The colonel drove Lena around the base in his jeep, making sure that she was aware of the perimeter defenses, as well as the plans for growth.
A giant grey transport aircraft flew overhead, landing on the runway.
The colonel said, “Ah, so they have begun to arrive.”
Lena said, “Are those our new recruits?”
“Indeed they are, ma’am.”
She shook her head, amazed that Admiral Song had been able to get it done so fast. He had organized a voluntary winter Junxun for all first-year university students and those who would be attending university the following year. The deal was sweetened by promising highly sought-after government jobs. Jinshan’s cyberoperations team had amplified the message over Chinese social media, and over two thousand students had volunteered so far.
While they’d thought the special winter training would take place at an island base just off the coast, the Chinese military transports actually took them across the Pacific Ocean to Manta, Ecuador. That was one piece of information that the students had not been aware of when they’d signed up. The other was that their military service was indefinite.
The whole world would know soon enough, Lena thought.
The jeep stopped near one of the hangars. A PLA captain walked up and saluted the colonel. Lena squinted as she realized that she knew the man.
Lieutenant Lin.
Now promoted. Captain Lin. She was rarely surprised, but she found this shocking. Her face betrayed nothing, however.
“Good day, Captain,” the colonel said. “What do you have for us?”
Lin looked at Lena and Natesh, but it appeared that he didn’t recognize her. Perhaps it was the scars. Or the two decades of age. “Sir, we are filling up the hangars with supplies, and sending out clothing and other materials to the new personnel.”
“Very well. Is everything on schedule?”
“Yes, sir.”
Now Captain Lin paused when he looked at Lena. She was unsure if he recognized her or if he was just staring at her scars.
“Something wrong, Captain?”
“No, Colonel.”
“Very well, that is all.”
“Yes, sir.”
The man saluted and walked back towards the hangar, where they were unloading the contents of a pallet onto the back of a truck. She saw him turn and glance back at her as he walked.
Lena said, “Is he one of yours?”
The colonel said, “You mean is he one of my commandos? Oh no. He is just a logistics officer. One of the ones who came over with us. Why?”
“No reason,” Lena replied.
14
Chase and the US Navy foreign affairs officer shared a cab back to the US embassy after they finished the Farragut briefing. The Naval officer was only needed to make sure that there was Navy involvement when providing orders to the Navy ship captain.
Chase then traveled to a CIA safe house on the eastern side of Panama City. Several members of Task Force SILVERSMITH were already there, including specialists from the NSA and military cryptologists. There were also two US Marines wearing plain clothes.
Chase shook hands with the Marines, a senior enlisted by the name of Darby, and the unit’s commanding officer, Captain Calhoun.
Gunnery Sergeant Austin Darby and Captain Jake Calhoun were members of the US Marine Corps Special Operations Command. The outfit had recently been renamed the Marine Raiders, an homage to the elite Marine Corps units of World War II. In 1942, Raider battalions were involved in combat action against the Japanese in places like the Solomon Islands and Guadalcanal. Today, the Marine Raiders were the Marine Corps’ own elite unit within SOCOM, the US Special Operations Command.
Chase had worked with Marine special operators in Iraq. They were used there to train and fight alongside Iraqi special forces in battles against ISIS. Chase considered the Marine Raiders among the elite soldiers of the world. They were much like the SEAL teams he had been a part of.
The CIA briefer sat them down at a table and opened his laptop. After typing a few keystrokes, he brought up a screen that said OPERATION SILVERSMITH.
“Who comes up with this stuff?” asked the gunnery sergeant.
The CIA man replied, “Actually, for this one… I did.”
“Ah.”
“Alright, gentlemen, we now have approval to move forward with this portion of SILVERSMITH. Some quick background…” He tapped a key and the screen changed, showing a bar graph. “Over the past decade, China has sold an increasing number of arms to nations around the world, including Latin America. It started off with just nonlethal supplies. Uniforms. Medical aid. But in recent years, they have switched to some more advanced weaponry…”
An image of two Chinese Z-9 helicopters appeared. Then an image of an armored personnel carrier. Then a tank.
“And that has raised some eyebrows. There are two main concerns. First, the Chinese are arming nations that have sometimes-adversarial relationships with the US, like Venezuela, Ecuador, and Bolivia. Also — many of these financial deals didn’t make sense.”
“What do you mean?” Chase was familiar with parts of the operation, but hadn’t been a part of this brief preparation.
The CIA briefer said, “We looked at the finances of these transactions. The Chinese didn’t make a profitable deal, in many cases. They sent Venezuela way more APCs and tanks than they were paid for. Now, the Chinese, as a rule, are good businessmen. They don’t make mistakes like that, unless it’s on purpose.”
“What are you saying?”
“We think they saw it as an investment.”
Chase frowned. “You mean, like foreign aid? In order to have a good relationship with these countries, so they would be partners in the future?”
The CIA briefer shook his head. “Not just that. We think that they were pre-staging their arms. Putting military equipment over on this side of the pond so they would have easy access later on.”
Gunnery Sergeant Darby said, “Clever little bastards.”
“A week ago we received signals intelligence that Chinese military units were conducting operations near Manta, Ecuador. Reconnaissance images”—the CIA briefer flipped through a few screen shots of an air base—“showed an increasingly large presence of Chinese personnel, weapons, and transport aircraft. These are Chinese construction companies plowing the fields, Chinese defense contractors selling the arms, Chinese troops training the Ecuadorian armies.
“Stuff like this has been going on for years, but not in concentrations like this. China is the largest arms seller in the world today. And much of it goes to nations unfriendly to the US. But the number of troops here is abnormally high. And it has raised a lot of concern in Washington. We now suspect that there was at least some Chinese involvement in recent attacks on US interests around the world — this includes the Persian Gulf attacks, the US cyberattack known as the Blackout Attack, and possibly even the Beltway attack.”
Chase watched the reaction of the two Marines. He wondered how long it had been since they’d been able to catch up on the news. The mainstream media was a twenty-four-hour billboard for the Beltway attack and the imminent US war with Iran, but there was almost nothing about China. That secret was being tightly controlled by US intelligence.
But Chase knew better. And now that Jinshan’s operative was spilling his guts to Langley interrogators, others would too. The Chinese — or Jinshan and his allies — were planning a major military attack on the United States. The wheels were already in motion. The cyberattack on the US satellite and communications network last month, while not crippling, had done an incredible amount of damage.
The American GPS system was still down. Military satellite communications were still down. The US Internet was just now recovering, with billions of dollars of data lost from tech companies’ data storage centers. And perhaps the biggest impact — the US economy was plummeting from the shock to the markets. People no longer had confidence that the Internet would be there for them. Perhaps they never should have had that confidence to begin with…