thousand eight hundred miles, and then their electronic signal — detection satellites will pinpoint and identify the ships.
“The battle group emissions are detected and the track is predicted, even through cloud cover.
“The Dong Feng 21D is their carrier-killer ballistic missile. It has its own radar, and it also pulls tracking information from Chinese satellite data.”
It continued like this for an hour. Ryan was careful to keep the momentum of the discussion up; he saw it as a waste of time for these men and women to be forced to explain the nuances of every weapons system of both sides to a man who had only to give a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down to the entire operation.
But he had to strike a balance. In his role as the man with the thumb, he owed it to America’s war fighters to be as educated as possible on their options before ordering hundreds — no, thousands — of people into harm’s way.
After an entire morning of back-and-forth, a Navy admiral, a former F-14 Tomcat pilot who’d led carrier wings and was now one of the Pentagon’s top naval tacticians, took the President through the plan of attack on China. It involved nuclear subs in the East China Sea launching barrages of conventional missiles at PLA command-and- control centers and technical bureaus, as well as targeting electrical infrastructure that powered these locations.
Simultaneously, subs in the Taiwan Strait and off the coast of the Chinese city of Fuzhou would launch cruise missiles against PLAAF air bases, known fixed-missile batteries, and command-and-control facilities.
American strike aircraft would fly from the
The admiral admitted that hundreds, if not thousands, of the PLA’s best missiles were fired from mobile launchers, and the poor overhead picture of the area meant those missiles would survive any attack the Americans could mount.
Ryan was floored by the scope and obvious difficulties the Navy would face in this seemingly impossible task. He knew he had to ask the next question, but he feared the answer.
“What are your predictions as to losses to U.S. forces?”
The admiral looked at the top page of his notepad. “To flight crews? Fifty percent. If we had better visualization, then that would be significantly less, but we have to deal with the battle space as it now exists, not as we had war-gamed it in the past.”
Ryan blew out a sigh. “So we lose a hundred pilots.”
“Say sixty-five to eighty-five. That will go up if follow-on strikes are necessary.”
“Go on.”
“We will lose submarines as well. It’s anyone’s guess how many, but every one of those subs has to go shallow and reveal itself in waters where the PLAN is active and the PLAAF is overhead, so they will all be at risk.”
Jack Ryan thought about losing a submarine. All those young Americans, acting on his orders, and then dying a death that Jack had always considered to be about the most horrific imaginable.
He looked up at the admiral after a moment of contemplation. “The
“Absolutely, sir. We expect the Dong Feng will be employed in combat for the first time. We don’t know how good it is, frankly, but to say we are hoping it does not work as advertised would be about the biggest understatement anyone could make. Obviously we have a number of countermeasures that our ships will employ. But many of those countermeasures rely on networking and good satellite data, neither of which we have much of right now.”
All totaled, Ryan was told he could expect to lose between one thousand and ten thousand lives in the attack on China. The number could, and likely would, explode if Taiwan was attacked in retaliation.
The President asked, “Do we think this will short-circuit the cyberattacks against America?”
Bob Burgess spoke up now: “The best minds at Fort Meade’s NSA and Cyber Command cannot answer that, Mr. President. Much of our understanding of China’s computer network attack infrastructure and bureaucratic architecture is, frankly, theoretical. We only hope to temporarily deteriorate their cyberattack capabilities and disrupt their conventional attack capabilities near Taiwan. Deteriorate and disrupt, temporarily, at the cost of upward of ten thousand lives.”
The Navy admiral spoke now, though this was not exactly his area of expertise: “Mr. President, with respect, the cyberattacks on America will kill more than ten thousand people this winter.”
“That’s a very good point, Admiral,” Ryan admitted.
Ryan’s chief of staff, Arnie van Damm, stepped into the conference room and spoke in the President’s ear.
“Jack, Mary Pat Foley is here.”
“At the Pentagon? Why?”
“She needs to see you. She apologizes, but says it’s urgent.”
Jack knew she would not be here if she didn’t have a good reason. He addressed the room: “Ladies and gentlemen, let’s break for fifteen minutes and pick back up where we left off.”
Ryan and Foley were shown to the anteroom of the secretary of the Navy’s office and then left alone. They both remained standing.
“I’m sorry for barging in like this, but—”
“Not at all. What’s so important?”
“CIA has had a nonofficial cover operative who had been working in Hong Kong, on his own initiative and without CIA support. He is the one who located the Chinese hacker involved in the UAV attacks.”
Ryan nodded. “The kid who was killed in Georgetown with the Agency guys.”
“Exactly. Well, we thought we lost him, he disappeared a few weeks ago, but he just emerged and got a message to us from inside China.” She paused. “He has located the nerve center of much of the cyberattack on the United States.”
“What does that mean? I just spent all morning listening to a room full of generals tell me China’s cybernetwork operations were in bureaus and CIC centers all over the country.”
Mary Pat said, “While that might be true, the architect of the overall strategy and the man in charge of the operation against us right now is located in a building in the suburbs of Guangzhou. He, a staff of a couple hundred hackers and engineers, and several mainframe computers are all in one place. One place that we have pinpointed. We are nearly certain that the vast majority of China’s cyberwar is being fought out of that building.”
Ryan thought this sounded too good to be true. “If this is, in fact, the case, Mary Pat, we could limit the scope of the planned naval attack considerably. We could save thousands of American lives. Hell, we could save thousands of innocent Chinese lives.”
“I agree.”
“This NOC. If he’s inside China, how do we know they don’t have him? How do we know this isn’t some disinformation operation by the Chinese?”
“He is operational and not compromised.”
“How do you know this? And why isn’t Director Canfield here giving me this intel? And how did this guy manage to communicate with Langley without getting compromised if Langley has a breach?”
Foley cleared her throat. “The NOC did not communicate with Langley. He communicated this information to me.”
“Directly?”
“Well…” She hesitated. “Through an asset.”
“Okay. So the NOC is not alone in the field?”
“No, sir.” Another clearing of the throat.
“Damn it, Mary Pat. What aren’t you telling me?”
“Jack Junior is with him.”
