Tomahawk (31 page)

Finally, he decided that when you put his résumé— which he had better start working on—together with the job market, he got commercial software development. He understood computers. He could manage a team. It sounded boring, but, on the other hand, he'd be making a lot more money.

The phone rang. Burdette yelled, “For you.”

Great, now what? … It was Ms. Toya. “Hi, Shirley. What you need?”

“Remember what you told me about yesterday morning? Before the hearing?”

He strained his brain for a second before remembering: the approach by Mr. Zhang Zurong. “Yeah. What about it?”

“Certain people found it very interesting. So interesting, they're in my office right now. Can you come up and see them?”

Two familiar faces looked up from the settee beside Mrs. Toya's desk. The NIS guy, Pat Bepko. The older agent, from the FBI, Attucks. He hesitated, then sat down with them. Toya said, ‘This is between you and them, Dan,” and excused herself, closing the door.

“Smoke? Coffee?” said Bepko. Dan said no, that he didn't smoke and didn't need coffee. He was getting tenser by the second.

Bepko kicked off. He said he'd taken the call from Toya; had done a little research; had finally called Attucks. “He thought it might be worth looking at while it's
a hot offer. So, if you've got a few minutes”…

Dan said he did, and Attucks pulled a briefcase off the carpet and unsnapped it.

The FBI agent said, “First, let me make sure we have this straight. Shirley says you were the subject of what seemed to you like a recruitment attempt, backed by a— was it a romantic involvement?”

“Not exactly. There was a girl, but no romance.” He explained what he thought was going on, told them that Mei might have given her uncle the impression they'd been intimate, mistakenly or otherwise.

“Well, that may or may not be relevant downstream. It might be helpful to maintain the idea you care for the girl. Or do you?”

“I like her, but I'm engaged to somebody else. At least I think I am. Look, what I'm hearing—Shirley didn't seem to think this was worth getting excited about. She said it was the kind of thing attachés were supposed to do.”

“On the contrary,” said Attucks. “Let me show you a couple of things we've developed. Since we last talked, I mean.”

The last, and actually the only, time they'd talked had been before he left for Canada, at the interview where Attucks and Bepko had told them somebody had left the hull plug out of the Tomahawk program. That had been a waker-upper. But now he had a lot of other things on his mind. He propped his hand under his chin as Attucks extracted a photo from, the briefcase. He handed it to Bepko, and the MS agent slid it over in front of him.

It made him sit up in his chair. A round, heavy-eyebrowed face. No glasses, but it was definitely “Uncle Xinhu.” Only he was in uniform. A high-collared, red-tabbed uniform.

“This looks like an official photograph.”

“It is. This is Col. Zhang Zurong, the defense attaché of the People's Republic of China.”

“His card didn't say anything about him being a colonel. And he used a different name at the party.”

“Probably his nickname. They don't use first names to be casual, the way we do. The first name you hear is the
family name, by the way. But he's military all right. Korean War veteran. He graduated from a Soviet staff college before the split between the Communist powers. We believe he's on detached duty from the Military Intelligence Department of the People's Liberation Army General Staff Department. We call it the Second Department. It would correspond to the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency, or the Soviet MVD.”

“He's a Chinese spy?”

“He's definitely got the connections. Zhang's one of the new breed. Speaks good English. He's doing graduate work at Johns Hopkins School for Advanced International Studies here in Washington.

“We suspect his assignment in the United States is twofold. First, Shirley's right—he does the kinds of things an attaché does no matter whether he's Brazilian or French or whatever: gathering open-source data, making contacts, picking up whatever he can about host-country military capabilities. But we think his covert, and probably higher-priority, mission is to acquire advanced technology that can be adapted for use by the Chinese military.”

Dan studied the picture. Yeah, he'd called it, drunk as he'd been. “So he was actually pitching me.”

“Believe me, this doesn't happen on the spur of the moment.” Attucks explained that the recruitment process had three phases: spotting, assessment, and, finally, the approach. “He didn't see you at that party and decide to hit on you then and there. They researched you thoroughly before they made their move. Your motivators, your weaknesses. Now, they first spotted you probably based on your access to specific data. That's backed up by— Pat?”

“He has a clean clearance,” said Bepko.

“It's backed up by some intercept material from back in November, the data we tracked back to JCM. So you apparently were the source.” Attucks raised his hand. “Save it! We know about your presentation in class. You're in the clear, okay? You've done everything exactly right: act noncommittal, remember the details, and report it immediately. But apparently the girl passed her class notes to Zhang, and now, somehow, they have the
idea they can get a handle on you. Anything been said about your friend being pregnant?”

He goggled. “She can't be. We never—”

“Don't get excited. All I'm saying is, it'd be consistent with the way they've operated before. What was he asking for?”

“Phone books. Personnel information. Oh, and he wanted me to meet a friend of his.”

“Who? Where?”

“Somebody named Li. That's when he gave me his card.”

Attucks nodded. He and Bepko exchanged glances; some message was passed, but he didn't catch what Then Bepko passed over another photo: black and white, grainy. It showed a stubby-bodied airframe with sweptback wings, on the rail of a truck-mounted launcher.

“A Styx?”

“Very good. Actually, it's a Silkworm. The Chinese variant.”

Attucks said, “We're starting too late in the story. First, let me tell you a couple of anecdotes.

“The first took place two years ago. Two Chinese officers, from the consulate in Chicago, were arrested attempting to purchase blueprints and seeker heads for Sidewinder missiles. They made contact with a naturalized citizen who worked for the company that builds the seekers. They met with him on several occasions and discussed what they needed, how much they were willing to pay, and how to manipulate end-user certificates and shipping documentation to forward the missile heads to the People's Republic via Hong Kong. Customs was able to penetrate the conspiracy and arrest both the Chinese and the employee. Just in time—because when they searched his home, he'd already copied most of the blueprints. Who did the consular officials work for? A guy who was at the time third secretary to the PRC mission to the United Nations in New York. A guy named Zhang Zurong.

“The second concerns a U.S. embassy employee in Peking. She was a State Department communications officer. She got involved in a relationship with a male Chinese national. We don't know whether the relationship was
pre-existing, and the Second Department discovered it and decided to exploit it, or if they arranged the entire thing. But they attempted to use it to blackmail the young woman into spying. Fortunately, she reported the recruitment effort to embassy security, and she was recalled.”

Attucks cocked his head. “Now, bearing those cases in mind, we have your call come in. And we ask ourselves, Is there a smarter way to proceed than just telling this young officer he's done the right thing by reporting this contact, and letting Zhang run on until he finds somebody he can develop as an agent in place?”

Dan said, “And you think now he wants Tomahawk?”

“Not exactly,” said Attucks. “Pat?”

Bepko took back the Silkworm photo and laid out a list. Dan studied it. It showed the ranges and guidance systems of ten East Bloc missile systems. The right-hand column was in U.S. dollars. It was headed “Quoted price.”

“Recently the Chinese have stepped up their attempts to sell military hardware to foreign countries—South Africa, Libya, North Korea, Pakistan, Iraq. The biggest handicap they have is that their gear isn't that advanced. It's inexpensive, but it's just not comparable to current NATO equipment, and it lags behind the Soviet export stuff, too.

“To get significant sales, they need to upgrade their technology. We think the Second Department is getting directly tasked by the People's Liberation Army with information objectives in support of their weapons-export program. We suspect that may have at least partially motivated the attempt on Sidewinder, along with the PLA Air Force's own desire for the missile. But this effort, the one that zeroed in on you when you made that presentation in the presence of your girlfriend—”

“She's not my girlfriend.”

“Of your classmate, then. Our interpretation is that this effort is export-driven. Correct me if I'm wrong, but what's really special about Tomahawk isn't the missile. It isn't the engine. Is it?”

‘That's what helps make it so small.” But Attucks didn't go on, and Dan completed the thought cm his own. “They want the guidance system,” he said.

“That's our conclusion, too. Equipment that can navigate it a thousand miles, no matter what the weather, and fly it through the front door of a hangar.

“Look at Silkworm again: a dependable, big, relatively long-range cruise missile. They've got hundreds of them, if not thousands. But both Silkworm and Styx are inaccurate as hell. And so stupid, they're easy to decoy or jam away from a live target.

“But what if they could put a terrain-matching guidance in the nose? Even if they used a relatively heavy analog scene-matching correlator for the final approach— hell, the damn missile could carry it—it would end-around the ballistic missile nonproliferation regime. It'd give countries like North Korea and Iraq a means of nuclear delivery, or precision nonnuclear delivery, close to the best we have.”

“I get the idea,” said Dan.

“And we think you should give it to them,” Bepko said.

He started to say, “Well, sure,” but he didn't see a smile. “Are you serious?”

“Only half,” said Attucks. He ran a hand over his suit. “Okay if I smoke?” Dan shrugged. The FBI man lit a Marlboro. Bepko lit up, too.

Attucks said, “Can you stand being exposed to a little bit of bureaucratic politics?”

“I'm developing a tolerance.”

“The problem we're facing is threefold. We have thousands of Chinese students, resident aliens, and immigrants in this country. Most of them are clean. But there's a steadily increasing effort by the PRC intelligence agencies. We've sent that message up the chain, but nobody in the administration seems to take it seriously. Somebody, maybe the trade people, blocks it at some point. It's almost an annoyance when you go up to them and say that here we have people doing so and so, which is a clear violation of law and sovereignty. We don't have the language capabilities, we don't have the organizational focus, and most people still think of them as friendly, or at least harmless.

“So we need to send a signal. One, to the Chinese: We
are not a soft target. Two, to the upper levels in our own government: We have a real problem here.

“We'd like to use Colonel Zhang to send that signal. Customs elicited his involvement in the Sidewinder case, but we weren't able to tie him to it convincingly enough to get the UN to take action. This time, we want him and anyone else who's spying out of the embassy. We want you to go back and say, ‘I've thought about it, and I could use some cash. Here's your phone book; what else can I get you?' My instinct is he'll go straight for TERCOM.”

“And then?”

“Then you give it to him,” said Bepko.

“No way,” said Dan.

“Or something that looks like it,” said Attucks. “We can put together a package that looks convincing. So convincing that we hope they'll launch a reverse-engineering effort. But that effort will actually lead them down a dead end.”

“You're not going to feed them some Rube Goldberg approach. They'll see right through it.”

“Well, we've got our people looking into it…. But if it turns out you're right, then we cut our losses and arrest the guy at the turnover. But to bottom-line it, we'd like you to go back to Zhang. I'll be straight up: We can't pay you anything. There might even be some risk. The one thing that would have to motivate you would be an old-fashioned value known as patriotism.”

“So you're actually asking me to be like a double agent.”

“Your government would very much appreciate your help on this,” said Attucks quietly.

“Well, there's something you ought to know.”

He told them about his resignation letter, the possibility he might be moving to California or Seattle. He concluded, “I don't know how long it'll take to process. Probably not long. And I'll be out. So, I wish you luck, but maybe we better not plan on my being part of this.”

The NIS agent said, “Jesus, that's a fork in the toaster all right. Are you telling me there's some kind of loyalty issue here?”

“Loyalty?” He felt angry. “You can still be loyal to the
United States and not want to work on weapons. Can't you?” Bepko looked doubtful, so he kept talking. “How about this. He asked me at one point if there were any ethnic Chinese in the program. I didn't tell him this, but there's one, a techie over in the Advanced Systems shop. I forget his name—Hung, or Yung, something like that. Air Force.”

“The trouble is, then we got to dangle him out there.” Attucks mused over it. “But if you're saying count you out—”