“Don’t look so upset buddy — like I said, I’ll give your wife a call for you. I’ll make up an excuse. You won’t be able to call her yourself. I can tell you that we’re headed to a small airport on the west coast. From there, you’ll get on another jet with other members of your team. I won’t be going. Got other fish to fry. I don’t even know where that flight is headed. Due to the sensitive nature of this mission, we’ve kept a lot of info compartmentalized. But when you arrive they’ll give you a brief, which will help explain everything. Just know that this is a vital project that will immensely help our nation’s security. And there is a specific need for someone with your background.”
“What background is that?”
“You’ll be perfect. Your knowledge of the Navy should even help. But mostly… your knowledge of ARES.”
“What does this have to do with ARES?”
ARES was the codename for a cyber-weapon that David had researched a little over two months ago. The NSA was enormously interested, and David had been sent out to evaluate and secure the technology for the US government.
“You’ll find out when you get there. Plan to discuss it. You know it better than anyone besides those MIT kids who created it. From my understanding, many of the people that will be going will have different pieces of the puzzle. The group that has put this little shindig together knows enough to realize the danger, but we need to get you all in a room together to really make sense of it. And that can’t be done easily; too many possible eavesdroppers to worry about. Hence the remote location.”
David glanced out the window. He could see the setting sun painting the tops of the clouds orange on the western horizon. He sipped his coffee and tried to make sense of it all. He wasn’t sure what to believe and couldn’t think straight. He was still too worked up from what had just happened. He was worried about his wife and how she would react to his being gone for three weeks without any phone calls. Hell, she would probably be a wreck after he didn’t show up tonight.
“You’ll call my wife soon?”
Tom nodded. “Scout’s honor.”
“Tom, I gotta be honest with you, this is all a little too insane. Is there anything else you can tell me about what I’ll be doing?”
Tom said, “I’ve seen some of the evidence. The threat is real. There’s already one CIA agent that sacrificed his life to get the word out. In light of the Chinese spy ring, finding people that we can trust has proven to be quite challenging. Even deciding on a secure location was a challenge. But here is what I can tell you. You guys are going to come up with plans that could help stop this war. There is a woman there running things. She’s very high up in the intel-world. She’s excellent, and right at the heart of all of this. Give her whatever she asks for. You have full authority to talk about any of the things you’ve worked on in the past. That’s why you were chosen.”
David was processing, shaking his head. “Why would China go to war with the United States?”
Tom replied, “Can’t say for sure. The Chinese didn’t bother to tell me.”
Brooke finally spoke up, “Why does any country go to war? National security, land, economics, religion, politics.”
Tom said, “Times are a changing in China. My personal opinion? Decisions for war always come down to what is in the best interests of the powerful few. The people in charge get scared that they will lose their throne. So they act. Powerful people like these ones we’ve been looking into don’t have the same inhibitions we little folk do. For them, every option is on the table. Even war.”
“So what will I be doing when we get to wherever we are going?”
Tom said, “It’s called a Red Cell. You’ll help to plan out what they might do to us so that we can be ready. That’s really as much as I can tell you. Probably more than I should.”
David nodded. “I see.” He wasn’t totally sure that he did. But he was starting to.
Tom asked, “Dave, can I count on you? I know this sounds cheesy, but your country needs you. I mean it.”
He hated it when people called him Dave. “Yeah, Tom… of course.”
Tom looked at his watch. “I need to get some sleep. It’s been a long few days. You hungry?”
Tom motioned the big guy that he could come back and sit down near them. Big Guy brought a cooler over and passed out submarine sandwiches and sodas. David took a turkey and ham sub and a diet cola. He took one bite of the sandwich and left the rest. He wasn’t hungry. The bumpy plane didn’t help. This still didn’t feel right. But if all of this was true, then of course he was going to do everything he could to help his country.
China. More than a billion people. The only military in the world that compared to the United States. It was the doomsday scenario that his instructors talked about when he was back at the Naval Academy. David had once heard that if it ever came to war with China, every response plan that the United States had involved using tactical nuclear weapons. It was simple math. There were just too many Chinese.
If this were really happening, would the Navy call him back up? He was only an active duty officer for a few months. About as long as it took the medical staff at Navy flight school to figure out that his eyes had gone bad. However, once you are commissioned, you’re commissioned for life, right? So was he going to be sitting on a boat a year from now, facing an onslaught of Chinese anti-ship missiles racing toward him? It was too incredible to seem real, and too distant to inspire the fear that seemed appropriate. He was more concerned about his wife being worried about her husband’s disappearance.
David still didn’t fully trust Tom after the kidnapping. But if this were all true, then this time in history could be like the days before Pearl Harbor. Or perhaps like the days before Germany invaded Poland. Much of the world was just going about its everyday routine, unaware of the massive conflict that was about to erupt.
Over 60 million people died in World War Two, or over 3 % of the world’s population. If a war of that scale were really on the horizon, David must do his part to prevent or win it.
David was exhausted from the earlier drama. He turned and looked at the other two men, both of whom were now sleeping in their fully reclined seats. Well, they likely wouldn’t be sleeping with him unrestrained if they meant to do him harm. He still wasn’t sure that he wanted to sleep himself. Or that he even could. But he sure was tired.
Brooke came around and sat in the empty seat across from him. She smiled and raised her eyebrows like she wanted to talk.
She said, “How are you doing?”
“Well, I just got kidnapped from my home and now I’m being flown to God-knows-where on some sort of CIA plane to help save the country from World War Three. I’m good. How are you?”
“It’s good to have a sense of humor about it.”
“I suppose.”
“I just found out about twenty-four hours ago. My boss made me meet him off the grounds of Ft. Meade. He introduced me to Tom and gave me the quick and dirty. I can’t believe it either. I work in signals intelligence. To be completely honest, I spy on the Chinese for a living. Used to be on the Iran team. Now I’m on China. I work in cyber operations. We hack into their computers. They hack into ours. It’s like the cold war all over again but over the Internet. But just like the cold war, there are rules. Over the past couple of weeks though, I’ve noticed a few things that were very unusual. Some of the rules were being broken.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, like this CIA guy that they killed. Tom didn’t tell you what he was looking for. It was part of an op that I was working. Have you ever heard of the CCDI?”
“No.”
“It’s the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection. A Chinese organization that is supposed to root out corruption in their government. A few months ago, it got a new boss. A guy by the name of Jinshan. Cheng Jinshan. Heard of him?”
“Uh, no.”
She laughed. “Sorry, of course you haven’t. Sometimes I forget that everyone doesn’t spend all day studying obscure Chinese businessmen and politicians. Well, this guy Jinshan is well-connected. He’s a very successful entrepreneur, but also was rumored to be tapped into the Chinese cyber warfare units with some of his Internet companies. We knew he was working closely with the government agency that heads up their internet censorship program. Turns out, he’s more than tapped into the government’s cyber warfare. He practically runs China’s cyber warfare. This guy has been interwoven into their operations from the beginning. Anyway, Jinshan is put in charge of the CCDI, a position that is almost always given to a politician. But this time the Chinese President himself picks Jinshan, a businessman. So the Chinese President has been using Jinshan and the CCDI to whittle away at the government’s leadership and shape it the way he wants. It’s Tyrant 101; clean house of all who could oppose you. Well, naturally we started hacking into Jinshan’s files and computers more closely. Turns out he really is a much bigger fish than we thought. He had his hands in everything. He rubs elbows with their highest-ranking military brass and has played golf with several members of their politburo. Some people think he might even be responsible for getting the current Chinese president in office. So we started an operation to monitor him more closely. The CIA agent that was killed was our man on the ground. But I had no idea what he had uncovered until yesterday when Tom read me in.”
David said, “So what does Jinshan have to do with a Chinese attack on the U.S.?”
“I don’t know exactly. I just know that our ground asset had started getting close to people in the CCDI. He began to realize that the whole point of that organization, which is supposed to be about stopping corruption, was now to fill key government leadership roles with people who were handpicked by Jinshan. I told you that before Jinshan got tapped for the CCDI leadership role, we didn’t have too much on him. Well, that isn’t true for the people he was picking to fill different political leadership roles. They are stacking the deck with politicians that are or have been closely aligned to the military or intelligence services. It’s like they’re militarizing all government posts over there. The CIA agent was supposed to get into some secure hard drive that would give us more info on their strategy and end game. That is where he must have gotten the info Tom shared earlier. Someone must have been onto him though… ”
“Shit. This reminds me of the Soviet Union.”
“Well, they are Communists too, you know.”
“Right. So who else at the NSA knows about what Tom told us? About China having a ton of spies in the US, and about the invasion?”
“My boss was working with Tom and some others in the CIA. But at the NSA, it was just my boss and me. We compartmentalize information like crazy. Thank goodness we do. If there really are sleepers in the NSA, we wouldn’t want this to get out. We wouldn’t want them to know that we know. With any luck, we still might be able to get out ahead of this thing.”
Brooke and David talked for another hour. She was a local Maryland girl, had gone to UMBC, and excelled in mathematics and computer science. She had interned at the NSA while in college and worked there for the past 15 years.
Eventually, David politely hinted that he needed a nap. He got the impression that she would talk the entire flight if he let her. But they ended their conversation and David found himself alone looking out the oval window into the vast evening sky.
David kept thinking about his family. He was worried about the short-term and how his wife would react to his being missing. And he was worried about the long term — about how their lives might change if America really was thrust into a war of this scale.
Could this really be true? He kept asking himself that question. It was all just too hard to believe. What was the saying? The simplest explanation was usually correct. The problem in this situation was that there didn’t appear to be any simple explanations.
The answer to the truth question had a significant implication. He had a choice here. David could go or stay. Tom didn’t say that he had a choice, but David could try to escape when they landed if he really felt this wasn’t safe or legitimate.