He’d read them all before, and he would read them all again.
His blood boiled.
Tong was dead. That was not in the papers; Su had learned this at five o’clock this morning when his body was identified, pulled from the rubble in two large pieces. Ninety-two Ghost Ship hackers, managers, and engineers died as well, and dozens more were injured. The servers were blown to bits, and with that Su had learned almost immediately that America’s secure Department of Defense network bandwidth increased, satellite communications came back online, and several of Center’s initiatives in the United States, corruption of banking and telecom and critical infrastructure, had simply ceased or at least lost much of their designed impact.
Center’s botnet operations, on the other hand, still executed denial-of-service attacks on America’s Internet architecture, but the deep-persistent-access hacks and RATs in the DoD and intelligence community networks, while still in place, had no one monitoring the feeds or disseminating the information to the PLA or the MSS.
This was a disaster. The single most powerful counterpunch America could have delivered China. Su knew this, and he knew he had to admit this today when he went before the Standing Committee.
He did not want to acknowledge he should have had better security for the Tong network. He could roll out the excuse, the valid excuse, that the China Telecom building was a temporary headquarters for the operation because there was nowhere else to put them on the fly after their compromise in Hong Kong. But he would not make excuses for the mistake. Yes, once this conflict was over and the South China Sea and Taiwan and Hong Kong were back securely in China’s grip, he would sack those in charge of Tong’s relocation to Guangzhou, but for now he needed to give his honest assessment of the damage Jack Ryan’s strike the night before had caused.
He had to do this for one reason, and one reason only.
Today, at the Standing Committee meeting, he was going to announce his intention to attack the USS Ronald Reagan, the USS Nimitz, and the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower with Dong Feng 21 ballistic missiles.
There would be some reluctance from the Standing Committee, but he did not expect anyone to really stand in his way. Su would explain carefully and forcefully that by dealing this devastating blow to America’s blue-water Navy, Jack Ryan would be forced to disengage. Su would further explain that once American warships left the theater, China could press ahead for full regional hegemony, and with this dominance would come power, just as America had become powerful only by controlling its hemisphere.
If, for some reason, the attacks on the carriers were not successful, the next step would be a full ballistic- and cruise-missile attack on Taiwan, the launching of twelve hundred missiles targeting all the island’s military sites.
Su knew Wei would yammer on about the damage this would do to the economy, but the chairman knew China’s projection of power would help it at home now with the domestic situation, and eventually it would help them abroad, once their unrestrained hegemony was established and the world saw China as a force that must be dealt with as the leading world power.
Su was no economist, he admitted this to himself, but he knew quite securely that China would be just fine once it became the center of the world.
He put the papers aside and looked out the window, thinking about his speech today. Yes. Yes, he could do it. Chairman Su could take this awful event last night, this body blow to his attack against the United States, and he could parlay it into a way to get exactly what he wanted from the Politburo.
With the deaths of twenty thousand American sailors and the resulting degradation of the American blue-water Navy, there was no doubt in Su’s mind America would leave the area, giving China complete control of the region.
Tong would be even more helpful in death than he had been in life.
Other than Driscoll, who was now trailing about one hundred yards behind the last troop transport truck, no one saw the motorcade in the rain until it neared the ambush point. Everyone was ordered to hold their fire until Clark launched an anti-tank rocket from the north. By the time Clark was sure he was looking at the motorcade, the first few cars had already passed by the position of Dom and his group of shooters.
Quickly Clark looked behind him to make sure the back blast area was clear. It was, so he adjusted his aim, lining the iron sight of the weapon on a white civilian car just in front of the motorcade. He knew, or at least he hoped, that by the time the rocket hit, the white car would have cleared that piece of road and the first SUV of the motorcade would occupy it.
He launched, felt the whoosh of the rocket motor as the weapon left the tube, then immediately dropped the spent tube to the asphalt on the overpass, and grabbed the second anti-tank rocket launcher from its case.
Only then did he hear the explosion two hundred fifty yards to his southwest.
He hefted the second weapon and saw that his first shot was a perfect bull’s-eye. The SUV, the lead vehicle in the motorcade, was a burning, rolling, disintegrating fireball that bounced sideways up the highway. The vehicles behind were swerving left and right, trying like hell to get around it and out of the ambush zone.
John aimed at a clear spot just to the left of the wrecked SUV and about twenty yards closer to his position. He launched a second rocket, tossed the tube down, pulled a pistol out of his pants, and started running off the overpass back the way he came. Only then did he look down at the road and see his second shot hit just in front of a big sedan, cratering the concrete and setting the front of the vehicle on fire.
Behind it, the rest of the motorcade all slammed on their brakes and began reversing, trying to back away from the pedestrian overpass ahead and the missiles that came from it.
Sam Driscoll opened the door of his moving truck, threw a large canvas bag onto the road, and then leapt out next to it. He was one hundred yards behind the rear vehicle of the convoy, but his truck rolled on, big and heavy and slow, because he had looped a rope from the dash through the steering wheel, and the automatic transmission was still in drive.
Sam hit and then rolled along the wet street, ran back to unzip his bag, and from it he removed an RPG-9 and an AK-47. By the time he leveled the launcher at the motorcade, he saw that several of the black cars were backing up or executing a three-point turn to reverse direction. The two big troop transports, however, were still in the process of slowing down. This compressed the motorcade, which was bad news for everyone in it.
Sam targeted the rear troop transport and fired. The finned grenade covered the distance in just over a second, and it impacted on the canvas walls over the bed. The vehicle erupted into a fireball, killing many in the back and sending others leaping and falling from the wreckage.
Quickly Sam checked his six-o’clock position. With the heavy rain, many motorists on the street could not see the melee until they were just a few hundred yards from Driscoll, which meant now a massive sliding car wreck was starting behind him. He put the slight danger of getting run over during this operation out of his mind, reloaded the launcher, and fired another grenade. This explosive shot right by the open driver’s-side door of the rolling work truck and struck the second troop transport, which had just slammed its rear into the center dividing wall between the northbound and southbound lanes while trying to back up to reverse direction. The broadside hit of this grenade meant fewer soldiers were killed outright, but the truck was ablaze and blocking the road so the surviving vehicles in the motorcade now had no way to escape.