Free The Art of War: A Novel by Stephen Coonts

drive.
    That evening he took Sally to a movie, a soapy love story. Sally snuggled up against him in her theater seat and held his hand. Just like the American girls up and down the rows near them.
    She was an American, of course, third generation. She spoke not a word of Chinese and merely giggled when he spouted some occasionally. Unlike Chinese girls, she didn’t cover her mouth with her hand when she smiled or giggled. She showed off perfect white teeth that her father had paid a whopping orthodontist bill to provide. Choy thought she was very charming. And her hand was warm and firm, supple, sensuous.
    He felt very, very good. Maybe he should marry this woman. Maybe he should ask her. But there was Zhang. If it weren’t for him, Choy could just cease his activities for his controller, get a job, probably move, and Chinese intelligence would be out of his life and a part of his past. They would never find him among three hundred million Americans.
    He would need a job, of course, because without the controller the money would stop. But jobs were plentiful in America if you were willing to work hard and had a little bit of intelligence.
    Choy Lee thought about all this and held Sally’s hand and let the sensations of life and love warm him gently.

 
    CHAPTER FIVE
    If men make war in slavish obedience to rules, they will fail.
    —Ulysses S. Grant
    Coffee cup in hand, Jake Grafton walked down the hall to the director’s office. After a short word with an executive assistant in the outer office, he punched in the code on the door and went in, closing it behind him. Today rain was hammering against the double-pane security glass of the office window and wind was shaking the branches of the nearby trees, which Grafton could have seen if he had looked, but he didn’t.
    Acting director!
    He didn’t know where to start. Soon, perhaps tomorrow, he would have to talk to the department heads, see where the agency’s budget was and how the draft budget for next year was coming together, review all the big irons in the fire … and he was going to have to find someone to run Middle Eastern ops. There was no way he could do the director’s job and that one, too.
    The CIA was a huge, global operation. Not that the agency’s staff was the sole outfit in the government charged with gathering foreign intelligence, because they weren’t. Still, this agency was supposed to collect, analyze and pass on the intelligence it collected to the director of national intelligence, Reinicke, who was supposed to pass it on to senior decision makers in the White House, and in military and civilian agencies and departments.
    Well, he decided, the more he knew about what was going on in the world, the sooner he could get on top of this job. He set his coffee cup on the desk, opened the director’s file cabinets and started in where he had left off.
    An hour into the mess, he found a Top Secret memo, or report, generated by the Pentagon’s IT staff. If had been forwarded to Tomazic by the chairman of the Joint Chiefs. Copious amounts of Tomazic’s green ink were all over the margins and footers.
    The Chinese had hacked into the Pentagon’s computers. The signature of Chinese computers was unmistakable in the telltale mouse droppings. U.S. Navy operational schedules were compromised. Apparently all of them. Nuclear submarine schedules and missions, aircraft carrier task groups, port calls, manpower problems, projects, budgets … It looked as if they had seen everything except technical data and ship plans. No, wait. Maybe they had cracked into those files, too.
    When he finished the printed report, he started on Tomazic’s handwritten notes. “Chinese espionage a huge problem. Their new stealth fighter an obvious clone of the F-35. Must get a handle on this. Our encrypted communications are obviously compromised—if the Chinese know what the messages might say, then they are easier to crack. How do we keep them out of this closet? Can we