by Tom Clancy
“It’s his computer handle. No, it’s not his Social Security number and home address, but we can use it to find him.”
“Anybody can make up a handle.”
“Trust me, Jack. There are people out there who know the identity of FastByte Twenty-two. You just have to find them.”
Jack nodded slowly, and then he looked at the clock on the wall.
It was not even three a.m.
“I hope you’re right, Gavin.”
TWENTY-FIVE
CIA nonofficial cover operative Adam Yao leaned against the entrance of a shuttered shoe store on Nelson Street, in Hong Kong’s Mong Kok district, eating dumplings and noodles with chopsticks from a cardboard bowl. It was nearly nine o’clock in the evening, the last of the day’s light had long left the sliver of sky between the tall buildings that ran down both sides of the street, and Adam’s dark clothing made him all but invisible under the shadow of the doorway.
The pedestrian crowd was not what it was during the day, but there was still a good bit of foot traffic, mostly coming to or going from the nearby street stall market, and Adam welcomed the crowd, because he felt his chances of avoiding detection were higher with more people strolling about.
Adam was on the job, conducting a one-man surveillance on Mr. Han, the counterfeit-chip maker from Shenzhen. After he took photos of the plates on the SUVs that picked Han up at Tycoon Court earlier in the week, he’d called a friend at the Hong Kong Police B Department and talked him into running the tags. The detective told Adam the owner of the vehicles was a real estate company in Wan Chai, a seedy neighborhood on Hong Kong Island. Adam looked into the company on his own and found it to be owned by a known Triad figure. This particular personality was a member of 14K, which was the biggest and the baddest Triad in HK. That explained the origin of the security goons protecting Han, but Yao found it very curious this high-tech computer manufacturer would involve himself with the 14K. The Triads as a whole kept their crime dirty — prostitution and protection rackets and drugs mostly — and the 14K were no more refined than the rest of the Triads. Any criminal operation Han would be involved in, on the other hand, would necessitate high-tech equipment and personnel.
This guy coming to HK and hanging around the 14K made no sense.
Once Adam knew Han was getting picked up each morning by gangsters, he spent the next few days moving around 14K-owned restaurants and strip clubs frequented by the vehicle’s owner, until he found all three gleaming white SUVs parked in a covered lot outside a hot-pot restaurant in Wan Chai. Here, with an abundance of skill derived from working in two separate jobs that required such a technique, he slapped a tiny magnetized GPS tracking device under the rear bumper of one of the trucks.
The next morning he sat in his apartment and watched while a blinking dot on his iPhone moved across a map of Hong Kong, first up to the Mid-Levels to Tycoon Court, and then down into Wan Chai. The dot disappeared, which Adam knew meant the SUV was traveling under Victoria Harbour through the Cross-Harbour Tunnel.
Adam ran outside and leapt into his Mercedes, knowing where Han was headed.
He was going to Kowloon.
Yao ultimately tracked the SUV here, to the big office building that held the Mong Kok Computer Centre, a several-story-tall warren of tiny storefronts selling everything from knockoff software to brand-new original high-tech motion-picture cameras. Anything electronics-related, from printer paper to mainframes, could be purchased here, though much of it was counterfeit and much more of it was stolen.
Above the Computer Centre were two dozen more floors of office space.
Adam did not go inside the building. He was a one-man band, after all, and he did not want to reveal himself to his quarry this early in the investigation. So he sat outside this evening, waiting for Han to leave, hoping to get pictures of everyone who came and went at the entrance of the building in the meantime.
He had attached a remote miniature camera with a magnet to the outside of a closed magazine stand on the sidewalk, and he had a wireless device in his pocket with which he could pan and zoom the lens and snap off rapid-fire high-quality pictures.
So he sat just up the street and watched, slurped noodles and dumplings from his bowl, and took pictures of all activity at either the front of the building or a side alley entrance right next to him.
For three consecutive nights he had photographed more than two hundred faces. Back in his office he ran the images through facial-recognition software, looking for anyone interesting he might link with Mr. Han or the sale of military-grade computer equipment to the United States.
So far he’d come up with nothing.
It was boring work, for the most part, but Adam Yao had been doing this for a long time, and he loved the job. He told himself that if he were ever moved into an embassy position with the CIA’s National Clandestine Service he would leave the Agency and start his own company, doing just exactly what his cover organization did, business investigations in China and Hong Kong.
Operating undercover in the streets was exciting, and Adam rued the day when he would be too old or too settled down to worry about anything more than his mission.
Four men appeared out of the dark alley that ran alongside the building that housed the Mong Kok Computer Centre. They passed close by Adam, but he looked down at his bowl and scooped dumplings and noodles into his mouth with his chopsticks. After they passed his position he looked up and immediately pegged three of their number as Triad soldiers. They wore open jackets on the warm evening, and Adam suspected they would be carrying small machine pistols under them. Along with them, a fourth man walked; he was slighter than the others and he wore his long hair spiked and gelled. He was dressed oddly, a tight purple T-shirt and tight jeans, a half-dozen bracelets on his arm and a gold chain around his neck.
He looked less like a Triad and more like a punk rocker.
It appeared to the American in the dark doorway that the three Triads were watching over this kid, much like the detail that protected Mr. Han.
Adam stuck his hand into the pocket of his slacks and found the remote control for the camera affixed to the magazine stand, and then he looked down to his smart phone and the image from the camera’s lens. He pushed a tiny control stick on the remote, and the camera rotated ninety degrees, more or less centering itself on the quickly moving punk rocker. Adam depressed a button all the way down on the control box and, at a range of only two meters, the camera started recording high-definition images, four per second.
The pictures clicked off automatically, but Yao had to pan the camera via the control stick to keep the subject in the frame. In seconds the four men had moved up Nelson Street and out of range, and then they turned left on Fa Yuen Street and disappeared from Adam Yao’s sight.
He had no idea if they would be returning tonight. He pushed himself back in the doorway to wait for Han, but as he sat back down with his noodles he decided to take a quick look at the images he had just recorded.
The camera was connected via Bluetooth to his iPhone, and it was a quick and easy thing to review the last set of images. The camera had night-vision capability, so the faces, while not perfectly clear, were a hell of a lot better than they would have been if they were shot without a flash with a normal camera in this nighttime street.
He scrolled through them. He saw the first two meatheads pass by; they had the requisite “Fuck off” expressions of gangsters who thought they owned the sidewalk on which they walked. Behind them was the third security man; he looked to be as much of a thug as the others, but Adam noticed the man’s left hand was low on the elbow of the punk rocker, leading him along as they walked up the street.
The kid was odd, and it was not just his clothes. He held a handheld computer with both hands and thumbed it furiously. Whether he was playing a game or working on his thesis, Yao could not tell, but he was intense and completely unaware of his surroundings. It looked to Adam as if the kid would walk into moving traffic without the three
men in front of him guiding him up the street.
Adam looked at the young man’s face now, illuminated via night-vision enhancement. He scrolled back and forth between the two closest and most in-focus images on his phone. Back and forth.
Back and forth.
The American CIA man could not believe his eyes. He muttered to himself, “I know this asshole.”
Yao stood quickly and headed off in the direction of the four men. As he passed his magnetic remote camera, he deftly reached up and pulled it off the magazine stand without breaking stride.
Adam found the group ahead of him in the crowd, and he stayed a full city block behind them as they walked, but he managed to keep them in view for a few minutes, until they turned and went into the Kwong Wa Street post office.
Normally the young CIA officer would not chance a close encounter, but adrenaline was racing through his body, and it encouraged him forward. He walked right into the post office. It was closed for the evening, but the P.O. boxes and mail slots were still accessible, as was a stamp machine.
Adam walked right by the four men, he felt the eyes of the 14K goons on him as he passed, but he did not meet their gaze. Instead he pulled some HK dollars out of his pocket and bought stamps.
As he waited for the stamps to be dispensed he glanced over his shoulder, taking a mental snapshot of what he saw. The punk rocker had unlocked a P.O. box on the wall and was going through the mail on a wooden table. Adam could not hope to read the box number from across the room, but on a second glance, this one as he exited the post office, he took another quick mental snapshot.
He stepped back out into the street. He did not smile; he would not think of breaking his cover like that. But he was happy.
He got it.
The young man’s P.O. box was the largest of the three sizes along the southern wall, four from the left, two from the bottom.
He walked deeper into the night, some eighty meters away from the building, and then he turned around.
The four men left the post office and headed in the opposite direction, and then turned into an apartment building, the Kwong Fai Mansion.
Yao looked up at the building. It was easily thirty stories high. There was no chance in hell he could tail anyone inside that building. He turned and headed back for his car, still somewhat in shock by tonight’s revelation.
It wasn’t every day, after all, that Adam Yao stumbled upon a fugitive.
The kid’s name was Zha Shu Hai, and Adam first heard of him more than a year earlier, when he was e-mailed a bulletin from the U.S. Marshals Service asking him to be on the lookout for an escaped felon who, both Marshals and FBI suspected, would be heading to China.
Zha was an American citizen who’d been arrested in San Diego for trying to sell the Chicoms classified engineering secrets from his employer, General Atomics, the makers of unmanned aerial vehicles for the Air Force. He’d been caught red-handed with hundreds of gigabytes of design information about the secure networks on which communications and GPS information was sent, and he’d bragged to the Chinese embassy that he knew how to bring the system down by hacking into its sat link, and how to obtain deep persistent access into the Department of Defense’s secure network by building a RAT that could infect a government contractor’s network and then swim upstream. The Feds did not believe him, but they weren’t sure, so they offered him partial immunity if he told General Atomics everything he knew about the system’s vulnerabilities.
Zha refused, and was sentenced to eight years in prison.
After just one year in a minimum-security federal correctional facility, however, he walked away from a work-release program and disappeared.
Everyone in the States knew Zha would try to slip back to China. Adam had been working in Shanghai at the time, and he’d received the BOLO, or “Be on the lookout” notice, from the Marshals Service because there was a reasonable expectation that some high-tech firm in Shanghai would employ Zha if he did make it to the mainland.
Adam had all but forgotten about it, especially after he moved from the mainland to Hong Kong.
Until tonight. It was clear Zha had done much to change his appearance; the booking photo on the BOLO showed a nondescript young Chinese man, not a spiky-haired flamboyant punk rocker, but Adam Yao recognized him nonetheless.
As Adam climbed into his car, he wondered about this strange relationship. Why the hell would Zha be here, in the protection of the Triads? Much like his discovery that Mr. Han had a relationship with the local street thugs, Zha was, if everything the Feds said about his abilities as a top-level black-hat hacker were to be believed, seriously out of the 14K’s league.
Yao had no idea what this meant, but he knew he’d be placing all of his other work on hold in order to find out.
One other thing was certain, though. He would not be shooting an e-mail to the U.S. Marshals Service or the FBI.
Adam Yao was a NOC; he wasn’t exactly a team player. He knew that a call to the Marshals Service would bring marshals and embassy staff here to the post office on Kwong Wa Street and the Mong Kok Computer Centre, and he also knew good and well that Zha and the 14K would see all the white guys with earpieces, they would leave the area, and that would be that.
And there was another reason Adam decided to sit on this news for now.
The obvious breach at CIA.
In the past few months several CIA initiatives had been thwarted by the MSS. Well-placed agents in the government were arrested, dissidents in contact with Langley were imprisoned or executed, electronic operations against the PRC were discovered and shut down.
At first it appeared to be just bad luck, but as time went on, many were sure the Chinese had someone working in Beijing Station.
Adam, the one-man band, had always played his cards close to his vest. It came with being a NOC. But now he really was operating out on his own. He sent Langley as little cable traffic as possible and had no communication whatsoever with either Beijing Station or the CIA field officers at the U.S. consulate in Hong Kong.
No, Adam would sit on his discovery of Zha Shu Hai, and he would find out on his own what this guy was doing here.
He just wished he had a little help. Being a one-man band made for long hours and frustrating setbacks.
That said, it was a hell of a lot better than getting burned.
TWENTY-SIX
It might come as a surprise to many of the patrons of the Indian Springs Casino on Nevada’s Route 95 to know that America’s most distant and most secret wars are fought from a cluster of single-wide trailers a little more than a half-mile from the blackjack tables.
In the Mojave Desert northwest of Las Vegas, the runways, taxiways, hangars, and other structures of Creech Air Force Base serve as home to the 432nd Air Expeditionary Wing, the only wing dedicated to unmanned aircraft. From here, within sight of the Indian Springs Casino, pilots and sensor operators fly drones over denied territory in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Africa.
Drone pilots don’t climb into a cockpit for takeoff; instead they enter their ground-control station, a thirty-foot-by-eight-foot trailer in a parking lot on the grounds at Creech. Detractors, often “real” pilots, refer to the 432nd as the Chair Force, but even though the men and women of Creech are some 7,500 miles from the battle space over which their aircraft fly, with their state-of-the-art computers, cameras, and satellite control systems they are as connected to the action as any fighter pilot looking out a canopy.
Major Bryce Reynolds was the pilot of Cyclops 04, and Captain Calvin Pratt served as the aircraft’s sensor operator. While Reynolds and Pratt sat comfortably at the far end of their ground-control station, their drone, an MQ-9 Reaper, flew just inside the Pakistani border, twenty thousand feet over Baluchistan.
A few feet behind the pilot and sensor-operator seats in the GCS was master control, a lieutenant colonel overseeing the Reaper’s mission, coordinating with units in the Afghanistan theater, the UAV’s physical base at Bagram in Afghanistan, and in
telligence operatives monitoring the flight in both hemispheres.
Though this evening’s flight was designated reconnaissance and not a hunter/killer mission, the Reaper’s wings carried a full weapons loadout, four Hellfire missiles and two five-hundred-pound laser-guided bombs. Reconnaissance flights often came upon targets of opportunity, and Cyclops 04 was ready to wreak destruction, should the need arise.
Reynolds and Pratt were three hours into their six-hour mission, monitoring ground traffic on Pakistan’s National Highway N-50 near Muslim Bagh, when the flight’s master controller voice came over their headsets.
“Pilot, MC. Proceed to the next waypoint.”
“MC, pilot, roger,” Reynolds said, and he tilted the joystick to the left to give Cyclops 04 twenty degrees of bank, then looked down to take a sip of his coffee. When he glanced back up he expected to see his monitor displaying the downward-looking infrared camera indicating a bank to the west.
But the monitor showed the vehicle was continuing its straight path.
He looked at the attitude indicator to check this, and saw the wings were level. He knew he did not have the autopilot engaged, but he checked again.
No.
Major Reynolds pushed the stick a little harder, but none of the relevant displays responded.
He tried banking to the right now, but still there was no response from the bird.
“MC, pilot. I’ve got a dead stick here. Not getting any positive reaction. I think we’ve got a lost link.”
“MC copies, understood Cyclops 04 has gone stupid.” Gone stupid was a term UAV pilots used to indicate the platform was no longer responding to operator commands. It happened sometimes, but it was a rare enough occurrence to warrant immediate attention from the base’s technicians.
Sensor operator Captain Pratt, seated on Reynolds’s right, said, “Sensor confirms. I’m not getting any response from the UAV.”
“Roger,” said master control. “Wait one. We’ll troubleshoot.”