China Dolls

by Rob Wood

  Raj frowned and shook his head. “The chances are not good. Primarily because the critical amounts are small.”

  “And we don’t know exactly who has this material. . .” Lily mused. “What kind of damage are we looking at?’

  “If a crude nuclear bomb were detonated in Beijing, it would take out more than half a million people immediately. Hundreds of thousands more would be injured, burned, and irradiated. The direct economic damage would exceed $1 trillion. The scar on that part of Beijing would be the equivalent of a smoldering hole where the Olympic stadiums used to be. And, of course, the target need not be people per se. It could be a commercial or cultural target.”

  “My fear,” said Lily, “is that such a device is detonated and then we are fingered as the culprits. Cao might jump to that conclusion anyway, connecting Xinjiang to the nuclear theft. I don’t want him nosing around my Uighur connections.”

  “If anything happens, the retaliation would be massive,“ said Raj.

  “And in the eyes of the Chinese people, much deserved,” added Lily. “In truth, it might not even matter that Xinjiang separatists are held responsible. Any terrorist action would result in a government crackdown that would roll us back to the worst of the Cultural Revolution. Goodbye to autonomy in the far west, goodbye to the rights of minorities. It may actually be something some in the Party wish for. Cao, for instance, is opposed even to the liberalization he sees in Hong Kong.”

  “Then we’ve got to track this stuff,” Raj nodded firmly. “But I’ll be honest. It’ll be very difficult. Feels like Waat Lag gayi—We are screwed. We operate best with information that comes directly from informants—like the word we got of the theft at Daiichi. We’re not really equipped to survey wide areas for a radiation signature.”

  “I’m hoping the Americans will help,” said Zhang. “I’ve given them . . . an ‘inducement.’”

  “Remember this?” Carla Izquidero strode right into Vicky’s office as if she owned it, a fat binder under her arm.

  Honestly, thought Jovanovich to himself, this woman is an extension of the Library of Congress. She doesn’t go anywhere without reading material! “Remember what?” he said.

  “The report worked up by Lawrence Livermore and Sandia labs on a bomb detonation in Washington. They did it for the folks at FEMA and Homeland Security.”

  “Yeah, I read it. What about it?”

  “A small nuclear device detonated at 16th and K streets would take out the White House, the Capitol, the Treasury, the Old Executive Office Building and the National Mall. Vaporized. Kaput. Gone. And the next three miles would burn.”

  “I said I read it,” said Vicky indignantly.

  “Within 10 to 20 miles of the explosion,” Izquidero continued, “radioactive exposure would cause nausea and vomiting within hours, and ultimately death. People would not be able to evacuate because fallout would arrive within just 10 minutes.”

  “Ten minutes?”

  “The magnitude of this terrorist attack would overwhelm all response resources. Anywhere in the country.”

  “Get to the point, Carla.” Jovanovich said evenly.

  “We’ve had a disturbing report from the U.S.S. Vinson. I think it’s coming. A suitcase bomb. Out of Asia.”

  “Who is it?”

  “Could be radical Muslims in Indonesia. Could be the Red Army Faction out of North Korea. Could be pure mercenary vengeance.”

  “What do you want from me?” asked Jovanovich.

  “Can you tell me the likelihood of its getting through to us?”

  “I’m not FBI or Homeland. All I can do is give you an opinion.”

  “That’s all I’m asking.”

  “Asia is home to the largest container ports in the world. Given the volume of shipping, realistically such a device could come here undetected—just like a rat negotiating a sewer system.”

  “And then what? Could it get into the country?”

  “We’ve got really good screens up around major entry points. Dogs. Chemical and metal detectors. And yes, profiling.”

  “What if it comes in through a minor entry point?”

  “In 2010, we discovered traces of nuclear isotopes in a smuggling tunnel on the U.S. Mexican border near Nogales, Arizona. That’s about as minor as it gets.”

  “You discovered traces. What about the nuke material, the weapon itself?”

  “We got that, too. We traced its passage from Arizona east along the Interstate 20 corridor. We set up roadblocks. We got it with the tech on a Z Backscatter Van. You know those ZBV’s can identify low levels of radioactivity from both gamma ray and neutron signatures. No dirty bomb is safe.”

  “Well, that’s a sigh of relief.”

  “No. Don’t hold your breath.” Vicky shook his head. “It takes time. It always takes time to run this stuff down. What if, one day, we run out of time?”

  8

  HAWKS AND HELICOPTERS

  Aboard the Vinson, XO Partridge was filling China Team in on latest developments.

  “He doesn’t have to do this,” thought Cochrane to herself. “It must mean that China Team has some kind of status in his eyes.”

  It was another one of Partridge’s speed-of-light meetings. No humor. No nonsense. No moving off message.

  “Captain says since we’ve got the assets on hand, we throw them at this problem. If there was a theft, the goal is to locate and contain the nuclear material. There’s no guarantee we’ll find anything. But you gotta shoot if you want to score, right?”

  Partridge looked from one to another of his China Team members. “In about 20 minutes we’ll be sending up Global Hawks with external radiation detectors. They’ll have the quickest response time and the furthest reach. We can fly circles out from the Daiichi plant in Fukushima. Obviously, we can’t violate national airspace elsewhere. Which means if the stuff is gone to ground in China, for example, it’s gone for good. What we’re hoping is to find it en route to its next destination. If it’s at sea, that would be wonderful.”

  “Sir,” said Purdy. “I worry that the Hawks will be too high to locate the kind of nuclear cache we’re talking about—50 k or less.”

  “The Hawks will go up first. We’ll follow with choppers with the best equipment we can cram on them. And even at that, Purdy, the odds are long.”

  “Right, sir.” Turning to Cochrane, Purdy asked, “Want to check out those Hawks?”

  “I would actually,” she said. “There are big holes in my educational experience—from Cuisinarts to radiation detectors.”

  They made their way down to the flight deck, with Purdy giving a walking tutorial.

  “Well, the Global Hawk, known formally as the RQ-4, isn’t specifically for radiation detection,” Purdy said. “It’s a high-altitude aerial reconnaissance system which provides real-time images over large areas. In this case, the Vinson is retrofitting the Hawks with radiation detection add-ons.”

  In a moment they were blinking in the sunshine of the flight deck. “And, here we are!” Purdy gestured proudly. “The Global Hawk—Rolls-Royce turbofan engine, carbon fiber wings, infrared sensors, and AESA radar.”

  Cochrane looked up at a bulbous head and thick stalk arcing up from the back of the plane. The aft portion was designed with enough girth to support the jet engine’s intake tube.

  “Kind of has an odd appearance, don’t you think?” She looked at Purdy.

  He smiled sheepishly. “Yeah, there are those who call it the flying phallic symbol.”

  “Phallic symbol?” Cochrane said. “I’d hate to tell you what it looks like to me!”

  Purdy coughed as if a big gulp of air had gone down the wrong way.

  “Sorry,” said Cochrane. “Anyway, that bulbous part at the head. . . is that where the pilot sits?”

  “No. Hawks are unmanned aircraft,” said Purdy regaining his composure. “We call them drones. It was a Hawk like this one that made the first non-stop unmanned powered flight across the Pacific. The fact that they’re u
nmanned makes them suitable for flying in high-risk environments. In the case of Daiichi, that means fly-overs in radiation-intensive environments.”

  “So, are the Hawks likely to locate the stolen goods?”

  “I don’t know. They’ll be flying at altitude, and they’re not equipped with the highly-sensitive receptors we’ll load aboard the helicopters for the second wave. So, both those facts weigh against them.”

  “Why bother, then?”

  “Speed. You don’t want to lose out because you didn’t react in time. We’re hoping to locate the radioactive material while it’s still close at hand. My surmise is that whoever scrounged the Daiichi site did not walk in with a lot of sophisticated equipment, probably not even a lead box. Our thief had to be mobile. Most important, he couldn’t stand out from the crowd in any respect. Now we got to get him quick. We want to find this stuff before it gets locked up in some lead and concrete high-security arms bunker.”

  “I wish you luck,” Cochrane sighed. The odds seemed to her to be very long indeed.

  They had nothing to do but wait now. Most of the time Cochrane spent hunched over her computer trying to dig out anything she could find on China’s minorities, their separatist aspirations, and how these had been advanced. In other words, who were their well-heeled friends? One name came up repeatedly: Zhang Lijuan. Aka Lily Zhang. Aka….so many aliases!

  There was also routine work to do. OPNAV had sent a briefing update on a Venezuelan-Chinese economic summit. None other than Hugo Chavez was getting the red-carpet treatment in Beijing. Chavez was full of praise for the communist government and its friendly deployment of resources in Latin America. He was also peddling heavy Venezuelan crude oil from the Orinoco Basin. It was cheap stuff, but it required special refining facilities. China’s state oil company was about to build a string of new refineries designed to handle heavy crude oil—specifically because it was abundant and cheap. As she glanced at the photos of the obligatory flesh-pressing in Beijing, Cochrane noted a familiar face. Colonel Cao Kai was always at the elbow of the Chinese dignitaries, as subtle a security presence as a fireplug in uniform could be.

  She was still working when her inbox dinged with a message from the XO to the China Team list proc: “RQ-4 Surveillance Results. High radiation levels over the Fukushima Daiichi plant—higher than reported by the Japanese. Hawks also plotted a plume of radioactive effluent moving from shore to sea. No other blips in background radiation levels.”

  “In other words, the hounds can’t find the fox,” Cochrane said to herself. She quickly e-mailed Purdy. “You there? Let’s talk.”

  Purdy took it on his hand-held and texted back: “I’m in 103.”

  This was a compartment on C-Deck close to the computer center. Purdy was helping sort equipment modules, each wearing an unruly beard of wiring. He stopped, screwdriver in hand.

  “What’s up?”

  “The aerial recon came up negative. . .”

  “So far,” he admitted.

  “I have an idea. A far-fetched idea, but it’s no worse than the goose egg turned in by your drones.”

  “Be my guest . . . spill the beans.”

  “Lily Zhang.” Cochrane looked at Purdy to gauge his reaction. “We know she is sympathetic to liberalization efforts. We know she is associated with a minority working for separatism. We know she’s from an area that twice now has had bloody, stinging defeats at the hands of the PLA.”

  “So?”

  “So, imagine what her separatist forces could do with a dirty A-bomb.”

  “Cherchez la femme,” he smiled. “I thought you were a big fan of Lily Zhang.”

  “I’m just being realistic.”

  “Assuming she was the author of the warning about the Daiichi theft, why would she take that step—and involve the Navy—if she had herself taken the hot rocks?”

  “Red herring, perhaps. An alibi. Something to deflect attention. . . . It could be a pretty low-risk maneuver if this stuff is going to be as difficult to locate as you say. What do you think?”

  “At the moment, just this: as Admiral Oliver Hazard Perry once said, ‘I have not yet begun to fight!”

  “What’s that mean?”

  Purdy gestured at the electronic boxes stacked around him. “Could be that you’re looking at the turning point in the war. This stuff we’re loading aboard the choppers is pretty sophisticated. Say you flew surveillance over New York City. Using these scopes you could pick up the change in background radiation caused by the isotopes in the nuclear medicine center at Mt. Sinai Hospital. Moreover, the detectors we’re deploying now will look for gamma ray decay. The significance of that is that we have a chance of finding the target even if it’s shielded.”

  “End game?” she asked.

  “Waiting game,” he replied.

  9

  A CADAVER AND A COLONEL

  The answer came inside of 48 hours. They were once more huddled up around XO Partridge: Cochrane, Purdy, Simmonds—most of the China Team.

  “We established a grid out from the Daichi plant, and each of the choppers flew low level surveillance over an assigned quadrant,” said Partridge. “We are as certain as we can be that we’ve left no stone unturned.”

  “Why doesn’t he get to the point,” Cochrane thought. “This doesn’t sound good.”

  “And did we locate any radioactive material?” Purdy asked.

  “We did.” Partridge paused. “But it wasn’t what we had in mind.”

  “Sir?”

  “We’ve got a floater. A corpse that washed up on a beach near Fukushima. And this thing glows in the dark. The count is about off the scale. You can’t approach it without a nuke suit, so get your issue from stores.”

  “You’ve got the thing here?” gasped Cochrane. “You want us to look at it?”

  “I particularly want you to look at it, Ms. Cochrane. I think it may be our thief.”

  “But why did you bring it in?” asked Simmonds. “Why not just alert the Japanese authorities?”

  “Of course we notified the authorities. But the body was too hot to leave unattended where someone could run across it and be exposed to the radiation. We weren’t prepared to leave Vinson people there on site, so we took the body. We’ll likely offload it at the next port, depending on what the authorities want. Besides, if it is our thief, we can expedite sending a description on to Homeland Security. Which is where you all come in.”

  Later, walking slowly in the unfamiliar, baggy nuke suits, they entered the portion of sickbay outfitted as a morgue. Under bright, surgical overhead lights, a six-foot lump lay on a gurney like a white linen cocoon.

  XO Partridge pulled the sheet down, revealing the head of the corpse, puffy and pasty. It had two or three darker, purple bruises around the forehead and chin.

  “Creepy. It has no hair. It looks like a slug,” Cochrane said with a shiver.

  “Radiation exposure,” said Purdy.

  “Foul play?” asked Simmonds pointing to a purplish region on the face. “Blow to the head?”

  “Can’t really separate a trauma like that from the trauma the body would have experienced at sea or in the surf,” answered Purdy. “You can wait for the full autopsy, of course, but it’s a near certainty that we’re looking at death from radiation exposure.”

  “Anything else?” asked Partridge.

  “The condition of the skin and the degree of bloating would fit with the time passed since we believe the theft at Daiichi occurred. That, and the fact that we still have head and feet here.”

  “What do you mean?” asked Cochrane.

  “In the ocean, the head and feet often become separated from the body first. That’s why you get reports of a single sneaker-clad foot washing up offshore Canada every once and a while. For our purposes, since the corpse is intact, it’s a rough measure of time passed.”

  Partridge pulled the sheet further down, revealing the round, tight balloon of chest and belly. The torso was covered by a dark snarl of lines, a p
attern perhaps, but the design would look random to most people.

  “Cochrane, what do you make of these?” asked Partridge.

  She didn’t like any of this business of ogling the bloated corpse, but she stared closely a moment and answered matter-of-factly. “Those would be yakuza tattoos, sir. Japanese organized crime.”

  “That’s what I suspected,” said Partridge. “You can imagine how sensitive the Japanese might be to the intimation that yakuza was involved in any way with the Daiichi incident. I’m not suggesting that the official report on our friend here would be delayed or incomplete in any respect. I am saying there’s a reason I wanted us to have the first look. That’s all, people. You can go.”

  Cao Kai pushed the plans for the little submarine away from him across the metal desktop. It was an interesting curiosity. Venezuelan drug smugglers were very inventive.

  Cao’s military jacket was already off and slung over the shoulders of his chair, so that the gold buttons on the sleeve touched the ground. Now, he loosened his tie and ran his hand absently through his close-cropped hair. He was tired.

  He glanced around the room. On his desk was a canister of coffee, a gift from the Venezuelans. It smelled awful. He despised the stuff.

  The only personal touch that pleased him was a photograph of a young girl in a gymnastics uniform. The photo rested on his desk. In the photo, the girl had just completed a dismount and her two arms were extended above her like wings. She looked upward, her eyes fixed on something faraway in the future. The personification of the new China, he thought: beautiful, strong, forward-looking. He had had that girl. Once.

  The rest of the room signaled the old China: Steel file cabinet. Steel chairs. A portrait of Mao on the wall and a framed passage from president Hu Jintao’s treatise on military affairs, the strategy that had reshaped the military and helped put Cao where he was today.

  In particular, Hu accorded defense forces a new and prominent place in the nation’s economic development. President Hu’s concept of the PLA’s function went well beyond traditional tasks such as protecting the nation’s borders or ensuring the safety of sea lanes through which China-bound oil tankers passed. He wrote that the PLA must “provide substantial liliang”—power and force—to ensure the consolidation of the Chinese Communist Party’s ruling status through both economic and military means.