Threat Vector jrj-4

by Tom Clancy

  SEVENTY-THREE

  President Jack Ryan decided he would travel to the Pentagon to hear their plan to attack China’s computer networking infrastructure and computer network operations capability. Most of America’s top war-fighting strategists had been working on nothing else there in the building, doing their best to ad-lib parts of the tactical plan because the cyberattack on America had hamstrung their capabilities to get information, advice, and a good picture of the battle space.

  Napoleon is credited with saying an army marches on its stomach. But that was in Napoleon’s time. Now it was clear to everyone affected by the attacks that the U.S. military marched on its bandwidth, and at the moment it seemed it could do little more than stand at parade rest.

  And in the two days since his directive to draw up the plan, the situation had gotten worse. In addition to increased cyberattacks on the United States — attacks that had shut down two days of trading on Wall Street — the Chinese had exploited other attack vectors against the military. Many American military and spy satellites had been hacked and their signals corrupted, so critical data were not getting from the theater to the Pentagon. Those satellites still online were sending back data sluggishly or sporadically corrupted, meaning the picture of the situation over there was spotty at best.

  The United States had lost visibility of the Chinese carrier in the South China Sea, and only received clues of its location again when an Indonesian Navy frigate, Yos Sudarso, was sunk eighty miles north of Bunguran Timur, reportedly by four missiles fired from a Chinese attack helicopter. Of the one hundred seventy sailors on board, only thirty-nine had been recovered alive as of twelve hours after the incident.

  More air-to-air contests over the Taiwan Strait had resulted in the shooting down of five more ROC fighters and a Marine Hornet, compared with the loss of eight PLAAF aircraft.

  Ryan sat quietly as colonels, generals, captains, and admirals briefed him on the options for a military strike or, more precisely, on the seeming lack of options for a military strike.

  The most frightening aspect of building a target list, clearly, was the poor coverage of the area. The degradation of the satellite data, more than anything else, made much of their attack plan a crapshoot, and the men and women in the room admitted as much to the President.

  Ryan asked, “But some of our satellites are still functional?”

  Burgess fielded this one: “Yes, Mr. President. But what you have to realize is, other than the dogfights over the Strait of Taiwan, the shooting war between the U.S. and China has not begun. Everything they’ve done to us to muddle our ability to fight, they’ve done with computer code. If we do attack, or if we do move carriers closer to attack or in any way show our hand, you can bet they will use shooting-war measures to disrupt those satellite feeds.”

  Ryan said, “Shooting down our satellites?”

  Burgess nodded. “They have shown their ability, in a test against their own equipment, to destroy a satellite with a kinetic missile.”

  Ryan remembered the event.

  “Do they have the capability to do that on a large scale?”

  An Air Force general spoke up: “Kinetic ASAT, or antisatellite weapons, are no one’s first choice. They are bad for all parties with space platforms, because the debris from a strike can orbit for decades and fly into other equipment in space. It only takes a particle about one centimeter in length to mission-kill a satellite. The Chinese know that, so we don’t think they will blow up our equipment in space unless they absolutely have to.”

  Ryan said, “They also can attack our satellites over China with an electromagnetic pulse weapon, an EMP.”

  Burgess shook his head. “The Chinese will not detonate an EMP in space.”

  Ryan cocked his head. “How can you be so sure, Bob?”

  “Because it would damage their own equipment. They have GPS and communications satellites up above their own nation, of course, not far enough away from our platforms.”

  Jack nodded. That was the kind of analysis he appreciated. The kind that made sense. “Do they have other tricks up their sleeves?”

  The Air Force general said, “Yes, absolutely they do. The PLA also has the ability to temporarily blind satellites with the use of high-powered lasers. The technique is called ‘dazzling’; they have done it on the French and Indian satellites in the past two years with great success. In both cases they totally degraded the satellite’s ability to see and communicate with the ground for three or four hours. We predict they will start with this, and if it does not give them the results they want, then they will start firing missiles into space to shoot down our communications and intelligence-collection platforms.”

  Ryan shook his head in frustration. “A couple months back I made a speech to the UN and said that any attack on a U.S. satellite was an attack on U.S. territory. The next morning half the news organizations in the country and three-fifths on the planet were running headlines saying I was claiming outer space for the United States. The L.A. Times had a caricature of me dressed like Darth Vader on their opinion page. America’s chattering class does not get the stakes we’re up against.”

  Burgess said, “You did the right thing. The future of warfare is going to be brand-new territory, Mr. President. Looks like we’re the lucky ones who get to blaze a trail.”

  “Okay,” Ryan said, “we’re half blind in the sky; what does the picture look like at sea level?”

  A Navy admiral stood and said, “Anti-access/area-denial. A-two A-D, sir. China does not possess a great Navy, but they have the largest and most active land-based ballistic and cruise missile programs in the world. The PLA’s Second Artillery Corps has five operational short-range ballistic missile brigades targeting Taiwan. DIA estimates they have over one thousand missiles.”

  A captain stood in front of a whiteboard festooned with notes for the President to read in lieu of a PowerPoint presentation. “Second Artillery Corps conventional anti-ship ballistic missiles also provide the PLA with an extra deployment option to enhance its anti-access/area-denial strategies against offshore threats.

  “Their ocean surveillance system over-the-horizon radar will see a carrier battle group at a distance of one thousand eight hundred miles, and then their electronic signal — detection satellites will pinpoint and identify the ships.

  “The battle group emissions are detected and the track is predicted, even through cloud cover.

  “The Dong Feng 21D is their carrier-killer ballistic missile. It has its own radar, and it also pulls tracking information from Chinese satellite data.”

  It continued like this for an hour. Ryan was careful to keep the momentum of the discussion up; he saw it as a waste of time for these men and women to be forced to explain the nuances of every weapons system of both sides to a man who had only to give a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down to the entire operation.

  But he had to strike a balance. In his role as the man with the thumb, he owed it to America’s war fighters to be as educated as possible on their options before ordering hundreds — no, thousands — of people into harm’s way.

  After an entire morning of back-and-forth, a Navy admiral, a former F-14 Tomcat pilot who’d led carrier wings and was now one of the Pentagon’s top naval tacticians, took the President through the plan of attack on China. It involved nuclear subs in the East China Sea launching barrages of conventional missiles at PLA command-and-control centers and technical bureaus, as well as targeting electrical infrastructure that powered these locations.

  Simultaneously, subs in the Taiwan Strait and off the coast of the Chinese city of Fuzhou would launch cruise missiles against PLAAF air bases, known fixed-missile batteries, and command-and-control facilities.

  American strike aircraft would fly from the Reagan and the Nimitz, refuel while still far out to sea, and then strike up and down the Chinese coast near the Taiwan Strait, taking out SAM sites, warships in port and at sea, and a huge target list of anti-access/area-denial capabilities, including a
nti-ship ballistic missile sites that the Chinese maintained in the south of the country.

  The admiral admitted that hundreds, if not thousands, of the PLA’s best missiles were fired from mobile launchers, and the poor overhead picture of the area meant those missiles would survive any attack the Americans could mount.

  Ryan was floored by the scope and obvious difficulties the Navy would face in this seemingly impossible task. He knew he had to ask the next question, but he feared the answer.

  “What are your predictions as to losses to U.S. forces?”

  The admiral looked at the top page of his notepad. “To flight crews? Fifty percent. If we had better visualization, then that would be significantly less, but we have to deal with the battle space as it now exists, not as we had war-gamed it in the past.”

  Ryan blew out a sigh. “So we lose a hundred pilots.”

  “Say sixty-five to eighty-five. That will go up if follow-on strikes are necessary.”

  “Go on.”

  “We will lose submarines as well. It’s anyone’s guess how many, but every one of those subs has to go shallow and reveal itself in waters where the PLAN is active and the PLAAF is overhead, so they will all be at risk.”

  Jack Ryan thought about losing a submarine. All those young Americans, acting on his orders, and then dying a death that Jack had always considered to be about the most horrific imaginable.

  He looked up at the admiral after a moment of contemplation. “The Reagan and the Nimitz. They will be in imminent danger of a response from China.”

  “Absolutely, sir. We expect the Dong Feng will be employed in combat for the first time. We don’t know how good it is, frankly, but to say we are hoping it does not work as advertised would be about the biggest understatement anyone could make. Obviously we have a number of countermeasures that our ships will employ. But many of those countermeasures rely on networking and good satellite data, neither of which we have much of right now.”

  All totaled, Ryan was told he could expect to lose between one thousand and ten thousand lives in the attack on China. The number could, and likely would, explode if Taiwan was attacked in retaliation.

  The President asked, “Do we think this will short-circuit the cyberattacks against America?”

  Bob Burgess spoke up now: “The best minds at Fort Meade’s NSA and Cyber Command cannot answer that, Mr. President. Much of our understanding of China’s computer network attack infrastructure and bureaucratic architecture is, frankly, theoretical. We only hope to temporarily deteriorate their cyberattack capabilities and disrupt their conventional attack capabilities near Taiwan. Deteriorate and disrupt, temporarily, at the cost of upward of ten thousand lives.”

  The Navy admiral spoke now, though this was not exactly his area of expertise: “Mr. President, with respect, the cyberattacks on America will kill more than ten thousand people this winter.”

  “That’s a very good point, Admiral,” Ryan admitted.

  Ryan’s chief of staff, Arnie van Damm, stepped into the conference room and spoke in the President’s ear.

  “Jack, Mary Pat Foley is here.”

  “At the Pentagon? Why?”

  “She needs to see you. She apologizes, but says it’s urgent.”

  Jack knew she would not be here if she didn’t have a good reason. He addressed the room: “Ladies and gentlemen, let’s break for fifteen minutes and pick back up where we left off.”

  * * *

  Ryan and Foley were shown to the anteroom of the secretary of the Navy’s office and then left alone. They both remained standing.

  “I’m sorry for barging in like this, but—”

  “Not at all. What’s so important?”

  “CIA has had a nonofficial cover operative who had been working in Hong Kong, on his own initiative and without CIA support. He is the one who located the Chinese hacker involved in the UAV attacks.”

  Ryan nodded. “The kid who was killed in Georgetown with the Agency guys.”

  “Exactly. Well, we thought we lost him, he disappeared a few weeks ago, but he just emerged and got a message to us from inside China.” She paused. “He has located the nerve center of much of the cyberattack on the United States.”

  “What does that mean? I just spent all morning listening to a room full of generals tell me China’s cybernetwork operations were in bureaus and CIC centers all over the country.”

  Mary Pat said, “While that might be true, the architect of the overall strategy and the man in charge of the operation against us right now is located in a building in the suburbs of Guangzhou. He, a staff of a couple hundred hackers and engineers, and several mainframe computers are all in one place. One place that we have pinpointed. We are nearly certain that the vast majority of China’s cyberwar is being fought out of that building.”

  Ryan thought this sounded too good to be true. “If this is, in fact, the case, Mary Pat, we could limit the scope of the planned naval attack considerably. We could save thousands of American lives. Hell, we could save thousands of innocent Chinese lives.”

  “I agree.”

  “This NOC. If he’s inside China, how do we know they don’t have him? How do we know this isn’t some disinformation operation by the Chinese?”

  “He is operational and not compromised.”

  “How do you know this? And why isn’t Director Canfield here giving me this intel? And how did this guy manage to communicate with Langley without getting compromised if Langley has a breach?”

  Foley cleared her throat. “The NOC did not communicate with Langley. He communicated this information to me.”

  “Directly?”

  “Well…” She hesitated. “Through an asset.”

  “Okay. So the NOC is not alone in the field?”

  “No, sir.” Another clearing of the throat.

  “Damn it, Mary Pat. What aren’t you telling me?”

  “Jack Junior is with him.”

  The President of the United States went white. He said nothing, so Mary Pat continued: “They both went on their own initiative. It was Junior who called me, who convinced me. He assures me they are both safe and absolutely not in harm’s way.”

  “You are telling me that right now my son is in fucking China?”

  “Yes.”

  “Mary Pat,” he said, but no more words would come.

  “I talked to Junior. He confirmed that K. K. Tong and his entire operation are working out of a China Telecom building in Guangzhou. He has sent photos and geo coordinates. Communication with him is spotty, as you can imagine, but we have everything we need to target the location.”

  Ryan just looked to a point against the wall. He blinked a few times, and then nodded. “I think I can trust the source.” He smiled; there was no happiness, just resolve. He pointed to the entrance to the conference room. “Get everything you have to those men and women. We can limit the attack, focus it on this nerve center.”

  “Yes, Mr. President.”

  The two hugged. She said into his ear, “We’re going to get them back. We’re going to get Junior home.”

  SEVENTY-FOUR

  John Clark flew on a private jet hired from the same fixed operating base where Hendley Associates kept its Gulfstream at BWI. Adara Sherman, Hendley’s transportation manager, flight attendant, and aircraft security officer, arranged the entire early-morning flight to Russia while at thirty-five thousand feet over the Pacific, as the Gulfstream was still on its way back from Hong Kong after dropping off Jack Ryan, Jr.

  While Clark flew in the chartered Lear, he spoke via sat phone with Stanislav Biryukov, head of the FSB, Russian state security. Clark had done one hell of a big favor for Biryukov and Russian intelligence the year before, more or less single-handedly saving Moscow from nuclear annihilation. Director Biryukov had told Clark his door was always open to him, and a good Russian always remembers his friends.

  John Clark put this to the test when he said, “I need to get into China from Russia with two others, and I nee
d to do it within twenty-four hours. Oh, and by the way, the two others are Chinese nationals who will be bound and gagged.”

  There was a long moment of silence, and then a low, almost evil chuckle on the other end. “Such interesting vacations you American pensioners take. In my country we prefer to go to the dacha to sunbathe after retirement.”

  Clark just asked, “Will you be able to help me?”

  Instead of a direct reply, Biryukov said, “And when you are there, John Timofeevich? Will you need assistance in the form of equipment?”

  Now John smiled. “Well, as long as you are offering.”

  Biryukov did owe John a favor, but Clark knew any help he would get from the head of the FSB would be implied help for Clark’s friend, the President of the United States. Biryukov knew that Clark would be working on behalf of America in its conflict with China, and he also knew Clark would not be working for the CIA, which was a good thing, as the FSB knew CIA was compromised in China.

  John told Biryukov what items he would like to take with him into China, and the FSB director wrote them down. He told Clark to fly on to Moscow and he would have the gear and the military transport waiting for him, and that he would take care of all other details while John enjoyed his flight over.

  “Thank you, Stanislav.”

  “I suppose you will also need a way home afterward?”

  John said, “I sure hope so.”

  Biryukov chuckled once again, understanding what Clark meant. If he did not need a way home, that would mean he was dead.

  Biryukov hung up, called his top operations people, and told them their careers would be over if they could not make all this happen.

  * * *

  Clark and his two bound and hooded prisoners arrived in Moscow and then flew on a Tupolev transport to Astana, Kazakhstan. Here they were put on an aircraft loaded with munitions that were being delivered to China. The transporter, Russia’s state-owned defense exporter Rosoboronexport, often flew covert missions into China, and they knew to do what FSB ordered and ask no questions.