Threat Vector

From the light of the living room Kovalenko saw a man, perhaps in his late twenties. He was solidly built and fit-looking, with an angular forehead and very pronounced and high cheekbones. He looked to the Russian like some sort of cross between an Asian and an American Indian warrior. Serious and stern, the man wore a black leather jacket, black jeans, and black tennis shoes.

“You are not Center.” Valentin said it as a statement.

“I am Crane,” was the response, and Kovalenko instantly could tell the man was Chinese.

“Crane.” Kovalenko took another half-step back. The man was intimidating as hell; he looked to the Russian like a stone-cold killer, like an animal not fit for civilized society.

Crane unzipped his jacket and opened it. A black automatic pistol was tucked in his waistband. “Put down the knife. If I kill you without sanction, Center will be angry with me. I do not want Center angry.”

Valentin took another half-step back and bumped into the desk. He placed the knife on the desk.

Crane did not reach for his gun, but he clearly wanted it displayed. He spoke in heavily accented English. “We are here, close to you. If Center tells me to kill you, you are dead. Do you understand?”

Kovalenko just nodded.

Crane motioned to the laptop computer on the desk behind the Russian. Valentin turned and looked at it. At that moment a new paragraph appeared on Cryptogram.

“Crane and his men are force multipliers for our operation. If I could realize all my schemes from a computer keyboard, I would do that. But sometimes other measures must be taken. People like you are used. And people like Crane are used.”

Kovalenko looked away from the computer toward Crane, but he was gone. Quickly Kovalenko shut the door and locked it.

He returned to the desk and typed, “Assassins?”

“Crane and his men have their tasks. Making sure you follow directives is one of their tasks.”

Valentin wondered if, all this time, he’d been working for Chinese intelligence.

When he thought it over, some of the pieces fit. But others did not.

He typed, his hands still shaking, “It is one thing to work with the mob in Russia. It is very different to control teams of assassins in the United States. This has nothing to do with industrial espionage.”

The uncharacteristically long pause by Center was disquieting. Valentin wondered if he should have kept these suspicions close to his vest.

“It is all business.”

“Bullshit!” shouted Kovalenko to his apartment, but he did not type this.

When he did not respond, a new line popped up on Cryptogram. “Are you ready to hear your next assignment?”

“Yes,” Kovalenko typed out.

“Good.”

FORTY-EIGHT

He who conquers the sea is all powerful.” It was the motto of the INS Viraat, the Indian aircraft carrier that docked in Da Nang one week to the day after Chairman Su Ke Qiang ordered all foreign warships out of the South China Sea.

The Viraat began its life in 1959 as Britain’s HMS Hermes and sailed under the Union Jack for decades before it was sold to India in the 1980s. No one could argue that the carrier was still cutting-edge, but a recent refitting by the Indian Navy had extended the Viraat’s life a few years, and, new technology or old, it was an important symbol of the Indian nation.

At just under thirty thousand tons, it was significantly less than a third the size of the Nimitz-class Ronald Reagan. There were 1,750 sailors and pilots on board, as well as fourteen Harrier fighter jets, and eight Sea King attack helicopters.

On the second day after the carrier arrived in Da Nang, one of its Sea King helicopters was patrolling in India’s oil exploration zone when it spotted a Chinese Song-class submarine moving to within ramming range of an Indian oil exploration vessel. The sub struck and damaged the ship minutes later, sending the thirty-five civilian crew members of the exploration ship into lifeboats. The Sea King began ferrying the crew to other vessels nearby, but not before calling in the antisubmarine-warfare-capable INS Kamorta, a corvette that had moved into the SCS along with the Viraat. The Kamorta raced to the area and got a radar fix on the Song-class sub.

The Kamorta fired one 213-millimeter rocket from its deck-mounted RBU-6000, a Soviet-designed antisubmarine rocket launcher. The rocket sailed from the horseshoe-shaped launcher, flew through the air for five kilometers, and then dove into the water. It sank to a depth of two hundred fifty meters but exploded prematurely, inflicting no damage on the sub, which had dived to a depth of three hundred twenty meters.

A second missile also failed to find its target.

The Song-class sub escaped the encounter. But this was the excuse the Chinese were waiting for.

Three hours after the attack on the Chinese submarine, just after dark, the Ningbo, a Chinese guided-missile destroyer on station between Hainan and the Vietnamese coast, went to battle stations. It launched four SS-N-22 missiles, NATO classification Sunburn, a Russian-developed anti-ship missile.

The Sunburns streaked over the water at Mach 2.2, three times faster than the American Harpoon anti-ship missile. The radar and guidance systems in the nose of the weapons kept them on target as they closed on the biggest ship within range.

The Viraat.

As the lightning-fast flying three-hundred-kilogram armor-piercing warheads neared their target, anti-missile defensive SAMs on board the Viraat fired in a desperate attempt to shoot down the Sunburns before impact. Miraculously, the first SAM out of its launch tube struck the first incoming missile just four kilometers from impact, but within moments all three of the remaining SS-N-22s slammed into the starboard-side hull of the big ship, with the second missile striking high enough to send three Sea King helos into the air in a fireball and to destroy two of the Harriers on the deck with the resulting shrapnel.

The carrier did not sink — three three-hundred-kilogram warheads were not enough ordnance to put the thirty-thousand-ton ship on the ocean floor, but the missiles succeeded in effecting a “mission kill”—a naval term for rendering a vessel useless as a war-fighting instrument.

Two hundred forty-six sailors and airmen were killed as well, and the Viraat’s support ships all raced to the aid of the carrier to help put out fires and to pull crew members from the black water.

Two Harrier pilots in the air at the time of the accident found themselves with nowhere to land, as they were too low on fuel to make it to their divert airfields in Vietnam. Both pilots ejected into the ocean and survived, though their aircraft were lost to the waves.

While the PLAN immediately declared the attack a defensive response to India’s attack on the submarine earlier in the day, it became abundantly clear to the world that China had determined that the South China Sea was worth killing for.

* * *

Valentin Kovalenko rented a white Nissan Maxima from a rental lot near Ronald Reagan Airport and drove it north over the Francis Scott Key Bridge and into Georgetown.

He was on yet another milk run for Center, or so he deduced from the instructions that Center gave him the evening before, shortly after his face-to-face introduction to Crane.

Kovalenko did not imagine today’s work would be as dramatic as last night’s events. He was to pick up a car, and then conduct surveillance on a location just two miles from his flat.

As usual, Kovalenko did not know a single thing about his operation past his instructions.