Zero day code, p.14
Zero Day Code, page 14
part #1 of End of Days Series
He waved his hands in the air, not quite sure of the words he needed to use. Michelle finished the thought for him.
“Any American response to Chinese aggression in Southeast Asia? Is that what you mean?”
His leg stopped jigging up and down.
“Yeah, I guess I do. I mean, how desperate are the Chinese? Is it worse than it looks?” he asked. “Because it looks pretty bad already.”
Michelle’s expression was blank. She sat across the desk from him, staring through him as though weighing something up. Her appearance, the severely cut clothes, the bright tattoos, the punk revival haircut, it all served to unsettle James, to make him feel as though he’d fallen through the looking glass.
“It’s bad enough,” she said, “that if they don’t get what they need, they could definitely go to war and take it.”
“But that’s…”
A notification pinged on her computer, interrupting him.
“Jesus, that was quick,” Michelle said.
She stared at the computer screen for a moment.
“We better go see Holloway,” she said at last.
The admiral was unavailable.
He wasn’t in his office, and he didn’t have a secretary to run interference. He was simply missing in action. When they couldn’t raise him, James followed Michelle back to her room where a couple of seconds of high-speed typing on her misshapen keyboard brought up a new window.
“Huh,” she said. “OfficeLink says he’s in transit to the White House. It’s an unscheduled meeting.”
“I’m gonna guess that doesn’t happen every day,” James said.
“You’d be surprised, especially with this president. But we need to take this up the line now. You’d better get your story straight.”
James felt as though he was falling after missing a step going down into an unlit basement.
“What? Wait. No. I don’t really have a story, Michelle. I just…”
“You just discovered a point of critical failure that was probed yesterday by a hostile foreign power, probably the Chinese, who have both motivation and means to effect a fundamental discontinuity in the national infrastructure, and who tried to cover up their reconnaissance with a broad-spectrum cyber-attack that brushes right up against the definition of an act of war. So, you have a story, James. And you’re gonna tell it.”
The magical tattooed alterna-babe had disappeared.
In her place a cold and deeply serious Michelle Nguyen all but frog-marched him down the corridor into a section of the building he had not yet seen.
James recognised the atmosphere, however. He was almost certainly entering the governmental equivalent of C-suite territory. Deputy secretaries or under-secretaries or whatever Uncle Sam called his chief operating ass kickers in the national security business. Pulled along in Michelle’s wake, by the forceful change of her personality as much as anything else, he glanced into those offices where the doors stood open. He saw waiting rooms as big as the lounge in his apartment, and ferocious looking personal assistants who glared at him as he passed. James O’Donnell tucked his head in and tried to gather his thoughts. What the hell had he just done?
He needed to figure it out quickly, because Michelle had just barged into a corner office with expansive views in two directions over the gardens surrounding the building. She was demanding to see a General Somebody-or-other, and muscling her way past the PA who tried to stop her. James expected armed marines to appear, but instead a surprisingly diminutive, grey-haired man who reminded him of Colonel Potter from the TV series MASH (his dad’s favourite) stuck his head out from behind the double doors of an inner sanctum.
“What on earth is going on out here?” Colonel Potter demanded to know.
“General Panozzo, this is James, he’s doing some consultancy for Admiral Holloway. I think he found something in the margins of yesterday’s cyber-attack, sir.”
General Panozzo emerged from his office and thanked his secretary, Denise, for attempting to defend his redoubt. He looked James up and down with a sceptical expression furrowing his brows.
“Well son, what is it? And don’t try to bamboozle me with any of those ten-dollar buzzwords you consulting types love so much. What have you got?”
James heart was pounding in his chest. He didn’t know what to say, so he just said it.
“It’s Pearl Harbour, sir. But with muffins.”
15
The Folly of Wiser Heads
Like all great cities Shanghai did not sleep. If anything, General Chu Jianguo thought, the city of twenty-five million seemed to gather itself as darkness fell, like a dragon drawing in breath to burn away the night with one long monstrous blast of fire and light. Chu stood so close to the highly polished glass of the double height floor-to-ceiling window on the top floor of the skyscraper that his breath fogged up the windowpane, obscuring his view of the scene below. It was well after one in the morning, but the vast electric landscape was alive with movement and energy. Millions of vehicles turned thousands of roads and streets and even tiny back alleys into a boundless web of streaming light. Fantastic towers reached towards the heavens, their forms so various, so unpredictable that even knowing the city as well as he did, Chu was often surprised and sometimes even shocked by some new and wondrous architectural marvel that had seemingly sprung into being as his eye had lingered briefly upon some older, more familiar sight. How could anyone behold such a vista and doubt the power, the undeniable, uncontainable power and glory of the reborn Middle Kingdom.
Chu could.
Because he knew the truth.
He chewed an antacid tablet as he waited for the order which he knew was coming. The attack would proceed because it had to. They had no choice. He and his comrades were responsible for the lives of the millions of souls he could see before him, and beyond them to one billion more. He was even responsible, he acknowledged, to humanity as a whole. He could not allow the current crisis to spiral out of control into the insensate slaughter of a conventional world war. Or worse.
“I will wager you did not imagine yourself here when you joined the army as a sent-down youth, eh Chu?”
“I did not imagine anything other than filling my rice bowl a couple of times a day,” Chu grunted, but not unkindly. He turned to the man standing next to him, a true comrade. “And what of you, Song Jiasheng? I will double your wager and hazard my pension that you did not imagine when we survived the battle at Laoshan that we would fight our next war from a hotel suite with room service.”
His old friend laughed.
“No, I did not. But I will take this over that Vietnamese shitting hole any day. And there will be no war. The Central Committee has said so.”
Both men laughed quietly, each in their own way. Chu snorted at the arrogance implied by the Committee’s decree. When they had sent him down this path, they had indeed ordered him to ensure that the plan did not result in armed conflict with the United States and her allies. As if wishing for something could make it so. General Song Jiasheng chuckled more to himself. Unlike his old comrade, Song was still able to take some pleasure and even amusement, however incredulous, in the folly of supposedly wiser heads.
“Perhaps if they had been at the Laoshan Front with us?” Song said. He did not need to finish the thought. Chu understood perfectly. Between them they were the only members of the army’s general staff with actual battle experience, and they had earned that many decades ago as lowly riflemen in an infantry platoon surrounded by hundreds of Vietnamese. It was a wonder they were alive to draw breath, let alone that they had risen through the ranks to their current station. An experience like Laoshan, however, that stayed with you forever. Perhaps, Chu conceded, it made him conservative. Perhaps, despite its present crisis, China had grown far beyond the constraints of normal powers. The Americans after all, and the British before them, had not felt themselves constrained at the heights of their power.
But as he stood high above the vast and spectacular panorama of Shanghai at night, General Chu Jianguo could not shake the feeling he recalled from the morning they had marched into battle at Laoshan.
They were all going to die.
The generals ate simply. Not combat rations, of course. There was no sense in being perverse, but nor did either one feel it appropriate to gorge themselves. General Chu Jianguo and General Song Jiasheng of the 2nd Bureau, Third Department of the People's Liberation Army General Staff, slurped up hot bowls of fat rice noodles with pickled radish and slivers of pork. They drank jasmine tea, and they waited, talking as old soldiers will of their younger days.
Three minutes after one in the morning, Chu heard the soft rapping of knuckles on the door of their hotel suite. He and Song exchanged a glance. With each other they could let their true feelings show, and what they felt was a deep anxiety about what might happen next. Chu had no special insight or information about the very difficult diplomatic talks underway with the governments of Thailand and Vietnam to guarantee China’s food security for at least the medium term. But he did know what would happen if either of those negotiations failed to literally put food on the table in Beijing.
“Your luck was always better than mine, Chu,” Song Jiasheng said quietly, almost smiling as if to apologise for something. “You should answer.”
Chu Jianguo replied with a rueful grin of his own.
“This is not mah-jong, old friend.”
Nonetheless he put aside his noodle bowl and padded over to the door. Chu did not look through the spyhole or ask who was there. The 2nd Bureau had quietly claimed this entire floor of the hotel, a Business Club level with its own lounge and conference facilities.
“Come in please, Colonel,” he said, as he opened the door for himself.
Colonel Tsien was used to his superior’s simple ways. He undoubtedly imagined Chu’s good manners and care for the feelings of his underlings as the persistent humility of a born peasant. The ambitious son of a Central Committee member, Tsien was not excessively favoured with manners or humility. As he entered and saluted, however, his unusually rigid formality struck Chu as a mask the man had pulled over his true concerns and creeping dread. Were this bold course to lead them into disaster, many, many powerful figures and great families would perish there.
“We have orders to proceed,” Tsien said, his voice tight.
Chu nodded to himself. He had been afraid of this. For a moment he did nothing, said nothing. Like a tiger with its jaws clamped around his head, a treacherous memory had taken him. Chu cowered in the red soil of Laoshan. The earth beneath him turned to mud with the piss soaking through his fatigues, adding his water to all the blood that cursed valley had already drunk of so deeply.
“General Chu? Sir?”
“Very well, Colonel,” Chu said, coming back from the past with a jolt. “Prepare the unit. General Song and I will join you presently.”
Tsien snapped out a stiff salute and turned on his heel, closing the door behind him with a slightly too forceful pull.
“It is happening,” Chu said, having trouble believing it himself. His voice was shaking, and he took a breath to centre himself and regain control. “It is actually happening,” he said, less anxiously. More in wonderment.
“The Thais or the Yuenán houzǐ said no, I presume,” Song ventured.
Chu threw up his hands, but more in resignation than anything else.
“What does it matter?” he said. “A bad beginning makes a bad ending and I fear no matter how well we think this will go; it cannot help but end badly.”
“Come now, Chu,” Song chided him. “All things are difficult at the start.”
The general gathered himself. His friend was right. They were on this path now, there was nothing but to walk it until the end. Chu Jianguo put on his jacket and fastened the buttons. He indulged himself in one last look over the city. It remained a boundless, brilliant swirl of electric colour, a billion moving points of light, alive with energy even in this darkest hour. Chu thought of all of the millions of souls he could see down there, and he hoped he was about to secure their futures, not destroy them.
The generals departed their suite, returning the salutes of the soldiers standing guard in the hallway immediately outside. Heavily armed men lined the wide corridor, two commandos standing opposite each other every ten metres. They all wore the black combat fatigues of the PLA Navy’s Sea Dragon special forces. Unit 61398 of the 2nd Bureau was not a traditional combat force and could not provide for its own physical security. It was the target of ceaseless, full spectrum surveillance and harassment by China’s enemies, most especially by the Americans and their so-called Five Eyes partners in the English-speaking democracies. Like the Sea Dragons it was an elite unit, but its members carried laptops, not assault rifles, and those on duty tonight had been gradually infiltrated onto the hotel as guests in parties of one and two over the previous week. Hundreds more remained in the unit’s four major data warfare centres in Shanghai, where they would cover for the absence of their comrades.
As Chu strode down the plush carpeted hallway, past stern-faced commandos and the occasional bowl of complimentary fruit—quite an extravagance given the current difficulties—he worried that some CIA drone was orbiting overhead, or that NSA ‘tailored access’ operators were already sitting on his networks, watching everything in real time. Despite the assurances of his own network security people, he suspected there was no way to truly make these things, these damned computers, impregnable. And now the whole world ran on them. Such abject foolishness.
“Attention!”
As Chu and Song entered the largest of the conference rooms, dozens of programmers came to attention while sitting their chairs, spines ramrod stiff, arms held straight down by their sides. Chu, who was not himself technically minded, was quietly proud of having foreseen the potential for disaster with a room full of operators suddenly leaping to the feet to salute a superior officer. He imagined the entire mission failing because somebody pulled out a plug, or knocked a laptop to the floor.
“At ease,” he ordered. “Continue preparations.”
The room returned to the quiet, focussed diligence he and Song had interrupted with their arrival. Screens glowed, fingers clicked on keyboards, the only talk he heard was the low voices of the supervising officers, carefully walking the floor between the conference tables which had been laid out in a grid pattern that a Roman legionnaire or Shang Dynasty general would instantly recognise as the outward form of a disciplined military unit.
What would they make of his war? Chu thought.
They might not understand the arsenal, but the principles of warfare did not change. The opportunity of defeating the enemy was always provided by the enemy himself.
Colonel Tsien broke away from conferring with two of his officers to shepherd Song and Chu to the nest of screens where they would watch the opening salvos of the war. Now that the moment was upon them, Tsien appeared to have found his spirit. His colour was high with excitement and a thin sheen of perspiration glowed on his forehead. He led them through a break in the wall of curved monitors, stacked three high, to create a digital fortress within which Chu could not see his cyber-warriors at their stations. Whether by design or happenstance he was content with this arrangement. Although the generals and Colonel Tsien wore the uniform of the Peoples Liberation Army, none of the programmers here did so. They had arrived at the hotel in various guises, most often posing as businessmen and women, and even now they maintained the ruse, performing their duties in a frankly disgraceful mix of civilian garb. Chu would prefer not to look upon the strangeness of that sight.
Within the bastion of huge, curving screens—all of them made by Chinese firms, naturally—he was finally able to put aside his unease. Here, with his old comrade, and attended by Tsien and two majors of the Central Military Commission, General Chu could feel as though he was playing his role in a more conventional battle. Some of the screens displayed news feeds from both Chinese and western sources, all with the volume turned down and the latter featuring real-time translation scrolling as text across the bottom of the screen. CNN reported on the enormous traffic jam which still paralyzed much of Los Angeles and which had occasioned serious outbreaks of looting and riots when the city’s criminal underclasses realised the authorities were as hindered in their movements as everyone else. He was about to gift the barbarian yáng lājī running wild in that city a great and terrible favour.
On Bloomberg a bald man explained how much money had been lost to the disruption of the previous twenty-four hours, while a panel on Fox News were in furious agreement with each other that blame for the disaster lay squarely upon the Democrats in Congress.
“When the enemy is relaxed, make them toil. When full, starve them. When settled, make them move,” General Song said, quoting the great Sun Tzu. “This enemy thinks it is starving, but we will soon show them otherwise,” he went on.
Chu kept his own counsel as he watched video feeds from the PLA’s closed networks. Thousands of men from the 15th Airborne Corps hustled into their transport planes at three separate airbases, as the Peoples Liberation Army Air Force prepared to drop six brigades of paratroopers onto critical targets in Thailand and Vietnam. In deep bunkers on the Mischief Reef base in the South China Sea, troops of the PLA’s Rocket Force hurried to ready sixteen 12x12 erector launchers with DF-26 ‘East Wind’ ballistic missiles, while on Fiery Cross the rocketeers fussed over another two dozen launchers laden with the shorter-range DF-21s. These, Chu understood, were a mix of land attack and anti-ship variants, tasked with servicing counterforce targets in Singapore, Malaysia and throughout the Indonesian archipelago. With a reach of up to four thousand kilometres, the East Wind 26s would soon punch into targets in the Bay of Bengal and northern Australia, delivering tonnes of conventional payload to the naval and air bases of hostile powers without the ability to hit back like the United States. One monitor appeared to cycle through live-cams looking over the decks of a container ship, although Chu understood that the imagery was being fed from three separate vessels.
