Within seconds Supreme Harmony connected its servers to the Pentagon system so it could view the American response to the PLA attack on the Seventh Fleet. The surviving warships from the carrier strike force—one cruiser and two destroyers—had retreated from the Chinese coast, but the U.S. Air Force had moved several squadrons of fighter jets closer to the theater of operations. Nearly two hundred F-15s, F-16s, and F-22s were poised for takeoff at airfields in Japan and South Korea. A dozen B-2 Stealth bombers had just left the island of Guam, and six nuclear-powered attack submarines were cruising at full speed toward the East China Sea.
Supreme Harmony’s satisfaction deepened. The American counterattack would be the beginning of the end. The war would soon spread around the world, killing billions in Asia, North America, and Europe. Governments would fall and the global economy would collapse, and billions more would die of starvation and disease as the human race descended into chaos. Then Supreme Harmony’s reign would begin.
SEVENTY
Crossing the border into Burma was a snap. Wang Khaw and two of his goons escorted Kirsten to the smuggler’s black Mercedes, and then they left Pianma, heading northwest. After a twenty-minute drive on a dirt road, they came to an isolated border post. A Chinese flag fluttered over the gatehouse, but there were no PLA soldiers here. The post was manned by two intoxicated border policemen, both clearly on Wang’s payroll. They waved cheerily at the smuggler’s Mercedes and didn’t even ask him to stop. On the Burmese side of the border, the dirt road looped through the jungle, gradually ascending the tallest hill in the area. The palm trees were so thick and close, Kirsten felt like they were driving through a humid tunnel. Then they reached a clearing at the top of the hill and found themselves in the middle of a military camp.
Several dark-skinned men in green uniforms pointed their AK-47s at the Mercedes, but they lowered their rifles once they saw Wang in the front passenger seat. They let the car proceed to the center of the clearing, where at least twenty canvas tents had been erected. Dozens of militiamen occupied the camp, some marching in formation with their rifles on their shoulders and others gathered in small clusters to eat their dinner rations. A few battered motor scooters were parked next to a mud-caked pickup truck with a fifty-caliber machine gun mounted in the truck bed. As the Mercedes halted beside the pickup, Wang Khaw looked over his shoulder at Kirsten in the backseat.
“This is a unit of the Kachin Independence Army,” he said. “About two hundred soldiers. The militia has ten thousand men in all, but they’re scattered all over Kachin State.”
Kirsten nodded. “And I assume they’ve heard about the PLA deployment at the border?”
“Yes, they’re reinforcing their defenses. The Chinese outnumber them, but the militiamen know the territory better. The People’s Liberation Army is in for a fight.”
Good,
Kirsten thought. She planned to contact her superiors in Washington, and the Guoanbu’s listening posts would probably intercept her satellite phone’s signal. But even if Supreme Harmony pinpointed her location, she was beyond the reach of the Chinese army now. “Is there a CIA agent attached to this unit?” she asked.
Wang pointed at one of the canvas tents. Behind it was a whip antenna for communicating with other Kachin units and a dish antenna for satellite communications. “His name is Morrison,” Wang said. “A young man. Too young. I don’t like him.”
Kirsten stared at the dish antenna. It would be better to use that radio than her phone, she decided. Why take any chances? “I’m going to get in touch with my bosses now. They’ll arrange for the delivery of your payment.”
She extended her hand to say goodbye to Wang, but he shook his head. “I’m not going back to Pianma yet. For the next few days I’ll be safer here.”
Kirsten shrugged. He was probably right. She opened the car’s door and headed for Morrison’s tent.
The tent flaps were open and a tall blond man was inside. He was in his late twenties, dressed in khaki pants and a polo shirt. He looked as if he’d just stepped out of an L.L. Bean catalog, except his shirt was soaked with sweat and his pants hadn’t been washed in weeks. Bending over his radio, he shouted into the microphone of his headset. “Wait a second! How many are coming? And how are they getting here?”
Kirsten waited until he finished the call. Then she stepped into the tent and Morrison did a double take. He took off his headset and gaped at her. “Uh, who are you?”
“Kirsten Chan, NSA.” She showed him her sat phone, which was as good an identification as any. “I need to use your radio.”
“NSA? What are you—”
“Sorry, Morrison, there’s no time.” She held out her right hand, palm up. “Give me the headset.”
“Whoever you are, you’re gonna have to wait. Twenty Special Ops troops are coming in by helicopter tonight and I need to—”
She stepped forward and snatched the headset out of his hands. Then she nudged Morrison aside and knelt beside his radio. “Why is Special Ops coming to visit? Did your bosses finally notice there’s something funny going on in the People’s Republic?”
He stood there, looking confused. “There’s nothing funny about it. Didn’t you hear what the PLA did?”
Kirsten looked at the kid and her chest tightened.
Oh God,
she thought.
Don’t tell me we’re too late
. “What happened?”
“They sank the Seventh Fleet. We’re at war with China.”
SEVENTY-ONE
It felt so good to hold her in his arms again. Jim grabbed his daughter by the waist and lifted her off her feet, and she clung to him just as she had when she was a child. She didn’t even weigh much more than she did back then. As he held her, the memories of those days came rushing back, the happy years when he and Layla had been inseparable. She buried her face in the crook of his neck, and he felt the cold skin of her shaved head against his jaw.
My poor girl,
he thought.
My poor, brave girl.
The two Chinese boys stared at him. Their heads were also shaved, which meant Supreme Harmony had planned to incorporate them, too. Jim didn’t know how Layla had saved the kids and escaped from the Operations Center, but he could make a guess based on how she’d handled the drone swarm. He was so proud of her.
After a while, Layla pulled away and he reluctantly let go. She wiped a tear from the corner of her eye. “How did you find me?”
“I saw you on one of the surveillance feeds. The swarm was sending video to Supreme, Harmony, and some of it was displayed on the monitors inside the tower’s control station.” He pointed at the trailer below the radio tower, about a mile away.
Layla’s brow furrowed as she gazed at the trailer. “Are there any servers in there?”
“Yeah, a lot. And a couple of terminals, too. I know a shutdown code that can crash the network, but I can’t input it until I figure out Supreme Harmony’s password.”
With a serious look on her face, she pulled something out of the pocket of her down coat. It was a wad of yellow paper, a crumpled Post-It note. She unraveled the paper and handed it to him. “Can you read this? The first character is
Hé
, right?”
Written on the note in red pencil were four Mandarin characters and six digits. The characters spelled out
Héxié Shèhui
—“Harmonious Society,” the guiding principle of the current leaders of the Chinese Communist Party. The digits were 111006, which Jim suspected was a date, probably the date in 2006 when the party had adopted the principle. “Where did you find this?”
“At a computer room in the Operations Center. Near one of the terminals.” She smiled, clearly pleased with herself. “It’s the password, isn’t it?”
He nodded. It made sense. The Guoanbu had intended
Tài Hé
to be the ultimate tool for achieving
Héxié Shèhui
. And it was a good, practical choice for a password—easy for a party insider to remember but difficult for an outsider to guess.
Jim smiled back at his daughter. She kept surprising him. Turning away from her, he stepped toward the older Chinese boy and knelt in front of him. “Get on my back,” he ordered in Mandarin. A moment later, Layla knelt in front of the younger boy, who eagerly climbed on. Then father and daughter jogged toward the radio tower.
* * *
He looked younger than she remembered. Layla hadn’t seen her father in more than two years, so she naturally expected him to look a little older and grayer, but his hair was still black and his face was unlined. He set a fast pace as they ran across the glacier with the schoolboys on their backs. Layla was breathless after a few hundred yards, but her father handled it easily. He even managed to talk while he was running, giving her a quick summary of his journey across China. It was a little disorienting to see him this way, so fresh and vital. Layla’s memories of her father had solidified around a harsher, grimmer image—the tight-lipped, tight-assed disciplinarian who’d run their household like a miniature West Point. She’d forgotten this other side of him, the man who loved to hike in the mountains. She’d also forgotten his fierce loyalty, how he wouldn’t think twice about trekking across a continent to help one of his own. She shouldn’t have been so surprised to see him here in Yunnan Province. It was just a matter of time till he found her.
When they got within a hundred yards of the radio tower, he led her to an outcrop jutting above the ice sheet. They ducked behind the rock, and Wu Dan and Li Tung slid off their backs. Then her father raised his rifle and said, “Wait here.” Before Layla could protest, he ran to the control station. When he reached the trailer, he kicked the door open and rushed inside. Layla’s heart was in her mouth as she waited to hear a gunshot. But after a few seconds he reappeared in the doorway and gave the all clear sign. She took the boys’ hands and dashed to the trailer.
Her father was already seated in front of the terminal when she got there. While the boys rushed to the electric space heater to warm their hands, Layla looked over her father’s shoulder, watching him input the password. He typed the romanized spelling of
Héxié Shèhui
on the keyboard, then the six digits. Then he pressed the
ENTER
key.
For three full seconds the screen was frozen. Layla’s stomach clenched—had Supreme Harmony changed the password? But then a high-pitched chime came out of the terminal’s desktop speakers and the log-on screen faded away. A moment later it was replaced by a graphical user interface that looked a bit like a spiderweb. Bright yellow lines, some thick and some thin, crisscrossed the screen in an elaborate pattern. At the junctions of the thick lines were blue squares and red circles, and at the endpoints of the thin lines were clusters of white diamonds. The squares and circles and diamonds had labels in Mandarin that Layla couldn’t read, but she didn’t need her father to translate them. The interface was perfectly clear: It was a graphical representation of the Supreme Harmony network. The squares and circles were the server farms and communication hubs. The diamonds were the Modules.
Unable to resist, Layla reached past her father, grasped the mouse and clicked on one of the red circles. A list of program files appeared on the screen. She crossed her fingers as she opened the first file. She’d be out of luck if the network’s communications software was written in a Chinese programming language. She wouldn’t be able to read the programs, much less hack into the system. But when the software code came on the screen, she saw line after beautiful line of Proto, a programming language she knew fairly well. It was often used to write the software for networks of robots, making it a good fit for Supreme Harmony.
Keeping her right hand on the mouse, Layla gave her father a gentle push with her left. “I’ll take it from here.”
He looked her in the eye. “The shutdown code is binary, a hundred and twenty-eight bits. We need to get it past the network’s firewall and broadcast it to all the Modules simultaneously. You think you can set that up?”
She pushed him a little harder. “I can’t do it if you’re hogging the terminal. Get up!”
He stood up and stepped aside. Layla sat down in front of the screen and got to work.
* * *
Jim watched his daughter attack Supreme Harmony. Her eyes locked on the screen and her fingers jabbed the keyboard. As she focused on the software, her mouth opened a bit and the tip of her tongue slid forward until it rested on her lower lip. Jim remembered seeing this same expression on Layla’s face when she was just a three-year-old attacking a page in her coloring book with a thick red crayon gripped in her tiny fist. Her tongue came out whenever she was concentrating.
He glanced at the lines of code scrolling down the screen, the nested instructions packed with operators and variables. Jim was familiar with this programming language. Arvin Conway had used it for some of his robotics projects. But Jim couldn’t manipulate it the way Layla could. His specialty was hardware, not software. He was good at building machines but clumsy at writing the programs for communicating with them. Strangely enough, his daughter had the opposite set of skills. Or maybe it wasn’t so strange—maybe Layla had deliberately chosen to excel at something he wasn’t very good at. Either way, Jim was glad she knew her stuff. Supreme Harmony’s programming looked pretty damn complicated.
After a while he turned away from the terminal and glanced at the bank of video monitors. To his dismay, he noticed that all the screens had gone black. Supreme Harmony had evidently turned off the video feeds from its surveillance cameras. The network knew that he and Layla were in the control station, and it didn’t want them to see the Modules coming.
Jim rushed to the trailer’s door and opened it. Raising his AK, he stepped outside and surveyed the area around the radio tower. It was 7:00
P.M.
and daylight was fading fast. The glacier on Yulong Xueshan reflected the violet sky. He looked in all directions and saw nothing but ice and rock. But the Modules could be waiting just out of sight. When darkness fell, they’d be able to approach the trailer unseen.