Midnight Fire

by Lisa Marie Rice

  Jack meant every word.

  Under his finger, the surging heartbeat had slowed. Her breathing was calm and steady.

  Hold that thought, sweetheart.

  His cell rang. From Joe, his soon-to-be brother-in-law.

  “I have to take this,” Jack said.

  She nodded. “Of course.”

  “Yo, Joe. Now’s not really the—”

  “Jack.” Joe’s voice was sharp. “You’ve got a TV monitor in the plane. Turn it on. Or link to USNewsNetwork on your laptop, whichever is quicker.”

  “What’s wrong?” Summer asked. “What is it?”

  Jack switched on the monitor hanging from the ceiling and turned on one of the laptops. The monitor showed a USNN talking head with helmet hair and a map of North Carolina in the background. A moving chyron read Possible terrorist attack on Fontana Dam, tallest dam in the East.

  “For those who have just joined us,” the talking head was saying, “we are receiving reports that the Fontana Dam, the tallest dam in the Eastern United States, situated along the Appalachian Trail, has been bombed. The dam holds over 630 million cubic meters of water. Early reports indicate there are heavy casualties down river. Here is footage that was posted on YouTube a few minutes ago.”

  Behind the news anchor was shaky footage of an explosion near the foot of the dam. There was no sound and at first it appeared nothing was happening. Then a crack appeared, snaked its way to the top of the dam, water leaking from the crack. A chunk of the wall came away and water spilled out like a small waterfall, then a big, powerful waterfall. The image grew shaky then stopped. Another image, tall and narrow, a cellphone image, showed the breach in the dam from the other side of the valley. The same sequence from another angle. The puff of smoke and debris, the thin line snaking up to the top, chunks falling away, the line becoming an open crack, the growing waterfall.

  Summer watched, face pale, and reached for his hand. Jack held on tightly.

  The screen showed the anchor again, wide eyed, speaking unscripted. “So far, ahm, reports are sporadic. There is a strong Twitter feed relating to the incident.” The screen showed a feed—#AttackOnFontanaDam with thousands of tweets scrolling down.

  “Joining us now by telephone is Dr. Alvin Norris of MIT, a structural engineer and considered one of the world’s greatest experts on concrete dams. Dr. Norris, what could cause the breach in the dam’s wall, other than a bomb? Is there a possible natural explanation?”

  Jack switched channels, another news cable feed. But the backdrop was not the dam. Instead it was shaky footage from a helicopter of an overturned train, steam rising from the cars. Men and women in hazmat suits were approaching the center of the train. The helo was circling overhead, a more professional camera being used instead of cellphones.

  Another anchor with helmet hair, this time male, with a very serious expression. “Reports are coming in of a train wreck just outside of Los Angeles. We have been told that the train was carrying barrels of highly toxic radioactive waste.”

  Jack switched channels, this time showing a smoking plane wreck, parts scattered all over a field. “—reports are of a loud explosion followed by the plane falling out of the sky just after taking off. We repeat, Flight 725 from Boston to Denver has apparently been brought down by an RPG, a shoulder fired missile.”

  Jack turned the tablet on, using an ASI proprietary Skype-like program Felicity had designed for them. Joe’s face appeared. He looked drawn. “Christ, Joe, what’s happening? Is this it? Is this what Blake was planning? A whole series of attacks, one after another?”

  Jack could see a wall of big monitors behind Joe. Each monitor was tuned to a different channel or website and even without hearing the sound feed, it was clear that a series of disasters was taking place.

  Besides the feeds he’d already seen, of the dam, the radioactive train and the plane wreck, there was a scene with hazmat trucks with flashing lights outside a hospital, with heavily-gowned medical staffers offloading patients from gurneys. The chyron at the bottom read: Chicago: 123 cases of Ebola.

  Summer had the plane’s laptop open and was scrolling. “Twitter’s announcing even more disasters, Jack.” She looked up at him, face pale. “Gas mains or a bomb took out twenty city blocks in Dallas.”

  The plane’s intercom beeped. “This is the pilot. We’re coming in to Portland International. We will land in twenty minutes. Please return to your seats and fasten your seat belts. The weather is rainy, ground temperature 45 degrees.”

  They were going directly in to ASI where they’d contact Nick and the Director. If this was the other shoe dropping, they were in trouble, because there didn’t seem to be an end in sight to the attacks.

  “See you on the ground, Joe.”

  “Yeah. Jacko will be at the airport to pick you guys up. He’s leaving now, in fact.”

  “Roger that.”

  Joe reached out a finger to shut off the connection then frowned, looked behind him. In the background, Jack could hear a female voice. Joe’s frown deepened.

  “What’s Felicity saying, Joe?” Jack asked.

  “She’s—” Joe shook his head. “She’s saying these are fake attacks. Or at least the first one is. She says the dam breaking up and the water spilling out are CGI.”

  Summer’s head jerked up. “What?”

  “And she says she had an algorithm study the Twitter feeds and she can’t trace the tweeters back more than a month. None of them.”

  Summer contemplated that for a second. “So they would be fake identities.”

  “Yeah.” Joe stretched the word out. He turned his head. “You sure, Felicity?”

  The high-pitched female voice in the background became agitated, indignant.

  The tablet was picked up and Metal’s face appeared. “Dude,” Metal said calmly to Joe. “Please. We’re talking Felicity here.”

  In the little time Jack had been around the ASI crew, he’d learned that Felicity, Metal’s fiancée, was always right. She wasn’t arrogant and she was fun and she beat the pants off everyone at video games. And she was always right.

  “What, darling?” Metal got up and walked over to Felicity, looked at something on her computer then walked back.

  Felicity’s computer was like the magic dragons on Game of Thrones. A dangerous, mythical creature. It had been destroyed by Hector Blake and she’d had another one arrive from a secret lab in Hong Kong, more powerful than the last one. No one was allowed to touch Felicity’s computer. They weren’t even allowed to breathe on it. Jack had seen her work miracles with it. If Felicity and her computer said something was true, it was true.

  “Dude,” Metal said again. His normally super placid face was furrowed. “The Ebola case is fake, too. Felicity just, um, checked the records of all the hospitals in Chicago.” By checked he meant hacked. “The footage is from the Ebola cases two years ago. And the train and plane wrecks—all fake. I think all of these disasters are fakes.”

  Summer picked up the tablet. Jack made the intros. “Summer, this is Metal O’Brien, Felicity’s guy. Metal, this is Summer Redding.”

  “Summer.” Metal dipped his head. “An honor. Everyone here reads Area 8. You do really good work.”

  “Did,” Summer answered sadly. “Did do good work. For the time being, Area 8 is down and I don’t know when it will go back up again. So, Metal, these attacks, fake attacks. Someone’s flooding the media with fake information, correct?”

  “Looks like it.”

  She leaned forward, beautiful face intense. “It’s a diversionary tactic. The media are kept confused. I have no doubt hazmat teams and SWAT teams and FEMA teams all over the country have been scrambled. If they have any smarts at all, these guys, the ones behind all this, will disable communications among them, just like they cut off cellphone and tablet connections during t
he Washington Massacre. Right now, all news teams are paralyzed. We’re really dependent on news feeds and tweets and Facebook postings. This looks like a team has been working on this for a long time, if Felicity says the tweeters have an established identity. How many fake identities do you think there are, Felicity?”

  Felicity’s pretty face appeared, a hand on her guy’s shoulder. Metal reached up a big hand and covered hers.

  “All the ones I looked at. This is bad juju. Law enforcement agencies will be called out and they won’t be able to tell the real thing from the fake. The entire country is on alert and I wouldn’t be surprised if the Pentagon raised the DEFCON Level to III.”

  Metal and Joe nodded.

  “How deep is this?” Summer asked.

  “Depending on the prep time, which at this point I imagine is at least several months, it’s pretty deep. I’m guessing tens of thousands of fake identities. It doesn’t cost anything except in terms of manpower. I’ve followed some of the tweet identities back in time and they’ve got some generic responses to issues of the day and movies and music that have been retweeted over and over. Some of that can be done by bot, some was done by hand. Some of the responses were automated, didn’t make much sense in the context of the discussion, but it looks like each identity has been around a while. Legit. They’re mostly software.”

  “Someone’s been planning this for a long time.” Summer said softly.

  “Scary shit.” Joe turned to look into the camera directly. “Jack, whatever happens, I’ve got Isabel covered. She’s in the house, I just talked to her and you know we’ve got a good security system there. I’m going home right now and I’ll wait for you and Summer and everyone else. We’re meeting at Isabel’s for dinner.” He dipped his head. “Summer, nice meeting you. See you tonight.”

  Summer nodded. “Joe. Nice meeting you, too. And tell Isabel I’m really looking forward to seeing her again.”

  “Will do.”

  He disappeared and Metal spoke. “So Jacko will be picking you guys up at the airport. Felicity wants to see Hector’s laptop and flash drives in the worst way. See you in about an hour.” The tablet screen went dark.

  “Something really awful is happening,” Summer whispered. Her hand reached out for his and Jack took it. To give her comfort. To give himself comfort.

  He nodded, kissed her on the forehead. “Whatever it is, we’ll face it together.”

  Chapter Eleven

  San Francisco

  The Mission district

  The soldiers arrived in the dead of night. They infiltrated via two two-man submersibles launched from a stealthed submarine. It was the equivalent of an ASDS, an Advanced SEAL Delivery System, with a few extra bells and whistles. They landed at 4:00 a.m. at Kellar Beach where a van was waiting for them. They had fifty kilos each of gear in big bags they loaded onto the van. Weapons, fifty thousand rounds of ammo, night vision gear, flashbangs, IR and thermal imagers.

  They could withstand a siege, but they weren’t expecting one.

  Zhang Wei and his men were technically PLA, of course. All of them had undergone training. But they were IT specialists and hadn’t undergone rigorous commando training like the four soldiers had.

  The van parked in the back of the building, in the alleyway protected from overhead surveillance. No one would ever know that four soldiers from the PLA, bristling with weaponry and gear, had entered the building.

  A soft knock and the first of the soldiers entered the command and control room. He was still in his dark wetsuit, though he’d taken off the mask.

  Zhang Wei stood up, saluted. The four men in wetsuits had all entered the C2 room, lined up neatly along the wall. They saluted back.

  Zhang Wei addressed their team leader. “We have prepared meals for you. You will also find four cots. Until the op commences, you will stay hidden undercover. Once we take down the grid, two men will deploy to the front and back entrances. There will be a sniper on the roof with night vision at all times. We estimate food and water in the city will run out in seventy-two hours but we are equipped for two months. By which time the PLAN ships will be moored offshore. When our military lands, you will liaise with them and you will receive further instructions. But until then, your mission is to protect us and protect our equipment.”

  The soldier nodded, then his eyes drifted to the twenty big screens hung on the walls of the room. Each screen showed an emergency, with increasingly distraught newscasters trying to sift fact from fiction. The backdrop to each screen was a disaster—a downed plane, an explosion, emergency wards...

  The soldier nodded to the screens. “Looks like the operation is off to an excellent start.” He turned on his heel and with his teammates descended down to the basement.

  So much could be accomplished through leveraging the power of computers, Zhang Wei thought. Only a class of soldier that had grown up with computers could understand this.

  The old guard did not want war. Nobody wanted war. War was destructive, eliminated resources that had taken generations to build up, killed indiscriminately. No. But by the same token, they didn’t understand that you could conquer without war. Using virtual resources very intelligently, destroying very little.

  That was the beauty of General Chen Yi’s plan using Cyberwarfare Unit 61398. Using strength softly, with maximum sparing of infrastructure that would be used later, after victory. Takeover by stealth.

  The General had already given the order to his opposite numbers in the navy. For the end stage, vast resources would be necessary. The officers would shift ships from the South Fleet and bolster the East Fleet. Two separate training maneuvers would be planned, both in the Pacific. So that when Zhang Wei turned the lights off all along the West Coast of the United States, the Chinese PLAN would arrive and keep a semblance of order, keep essential services running.

  Zhang Wei could see it, picture it precisely. His would be the hand that pressed the button that started it all.

  The entire West Coast electricity grid would go down. Irreparable damage to the breakers of generators, catastrophic failure of the generators and no spare parts available anywhere. The spare parts were all manufactured in China and the General had made sure that all generator spare parts were removed from the manufacturing process months ago. The West Coast of the United States would get its energy back when the People’s Republic decided it could. Not one minute earlier.

  The scenario had even been played out by the American authorities. The Aurora Project, which showed how even a minor cyber attack on vulnerabilities in the grid system could take it down. The Americans had even gamed it for him.

  The experiment had been very clear, a sort of step by step primer on how to take a country’s electrical grid down. The test was a cyber-attack that opened and closed breakers in an unsynchronized fashion, placing immense stress on the generators. Torque literally tore the generators apart, throwing pieces as far away as twenty meters, leaving the generators a smoking ruin inside of three minutes.

  Zhang Wei was certain he could do it in one.

  America was an unruly nation. Not a nation of civil order. And it was a nation full of guns. After the first twenty-four hours without power, utter chaos would reign.

  When it was clear that power was not coming back anytime soon, when the gas pumps stopped pumping, when the food stores were looted and no supplies were coming, when the water system stopped supplying water, when all communications except for the few who owned satphones were cut off...that was when the Chinese Eastern Fleet would come to the rescue on the greatest humanitarian mission ever undertaken. Three Peace Ark hospital ships, four Xu Xiake barracks ships, two Yantai-class supply ships, four Tang class destroyers and five Leizhou-class tankers would anchor offshore the major West Coast cities and start supplying emergency electricity to hospitals, select civic centers and water pumping stations. There
would be food distribution to the hungry, rationed water would start flowing.

  The sight of Chinese soldiers—disciplined, carrying essential supplies—would be the most welcome sight imaginable. Welcomed with open arms. Never to leave again.

  Let the games begin.

  Portland, Oregon

  The man who met them at the airport looked hard and dangerous. After they rolled to a stop in an empty part of the airport, Jack held up his hand, a sign to wait. He had already closed the window shutters and they sat and waited while the pilot opened the door that became a metal staircase. As soon as the staircase was open a man came up, nodded to the pilot, nodded to Jack.

  He was dark-skinned, with a shaved head. He wasn’t tall but was immensely broad with huge biceps. Despite the cold weather he was dressed in a T-shirt and jeans jacket. Summer could see part of a tribal tattoo where his neck met the collar of the tee and along both arms.

  His face was closed, unsmiling. Not hostile, but not warm and fuzzy, either. Summer nearly took a step back when he entered the jet, but no one else seemed to find him disturbing so she forced herself to stay where she was.

  He seemed very competent, so if he had been sent to kill them, he’d have done so already.

  Jack slapped him on the back and though from his looks, Summer would not have been surprised if the man knocked Jack down with one blow, he didn’t. He just nodded and turned to her.

  God, he was scary-looking. Summer’s skin prickled and she had to mentally nail her feet to the deck of the jet so she wouldn’t try to run past him and escape.

  Jack put his hand on her arm. “Honey, I’d like you to meet one of the great guys at ASI. Morton Jackman. Jacko to his friends.”