by Mark Henshaw
Pioneer nodded and replied. “I wish that I had been able to access more information on the shashoujian, but much of it was compartmented beyond my reach. What do you want to know?”
“We sorted through your reports. There wasn’t any progress on the shashoujian until 1999. Correct?”
“Correct. Jiang Zemin started the program in 1996, but there was little worth reporting for three years. A few papers, a few efforts to steal some US weapons. Several senior military officers developed ideas for weapons, but the PLA lacked the expertise to make any of the designs work. It was all science fiction.” Mitchell didn’t bother trying to convey the venom he heard in Pioneer’s voice. “They were stupid old men dreaming of weapons that we won’t be able to build for a hundred years. Anything they could dream of that could reach your carriers, the PLA couldn’t build.”
“So what changed in 1999?” Kyra asked.
“I don’t know,” Pioneer admitted. “If there was a breakthrough, it was compartmented and I couldn’t access it. There was some new cooperation between the PLA and Xian Aircraft Design and Research Institute, but I reported on that.”
Jonathan nodded. “I read that report. If there were no successes, were there any significant failures that you didn’t report?”
“Why are you asking about failures?” Mitchell asked.
“Science is all about failure,” Jonathan explained. “Test, fail, test again, until you have a breakthrough. If he can outline some major research failures after 1999, it might show us the direction that the PLA’s research took.”
“Fair enough,” Mitchell said. He translated.
“The J-20 was a disappointment, useful mostly for trying to humiliate your visiting military officers, and we would never have enough to match your Raptors. And the Dongfeng missile was always suspect. Senior party leaders were losing faith in all of it, so they removed it from the shashoujian program,” Pioneer answered.
“No successes, lots of failures,” Jonathan said. “Something set them off. We’re missing something.”
“I agree, but I don’t know what it would be. In fact, around that time, the MSS even wanted to shut the program down.”
“Why?” Jonathan asked. That hadn’t been in the reporting.
“Because the MSS feared that CIA had penetrated the program. It was true, as I had done that, but not like they thought.”
“What do you mean?” Mitchell said.
“I was sure that the CIA did not have another penetration with better access than mine inside the shashoujian. I know that intelligence services like to confirm information from multiple sources, but my case officers were never asking me about the things the MSS was afraid you knew. I was the senior MSS archivist. I assumed that even if you had a more senior penetration, my case officers would still have asked me those questions. They never did. I tried to raise them sometimes, but the case officers never seemed interested. They liked me to respond to their questions. They did not like me to invent my own taskings. They said it was a risk.”
“He’s got your number cold,” Jonathan told Mitchell.
“Yeah, well, it happens when the case officers aren’t technical specialists in the subject they have to ask about,” Mitchell said. “They stick to the questions that you analysts send them from headquarters. If you don’t send the right questions, they never get asked.”
“Chalk one up for the system,” Kyra said.
“What triggered their fears that we had penetrated their program?” Jonathan asked.
Pioneer sat back and thought for a moment. “It happened after you bombed our embassy in Serbia. I forget the exact date.”
Jonathan cocked his head. “Serbia . . .,” he said quietly, but Kyra overheard. “Did the MSS smuggle anything through that embassy related to the Assassin’s Mace?”
“I know that the Guojia Anquan Bu Tenth Bureau purchased something of value from a senior Serb army officer in Belgrade and sent it to Beijing through the diplomatic pouch a few days before the bombing. The Tenth Bureau is responsible for stealing foreign technologies, so I assumed the Serbs had stolen some piece of equipment from NATO. When your Air Force blew up the embassy wing, the MSS was convinced that President Clinton had ordered the strike to keep the delivery out of their hands. That is why they refused to believe that the bombing was an accident. They still believe that.” Mitchell translated. Jonathan leaned forward and put his head in his hands.
“You don’t know what was in the package?” Mitchell asked Pioneer.
“I don’t. I tried to find out, but the MSS kept the records compartmented. I could never access them, so I had nothing to report. I was not even sure that the technology had anything to do with the shashoujian. The timing of the sale and the MSS worries about a penetration could have just been coincidence. I do know that after it came to Beijing, the MSS gave it to the PLA and from there it went to Chengdu. But they often buy stolen technology abroad. It is common.”
“I’ve been an idiot!” Jonathan hissed.
“What? What is it?” Kyra asked.
“It’s been sitting there the entire time and I was too stupid to see it,” Jonathan said. “We should have seen it when we did the timeline.” He stood up and looked at Mitchell. “We’re done. I’ve got what I need.” Mitchell nodded and spoke to Pioneer in Mandarin, telling him the conversation was finished.
“What did we miss?” Kyra asked.
Jonathan took a deep breath. “You remember that the timeline showed no progress in the Assassin’s Mace project until 1999?”
“Yeah,” Kyra said. “We’ve been looking for an event that kick-started it.”
“We’ve been looking for an event in China,” Jonathan said. “That was stupid and narrow-minded. There was a kick-start event, but it didn’t happen in China. It happened in Serbia.”
“What happened in Serbia?”
He shook his head. “Stupid,” he said, quiet but still intense. “We can break this thing open. He gave us the Assassin’s Mace.” His voice was calm. “He’s had pieces that he didn’t know belonged to the puzzle. So did we, for that matter. We could’ve figured it out without him if we’d been smart enough. I was an idiot not to see it,” Jonathan said. It was an honest admission that stemmed more from exhaustion than humility. The sleep deprivation was finally degrading his ability to think, and the caffeine pills were now doing him more harm than good. He hoped Kyra was doing better, but she had been under more stress and alternating between coffee and alcohol.
Jonathan checked the clock and did the conversion of time zones in his mind. It was 0830 at Langley. He turned to Mitchell. “I need a secure cell phone and a laptop.”
Sachs reached into his pocket and produced a mobile handset. A backpack from the plane’s cockpit produced an iPad. “You can’t keep those. I had to sign for them.”
Jonathan shot the junior officer a withering look as he pulled the phone from his hand. “How long before we leave?” he asked Mitchell.
“By the schedule, thirty minutes. But we own this plane. You need us to wait?”
“If you would,” he said. He handed the tablet computer to his partner. “I’m calling home. I need you to look someone up for me.”
“Who?” she asked.
“Pyotr Ufimtsev. P-Y-O-T-R. U-F-I-M-T-S-E-V. Trust me, you’ll know it when you see it.” Kyra shrugged, pressed a button on the computer, and began typing. “We just need a little more,” Jonathan said, as much to himself as anyone listening. “And we need to talk to the Navy.”
“About what?” Mitchell said, exasperated.
“Have you ever heard of Noble Anvil?” Jonathan said.
Kyra looked up. He was as excited as she had ever seen him during their short time together. She sifted through her thoughts as she pressed the return button to start the Internet search on the name Jonathan had given her. She had a good memory for acronyms and code words. Developing memory skills was a standard part of case officer training, and life in government service demanded it anyway.
“The US part of NATO’s Allied Force operation in Yugoslavia back in ninety-nine,” she said.
Jonathan nodded. He was more grateful that he wouldn’t have to explain the reference than impressed with Kyra’s knowledge of military history. “The Air Force bombed the Chinese embassy by accident. The Chinese believed there’s no way we could have screwed up our targeting that badly, so somebody must have ordered it. And they think we ordered it because they had a piece of classified US technology in the building—something sensitive enough that the Chinese thought we might be willing to bomb their embassy to keep them from shipping it to Beijing.”
“Wait . . . the F-117 Nighthawk?” She started swiping her finger across the computer’s screen, looking through the search results.
Mitchell said nothing for a moment, searching his thoughts. “The one the Serbs shot down.”
Jonathan nodded. “The only stealth plane we’ve ever lost to hostile fire. Six weeks later to the day it was shot down by the Serbs, we dropped a bomb on the Chinese embassy sixty miles away. But the PLA wasn’t part of the shootdown, so we never had a reason to connect it with the Assassin’s Mace program even when the Chinese thought we had.”
“I thought the Nighthawk was destroyed on impact,” Kyra said.
Jonathan shook his head. “There was more than enough intact for an intel service to reverse-engineer. Imagery shows that the plane wasn’t vaporized.”
“Why not?” Mitchell asked, curious. “Most planes that fall from a few miles up just leave a smoking crater.”
“Nobody knows for sure,” Jonathan said. “My guess is that the fly-by-wire computers kept trying to level the plane after the pilot bailed out. Nighthawks have the aerodynamic properties of a brick. The only way one stays up is if the computers can make adjustments to the control surfaces fast enough, so the pilot uses the stick to tell the computers where he wants to go, and they figure out how to adjust the airframe to make it happen. I think the SAMs exploded close enough for the shrapnel to shred the airframe and damage the control surfaces. The pilot bailed out, but the computers kept trying to fly. They leveled the plane out enough to keep it from turning into a fireball when it hit.”
“That actually makes sense. You would think that the engineers could have come up with something that could glide in a pinch,” Mitchell mused.
Kyra stared at the iPad screen. “I read about this. Computers in the seventies weren’t powerful enough to calculate the radar cross sections of curved surfaces,” Kyra said. “They could only crunch numbers for flat surfaces, but flat areas are perfect radar wave reflectors. Right angles are the real killers because they reflect virtually the entire radar wave back to the receiver. So Lockheed had to build a plane with flat surfaces and no right angles. Now you could do the math on one of these.” She held the tablet computer up.
“The Air Force didn’t bomb the crash site?” Mitchell asked.
“Serb civilians overran the site too quickly,” Jonathan replied. “We’ve got pictures of little old Serb ladies dancing on wing sections still smoking from the impact. The idiots probably all died of cancer. And the Serbs don’t have the industry to build fighters, stealth or not, so they likely went looking to sell the technology for money. The Chinese would be the perfect buyers. They’ve got money, our technology in the Gulf War freaked them out, and they were trying to modernize their military. The Assassin’s Mace project was under way, and stealth bombers would be the perfect weapons to use against an aircraft carrier.”
“You think they’ve got a working stealth bomber?” Mitchell was engrossed now.
“Yes,” Kyra said. “Yes, they do.” She pulled the phone out of Jonathan’s hand.
CIA INFORMATION OPERATIONS CENTER
The STU-III’s tiny display finally read “TS//SCI” and the secure voice button went red. Weaver had hoped that there were enough fiber optic lines between Beijing and Langley that the encrypted phones could make a connection quickly, but the wait had been painful. In truth, it probably had taken less than fifteen seconds.
The encryption stripped Stryker’s voice of life, as expected. “I hope you’ve got something for me, Mr. Weaver,” she said.
“Lunch, I think,” Weaver said. “I finished reverse-engineering the CAD app’s subroutine yesterday. I extracted the algorithm and converted it to standard mathematical notation. That took most of the night, but it’s oh so pretty. The problem is that I can’t match the equations to anything. I’m not good enough at math to know what I’m looking at,” Weaver said. He had earned a C grade in the required course for his computer science degree, and that had been a gift from a merciful professor. Weaver had never seen the point. He’d been a programmer for more than a decade now and had never needed any math beyond what he had learned in high school.
“I might be able to save you the trouble,” Kyra said.
“I’ll buy you a beer if you can.”
“You’ll be buying me more than that. Take a copy of the equations and run over to—” There was a pause as Kyra asked someone a question that Weaver couldn’t make out. The encryption stripped too much detail for him to understand quieter voices. “Run over to WINPAC.”—the Weapons, Intelligence, Nonproliferation, and Arm Control center—“You need to find a senior analyst who works air defense issues. If you can, they should be able to lay hands on a copy of a Russian science paper that will explain the algorithms.”
“It’s not on the web?”
“Only in Russian,” she explained. “You read Russian?”
“You have the title and author?”
“Theory of Edge Diffraction of Electromagnetics. Written by Pyotr Ufimtsev, 1966. The original Russian title is Metod kraevykh voln v fizicheskoi teorii difraktsii.” It sounded like Stryker was reading the titles off something. Weaver’s ear for accents wasn’t well trained, but he’d been sent to Russia on several occasions. Stryker’s Russian pronunciation sounded flawless, the accent nearly pure Muscovite as far as he could discern.
“Give me a second, I don’t have a Cyrillic keyboard,” Weaver said. He winced and hoped that Kyra appreciated sarcasm, but she sounded too tired to care. The tech stole an engineer’s graph pad from the next cubicle and hunted for a pencil. “Repeat the name.” Kyra repeated the Russian words again. “What’s the paper about?”
“Stealth.”
“I thought Lockheed Martin invented stealth in the seventies,” Weaver said.
“Ufimtsev worked out the math, but the Russians didn’t realize what it could be used for. Lockheed Martin did. We think the algorithms you extracted are Ufimtsev’s equations for calculating radar cross sections. He figured out that the size of the object reflecting the radar wave is irrelevant: all that matters is the shape. That’s why that number on the CAD program only changed when you loaded a new shape. It was the radar cross section. The actual dimensions of the object were irrelevant.”
“That’s counterintuitive,” Weaver said.
“The technology works.”
“I guess,” Weaver said. “If nobody in WINPAC has a copy of that paper, I’ll have to see if the librarians can track it down.”
“Whatever you have to do,” Kyra conceded. She disconnected the phone.
CIA DIRECTOR’S OFFICE
The CIA director’s secure phone rang. She enabled the encrypted connection. “Cooke.”
“It’s Burke. We’re in Seoul.”
“How were the potstickers?”
“Wish we’d had the chance to try some,” Jonathan said. “I need a favor.”
“Sure.”
“This might be nothing, but I want to rule it out if there’s no connection. Did the Taiwanese ever figure out what that chemical was that took down those SWAT officers in Taipei?”
“The Ops Center finally dropped that one on my desk yesterday, after you two started playing games with the Chinese,” Cooke said. “The chemical was something called chlorofluorosulfonic acid. Finding out what that is took another call. The common use is to inhibit water vapor
from condensing at near-freezing temperatures. It’s used occasionally by DoD to break up contrails on aircraft so they can’t be tracked visually from the ground. Is that helpful?”
“You have no idea.”
“You going to tell me what this is about?” Cooke asked.
Jonathan told her. “Kyra and I need a flight to one of the carrier battle groups in the Strait,” Jonathan said.
“Not a chance. I am not sending you two into an active war zone,” Cooke declared.
“We know what the Assassin’s Mace is. I can either explain it to an admiral in person, or I can explain it in a cable and we can pray that he bothers to read it and loves my Shakespearean prose.”
“You’re not the most charming analyst.”
“Charming enough for you, I hope,” Jon answered.
There was a very long pause and Jonathan found himself listening to the slight hissing static. “You’re going to owe me whole barrels of whiskey when you get home,” Cooke finally said.
“I’ll be able to afford them with the performance bonus that you’re going to give me,” Jonathan said. “By the way, you should call Garr Weaver. He’s an IOC analyst but he should be knocking around WINPAC in another hour or so. He’s got something you’ll want to see.”
“I’ll track him down,” Cooke said. “Give me fifteen minutes to call the SecDef and see about getting you down to the Lincoln.” It took her precisely that long to get back to him with the answer.
INCHEON INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT
SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA
Jonathan snapped the handset shut and tapped it lightly against his forehead.
“And?” Kyra asked.
Jonathan looked to Mitchell. “You’re taking off without us,” he said. He turned to Kyra.
“Where are we going?” she asked.
“The Abraham Lincoln.” It was his turn to smile. “You never get to go if you don’t ask.”
Kyra grinned. “Oh, yeah.” She leaned over to Mitchell. “I want to say good-bye to him.” Mitchell nodded, then turned to Pioneer and spoke to him in Mandarin. The Chinese asset listened to Mitchell, focused on his face until the man stopped speaking.