A Time for War (12 page)

It had taken the terrorist attacks of September 11 to get the intelligence agencies talking to one another with a real sense of cooperation. The nation had benefited from that. It had taken the Golden Gate incident to get Forsyth to talk to Jack Hatfield. Even if this turned out to be nothing, he had a sense that the nation would gain from that relationship, too.

It was a shame, he thought, that it took tragedy rather than a sense of the common good to get people—including himself—to cooperate. But it was definitely the right thing to do. He had to acknowledge that he was the one sticking pins in the doll and no one else.

Fairfield, California

Located nearly 3 miles east of Fairfield, California, 46 miles northeast of San Francisco, Travis Air Force Base encompasses nearly 6,400 acres and is home to the 60th Air Mobility Wing, a major component of the Air Mobility Command. With a workforce of 14,353 military members and civilian employees, it is also home to branch divisions of the Department of Defense, the Department of Homeland Security, and other government agencies.

With over 200 surveillance cameras, 30 radiation detectors, and over 1,000 security personnel, Travis is one of the most physically secure facilities in the United States. But like so much of the United States, an assault on the body was not the gravest threat. Chinese agents had been planning, testing, and executing cyber attacks on American systems for nearly a decade, starting in 2004 when hackers in the Guangdong Province codenamed “Titan Rain” by the FBI retrieved sensitive information from military facilities, NASA, the World Bank, and other institutions. Two years later another Chinese team cyber-invaded the U.S. State Department, which enabled them to access computers in American embassies worldwide. That same year the Bureau of Industry and Security at the Commerce Department had to get rid of all its computers when it was learned the Chinese had compromised them. That did more than inconvenience a government agency: it literally shut Commerce down for over a month.

There were over a dozen other attacks ranging from small targets to large, from the Naval War College in Rhode Island to senatorial offices to the top secret files of Lockheed Martin's highly advanced F-35 fighter program to the already legendary GhostNet assault in 2009, which compromised over 1,200 systems in more than 100 nations.

Now the Chinese were launching a new front with Sammo Yang as their trailblazer. There was a message to be sent to Washington, one that they would hopefully begin to receive and understand when he was finished here.

*   *   *

After escaping the tail, Sammo had intended to reconnoiter along the southern perimeter of Travis Air Force Base, confirming the usability of the attack position he had already selected based on satellite photographs. Then he would have returned to the consulate to stay. It would have required a few hours at most. But an environmental reclamation project unknown to Chinese intelligence had changed the flight paths of all the aircraft taking off from or landing at the air base. Now Sammo needed to find a new position. He was going to have to spend more time in Fairfield than he had planned.

He booked a room near the air base at the Cordelia Respite Inn, using the fake Taiwanese passport he carried. After signing in, he selected a few brochures from a rack, then sat in the lobby and pretended to read them while he assessed whether anyone was likely to pay attention to him, or to anything unusual. There was no doorman. One bellboy was more interested in the girl at the counter than he was in any cars that pulled up outside. Another bellboy stood in a corner chatting with a guest, a soldier. Sammo watched as a car stopped to drop off passengers. The soldier peered out, shook his head, resumed his talk. He was obviously waiting for his family to arrive. Neither bellboy went outside to help the arriving guests.

Perfect,
he thought. None of them felt any need to be observant. His maneuvers would go unnoticed.

Sammo went out to the pool and sat for a while, ostensibly checking e-mails on his cell phone, but actually taking pictures of aircraft. His successful test on the helicopter in Afghanistan had confirmed that the EMP device required a direct line of sight that was no more than two thousand feet away from the target. None of the jets he was currently observing were suitable. They were not flying low enough and they appeared to be commercial flights, which meant the collateral damage would be severe. Beijing was targeting the military, not civilians. He needed a military plane specifically.

He returned to his room and got online to see if the air base organized any visits for civilians. He ran the language translation program on his computer and discovered that there were tours every Thursday for groups of twenty-five to forty people. However, the notices of heightened security protocols meant that it would probably be very difficult for him to wander away from the tour to get to the southern perimeter.

The situation was frustrating. The base had been selected because of the proximity of the southern fences to public properties—easy access. And there were no buildings in the way—direct line of sight.

Sammo tried to access the Federal Aviation Administration website to see what flight lanes were restricted to military use and if any of them were lower than two thousand feet. The FAA information was password protected and he didn't have time to bounce the information back to Beijing.

Instead, he did a general word search of air space restrictions in the larger area of Solano County and found something promising: minutes from a Suisun City Board of Supervisors meeting that referred to a land development problem because the proposed building was in the approach pattern for Travis. It referred to a parcel of land off Highway 12 between Suisun City and Fairfield. Sammo looked up the filing from the developer. He didn't need a translator to recognize the logo of the Mother Hen Toy Company, an international corporation that had started out making chicken hand puppets in a British factory. They were looking for a height exemption to construct a North American distribution center.

“The lowest-flying aircraft will be more than eleven hundred feet above the four-story structure,” said the proposal. “The sound concerns that affect general construction along the corridor will not impact this building, which will only be inhabited by day workers, only a few of whom will be assigned to the automated upper floors.”

A four-story structure would be about sixty feet high. That would put the military aircraft approaching the air base well within range. All Sammo had to do was find a position along the flight corridor from which to operate the EMP device. He was sure there would be multiple suitable locations.

Sammo called the consulate to have a car sent for him. It would take about an hour, during which time he would have lunch in the hotel dining room.

*   *   *

The meal was delicious—he had assumed it would be, in a coastal town—and Sammo savored the taste of the fish, the tang of the capers, the rich crunch of the lettuce. It was useful to have nothing to do, at least for a short while. Not to relax but to acclimate. It was difficult for a foreigner not to stand out physically, far more challenging for him not to call attention to himself behaviorally.

Sammo used this time to observe, mimic, adapt. He watched tourists argue over their maps. Mothers with babies having lunch. The soldier who had been waiting in the lobby, now seated at a table with his family, taking pictures. Loud teenagers who were school age, yet not in school. Sammo adjusted his behavior in several small ways, not least of which was learning how to watch without staring, a mannerism that caught the attention of one or two people, albeit briefly.

The mannerism of a child,
he reflected.

But the single-minded purpose of a child had to be partnered with adult skills. Those were qualities the American agents following Sammo did not possess. He knew the agents would try to find him. He knew how they would try. He knew they would already have begun.

And he knew he would be ready for them.

Sausalito, California

A day after the explosion, Jack still had a dull hum in his ear. In Iraq, IEDs would explode with a
pop
or
crack
. This one had been a
pow
and it had settled somewhere inside his inner ear. He was recovering, but slowly. Jack had to crank up the sound on his cell phone, his computer, and he found himself actually looking at lips when he spoke with people. He used to complain about how noisy the marina was. Never again. When he got back to the boat and walked Eddie, bells that he knew were crisp and sharp sounded like dull gongs. He couldn't even hear some of the more distant gulls.

Back in his workspace, he sat on the stool by his editing computer and shifted his jaw from side to side in a useless effort to clear his ears. Giving up, he put the phone on speaker and called the personal cell phone number Dover Griffith had given him.

“How are you, sir?” she asked with a buoyant flourish.

God,
Jack thought. This deep into the day back east and she was still chipper. Either Dover Griffith was a special human being or they were breeding them differently in her generation. When he was fifteen years younger, Jack was already being described as a curmudgeon—and that was by his friends.

“I'm good,” he said, “except that the FBI doesn't know what killed their tail car. And I believe my guy. He's in a position to know and—well, interviewing people for years, you kind of know when they're telling the truth.”

“Hence the name of your old show,
Truth Tellers.
”

“Right. You have anything?”

“Not really. By the way, I've been watching some of those episodes on YouTube. Or rather, listening to them while I researched this. You didn't take any prisoners.”

“Never. Someone comes on my show with an agenda, wants to attack me, they better be able to defend their position. It's a tactical choice, too. Naysaying is a great way to get windbags to articulate.”

“And it makes good TV,” Dover added quickly. “That wasn't really a criticism, just an observation. I loved the animal rights activists you had on.”

“The one who didn't want eyeliner tested on bunny rabbits?”

“That's the one.”

Jack grinned. The woman, who was in her fifties and twice widowed—once by a suicide—had actually suggested that new makeup formulas be tested on convicts instead of on animals.

“With the added benefit that these guys will look great in the showers,” Jack had replied. His glib response ticked off the woman and PETA but earned him the first positive comments he had ever received from the gay community.

“Enough about me,” Jack said. “Getting back to your ‘Not really'; did you find anything at all?”

“Well, I can't tell you more than this, but over the past two years there has been extensive, direct contact between Richard Hawke and high-ranking officials of the Chinese government.”

“You can't tell me because it's classified?”

“No,” she said. “I can't tell you because we have nothing about those dealings on file. I got that information from
The Economist
and
Forbes,
and that's basically all they said. Though it was interesting,” she added. “One of them openly wondered if the old Squarebeam technology was responsible for inadvertently bringing down that drone spy plane over Iran in December of 2011.”

“Where would you be without the Fourth Estate?” Jack asked. That was no joke. Since 9/11, more than sixty percent of actionable intelligence came from journalists and ordinary citizens. “I suspect there are no files because Hawke has friends at the ONI, the CIA, and everywhere else in D.C.”

“Most people at his level do,” Dover replied.

Jack didn't want to say more in case either of their phones was being monitored; being harassed by the government was not pleasant, especially if they recruited the IRS and local police in the project. He'd known targets who were fined for disturbing the peace every time their dogs barked. But he had seen that kind of relationship before. One way intelligence agencies got personnel in-country was as ride-alongs with business entourages. He had witnessed secret deals with Saudi businessmen to gain access to Libya before the civil war, and pacts with Russian black-market tsars to get agents into Iran. In order to benefit from Hawke's access to China, the Department of Defense would certainly have agreed not to track or interfere with his business activities. It was simply assumed that no American in Hawke's position would do anything treasonous by design or stupidity.

“Did you do that research on your office desktop?” Jack asked.

“Yes,” she said.

“You
do
know that those searches are stored and filtered for keywords, don't you?”

“I do. In fact, I'm counting on it. If my superiors tell me to stop, it means Hawke is under our protection, as you suggest.
That
means he's invisible to us, to the FBI, to the CIA, to Homeland Security, and to everyone else. And that leaves him or his people free to take any potentially unlawful, off-grid actions they want. I hate to think the worst of people, but it comes with the job.”

“The rich and powerful aren't immune to bad political judgment,” Jack said. “Charles Lindbergh was a racist and Nazi sympathizer. Lucille Ball was a registered Communist. So let's assume you're still worried about Squarebeam. What then?”

“I file a report about my concerns. The higher-ups are aware of the dangers of this technology, but they may not realize it could be adapted and abused. Hawke himself may not know.”

Jack felt she was being dangerously naïve. It was also possible the ONI or one of the other agencies had helped to develop the technology and someone fed it to the Chinese for a lot of cash. But maybe innocence was also Dover Griffith's shield. The ONI might not be inclined to dismiss a valued analyst who was simply pursuing a reasonable lead. Not without first firing a shot across her bow.