Covert Action (Command and Control Book 5), page 4
He checked for satellite coverage in the area during the time frame. Still nothing. It didn’t surprise him. The U.S. interests in the region were negligible, and satellite resources were precious.
Harrison blew out a breath and sat back in his chair. The single data point in the wilderness made no sense. Annette was probably right. The signal must have been an echo off another tower.
So much for technology, he thought. I can sit on my ass in Washington or I can get out in the field to use my best intel-gathering device: my own two eyes.
Harrison logged onto an unclassified browser and looked at plane tickets to Tashkent. He would need to get a visa, and that would take some time. He let his gaze roam over the stacks of paper he had pushed to the side.
First things first, he thought.
He opened his unclassified email program and found Don Riley’s name in the directory. The cursor blinked in the subject line.
He typed: Emergency leave of absence.
4
Tashkent, Uzbekistan
The black Mercedes-Benz Sprinter van pulled to the curb of the new Tashkent high-speed rail terminal. On the wide sidewalk, a knot of men clad in identical blue business suits waited for the Chinese delegation.
“One moment, General.” The makeup artist was young and beautiful with delicate porcelain features. Two tendrils of straight dark hair framed the oval of her face. When she concentrated on Major General Gao’s features, brush poised in the air, a tiny furrow appeared between her wide set eyes.
The director consulted with the cameraman in the back seat, then spoke to Gao. “Sir, would you mind leaving your overcoat in the van, please? We want your ribbons to be visible when you go into the entrance hall.”
Gao Yichen sighed as if all these petty details were beneath him, but inside he glowed. The Party had chosen to make him the centerpiece of their documentary about the Belt and Road Initiative in Central Asia. Without a doubt, it was the most important story of their time, and he, the Hero of Taiwan, was the star. He imagined how proud Mei Lin would be when the documentary appeared on state television. His picture, his personal story, the colorful rack of ribbons on his chest and the scar on his cheek being seen by millions of eyeballs.
Gao coughed gently into his fist and waved away the makeup artist. “If you think that's really necessary.”
He thought he saw a flicker of emotion flash across the director's face. Did he see through Gao’s facade of modesty? Did he secretly think the hero of his film was a fraud?
For Gao, the nightmare was always the same: A crowd of people surround him. A child steps forward, a boy, and points at Gao. “Liar!” the child shouts. “Coward!”
Then Gao wakes up in a cold sweat.
The makeup girl swooped in again and ran a delicate finger along the ridge of his cheekbone. “Perfect,” she said in a breathy voice.
The director leaned forward. “I want to get a following shot of the general exiting the van. Then we set up and do it again from the curb.”
Gao nodded his understanding. He sat up straighter in his chair so his uniform was tight across his shoulders. He was aware of the camera lens behind him.
“Action,” said the director.
Gao reached for the door handle and pulled.
Nothing happened.
“Cut!” The director swore. “Put the car in park, you idiot!”
Their driver was a local man, maybe twenty years old, with heavy brown features. He looked at the interpreter riding in the passenger seat for guidance, who pointed at the gear shift. The young man flushed red, then complied.
“Again,” the director said, his voice dripping with sarcasm.
This time the automatic door slid open smoothly and Gao stepped out onto the patterned concrete sidewalk. He raised his gaze to take in the great vista of the billion-dollar transportation and logistics center, designed and built by the Chinese government for the people of Uzbekistan.
He strode forward to where the delegation waited. A stiff breeze, dry and chill, ran perpendicular to his path and Gao wondered if it ruffled his hair, which he’d grown longer than regulation length for this trip. How would it look on camera?
The man leading the Uzbek delegation was short and squat, and he sweated despite the cool of the late February day. The sun was harsh. Gao wished he'd remembered to put on sunglasses.
With his best diplomatic half smile in place, he extended his hand toward the sweating fat man.
“Cut!” the director called out. But the man had latched onto Gao’s hand. His grip was wet and clammy and he held fast as Gao tried to pull away.
“We are . . . glad . . . you are here, General Major Gao,” the man wheezed in mangled Mandarin.
“Salom,” Gao replied. Hello, in Uzbek. He extricated his hand and turned back toward the van.
“You are leaving?” the man said, in English.
The interpreter rushed in to explain the situation as Gao walked away. It had been like this the whole day, a mixed salad of languages. Few Chinese spoke the local dialect and fewer locals spoke Mandarin, but everyone seemed to know at least a little English, so it became their fallback position. He allowed a wry smile. That fact would never make it into the documentary.
The makeup girl assumed his smile was for her. She met his gaze as she examined his face and pronounced him perfect yet again.
They repeated Gao’s exit of the van and introduction to the Uzbek contingent. The director made a rolling motion with his index finger to indicate they should keep going, so Gao allowed the sweaty Uzbek man to lead him through the automatic doors into the vast foyer.
Pale sunlight flooded through the domed glass ceiling twenty meters overhead. The floor was a mosaic of different colored marble made up to look like a distant mountain range. The foyer served as the public entry point for the high-speed rail station and a not so subtle symbol of the greatness of Chinese engineering.
Gao stopped to admire the hall. It was immense. It was magnificent. And it was completely empty.
“Cut!” the director shouted. “Where are my extras?”
The man leading the Uzbek delegation looked lost.
The director swung his arm around the empty space. “People,” he exclaimed in English. “Where are the people?”
The man's face cleared and he pulled a mobile phone from his inside pocket. Less than a minute later, the double doors at the far end of the space opened and people streamed out.
Gao spent thirty minutes waiting while the director rushed around the hall marshalling his extras like so many mannequins. Few in the crowd spoke English or Mandarin, so the director mimed walking and talking for the assembled actors.
When they started shooting again, Gao followed the fat man through the thronged hall as he babbled on in his native language. Gao nodded and did his best to keep the camera on the side of his body where there was a clear shot of both his ribbons as well as his scarred face.
The walking tour ended on the observation deck. An entire wall of floor-to-ceiling windows looked out over the airport to the barren landscape beyond. Hot, brown earth as far as the eye could see, sloping up into distant, snowcapped peaks. It was dramatic, but not quite real to Gao, like something out of a movie set. He half-expected to see a horde of Mongol raiders on horseback come thundering across the plain.
The makeup girl arrived for a touch-up that Gao was certain he did not need. As the young woman fussed over him, Gao gave himself a stern reminder that Mei Lin was home in Beijing with two young children, one still in diapers. The attention from the clearly infatuated girl was flattering, but would come to nothing. He was a most happily married man.
She stroked his eyebrow with a carefully manicured fingernail and once again pronounced him perfect.
The director approached, dismissing the makeup artist with a curt wave of his hand. “We’re going to set up in the control room,” he said. “We’ll get some B-roll. When the train arrives, we’ll follow you out to the platform for the ceremony.” He lowered his voice. “Just try to be yourself, General. The best acting is not acting.”
The director walked away, leaving Gao to stew over this criticism. Was he being too showy? What did the man want—
“General!” the director called. “We’re ready for you.”
Gao tried “not acting” as he descended the stairs, camera crew in tow, into a subterranean bunker the size of a ballroom.
The operations center for the rail portion of the transportation hub was staffed with at least a hundred people hunched over computer workstations, most of them local men and women, and all of them under the age of twenty-five. The elder in the room was a stoop-shouldered Chinese man in his early thirties with a harried expression and a pair of half-moon reading glasses on a chain around his neck. His face told Gao that a camera crew was the last thing he wanted to see on this very busy day.
Gao walked along the alley at the back of the room, studying the monitors that covered the front wall. The center third of the monitors showed a line drawing of the railyard and the status of all the trains. Only one line was active: the incoming high-speed train filled with dignitaries for the ribbon-cutting ceremony.
Gao’s gaze shifted to the left, where a series of monitors displayed video from the interior of the arriving train. Although he recognized none of the faces, he’d seen a list of the VIPs. The President of Uzbekistan was there, as was the mayor of Tashkent, and the Chinese ambassador. He saw a few military uniforms from other Central Asian countries mixed in among the dark suits and colorful dresses.
The bottom of the screen said the train was operating at 260 kilometers per hour and would be arriving at Platform One in 15 minutes. When they arrived, Gao would be there to greet them. Gao, the Chinese ambassador, and the President of Uzbekistan would cut the ribbon to formally open the Tashkent Logistics Hub.
“Cut!” the director called. The camera crew faded away.
Gao found a seat behind an empty workstation in the back row and sat down, still watching the live video feed from the dignitary train. His eyes narrowed in thought. They seemed to be having a good time while he was stuck here in the basement, waiting for the party train to arrive. He watched the director deep in conversation with the camera crew, wondering again what he’d meant by the best acting is not acting.
The makeup girl appeared holding a cup of tea. As he accepted the gift, their fingers brushed gently. Gao took a sip. “Perfect,” he said, and the girl blushed.
Gao placed the cup on the desk and followed the contours of the young woman’s legs as she walked away.
Perfect, indeed. And you're still a married man, Yichen.
He shifted his attention back to the video screens. There were security stations at every kilometer mark along both the new highway and rail lines that ran from Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan to Tashkent, Uzbekistan, all captured on video and delivered to the control room courtesy of the Huawei network. By this time next year, a person would be able to take a train or drive a car from Xinjiang province in western China all the way to Tehran, a modern-day Silk Road of steel and asphalt.
Gao leaned his elbow on the desk and posted his chin in his palm. Before the end of the year, the Party would stage a grand celebration in Samarkand to unite the rail lines being built from the east and the west. They were calling it the Jade Spike Ceremony. Gao wondered if he would be invited to that ribbon cutting.
Probably not, he decided. The General Secretary would be at that event. Surely, he would do the honors.
The thought of the most powerful man in the People’s Republic of China steered Gao’s musings in a new direction. Had he exhausted his opportunities for advancement in the military? Maybe it was time to parlay his connections with the General Secretary and the Minister of State Security into a political career. Nothing too grand, not at first anyway. A mayor of a medium-sized Chinese city to start, then perhaps a governor of a province—
Gao felt a slight tremor under his elbow. The liquid in his teacup quivered. Half of the video screens on the wall of monitors went blank. There was a beat of shocked stillness, then a cacophony of raised voices.
The supervisor shouted over the din and Gao heard the word “reboot.” The man obviously thought they had lost their computer connection.
But as a combat veteran, Gao knew this was more than just a simple loss of power or a faulty computer connection. There had been an explosion nearby. An explosion large enough to be felt in an underground, seismically-isolated bunker.
He stood, staring at the screens, comparing location tags. All the video feeds for the railyard were out, so the explosion must have taken out a local control node.
His gaze snapped over to the video from the incoming train. People drank champagne and laughed as the landscape outside the windows passed in a brown blur. The data feed at the base of the screen read: Speed: 256 KPH.
Gao checked his watch. Thirteen minutes until the train arrived.
He strode across the room and seized the floor supervisor’s elbow. The man’s skin was feverish hot and he was trembling like a kitten. Sweat bathed his face.
“It’s not just a computer failure,” Gao said. “There’s been an explosion.”
The man looked at Gao without comprehension. “Explosion . . . ?”
He tried to extract his arm, but Gao held him fast. “Somewhere in the railyard.” He pointed at the video monitors. “Look, all your railyard cameras are out. Can you signal the train to stop?”
The man looked, blinked at the wall. Gao watched the color drain from his face. “The train. . .” he whispered.
“Yes, you need to stop the train!”
Gao felt tension in the man’s arm and he let him go. The supervisor barked at one of the operators, a young woman who seemed like she was handling the stress of the moment better than her manager. She tapped at her keyboard, then spoke into her headset. Gao saw her shoulders go rigid, then she repeated her actions, taking care with each keystroke.
When she turned back to her supervisor, Gao didn’t need a translator. Her face told the story: they had lost communications with the train.
His gaze clocked up to the video feed where the people on the train were still drinking and laughing. 267 kilometers per hour. Ten minutes.
“Remote control?” Gao asked. “Can you stop the train from here?”
The supervisor hurried across the room to a set of workstations set along the far wall. Gao was relieved to see the screen held an image of what looked like a control panel for a train operator. The supervisor spoke to the technician, who nodded his understanding and then tapped the screen. He dragged his finger across a virtual throttle to reduce power. The screen showed the train speed slowing down rapidly.
Gao watched the video monitor of the train occupants. There was no reaction. Speed: 256 KPH. Arrival: Nine minutes.
The supervisor looked like he was about to throw up.
“Not working,” he said in Mandarin. “Not working.”
Gao’s own stomach roiled with fear. Then he realized the camera crew was filming and sweat broke out all over his body. If there was an accident at the grand opening, it would overshadow everything he had accomplished. The documentary would be a farce. He would be shunned in the Party. No one wanted to be associated with failure.
He seized the supervisor by the shoulders and shook him. “Do something!”
The man’s head lolled like he was drunk. Gao pushed him aside. There had to be a way to stop that train.
“Show me a map of the railyard,” he ordered the young man at the workstation.
It took him only a few seconds. Gao tried to make sense of the lines snaking across the screen. There was only one rail line active, the incoming train inching across the screen as a thick red line. The remainder of the journey showed green, all the way into the railyard and up to the platform. The same platform where an enormous red ribbon was stretched between two concrete pillars and hundreds of reporters and TV cameras were waiting. Gao’s stomach spasmed.
Speed: 253 KPH. Seven minutes.
Gao ran his finger across the path of the train to where it passed a yellow line that branched off, ran for a few centimeters, and stopped.
“What is this?” he demanded.
The young man zoomed in. “It’s a rail spur. For future expansion.”
“What’s out there?” Gao stabbed at the end of the yellow line.
“Nothing. It’s just open.”
Gao swallowed. “Divert the train there.”
“But . . .”
“Do it!” Gao shouted. “Now!”
“We don’t have control of the rails, sir.”
“Use the back-up then,” Gao said.
“But we don’t have—wait.” The young man sat bolt upright in his chair. He switched screens on the monitor, replacing the map view with lines of code. He muttered to himself as he opened a search box and typed in a string characters. The screen scrolled down at a dizzying rate, stopping at a highlighted line of code. He tapped in a fresh line of code, then looked up at Gao, finger poised over the keyboard. “Are you sure?”
Gao felt his breath coming hard and fast. This was not his responsibility, but if he stood by and did nothing… “Do it,” he ordered.
The tech dropped his fingertip to the keyboard, then immediately switched back to the map view of the rail network. The green line had shifted from the railyard onto the rail spur to nowhere.
“That section of track is not powered,” the supervisor said. He was at Gao’s elbow. “Their speed will drop.”
Gao turned to watch the video of the train occupants on the wall screen. They lurched as the train made an unexpected turn. He saw mouths open in surprise, champagne glasses tumble to the floor. One woman lost her balance and reeled against the wall.
Gao’s eyes were glued on the speed of the train 180 . . . 140 . . . 98 KPH.
He looked at the progress of the red line on the map. It was nearly at the end of the rail spur now.
The brand-new high-speed train was still moving at 38 KPH when it ran out of track. The people on the video feed lurched and careened inside the carriage in a silent pantomime of panic.
