Razing Beijing: A Thriller (68 page)

THE BRIGHT, FLUORESCENT FLASH
was accompanied by a thunderous
crack
that hundreds of commuters
would later insist to be proof of an explosive charge. In reality, the center two
meters of one pair of the bridge’s suspension cables simply vanished. A
half-million
tons
of load suddenly had nowhere to go. Like great
collapsing springs, the ends of the severed cables rocketed toward the tower
structures at over five hundred feet per second. Two-ton vertical suspenders,
previously attaching cable to roadbed, cratered into asphalt and cars below;
five motorists were instantly crushed. The George Washington’s twin decks
responded to the sudden release of strain energy, twisting like a giant
lumbering serpent as the northernmost edge of both decks collapsed in a great
downward surge. A raucous choir of screeching tires and shattering glass,
protesting steel and metallic popping filled the air.

Every driver confronted his own individual hell. Most felt
more than heard the initial sounds through the seats and steering wheels of
their cars. Confused, many reacted by simply stomping their brake pedals. Engulfed
in fear of the unthinkable, others stopped only by crashing into a car in front
of them.

Deputy Inspector Joseph Ciccone grit his teeth as he
gripped the wheel of his skidding patrol car. With the first explosion still
echoing, four westbound lanes of the upper deck suddenly fell away beneath him.
He heard the high-pitched shriek of twisting and tearing steel girders—the
handrails at the edge of the bridge buckled like foil and dipped below the
horizon. The sky and hills visible in the distance became the wind-roiled
whitecaps of the Hudson River.

Ciccone’s car slid with increasing speed toward the edge of
the precipice and was struck broadside by a Cadillac Seville. Another driver
floored the accelerator to arrest her slide, tires spewing blue smoke, as the
car slid sideways into a spreading pool of gasoline and burst into flame. Zigzag
fissures ripped across the asphalt through which Ciccone glimpsed jagged metal
and whitecaps. Police training had prepared him to dispel the chaos that
accompanied unexpected and often violent events. He sat paralyzed, a hapless
flea on the shoulder of a woken beast.

Panic erupted in full when the first two cars—a
midnight-blue Mercedes and a battered red Toyota pick-up, their male occupants’
eyes bulging as they clawed to escape—barrel-rolled over the guardrail and
disappeared.

The main support truss, a crisscrossing steel structure
under-girding the roadbed, twisted grotesquely and held—the bridge completed its
first ten seconds of collapse. Now the bridge heaved
up
.

The rebound sent asphalt slabs and cars and trucks flipping
skyward. Three loud thuds like cannon fire rocked the bridge as the main girder
trusses of the northern structure failed in rapid succession.

The GW Bridge’s entire three-quarter mile center span
began its final downward lunge; this time, there was no structure to restrain
it. The upper deck collapsed into the lower and crushed forty-three motorists
as they gripped the wheels of their cars. All fourteen lanes swung, as on a
hinge, around the remaining south-side cables and girders. Four hundred
thirty-eight automobiles, delivery vans, trucks, taxi cabs and semi-trailers
plummeted 260 feet into the churning waters of the Hudson.

MILTON THACKERAY WEDGED
the
phone between his ear and shoulder, freeing one hand for the keyboard and
balancing a can of Mountain Dew with the other.

“Not bad for a Stanford
putz
,” he heard his friend
Jeff Kirby, a career academic, say while looking over his email.

Thackeray was probing for more than approval. The orbital
relationships were readily accessible to anyone, and had been for centuries
thanks to the German astronomer Johann Kepler. They were also available on the
Internet and in CLI’s software archive, where Thackeray accessed them in his
attempt to characterize an orbit for Stuart’s mysterious satellite. He had
started with the precise site and time of the Chinese launch obtained from a
website, based on information given him by Stuart, whose governmental source Stu
refused to identify. Thackeray approximated the satellite’s second time and
location from newspaper articles covering the so-called ‘stadium stunt.’ He
plugged these two sets of values—‘Epoch’ time satellite data, they were
called—into the orbital mechanics equations.

His problem was that trying to divine the orbit from two
discreet snapshots amounted to working backward, assuming that the two
coincided with the same satellite to begin with. Kepler’s Third Law specified a
precise relationship between the speed of a satellite and its distance from the
earth; the closer the orbit, the faster it needed to travel in order to
counteract gravitational pull. He’d had to make a slew of assumptions, such as
a range of low-earth altitudes—as opposed to, say, the 29,313 miles of
geo-synchronous altitude—and a geographical ‘footprint’ over which the
satellite might reasonably project its malevolent reach. Also assuming that the
Chinese had not appreciably retasked the satellite’s orbit, the result was a
solution describing a region of space that probabilistically defined its
location at any given instant. With only two ill-defined points, and an
infinite variety of orbital inclinations from equatorial to polar, the region
of space potentially containing the satellite was still too large to be of any
use. Or so Thackeray thought.

Dr. Jeff Kirby had spent the better part of his career
refining the known inventory of orbiting space junk—remnants tiny and large of
man’s decades in space which nowadays threatened the lives of astronauts and
valuable satellites.

“I wasn’t sure the Keplerian elements would still be
valid.” Thackeray tugged at his beard. “You know, if the thing’s busted up
into—”

“Hummingbird flotsam,” Kirby said.

“What?” He noticed Emily peering at him over the top of her
terminal.

“On radar they look like a giant orbiting flock of
hummingbirds. Or hummingbird feces, I guess, depending on how violent the
demise. But you said this payload was intact the first hour or so?”

“So they say.”

“Okay. I’m pulling up the launch log...”

Thackeray read him the date of the launch.

“Let’s just see...Xichang Center, Launch Complex 2...they’re
not always so frank about what they launch out of there. Long March-5—that’s
their heavy launch vehicle. Fits with what you were saying. Assuming NORAD got
one or two good shots of it, the Keplerians should still be pretty accurate.”

“Really?” This was stunningly good news—he flashed Emily a
thumbs-up.

“It depends on altitude, atmospheric friction, decay rate
and so forth,” Kirby expounded, “but for this recent a launch, those effects
are probably small. That the Chinese report it’s broken up hasn’t changed the
integrated mass center of all the bits. Our database wouldn’t be updated yet to
reflect that sort of catastrophe. What is CLI’s interest in this, any way?”

Thackeray cleared his throat. “Well, you know how it goes. We
spend months investigating available orbits for some customer, and then these clowns
plop this friggin’ bird up there. Not only right where we were going to
recommend, but shit—it goes hummingbird on us. I guess what they would like to
understand is how long before this junk might start falling out of our way.”

Kirby lectured him on orbital decay due to atmospheric drag
of whole versus disintegrated objects, but Thackeray was no longer listening. His
attention instead was riveted by the alert flashing from the middle of his
monitor.

Thackeray had taken another step in order to pinpoint the
phantom satellite, a fact which he deliberately excluded from his query with
Kirby. He had set up transmission intercepts from three Hughes
telecommunications satellites in geo-synchronous orbit over North America—he
doubted CLI’s customers would care, but telling Kirby might prompt difficult
questions. He had also written a simple program to screen transmissions against
known sources—ground relay stations and commercial satellites in the Internet
launch log, which tracked and updated orbits for things like the dozens of
Globalstars crisscrossing the globe. When a signal was transmitted up to one of
the telecom satellites from an origin
not
corresponding to anything
supposedly there, Thackeray’s program brought it to his attention. Intercepts
flagged by the program had so far only revealed his inadvertent omission of
some known satellite or other. He had already corrected most of these.

There had been a time when Thack enjoyed illegal computer
hacking as a pastime, but with age came enlightened wisdom, wealth, and
something to lose—the message on the screen made his pulse race. “Hey, uh,
thanks, Jeff. Gotta run. Talk next week?”

“Any time.”

Thackeray hung up the phone.

Five minutes later, he had yet to find the source of the
error. “Mind taking a look at this?”

Emily studied the monitor from over his shoulder. “Looks
like video data.”

Thackeray typed a few keys for repeating the playback. He
had already tried several signal-processing solutions, but the image on the
screen—barely discernible as such—remained wavy and hashed.

“The encryption looks weak,” Emily said, frowning. “Is
there an audio signal?”

“No. Is that maybe a time stamp there?” Thackeray shook his
head. “I don’t know.”

“It’s too brief for a commercial transmission. Maybe it’s
disguised to look like video.”

“Or it’s compressed.”

“I don’t think so. Try another filter.”

“I’ve tried filtering it.”

“Then try another one.”

To their mutual surprise, the hash then lessened
significantly. They huddled over the screen as Thackeray replayed the sequence.
It was clearly an image now.

“There it is again—that flash.” Thack pointed at the screen.
“Did you see it?”

Emily said nothing. The high-speed aerial fly-over
effect was obvious to both engineers.

*     *     *

“SHE CLAIMS IT’S A MATTER
OF LIFE
or death, and she insists on talking to Mr. Stuart.”

“Life or death?” McBurney repeated his secretary’s words
into the satellite phone, prompting concerned stares from his fellow
intelligence officers.

“I’m only telling you what she said, Sam. I don’t know how,
why, or what.”

McBurney glanced at his watch; almost eleven
P.M.
Tokyo put it around nine in the morning
at Langley. “Let me talk to her.”

McBurney heard a click as he was put on hold. His
secretary’s voice came back a moment later. “Sam, she insists on talking to
Stuart directly.”

McBurney cupped his hand over the phone. Counting slowly to
ten, his eyes darted over crumbs, the Seven Lilies floral design on his dinner
platter, and coffee-stained mugs. Stuart, he realized, was turning out to be a
pain in the ass.

“Sam?”

He raised the phone back to his mouth. “All right. But
she’s going to have to wait. Hold on, Philip.” McBurney cupped his palm over
the phone to speak to the others. “One of Pedersen’s employees deduced how to
get hold of him.”

The team all exchanged looks of bewilderment. “What the
hell, Sam?” Gary Nomura asked with justifiable alarm.

“Relax, I’ll explain later. There’s some sort of an
emergency. We’ll have to get an encrypted telephone to uh, to Pedersen.” As a
basic precaution, they had not equipped Stuart with an encrypted telephone. A
private citizen untrained in the craft was vulnerable to eavesdropping and
simply too great a risk.

O’Connell said, “We could page him, send him to the
embassy.”

“No. Other than you and Nomura, I don’t want any of us seen
anywhere near the embassy. Damn—where else can he go?”

O’Connell thought for a moment. “How about the Tsukiji Fish
Market? It’s easy. He can jump onto the subway right outside the Tokyu.”

“I’ve been there. But this late?” McBurney checked his
watch. “It’s eleven.”

“Hell, the place is always open.”

McBurney concurred. “Carolyn, you know what our Mr.
Pedersen looks like.”

“I can be there in an hour.”

McBurney told his secretary to arrange to have Emily Chang
on hand for the call in one hour. “And tell her she makes that call from inside
my
office, or not at all...as close to an hour, then...I don’t care what
they say, look, she’s already been...I’m not asking you to invent...just figure
it out!” McBurney snapped off the phone.
A personal telephone call for
Stuart, smack in the middle of a covert op.

Ross and O’Connell devised a brief set of instructions. They
entered the message into one of the phones and sent Stuart the page.

“Thanks, Carolyn.” McBurney smiled tightly. “I guess we
were about through for the night.”

Price O’Connell looked at McBurney. “So much for Pedersen
staying put in his room.”

Carolyn Ross raised her eyebrows and stood up from the
table.

“Carolyn?”

“Yes, Sam?”

“Try to find out what’s going on. It had better be
important.”

JOSEPH CICCONE OPENED HIS
EYES
to find himself hanging by his lap belt and staring through the
shattered windshield into the waters of the Hudson River. In the instant it
took the police officer to realize his patrol car was suspended vertically in the
air, a stabbing ache in his head asserted itself. He was unable to blink away
blurring in his left eye. His fingertips revealed a nasty lump above his
eyebrow.