The Mandarin Club (40 page)

Rachel, her routine shattered, sat regarding it all. Her hip was vibrating, the Blackberry gone mad again, with the zapping of yet another someone trying to reach her. Her phone lights were flashing. Her voice mail light was illuminated, with a red indicator on: it was full. The computer was beeping, hailing incoming e-mail behind her. Outside, below a cerulean sky, a jackhammer was pounding staccato-like on F Street.

She walked slowly to her door and closed it. Then she sat back at her desk and began, for the first time since April, to cry, the salty tears flowing freely. She wanted to let go with one great wail. She could not find the voice to call out, however—not here, not now.

How have I come to this place
? She wondered at it all, at the long journey from her Wyoming childhood. The work started out as a challenge, a cause to pursue, an intellectual frontier to conquer, a climb up the economic ladder. Too soon, the career became its own end. Then, as if in the third step of grieving, the job became a definition of self. You
were
your job. It defined you—she realized now—especially in this city where status and access meant everything. Your vocation became your entire identity. You clung to it, terrified of the day when they would have to pry the desk from your desperate hands.

She had seen it. She had seen the utter defeat on the faces of aging TPB officers—the ones let go quietly after lunch on Fridays. Their building access keys were seized. Their computer network passwords were suddenly denied. Some escort from Personnel loomed close by to practically frog walk them off the premises.

She struggled in vain to rally, to climb beyond the chaos breaking all about her, to make sense of the world events and to figure out her proper role in them. There was a knock at her door; then her secretary’s head appeared.

“Oh, there you are, Rachel,” she said, relieved. “It’s Alexander Bonner. He’s holding on line one. Say, are you feeling OK?”

“Sure,” Rachel said, “thanks, I’m just kind of spaced out again today, I’m afraid.”

“You need some coffee or something?”

“Maybe something stronger.”

Rachel stared a moment longer, even after the door was closed, then found Alexander on her private line.

“So, I guess maybe the summit is off,” Alexander began.

“No kidding.”

“Are you watching?”

“I was. I mean, it’s kind of buzzing all around me, like Sensurround. The TV, Internet, the phones. I can’t really process it all.”

“I know,” he said.

“I mean, I’ve already
done
this. My goddamn office got bombed to start this season—and I’m still not sure we know the who and why of that.”

“Hey, believe it, girl.”

“But a war? With China?”

“You think all those RAND studies were just academic exercises?”

“It’s just so. . . so surreal. It feels like a stupid video game. The news stations have all become Entertainment Channels. Except today, they keep playing some new horror film.”

“Welcome to the twenty-first century.”

T
he war unfolded very much the way Booth and Branko had foreseen: cyber warriors ruled the field. It was all over in less than thirty-six hours. But the repercussions of Beijing’s technological blitzkreig promised to be felt for generations to come. The Communist goliath humiliated the nettlesome island democracy with remarkable ease, while a confused world watched on satellite TV.

From the very outset, Alexander was embarrassed to find that the conflict was tailor-made for his coverage. It was a perverse reward for years of developing unique China sources. He had cell and home phone numbers for virtually every Western policy-maker responsible for managing the conflict—from Langley to the Pentagon, from the White House to Honolulu’s Pacific Command. Even amidst the electronic chaff hurtling about, he managed to get direct calls through to a number of key players in Beijing and Taipei, yielding some brutally blunt on-the-record quotes.

Alexander was appalled. He could sit at his desk and witness devastation raining down on familiar avenues twelve thousand miles away. Yet, he could not suppress his fascination. It was like that horrible September morning, watching those damn planes sail into the Twin Towers over and over again—only this time, it fell to
him
to explain it all to the reading public. This was his story; he felt like the assigned witness to the macabre.

Branko had long ago warned that the financial markets were the West’s most vulnerable point. That is precisely where the Chinese military had wittingly designed their early blows to strike. The prospect of the U.S. being drawn into a shooting war with China provoked panic among global investors. In its earliest hours, the conflict halted commercial shipping throughout the East Asia region. The possibility of losses drove insurance rates through the roof, effectively shutting down trade in the region, halting ships at sea. Critical communications with many Fortune 500 companies’ overseas production facilities—especially the legions of chipmakers on both sides of the Taiwan Strait—were crippled. Capital investments froze. Share prices plummeted around the globe.

Once the shooting stopped, Branko explained to Alexander just how the Chinese government could credibly allege that
Taiwan
had initiated the hostilities. “Planes go up and troll for targets every day. That is what they’re
supposed
to do. The problem comes when adversaries detect a ‘radar lock,’ even from fighters on routine patrol. It appears like the headlights of an onrushing train; a pilot has only seconds to react, or risks losing the plane and being killed. When that happens, orders are to shoot first and ask questions later.”

The Chinese accusation that Taiwan had started it all was thus difficult to refute, especially amidst the chaos of the ensuing conflict. The reality was that such radar-lock incidents happened all too frequently. Alexander’s analytical stories accurately noted that the justification was the same used after the first Gulf War by the Americans, when they continued to assault random Iraqi targets throughout the 1990’s. Perhaps Taiwan’s fighters
had
provoked Beijing by using radar in a hostile fashion. If so, Taipei was guilty of escalating above a clear threshold—an indisputable provocation.

Responding to these incidents, the Chinese methodically assailed the spine of Taiwan’s electronic infrastructure, crippling the island nation. The PRC forces began with a missile attack on the Yangmingshan listening post, a traditional military target. China’s missiles knocked out Taiwan’s intelligence nerve center, blinding Taipei from the outset of the crisis. Then Beijing escalated with a series of ingeniously targeted follow-up strikes. The Pulitzer committee would ultimately credit Alexander with the phrase that best captured the novel nature of the ensuing contest. It was, Alexander had explained to his readers, “The First E-War.”

Branko’s department had long been criticized for its hard-line views about the Chinese military build-up. The events in the Taiwan Strait offered some unwelcome vindication. For more than a decade, the People’s Liberation Army had been preparing for just such a high tech conflict. Alexander’s
LA Times
had even run stories about the nearly one hundred thousand Chinese cyber attacks on U.S. security software. “Titan Rain,” the Pentagon called these assaults on the five million DOD computers—many of the attacks emanated from the more than one hundred million PC’s in China. And like the old ABM debates about Soviet missile threats, U.S. planners were chagrined to discover that cyber war
offense
was much cheaper—and far more effective—than defense.

The PRC had learned from watching Desert Storm and the “no contact” wars like Kosovo and Afghanistan. Overconfident Western war gamers had assumed that Taiwan would use its technology to advantage in such a showdown. Two days in July proved them wrong. Taiwan, it turned out, had spent too many years futilely pleading with Washington to buy traditional 1980’s military hardware—ships, planes, missiles, and ammunition. But Taiwan had purchased the wrong goods. Driven by an imaginative procurement team in the PLA’s central command, the Chinese had leapfrogged a generation of technology, rolling out a computer-driven war that incapacitated much of Taiwan’s antiquated military hardware while hitting the West in its pocketbook.

The E-War was fought on a new battlefield. It rewarded ingenuity and freelancing within the Chinese military, and the general populace as well. “It mushroomed into a uniquely populist assault,” Alexander wrote, “a thoroughly modern conflict which enabled even armchair Chinese patriots to become involved. Every hacker on the mainland became a modern day Minuteman.”

It was true. PRC citizens were poised to join in from home, with every personal computer becoming a potential weapon. The new PLA dogma held that citizens could help seize the initiative to establish “electromagnetic dominance” early in any high tech conflict. The plans were put in action this time: computer viruses were exported wholesale, polluting Internet access in Taiwan. Trojan horse viruses were planted in Taiwan’s networks, unleashing destruction. Alexander stayed with his analogy of the Redcoats’ 1775 retreat at Lexington and Concord, a vivid image that captured the spirit of this element of the assault plan.

Both military and civilian air traffic control—and even Taipei’s subway trains—were frozen by the deft cyber-attacks. TV broadcast towers and electrical plants were targeted with extremely accurate missile strikes. Financial data banks were penetrated and compromised. Market records of stock trading were dumped. Commerce above the level of cash-in-the-fruit-market virtually halted throughout the country.

Dummy radio broadcasts and junk e-mail full of disinformation were tossed into the mix by the Second Directorate in a kitchen sink-load of techno-warfare. Electro-magnetic pulse bursts were detonated, disrupting the electronics of scores of Taiwan’s weapon systems, creating electrical shock waves akin to that of a nuclear blast. The information warfare assaults and the electronic weapons eroded Taiwan’s command and control, freezing many of their defensive weapons platforms. Even Branko’s command post in Langley, Virginia found communications with Taiwan a challenge, and solid data hard to come by.

Life in Taipei regressed decades in a matter of hours as fire crews rushed to rescue thousands trapped underground in subway cars. Civilian aircraft were frantically rerouted to Tokyo and Manila. One Taipei-bound plane full of tourists from Australia ran low on fuel and limped into Shanghai, making a forced landing.

Alexander’s articles in the
Times
chronicled the ensuing escalation in great detail. Taiwan scrambled its F-16 aircraft out of Jia-shan and flew them off from nearby Hualien Air Force Base. Emerging from hangars carved from caves in the side of the hills, the jets were a terrific sight, straight out of
Battlestar Galactica
. Taiwan’s military had few inviting targets for retaliation, however. An instinct for self-preservation made Taiwan’s leaders reluctant to respond to the initial Chinese attacks with any substantial targeting of the Mainland. There was little future for a Lilliputian island nation assaulting the territory of a nuclear-armed power, a Gulliver possessing an army that outnumbered Taiwan’s ten to one. Most of Taipei’s ripostes were against Chinese jet fighters and ships at sea. Here Taiwan’s military scored their greatest successes. The air-to-air and air-to-ground missiles sold to Taipei over the years by Washington proved effective, and the Chinese lost several fighter planes.

The second wave of Chinese strikes hammered more traditional Taiwanese military targets, beginning with Chiang Chuan Kang Air Base. In the 1960’s, the old U.S. Strategic Command facility had been used to launch B-52 sorties over North Vietnam. Once upon a time, the base had housed scores of American nuclear weapons to deter an Asia conflict. Now, it proved to be ground zero for a Chinese direct assault. The airfield’s defenders expected the Chinese to start up with short-range ballistic missile attacks, then after that softening-up, launch waves of F-8 fighters and Su-27 jets against the facility. War-gamers assumed it was here that Beijing would try to first seize a base to be used as a staging area for incoming airborne troops.