Adam answered, quickly. “I’ll be there in under a minute.”
Yao picked Jack up and immediately headed north. He said, “We go through Shenzhen and then hit Guangzhou in about an hour. Center’s building is in the northern part of the city, out in the suburbs near the airport.”
“How did you find it?”
“I tracked him from the movements of their supercomputers in Hong Kong. The servers traveled by ship, and I found the ship, the port, then the trucking company that brought them to the China Telecom building. I wasn’t sure at first, but then I chatted up a girl at the new China Telecom office who said she came into work one morning and found out her entire building had been vacated overnight because the PLA needed the space.
“At that point I was pretty sure, so I got an apartment in a high-rise across a drainage culvert from the CT building. I can see the Army guarding the place, and I can see the civilians coming and going. They installed a satellite barn in the parking lot and have huge dishes on the roof. They must be using a ton of electricity.”
“What’s the next step?”
Yao shrugged. “The next step is you tell me who you really work for. I didn’t ask you over here because I needed a friend. I need someone on the inside in the U.S., away from CIA. Someone who can make something happen.”
“Make
Yao shook his head. “I want you to be able to contact someone in the government, high up in the government not at CIA, and tell them what’s going on. We will be able to prove it beyond a shadow of a doubt. And then when you do that, I want someone to come over here and blow it up.”
“You want me to call my dad.”
Yao shrugged. “He could make it happen.”
Ryan shook his head. He had to keep his dad insulated, to some degree, from his operations. He said, “There is someone else I can call. She’ll get the message through.”
SEVENTY-THREE
President Jack Ryan decided he would travel to the Pentagon to hear their plan to attack China’s computer networking infrastructure and computer network operations capability. Most of America’s top war-fighting strategists had been working on nothing else there in the building, doing their best to ad-lib parts of the tactical plan because the cyberattack on America had hamstrung their capabilities to get information, advice, and a good picture of the battle space.
Napoleon is credited with saying an army marches on its stomach. But that was in Napoleon’s time. Now it was clear to everyone affected by the attacks that the U.S. military marched on its bandwidth, and at the moment it seemed it could do little more than stand at parade rest.
And in the two days since his directive to draw up the plan, the situation had gotten worse. In addition to increased cyberattacks on the United States — attacks that had shut down two days of trading on Wall Street — the Chinese had exploited other attack vectors against the military. Many American military and spy satellites had been hacked and their signals corrupted, so critical data were not getting from the theater to the Pentagon. Those satellites still online were sending back data sluggishly or sporadically corrupted, meaning the picture of the situation over there was spotty at best.
The United States had lost visibility of the Chinese carrier in the South China Sea, and only received clues of its location again when an Indonesian Navy frigate,
More air-to-air contests over the Taiwan Strait had resulted in the shooting down of five more ROC fighters and a Marine Hornet, compared with the loss of eight PLAAF aircraft.
Ryan sat quietly as colonels, generals, captains, and admirals briefed him on the options for a military strike or, more precisely, on the seeming lack of options for a military strike.
The most frightening aspect of building a target list, clearly, was the poor coverage of the area. The degradation of the satellite data, more than anything else, made much of their attack plan a crapshoot, and the men and women in the room admitted as much to the President.
Ryan asked, “But some of our satellites are still functional?”
Burgess fielded this one: “Yes, Mr. President. But what you have to realize is, other than the dogfights over the Strait of Taiwan, the shooting war between the U.S. and China has not begun. Everything they’ve done to us to muddle our ability to fight, they’ve done with computer code. If we do attack, or if we do move carriers closer to attack or in any way show our hand, you can bet they will use shooting-war measures to disrupt those satellite feeds.”
Ryan said, “Shooting down our satellites?”
Burgess nodded. “They have shown their ability, in a test against their own equipment, to destroy a satellite with a kinetic missile.”
Ryan remembered the event.
“Do they have the capability to do that on a large scale?”
An Air Force general spoke up: “Kinetic ASAT, or antisatellite weapons, are no one’s first choice. They are bad for all parties with space platforms, because the debris from a strike can orbit for decades and fly into other equipment in space. It only takes a particle about one centimeter in length to mission-kill a satellite. The Chinese know that, so we don’t think they will blow up our equipment in space unless they absolutely have to.”
Ryan said, “They also can attack our satellites over China with an electromagnetic pulse weapon, an EMP.”
Burgess shook his head. “The Chinese will
Ryan cocked his head. “How can you be so sure, Bob?”
“Because it would damage their own equipment. They have GPS and communications satellites up above their own nation, of course, not far enough away from our platforms.”
Jack nodded. That was the kind of analysis he appreciated. The kind that made sense. “Do they have other tricks up their sleeves?”
The Air Force general said, “Yes, absolutely they do. The PLA also has the ability to temporarily blind satellites with the use of high-powered lasers. The technique is called ‘dazzling’; they have done it on the French and Indian satellites in the past two years with great success. In both cases they totally degraded the satellite’s ability to see and communicate with the ground for three or four hours. We predict they will start with this, and if it does not give them the results they want, then they will start firing missiles into space to shoot down our communications and intelligence-collection platforms.”
Ryan shook his head in frustration. “A couple months back I made a speech to the UN and said that any attack on a U.S. satellite was an attack on U.S. territory. The next morning half the news organizations in the country and three-fifths on the planet were running headlines saying I was claiming outer space for the United States. The
Burgess said, “You did the right thing. The future of warfare is going to be brand-new territory, Mr. President. Looks like we’re the lucky ones who get to blaze a trail.”
“Okay,” Ryan said, “we’re half blind in the sky; what does the picture look like at sea level?”
A Navy admiral stood and said, “Anti-access/area-denial. A-two A-D, sir. China does not possess a great Navy, but they have the largest and most active land-based ballistic and cruise missile programs in the world. The PLA’s Second Artillery Corps has five operational short-range ballistic missile brigades targeting Taiwan. DIA estimates they have over one thousand missiles.”
A captain stood in front of a whiteboard festooned with notes for the President to read in lieu of a PowerPoint presentation. “Second Artillery Corps conventional anti-ship ballistic missiles also provide the PLA with an extra deployment option to enhance its anti-access/area-denial strategies against offshore threats.
“Their ocean surveillance system over-the-horizon radar will see a carrier battle group at a distance of one
