Page 25 of Clive Cussler's Quantum Tempest
“Does that mean what I think it means?” Linc had enough French that he understood the many Spanish cognates.
Raven flashed a grim smile.
“We’re about to ascend the Mountain of Death.”
14
The People’s Republic of China
Peng De sat at his desk in the top-floor corner office with a two-hundred-seventy-degree view of Shanghai, befitting his rank and prestige in China’s Ministry of State Security (MSS). His secret division occupied several floors of the city’s newest and most futuristic tower of gleaming glass. China’s cities, like its society, were leaving behind the inelegant brutalism of Soviet-era design.
Peng’s meteoric rise to the near pinnacle of the infamous organization was based entirely on his merits. The corruption reforms of the past decade had cleared away most of the geriatric dead wood clogging the system. The Party understood that self-serving bureaucrats and crony careerism had warped his country’s development for years. Peng was at the forefront of an emergent class of young and dedicated technocrats forging a brighter destiny for China. He was a new breed of Chinese patriot: thoughtful, technical, and incorruptible, all of which made him an exceedingly dangerous opponent.
Peng’s primary responsibility for his division within the dreaded MSS was to carry out China’s decades-long policy of “unrestricted warfare” against the United States. Unrestricted warfare was a form of asymmetrical combat formulated at a time when America had far superior military and technological resources. The concept was to attack America where it was most defenseless without resorting to actual kinetic combat.
Unrestricted warfare was designed to inflict unbearable social and material costs, divert government resources, demoralize the population, and steal away thousands of lives, all in an effort to delegitimize the capitalist American regime. After all, it was the venerable Sun Tzu who taught the very essence of all strategic thinking: “The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.”
Thanks to decades of strategic theft, and especially the efforts of the MSS, China had nearly closed its yawning economic, technological, and military gaps with the Americans. But despite his nation’s near parity in military capabilities, the policy of unrestricted warfare continued unabated. And why shouldn’t it? It had proven wildly successful.
In his youth, Peng imagined the Americans would have seen through this strategy and done everything they could to combat it. But that was before he had joined the conflict himself and witnessed the workings of both regimes. Corruption wasn’t just a Chinese problem—but China had solved it, mostly at the point of a gun or dangling on the end of a hangman’s noose.
The Americans hadn’t.
Peng was now the tip of the spear in unrestricted warfare, or at least he held the forward end of the shaft. His primary thrust was flooding America with both deadly drugs and millions of illegal immigrants, often at the same time. To do so he had to work with some of the world’s most unsavory characters, including drug lords and American politicians. But in so doing he kept his uncalloused hands clean from the actual dirty work involved. “Always kill with a borrowed knife” was one of Peng’s most cherished strategies.
Each year now, twice as many Americans died of opioid drug overdoses than died in the twelve years of fighting the Vietnam War. Such was heaven’s justice after the Opium Wars and the “century of humiliation” the West imposed upon China. The Americans taught China well. If President FDR’s grandfather built his fortune on poisoning Chinese society with opium, wasn’t turnabout fair play?
Illegal immigration was equally damaging, overwhelming American social services, the medical and criminal justice systems, employment and housing. And, of course, elections.
Beyond the annual toll of hundreds of billions of dollars on the American economy, China’s unrestricted warfare efforts were eroding America’s concept of itself. What does it mean to be a so-called “nation of laws” when the nation itself permits such lawlessness? Even a child understood that a nation without borders is no nation at all. What military recruit will pledge allegiance to a borderless entity, let alone fight and die for it? America was demoralized, disoriented, and nearly defeated. Soon it would have neither the ability nor desire to defend itself.
But as promising as these developments were, Peng and his mentors couldn’t afford the risk that patriotic American leaders might rise up and turn the tide on these events before it was too late. China had to keep pressing forward in its development. That was why Peng and every other division head in China’s intelligence community was additionally tasked with acquiring artificial general intelligence.
The world had already achieved AI. Artificial intelligence was a very powerful computational tool. But it was nothing compared to AGI. AI was like a factory robot, able to efficiently carry out one very specific task assigned to it. But AGI was like the gifted engineer who designed, built, and even repaired all kinds of robots—even the whole factory. It was the difference between a paintbrush and the master painter.
The inescapable verdict of future historians would be this: the nation that first acquired AGI would dominate the planet for the next five hundred years.
Artificial general intelligence would give godlike capabilities to captains of industry as well as of armies. It would exponentially accelerate advances in science, medicine, industrial production, and military capabilities, leaving all other competitors in the dustbin of history.
Peng smiled, his eyes gleaming as he imagined the possibilities. Chinese war planners knew AGI would easily penetrate American military communications networks and launch America’s nuclear arsenal into its own atmosphere. The resulting electromagnetic pulse cascade would destroy electrical grids and critical infrastructure, plunging theU.S. into a stygian darkness, and utterly collapse emergency services, hospitals, transportation networks, and water supplies. Within weeks the Americans would suffer total social collapse. The proverbial Four Horsemen of starvation, disease, death, and civil war would trample across the continent, after which Chinese military forces would sweep in without resistance and harvest America’s nearly infinite natural resources.
Peng’s normally buoyant mood turned decidedly somber as he viewed the encrypted video his Russian colleague in the FSB had sent him. His anger swelled as the shaky handheld video revealed the gruesome details.
The burnt and broken wreckage of the Chinese 747-8F transport aircraft was scattered for hundreds of meters over the Siberian ice. Peng’s Russian was passable, but the attached transcript and washed-out video images indicated that neither the crew nor his security team survived, and the plane’s precious cargo of EUV photolithography equipment clearly destroyed.
Peng closed the laptop, his concern rising. He rubbed his closely cropped chin beard thoughtfully. The destruction of the aircraft’s cargo was a crushing blow to China’s AGI program, the equipment invaluable and irreplaceable, at least for the time being.
This crash was one of several similar catastrophes that occurred in the past year, each seemingly random and entirely accidental. He’d submitted detailed reports suggesting there were too many coincidences to avoid the conclusion some kind of conspiracy was at play. His intelligence work had taught him to infer motives from outcomes. Effects were always produced by causes, and a pattern of coincidences still amounted to a pattern.
Though his conspiracy theory had been rejected by his superiors, this latest event only confirmed Peng’s deepest fears.
According to the radar tracking he’d seen, it appeared as if either Captain Yuchen or his first officer committed suicide for some unknown reason by plunging the perfectly operating aircraft into the Siberian wasteland.
But Peng De knew both pilots personally and was deeply familiar with their dossiers. They both had flawless flight records. They nominally worked for one of China’s largest civilian air cargo transport companies, but were also on his payroll. Highly respected international pilots like them passed through security gates with frictionless ease, making them perfect couriers for his worldwide operations.
There was no way either man committed suicide. Neither was mentally unbalanced nor given over to alien ideologies. Like him, they were committed Party men and patriotic to the core. They fully understood the vital importance of this delivery.
Peng had also checked the meticulous maintenance logs. They were flawless.
