None of the pilots liked leaving the Reagan, but all these young men had been in the Marine Corps long enough to know military orders did not need to make a damn bit of sense to be lawful, so they sat there, waiting to be dismissed.
But the lieutenant commander surprised them again when he told them that they would need to volunteer to go on an extremely dangerous mission. They would learn more details in Iwakuni, and then further details at their final destination.
Confused, intrigued, and excited, every man in the room volunteered.
They landed in Iwakuni before lunch, and as soon as they climbed out of their flight gear they were handed civilian clothing and led into a briefing room. Here Trash, Cheese, and the rest of the two squadrons found themselves in front of a Defense Intelligence Agency civilian who did not offer his name.
Trash was floored when the man told them they would all be issued packed luggage and false passports, and they would climb in a helicopter and be flown to the international airport in Osaka. There they would board a commercial flight to Taipei, Taiwan.
Trash and his squadron were going to sneak onto Taiwan, an island with no U.S. military presence.
The Taiwanese Air Force had recently taken delivery of two dozen F/A-18 Hornets. The Marines would be sent to Taiwan, placed in the airplanes, and they would then run combat air patrols in the Taiwan Strait.
The United States had not placed military fighting forces on Taiwan since 1979, as it would have been seen by the mainland Chinese as an overt provocation to do so. The conventional wisdom had always been that U.S. forces on Taiwan would freak the PRC out enough for them to launch missiles at the tiny island and forcibly repatriate it. America did not want to give China such an excuse, so America had stayed away.
The Marines, the DIA man told the pilots, had been chosen because they were versatile, able to operate with less support than Navy forces, and all the men in the room had spent the previous two weeks going head-to-head with the PLAAF in the strait.
They were battle-hardened, as it were.
The covert squadron would be getting some support staff, mechanics, and flight operations personnel from here in Iwakuni, but the bulk of the ground crew would be Taiwanese Air Force men and women secretly moved to the base.
Trash knew he and twenty-three other guys were not going to fight off the Chinese if they attacked Taiwan. He wondered if this entire exercise was nothing more than politics, showing the ROC government that even though the Reagan and the other carrier in the Pacific weren’t getting too close to the danger, the United States was willing to stick a few of its own boys right there in the middle of the strait.
It pissed him off to think of himself and his friends as pawns in a geopolitical chess match, but he had to admit, he was glad for the opportunity to get back in the action.
The flight to Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport went without incident, other than the fact twenty-four American men, age twenty-six to forty-one, all with military haircuts, sat in ones and twos throughout the cabin and ignored one another. On the ground they passed breezily through customs, and then met up in the lobby of an airport hotel.
A couple of guys whom Trash took for DIA operatives led them to a bus, which shuttled them to a closed portion of the big international airport.
They flew in a ROC C-130 transport aircraft from Taipei to Hualien Airport, a commercial airport in the middle of an active military base on Taiwan’s eastern shore. The ROC Air Force flew F-16 fighters off the runway year-round, and the civilian portion of the airport had been closed indefinitely for “military training maneuvers.” Trash and the other Marines had been told they would be kept away from the vast majority of base personnel to minimize the possibility of leaks.
A Hawkeye owned by the ROC Air Force was also staffed with American air combat officers, and it provided command and control for the flights.
The Americans were ushered into a large bunker built into a hillside near the runway, where they found twenty-two used, but in good condition, F/A-18C Hornets, as well as living quarters and operational areas set up for the Americans.
Thirty-three hours after being awakened in the middle of the night on the Ronald Reagan, Captain Brandon “Trash” White and Major Scott “Cheese” Stilton walked out of the secure area with their helmets over their heads, following the operational security orders given to them by the DIA.
On the tarmac they both inspected their aircraft one last time, and Trash climbed into the cockpit of “his” Hornet, 881. Cheese climbed up the ladder and stepped into the cockpit of his assigned aircraft, 602.
Soon they were back in the air, flying CAPs over the strait, and — and this was the best part for Trash and the other Marines — returning after their mission to land on a real runway — a long, wide, flat, unmoving piece of asphalt, not a bobbing postage stamp in the middle of the ocean.
FIFTY-TWO
Gavin Biery had spent the past week since returning from Hong Kong locked in his laboratory picking apart the secrets of FastByte22’s handheld computer.
Now that FastByte22 was dead, Gavin knew the only clues the young hacker would ever reveal were locked within the circuitry, and it was his job to expose them.
The device had been difficult to crack. On the first day of working on it, he realized FastByte22 had booby-trapped the machine with a virus that would launch against any computer, Bluetooth-receiving device, or other peripheral that was attached to it in any way. The virus would then deliver a RAT payload into the infected device that would take a snapshot of the user on the other side.
It was an ingenious piece of code, and it took Gavin two full days to circumvent it.
Once inside the drive and through the encryption, he found a treasure trove of information. Almost all of the notes he found were in Chinese characters, of course, and Zha was a note taker. Biery was terrified about the possibility that the machine had other virus booby traps installed, so he had a Mandarin-speaking translator from the third floor come into the room after submitting to a pat-down, and this poor young man then had to hand-transcribe hundreds of pages of document files onto a legal pad for translation back at his desk.
While the documents were being transcribed, Biery looked through the executable files and discovered other secrets.
A complicated custom-coded file-uploading system on the device was at first a mystery to Biery. Looking through the source code of the program, he could not for the life of him discern what made it different from all the commercial file-uploading applications available for free. It seemed to be an overly complicated Rube Goldberg piece of software.
He was certain there was something to it; FastByte22 was not the kind of hacker to build something so bloated just to pass the time, but he put it aside and kept hunting through the device.
In the end, the Chinese translator unlocked the secret of FastByte22’s computer. The Mandarin notes, it seemed, were ruminations that Zha had in his time away from work. Ryan had explained to Gavin that when they tailed FastByte through the streets of Hong Kong, and even when he sat in the strip club, he seemed to always be typing away on the computer. Biery understood the kid; he was the same way. In his time away from work Gavin was always on his laptop at home or making little audio notes to himself in his car, ideas that just came to him in that moment that he wanted to record for later.
Most of Zha’s notes were just his ideas, and many of them were silly or downright weird: “I want to break into the website of Buckingham Palace and place a picture of Chairman Mao over the Queen’s head,” and “If we were able to fire the stabilizing rockets on the International Space Station, could we hold the world for ransom to prevent the ISS from crashing into a satellite?”