by Toby Weston
Without the Wikis and walkthroughs, Anosh would probably never have made it out of Europe, but he would certainly never have considered getting off the overloaded boat with his goal so tantalisingly close. A finger of Kurdistan reached down to the Mediterranean at Latakia, sandwiched between Syria and Osmaniye. Kurdistan was a formal part of the sprawling Caliphate; in fact, it owed its very existence to the recognition it had been granted by the first Caliph, but old frictions persisted. This made the relationship between the two neighbours rather uncomfortable and diplomacy tortuous. It also meant, while the borders were officially closed, there was a need, and therefore a market, for unofficial border crossings.
At least, that is what the Mesh had led Anosh to believe. As a result, he had found himself a Kurdish Coyote before leaving Prussia and, if things were still on track, the smudge of smoke across the valley should be him now.
He takes the binoculars away from his eyes and carefully seals them back in their case. After another sip of water, he pushes himself back to his feet and on down the side of the valley towards the rendezvous. The sun will dip behind the hills soon. If he picks up his pace, he should be able to meet his guide before then; he doesn't like the idea of staggering around amongst the thorns and snakes in the dark, but equally, the FAQs suggest not to use a torch while attempting a night-time border penetration. If the sky remains clear, there might be enough moonlight for his Spex to brighten things up. His new, latest generation Companion and Spex are luxuries bought with proceeds from the liquidation windfall. They are loaded with grey-ware and are currently set to flight mode—all radios passively listening. From the air, or space, he could be a farmer checking his pistachio trees, or a herder following errant goats. A constant stream of encrypted traffic from all the nasty software running on the customised Mesh-sourced OSs he had installed before setting off would not be in character.
***
Once they are within shouting distance, his guide—if that’s who it really is—waves. Anosh waves back and crosses the remaining scrub, joining the man beneath a massive olive tree. The overhanging bows and the thicket of leaves effectively hide them from the sky. They shake hands and the man, Ali, offers Anosh a glass of tea from a small aluminium pot he has boiling away over a smokeless fire of dry branches.
“Won't they see the fire?” Anosh asks.
“Farmers make fire. Everybody drinks tea.”
Anosh nods and stirs in a spoonful of sugar, ignoring the black specks which are probably just ants. Ali even has biscuits and water; obviously he cares about his ratings. A strategy that seems to pay off. Anosh had chosen him, although he charged more than most of the competition.
This is the Middle East; it isn't form to talk business before the first three glasses of tea have been drunk. So Anosh enjoys the refreshments and tries to make polite small talk.
“Will the moon be bright tonight?”
“No worry, moon rise late. We go early.”
“Oh, good. We are going to cross before the moon comes up?”
“We go across when guards change, when sun go down.”
“You have a good reputation, lots of happy customers, I guess?”
Ali puffs up. “I am best,” he answers. “You like another biscuit?”
“Sure, thanks.” Anosh accepts the yellow crumbly disk, then puts his hand in his pocket and takes out the little 1/10 ounce of Krugerrand—three grams of gold, half of the agreed price—and offers it to his guide.
Ali accepts it without a word and, after a minimum of inspection, it disappears inside his shirt. He hands back a deflated rubber balloon with a battery and an LED stuck to one end.
“Half now half later, okay?”
“Sure.” Anosh knows the deal. ‘Don’t pay the ferry man’ is the slogan on Ali’s site.
“When you are on other side, put coin in balloon and toss back. Okay?”
Anosh inspects the little widget and then tucks it away into the pocket on the top of his rucksack. The sugary tea and water do him the world of good. By the time the sun is dipping between the distant mountains, shining its orange rays against the bottom of the feathery clouds, he is ready for action. If anything, the journey is an anti-climax. They quickly cross the three kilometres of scrub to the former Syrian border, a few poles linked by rusty tatters of wire mesh. Ali doesn't even slow down as they leave Kurdistan behind. Fifty metres of no-man’s land, then there is a line of cleared vegetation stretching off in both directions with a more imposing, shiny new fence topped with razor wire running through the middle of it. A little winding path runs at an angle to the fence and then pushes under it through a furrow.
“Wait.” Ali takes a plastic contraption out of his pack. It’s about the size of a children's beach bucket with the bottom knocked out. It is threaded through with thousands of turns of thin wire. Something like an old set-top TV aerial pokes out of the middle. “Pigs make hole under fence, soldiers watch with camera.”
They are waiting about ten metres away from the fence and crouch there behind a large spiky bush. Ali points towards a camera set on a pole on the Osmanian side. He sets up the device and points the aerial at it; then, flipping a little metal switch, it starts to whine.
“EMP?” Anosh asks.
Ali nods. “Go now, quick!”
Anosh races forward in a crouch and squeezes himself under; it’s a tight fit and he has to take off his pack and push it before him as he wriggles through the scraping, where the wild pigs have made their run.
“Go hide in bush. Quick.”
Anosh does as he is told and, as soon as he is out of sight of the camera, Ali fiddles with his device, and presumably somewhere a monitor is again showing a clear view of the fence. Probably the ten seconds of static will not be enough to justify sending out a jeep. Anosh should be long gone by then, anyway. As agreed, he takes the second Kruger from his pocket and pokes it into the little red balloon which Ali gave him. He switches on the tiny flashing LED duct-taped to its side and flings it all over the fence. The red LED traces out a broken arc in the dusk and Ali has no problems finding it and scooping up the flashing bundle from where it lands.
“Thanks!” Anosh shouts.
“No worries man,” Ali replies in his strange hodge-podge accent. “Give good rating!”
“Will do! Five stars. Bye!”
Anosh takes out his Companion and checks the bearing to where his family should be waiting. Once he has put a few kilometres between himself and the border, he will connect to whatever networks he can find and see if there are any messages for him, but first he needs to do some serious walking.
Bad things had continued not to happen and Anosh was starting to take the proverbial smooth sailing for granted.
The twelve days on the decaying fishing boat, with a profitable side line in refugee smuggling, could have ended badly—mugged and murdered and tipped into the sea being Anosh’s favourite night terror—but the crew, a mixed bunch of Greeks and Palestinians, had turned out to be friendly. As the days had slipped by, he had eventually relaxed enough to let his guard down; enjoying the conversations on deck in the evenings while sharing bottles of ouzo. Again, at Latakia, he had been paranoid, expecting that the Caliphate's Mutaween would be waiting for an infidel with a pack stuffed full of gold coins and subversive tech. He had fully expected to be arrested as a spy then. The FAQs were pretty clear about how bad an outcome that would be.
Now with Latakia behind him, he is enjoying the grey moonlit landscape as he walks casually amongst the olives and pistachios. He is thinking of being reunited with his family and, as it turns out, counting his chickens far too early.
There must be water nearby, as a chorus of frogs starts an electronica party. The hundreds of break-beat DJs chirping frantically somehow manage to merge into an ambient blanket of sound. Fragrances insinuate themselves into his sensorium, lulling his soul and drawing him out, smearing his existence, merging his awareness with the night.
The thump of a chopper takes a wh
ile to register. He isn’t out for a Sunday stroll. He is suspiciously close to a militarised border, with no papers and a pack stuffed full of incriminating contraband. Eventually, his brain catches up and he drops to the dirt in the darkness. He wriggles his body into a thick bush that is growing around the trunk of another massive olive tree. A camouflaged infrared blanket is stashed at the top of his pack, ready in anticipation of exactly this scenario. He can feel his heart thudding as he fishes it out and drapes it over his head like a disco hijab.
There seem to be at least two of the big antique Russ helicopters. They are flying as a pair in formation, high-powered lights scanning the scrub for immigrants or terrorists. It would be too optimistic to hope the sensory suites on the choppers also date from the 1970s. Ironically, his Spex are flashing a yellow network icon that tells him that they are confident that they can send data, piggy-backing on the Mil-Net, out to the Mesh. It could be a trap, though, tempting him to send his packets out like a flock of startled doves and so give himself away. At the moment, the choppers seem to be flying away from him. He nestles down against the trunk, the camo-blanket loose over his head, and waits for them to leave.
An hour later, they are still around. It is beginning to look more like a directed search than a random patrol. His thoughts return to the crew of the little boat. Had the friendship been genuine as they filled his cup with ouzo?
Nervousness steps up to fear. Anosh decides to risk breaking radio silence. He can’t penetrate the Mil-Net on his own. The upgraded software on his slate estimates it would take 240,000 years to crack, but that shouldn't be a problem. Each state has its own eclectic assortment of hardware purchased from West and East as the politics of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries played out. Russ helicopters and Prussian tanks, British subs and Çin fighter jets, like the nations that manufactured them, each communicates with its own mutually incomprehensible languages and protocols. Most pragmatic commanders simply run a second, much less secure, network over the same radios to let all the kit talk together. Anosh can’t read their coms or hack their systems, but he can probably sneak a couple of packets into the network soup and out onto the Mesh.
He gets his Companion to encrypt a tiny message, according to the emergency format they set up:
‘I am here: [X,Y], Undetected, Hiding, Assist if possible.’
He keeps it small enough so that it fits into a single packet and lets it swim off with their ‘do not reply flag’ set. The coordinates are a decoy, shifted eighty kilometres to the East along the border. If the Osmani manage to intercept his package and crack the code, he will see the choppers dash away towards the decoy; but if they simply triangulate on the radio carrier wave, then the whoosh of an incoming missile will be his only warning. They don’t budge, which is good.
While he can hear the thudding blades, he makes sure he remains motionless, with his feet and elbows tucked in carefully under the stripped and blotched Mylar blanket.
‘Be the rock, warmed by the sun.’
It seems to be working, as nobody has shot at him or sent streams of abseiling troops to flush him out; but equally, the choppers don’t seem to be in any hurry to go home. They circle like aggressive angels, blinding both the transient and aboriginal denizens of the night with their all-seeing beams.
A few kilometres away, his family waits in an ancient Land Rover. They'd arrived in the area two days before Anosh's planned crossing and, with rising excitement, had spent the time subtly scoping out the border.
While Anosh had been waiting in a shabby little pension, Zaki had been suffering heat and discomfort, using illicit scripts and packages to intercept and record the encrypted coms from outposts and occasional foot patrols. Sleeping in a little tent and sheltering under trees in the day, their first task had been to farm out the captured data to one of the mercenary BotNets.
Ayşe had established their cover as a small family camping out by a scenic bend on a dried-up stream. She spoke with the curious local kids, who passed by with their goats. While she was busy, the boys sank their senses into the sparse local Mesh, drawing together threads and favours to build some sort of defence in case Anosh's crossing didn't run as smoothly as they all hoped.
When Zaki was ten, Anosh had shown him how to code a simple ‘run and jump’ game and, since then, he has thought himself a hacker. Although, in reality, he is little more than script kiddie plankton on the hacker food chain, there is so much grey-ware on the Mesh that, over the past several months, with the curtains drawn and his twisted, aching back protesting, he has been ghosting on forums, reading rockstar hacker posts, downloading and configuring packages and, in a short time, educating himself to a government unsettling level of proficiency on electronic insurgency.
Segi, meanwhile, had been pulling in favours from their friends and trying to deal with the fickle, treacherous BotNets. These massive swarms of ad hoc semi-autonomous computation were constantly under attack from the governments and corporations they mocked, and pulled and stretched in all directions by hackers of all hat colours, who tried to co-opt their super powers. Most were parts of the greater Mesh; running as DACs, they charged for services, and paid their own rents. They were accountable only to their own opaque algorithmic morality. They lost data and gave up on jobs, without explanation. There were no money-back guarantees.
Cracking the DT08-q that the Osmani were using should have taken hours and a significant quantity of MeshCoins, but after the initial upload and Coin transfer had cleared, Segi only had to wait twenty seconds before the keys arrived on his Companion. Other parties were eavesdropping on the Osmanian border patrols today, and the BotNet had either cached the keys from an earlier job or bought them from a peer. They sent the keys through to Anosh, but he was already on his way, under a thick cloak of radio silence.
While Zaki had been using the keys to hack into the coms, Siegfried had prepared interference packages full of beautiful false starts and decoys if things turned bad. He had used his reputation and promises of contribution to a bunch of projects to draft help. His virtual team had been creating realistic-sounding reports and even low-quality video of civilian bodies lying in pools of blood. It was trivial stuff when given anything more than a cursory glance, but hopefully it would do some good if they needed it.
Zaki is lying stretched out on the tatty backseat of the Land Rover, when he suddenly knows his father is in trouble. Spex worked like that. He hadn't read the message, hadn't even noticed, as it blitted itself across his visual field, just as he didn't notice his own blind spot. Meaning passed into his brain by osmosis, subconsciously extracted and incorporated into the set of things he knew. His brother and mother are only sitting a metre away, but it is easier to IM them than to spend time talking. He forwards the contents of the coded packet Anosh had sent, adding the location of the two helicopters.
A few seconds later, their mother finishes reading the alert and starts panicking and begins to ask obvious questions; however, by then, the boys are already well into their choreographed response.
Segi’s first interference package looks like a transcript of PKF coms, intercepted from a foot patrol. It places a raiding force at the fake coordinates of their dad's distress message. Zaki, fingers flashing expertly on the Companion’s small screen, runs the script that will use today’s BotNet sourced certificates to inject Segi’s distraction into the Osmanian Mil-Net. Once dispatched, the boys hold their breath.
Two and a half minutes later, out on the horizon, one of the choppers stops its sedate patrolling, then turns and thunders off. Zaki exhales with relief and, a few minutes later, uploads the second package: a report from a small village police station twenty kilometres deeper into Osmaniye—an explosion has been heard and there is shooting, possibly injured civilians. Siegfried attaches the faked video to the report. Another minute later and the boys whoop and high five as the second helicopter goes chasing off after the mirage of a major PKF operation.
Anosh watches from under his blanket
, with a mixture of relief, pride and disbelief as the helicopters leave. As soon as it is safe, he crumples the blanket back into his pack. With stiff legs from hours of sitting motionless he begins to hobble, then jog, though the night. He is following the hovering green arrow that his Spex are creating, vague fears of snakes forgotten against the very real threat of death from above. His Spex manage to highlight some of the stones or branches, but more than once he picks himself up, cursing a stubbed toe or a bruised shin.
While the helicopters are following ghosts beyond the hills, the barrage of industrial noise is gone. It is peaceful and, although chaos whirls around him, here, jogging through the eye of the storm, it is calm.