As dogs barked in the neighborhood and lights flipped on up and down East Quail Avenue and South Hedgeford Court, Crane and Snipe walked calmly but quickly down the driveway. They used a pedestrian gate by the main drive gate and then walked out onto the street.
The front door of a home across the street opened, a woman in a bathrobe stood backlighted by the overhead fixture in her entryway, and Snipe drew his pistol and fired twice at her, sending her back inside, crawling frantically to safety.
In seconds a gray panel truck pulled up and the two men climbed into the van. It rolled north, heading to I- 15. While Grouse drove and the other men sat silently, Crane pulled out his phone and pressed a few buttons. After a long wait for a connection and an answer, he said, “All objectives achieved.”
TWENTY-TWO
Sitting alone in front of a bank of glowing computer monitors in a glass office that overlooked a massive floor of open cubicle workspaces, a forty-eight-year-old Chinese man in a rumpled white shirt and a loose necktie nodded in satisfaction at Crane’s news.
“Begin uploading data as soon as you can.”
“Yes, sir,” said Crane.
Dr. Tong Kwok Kwan, code name Center, tapped the secure voice-over Internet earpiece in his right ear to disconnect the call. He looked out past his monitors toward the open office floor and considered his next play. He decided to make the quick walk across the operations floor to the workspace of his best coder to let him know DarkGod’s data would be coming in shortly from America.
Normally he would simply touch a button on his desk and talk to the young man via videoconference, but he knew a personal visit would encourage the coder to take this matter seriously.
Tong looked around his spotlessly clean office. Though there were no pictures of family or other personal items in view, a small, unframed cardstock sign hung from the glass door to the hallway.
It was written in flowing Chinese calligraphy, the characters one above the other in a single vertical row. Taken from the
Tong read the words aloud:
Although his unit of operatives in the United States had just killed on his behalf, Tong knew he himself was the borrowed knife.
Not much gave him pleasure, his brain had been virtually programmed by the state so that it did not respond to such banal stimuli as pleasure, but his operation was on track, and this satisfied Dr. Tong.
He stood and left his dark office.
Tong Kwok Kwan was from Beijing originally, the only child of a union between two Soviet-trained mathematicians who worked in China’s then-fledgling ballistic missile program.
Kwok Kwan had no Princeling pedigree, but his brilliant parents pushed academics upon him relentlessly, focusing his attention and his studies on mathematics. He consumed workbooks and textbooks as a child, but he reached adolescence in the early days of the personal computer, and his family saw immediately that his future lay in the near limitless power of the incredible machines.
Because of his good grades, the state sent him to the best schools, and then to the best universities. He went to the United States to heighten his abilities in computer programming, to MIT in 1984, and then to Caltech for his master’s in 1988.
After Caltech, Tong came home and taught programming for a few years at China’s University of Science and Technology, before beginning a doctoral program in computer science at the prestigious Peking University in Beijing.
By now the concentration of his studies was the Internet and the new World Wide Web — specifically, their vulnerabilities and the ramifications of these vulnerabilities in any future conflict with the West.
In 1995, while a thirty-year-old doctoral candidate, he wrote a paper titled “World War Under Conditions of Informationization.” Almost immediately the paper made its way from the world of Chinese academia to the People’s Liberation Army and the Ministry of State Security. The Chinese government classified the document top- secret, and immediately MSS operatives fanned out into any institutions of higher learning where the paper had been distributed, picking up hard copies, retrieving floppy disks containing the work, and giving long, intense, and intimidating talks with any professor or student who had come into contact with it.
Tong was immediately brought to Beijing, and within weeks he was lecturing the military and intelligence communities on how to leverage cyberoperations against China’s enemies.
The generals, colonels, and spymasters were in over their heads in Tong’s lectures, since the arcane terminology used by the brilliant young man was difficult for them to follow, but they realized they had, in Tong, a valuable resource. He was handed his doctorate and placed in charge of a small but powerful cyberwarfare testing, training, and development group within the MSS, and he was also given responsibility over PLA and MSS computer defensive operations.
But Tong was not content to run teams of government computer network operators. He saw more potential for power in the harnessing of the individual and independent Chinese computer hacker. He formed an organization of independent Chinese hackers in 1997 called the Green Army Alliance. Under his direction they targeted websites and networks of China’s enemies, achieving intrusions and registering some damage. Although their impact was relatively minor, it showed that his academic paper could, in fact, be implemented in the real world, and it only increased his cachet even more.
Later he started the Information Warfare Militia, a collection of civilians in the technology industry and academia who worked independently but under the direction of PLA’s Third Department (Signals Intelligence).
In addition to this unit, Tong formed the Red Hacker Alliance. By courting or threatening hundreds of China’s most accomplished amateur computer coders via online bulletin boards frequented by the hackers, and then organizing them into a purpose-driven force, he used the men and women to penetrate industry and government networks around the globe to steal secrets for China.
But Tong and his army developed the means to do more than steal digital data. During a public dispute between China’s state-owned petroleum organization and an American oil company over a pipeline contract in Brazil, Tong came before the leadership of the MSS and asked them, quite simply, if they would like his Red Hacker Alliance to destroy the oil company.
He was asked by the ministers if he intended to destroy the American oil company’s dominance in the marketplace.
“That is not what I mean. I mean, physically ruin them.”
“Shut their computers down?”
Tong’s impassive face did not let on what he thought of these foolish ministers. “Of course not. We need their computers. We have obtained command-level control of their pipelines and oil-drilling capacity. We have kinetic capabilities at their locations. We can cause actual real-world destruction.”
“Breaking things?”
“Breaking things, blowing things up.”
“And they can’t stop you?”
“There are manual overrides for everything at the site, at the physical location. I am just assuming this, of course. Some human being can get in the way and close a pump or cut power to a control station. But I can do so much, so quickly, that there is no way their humans can stop me.”
No physical action was taken on the oil company. The Chinese government recognized, instead, the importance of Tong and his capabilities. He was not just a valuable resource, he was a potent weapon, and they would not waste this capability on ruining a single firm.
Instead he and his team hacked into the oil company’s website and read sensitive internal communications between the oil company’s executives about the acquisition attempt of the Brazil pipeline. Tong passed this on to
