The Ascendant: A Thriller

by Drew Chapman

He shrugged. “I figured short was better than long. Keep ’em wanting more.”

  “Okay,” Mitty said. “You have others?”

  Moe shot a conspiratorial look at Curly, who tapped on the keyboard of his own laptop. On his screen, a dozen tiny tiles popped up, all in a cluster. Each one seemed to show a different freeze-frame angle on a different street, with different policemen, and different protestors. Lots and lots of protestors.

  “I got a million angry Chinese,” Curly said happily. “All just sitting around on my laptop. Waiting for some motherfucker to upload ’em. Right?”

  Moe and Curly burst into cackling laughter, while the one dubbed Larry just sat there, staring into empty space.

  Moe grinned expectantly at Mitty. “Right? Am I right?”

  Mitty grimaced. She hated these morons. But they got the job done.

  “You are so right. Let’s roll,” she said. “ ’Cause I gotta get back to headquarters before the fun starts.”

  81

  NEW YORK CITY, APRIL 19, 3:26 AM

  Cherise Ochs Verlander hung up the phone just as three of her other lines lit up. It had been that way for the last four hours. It seemed to Cherise, who was sitting in the middle of the now bustling New York Times newsroom, that she currently had four different page-one stories, all breaking at exactly the same time. It was insanity. And it was all happening at three-thirty in the morning.

  She’d never seen anything like it: an American jetliner had made an emergency landing in North Korea. Half an hour later word had leaked out that the Chinese Internet wall had been massively hacked. Ten minutes after that, rumors from a military source hinted that the American and Chinese navies were facing off in the South China Sea. Apparently, both navies were on full combat alert. In between all those leads came reports—from an FBI source—that there was some kind of rogue operation blossoming in D.C., and that Homeland Security was putting a full court press on finding the source and destroying it. What kind of rogue operation, no one was really sure.

  All of these stories would have been front page, above the fold, on a normal day. Today, Cherise thought, they might need to run half a dozen separate front pages.

  She answered the first line. “Cherise Verlander.”

  “Cherise, hey. Art Saunders, State Department.”

  “Mr. Saunders,” she said, eyes widening. Saunders was the deputy secretary of state, one rung beneath Madam Secretary herself. “You’re up early.”

  “Lot going on. Have you checked YouTube?”

  “Not since I saw that cat singing the National Anthem yesterday.”

  “I’ll send you a link. Amazing stuff. All live. From ten different cities, all over China.”

  “Okay,” she said, slightly baffled. “Can you tell me what it’s about?”

  “All hell breaking loose,” Saunders said. “Check it out. Gotta run.”

  “Wait, I need a comment on the United flight that made that emergency la—” But Saunders had hung up. Cherise sighed. What the fuck?

  She checked her e-mail. There were ten e-mails from the deputy secretary already waiting in her inbox. This had to be preplanned. She clicked on the link in the first e-mail. A new browser tab popped up, and a YouTube video began to load. The descriptive tags on the page were all in Mandarin. She stared, stunned.

  Cherise didn’t read Mandarin, but she knew a riot when she saw one. And she was looking at ten of them.

  82

  THE WHITE HOUSE, APRIL 19, 4:10 AM

  By the time he got to the White House Situation Room at 4:10 in the morning, the president had been awake for exactly nine minutes. He was unshaven, his hair was unwashed; he wore a sweatshirt, slacks, and a pair of sneakers with no socks. He’d only gotten two hours of sleep. He hated looking disheveled, but sometimes the job required it.

  The entire national security team, including Jane Rhys, his national security advisor, was already gathered in the Situation Room. Cross noticed immediately that Secretary of Defense Frye was there as well, and that Frye did not look happy. The team rose from their chairs when the president rushed in. He waved a distracted hand in the air: “Please. Sit. Too early. Just bring me up to speed.”

  An aide brought him a mug of coffee, black, no sugar. President Cross saw Jane Rhys shoot a quick glance at Secretary Frye—she got no response—then lean forward. “Mr. President, as you know from last night’s briefing, at approximately ten p.m., local time, a United Airlines 777 made an emergency landing at Pyongyang International Airport. The captain sent out a distress call. He said he had an engine fire and requested clearance to land. His request was denied—the North Korean air traffic controller told him to continue on to Seoul—but the captain landed in Pyongyang anyway. Safely. The plane was evacuated. After that point, our new information gets sketchy. We believe the crew and passengers have been taken into custody and are currently being interrogated.”

  “Can the North Koreans do that? Interrogate our airline passengers?” Cross asked.

  “Unfortunately, they can do anything they like on their own soil. And it appears they have some reason for doing it. The distress call and landing were suspicious. Why the captain chose Pyongyang is a mystery. Also, the passenger manifest lists a certain number of government and military employees. Using aliases.”

  President Cross took another sip of coffee and rubbed his eyes wearily. Before he could ask a question, his national security advisor continued. “Approximately twenty minutes later, we monitored a massive shutdown of Chinese servers that provide that country with a censorship wall around their Internet access. They call it the Golden Shield. We suspect a potent virus, but we are not sure. The shutdown was unprecedented in scope and speed.”

  “These two things are connected?” Cross asked.

  Ms. Rhys grimaced and cocked her head slightly to one side. “There’s more,” she said. “At about the same time, videos began to show up on YouTube, purportedly posted from cities around China, showing massive street protests. Young people battling police. Police shooting tear gas. Rocks being thrown. Cars set on fire.”

  “Good Lord,” Cross said. “Are they real?”

  “We’ve called a number of contacts in those cities, and while none of them saw any fighting, they said people are now gathering in the streets. They may have gone initially out of curiosity, but now they’ve begun protests of their own. It’s as if the videos of the protests prompted actual protests. It doesn’t seem to matter anymore whether the videos are real or not.”

  “Are we behind all this?” Cross asked.

  Jane Rhys bit her lip hesitantly, then looked over to the secretary of defense.

  “Sir, you of course remember the Ascendant program?” Frye said.

  “With that kid? I thought he’d been arrested?”

  “Garrett Reilly. He was, sir. But he escaped.”

  “Escaped? Why wasn’t I told?”

  “We expected he would be caught. Quickly,” Frye said, uneasily.

  “But he wasn’t?”

  “No sir, he was not.”

  President Cross leaned back in his chair. He smiled, adjusting the glasses on his nose. “And you think this is him? Behind all this? It’s a counterattack, aimed at China? He’s doing what we told him to do? Strike at them without firing a bullet.”

  “He may be, sir,” Frye said. “But we can’t be sure. And if he is doing it, he is acting entirely without our authorization. In fact, there is a very distinct possibility that Reilly is operating under an entirely different set of orders. That he has a goal that is not the one you stated to him. That in fact he is trying to achieve something else.”

  “And what would that something else be, Duke?”

  “The subversion of the United States military.”

  President Cross stared at his secretary of defense. “How would any of what’s happened lead to that?”

  “By maneuvering us into a place where we are forced to act in a manner that is highly advantageous to the Chinese. And not to us. By
putting American hostages in the hands of the North Koreans. By putting the Central Committee of the Communist Party on full alert ahead of our battle plans.”

  President Cross sipped his coffee again and scanned the faces of the men and women in the Situation Room. He was good at reading faces—it was what had made him such a successful salesman for all those years. And what he saw among his advisors was hesitancy. And confusion.

  “But you don’t know?” the president asked. “You’re not certain of any of this?”

  Secretary Frye and Jane Rhys exchanged a brief look.

  “Reilly has had contact with an agent of a foreign government. That was why he was detained in the first place. His loyalties are currently unknown.”

  President Cross stood abruptly. “All right,” he said. “The Pacific Fleet stays on high alert. Same with the Eighth Army in Korea. From here on in I want updates every twenty minutes. And for God’s sake—find the kid.”

  83

  SOUTHEAST WASHINGTON, D.C., APRIL 19, 6:15 AM

  Garrett projected the riot videos onto a white wall in the operations room of Murray’s Meats and Cuts. He played them in a continuous loop for fifteen minutes, and everyone got a kick out of the images. They also monitored the page views on each video, and watched them skyrocket. Over half a million views in less than an hour, climbing fast, and it was only just dawn on the East Coast.

  Regardless of the videos’ effectiveness, Mitty came back from the motel room full of complaints about the video creators. “Total morons,” she said.

  “But they did a good job,” Garrett said.

  “Even morons can get lucky,” she said.

  Ten minutes later she barked from her computer station: the morons had uploaded the next round. Garrett typed in the YouTube URL. The video loaded. It was grainy, like all the others. A vast expanse of blue appeared. The ocean. Writhing, frothy. The camera jittered, but under the jitters was the slow, methodical up-and-down motion of a boat on a rolling sea. The camera panned. The video was being taken from the deck of a ship. An enormous ship—its bow stretching off into the distance, the prow a football field away. Pipes and derricks crisscrossed the deck. It was a tanker. An oceangoing tanker.

  Voices were shouting offscreen; nervous, almost panicked voices, their words unintelligible. Then someone said, “There!”

  The camera swiveled hard right and suddenly a massive gray warship was visible on the crest of a wave. It was big, but clearly nowhere near as big as the tanker itself. It was steaming right at the tanker, about half a mile away, its forward gun clearly visible above the waves.

  “Chinese?” Garrett asked.

  Bingo stepped closer to the wall, eyes glued to the projected video. “Type 052, Luhu–class destroyer. Built in 2009, Jiangnan Shipyard, Shanghai,” he said.

  Garrett smiled. “How do you remember that shit? Just looks like a boat to me.”

  Bingo lowered his eyes, momentarily hurt. “I don’t make fun of your patterns.”

  Garrett put his hands up, palms forward, in a quick show of apology. “It looks like a very nice boat, Bingo.”

  On the video, someone could be heard yelling “What flag? What flag?” The camera zoomed in on the destroyer to show the red star standard of the People’s Republic of China flying just above the foredeck.

  Lefebvre smiled. “Nice touch,” he said. “For everyone who’s not quite as up to speed as Bingo.”

  And suddenly, on-screen, the big gun at the front of the Chinese destroyer opened fire, belching red flame. One, two, three, four shots were fired. Someone offscreen yelled and the video camera snapped back to the deck of the tanker. There was a high whistling sound and then a fireball erupted on the deck of the tanker, a huge explosion of red and orange. The video went fuzzy, the camera spinning around and landing on the deck. There were cries of terror. Smoke and flame filled the frame, and then everything went black.

  Garrett looked around the room: everyone was nodding in appreciation.

  “Yeah, but how did they get the footage on the Web?” Lefebvre asked.

  “Uploaded through satellite phone,” Bingo said.

  Lefebvre gave him a look. “Rather than save themselves?”

  “Everyone wants to be on YouTube,” Bingo said.

  “Not sure people are gonna buy it,” Lefebvre said.

  Garrett stepped up. “Doesn’t matter. Cumulative effect is what counts. Bolts from the blue. Chaos is what we’re after.” He turned to his small cyber army: “Everyone tweets. Get to it.” Then he turned to the Marine lieutenant. “Patmore!”

  “Sir?”

  “Hit the road.”

  84

  NORTHWEST WASHINGTON, D.C., APRIL 19, 9:07 AM

  Timmy Ellis was always up for a good protest. He’d been at Occupy Wall Street in New York, in Boston, and in D.C. He’d tried to make it out to the Oakland port demonstrations, but he couldn’t scrape the money together for a plane ticket, which totally bummed his stone. Before that, he’d camped out in Miami to legalize medical marijuana, marched in New Hampshire for gay rights, and handcuffed himself to a chain-link fence in Tacoma, Washington, to end the war in Iraq.

  To say that Timmy Ellis believed in the power of the crowd to alter the direction of government was an understatement—it was his reason for living. Of course, he also loved a good party. And every one of those demonstrations—except for the one in Tacoma, where a policeman’s truncheon had broken his forearm—had been a good party. He would even categorize some of them as excellent parties. At the OWS camp in Boston, for instance, he’d been high for a week straight and gotten laid twice, which was a personal protest record for him. That had been a really good seven days.

  So when Timmy Ellis got the Twitter feed—pushed to his cell phone, as all his protest updates were, so he could respond instantly—about the flash mob at the Chinese embassy, he was on his bike in minutes. He wasn’t sure what the issue was with the Chinese, but it didn’t really matter—he had nothing else to do until his dentist appointment at noon. He packed a snack, a Red Bull, and a box of Sudecon wipes to counteract pepper spray. Sudecon wipes had become must-haves in every competent protestor’s toolbox—pepper spray was nasty shit, and the wipes seemed to decontaminate your skin and face a lot faster than water. Or beer.

  It took him twenty minutes to ride to the embassy in Northwest D.C., and by the time he arrived—nine-thirty in the morning—there were at least a thousand people already there, with more pouring in by the minute. They were chanting something about Tibet, and human rights, and also the old standby about how the people, united, would never be divided, so Timmy chained his bike to a railing down the block and joined right in. He saw a few friends up close by the embassy gate, waving rainbow flags and banging on drums, so he snaked his way through the crowd to the front. It was there that he saw the Chinese guards, wearing black suits and looking more than a little unhappy. Timmy Ellis yelled “Peace, brothers” to them, but they didn’t respond. A few of them jammed their hands into their suit jackets like they were going to pull out their guns.

  Timmy did not like the looks of that.

  The embassy building was large, white, and nondescript, with few windows facing the street, and lots of reinforced concrete, as if the architects had been thinking principally about security when they designed the place. There were cameras everywhere, but Timmy didn’t care. He’d been filmed at so many protests he figured the FBI had a file on him a foot thick. And good for them, he thought. In for a dime, in for a dollar.

  The crowd behind Timmy began to press in on him, shoving him and the other lead protestors up closer to the fence, which gave Timmy pause: he was well enough versed in crowd dynamics to know that things could get out of hand quickly, and you had to be very aware of your exit strategy. The problem was, he was hemmed in now, with a mass of people behind him and a fence in front of him. Plus, beyond the fence, there were even more sullen-looking Chinese guards showing up. A full two dozen of them, as far as Timmy could tell. They we
re shouting to each other in Chinese, and some of them looked more nervous than angry.

  That was more bad news. An experienced protestor wanted experienced police on the other side. That made for a much more peaceful environment.

  Overall, Timmy thought, this was turning out to be less of a party than he had expected. It was beginning to feel downright dangerous. He decided to turn around and get back on his bike and go to the dentist. But then he saw a protestor who didn’t look much like a protestor. He was the right age—midtwenties—but his hair was buzz-cut like a soldier’s, and he wasn’t shouting or dancing or banging on a drum. He was watching the Chinese guards and holding something in his right hand, which was hanging loosely by his hip. Timmy thought maybe he was a tourist who’d gotten caught up in the crowd. But that didn’t seem right either, because he was moving slowly, steadily, to the front of the embassy gate.

  He brought the thing he was holding in his right hand up to his chest and flicked a lighter with his left hand, and now Timmy knew exactly what it was that the serious-looking dude was holding. An M-80. Timmy had used plenty of them when he was younger. Firecrackers. And loud ones. Really loud ones.

  Oh shit, Timmy thought. When that thing goes off the Chinese guards are going to freak. Timmy turned fast, ducked his head and started pushing away from the front of the protest. He heard somebody yell—and it wasn’t a protest yell, it was a startled yell—then there were more shouts, panicked shouts, and Timmy tried to bull his way further toward the rear of the crowd, but it was no use. People were laid on thick.

  Then came the explosion. Loud and sharp and singular, a boom that rang in his ears. Then screams. And gunshots.

  The crowd surged away from the embassy, like a single living organism, sweeping Timmy up in its force. He knew better than to fight it, so he let himself be carried away from the embassy, and in seconds he was free, the protestors scattering in different directions, most of them sprinting pell-mell down International Place.