Razing Beijing: A Thriller (66 page)

After Ciccone had radioed in the New York State license
plate number, along with a description of the two men and the car, the
dispatcher reported back that the owner and vehicle were clean. The Buick Lucerne
was registered to one Mohammad Rahmani, an employee of Security Solutions in
Paterson, New Jersey, and a Brooklyn resident with no prior arrest record.

Ciccone climbed out of the squad car. Seeing the police
officer approach had the effect of speeding the men’s efforts to replace the
rear tire. Each was dressed in shirt and tie; professionals, Ciccone saw. Off
to the side of the lane was the damaged wheel with the worn-out tire flattened
and shredded around the rim. He wondered about the delay just to replace a flat
tire.

The mustachioed and more muscular of the two stood and
identified himself simply as ‘Rahmani.’ The man was very apologetic. “We are
sorry for all the trouble, officer,” said Rahmani, his accent thick. He
nervously explained that their problem developed as they traveled in the
left-hand lane where there was no place to stop.

Ciccone acknowledged the difficulty in crossing four lanes
of cranky Midtown commuters with a crippled car. He also noted that the Buick
was partially blocking the right-hand lane—the men had done a singularly sloppy
job of getting the car and themselves clear of traffic. That probably explained
why Rahmani seemed a little on edge. Nerves would get frazzled merely trying to
avoid being struck by passing vehicles, whose drivers—despite the presence of a
police uniform and flashing strobes—blasted their horns while waiting to merge
into the flow, and finally gunned their engines testily to escape the snarl of
traffic.

Officer Ciccone walked to the rear of the car and inspected
the open trunk; it was empty. There was a cell phone laying on the front
passenger seat and a briefcase on the floor. He watched the man’s companion
kneeling to torque the lug nuts with a speed wrench. The job looked nearly
complete.

Ciccone cast an annoyed glance at the traffic crawling by. In
doing so he more fully understood Rahmani’s jitters. A stream of scowls and
obscene gestures were being hurled from passing motorists toward the
olive-skinned men.

Ciccone said to the owner of the car, “They’ve called in a
tow truck.” He nodded toward the other man’s grease-smeared hands fumbling to
tighten the wrench before lowering the wheel to the ground. “Looks to me like
you’re not going to need one.”

Rahmani smiled sheepishly. “In fact, we are going to need
the assistance. I am afraid our spare tire has not any air.”

TOSSING BACK
the
last of his whiskey, Stuart reclined his business-class seat aboard the United
Airlines 777-200 IGW, outbound Chicago for Tokyo. The cabin lighting was dimmed
to encourage sleep, something he realized for him was unlikely to come.

Minutes ticked slowly into the twelve-hour flight. Stuart
frequently glanced from his newspaper to gaze out the window. Individual lights
around the cabin began to go out. After awhile a flight attendant stooped over
and, flashing friendly green eyes, she asked if he would like another Maker’s
Mark.

“Port, if you have any,” Stuart replied.

The well-traveled passport inside his coat pocket displayed
his own photograph and the name of Randolph Pedersen, a Cleveland businessman
for whom, McBurney assured him, there existed a sufficiently verifiable
background. Pedersen was traveling to Tokyo with the hope of rubbing elbows
with attendees of the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation forum, hosted this year
by the Japanese Ministry of Trade. At least there would be no tedious
hobnobbing with international trade representatives. If not without elements of
uncertainty, Stuart’s—Pedersen’s—task should be relatively straightforward. To
hear McBurney describe it, what was expected of him amounted to nothing more
than enlightening discourse between two mutually respected acquaintances.

The flight attendant returned with Stuart’s port and a
small porcelain bowl of mixed nuts.

McBurney was insistent on one point, that their being
discovered and apprehended could not be permitted to happen. An advance
entourage of operatives even now were assessing the layout of the Japanese Diet
and working to determine at which of the neighboring hotels the Beijing
delegation would be staying, dining, and socializing. The operation would be
choreographed every step of the way, each minute planned in advance and then
monitored, deviations taken into account and adjustments made going forward. At
least, this is what McBurney had tried to assure him.

As someone who had always prided himself on being open and
direct, he simply disliked the air of coercion underlying the whole slick
affair. How was Deng Zhen going to react to such a revelation, delivered by a
virtual stranger? Who was
he
to drop a personal bomb for the purpose of
manipulating the man? And how could they be sure he wouldn’t be noticed in the
process? Stuart could only hope that the CIA had considered such things. McBurney’s
plan was logical, even intriguing when viewed from afar. As one of the players,
it was easy to find reasons that made it unlikely to work—one exception being
that it should easily dovetail into
his
plan. Stuart assumed that, when
the time came, he would figure out how to secure his privacy with Deng...

Again he had come full circle, as he had every time that he
thought the thing through. Staring down at the scattered lights of British
Columbia glistening through the wispy layer of clouds, Stuart drifted off to
sleep.

Tuesday, July 7

9:37 P.M. Beijing, China

THE INCOMING SHIFT
at
Beijing Security Center settled into their posts behind their terminals. The
two outgoing Defense Intelligence communications specialists had reported
monitoring only spurious transmissions from a joint US-ROK naval exercise in
its second day off the coast of Inch’on. There had been chatter of Chilean
military aircraft coordinating recovery after a crash in the Andes. Nothing to
disrupt the normal routine.

Routine would not be the watchword for the departing shift
officers heading down the corridor, ostensibly to leave for the night. Recently
promoted and the envy of their command, the two men left the terminal area with
their heads held high and purpose to their stride. Tonight the customary
cigarette that capped the end of their monotonous work would have to wait. The
People’s Liberation Army lieutenant accompanied his next-in-command into the
basement-level elevator. Checking that the corridor behind them was empty, he
depressed the button not to ascend two stories to Iron Lion Lane, but up the
additional four to the recently renovated floor atop the building.

The top floor was in fact off-limits to all personnel. The
ground floor security guard would fastidiously record the two men’s failure to
depart the building at the regular time, were it not for his sudden
reassignment to Tianjin. The reassigned guard’s replacement was a bright,
ideological woman in her mid-twenties who, like her two PLA colleagues, was
also recently promoted. The pneumatic groan announced the elevator’s burdensome
rise and the young woman watched the annunciator digits above the elevator
doors. She tracked the car’s progress past the lobby and all the way to the top
floor. Then, she dutifully noted the time and logged the officers’ departure
from the building.

The two young men exited the elevator and stepped to the
security door that led into the new facility. The lieutenant glanced around the
alcove as his subordinate keyed in the password. The floor was still bare
concrete; the air smelled of fresh plaster and paint. An overhead surveillance
system would soon be installed. Along with storage closets and a small,
unfinished kitchen for extended duty, the facility occupied the building’s
entire uppermost floor. Encasing the facility on all sides was the security
‘moat,’ a two-meter void between false walls that contained multiple layers of
metallic sheathing and white noise interference equipment.

The air inside was alive with the malignant buzz of
electronic instrumentation. Red and blue panel diodes cast a dim glow of idle
readiness until one of the men hit the breaker for the overhead lights. The
procedure was familiar to both men. Little conversation was necessary as they
assumed their positions behind separate terminals. The junior officer typed a
series of start-up commands into his keyboard to activate the ground-site
operating system.

Several minutes later, a video monitor snapped to life and
verified satellite acquisition—an embedded program automatically conducted a
satellite systems control interrogation, a simulated command sequence that
verified all ground and orbiting systems were properly operating and ready for
inputs.

The security protocol to prevent unauthorized use involved
two thresholds; Lieutenant Bo had the necessary clearance to perform them. The
first was an authentication step for arming the system, the second for fire
control. The satellite weapon communications module was actually programmed
with a common link encryption algorithm, selected by the Chinese engineers for
both its robust reliability and their interest in holding to schedule. This
modest vulnerability was mitigated by their selection of an 80-bit encryption
key, requiring up to 20 billion
billion
computational tests by anyone
attempting a brute-force search to replicate it. When authentication from the
ground carried the duplicate key, the satellite’s on-board targeting and fire
command modules were activated; the system became armed. In practice, the
authentication sequence was virtually impossible to decrypt, guaranteeing that
the Beijing ground site was the only facility capable of arming the weapon.

This first threshold, then, the lieutenant achieved by
typing in several simple commands. What the weapon system required next were
the targeting instructions.

Lieutenant Bo removed a sealed envelope from inside his
coat and tore it open. Reading from the single sheet of paper inside he began
entering the firing instructions to be up-linked by ground computer. These
designated the terrestrial target’s global position coordinates as well as
approximate volumetric and compositional data. The instructions would be used
during Phase I of the attack by directing the satellite to acquire the target
with an initializing raster-scan. Phase II of the attack required no additional
instructions; even at the speed of light, the time-of-flight required to transmit
trillions of bits of data required that these be ‘hard-wired’ into the
microprocessors aboard the satellite.

But transmitting the firing instructions required that the
final security threshold be met. The format was somewhat conventional. The young
officers acknowledged their readiness, left their terminals and walked to
opposite ends of the long bank of instruments. Each removed a key from around
his neck and inserted it into a lock on identical security consoles designed
for the purpose. Lieutenant Bo reaffirmed the twelve-digit authentication
password and, seeing that his partner was ready, began the countdown sequence: “Three,
two, one,
now
”—each officer rotated his key ninety degrees.

Through one of China’s three geostationary data and relay
communications satellites, the ground computer up-linked the firing
instructions in a sixty-microsecond digital burst to the orbiting leviathan. A
low-pitched hum sounded; columns of characters appeared on the video monitor
with the announcement, “SYSTEM FULLY CHARGED—TARGET ACQUISITION SOLUTION ONE-HOUR
FORTY-EIGHT MINUTES TWENTY-EIGHT SECONDS.” A digital counter at the top of the
screen updated each second.

Less than an hour after entering the People’s Defense
Satellite Center, the officers climbed into Lieutenant Bo’s glistening
Mercedes-Benz S-Class, where they finally took the time to light up their
cigarettes. It was not as though there was any real stress involved in
destroying an unknown target; naturally, the men were curious to know the
objective of tonight’s GPS coordinates. Were it not for snippets of Xinhua news
reporting, they might never have learned that their first attack had targeted a
pair of enemy navy vessels. For now, dusk was yielding to a crisp star-lit sky
and they were eager to get home to their wives.

MCBURNEY AND THE REST OF
his jet-lagged contingent had staggered their arrivals to the lobby of the
Okura Hotel; two of his staff were scheduled to arrive later that evening on a
flight connecting through Brussels. Robert Stuart, a.k.a. Randolph Pedersen of
Cleveland, checked in several blocks away at the Capitol Tokyu where the
Chinese trade delegation was staying. McBurney’s parting instructions to Stuart
were dine in your room, sleep alone, don’t answer the phone or a knock at the
door unless you’re expecting it. We’ll page you if we need you, otherwise stay
put and try to relax.

His team had agreed to convene for a planning session at
ten o’clock over a late evening meal. McBurney meanwhile flopped onto the bed
in his hotel room for a few hours sleep. Falling victim to the insomnia of jet
lag, he realized it wasn’t to be. “I can sleep all I want when I’m dead,” he
muttered aloud in frustration.

McBurney turned the light on over the room’s desk and began
perusing the information prepared for him by the embassy staff. He flipped
through routine operations stuff until he came to the section summarizing the
APEC activities. There he found individual profiles of the Chinese delegation,
which he took time to browse. Most of it seemed to be information routinely
compiled and disseminated by the State Department for the edification of trade
representatives on hand for the summit. He tossed the folder aside.