him, accompanied by a recording of a speech he'd given to the old party congress in 2013: “However deep the water may be, we will wade into the water. This is because we have no alternative.”
45

The image of the long-dead president elicited a nervous murmur in the room.

“Many of you are familiar with this speech, what Xi called the ‘Chinese Dream.' The old party leaders were wrong in many things, but in this they were right. America's rise came first with its ensuring control of its home waters and then extending its global economic presence. And then the country had no choice but to assume its new responsibilities, including protecting the system from the powers of the past that would threaten it. I mentioned their thinker Mahan. Soon after he laid out the new demands upon the United States, war with Spain followed, as you remember, and the Americans reached across the Pacific, thousands of miles beyond their home waters, extending to the Philippines, patrolling not just our ports but even our very rivers. Just as Mahan told them, we similarly have no choice but to meet these demands.”

Wang took in the room, searching for signs of understanding but also dissent.

A civilian on the far side of the room took the pause as an invitation. Chen Shi was the chairman of Bel-Con, China's top producer of consumer electronics, which had been formed by the merging of dozens of firms during the most recent crisis. His role on the Directorate's Presidium, though, was an extension of his reputation as a strategist and visionary in business, something that perfectly fit the Directorate's hybrid of military authority and market-inspired efficiency.

“Admiral, you began with a quote from the
Art of War
, so I will match you: ‘Those who know
46
when to fight and when not to fight are victorious.'” He paused. “I do not see your logic here. We always have choices. Does your old vision of power actually matter anymore in a world where we can choose to buy anything, anywhere? These notions you describe risk all that we have accomplished.”

Admiral Wang nodded. “Then this failing is mine, and mine alone, if I have not made the case properly.” He turned to the map, pausing to collect his thoughts. Along the wall, the naval commandos stood unnervingly still and held their weapons at the ready. Wang smiled at them and continued.

“All of us here who first formed the Directorate acted to pull order back from chaos. We chose to act. But we acted because there was no other choice in the end,” he said. “In turn, who can argue that this is not the purpose of the Directorate? Thousands of years have brought us to this point. We protected China from the party leaders who held the country back, and we should not grow meek on the brink of the next great step.”

A young woman's voice cut through the room. “Desire and ability are not the same thing, Admiral,” said Muyi Ling. Muyi was not yet thirty, but thanks to her father's wealth, she now ran Weibot, the largest manufacturing consortium. “Didn't General Sun also say, ‘Avoid overconfidence, as it will lead to disaster'?”

Damn those viz glasses. While the old man might have known Sun-Tzu by heart, Wang doubted she did. He noticed the Directorate commando closest to him shift his weight slightly. Maybe they were not naval commandos at all, despite the uniforms. Could they be from the 788th Regiment,
47
which protected the Presidium? Were they letting him hang himself, word by word, for threatening the status quo that so many in the Presidium had profited from?

“That is always a concern. But as Sun also said, ‘Make no assumptions about all the dangers of using military force. Then you won't make assumptions about the benefits of using arms either.'”

She smiled, but he saw her eyes scanning her glasses rather than looking directly at him. She was likely researching a retort. He realized that he had to move the discussion beyond the level of trading quotations. Wang turned to the wider group.

“Of course, we are all aware of the reasons given for why it will never be our time. Our population demographics are not optimal,
48
they say. Our trade routes are too vulnerable,
49
they say. Our need for outside energy is too great,
50
they say. These statements are all true. And they will always be true if we turn our backs on our duty to make our destiny manifest. The worst thing we can do is fear our own potential.”

His smart-ring finger clicked one last time, and around them played the famous scene of the tank in People's Square crushing the old Communist Party's riot-control truck, the crowd of protesters' initial looks of surprise and then their celebration as they realized that the military was on their side. He saw a few instinctively nodding their approval, reliving the moment when they had remade China into their vision.

“I have abused your time, so I will end my presentation with three questions. First, just as we acted then to meet the people's true expectations of their nation's leaders, we must ask, What would the people expect of us now? Second, what do you expect the Americans to do once they learn of our energy discovery? Third, and most important, is a simple question of the arc of history: If now is not the time, then when?

“You know the answers to these questions, and thus you know that you, the truly powerful, actually have no choice.”

Admiral Lin appeared at Wang's shoulder and placed a hand on his back. Wang noticed that the commandos now surrounded them. Perhaps he had gone too far.

“Admiral, the Presidium thanks you for your views,” said Lin. “These men will see you out.”

As Wang walked down the hallway, wedged between the commandos, he replayed the presentation in his mind. He could find faults with his performance, but he was at peace.

At the elevator door, the commandos stood in silence. Wang wondered where they would take him next. Then he noticed that they were tensing up as the elevator lights numbered ever closer to their floor. The door opened and another armed phalanx emerged; these bodyguards were Caucasian in ethnicity and wearing civilian suits, but they were clearly military. While the two groups eyed each other warily, Wang watched how the elderly man in the middle didn't bother even to look up from the outdated computer tablet he tapped away on. Red diamonds and purple hearts reflected in his traditional eyeglasses. He was surprisingly fit for his age, but supposedly the old Russian spy was addicted to memory-improving games, an effort to stave off what Directorate intelligence suspected was dementia. A strong body still, but not the mind.

So, Wang realized, this had not been a strategy session but an audition. The Presidium had already made its choice.

 

PART 2
 
 

Attack your enemy where he is unprepared,
appear where you are not expected.

—
SUN-TZU
,
THE ART OF WAR

 

 

Joint Base Anacostia-Bolling, Washington, DC

 

Armando Chavez exhaled when he made the initial slice. As his mentor Dr. Jimenez had explained so long ago, the key to precision was to move slow but steady, advancing the blade at a consistent pace. The cut complete, Armando reached down, picked up the withered rose branch, and placed it into the faded canvas bag slung over his shoulder.

Landscaping was a step down for someone with an MD from Universidad Central de Venezuela. But it was the only kind of work Armando had been able to get since he'd arrived as a refugee from the chaos in his homeland seven years ago. He could get angry or he could focus on achieving the little perfections that made life satisfying.

As he trimmed the flowers at the base of the sign, he glanced at the etching in the black marble:
DEFENSE INTELLIGENCE AGENCY
.
1
He wasn't sure what the DIA did. Hadid, his supervisor, said it was something like the CIA, but for the U.S. military. It didn't matter. The landscaping crew was almost done here. After the break, Hadid said they would head over to trim the hedges behind the base's elder-care center.

Because of security, the landscapers were not allowed inside the building. When break time came, the others gathered in the shade, but Armando walked over to sit by the small decorative pond beside the entrance doors.

He flipped open the tablet he kept in his pocket to see if he had any messages. The screen projected a 3-D packet from his cousin back in Caracas. More pictures of his granddaughter. Such lovely eyes.

Armando's smile went unnoticed by Allison Swigg as she cut across the grassy field by the pond in her rush from the parking lot. The imagery analyst had gotten stuck in the traffic on I-295 on her way back from a networking lunch out at Tysons Corner. And now she was late for the staff meeting.

Neither of them noticed the other, but as she passed the landscaper, his tablet recognized the RFID chips embedded in Allison's security badge. A localized wireless network formed for exactly 0.03 seconds. In that instant, the malware hidden in the video packet from Caracas made its jump.

As Armando finished the iced tea his wife had made for him the previous night, Swigg approached the security desk manned by a guard in a black bullet-resistant nylon jumpsuit. A compact HK G48
2
assault rifle hung from the glossy gray ceramic vest that protected his chest. The only insignia on his uniform was the eagle-silhouette logo of the security company that guarded the DIA headquarters.
No Personal Devices Allowed
read the sign suspended above a row of silver turnstiles.

“Hey, Steve,” said Allison. “How's the little one?”

“Pretty good,” the guard replied with a smile. “She slept through the night.”

She placed her iTab bracelet in a metallic lock box and pulled out the key. But Allison's badge stayed with her. As she walked toward the gate, the software in her badge automatically communicated her security clearance to the machine via a radio signal. And at the same moment of network linkage, the malware packet jumped again in less time than it would take to read the engraving on the entrance wall:
Committed to Excellence in Defense of the Nation
.

The idea of using covert radio signals
3
to ride malware into a network unconnected to the wider Internet had actually been pioneered by the NSA, one of the DIA's sister agencies. But like all virtual weapons, once it was deployed in the open cyberworld, it offered inspiration for anyone, including one's enemies.

The turnstile gate lifted. Swigg rushed down the hall, too far behind schedule to make her ritual stop at the Dunkin' Donuts stand just inside the spy agency's entrance. By the time she had passed the old Soviet SS-20 ballistic missile that stood mounted in the lobby like a Cold War totem pole, the malware packet had jumped from the gate onto another security guard's viz glasses. When the guard walked his rounds, the packet jumped into the environmental controls that cooled a closet full of network servers supporting aerial surveillance operations over Pakistan. After that, it went to an unmanned-aircraft research and development team's systems. And bit by bit, the malware worked its way into the various subnetworks that linked via the Defense Department's SIPRNet classified network.
4

The initial penetrations didn't raise any alarms among the automated computer network defenses, always on the lookout for anomalies. At each stop, all the packet did was link with what appeared to the defenses as nonexecutables, harmless inert files, which they were, until the malware rearranged them into something new. Each of the systems had been air-gapped,
5
isolated from the Internet to prevent hackers from infiltrating them. The problem with high walls, though, was that someone could use an unsuspecting gardener to tunnel underneath them.

 
 

Shanghai Jiao Tong University

 

A thin teenage girl stood behind a workstation, faintly glowing metallic smart-rings
6
on her fingers, one worn above each joint. Her expression was blank, her eyes hidden behind a matte-black visor. Rows of similar workstations lined the converted lecture hall. Behind each stood a young engineering student, every one a member of the 234th Information Brigade—Jiao Tong, a subunit of the Third Army Cyber-Militia.

On the arena floor, two Directorate officers watched the workers. From their vantage point, the darkened arena seemed to be lit by thousands of fireflies as the students' hands wove faint neon-green tracks through the air.

Jiao Tong University had been formed in 1896 by Sheng Xuanhuai, an official working for the Guangxu emperor. The school was one of the original pillars of the Self-Strengthening Movement, which advocated using Western technology to save the country from destitution. Over the following decades, the school grew to become China's most prestigious engineering university, nicknamed the Eastern MIT.
7

Hu Fang hated that moniker, which made it seem as if her school were only a weak copy of an American original. Today, her generation would show that times had changed.

The first university cyber-militias had been formed after the 2001 Hainan Island incident.
8
A Chinese fighter pilot had veered too close to an American navy surveillance plane, and the two planes crashed in midair. The smaller Chinese plane spun to the earth and its hot-dogging pilot was killed, while the American plane had to make an emergency landing at a Chinese airfield on Hainan. As each side angrily accused the other of causing the collision, the Communist Party encouraged computer-savvy Chinese citizens to deface American websites to show their collective displeasure. Young Chinese teens were organized online by the thousands and gleefully joined in the cyber-vandalism campaign, targeting the homepage of everything from the White House to a public library in Minnesota. After the crisis, the hacker militias became crucial hubs
9
of espionage, stealing online secrets that ranged from jet-fighter designs to soft-drink companies' negotiating strategies.

BOOK: Ghost Fleet : A Novel of the Next World War (9780544145979)
3.96Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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