Red Cell (37 page)

She changed her clothing, pulled a Mini Maglite from her pack and
turned it on, then killed the room light and crawled into the small bed. The rack barely gave her the space to roll onto her side, as her shoulder brushed the upper bunk. Kyra clenched the lit Maglite in her teeth as she locked the restraining curtain to keep herself from rolling out. A fall onto the metal desk next to the bed could kill her.

She turned off the flashlight and was surprised for a few moments at how complete the darkness was before she dropped into unconsciousness.

Reveille sounded at 0600, full lighting came on in the hallway and climbed under the door, breaking the blackness. The aircraft beating on the deck had never broken their rhythm throughout the night, and the morning shift now began pounding its way across the hallway’s floors. None of it disturbed Kyra a bit until Jonathan’s endless pounding on her door finally broke into her private oblivion.

USS
ABRAHAM LINCOLN

Grumbling by the enlisted notwithstanding, the Navy did not bestow flag rank on the gullible or the uncritical. Pollard was quite the opposite, perhaps too critical too often, or so he believed, but he made no apologies for applying stress to his intelligence officers. There was a difference between an error and an intelligence gap. He had suffered through intelligence briefings every morning at sea since his days as a carrier XO and could discern in less than a minute whether the briefer knew his subject. Pollard respected officers willing to confess uncertainty and had blocked the promotions of several who tried to fake their way past him. The admiral had no desire to humiliate any officer for no good reason, but Pollard had no patience for those who thought they could waste his time. Few tried it twice.

His standards were no different if the briefer was a civilian. His gut impression of the analysts sitting in his quarters was favorable. Burke gave no sign of being intimidated by rank. Pollard had come across few men who acted with such equanimity in his presence aboard this ship. It was rare and slightly annoying. He didn’t consider himself a tyrant to be feared, but some display of intimidation would have shown a healthy respect for the experience and accomplishments underlying his senior rank.

The woman was harder to read. Stryker came across as an odd mix of confidence and inexperience, traits that were usually contradictory. She handled herself well enough around the officers but deferred most questions to Burke.

“If it had been my choice, I would have denied you permission to come aboard. You have some friends in high places,” Pollard told them. The order had come from Showalter by way of a shore-to-ship call. “I don’t like having civilians aboard in a possible war zone. Nothing personal.”

“Understandable. But I promise, we can justify our presence,” Jonathan replied.

“You’ve got five minutes to do it,” Pollard said.

Jonathan nodded. “I assume you’ve heard of the Assassin’s Mace project?”

“Of course.”

“We believe the Chinese have deployed an Assassin’s Mace weapon and the PLA might be setting either the
Lincoln
or the
Washington
up as the target of a weapons test,” Jonathan said.

Pollard dropped his head and stared at the analyst over the top of his glasses. “You get right to the point, Mr. Burke,” Pollard said.

“Socializing isn’t his strong point,” Kyra advised.

“Okay, forget the clock,” Pollard ordered. “What’s your evidence?”

“Director Cooke has given us approval to share some intel with you that came from a CIA asset who was the senior archivist inside Ministry of State Security headquarters in Beijing,” Jonathan began. “He worked for us from 1991 until yesterday, when Ms. Stryker here exfiltrated him from the country.” The officers turned their heads to Kyra and the admiral’s eyebrows went up, but he remained silent. Kyra blushed a bit at the attention. “He’s provided us with information that suggests the PLA has developed stealth technology. We can review the fine details if you have the time, but suffice it to say that we believe the PLA has at least one fully functional stealth aircraft.”

Pollard lowered his head and stared at the analysts, then pulled off his glasses and dropped them on the coffee table that separated him from Burke. “Mr. Burke, the Chinese have been showing off a stealth plane for years. Every piece of intel I’ve read says it’s a test bed piece of crap that can barely fly, much less fight. They just roll it out as a showpiece to embarrass the SecDef when he goes over for a visit. So please tell me you’re not that far behind on current events.”

“That’s not the plane you need to worry about,” Burke said. “The J-20 is, I suspect, used for misdirection, to make us think the Chinese are less advanced than they really are. The PLA has a stealth fighter that can most definitely fight.”

“And what’s your evidence that this thing is functional?” Pollard said.

“First, and most to the point, our asset told us point-blank that the J-20 is considered a disappointment by the PLA and was removed from the Assassin’s Mace project years ago,” Jonathan replied. “Then there’s the bombing of the Kinmen power station. Everyone assumed that a Chinese fifth-column unit or sapper team took it out on the ground because the radar track didn’t show anything inbound before the explosion.
But the radar track wasn’t entirely clean. There was a radar hit on a lower frequency above the target for a few seconds before the explosion. Stealth planes are detectable on low-band frequencies, but most modern radar systems don’t use them because they pick up birds, clouds, and everything else.”

“Yeah. The clutter gets bad on the scope, and the software doesn’t always do a great job cleaning it up,” Nagin agreed. He looked at his superior officer. “Would’ve taken a lot of explosives to dig that hole, but I can believe that the PLA had that much stored up on Kinmen.”

“With plenty more on Penghu and Taiwan proper,” Pollard added, skeptical.

“In the absence of our other intelligence, I would agree. But imagery analysis suggests that the blast pattern was consistent with an air-dropped munition,” Jonathan said. “It certainly would have been far easier to deliver that quantity of explosives from the air, and it would have made a good first test of their current stealth technology. Then they took out the
Ma Kong.
She was a
Kidd
-class vessel, so she wasn’t top-of-the-line by our standards, but her radar systems were still better than most of what the Chinese have sailing around the Strait, and she was a key component of Taiwan’s air defense network. No sapper team did that, and I think it’s unlikely the PLA Navy really got a submarine that close to a secured naval base and then back out again without being detected.”

“Tough,” Pollard agreed. “But not impossible. So where did they build this thing?” He didn’t expect an answer.

Jonathan surprised him. He turned to Kyra and said nothing. It took her a second to realize he expected her to answer. It took another second to review the data in her head and extract the answer. “No idea,” she said. “But they’ve been test-flying it at Chengdu.”

“Very good,” Jonathan muttered.

“Chengdu?” Pollard asked.

“It’s the one air base not in the Nanjing Military Region where imagery showed significant activity once the fighting started,” Kyra said. “And it’s where the Chinese sent the F-117 wreckage that they bought from the Serbs.”

“Okay, you’re going to tell me that whole story later,” Nagin advised her. “You think the Chinese have their own Area Fifty-One.”

“Why not?” Kyra asked. “It worked for us.”

“And why do you think this is all a weapons test?” Pollard asked.

“It’s the dog that didn’t bark,” Jonathan replied.

“Excuse me?” Pollard asked, impatient.

Kyra grasped the reference immediately. “Admiral, did the PLA harass you during your approach to Taiwan?”

The admiral and his CAG exchanged short glances. “They certainly could have made life harder for us,” Nagin finally answered for the pair. “We’ve chased off a few PLA fighters. Four or five planes at the most each time.”

“No submarines tried to approach?” she asked. “No surface vessels?”

“No,” Pollard admitted. “At least none that our ASW screen has reported.”

“Any cyberattacks on TRANSCOM, NIPRNet, or any of the other critical military networks?” Kyra asked.

“Not that we’ve heard,” Nagin said.

“And that, gentlemen, flies in the face of everything we know about Chinese doctrine for mounting an invasion of Taiwan,” Jonathan concluded. “The plan is for the PLA to do everything it can to delay your entry into the Taiwan Strait while they’re making their move, and they aren’t following the plan. So there are two possibilities. Either they’re planning to invade Taiwan and what we know about the plan is wrong, or they aren’t planning on invading, in which case they don’t need to follow the plan. And I can’t believe the first one is right because no sensible OPLAN for invading Taiwan would ignore the presence of US carriers.”

“And that means you’re here because the Chinese want you here,” Kyra finished. “We were playing China’s game the minute the president ordered you into the Strait. It’s the logical end to the theory. Your Aegis air defense systems are more advanced than anything the Chinese have and we’ve had decades to figure out how to beat the Ufimtsev equations. They don’t have a test bed that can make sure their plane works against your systems, and they have to know that before they can attack Taiwan.”

Pollard took his time coming up with an answer. “That would be a risky way to test the platform,” Pollard said. “If it doesn’t work, they’ve blown their black program open.”

“If it does work, they change the entire balance of power along the Pacific Rim,” Jonathan countered. “Consider it. The PLA takes the first small steps toward invasion to draw in some carriers. They test the
plane. If it takes out the carrier and the president pulls the rest of the fleet back, they go full bore against Taiwan. If it takes out the carrier and the president doesn’t pull back the fleet, they start taking out the fleet. And if it doesn’t take out the carrier, they pull back and still own Kinmen, knowing that no president in his right mind will start a full-on war to take it back for the Taiwanese. The possible rewards outweigh the risk no matter how it plays out.”

“Point taken,” Pollard admitted.

“It’s still just a theory,” Nagin observed. “You don’t have a smoking gun. You have a radar hit that could be a flock of birds and a pile of reports from a single source that possibly point at a stealth plane program, which could have produced that showpiece junker and not some mysterious second fighter.”

“When do we ever have a smoking gun in this business?” Kyra replied.

“Assuming I believe you, how do we defend against a stealth bomber?” Pollard asked, ignoring the question,

“I think you have to draw it out into the open. Give it a target worth chasing,” Jonathan said.

“You think I should take the battle group into the Strait,” Pollard said. It wasn’t a question.

“I think that if you don’t pick the time and place, Tian Kai will.”

Pollard lifted a coffee mug from the table sitting between himself and the CIA officers, took a long sip, and then set it down carefully in the exact spot from which he’d picked it up. “Mr. Burke, there are eighty-seven hundred sailors in this battle group,” the admiral said. “Fifty-six hundred on this ship alone. Another three thousand on seven ships and three subs, and so far, President Liang hasn’t showed me that he’s got the stones to defend his own people, much less help me defend mine. And if I order us into the Strait and the Chinese really do want to rumble for Penghu, the PLA won’t need a stealth fighter to kill a lot of my kids. So it shouldn’t surprise you that I’m not going to even think about giving that order unless you can give me something better than a theory and a bird on a radar track.”

“Give me a few hours—,” Jonathan started.

“Mr. Burke, you can have all week as far as I’m concerned,” Pollard replied. “I’ve got this battle group right where I want it and I’m not moving without a good reason.”

“Any matches on the names?” Kyra asked. She crooked the phone between her head and shoulder, checked her watch, and tried to ignore the gaze of the Navy ensign who thought he never had enough female visitors in his comms shack.

“Barron put the screws to the Taiwanese. They finally coughed up enough information for us to get matches on all of them,” Cooke said. “A few are unknowns, but that’s to be expected. One of the MSS officers at the Taipei raid site where they recovered the acid was from the Tenth Bureau, a gentleman by the name of Han Song. We also have two reports of him taking trips to Chengdu. A shame he didn’t get a lungful of the stuff. Makes me wonder why the Chinese can’t figure out how to make it.”

“I asked that too. Jonathan thinks they probably just wanted a sample of ours to reverse-engineer so they could compare it with their own recipe.”

“That makes as much sense as anything else we’ve come up with,” Cooke said. “Anything else you need?”

“Admiral Pollard isn’t buying. We could use a little more material to persuade him.”

“What are you asking for?” Cooke asked.

“It would help if you would declassify Pioneer’s reporting,” Kyra said. “He’s out of country now, so there’s no threat to him if we clear Pollard and a couple of members of his staff to read the good stuff.”

Cooke frowned at the other end of the phone. “Barron won’t like that, but we’ll have a talk. Is that it?”

“For now.”

“Then I’ve got someone else here who wants to talk.” There was a pause while Cooke handed the phone over to someone else.

“It’s Weaver.” Kyra realized that her call to Cooke had been transferred to the WINPAC vault. The IOC analyst was at his desk and Kyra could hear several people chattering in the background. Weaver was hosting a small party in his office, it seemed. “I found your paper. Some crusty old gent in WINPAC had a hard copy. You should see his office. Looks like he never throws anything out. Paper everywhere. Anyway, the equations match. The CAD program definitely calculates radar cross sections. WINPAC is running some test objects now to check the accuracy, but it looks like the Chinese worked out their own coding for the algorithm,” Weaver said. “By the way, there was serious bribery involved to make your deadline.”