he
He got it.
The young man’s P.O. box was the largest of the three sizes along the southern wall, four from the left, two from the bottom.
He walked deeper into the night, some eighty meters away from the building, and then he turned around.
The four men left the post office and headed in the opposite direction, and then turned into an apartment building, the Kwong Fai Mansion.
Yao looked up at the building. It was easily thirty stories high. There was no chance in hell he could tail anyone inside that building. He turned and headed back for his car, still somewhat in shock by tonight’s revelation.
It wasn’t every day, after all, that Adam Yao stumbled upon a fugitive.
The kid’s name was Zha Shu Hai, and Adam first heard of him more than a year earlier, when he was e- mailed a bulletin from the U.S. Marshals Service asking him to be on the lookout for an escaped felon who, both Marshals and FBI suspected, would be heading to China.
Zha was an American citizen who’d been arrested in San Diego for trying to sell the Chicoms classified engineering secrets from his employer, General Atomics, the makers of unmanned aerial vehicles for the Air Force. He’d been caught red-handed with hundreds of gigabytes of design information about the secure networks on which communications and GPS information was sent, and he’d bragged to the Chinese embassy that he knew how to bring the system down by hacking into its sat link, and how to obtain deep persistent access into the Department of Defense’s secure network by building a RAT that could infect a government contractor’s network and then swim upstream. The Feds did not believe him, but they weren’t sure, so they offered him partial immunity if he told General Atomics everything he knew about the system’s vulnerabilities.
Zha refused, and was sentenced to eight years in prison.
After just one year in a minimum-security federal correctional facility, however, he walked away from a work-release program and disappeared.
Everyone in the States knew Zha would try to slip back to China. Adam had been working in Shanghai at the time, and he’d received the BOLO, or “Be on the lookout” notice, from the Marshals Service because there was a reasonable expectation that some high-tech firm in Shanghai would employ Zha if he did make it to the mainland.
Adam had all but forgotten about it, especially after he moved from the mainland to Hong Kong.
Until tonight. It was clear Zha had done much to change his appearance; the booking photo on the BOLO showed a nondescript young Chinese man, not a spiky-haired flamboyant punk rocker, but Adam Yao recognized him nonetheless.
As Adam climbed into his car, he wondered about this strange relationship. Why the hell would Zha be here, in the protection of the Triads? Much like his discovery that Mr. Han had a relationship with the local street thugs, Zha was, if everything the Feds said about his abilities as a top-level black-hat hacker were to be believed, seriously out of the 14K’s league.
Yao had no idea what this meant, but he knew he’d be placing all of his other work on hold in order to find out.
One other thing was certain, though. He would not be shooting an e-mail to the U.S. Marshals Service or the FBI.
Adam Yao was a NOC; he wasn’t exactly a team player. He knew that a call to the Marshals Service would bring marshals and embassy staff here to the post office on Kwong Wa Street and the Mong Kok Computer Centre, and he also knew good and well that Zha and the 14K would see all the white guys with earpieces, they would leave the area, and that would be that.
And there was another reason Adam decided to sit on this news for now.
The obvious breach at CIA.
In the past few months several CIA initiatives had been thwarted by the MSS. Well-placed agents in the government were arrested, dissidents in contact with Langley were imprisoned or executed, electronic operations against the PRC were discovered and shut down.
At first it appeared to be just bad luck, but as time went on, many were sure the Chinese had someone working in Beijing Station.
Adam, the one-man band, had always played his cards close to his vest. It came with being a NOC. But now he really was operating out on his own. He sent Langley as little cable traffic as possible and had no communication whatsoever with either Beijing Station or the CIA field officers at the U.S. consulate in Hong Kong.
No, Adam would sit on his discovery of Zha Shu Hai, and he would find out on his own what this guy was doing here.
He just wished he had a little help. Being a one-man band made for long hours and frustrating setbacks.
That said, it was a hell of a lot better than getting burned.
TWENTY-SIX
It might come as a surprise to many of the patrons of the Indian Springs Casino on Nevada’s Route 95 to know that America’s most distant and most secret wars are fought from a cluster of single-wide trailers a little more than a half-mile from the blackjack tables.
In the Mojave Desert northwest of Las Vegas, the runways, taxiways, hangars, and other structures of Creech Air Force Base serve as home to the 432nd Air Expeditionary Wing, the only wing dedicated to unmanned aircraft. From here, within sight of the Indian Springs Casino, pilots and sensor operators fly drones over denied territory in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Africa.
Drone pilots don’t climb into a cockpit for takeoff; instead they enter their ground-control station, a thirty- foot-by-eight-foot trailer in a parking lot on the grounds at Creech. Detractors, often “real” pilots, refer to the 432nd as the Chair Force, but even though the men and women of Creech are some 7,500 miles from the battle space over which their aircraft fly, with their state-of-the-art computers, cameras, and satellite control systems they are as connected to the action as any fighter pilot looking out a canopy.
Major Bryce Reynolds was the pilot of Cyclops 04, and Captain Calvin Pratt served as the aircraft’s sensor operator. While Reynolds and Pratt sat comfortably at the far end of their ground-control station, their drone, an MQ-9 Reaper, flew just inside the Pakistani border, twenty thousand feet over Baluchistan.
A few feet behind the pilot and sensor-operator seats in the GCS was master control, a lieutenant colonel overseeing the Reaper’s mission, coordinating with units in the Afghanistan theater, the UAV’s physical base at Bagram in Afghanistan, and intelligence operatives monitoring the flight in both hemispheres.
Though this evening’s flight was designated reconnaissance and not a hunter/killer mission, the Reaper’s wings carried a full weapons loadout, four Hellfire missiles and two five-hundred-pound laser-guided bombs. Reconnaissance flights often came upon targets of opportunity, and Cyclops 04 was ready to wreak destruction, should the need arise.
Reynolds and Pratt were three hours into their six-hour mission, monitoring ground traffic on Pakistan’s National Highway N-50 near Muslim Bagh, when the flight’s master controller voice came over their headsets.
“Pilot, MC. Proceed to the next waypoint.”
“MC, pilot, roger,” Reynolds said, and he tilted the joystick to the left to give Cyclops 04 twenty degrees of bank, then looked down to take a sip of his coffee. When he glanced back up he expected to see his monitor displaying the downward-looking infrared camera indicating a bank to the west.
But the monitor showed the vehicle was continuing its straight path.
He looked at the attitude indicator to check this, and saw the wings were level. He knew he did not have the autopilot engaged, but he checked again.
Major Reynolds pushed the stick a little harder, but none of the relevant displays responded.
He tried banking to the right now, but still there was no response from the bird.
