Zero day code, p.16
Zero Day Code, page 16
part #1 of End of Days Series
James heard a dull thudding sound that grew to a roar.
“Marine One!” Michelle shouted over the din. “They’re evacuating the President. Come on, we gotta get back to the office.”
It sounded a genuinely insane thing to say, but of course he was on the government’s dollar now, and Michelle’s office was the National Security Council. She really did need to get back there. They hurried away from the White House, part of a larger group of a hundred or more people, some wearing expensive business attire and multiple ID cards on coloured lanyards, some tourists in summer leisure war, and some folks who obviously worked as gardeners or cooks or service staff of some kind.
“We’ll walk. It’ll be quicker,” Michelle announced when they cleared the outermost checkpoint, where the security guard had given them the ride in the golf cart.
“Damn!” James said.
“What?”
“I left my jacket hanging on the chair back in there,” he said, suffered a cascade of emotions as he realised his wallet was in the breast pocket and he was never getting that jacket back.
“Jesus Christ, James,” Michelle shouted over the din. “We’re well beyond dress code issues here. Forget your fucking jacket.”
She was pissed and he wasn’t inclined to tell her that he’d lost his wallet too. At least his ID card was still flapping from the lanyard around his neck.
It took only a few minutes to get back to the front entrance of the Eisenhower Building. They turned left at Lafayette Square and cut through the manicured gardens James had admired while they’d eaten breakfast about a million years ago. It took longer to get back into the executive wing than it had to walk there. Soldiers or marines—he wasn’t sure which—now guarded the entrance and exhaustively checked everyone’s identification before allowing them past. He was sure his own very temporary credentials had probably been revoked and was surprised when a sergeant waved him on through.
The chilled air inside the vestibule was a sweet kiss after a long exile in Hell, and he risked Michelle’s ire to stop and take a few mouthfuls from the water bubbler at the end of the hallway where she had her office. He needn’t have worried. She was just as hot and flustered as him, and she took a few seconds to splash cold water over her face. The corridors of the NSC were heaving with very serious looking people hurrying about their very serious looking business. Having escaped the chaotic crush and headlong dash back to work, James realised his phone was ringing in his pants pocket. He pulled it out and saw that it wasn’t ringing, but buzzing with dozens of notifications.
“Hey, Michelle,” he said. His stomach felt like he’d just plunged over a sickening rollercoaster drop. “You’d better see this.”
He held up his iPhone, but she shook her head as she hurried away down the corridor.
“Just tell me. No time.”
“It’s a run on the banks.”
She stopped dead.
“Shit.”
Michelle turned around and hurried back to him. He passed her the phone, but the screen turned dark as it went back to sleep and it refused to open when his Face-ID didn’t recognise her.
“Oh for fucks sake,” she said. “Forget it. Come on.”
A few seconds later they were sliding into chairs on either side of her desk as she woke up the screen on her computer. Hundreds of notifications slid down the right-hand side of the display and she swore quietly as she clicked on one, seemingly at random.
“Jesus Christ,” she said softly.
“What? What going on?”
“It’s the Chinese. They moved on Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia and… fuck I dunno yet, it’s going to take hours to digest all this. Here, look.”
She angled the screen around to give James a better view. Dozens of windows were open, but one stood to the fore. It wasn’t framed in red or flashing with alerts. It was a simple text document, headed FLASH TRAFFIC CINCPACCOM.
James had trouble deciphering the content. It was dense with acronyms and jargon.
“Sorry,” he said, “what does it all mean.”
Michelle shook her head, but not at him. He could see she was just as overwhelmed by the torrent of data flooding her screen. She stabbed at a button on the keyboard to cut off the pinging alerts for more notifications. They were pouring in at the rate of three or four every second. He felt a little calmer as soon as she restored some relative quiet. It was still bedlam outside, though.
“They’ve hammered Vietnam’s air defence net and fighter bases with cruise missiles,” she said scanning and simultaneously translating the document from the original DOD jargon. “Cam Ranh Bay is a fucking dumpster fire. Biên Hòa air base, Hòa Lạc and Thanh Son are all smoking fucking craters. PLA naval air strikes have wrecked everything south of Hanoi and the South Sea Fleet is closing in on the coast.”
She went quiet for a few seconds, losing herself in the text. James sat quietly and waited on her to return.
“The Vietnamese air force is… gone. The navy too. Nine frigates and corvettes sunk, three Kilo class submarines with them, two of them at anchor. The army is mobilising, but cruise missiles have targeted most of the major barracks.”
“Most?”
Michelle’s eyebrows knitted together, whether in concentration or disapproval James couldn’t say. He was struck by the sudden comprehension that this was more than just a professional crisis for her. Michelle Nguyen’s family had come as refugees from Vietnam. She would have more family back there.
“Chinese bombers refuelled by inflight tankers are hitting the naval base at Phu Quoc right now. That’s… Jesus Christ. They hit Tindal air base in Australia with bunch of DF 26’s! That’s like… we’ve got… we have a fucking alliance with them! Like, an actual alliance. Holy shit, these guys are not…”
She fell silent and James felt his balls trying to crawl up into his body when he saw the expression on her face. There was something else.
He said nothing. He didn’t want to know.
When she spoke, it was in a very small voice.
“They hit Pearl, Guam and Okinawa,” she said.
17
The Grand Ballet of Steel
Standing squarely in the centre of the bridge on the carrier Liaoning, Admiral Feng Danyu maintained his severest glower and stern disposition as the South Sea Fleet altered course. The two Philippine Navy corvettes, which had been ‘escorting’ the task force south to war games off the island of Luzon, appeared for all the world as though their helmsmen had suddenly taken to liquor. They heaved to, tacked aback, and for a brief period described a confused, chaotic track which broadly kept them in contact with Feng’s command. They abandoned that effort when electronic warfare officers from the Type 52 destroyer Yinchuan blinded the corvette’s primitive sensor arrays and cut their commlinks to Manila. Watching through powerful binoculars, Feng Danyu’s forbidding expression did not change as first one corvette, then the other, poured on steam and ran south for home, throwing up great white fantails of water. They did not get very far before anti-ship missiles fired from two J-15 fighters of the Liaoning’s own Combat Air Patrol speared into their flanks and ripped the flimsy little vessels apart in twin explosions of shredded steel and oily fire.
Below him, on the Liaoning’s flight deck, three helicopters lifted off and banked away toward the burning wreckage of the Filipino ships. The Liaoning was the oldest carrier in the People’s Liberation Army Navy, a former Soviet flattop, laid down in 1985. It had been extensively refurbished in the dry docks in Dalian, but it had none of the amenities of China’s modern carriers, constructed by Chinese workers from Chinese blueprints. The clattering roar of the choppers was loud enough to make conversation difficult in the Liaoning’s bridge. Not that anybody had much to say. The three aircraft racing in toward the sinking corvettes were not tasked with Search and Rescue. They were dark grey and waspish in appearance. Z-10ME gunships. Feng lowered the binoculars from his eyes and rolled the stiffness out of his shoulders, turning away from the industrial hammering roar of the chopper’s miniguns raking the seas free of any survivors.
He took no pleasure in the necessity of such tactics.
Tactics served strategy, and China’s current strategies provided not for glory, but for her very survival. This could not be realised without forceful measures and the most dreadful resolve. Feng took nothing, not even grim satisfaction from drawing first blood. He did not doubt that many of his sailors would give their lives in service of the republic and her people in the coming struggle. He might yet join them in their sacrifice.
“Prepare the first strike,” he ordered, and with that the bridge crew of the fleet carrier erupted into activity around him. Dozens of officers began issuing orders down their individual lines of authority. Out on the flight deck he saw the first step in the grand ballet of steel and blood as hundreds of crewmen, in a rainbow assortment of brightly coloured hi-vis shirts, burst into activity, clearing and stowing the gear from the rotary wing launch moments earlier. Far below him – in a hostile, howling maelstrom of piercing noise, hot exhausts, whining air vents and a buffeting sea breeze – deck crew swarmed the remaining fighters of the Liaoning’s J-15 attack squadron as pilots in green Nomex flight suits and bulbous white helmets completed their pre-op checklists.
Raising his binoculars again, Feng looked across the foam-flecked waters to the Shandong, the newer of the South Sea Fleet’s two aircraft carriers. Like his beloved Liaoning, its flight deck curved up at the bow in a prominent ski ramp. Feng swallowed his resentment of the slight done to the Fleet by the assignment of the three newer, more advanced platforms to Admiral Wen and the East Sea Fleet. Feng’s task force would soon enough likely engage the Japanese and Koreans and perhaps even the US 7th Fleet should things go wrong, and he thought it was only sensible that they should ride into battle on the strongest horses carrying the longest bows.
The gunships detailed to police the wreckage of the two corvettes finished raking over the last drifting remains of the wryly named Armada de Filipinas and cross-decked to a pair of Type 55 destroyers, saving crucial minutes for Liaoning’s flight deck. Everything was so tightly scheduled that Feng could not help but worry. He had argued strenuously back at Zhanjiang HQ that for any military plan to have a hope of success, there needed to be robust margins built in for error, ill fortune and, naturally, for enemy action. Who was to say there was not some American or Australian submarine plotting firing solutions on his fleet right now, or a wing of Japanese F-35s locking missiles onto Admiral Wen Bo Xi’s fleet?
Feng dropped the spyglasses and finally returned to his command chair, grateful to take the weight off his feet after two hours of standing and forever adjusting his balance against the roll of the ocean swell. He had not prevailed in his arguments, and perhaps that was for the best. Whether setting one army against another, or one man onto one opponent, when the moment to fight was upon you it was better to let your plans be dark and as impenetrable as night, and when you did move, to fall like a lightning bolt.
The thunder of the first flight of J-15s arrested his self-indulgent moping, jolting Feng back into the moment. Having given his order, he had nothing to do but let the Liaoning’s officers fight the battle. Flurries of orders, queries, answers and acknowledgments flew around him as the great ship of war adjusted course to put her ski ramp into the wind. Admiral Feng Danyu felt his pulse quickening as the first planes roared away and his heart seemed to fall into his stomach with the inevitable dip of the heavily laden J-15 as it threw itself from the launch ramp six hundred feet away. And then the deadly grey hawk soared up and into the skies which rippled behind it, distorted by the plane’s powerful jet engines. Feng Danyu’s heart flew away with it.
They were committed now.
The state-owned China Ocean Shipping Group boasted of a great many vessels in its huge commercial fleet. More than a thousand on the day the container ship COSCO Vancouver left the port of Guangzhou under the command of Captain Bei Zhihui, fully two weeks before Admiral Feng’s battlegroup steamed from Zhanjiang. Bei, a thirty-eight-year-old mariner and native of Guangzhou, looked every inch the grizzled and veteran sea dog as he sat in the captain’s chair in the bridge high over the container ship’s main deck. As well he should. Bei Zhihui had gone down to the sea as a gangly, awkward sixteen-year-old, and most of the following twenty-two years had seen him crewing, and eventually commanding, a line of increasingly important ships.
Not for the masters of the China Ocean Shipping Group, however.
Bei Zhihui was not a captain of the merchant marine. He was a decorated and well-connected officer of the People’s Liberation Army Navy.
Nearly six thousand miles east of Feng, and forty minutes out of Honolulu Harbor, Captain Bei Zhihui received his final orders via an encrypted satellite phone at 0703 hours local. Bei had no idea what was happening at home, only that the time to do his duty had arrived. He was dressed in the uniform of PLA Navy captain. All of the bridge crew wore naval fatigues, but those who had reason to go out on deck still disguised themselves in the workaday coveralls of merchant seamen. Bei regretted the necessity of that. They had discussed it on the long voyage across the Pacific. His men would have preferred to die as warriors, facing the enemy arrayed for battle, rather than skulking and sneaking and striking like hidden vipers.
It was…
He hesitated, his eyes squinting into the morning sun.
It was not… dishonourable, as such. After all, deception was a time-honoured weapon of war. Twenty-four hours before they had departed Guangzhou, engineers swapped out thirty shipping containers for thirty more, which arrived on trucks in the dead of night. The ship’s automatic ID system, a tracking beacon carried by all large commercial vessels no matter their homeport or national flag, showed the Vancouver as still being moored to the wharf near Gate 33. Shortly after Captain Bei and his crew departed, another COSCO ship of the same class did indeed take up that berth. It even loaded out with the same configuration of containers on the main deck. An inquisitive photo analyst at the CIA or DIO could compare the colour palate and even the item numbers painted onto those containers and not find one point of difference.
Thousands of miles away, on the real Vancouver, Bei ordered Lieutenant Tu, the drone specialist, to deploy the weapons.
The lieutenant, who had graduated first in his engineering class at Beijing Polytech, and who might have gone on to found some great company had history run differently, flipped open his ruggedised laptop, a Huawei Matebook X Pro, and bent to the task. The Vancouver – now emitting a transponder signal identifying itself to US customs and port authorities as a New Zealand flagged container ship, the MV Dunedin – maintained station just outside the US territorial limit of twelve nautical miles. She was scheduled to enter port late in the afternoon. The nearest vessel, another container ship, was three thousand metres to starboard.
Like Admiral Feng, so far away to the east, there little for Bei to do, having delivered his ship to the launch point for the mission. Like Feng, he too sat back and watched the opening moves of the attack. The other officers and enlisted men on the bridge were quiet, the atmosphere palpably tense as Lieutenant Tu worked his computer. For a while, the click-clack of keys was the loudest sound, save for the occasional report over the ship’s tannoy from the engineering and deck divisions. After a quietly fraught couple of minutes, Tu looked up and nodded to Captain Bei, his eyes asking an unspoken question.
“Proceed,” Bei said with a nod.
The young officer breathed in and out, as though preparing to lift some large weight in the gymnasium. He also nodded, but only to himself, as if assuring his conscience that there was nothing unusual happening here. A single keystroke followed, and the course of human affairs was turned from a hopeless but knowable future towards … another fate, perhaps more promising, but ultimately inscrutable to everyone who would now await its judgment.
Bei sat slightly higher in the captain’s chair as sirens sounded down on the main deck. He saw movement on the uppermost layer of shipping containers. Thirty of the long metal boxes cracked open, hydraulic pistons lifting the heavy slabs of ribbed steel like the opening of a child’s music box. The mechanisms were powerful, custom designed for this one task. The profile of the Vancouver’s container stack changed rapidly. Another siren sounded and dozens of dark oblong canisters shot out of the shadowed interiors of the open containers, launched a hundred metres into the air by magnetic catapults. The outer carapace of the massive projectiles popped open just before they reached the apogee of their short, almost vertical flight paths, and the sky around the ship was suddenly filled with hundreds of drones.
Some were larger than the others, and these boosted themselves away from the flock as stubby winglets unfolded and small jet engines spooled up. They sped off under full power, dropping down to a few metres above the waves and engaging terrain following sensors stolen and aggressively adapted from the True Depth camera system in Apple’s iPhones. Behind them, hundreds of smaller drones began their own flight towards the Pearl Harbor and the US Air Force bases Hickam and Bellows. All of the drones were cloaked by radar absorbent meta-plastics developed in the laboratories of the PLA’s prosaically named ‘science and technology committee’—otherwise known as the Chinese DARPA. Powered by miniaturised scram jets, they accelerated to hypersonic speeds in less than a minute, closing with their targets before any of the US military’s early warning systems could detect or respond to the attack.
The development team at the science and technology committee had been given a difficult brief. The drones were to avoid the American defences, naturally, but when servicing their targets, loss of life was also to be kept to a minimum. The Party did not seek a war with the US. Its grand strategy was entirely bent toward avoiding one.
