The Ascendant: A Thriller

by Drew Chapman

  He let out a long, anxious breath. Alexis considered trying to say something supportive—an optimistic word of encouragement. But she couldn’t think of any. At best, this would be a stealth operation that was finished before anyone realized it had happened—or could object. At worst, it would be a disaster that would turn into a gunfight between powerful bureaucracies, and there would be blood in the streets. Kline’s blood. And hers. Not to mention the possibility of it touching off World War Three . . .

  Her boss popped out of his chair again and began to pace his office furiously. “The Chinese are bristling. Have you been following the cables?”

  “Another division positioned across the strait from Taiwan. Half the fleet steaming to meet us in the South China Sea. I have, sir.”

  “But they haven’t gone public with it yet. They’re waiting.”

  “They want us to fire the first shot.”

  “Just like Reilly said,” Kline said. The general stopped pacing. Alexis could see a fine layer of sweat on his forehead. He shot a long, anxious look at Alexis.

  “Does he know what he’s doing?”

  “I believe he does,” she said.

  “You’re not saying that because you’re in love with him, are you?”

  That caught Alexis short. She felt an involuntary rush of blood to her face. She watched a sparrow flit from tree branch to tree branch outside Kline’s office window. “No sir, I’m not.”

  “Not in love with him? Or not standing up for him because you are in love with him?”

  “I’m basing my answer on a considered review of his behavior and a collective appreciation of what he’s accomplished and predicted so far. As to whether I’m in love with him—that’s none of your fucking business, sir. Respectfully.”

  Kline nodded. “You’re right. Sorry I asked.” Beyond him, through the window, Alexis could see gentle white clouds drifting slowly over the Potomac. They were so beautiful. So peaceful.

  “If this fails, we don’t just lose our jobs,” Kline said. “We are disgraced, discharged, will probably go to jail. For a long time.”

  “I’ve considered that, sir.”

  “Are you prepared for that?”

  “If we fail, people die. A lot of people. Maybe millions of people. Me in jail seems like a small price to pay.”

  Kline shook his head ferociously, as if working himself into agreement with her. “You’re right. You’re absolutely right.” He turned to her. “Okay,” he said. “Let’s make it happen.”

  Alexis got up, saluted him, and headed for the door. He called after her.

  “One other thing, Captain.”

  She stopped. “Sir?”

  “I’ll have to make myself scarce now.”

  Alexis said nothing.

  “You they’ll follow, hoping you lead them to Reilly. Me they’ll haul in front of the president. And I will be obliged to tell him what I know.”

  “I understand,” she said.

  “Do you?” He said. “It means . . .”

  “I’ll be in charge,” Alexis said, finishing his sentence.

  “That is correct.”

  “And if they haul me in front of the president?” Alexis asked.

  “You have no authority.”

  “But I know things.”

  “You were following orders. Implementing the Ascendant project, which was approved at the highest levels.”

  “And if they order me to tell them where Reilly is?”

  This time it was Kline who said nothing. She understood his silence: if they ordered her to reveal the whereabouts of Garrett Reilly, then she was on her own, in uncharted territory. Kline obviously hoped she’d say nothing, but he wasn’t going to order her to defy the president.

  That would be treasonous.

  Alexis shifted her gaze from the general to the wide window behind him, and the clouds that blew, scattered, in strings of cottony white, over the river, which flowed out to the Atlantic. It occurred to her that no matter how seriously humans took their problems, nature didn’t care; nature just went on its merry way, resplendent, sublime, awe-inspiring. Clouds over the Potomac. Gorgeous. It gave her strength.

  “I understand,” she said, saluting Kline one last time and heading out the door.

  “Good luck,” Kline called after her. “And Godspeed.”

  74

  SOUTHEAST WASHINGTON, D.C., APRIL 18, 4:25 PM

  Murray’s Meats and Cuts was silent except for the occasional tap of fingers on a keyboard, or the crack of a Red Bull being opened. Garrett, standing above his central computer terminal, watched the blink of lights on his bank of monitors: bars and graphs, rising and descending, numbers scrolling, words unrolling, left to right, videos starting, buffering, finishing. His homegrown nerve center was in full swing.

  There were twenty-four computers arrayed around him, not counting the servers in the freezer. Garrett had six monitors mounted in double rows on his desk, Mitty had four of her own, while everyone else had one, maybe two. Garrett had one monitor dedicated to tracking Internet traffic, another ran search trends from the big engines—Google, Yahoo, Bing, Baidu—to track the pulse of the world’s queries. Mitty had brought him a stolen Bloomberg terminal, and a hacked Goldman Sachs account. He split that feed to everyone else in the store, so they could keep current on any trends he missed. It didn’t really matter if anyone else was watching the markets—using a Bloomberg terminal was akin to breathing for Garrett. He didn’t need anyone backing him up on those.

  He had to admit he loved being in front of a market feed once again: the Dow, the LIBOR, the euro, Chicago futures, the Hang Seng, the DAX, the VIX . . . it was comforting to watch the world of commerce rush past his eyes. T-bills, gold prices, pork belly futures, the price of Brent Crude. It was like music to Garrett. The flow of digital information calmed his nerves. It even dulled the throbbing in his head.

  And that throbbing had been explosive. Black spots had begun to appear and then vanish at the periphery of his vision. If he stood too quickly, the room spun and he had to grab the nearest chair or wall to keep from toppling over. His left arm went occasionally—and alarmingly—numb, shoulder to fingers. Garrett had never felt quite so mortal. It was as if he were eighty-six, not twenty-six. Death suddenly seemed . . .

  No. He forced the thought from his mind.

  On his fourth computer monitor Garrett ran a scan of dark net hacker websites and bulletin boards. He wanted to know what the underground was talking about at all times. A fifth ran RSS feeds from most of the big news sites. The sixth was hacked into a Pentagon video line that showed the position and strength of American troops and naval fleets. It had been remarkably easy to hack into the military’s network, the NIPRNET, or Non-classified Internet Protocol Router Network, especially since he’d spent a good part of his week in the Pentagon war room collecting stray passwords and IP addresses. Even the most paranoid people were sometimes careless inside their own fortress.

  Of course it was much harder getting onto the military’s SIPRNET, or Secret Internet Protocol Router Network. In fact, it was impossible, completely sealed off from the rest of the World Wide Web. But that was okay. Garrett didn’t need all of the military’s secrets—just some of them.

  He had six flat-screen televisions hung on the opposite wall, then mainlined to European and American news services—CNN, Fox, BBC, Sky News, France 24, Al Jazeera in English. He had another half dozen TVs hung just below the first set, these dedicated to Asian channels—China Central Television’s channel 13, Hong Kong’s i-Cable News, Japan’s NHK News 7. He had them running continuously; a few were mentioning rumors of naval maneuvers in the South China Sea, while the BBC noted that large numbers of Chinese troops had been spotted north of Guangzhou.

  Garrett left one screen unsecured to patch in to random stations from a satellite dish on the roof, and the last he tuned to Nickelodeon, just so they had something different to watch during the slow periods; Garrett had a soft spot for SpongeBob.


  He rubbed his weary eyes, watched the motes of dust dance in the beams of the overhead light, shafts of brilliance in the otherwise darkened room. His eyes strayed to the map of world time zones on the right-hand wall. It was four-thirty in the afternoon in Washington. Beijing was exactly twelve hours ahead, four-thirty Thursday morning. Garrett watched the seconds tick by, watched the sine curve of sunlight on the time-zone map creep steadily westward.

  His eyes snapped back and forth from screen to screen, from map to map, letting the waves of data wash over him. He let go of plans and concepts, attempting to immerse himself in the chaotic sea of information, in the pulse of the digital planet. He knew all eyes were on him, everyone in the room watching him for a sign, some signal that the time to act was now. The silence was like a blanket of expectation; a soft, quiet cover that kept the room on edge, but orderly and poised. Garrett knew that everyone felt it, that everyone was as edgy as he was, but there was no pushing the timetable. The moment would come, and he would say go, and then it would start. But before that, nothing.

  A few hours ago, over a lunch of ham sandwiches, Gatorade, and Sun Chips, Garrett had tried to explain that everything had to be right, that all the disparate strands of events had to line up in order for the cumulative effect to work. It had taken half a day, for instance, just to finally get the encrypted e-mail from Celeste Chen out of China, but it had been worth it, because she was the linchpin; or, really, Hu Mei was the linchpin.

  Garrett wondered what she was like. He had unscrambled a highly pixelated jpeg that Celeste had sent, but it was so blurry and undefined that it described little of the woman’s features. Garrett studied it for an hour. She looked young, much younger than he would have guessed. And pretty. But her character? He couldn’t tell.

  Six-thirty in the evening, D.C. time. He wished he had some pot—that would help with his pain. But he knew he couldn’t smoke now. He needed his mind clear. He realized he hadn’t smoked pot in days, maybe even weeks, he couldn’t remember, and even though he wished he had a joint, his deep craving for marijuana had lessened. That was a surprise, another shift in his personal patterns; everything about his life had been upended. He told himself he’d have to investigate this further, this lack of needing weed, because it might also be a sign that he was losing his edge. But not now; now he needed to focus.

  Garrett checked one of the maps on the bank of computers in front of him, the second to the left, an air traffic control map. China, Japan, and the two Koreas appeared lit up on the screen. Hundreds of tiny airplane symbols crisscrossed the airspace between the four nations, heading east out over the vast Pacific, and south toward Australia. Fewer were aiming west into Central Asia and then onward toward Russia and Europe. None were flying into North Korean territory. It was a blackened no-man’s-land, enemy state to all around it, but still something of a vassal to China.

  Garrett stared at the blankness that was North Korea, the Hermit Kingdom. What did all those people think of the outside world? Did they know what they were missing? Was it an entire nation in the grip of Stockholm syndrome, where victims sided with their oppressors? Then again, wasn’t all nationalism just a form of Stockholm syndrome, but by another name? Garrett certainly believed so, and yet here he was, giving everything he had for the interest of his home country. So was he, too, suffering from it?

  Garrett reminded himself that he was here, now, because he’d run out of other options; working for the DIA provided him the best chance of staying out of the clutches of Homeland Security. And yet . . . he wished he could talk to Alexis about it. She would have an answer. Or at least a theory. He wondered where she was right now. Back at work? Detained? In jail?

  Put her out of your mind. Clarity. What you need is clarity.

  Another hour passed. And another. Eight-thirty at night on the East Coast of the United States. The sun was up over Beijing. Their day had started. The agony in his skull pulsed. Black spots danced across his eyes like crazed amoebas. Garrett took 1,200 milligrams of ibuprofen. And then another 1,200. He hoped that wasn’t a toxic dose.

  Lefebvre and Patmore were fidgeting at their terminals. Bingo rocked back and forth in his chair like an autistic seven-year-old. Mitty kept glancing at Bingo, smiling and winking. Had something gone on between them? Had Garrett missed it? They seemed an unlikely couple. Then again, there were weirder hypothetical couples in the world—Alexis and Garrett, for instance.

  Garrett shook his head. What a ragtag army: geeks and misfits and semipsychotic jarheads. And yet, every one of the team now appeared comfortable at their computers, fully plugged in to the dissonant symphony that was the Web. That gave him a measure of confidence. He clicked on the air traffic control map, enlarging it. He studied it, searching out the right call sign, the letters and numbers by which a commercial flight identified itself to international air traffic controllers. Qantas, Air China, Singapore Airlines. No, no, and no.

  And then he spotted it. One small dot, curving gently southward over the Sea of Okhotsk, having just passed through Russian airspace and past the Kamchatka peninsula.

  Garrett let out a long, silent breath. His eyes ran one last time over the half dozen computer screens, all linked together, blinking in front of him.

  Okay. This was it. Time to do it. Time for a brave new world, brought to you by Garrett Reilly, Long Beach State graduate, bond analyst supreme, and soon to be, for one brief moment in time, a Master of the Universe. Garrett nodded to Lefebvre.

  “Make the call,” he said.

  Lefebvre popped the battery into his first disposable cell phone.

  75

  THIRTY-NINE THOUSAND FEET ABOVE

  THE SEA OF JAPAN, APRIL 20, 9:42 AM

  Captain Leo Peterson checked the ACARS message that had just appeared on the MCDU, or management control display unit, of the Boeing 777 wide-body aircraft he was piloting. The early-morning sun was blasting through the right-hand cockpit window; they were high above the clouds that were scattered over the Sea of Japan. Captain Peterson flipped up his sunglasses and read the message. ACARS stood for aircraft communications addressing and reporting system; it was an airliner’s equivalent of e-mail, and every commercial jet around the world sent and received them.

  The message simply said: 15C24A.

  The 15C24 stood for nothing. Only the last letter was meaningful. It was a prearranged code, sent from a United Airlines maintenance control center in Chicago, and Captain Peterson had expected it, and knew how to decipher it. It was simple, really. A last letter of “B” meant: Do not do it. Cancel the operation. But a last letter of “A” meant: Go.

  He deleted the ACARS message, turned to his copilot, a Kentucky boy named Deakins, two years out of the Air Force, and nodded. They didn’t want any verbal commands to register on the plane’s cockpit voice recorder. A simple movement of the head would do. Deakins put his left hand on the engine thrust control, and dialed it back to zero. In moments, the plane’s right engine—a Pratt & Whitney PW4000—sputtered and went silent. The plane shook as the airflow over the wing was disrupted.

  Deakins adjusted the rudder trim to stabilize the plane, then upped the power in the left engine, exactly as procedure dictated in the event of an engine loss, while Captain Peterson punched in the radio code for an emergency—121.5 MHz, the international emergency frequency for any plane in distress.

  “Captain,” Deakins said in his Kentucky drawl, “we have lost power in our right engine. I believe it is an engine fire.”

  He was talking only for the benefit of the cockpit recorder.

  Captain Peterson worked up as much panic as he could in his voice, then yelled into the microphone: “Mayday, mayday, mayday. This is United heavy 895, we are reporting right-engine fire and cabin smoke. Repeat, United heavy 895, engine fire and cabin smoke. We are declaring an emergency, need immediate runway clearance. Nearest airport.”

  He repeated himself two more times, then throttled back on the left engine and aimed the plane down.

&nb
sp; Toward North Korea.

  76

  PYONGYANG, NORTH KOREA, APRIL 19, 9:51 AM

  Soo Park had been a North Korean radar operator for ten years. He knew the country’s radar profile by heart, could identify every friendly and hostile plane skirting North Korea’s airspace in his sleep. But two months ago he’d asked for a transfer to the main air traffic controller’s desk at the Sunan International Airport outside of Pyongyang. It was closer to his tiny apartment on the south side of the North Korean capital, the job carried a touch more prestige, and Soo Park was trying to find a bride. He needed all the prestige he could muster.

  He claimed he spoke excellent English—a must for an air traffic controller—and had even passed the state’s rudimentary English test. But in truth he’d cheated on the English test, promising a bottle of Canadian whisky to a friend of his who’d learned English while working as a diplomat at the embassy in Beijing. His friend had taken the test for him, aced it, and Soo Park had landed the job.

  Only now Soo Park wished he hadn’t. The truth was, Soo Park was quite a few levels below fluency. He could read an English-language book with a dictionary in his lap, but deciphering the spoken language was another task entirely. He strained to listen as the American pilot—Soo Park knew he was American because he’d tracked the flight a hundred times before, a Hong Kong–bound United 777—squawked into the radio again, his voice surrounded by a blast of static. He understood less than half the words: “. . . engine fire . . . emergency landing . . . runway . . .” That was about it. Had the pilot said he was making an emergency landing here? In Pyongyang? That was impossible. Completely out of the question . . .

  Park’s phone was ringing. It was the North Sector Radar Team, the team he used to be a part of. Yes, he answered, he had heard the distress call. And yes, he thought the American jetliner was headed for Pyongyang. Well, might be. He wasn’t sure.