Cambridgeshire, England
‘DÉJÀ VU,’ LUKE REMARKED.
‘Sorry, say again?’ The woman seated opposite took out her ear-buds and raised an immaculately sculpted eyebrow at him.
‘I said, this feels like déjà vu,’ Luke repeated, putting down the sheaf of notes on his lap. ‘This.’ He gestured towards the window as the flat fields and hedgerows of Cambridgeshire flashed past in a blur. The nearest fellow passengers were at least six rows away but, still, he kept his voice low.
‘You know,’ he continued, ‘us, on a train, heading for a briefing. Like the one we had in Cheltenham, just before Moscow?’
This time she gave him a rueful smile. Jenny Li was a mid-level intelligence officer in MI6. She was a scientist by training and one of the UK’s leading inter-agency experts on CBRN – chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear – making her a go-to subject-matter expert within the intelligence community. But Luke and Jenny’s Moscow assignment had so very nearly ended in disaster.
‘Yes,’ she replied sharply, ‘and the less said about that Moscow trip the better.’
‘Sorry.’ He grimaced. ‘Bad memories. So …’ he said, changing the subject and nodding towards her phone ‘… what you listening to? Anything good?’
‘That depends on your tastes,’ she said. ‘It’s a podcast. On CRISPR. You know, genetic manipulation? Just getting myself up to speed before the briefing. Here.’ She passed him her ear-buds. ‘Have a listen.’
How very Jenny, he thought, suppressing a smile. No chance of her kicking back and listening to Kings of Leon, then. No, that would be far too much like fun. Instead it was non-stop work for Ms Li. Luke admired her in many ways: for her knowledge, her dedication, her dogged determination to get to the bottom of things. Yet he also knew that had they been classmates at school they would almost certainly not have been friends. Jenny Li, he felt sure, would have taken a dim view of the sort of thing he and his mates had got up to.
‘Ah. Too late,’ she said brightly, taking back her ear-buds. ‘Looks like we’re pulling in to Huntingdon.’
Things had moved quickly after the Chief’s crisis meeting in Vauxhall Cross. Hong Kong station had been alerted and was now tapping up every contact in an effort to trace the missing courier, Hannah Slade. GCHQ was on notice to hoover up any digital clues that might emerge in cyberspace, and extra assistance was being called in from the US National Security Agency. Luke and Jenny were on notice to fly out to Hong Kong and were now being dispatched to Cambridgeshire for a hastily arranged briefing on China’s offensive military programmes.
As they stepped off the train at Huntingdon the question kept playing in Luke’s mind: why me? Why have I been chosen for this mission? He couldn’t speak a word of Mandarin or Cantonese, and he wasn’t on the China team back at Vauxhall Cross. But perhaps that was just the point. Was this the Chief keeping things compartmentalized? Sending someone out to China who wouldn’t be on Beijing’s radar? If so, then that made sense.
They were met at the station: a uniformed RAF officer and a civilian in a suit. There was little conversation on the ten-minute drive across the flat, windswept landscape of East Anglia towards the high-security base at RAF Wyton. A brief apology for the delay came from the suit as they stopped at the main gate to clear security, then a short drive through the base, pulling up at what looked like a giant white aircraft hangar. ‘Pathfinder Building’ read a sign outside the cube-shaped entrance portal. Luke registered the five flags fluttering outside, one for each of the ‘Five Eyes’ intelligence partners: the US, Canada, the UK, Australia and New Zealand.
‘Place looks like a glorified cattle shed,’ he remarked to Jenny, as they walked a few paces behind their escort towards the entrance lobby.
‘Don’t be rude,’ she scolded him, but he caught the trace of a smile on her face. ‘Be nice. We’re here to learn, remember?’ She tightened the belt on her camel-hair coat and strode on ahead.
Inside, an Army officer in camouflage working dress stepped forward to greet them. Sleeves rolled up, red collar tabs. A full colonel, Luke noted, and he realized they were probably about the same age. Luke had left the SBS as a captain but even now, after several years as a civilian, he often wondered how far he would have gone if he had ‘stayed in’. Probably not very far, he suspected, since he really couldn’t see himself putting in the requisite time ‘flying a desk’ in Whitehall.
‘Welcome to the Pathfinder Building,’ the Colonel said briskly, rubbing the palms of his hands together, ‘and welcome to the home of Defence Intelligence.’ He handed them their laminated passes on lanyards, each marked in bold with the words ‘Top Secret’. ‘I’m John Trent and I’ll be looking after your visit programme today.’ He looked from Luke to Jenny and back to Luke. ‘Right. Let’s get you a brew, shall we?’ He made a swift, vertical slicing motion with his hand as if cutting through thin air. ‘So, if you’d like to follow me …’
They walked in single file past the front desk and down a long corridor where framed photographs hung on the walls.
‘Some of our illustrious forebears there,’ remarked Colonel Trent, as he strode ahead of them. ‘This is actually the Defence Intelligence Fusion Centre to give it its full name. But I expect you knew that already.’ He gave a short, brittle laugh that was surprisingly high-pitched. ‘Used to be just imagery and exploitation but nowadays we do the whole nine yards in here. Oh, yes. Intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance, geospatial, satellites, you name it. Right. Coffee.’ He pushed open a door and ushered them through. ‘How d’you take it?’
Five minutes later Luke and Jenny were sitting in the briefing room, clasping their steaming cups of rather unappetizing coffee. Living in London, Luke had almost forgotten how awful military coffee tasted – or, rather, didn’t taste. Out of politeness to their hosts, he took a sip, then put it down beside him and left it there. ‘Christ. That’s weasel’s piss,’ he remarked to Jenny.
‘You’d know, would you?’ she replied, looking dead ahead and trying once again not to smile.
The room was arranged like a classroom with its rows of desks, a whiteboard, a lectern and an overhead projector. But the photographs on the walls spoke of the deadly business of modern warfare. There were striking images of F35 jets taking off from an aircraft carrier, a Royal Navy sub slipping out of Faslane, the last light of the day illuminating the purple heather on the Scottish hills beyond. But the one that caught Luke’s eye was a grab from a drone feed he recognized from the early days of Ukraine’s failed counter-offensive in June 2023. It showed a squad of Ukrainian infantry pinned down in a Russian minefield. He shuddered as he remembered watching that, seeing one man after another become casualties as they tried to rescue their comrades.
‘Let’s start with the big picture,’ said a voice at the front of the room. A bald man in glasses was standing next to a large map of China projected onto the screen behind him. A woman stood next to him. Other than that, it was just Luke and Jenny in the briefing room.
‘China or, to give it its official title, the People’s Republic of China, is well on the way to becoming the world’s leading economic power. Since the beginning of this century it has embarked on an aggressive but extraordinarily successful programme of acquisition around the world. It has bought up strategic stakes in key ports like Djibouti, Piraeus and Gwadar in Pakistan, giving it access to vital shipping lanes well beyond its borders. It even has a military base in Djibouti on the Horn of Africa and that’s nearly eight thousand kilometres from Beijing.’
He stopped to unscrew the top of his reusable water bottle, took a swig and continued.
‘China has also – and I expect you already knew this – made an illegal grab for a whole string of islands and reefs in the South China Sea. Some of these are literally nowhere near the Chinese mainland. They’re hard up next to the coasts of Malaysia and the Philippines. Yet the PLA – that’s the People’s Liberation Army – has occupied them, militarized them and turned these reefs into forward airbases. It’s all about power projection and Beijing has managed to do this right under the noses of the international community. Everyone complained but nobody was prepared to confront China about it so now it’s a fait accompli, a done deal. I don’t think we’ll ever dislodge them from those reefs now. The best we can do is support our allies in the region with Freedom of Navigation patrols like the one that’s just run into trouble in the Taiwan Strait.’
Luke noticed that several drops of water had spilled down the front of the bald man’s suit but he either hadn’t noticed or didn’t care. He was in full flow now.
‘Cancelling democracy in Hong Kong, stealing intellectual property, persecuting the Uighurs in Xinjiang province, vowing to “return Taiwan to the Motherland”, picking fights with India and Japan. These have all been wake-up calls to a lot of people that China has a new, aggressive agenda and it’s a very different one from ours. Theirs is an autocratic, surveillance-based society so you could say this is a struggle between autocracy and democracy. Which brings us neatly on to their weapons programme.’ He stepped to one side to introduce the woman beside him.
‘I’m going to hand you over now to my colleague Emma Saye to give you an overview of some of the weapons systems currently being developed by the PLA.’
Luke glanced down at his spurned cup of coffee and saw that a layer of congealed skin had already formed on its surface. He noticed Jenny hadn’t touched hers either.
‘Mach 8,’ said the woman now addressing them. ‘That’s nearly ten thousand kilometres an hour or, to put it another way, nearly three thousand metres a second.’ It was a deliberately melodramatic start to her presentation and one Luke guessed had been wheeled out a fair few times to visiting VIPs. Still, she certainly had his attention.
‘That’s how fast one of China’s hypersonic cruise missiles can travel. All right, so they haven’t quite perfected their guidance systems yet but they’re working hard on that and they will get there. We have no doubt about that. So …’ She gave them what Luke thought was an odd smile, given the grimness of the topic. ‘… I want you to imagine what one of those would do, rocketing down from twenty-five kilometres above the Earth, on contact with, oh, let’s say for the sake of argument, our aircraft carrier, the Prince of Wales.’
She clicked a button on the monitor in her hand and the screen filled with a photograph of a military parade somewhere in China. A trio of long, thin, dark green missiles, emblazoned with the letters DF-17, was mounted on vast, camouflaged transporters.
‘What we’re seeing here is the Dongfeng-17. It was first unveiled to the public in 2019. We knew they were working on it, we just didn’t know they were turning out so many of them. So here at Defence Intelligence we quickly came to the conclusion it must be part of their swarm strategy. Launch enough of these in quick succession and you overcome the enemy’s defences. Oh, and it’s a dual-use weapon so it can carry either a conventional or a nuclear warhead. We just won’t know which until it’s detonated.’
Luke raised his hand with a question. ‘Sorry to interrupt, but doesn’t this rather beg the question: is it wise to send our premier warship into the path of one of these things in the South China Sea? I mean, it’s all very well to talk about “power projection” in peacetime but if the situation in the Taiwan Strait turns hot then whatever we send into theatre is going to be a sitting duck, isn’t it?’
The two lecturers exchanged knowing glances.
‘You might say that,’ replied Emma Saye, trotting out a worn cliché, ‘but I couldn’t possibly. I’m afraid that’s above my pay grade. But, yes, I expect a lot of people would agree with you, Mr Carlson—’
‘Carlton,’ he corrected her.
‘Mr Carlton, excuse me. Right, let’s move on. We’ve got a lot more to cover before we finish this briefing and I’m afraid it’s nearly all bad news.’