Whoever was behind it, it had caused a very quiet, but very significant reaction. NSA had upped its monitoring of Chinese traffic going through NAES, the North American Electronic Shield firewall that protected the US and Canada. They’d installed passive traps for the hack used against Barnes’s home, and other known Chinese hacks, on thousands of pieces of hardware, so it could be detected in real-time if it were ever used again. NSA was upping its efforts to crack communications of Politburo members, and especially Bo Jintao.

And real, physical hardware was moving. Pryce tuned back in as McWilliams showed them, his voice carrying the somber note of a soldier who knows just how horrible his weapons are, just how terrible their use would be.

On the giant map that was the wallscreen, the Third and Seventh fleets were quietly re-orienting themselves, white and black streaks moving across an open blue sea. More than a thousand drone and human-piloted aircraft, a hundred robotic combat vessels, another fifty legacy combat ships, half a dozen carrier task forces, and almost a hundred thousand soldiers between the US and Asia had received new orders. Orders that placed them in a capacity to absorb, respond to, or pre-empt any further Chinese provocation. Miles overhead, almost a hundred satellites had had their missions slightly altered. NRO monitoring satellites had increased their surveillance of Chinese military installations. Stealthed hunter-killer birds were slowly, ever-so-slowly adjusting their orbits to put them in position to take out Chinese satellites should it ever be required. And the JAVELIN birds, codeword-classified space-to-ground weapons platforms, were running through tests of software that should never, ever be used.

Never.

Damn Miles Jameson for ever approving their launch.

Damn him and his people for not answering her calls now.

And then there were the nukes. The Third and Seventh fleets had their share of tactical warheads. The air wings based in South Korea were going on alert, ready to use weapons stationed there nominally to deter their North Korean neighbors. And below the waves, a dozen robotic nuclear missile submarines, stealthy, nearly undetectable things, were passing ever closer to China’s shore, their mix of nuclear-tipped ballistic and cruise missiles able to put as many as a thousand warheads down on the Chinese mainland with just minutes of warning.

What a nightmare.

Carolyn Pryce looked at the President, watched him as he watched McWilliams, and then shook her head. She wanted to just call her Chinese counterpart and ask “What the hell were you thinking?” But that would give away Intel. All of this, all these maneuvers, could be attributed to the coup, if they were even noticed at all.

CIA needed to dig deeper. NSA needed to intercept more. They needed to know what was really going on.