Mark Greaney - Full Force and Effect

“Didn’t say that, either. As far as I’m concerned, you’d never leave the White House. But it’s not my call to make, Mr. President.”

Ryan drummed his fingers on his desk for a moment. Then he said, “I’m going. I don’t duck and cover because some Mexican cartel psycho scumbag in the mountains goes on Twitter and threatens me. The office of the President is too important to show any reaction to a two-bit thug like that.”

Arnie said, “But—”

Ryan cut him off. “If Secret Service wants a meeting, I’ll give it to them, but only out of respect. I have no plans of canceling that trip. Tell them that, maybe they can save us both some time.”

He looked at Andrea. She nodded. As far as she was concerned, the matter was settled. “I’ll be right there with you.”

“Then everything will be fine.” O’Day returned to her seat, and Ryan looked back to Arnie. “We’re about five seconds from throttle up. You’d better fasten your seat belt.” Both men reached for their seat belts just as the massive 747 began to vibrate.

—

Right after takeoff at seven-fifteen a.m. Ryan sent down for his intelligence chief, who was just finishing an apple bran muffin and a cup of coffee in the senior staff meeting room while she worked on her iPad. She climbed the steps to the President’s office and found Ryan sitting behind his desk. He wore a dress shirt and a tie, but over that he wore his dark blue Air Force One flight jacket. He beckoned her over to a small rectangular conference table and grabbed a stack of papers from his desk. When he started to a chair opposite her, she reached out and pulled the chair around to her side of the table.

“Mind if we sit next to each other? I have to show you some things on my tablet.”

“As long as it doesn’t get back to Ed,” he joked.

Mary Pat laughed and they both sat down. More coffee was poured for them while they got settled.

Ryan asked, “Have you seen the reaction from the North Koreans about the interdiction of the Emerald Endeavor ?”

Foley shook her head. “I missed it. I haven’t had a chance to turn on the TV.”

Ryan said, “Any guesses as to the wording?”

“I don’t know, something like ‘This illegal interdiction is an act of war perpetrated by America.’”

Ryan looked down at this morning’s Presidential Daily Brief, which contained an abbreviated transcript of the North Korean ambassador’s remarks from the evening before. He read it silently, then said, “Pretty good, Mary Pat.” He read from the transcript. “‘We regard this unlawful interception by the U.S. as an act of war.’”

Mary Pat waved away Ryan’s compliment. “Easy guess. It’s always the same with these guys.”

“So, what do we know about the material found? Definitely components to a missile?”

“Definitely. These tubes are the exact specs of a Dongfeng-3A. It is a Chinese single-stage medium-range nuclear ballistic missile.”

Ryan was confused. “ Chinese? That doesn’t make sense. The Chinese could truck them over the border. Why would they sail them out into international waters where they could be interdicted?”

Foley replied, “The Chinese didn’t make them or deliver them.”

“But you just said—”

“These are knockoffs.”

Jack cocked his head. “Counterfeit?”

“Yes. They are exact reproductions of the tubes used for the fuselage of the DF-3A Chinese medium-range missiles. But these were made by a private aerospace company in France called Précision Aéro Toulouse.”

“That’s interesting. Why?”

“The theory we have is this: We all know the North Koreans are having problems fielding a long-range ICBM because their Taepodong-2, the closest one they have to being ready, keeps failing, either between first and second stage or between second- and third-stage separation. That means something could be wrong with the second stage they are using.”

“Right. Go on.”

Mary Pat slid her iPad along the table to where Jack could see it and she began scrolling through several photos and diagrams of missiles. Each picture was labeled and time-stamped and captioned, and Ryan saw some of the photos were from open-source intel, and others were from top-secret sources.

“The second stage they are using now is taken from their Rodong medium-range ballistic missile. Basically they just slapped a single-stage rocket into the middle of their three-stage rocket, and it’s not working out for them.”

“Imagine that.”

“Rocket science is tough,” Mary Pat said with a chuckle. “But what we know is the Chinese are doing something similar with their long-range missiles. They use their Dongfeng-3A single-stage rocket as the second stage of their long-range ICBM.”

“And the North Koreans want to use the Dongfeng on their Taepodong-2?”

“It appears so. Back in the early nineties the Chinese gave the North Koreans one Dongfeng-3A missile. They never deployed it, they just took it apart to cobble pieces together in their own equipment. Now that China has refused to give Choi the ICBM technology that he wants, we think they are using this French aerospace firm to build replicas of the Dongfeng-3A.”

“Off Chinese plans?” Ryan asked.

“We don’t think so. We think this company in France actually reengineered these missile components by using the tube of the one Dongfeng-3A in the North Koreans’ possession.”

Jack looked over the photos of the tubes pulled off the Emerald Endeavor . “Wow.”

Mary Pat said, “‘Wow’ is right. In order to reengineer these tubes, they would have had to have built proprietary tools and high-tech machines.”

Ryan said the obvious. “And that didn’t come cheap.”

“Not cheap at all. We’ve spent the past couple of days looking into this. Précision Aéro received a payment of seventeen million euros eight and a half months ago. That’s nearly twenty-five million U.S. dollars.”

Ryan sipped his coffee. “Should it bother us North Korea has twenty-five million U.S. to drop on a project as speculative as this?”

“It bothers me . We don’t know what all they expected for that payment, or what all Précision Aéro has already shipped them.”

“We need to find out. Have we talked with the French government?”

“No, and there’s a problem with doing that. We need to go carefully so they don’t know we are looking into the bank accounts of one of their companies. Anyway, I know what they will say. The deal wasn’t done with the North Koreans. It was with a shell company out of Luxembourg.”

Ryan sighed, looking again at the tubes taken from the Emerald Endeavor . “This equipment must violate international nonproliferation treaties.”

“That’s debatable.”

Ryan turned to Mary Pat, and she put her hands up quickly. “ I’m not debating it. Of course the commerce in these kinds of ‘dual-use’ parts should be banned by international treaty, but companies make the argument that as long as it is not overtly going to end users who are going to make ICBMs, then it should be fair game. There are enough private satellite companies on earth today to where firms like Précision Aéro can dip their toe into weapons proliferation with plausible deniability.”

Ryan rubbed his eyes under his glasses. “I’ll call the French president and let him know what we know. I’ll play it like we got tipped off. He might not believe me, but he won’t be able to challenge me.”

Foley said, “The real issue here, Mr. President, is not the material we found on board the Emerald Endeavor . It is the fact North Korea had the hard currency to buy this material on the world market in the first place.”