CyberWar: World War C Trilogy Book 3

by Matthew Mather

  Damon said, “Luke collected fragments of the drones that attacked us back at the house. Bits and pieces scattered across the lawn. I’ve been reconstructing them, looking at the chips and circuits. These are definitely Chinese drones.”

  “So this is an attack by the Chinese?” Chuck said.

  “Please, let’s not go down that road again,” I said.

  “Someone is doing this,” Chuck pointed out.

  Up ahead, through the windshield, I made out a flickering light. For the last forty minutes, as night descended, we’d wound silently up Interstate 66 in near darkness. No headlights coming or going. We had our running lights off, kept the interior almost dark except for dim blue reading lights.

  When we’d passed the city of Front Royal, it had been almost totally dark. No lights, except for a few emergency ones in parking lots. Riverton was the same. Complete power blackout across the entire area. I hadn’t seen any bright lights in almost an hour, and we were now climbing upward into the mountains.

  I hadn’t expected to see any lights at all.

  “Look at that.” I pointed.

  Excitement rose in my throat. Maybe it was the police? A town with power? The suffocating blackness enveloping us gave me the feeling that we were alone, abandoned. The light ahead had a surprising effect. The others in the truck felt it too.

  Except.

  It wasn’t a streetlight.

  The truck accelerated up the incline and swept around a switchback in the road. The flickering light grew in intensity. Orange flames leapt into the deep purple sky under roiling clouds of black smoke. As we climbed closer, the churning blaze stretched into the distance along a ridge line.

  Hadn’t it just rained here? How was such a fire possible?

  The answer slipped into view. A five-foot-wide platform suspended on six rotors hovered near the top of the tree canopy. It spit a gorging river of flame from a device suspended below it. Our truck swept along the hairpin and turned back, close enough to hear the roar of the flamethrower below the drone.

  Smaller drones hovered nearby, their tiny red dots visible against the inky darkness.

  A flotilla in the sky.

  If the machines had sensed us coming, they would have hidden, I realized. They didn’t know we were here. They didn’t try to hide.

  This answered a two-week-old mystery—where had all the fires come from? The ones across the Appalachians? They’d seemed to spring up everywhere. My mind retreated to a map I had seen of the fires, back when they’d been reporting them on TV. I reminded myself that had only been this morning. The locations of the fires seemed random at the time, but I added the ridge of new blazes here to that image in my mind.

  It wasn’t random. Someone was connecting the dots. Fiery flaming dots.

  “Twenty minutes,” Chuck said. “We’re going to be at the cabin in twenty.”

  “They’re cutting off Washington,” I said. “The machines are cutting off DC.”

  Chapter 20

  SUSIE EXTRICATED THE phone from her pocket and looked at the number on the screen.

  Irena.

  The call was coming from Irena. Or Amina. Whatever her name really was.

  One of the Chechen terrorists that Susie had invited into her home less than a week ago, before she knew who or what they were. They had fooled her and her friends. Susie had given Irena the Wi-Fi password, of course. They had been her guests.

  Never invite a vampire in, wasn’t that the rule? Except you didn’t always know who the bloodsuckers were.

  With one shaking finger she slid the answer button over. “Hello?”

  “Susie,” answered the familiar voice. “Whatever you are about to do, I suggest you stop.”

  A prickling heat crept down Susie’s spine at the sound of Irena’s lilting foreign-but-distinctly-Boston accent. Dread slithered into the pit of her gut, but not for herself. This woman Irena had played with her children just days ago, and shared warmth under a blanket on the couch when they ate popcorn and watched movies. How could she do this? Raging momma-bear anger eclipsed any fear for herself.

  “You tried to kill me.”

  “We saw you had full body armor. We were trying to disable you before you hurt yourself, or anyone else. Which we failed at. You killed two of my men.”

  “What do you want?”

  “Same thing as you.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “You don’t want your children to survive the night?”

  Susie’s chest heaved in and out. Pain like fire burned through her torso.

  Irena said, “You have a beautiful little boy.”

  A video chat request popped up on the phone.

  Susie’s finger hovered near the detonation button. She needed help. She couldn’t trust anything this woman told her. Then again, she needed to get as much information as she could.

  Susie accepted the video call.

  But it wasn’t Irena’s who appeared on the screen. Ellarose’s tear-streaked pale moon of a face materialized on the screen, her blond hair in a bob. Susie eyed the detonation button, looked back at Ellarose’s eyes, closed her own.

  Tick-tock. Tick-tock.

  She tried to budge in her seat, adjust her position to lessen the pain, but her feet slipped away from under her in the blood now leaking from the pool below her to the door. Pain lanced like hot needles stuck into her spine. No way was she doing a Usain Bolt out the back tunnel with Bonham in her arms.

  She studied her little boy. His lower lip trembled. Face white.

  In the darkness of the forest behind Irena, over Ellarose’s sobbing, Susie heard an owl calling out. Was that a barn owl? There was one out by the workshop most nights.

  She stepped on a pedal by the floor.

  “You want to watch another Peppa Pig?” Lauren asked Olivia.

  “Yes, please.”

  My daughter smiled at my wife and then at me in that earnest way that melted my heart. Terrifying and confusing things had happened today, but to her, they had been erased into the past. She didn’t understand. All she comprehended was that we were in a nice warm car with Peppa Pig episodes playing, mom to one side and dad to the other. She was hungry, but we said we couldn’t stop yet.

  Peppa Pig videos solved most big-world problems. Luke, on the other hand, had progressed to playing Fortnite.

  “Fifteen minutes,” Chuck said from behind me.

  My stomach lurched each time he gave another countdown marker.

  Going to his cabin in Shenandoah made me feel ill even in the best of circumstances. We still had no idea what we might be facing. We might show up and Susie would be making dinner. That’s what I hoped. A nice cold beer and a laugh and some chicken wings, and we could hide up in the hills until whatever was happening was fixed by someone else.

  Fat chance of that, a voice said in the back of my head.

  Luke switched to watching The Lego Batman Movie on the display in front of him. He leaned against me. I put an arm around him.

  Behind us, Chuck explained the layout of the cottage, all the modifications he and Susie had made, including the tear gas and explosives outside the safe room in the basement.

  I didn’t need to listen.

  I had spent two months starving to death in that cabin. I knew every inch of it all too well.

  “Mr. Jakob, I gotta ask.” I leaned forward over the seat back in front of me to get closer to the man. “You must have kids, right?” Nobody would load all these videos into their entertainment system without them. Right?

  “Two boys,” Tyrell responded. “Want to see?”

  I nodded.

  Tyrell said, “Mr. Archer, can I access the display to show—”

  “Keep an eye on him, Mitchell,” Archer gruffly interrupted from behind me.

  A few keystrokes and the image of two young boys appeared on the screen. “Ensign is six, Olympus seven,” Tyrell said.

  They stood on their own in the picture, a view of white-capped mountains in the dis
tance behind them. No other humans in view. Neither of the kids smiled.

  “You didn’t go to them when this happened?” I asked. It would be my first reaction. Get to my family.

  “And drag them into it?”

  I looked at Luke. What I would give to not have him here with me, but then, where would he be? “I understand.”

  “Humans are capable of terrible things.”

  “I suppose humans are behind the machines,” I said.

  “Maybe not,” Damon said. He was in the front, and back in his safe space. On his laptop, analyzing something. “The machines might be operating entirely independently. Now they’ve been let loose, those things could roam the entire United States, killing indiscriminately. Maybe the machines even launched themselves.”

  “Like Skynet?”

  “Maybe. What about that artificial intelligence that got loose in that hedge fund in Connecticut a few years ago? Nobody even knew all the people in the organization were all gone. The machine operated as a legal person, an incorporated entity operating entirely by itself making trades and mimicking people for months before the authorities realized it and shut the thing down.”

  “Can we at least stick to human bad guys? We know humans are involved in this. They kidnapped my wife.”

  “Might have been humans hired by machines.”

  “You’re kidding, right?”

  “I’m just saying.”

  Tyrell said, “It was Sun Tzu who said not to use flames in battle unless you are fireproof yourself. Letting artificial intelligence loose in weapons systems is something I have long campaigned against.”

  The truck hummed along in silence for a few seconds.

  I asked Damon, “What are you doing?”

  “Analyzing the signal spectrum I picked up when we passed that flock of drone-birds and the flamethrowers. They operate off UWB, ultra-wideband, as I figured they might. 2.4 GHz is too crowded and doesn’t penetrate water or rain or leafy environments well. Optimal antenna length is about a quarter to half of wavelength—”

  “Smart,” Tyrell interrupted. “Drones that small, the antennas need to be tiny as well. A quarter wavelength of 10 GHz is what? About—”

  “Eight millimeters,” Damon answered. “Which would fit the size of those devices. Low power. Short distance.” He pointed at his laptop screen. “See? The signal is jumping around in predetermined sequences. To most outside observers it would look like a bit of RF noise. The VHF signals you picked up are for intermittent long-range communications to larger drones, I would guess. Maybe ones on the ground. They must operate as a pack.”

  I asked, “How does this help us?”

  Damon shrugged. “Now that I can see where they’re communicating, maybe we can jam them. Hack their network if I can decrypt and understand the protocols.”

  The flames receded in the rearview mirror.

  I leaned closer to Tyrell. “You think it’s someone inside our own government carrying out these attacks. Isn’t that what you said? If that’s a targeted kill list, you think it’s a list of US citizens to kill, made up by Americans?”

  “As Mr. Indigo pointed out, it would not be the first time the American ruling class has decided to assassinate its own citizens without trial, for political purposes.”

  “I wouldn’t call terrorism a political opinion.”

  “What would you call it?”

  “So, these aren’t really Chechen terrorists?”

  “Might be. Or they could be guns for hire. Maybe both.”

  “Mercenaries?”

  “Don’t tell me you don’t think half of America wants to kill the other half.”

  “That’s a double negative.”

  “You get my meaning. I believe this presages a second civil war, of sorts. Or, perhaps, might avoid one. The whole idea of a targeted kill list is that, in theory, it averts the indiscriminate killings of full-blown war.”

  “Who inside our government?” The more I listened to him, the more he seemed unbalanced. Weren’t genius and madness two sides of the same banknote?

  Then again, half the time Chuck had most of these same types of conspiracy ideas. That a “deep state” was acting within our government for its own purposes. Whatever Tyrell was thinking, I seemed to have gained some of his trust. Or maybe that’s what he wanted me to think.

  I probed further. “Do you have an idea? Of whom, exactly?”

  “The same people carrying out these types of precision attacks on foreign soil, except they have now turned our own country into the battlefield.”

  “You need to be careful what you say, Tyrell,” Archer said from the back.

  “Indeed I do. I do.” He lowered his voice to a whisper and beckoned me closer. “Think about it. Degrading our own military, shutting off communications and power. Isolating the population, and then assassinating the people who might oppose your rise to power. How is it that the mighty American military has let this happen on their own soil, unless they are letting it happen?”

  I asked again, “Any idea who that someone would be?”

  “Who would benefit the most?” Tyrell replied. “Who is the last man standing, so to speak? Who, despite their protests, is the one that ends up in power? Imagine how this plays out. Massive terror attack rocks the nation. Then terrorists are killed, mission accomplished. Sound familiar? Who will be the king left on top of the hill when the dust settles?”

  He looked at the third-row seating, right at Senator Seymour.

  I glanced behind me, then back at Tyrell. “Did you come to find Leo on purpose?”

  Before he could answer, Chuck asked, “How does this EMP thing function?” He held up the gray metallic box. “We got about five minutes till we get there. How does it work? You’re saying this isn’t a miniature nuclear bomb? Because that could be handy.”

  “It’s not the EMP you get from nuclear devices, which have three components,” Tyrell replied. “E2 effects are due to scattered gamma radiation, which that gray box cannot reproduce, nor the E3 components which can last for minutes and are similar in effect to a solar geomagnetic storm—which is why low-yield nuclear weapons high over North America might be the best option for taking out the electrical infrastructure.”

  Chuck said, “Might be? I’ve heard—”

  “And so has everyone else in the sixty years since the Starfish Prime test. Yes, that nuclear blast over the Johnston Atoll took out streetlights seven hundred miles away in Oahu, but most military equipment—-and even civilian infrastructure—has now been upgraded to handle E2 and E3 pulses, and even E1 fast-pulse effects.”

  “So this box can’t do E2 and E3,” Chuck said. “What’s left? The E1? Fast pulse?”

  Tyrell nodded. “Nuclear devices produce fast-pulse effects that trigger the Compton Effect, in which gamma radiation transfers its energy to electrons in the stratosphere that then travel downward at relativistic speeds, and depend on the shape of the Earth’s magnetic field—”

  “Can you spare us the physics lesson?” Archer complained.

  “In practical terms, that’s a single-shot, ultra-high-storage capacitor. Push the button and it discharges—a by-product being a short-duration but high-intensity magnetic field, enough to scramble the volatile random access memory of unshielded computing devices with an effective range that falls off with the square—”

  “Please?” Archer asked.

  “Fifty feet, maybe a hundred. Small flying drones need to be light and don’t have much shielding. A word of warning—I wouldn’t discharge it if someone nearby has a pacemaker or other medical implant.”

  The truck slowed.

  “This is it,” Chuck said.

  We pulled off the Interstate and stopped to turn left onto a smaller road heading south along the ridge line. A crescent moon hung high in the sky, offering the only illumination beyond the steely pinpoints of the stars. We had the interior lights low. Most of the interior illumination came from the video screens the two children watched. Tyrell sa
id the inside lights wouldn’t be visible to anyone outside.

  Of course, we kept the headlights off.

  Selena navigated in the dark. A heads-up display on the windscreen showed a vector line drawing of the road and the destination of the truck’s navigation system.

  “What is our plan, Mr. Archer?” Tyrell asked from the front.

  “Whoever sent those drones to attack us, even if they had people on the ground, it was less than an hour ago. Gotta be unclear exactly what happened back there, assuming whoever sent the attack isn’t sitting in this car.” He kept his eyes straight ahead on Tyrell.

  “I think we need to assume that,” I said.

  “We still have the element of surprise,” Archer continued. “We go in and do reconnaissance. This might all be bull. We are only here because Tyrell said he triangulated a control signal up near—”

  “The second set of drones we encountered was getting a transmission from this direction as well,” Damon said. “The encrypted signal is hopping frequencies, but the signature is consistent and growing in power as we get closer.”

  Archer replied, “I’m going to take that with a heap of salt.”

  Chuck said, “The Baylor house is two hundred yards from mine, along the same dirt path in, but that driveway branches off just before you can see it from my place. We go in, see if anyone is at the Baylor place, then Archer and I access the tunnel while you guys creep in back along the driveway.”

  Archer said to Lauren, “I don’t like people who point guns at me,” while he kept his eyes on Damon, then added, “And we’re up here to collect your friends. We do reconnaissance, get them safe and clear this cabin. If there’s nobody up here, Tyrell is wrong, and we go back to Washington.”

  “I am not going to DC,” Tyrell said calmly.

  “Which is why you are not getting a gun. You can get out here, if you wish. Stay at Mr. Mumford’s cabin for a few days while we sort things out. It’s heavily defended, from what he’s explained.”

  “This is my vehicle.”

  “Which I am commandeering in the name of the United States Armed Services Committee. We have the chairman sitting right with us.” He tapped the senator’s shoulder. “Wasn’t this truck built and paid for using Uncle Sam’s dime? And we have the guns—might makes right, at least for now.”