by Tom Clancy
Adam did not know these roads, but he did know there was no way in hell they would make it long in a car that would be reported by a dozen men to the Army within moments.
He thought about helicopters in the air, about police roadblocks, about roving convoys of soldiers searching for the downed pilot and the spies who rescued him.
“We’ve got to get another car,” he announced to Ryan.
Jack said, “Okay. Try and find a van, something where we can lay this guy out flat, he’s hurt pretty bad.”
“Right.”
Jack looked into the eyes of the pilot. He could see the pain and shock and confusion, but he also saw that the guy was very much alive. His flight suit said White on the chest.
“White?” Jack said. “Here’s some water.” Jack opened a Nalgene bottle he pulled from Adam’s bag and offered to pour it into the Marine captain’s mouth.
The pilot took the bottle himself with his good hand and took a swig. “Call me Trash.”
“I’m Jack.”
“Another aircraft went down. Before mine.”
“Yeah. We saw it.”
“The pilot?”
Ryan shook his head slowly. “I have no idea. I didn’t see what happened.”
Trash closed his eyes for a long time. Jack thought he’d passed out. But then he said, “Cheese.”
Trash’s eyes opened now. “Who are you guys?”
Jack said, “We’re friends, Trash. We’ll get you someplace safe.”
“Tell me whatever the hell we hit was worth it.”
“Whatever you hit?” Jack asked. “You don’t know what you bombed?”
“Some building,” Trash said. “All I know is that me and Cheese nailed the fuck out of it.” The car hit a pothole, sloshing the two men in the back, and the Marine winced in pain. Adam then pulled onto a larger road, heading to the southeast for Shenzhen.
Jack fell to the side, but he sat back up and said, “Captain, with what you did back there, you may have prevented a war.”
Trash closed his eyes again. “Bullshit.” He said it softly.
Moments later Jack was sure he was asleep.
SEVENTY-EIGHT
The morning started out typically Beijing gray, with a heavy mist and cloudy polluted skies that gave little hint of the sun’s rise above them.
The force of twenty-five Chinese and Americans moved to their staging position in four vehicles. A sedan, a work truck, and two commercial minibuses.
Driscoll drove the heavy work truck. In the backseat were the two bound Divine Sword men, Crane and Snipe.
Once the morning rush-hour traffic began rumbling on the roads, rain started to fall, and Clark and Chavez positioned the force on Gongchen North Street, a north-south four-lane blacktop that ran between the two potential ambush points. A long row of municipal buses was parked on a quiet road that ran off to the north toward a concrete ditch high with rainwater that continued under the main highway.
The Americans felt incredibly exposed here. Their vehicles were loaded up with two dozen Chinese rebels, guns, ammunition, incriminating maps, and radios and other gear.
Not to mention two men tied up hand and foot and gagged with electrical tape.
If a single policeman pulled up on their little roadside get-together they would have to neutralize him somehow, which sounded clean and efficient, but which easily could get ugly in a hurry.
Though this particular road was secluded enough, dozens of high-rise apartments were just to the southeast of their location. As soon as the morning traffic got going, there were going to be a lot of eyes on Gongchen North.
Eight o’clock came and went, and then eight-thirty. The rain had picked up under dark gray clouds, and occasional lightning flashes to the north of the city preceded claps of thunder.
Twice Chavez ordered the two buses to relocate to other parts of the neighborhood. This would slow down their deployment at the ambush sites, but Ding was more concerned with being compromised before they even got the chance to hit the motorcade.
At eight forty-five Caruso stood by the rebel translator on the sidewalk next to the van. He said, “Yin Yin. We really need to hear from your motorcycle cop friend.”
“Yes, I know.”
“One if by land, two if by sea,” Dom added.
Yin Yin cocked her head. “It is land. It is definitely land. There is no sea here in Beijing.”
“Never mind.”
She held a radio, and he heard near-constant transmissions, but he’d given up on trying to pick even a single comprehensible word out of all the chatter.
A short, barking call from a male voice came through, and Yin Yin turned so quickly she startled Dom. “Jingzhou Road!” she shouted.
Dom was on his radio within one second. “Jingzhou! Everybody move out!”
Chavez broadcast to the unit as all the vehicles began heading to their objectives. “We do it just like we talked about last night. Remember, the map is not the territory. When we get there it’s not going to look like it did in the dark, and it’s not going to look like it does on the map. You will have just minutes to set up. Don’t look for the perfect situation, just the best situation you can make for yourselves in the time we have.”
Sam, John, and Dom said “Roger,” and Ding went back to worrying about his own end of the operation.
—
Chavez drove in one of the minibuses with three rebels, none of whom spoke a word of English. Still, they had their instructions from Yin Yin, even if no ability to communicate with the American. They parked in front of a six-story apartment building and ran inside. Two men stayed downstairs to guard the entrance, while Ding and the last man carried long plastic bags and headed for the stairs.
They made it up the stairs to the fourth floor of the building and arrived at an apartment door on the northwest corner. The young Chinese man knocked on the door, and he pulled a small Makarov pistol from his jacket as he waited for it to be answered. After thirty seconds he knocked again. Chavez listened to the radio on his chest and shifted his weight nervously from foot to foot.
The rest of his ambush force was rushing to get into place before the target passed, and he was standing in a hallway, politely waiting for a door to be answered.
Finally Chavez gently moved the Chinese man out of the way and kicked in the door.
The apartment was furnished and lived in, but no one was home.
The Chinese man’s job now was to protect Chavez from anyone coming into the apartment. He stayed in the living room and watched the door with his rifle at the ready while Chavez found a suitable sniper’s nest.
He ran to a window in a corner bedroom and opened it, moved back deep into the dimly lit room, slid a heavy wood table against a back wall, and then lay down on the table, resting the sniper rifle on his backpack.
Through his eight-power scope he scanned the road, some two hundred fifty meters away, a very makeable distance.
“Ding is in position.”
He scanned across the road to the low grassy hillside and saw the minibus there. The doors were open, and it was empty.
—
Dom Caruso crawled in the tall brown grass, wet from the morning storm, and hoped like hell everyone was still with him. He raised his head and picked his spot, fifty meters or so from the southbound lanes, and about sixty-five yards from the northbound lanes where the motorcade would pass in just moments. He positioned Yin Yin on his right and had her tell the other fifteen rebels with them to space themselves about two meters apart.
From here they could shoot down across southbound traffic and into the motorcade when it appeared.
“Dom, in position.”
Chavez spoke into his radio from his sniper perch southeast of the road. “Dom, the rest of that gang over ther
e with you is going to be spraying and praying. I want you firing that RPG carefully. You’re going to make yourself a target each time you launch, so find some cover and move to a different part of the hill before firing again.”
“Roger that.”
—
Sam Driscoll was two kilometers south of the ambush point, parked alongside the road in a concrete block–laden four-door pickup truck. Crane and Snipe were hooded and bound next to him. The motorcade passed him in the morning traffic; it was seven black four-door sedans and SUVs, and two large green military trucks. Sam knew there could be fifteen to twenty troops in each of the trucks, and another twenty-five or so security in the other vehicles. He reported this over the radio, then drew a Makarov out of his waistband, got out of the truck, and then, by the side of the road, calmly shot both Crane and Snipe in the chest and head.
He pulled off their hoods and ripped off the tape binding them, and then tossed a pair of old Type 81 rifles onto the floorboards in front of them.
Seconds later he pulled his truck into traffic and raced to catch up to the convoy. Behind him a sedan with four more Pathway men followed.
—
John Clark wore a paper mask over his face and sunglasses that did not make much sense in this thunderstorm. He and his Chinese rebel minder walked with two large wooden crates between them, one stacked on the other. They entered the covered pedestrian overpass that crossed the eight-lane road two hundred fifty yards northeast of the ambush site. A single motorcycle policeman had dismounted and was walking well ahead of them. Dozens of men and women heading to work or public transportation pickup points on both sides of the road also were entering and exiting the walkway.
Clark’s Pathway of Liberty man was tasked with holding a gun to the policeman and disarming him before Clark attacked the convoy. John hoped the frightened-looking young rebel would have the guts and the skill to pull this off, or the stomach to shoot the cop dead if he did not comply. But John had enough problems of his own to take care of, so when they arrived at their point directly above the northbound lanes, he put the cop out of his mind and prepared himself for what was about to happen. He lowered the cases to the ground by the overpass railing, motioned for the young rebel to go handle the cop, and then John knelt down, opened both cases with his left hand, and reached into the top case to flip the safety off the first weapon.
He spoke into his radio at the same time.
“Clark in position.”
All around him, men and women walked by unaware.
“’Bout thirty seconds out,” Driscoll said.
—
The chairman of the Central Military Commission of the People’s Republic of China, Su Ke Qiang, was in the fourth vehicle of his nine-vehicle motorcade, surrounded by fifty-four men armed with rifles, machine guns, and grenade launchers. As always, he paid no attention to his protectors. His complete focus was on his work, and this morning that work consisted chiefly of the papers in his lap, the latest reports from the Taiwan Strait and the Guangzhou Military District.
He’d read them all before, and he would read them all again.
His blood boiled.
Tong was dead. That was not in the papers; Su had learned this at five o’clock this morning when his body was identified, pulled from the rubble in two large pieces. Ninety-two Ghost Ship hackers, managers, and engineers died as well, and dozens more were injured. The servers were blown to bits, and with that Su had learned almost immediately that America’s secure Department of Defense network bandwidth increased, satellite communications came back online, and several of Center’s initiatives in the United States, corruption of banking and telecom and critical infrastructure, had simply ceased or at least lost much of their designed impact.
Center’s botnet operations, on the other hand, still executed denial-of-service attacks on America’s Internet architecture, but the deep-persistent-access hacks and RATs in the DoD and intelligence community networks, while still in place, had no one monitoring the feeds or disseminating the information to the PLA or the MSS.
This was a disaster. The single most powerful counterpunch America could have delivered China. Su knew this, and he knew he had to admit this today when he went before the Standing Committee.
He did not want to acknowledge he should have had better security for the Tong network. He could roll out the excuse, the valid excuse, that the China Telecom building was a temporary headquarters for the operation because there was nowhere else to put them on the fly after their compromise in Hong Kong. But he would not make excuses for the mistake. Yes, once this conflict was over and the South China Sea and Taiwan and Hong Kong were back securely in China’s grip, he would sack those in charge of Tong’s relocation to Guangzhou, but for now he needed to give his honest assessment of the damage Jack Ryan’s strike the night before had caused.
He had to do this for one reason, and one reason only.
Today, at the Standing Committee meeting, he was going to announce his intention to attack the USS Ronald Reagan, the USS Nimitz, and the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower with Dong Feng 21 ballistic missiles.
There would be some reluctance from the Standing Committee, but he did not expect anyone to really stand in his way. Su would explain carefully and forcefully that by dealing this devastating blow to America’s blue-water Navy, Jack Ryan would be forced to disengage. Su would further explain that once American warships left the theater, China could press ahead for full regional hegemony, and with this dominance would come power, just as America had become powerful only by controlling its hemisphere.
If, for some reason, the attacks on the carriers were not successful, the next step would be a full ballistic- and cruise-missile attack on Taiwan, the launching of twelve hundred missiles targeting all the island’s military sites.
Su knew Wei would yammer on about the damage this would do to the economy, but the chairman knew China’s projection of power would help it at home now with the domestic situation, and eventually it would help them abroad, once their unrestrained hegemony was established and the world saw China as a force that must be dealt with as the leading world power.
Su was no economist, he admitted this to himself, but he knew quite securely that China would be just fine once it became the center of the world.
He put the papers aside and looked out the window, thinking about his speech today. Yes. Yes, he could do it. Chairman Su could take this awful event last night, this body blow to his attack against the United States, and he could parlay it into a way to get exactly what he wanted from the Politburo.
With the deaths of twenty thousand American sailors and the resulting degradation of the American blue-water Navy, there was no doubt in Su’s mind America would leave the area, giving China complete control of the region.
Tong would be even more helpful in death than he had been in life.
—
Other than Driscoll, who was now trailing about one hundred yards behind the last troop transport truck, no one saw the motorcade in the rain until it neared the ambush point. Everyone was ordered to hold their fire until Clark launched an anti-tank rocket from the north. By the time Clark was sure he was looking at the motorcade, the first few cars had already passed by the position of Dom and his group of shooters.
Quickly Clark looked behind him to make sure the back blast area was clear. It was, so he adjusted his aim, lining the iron sight of the weapon on a white civilian car just in front of the motorcade. He knew, or at least he hoped, that by the time the rocket hit, the white car would have cleared that piece of road and the first SUV of the motorcade would occupy it.
He launched, felt the whoosh of the rocket motor as the weapon left the tube, then immediately dropped the spent tube to the asphalt on the overpass, and grabbed the second anti-tank rocket launcher from its case.
Only then did he hear the explosion two
hundred fifty yards to his southwest.
He hefted the second weapon and saw that his first shot was a perfect bull’s-eye. The SUV, the lead vehicle in the motorcade, was a burning, rolling, disintegrating fireball that bounced sideways up the highway. The vehicles behind were swerving left and right, trying like hell to get around it and out of the ambush zone.
John aimed at a clear spot just to the left of the wrecked SUV and about twenty yards closer to his position. He launched a second rocket, tossed the tube down, pulled a pistol out of his pants, and started running off the overpass back the way he came. Only then did he look down at the road and see his second shot hit just in front of a big sedan, cratering the concrete and setting the front of the vehicle on fire.
Behind it, the rest of the motorcade all slammed on their brakes and began reversing, trying to back away from the pedestrian overpass ahead and the missiles that came from it.
Sam Driscoll opened the door of his moving truck, threw a large canvas bag onto the road, and then leapt out next to it. He was one hundred yards behind the rear vehicle of the convoy, but his truck rolled on, big and heavy and slow, because he had looped a rope from the dash through the steering wheel, and the automatic transmission was still in drive.
Sam hit and then rolled along the wet street, ran back to unzip his bag, and from it he removed an RPG-9 and an AK-47. By the time he leveled the launcher at the motorcade, he saw that several of the black cars were backing up or executing a three-point turn to reverse direction. The two big troop transports, however, were still in the process of slowing down. This compressed the motorcade, which was bad news for everyone in it.
Sam targeted the rear troop transport and fired. The finned grenade covered the distance in just over a second, and it impacted on the canvas walls over the bed. The vehicle erupted into a fireball, killing many in the back and sending others leaping and falling from the wreckage.