The Ascendant: A Thriller (43 page)

C
aptain Leo Peterson checked the ACARS message that had just appeared on the MCDU, or management control display unit, of the Boeing 777 wide-body aircraft he was piloting. The early-morning sun was blasting through the right-hand cockpit window; they were high above the clouds that were scattered over the Sea of Japan. Captain Peterson flipped up his sunglasses and read the message. ACARS stood for aircraft communications addressing and reporting system; it was an airliner’s equivalent of e-mail, and every commercial jet around the world sent and received them.

The message simply said: 15C24A.

The 15C24 stood for nothing. Only the last letter was meaningful. It was a prearranged code, sent from a United Airlines maintenance control center in Chicago, and Captain Peterson had expected it, and knew how to decipher it. It was simple, really. A last letter of “B” meant:
Do not do it
.
Cancel the operation.
But a last letter of “A” meant:
Go.

He deleted the ACARS message, turned to his copilot, a Kentucky boy named Deakins, two years out of the Air Force, and nodded. They didn’t want any verbal commands to register on the plane’s cockpit voice recorder. A simple movement of the head would do. Deakins put his left hand on the engine thrust control, and dialed it back to zero. In moments, the plane’s right engine—a Pratt & Whitney PW4000—sputtered and went silent. The plane shook as the airflow over the wing was disrupted.

Deakins adjusted the rudder trim to stabilize the plane, then upped the power in the left engine, exactly as procedure dictated in the event of an engine loss, while Captain Peterson punched in the radio code for an emergency—121.5 MHz, the international emergency frequency for any plane in distress.

“Captain,” Deakins said in his Kentucky drawl, “we have lost power in our right engine. I believe it is an engine fire.”

He was talking only for the benefit of the cockpit recorder.

Captain Peterson worked up as much panic as he could in his voice, then yelled into the microphone: “Mayday, mayday, mayday. This is United heavy 895, we are reporting right-engine fire and cabin smoke. Repeat, United heavy 895, engine fire and cabin smoke. We are declaring an emergency, need immediate runway clearance. Nearest airport.”

He repeated himself two more times, then throttled back on the left engine and aimed the plane down.

Toward North Korea.

S
oo Park had been a North Korean radar operator for ten years. He knew the country’s radar profile by heart, could identify every friendly and hostile plane skirting North Korea’s airspace in his sleep. But two months ago he’d asked for a transfer to the main air traffic controller’s desk at the Sunan International Airport outside of Pyongyang. It was closer to his tiny apartment on the south side of the North Korean capital, the job carried a touch more prestige, and Soo Park was trying to find a bride. He needed all the prestige he could muster.

He claimed he spoke excellent English—a must for an air traffic controller—and had even passed the state’s rudimentary English test. But in truth he’d cheated on the English test, promising a bottle of Canadian whisky to a friend of his who’d learned English while working as a diplomat at the embassy in Beijing. His friend had taken the test for him, aced it, and Soo Park had landed the job.

Only now Soo Park wished he hadn’t. The truth was, Soo Park was quite a few levels below fluency. He could read an English-language book with a dictionary in his lap, but deciphering the spoken language was another task entirely. He strained to listen as the American pilot—Soo Park knew he was American because he’d tracked the flight a hundred times before, a Hong Kong–bound United 777—squawked into the radio again, his voice surrounded by a blast of static. He understood less than half the words: “. . . engine fire . . . emergency landing . . . runway . . .” That was about it. Had the pilot said he was making an emergency landing here?
In Pyongyang?
That was impossible. Completely out of the question . . .

Park’s phone was ringing. It was the North Sector Radar Team, the team he used to be a part of. Yes, he answered, he had heard the distress call. And yes, he thought the American jetliner was headed for Pyongyang. Well, might be. He wasn’t sure.

Yes, yes, he knew that could not happen. Absolutely could not.

The military called next, before Soo Park had a chance to catch his breath. They were scrambling four MiG-21s to intercept the plane. Soo Park was ordered to tell the 777 not to land here, no matter what the emergency. Yes, he would do that. Right away.

Soo Park hung up the phone and picked up his radio. “United 8-9-5! Do not land! Do not land Pyongyang. Must not land Pyongyang!”

The American captain came back on the radio immediately. “Negative, Pyongyang. We are experiencing thick cabin smoke. Must land Pyongyang. This is a mayday. Mayday situation. Please open FNJ runway 35 Right.”

“No, no, no!” Soo Park yelled. “Cannot do this! Must not! Must not!”

“We have 277 souls on board this aircraft. We need to get on the ground right away. It is imperative.”

Soo Park latched on to one word he understood. “Seoul! Yes. You go Seoul! Very close. You go Seoul!”

“No sir, souls. People. Two hundred seventy-seven. All will die if we do not land at Sunan International, FNJ. We are four minutes from wheels down, coming in hard. Please have emergency personnel on hand. We may have injuries.”

Now all three phones were ringing in the cramped air traffic control room. Soo Park picked them up one after the other. First was radar, screaming, second was the military, third was the Central Party boss for the southern airport sector. Everyone was saying the same thing—tell that American plane to go somewhere else!

“I have tried,” Soo Park pleaded with each of them in turn. “They say they have an engine fire and a fire in the cockpit. They will not turn around. I told them, but they will not listen.”

Each of the callers hung up, furious and panicked in turn. Soo Park threw down his radio headset, shoved open the door to the air traffic control room, and ran up the two flights of dingy stairs to the main deck of the airport control tower. There, hovering over the ancient command and control radios that passed for ground-to-plane radar in North Korea, two of his fellow air traffic
controllers stood wide-eyed and horrified at the broad window that gave them a view of Sunan International’s main runway, 35 Right.

In the distance, barely visible, was a 777, coming in low and fast, followed tightly by a squadron of North Korean People’s Air Force fighters. A thin trail of white smoke seemed to be billowing from the nose of the plane.

It was coming in for a landing. Right square in the middle of
his
airport.

G
arrett watched the news feed as it appeared on the AP wire. First reports were in: United wide-body jet forced to make emergency landing, Pyongyang, North Korea. All passengers reported safe. No injuries.

Garrett let out a long, relieved breath. There had been a very real possibility the North Korean Air Force would shoot the plane down before it could land. Garrett figured they wouldn’t, that they’d pull back at the last second, but he couldn’t completely dismiss the risk, so they had stocked half the plane with ex-military officers, State Department contractors, and federal volunteers, all with cover stories.

Garrett scrolled quickly through the falsified passenger manifest, checking the names and their purported places of residence. He signed off on it, then forwarded it to Patmore. He waved the Marine lieutenant over.

“Call everyone on your media list, starting at the top: the
New York Times
,
Washington Post
, CNN. Blanket coverage,” he said. “You are an airline employee, and you are leaking the passenger manifest. Then hang up.”

“Yes sir,” Patmore answered.

Garrett’s eyes scanned the news screens on his computer terminals. Sites were picking up the AP release. The story would top the news cycle for the next twenty-four hours, until the next explosion of news would bump it from that perch. But twenty-four hours was plenty of time for Garrett’s purposes. Asian stock markets were all open now; news of the plane incident would begin to reach traders in about ten minutes. Uncertainty was poison to an exchange;
volatility would start to climb. It would be off the charts in a few hours. And that was just the beginning.

Garrett walked out of the darkened computer room and into the meat locker. The room was cold. It smelled faintly of old food. Garrett stood over the paralleled computers that Mitty and Bingo had set up, the ones with the Russian shell intrusion software on it. They were humming quietly. He plugged an ethernet cable into a port in the back of one of the machines. It was connected to the Web now. Whatever it had on its hard drive was milliseconds away from being loosed on the world. That would be step two.

He executed the program and waited for the show to start.

X
u Jin, director of the Ministry of State Security, was having trouble understanding the news. An American commercial jetliner had made an emergency landing in Pyongyang? That was the closest airport? Couldn’t they have flown the extra hundred miles to Seoul? By landing in North Korea they had placed themselves squarely in an international incident. Had the pilot no sense at all? What a fool. And what a headache for the Chinese. Already the American ambassador had called twice to demand Chinese intervention with the North Korean government.

As if we control those lunatics in Pyongyang! Xu Jin scowled and lit a Zhonghua cigarette, the most expensive brand in China. They were a hundred dollars a carton. Not that Xu Jin ever bought his own cigarettes: they were given, as were a constant stream of gifts, by groveling supplicants and party underlings. As the old saying went: The people who buy Zhonghua don’t smoke it, and the people who smoke Zhonghua don’t buy it.

The phone rang. It had been ringing since Xu Jin had walked into his office an hour ago.

“Yes?” he barked, irritated.

“Director Xu, we have a problem.” It was one of the functionaries in the Internet Subdivision. His name was Yuan Gao. Or something like that. Their offices were in a warehouse in Beijing’s Haidian district, mixed in among the university students and IT workers. The place smelled of sweat and fried pork. Xu Jin avoided the computer techs whenever possible.

“What is it? You know I have other things to deal with.”

“Yes, Director Xu, I know this. But there is a problem with Golden Shield.”

Xu Jin exhaled a great ball of gray cigarette smoke and growled. There was always a problem with Golden Shield, the censorship wall that the ministry had erected around all of China’s incoming and outgoing Internet traffic: the wall was porous; the computer servers were down; there was a virus, and it was malicious; the virus was from inside China—no, it was foreign, from Russia, or the U.S. It was constant din, and Xu Jin understood almost none of it.

Every time they tried to tighten the specifications of Golden Shield, making it harder for Chinese citizens to access subversive or antigovernment information, another crack appeared in the wall someplace else. There were too many hackers with time on their hands—like that greasy moron Gong Zhen—always sticking their adolescent fingers where they didn’t belong, usually into the gears of the Chinese government. Although, Xu Jin had to admit, Gong Zhen and his hacking team had done a masterful job with the American power-plant virus. That had succeeded beyond his wildest expectations.

“So,” Xu Jin growled. “What is the problem?”

“A worm has slipped through the wall,” the Internet functionary bleated.

“There is always a worm or a virus,” Xu Jin interrupted. “Just fix it. Deal with it. I have an incident in North Korea to deal with.”

“That’s just it, Director Xu. I cannot fix it.”

Xu Jin stubbed out his cigarette in the Italian marble ashtray on his desk. “Why can’t you fix it? And why should I care?”

“I can’t fix it because it is too widespread.”

Xu Jin narrowed his eyes in frustration; this was how it always went with the Internet toads. Everything was “beyond their control,” “too complicated,” “of major importance”: as if the Internet were the only thing that mattered in the world. What about reality? What about people walking the streets? Cars, or birds, or airplanes—airplanes that for some idiotic reason landed in the middle of North Korea?

“Explain,” Xu Jin said, lighting another cigarette. It was a multicigarette morning. “And fast.”

“Malicious computer code has breached the firewall. Many users downloaded it. It was attached to a video of, well, sir, one of your speeches. The one you gave at the conference in Hong Kong last fall. About Internet safety.”

Xu Jin blanched. Was this somebody’s idea of a bad practical joke? He would personally find that person and destroy them: ruin their reputation,
have them fired, kicked out of school, have their head separated from their puny body. Xu Jin didn’t care. This was beyond what was acceptable.

“Who did it?”

“We think it came from America. Or Europe. We can’t be sure yet.”

“Well, find it, destroy it, make it better.”

“That’s the problem, Director Xu. We cannot. The worm has taken over computers inside the firewall. Thousands of computers. Maybe millions. We don’t know for sure.”

“Taken them over to do what?”

“It turned them into zombie machines. It made them attack our servers. Golden Shield’s servers. Wave upon wave of attacks. It has shut them down.”

Xu Jin held his breath. His office, with its broad windows looking out onto the courtyard of the party headquarters in Zhongnanhai, in central Beijing, was silent. A battery-powered clock with a picture of Mao on its face ticked from the desk. A wisp of smoke from his newly lit cigarette curled toward the ceiling. Xu Jin breathed again.