Xichang had been designed to put geosynchronous satellites into orbit, hardware that would remain in place over specific regions of China. A network of geosynchronous stations would create a relay system, making telecommunications and wireless technology available to all of the vast nation. Begun in 1978 and completed six years later, Xichang was built in the heart of an area populated with small farms. The facility was inaugurated inauspiciously with the disastrous launch of a satellite whose third stage failed to ignite. Several years of successful launches followed until the powerful Long March 2E booster exploded on takeoff in 1995. The debris killed six farmers and injured twenty-three others who were going about their business five miles downrange. The following year, a Long March 3B crashed in a hill just a mile from the launch pad, killing six and injuring fifty-seven. As recently as one year ago a powerful new Star Dragon 5 exploded upon liftoff, killing twelve technicians and destroying the pad. Very few of the local citizens relocated. They made too much money selling food, clothes, and other goods to the men stationed at the space center.
The failure of the Star Dragon 5 was one reason Beijing had invited international participation in the creation of the hardware. The old boosters were based on Russian designs. They were brutish rockets that could lift heavy payloads but had little finesse and sophistication. A great deal of time and money had gone into the reconstruction of the base. It was important that the hardware function properly. It was just as important that the invited dignitaries see the start of a successful new era in Chinese space activities. One way that Beijing hoped to raise money for future endeavors was by using their rockets to boost foreign payloads into space.
They could not afford a failure.
Mike Rodgers was very much aware of that. He was also aware of the fact that over four hundred people were going to be in the launch area, including five Americans. He did not want to see any of them vaporized. For that matter, an explosion would not do him any good. He was well within the fallout zone if the plutonium power source were attacked.
Rodgers had taken a commercial flight from Beijing to the Xichang Airport. He managed to sleep during the three-hour-plus flight. Studying maps and white papers was a key part of mission preparation. So was being rested. Since he would be on the outside, with the data available on his laptop, he opted for sleep.
The airport was small but modern. Rodgers took a taxi to the nearby Satellite Hotel which, as the name suggested, had been built primarily for visitors to the space center. He rented a car at the hotel, a reservation that had been made through the prime minister’s office. Foreigners were not generally permitted to drive through the securityconscious area. He tucked himself into the compact cherry-red Xiali Bullet, one of the new generation of Chinese cars intended for domestic and international sales. Its pickup reminded him of one of the rickshaws that wove in and out of the streets of Beijing. Slow to build, once it reached the required speed, it hummed along nicely. Not that it mattered. Though a new freeway was being built through the region, it was not yet completed. Most of the hour-long drive took place on dirt roads, which cars had to share with bicycles and horses as well as herds of sheep and cows. At one point Rodgers had to wait for nearly twenty minutes while a bus driver and a woman argued in the middle of the road. From what he could gather based on the position of their vehicles, the woman’s scooter had tried to pass the bus and ended up in a ditch. Every now and then she slapped the hood of the bus angrily, which was a greater insult than if she had struck the man. It was not the driver himself who had offended her but his ability. That was the equivalent of insulting his manhood.
The conflict ended when the bus driver simply drove off, leaving the woman shouting and cursing at his thick black exhaust.
After clearing that impediment, Rodgers checked in with the marines. They had gone ahead on the shuttle bus operated by the space center. They had flown in earlier with other specialists from Beijing. Throughout the mission the marines were going to stay in touch via text alert. These were similar to cell phone text messages. The difference was that they were transmitted via wristwatch, as a crawling document. The wearer spoke his or her message, a chip in the watch transcribed it to text, and it was sent to every other wristwatch receiver in the network. The DoD was working on a heads-up display for eyeglasses, which would also display graphics images visible only to the wearer. Tiny but powerful antennae in the hinges would allow the wearer to intercept wireless data sent between stations. Rodgers’s firm was bidding on the contract to develop the lens technology. By connecting to an international number, Rodgers’s cell phone would be able to receive all the messages. His capacity to send was limited to text messages or sending a single tone to each of them. The watches would vibrate, and they would call him on their own cell phones. It was not a secure means of communication, but it might be the only one available to them in an emergency.
For now, all Rodgers needed to know was that they had gotten to the complex. He sent a tone. They were to respond by pushing their watch stem once. The numbers one through four would show up on Rodgers’s cell phone, depending upon who had received. All four responded.
Not long after that, Rodgers received a call from Hood. The former director of Op-Center explained to his former number two what had happened in Zhuhai. Rodgers was surprised. He was also concerned.
“Do we know if our prime suspect blew himself up or was blown up?” Rodgers asked.
“I just got off the phone with Stephen Viens,” Hood told him. “He said a routine satellite sweep of the region picked up the blast. He’s having the photo analyzed now, but it looked like the explosion may have started with a fire under the aircraft. There was a tanker on the field, and the plane had apparently just been refueled.”
“When did it land?”
“NORAD told Viens it was on the ground less than twenty minutes,” Hood told him.
Since the homeland attacks of 2001, NORAD had been linked to every air traffic control system in the United States and, through relays and hacks, to virtually every ATCS in the world. If a plane diverged from its reported flight path for more than ten seconds, the United States Air Force went on intercept alert. That meant fighters were scrambled at once if the aircraft were over American airspace. If they were over foreign airspace, the information was immediately relayed to domestic and allied intelligence services. Flags had not been raised by Chou Shin’s flight. But there was still a radar record of the trip from Beijing to Zhuhai.
“Chou Shin lands, does not get off the plane, and dies in the explosion twenty minutes later,” said Rodgers. “If it wasn’t a setup, it sounds as if Tam Li was willing to seize the moment. Neither man could simply eliminate the other without alienating their supporters in Beijing.”
“It doesn’t make sense, though,” Hood said. “There will be an investigation. Interviews with eyewitnesses. If this was an assassination, Beijing will find out.”
“Yes, if this is just an assassination,” Rodgers said. “Obviously, this was something the general thought he could get away with. Why?”
“Because he expects the political situation in Beijing to be changing soon?” Hood speculated.
“That would be my guess,” Rodgers said. He stopped while a herd of cattle crossed a muddy stretch of road. “We may have been looking at the wrong guy as a potential Xichang bomber.”