Sea of Lies: An Espionage Thriller (70 page)

Turning to address the other joint chiefs within earshot, the president continued, “There’s no room for doubters or the faint-hearted. Either execute your orders or resign, but get out of my sight. There’s work to be done.” The military brass fled, led by General Yao. Good riddance to all, Gao thought.

A colonel scurried up to Yi and handed him a slip of paper. Yi sidled over to Gao, head bent in supplication. “Comrade President, good news. The
George Washington
is within reach of our extended-range DF-21D anti-ship ballistic missiles. However, it is already taking evasive maneuvers and will prove difficult to hit.”

“Target all three missiles on the carrier and fire them in fifteen minutes. Get Admiral Wang in here. He’s been promoted to acting chief of staff, and I want his sign-off on the launches.”

“Yes, Mr. President.” The colonel turned and strode away.

Gao turned to Yi, who was reading a new piece of paper provided by a civilian he didn’t recognize. “What, tongue-tied, are we?” the president asked his subordinate.

Yi looked up, ashen. “US cruise missiles and ASBMs have destroyed or damaged seven vessels in our invasion fleet. Over seventy percent of coastal defense radars and missile sites have been destroyed. Operational radars and satellites are tracking a mixture of planes and missiles inbound into China’s airspace. The Americans must have jammed our weapons control radars, as they aren’t locking on targets. Our forces are being destroyed where they sit.”

Gao smiled between clenched teeth. “Good. China has been provoked! Launch the ASBMs immediately. Reconvene the joint chiefs. Notify the Politburo Standing Committee that we meet in twenty minutes.”

“What about our nuclear preparedness status?” Yi Xiubao asked.

“Leave it as it is!” snapped the president. “If we raise the alert level or activate our strategic bombers, submarines or ICBMs, the Americans may well destroy us all. Authorize the use of conventional weapons in self-defense, nothing more.”

The same colonel came back as Gao Xiang digested the last dollop of ill tidings. “Mr. President, we need to move you to a more secure location. There’s a hardened bunker and command center in the basement. Could you come this way, please?”

“Yes, in a moment. Give me a damage assessment once our missiles strike the imperialist navy.”

Yi Xiubao looked at the third piece of paper he’d received from a military underling in as many minutes. Smart bombs and cruise missiles had destroyed the ASBMs before they could be launched. The strategic PLA-Navy’s Yalong Bay base on Hainan Island was under attack by supersonic bombers. The report listed high casualties and major losses of ships, planes and lives. The American bombers and ships appeared to be largely unscathed.

The president’s personal secretary ran up. “Where is the president? Obama is calling him. The American president is calling!” Yi pointed to the elevator bank where a group of sentries had just seen Comrade Gao safely inside. She sprinted toward them, calling out.

Yi crumpled the printout and dropped it into his pocket. He had to a find a pen and paper somewhere. There was a letter to write.

*  *  *  *  *

Rear Admiral Cochran’s smile lit a tense room. “Gentlemen! Effective immediately, China and the United States have halted hostilities. I repeat, there is a global ceasefire in place. Please make certain that all assets within your purview acknowledge. Stay on top of those screens! As our late, great President Reagan once said, ‘Trust, but verify.’ Captain Howard, please update your tally of US and allied losses. I want a preliminary count in twenty minutes. We are now at DEFCON 3.”

“Aye, aye, sir!” said Howard.

The room was awash in fist bumps and high fives. With the crisis in abeyance, someone took CNN off mute. Howard heard the anchor intone that China had agreed to a UN-supervised orderly and peaceful withdrawal from the Senkakus. Furthermore, China had accepted Japan’s sovereignty over the islands and would submit to binding arbitration over the appropriate level of reparations owed to Japan. The voice droned over footage of albatrosses nesting on barren volcanic rocks along a wave-battered shore.

Howard’s tally to date was scant, with Japan losing three fighters and suffering three damaged in the defense of Uotsuri Jima
,
plus two US aircraft lost. The US had won a victory in record time, almost bloodlessly. The whole episode had a surreal feeling. After all, China wasn’t Iraq. And while everyone on Cochran’s staff had expected the US to prevail, in retrospect it seemed too easy.

One of the young Spec 4s chortled, “We opened a can of whup-ass!” Whup-ass, indeed, thought Howard. China’s coastal defenses and forces were in ruins with casualties surely in the thousands, and damage into the hundreds of millions. Even in this hour of jubilation, he couldn’t help asking himself, “Are we really this good?”

CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT

MAC ATTACK

FRIDAY MARCH 14, US WEST COAST; SATURDAY MARCH 15, ADMIRALTY GULF, WESTERN AUSTRALIA; SINGAPORE

Farrokhzad already despised the Americans and Israelis; he added Australians to the list. Sleep deprivation, bright lights and loud noises had been so intermingled with the questions of the past four days that he no longer remembered what he’d told them, versus what he’d shouted only in his mind while his body resisted. Johnson recognized the type. The way to change the conversation from a war of attrition to something more mutually accommodative typically required a swift, brutal act. Maybe a smashed finger or a clipped toe would bring the subject’s mind more sharply into focus. Then, after some time to reflect and reorder one’s life priorities, Johnson would start by asking straightforward questions. The subject either cooperated, or he started losing body parts at a brisk rate.

Before Johnson arrived, the amateur interrogator who preceded him had gleaned nothing of value save confirmation that the Iranian could both understand and speak English. Farrokhzad radiated defiance, and they had zero leverage: no family, no close friends, and no career prospects if there wasn’t a nuclear program to go home to. The scientist wanted to die in the interrogation shed and had been doing his best to goad them into killing him. Since the Australians weren’t the murdering types, they’d asked for help, and Coulter tapped his old boy network for recommendations. Johnson was the fruit of these efforts.

To hell with hacking off a finger, thought Johnson. From that look of pure contempt he’s giving me, there’s nothing he’d like more than to bleed out from an ill-executed amputation. Instead, Johnson decided to inject five cc’s of Sodium Pentothal to see if a dose of old-fashioned truth serum might induce more cooperation. Otherwise, it was back to Plan A, with a blowtorch and power drill already on display.

Coulter was a man in a hurry. Johnson wouldn’t mind leaving the Eco-Camp sooner rather than later, too. He’d been in secret CIA camps before—hell, he was living in one right now at Forward Operating Base Chapman outside Khost—and this one felt dodgy. There weren’t enough people on-site. There was no perimeter fence. The guards had the look of irregulars. Coulter and Wollam were retirees for God’s sake. Most of the buildings and physical plant were either out of commission or decrepit. Essentially it was a rundown fishing camp that someone was borrowing for a couple of weeks in the off-season. It couldn’t be a Company-sanctioned interrogation center when there was a gigantic crocodile in a cage mauling a dead cow, could it?

“OK, Doctor. Time for a vitamin shot,” he said in his best soap opera voice. Farrokhzad’s eyes bulged and his muscles tensed, but he said nothing as Johnson found the vein inside his elbow and depressed the plunger. He was thankful for the leather band binding the Iranian’s neck to the back of the chair, as that crazy fucker would have bitten him rather than just spit in his face. Stay in this business long enough, and you can spot them across the room. The man was a hater through and through.

The syringe empty, Johnson withdrew it and didn’t bother applying an alcohol swab. Farrokhzad’s life expectancy right now was shorter than an Ebola patient’s in a Liberia refugee camp. The scientist slumped forward, unconscious.

Johnson turned to a guard and said, “Come get me once he wakes up. And turn off the camcorder. Nothing will happen here for at least an hour.”

Time for another nap. He hoped the mainlander Jack Wong wasn’t snoring like before. Wong was some kind of weirdo as well, having already demanded to be present when and if Johnson burned, electrocuted or cut open the Iranian. Wong apparently thought Johnson was a medieval torturer.

*  *  *  *  *

Every time the green light flashed and the buzzer sounded, LT Ian “Macca” McCullough got a rush, despite having logged over a thousand jumps. This one differed on several counts, however. A night combat High Altitude High Opening operation from almost thirty-three thousand feet meant they’d be on oxygen for two-thirds of the descent. His job was to lead a force of seven others and free a hijacked civilian jet. The mission was right at the limits of his men’s training and the bounds of the possible. And they were attempting this with scarcely three hours of planning and preparation.

McCullough and his men were SAS Regiment, Australia flavor. Specifically, they were assigned to the Tactical Assault Group (West) based in Perth. As Macca’s crew had undergone intensive anti-hijacking training at the Yanks’ Delta Force center in North Carolina, they were the first ones onto the C-130J Hercules when the call came in earlier that night. He and his men had fidgeted and checked gear for the past five hours as the four-engine behemoth lumbered fifteen hundred miles north and positioned the jumpers fifteen miles from where the hijacker had forced down the Gulfstream 550 on the Mitchell Plateau.

Macca’s chute opened cleanly with a satisfactory jolt and the harness responded properly to his tugs. A ninety-pound Bergen dangled fourteen feet below his shoes on a quick-release carabiner attached to his harness. It would take them nearly an hour under their customized parachutes to glide north to Truscott Field. They’d use the time to tighten up the TAG squad’s formation. The operation came into being with urgency last night. Only now could he reflect, late in the day given that he was twenty-two thousand feet up with an automatic weapon strapped to his chest and breathing through a facemask. The operation struck him as overkill with only the one hijacker and three hostages: a foreign intelligence officer and two pilots. A pair of snipers inserted a mile away should be able to end it by breakfast. Instead, there were eight of them with the same orders to shoot Robert Nolan on sight.

He used the GPS and prevailing winds to silently and invisibly direct their path to the target LZ three miles from the downed plane. He checked the altimeter again and saw that they were halfway to the ground. He gave his right rigging line another tug to put him back on course. No sound issued through his comms earpiece, meaning that all was well above and behind where the team parasailed in loose formation. The full moon and myriad stars glittered in silence. Quiet was good, Macca knew. Bad things happened when there were five blokes all talking at once while gunfire and explosions rang in the background.

Meanwhile, three of the Regiment’s Black Hawk MH-60K Night Stalker helicopters with another two dozen men from TAG were two hours behind them. Thirty-two of the SAS Regiment’s best and three Black Hawks just to take down one man? Nolan must be a hard bastard.

*  *  *  *  *

FBI Special Agent in Charge of the Seattle office Myron Fillmore smiled an hour ago when he first heard the news. The Bureau, assisted by the Washington Highway Patrol, found the Silverado abandoned outside Appleton, WA. McGirty’s vehicle was covered in freshly cut brush, parked on a country lane not far from the mighty Columbia River. A visit to the family home of one of Nolan’s former girlfriends, Jennifer Ryneburg, revealed that she drove off Thursday night on short notice and hadn’t been seen since. Her parents were frantic with worry. The FBI and police now had an APB out on the vehicle, a brown 2005 Honda Accord. Officially Jennifer was a potential kidnap victim, but law enforcement officers unofficially suspected that she was aiding the felons and perhaps even traveling with them. 

*  *  *  *  *

Coulter walked out of the interrogation shed, steadied himself with a palm against the corrugated metal wall and vomited. Johnson wasn’t running an interrogation; he was operating an abattoir. Coulter wiped the spittle with the back of a hand that clutched blood-smeared maps with the key facilities comprising Iran’s nuclear arms program now identified. Through the walls he heard a drill, followed by a bloodcurdling scream. He shuddered and shuffled away to find something to rinse his mouth.

Wollam didn’t like the interrogation shed any more than Coulter, but at least he had the sense to stay away. He loitered outside his cabin with their pilot, flicking through a month-old news weekly. Wollam flashed his light at Coulter to beckon him over. Handing him a bottle of water, he said, “It’ll be light in thirty minutes. For Andy’s benefit, tell me again how you want to play it.”

“Andy flies you and two guards up to Truscott. Stay off the radio. Put the helicopter down behind the plane. Walk over unarmed and alone, but covered by the guards. Tell whoever comes out that you have a message for Bob Nolan’s ears only. He’ll have to step down. You aren’t coming aboard. Nolan will do it. You offer him a helicopter ride to meet someone who will answer all his questions, but don’t mention me by name.”

“Why will Nolan bite?”

“His need to know is his fatal flaw.”

The sound of more power tools punctured the predawn. Wollam thought he heard an animal cry underneath the burr and whine. He turned around and went inside to change.

*  *  *  *  *

“So this is it, the bright lights of the big city of Weaverville,” deadpanned Big Duck. They pulled into the Victorian Inn’s parking lot off Main Street.

Bert was all business. “Park at the back, register us in a quiet and back-facing room, unload and then we’ll ask around. There must be someone in town who knows the directions to Coulter’s house,” Bert said.