Extinction

by J. T. Brannan

  She saw their clothes hanging on makeshift drying poles over the fire, and realized that they were both naked, entwined on a bed of ferns.

  ‘What happened?’ she asked at last, when the dryness in her mouth eased slightly.

  ‘We came down over the waterfall,’ Jack explained. ‘The water was deep, and you must have passed out when you hit, but it was a lot slower at the bottom and I managed to drag you to the bank. The left-hand side, like you said.’

  She clutched his arm. ‘Thank you,’ she breathed.

  He squeezed her back. ‘You would have done the same,’ he said.

  She licked the dryness from her lips again. ‘What happened then?’ she asked.

  ‘I realized we were both going to go hypothermic if we didn’t get warm, so I followed your advice about how to make a fire, and got one started. You didn’t tell me how hard it was!’ he said light-heartedly. ‘Without matches or a lighter, it must have taken me about forty minutes to get the damned thing going.’ He smiled. ‘But finally it caught, and I used some other bits of wood to make this little shelter, then stripped us both off, and . . . well, here we are.’

  Alyssa nodded. ‘Here we are,’ she murmured and kissed him, a gesture of relief in being alive more than anything.

  Jack reached forward, checking their clothes. ‘They’re nearly dry,’ he said.

  ‘Good,’ Alyssa replied. ‘It’s must be nearly dawn. We’re going to have to move.’

  Jack nodded. ‘Bad news about our travel plans,’ he told her.

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘The car keys have gone, all of them. Not that we’d have been likely to find the cars anyway. I mean, they could have been parked anywhere.’

  ‘The IDs?’ Alyssa asked anxiously.

  Jack pointed to the fire. ‘Drying out along with the clothes. About three hundred in notes too, and some bank cards we might be able to use.’

  ‘OK, that’s not so bad. At least with ID we can rent a room or a car.’

  Jack shook his head. ‘I’ve been thinking about that. I don’t think we’re going to be able to do that,’ he said. ‘At least not until we’ve had a chance to change our appearance somewhat. The likelihood is that our pictures have been flashed across the country on every news channel in existence. They’ve probably had time to sort through the bodies by now, and realized we weren’t there.’

  ‘Did you manage to think of a plan while I was out of it?’ she asked hopefully.

  Jack smiled at her. ‘Kind of. We need to find out who’s behind Spectrum Nine. We can’t go to the authorities; we’ve already seen that they’re willing to kill friends of the mayor himself. The media’s out too, as they’ve probably already spread stories about us which will make us less than reliable sources. Essentially, if we present ourselves, we’ll be arrested again, and they’re unlikely to make the same mistake twice and let us escape. So we’re on our own. But I noticed back in Stevens’ office that a lot of the information you found on the base’s files was authorized by the user of a computer based in the headquarters of the Department of Defence.’

  ‘And you can trace the user?’

  ‘Yes, I think so,’ Jack said.

  ‘So all we need to do is get to a computer, right?’

  Jack shook his head. ‘The DoD uses a closed system, probably one of the most sophisticated anti-hacking programs in existence. You can’t pull the user ID from outside.’

  ‘You mean. . .’

  ‘Yes,’ he confirmed. ‘We’re going to have to break in.’

  ‘But that’s impossible!’ Alyssa exclaimed. ‘We’re wanted fugitives, and you think we can just walk into one of the most secure locations in the entire country and access their computer systems? And what do we do then, even if we can get in?’

  ‘I told you,’ Jack said with a wink. ‘I have a plan.’

  They decided to follow the river, which eventually led them to a tourist parking lot. There were a couple of cars parked up, but luckily no people. Neither of them knew how to hot-wire a car so they followed the access road through the trees on foot, and out on to a main highway that cut through the park. They debated about what to do, whether to keep on walking or try and hitch a lift. Desperation won; they had no idea where they were, or how long they would need to walk before they came to civilization.

  Traffic was light, no doubt due to the curfew and military lockdown, but the road did still have a fair number of users, people who were probably designated as having jobs vital for the economy or industrial infrastructure.

  Alyssa and Jack were aware they looked bad – their clothes torn and barely dry, their appearance dishevelled and covered in cuts and bruises – but at least it meant they looked quite different from any photographs of them which might have been shown on the news recently.

  When they saw a likely car – an ancient SUV driven by a kindly looking elderly couple – they showed themselves, and were rewarded when the car stopped moments later. Alyssa gave them a hastily concocted story about going on a camping trip days before and getting lost in the wilderness, which evoked the couple’s sympathy and got them an invitation into the car.

  The man told them about the roadblocks in the area and Alyssa asked to be dropped off at the nearest shopping mall, hoping there would be one before the first roadblock came up.

  They arrived at a medium-sized retail park just forty minutes later, without having had to pass through any roadside security checks. They also discovered that they were now over sixty miles south-west of the city. They thanked the couple and made their way inside, careful to keep their faces away from the mall’s CCTV cameras.

  Alyssa went shopping for clothes for the two of them – conservative, muted colours that wouldn’t attract attention – and also for spectacles and hair dye. She picked up two new cellphones at the same time.

  Jack, meanwhile, found an internet café. As well as checking out the latest news on their situation, he spent the next hour researching how to make fake IDs.

  When they met up later, Jack told her that very little information had been reported in the press – there was next to nothing about the attack on the internment camp – but their pictures had indeed been flashed across the nation’s media as dangerous terrorist suspects.

  In the bathrooms, they changed clothes, put on the clear-glass spectacles, and dyed their hair. Then they went to a passport photo booth to have their pictures taken.

  While Alyssa shopped for more supplies, Jack went to a stationery store to pick up scissors, superglue and plastic laminate and then made his way back to the bathrooms.

  When they met up another hour later, Alyssa showed Jack the fleece tops which she had bought, with embroidered logos on them that another store had done for her. Large lettering across the back, company logo on the breast.

  ‘Perfect,’ Jack said, before showing her their new IDs.

  Deciding that they had stayed long enough at the mall, they went to a car rental desk and used their new identification to hire a small family car. Their fake IDs were accepted with no sign of suspicion. Sterner security faced them at the roadblocks but there, too, they got through without a hitch and continued their journey southwards to the capital. On the outskirts of the city they stopped at a small roadside diner, where they changed into their fleece tops and pinned their brand-new company ID cards to their lapels before sitting down to eat, and to wait.

  Jack had just picked up the menu to select a dessert when Alyssa’s cellphone rang.

  Jack looked up at her, and their eyes met, searching for mutual reassurance.

  Alyssa answered the call. ‘Beltway Security Systems, how may I help you?’

  Phase one of the plan was about to commence.

  5

  THE HEADQUARTERS OF the DoD was one of the world’s largest buildings, at least in terms of floor space.

  Built to house an amalgamation of several government departments, it had been decided to position the huge structure just over the river from the President’s own famous
residence and the rest of the congressional and senatorial machinery on the hill beyond.

  It was a bulky, ugly structure made out of visually unsympathetic concrete built on three hundred acres of what had once been swampy marshland, but it was an architectural marvel nevertheless; its creators had managed to cram nearly twenty miles of corridors into its floor plan. With close to seven million square feet of internal space, the building housed over thirty thousand employees. Almost four thousand of these employees worked within the Cyber Warfare Division, trying to protect the DoD’s fifteen thousand separate computer networks from the ever-increasing threat of cyber attack and cyber terrorism. The department was based right in the heart of the building, in a huge cluster of offices connected to the main server rooms where the building’s supercomputers and internal mainframes were housed.

  Lieutenant Colonel Evan Ward was the lead cyber warfare technician currently assigned to the operations room, and he contemplated the department’s problems as he stared at the three separate flat-screen monitors that sat in front of him.

  The main trouble was the large number of networks that operated within the building. Most office complexes used one system, but here, mainly as a result of numerous departmental mergers over the decades, there were now fifteen thousand vaguely interconnected systems. This was simply too many for the staff to even monitor, never mind adequately protect against external threats, especially for those networks connected to the outside world via the internet.

  The really sensitive stuff – black projects, lists of agents, details of ongoing sensitive operations – was held exclusively on so-called ‘closed’ systems, able to be used internally only. Someone would have to get access to the room Colonel Ward now stood in to have a chance of accessing the information on those computers.

  But still, he thought, his task was an unenviable one. Although he was good at his job, he was a military man first and foremost, as DoD protocol dictated. An outside computer expert – although arguably better at the job – would never be allowed to run a DoD department. And the problem ran right through the Cyber Warfare Division’s staff from top to bottom. The government simply didn’t pay enough to attract the very top people, which meant that Ward often had to outsource to private companies, at great expense. It was a perverse irony that more money was spent on external contractors than on the four thousand men and women directly under Ward’s command.

  The system was archaic, the staff underpaid and undervalued, but they somehow managed to struggle on. Ward took a sip from his steaming mug and thanked his lucky stars that the intelligence resources of other countries were in an even worse state than his own. It would be a dark day indeed if any enemy nation were to launch a concerted, technically thorough attack on the country’s computer infrastructure.

  ‘Sir,’ a voice said from behind, and Ward swivelled in his chair to face the man.

  ‘Yes, Sergeant,’ he replied.

  ‘We’ve got something in one of the systems.’

  ‘What sort of something?’ Ward asked, not too concerned. There was always something.

  ‘A virus,’ the sergeant replied. ‘We’ve been working on it a while now, I know you don’t like to be bothered normally, but it’s a tough one.’

  ‘Which system?’ Ward asked, still not unduly concerned.

  ‘Alpha Two Bravo,’ the man said, then stopped as his boss’s phone rang.

  Ward answered instantly, listened for ten seconds, then put the phone down. ‘Four more systems have gone down,’ he said, more urgently now.

  And then he saw more people heading for his desk, messages began to appear on his computer, and the phone started to ring again; all of his fears appeared to be coming true.

  The virus was spreading everywhere.

  Half an hour later, Ward received his damage report.

  An unknown but highly dangerous virus had infected two hundred and forty-five of the DoD’s ‘open’ networks, and although its progress had seemed to slow, other networks were still being sporadically infected. No major systems had yet gone down, but it was just a matter of time unless Ward could get a grip on it.

  Nothing his staff was doing seemed to be working. He had called in people from across the division, pulling them from all but the most vital projects, until he had seven hundred people trying to stop the virus. But another half an hour later, a hundred more networks had become infected, and Ward knew the time had come to bite the bullet. It went against the grain, but he had to do it nevertheless.

  He picked up the phone and dialled a number he had memorized long ago.

  ‘Beltway Security Systems, how may I help you?’ a cheerful female voice answered.

  Reluctantly, Ward explained the situation and asked for help.

  Alyssa hung up, smiled at Jack, and zipped up her Beltway Security Systems fleece.

  Back at the mall, Jack had not only spent time in the internet café learning how to make fake IDs; he had infected the live, internet-connected part of the DoD’s internal mainframe with a virus. He had also found out which external companies were used to deal with hacking and virus problems, and discovered that one communications security contractor was used almost exclusively.

  Beltway Security Systems was based just outside the capital and did a wide range of work for the government, and for top multinational firms in the area. Its own security systems were good, but Jack had nevertheless managed to get his and Alyssa’s new identities registered on to the company’s database as long-term employees.

  Jack knew that when the virus was detected, procedure would dictate that the DoD’s own internal people would try and deal with it, and when they failed – as Jack was confident they would – they would contact Beltway Security Systems and arrange for contractors to come in and deal with the problem. He had hacked Beltway’s telephone system to redirect calls from the DoD’s computer centre to one of the cellphones Alyssa had bought. Pretending to be the Beltway control centre operator, she had taken Colonel Ward’s direct number and told him a senior technician would call him back immediately. Ward had demurred, demanding the technician’s number instead, which Alyssa had provided.

  As they reached the car, Jack’s own phone began to ring.

  ‘You’re on,’ Alyssa told him, and Jack answered as he opened the car door.

  ‘Dave Jenkins, Beltway,’ Jack said, sliding into the passenger seat.

  He listened to the voice on the other end for some time before speaking himself. ‘Yes, sir, I understand. You’ve been passed through to me because my colleague and I are only twenty minutes away. We’ll take a look, report back to Beltway, and then decide what sort of resources need to be mobilized.’

  There was another pause before Jack gave the details of their new identities, including their employment codes at Beltway. He knew Ward would check the names against Beltway’s database, but was confident their new identities would be there; security passes would be duly issued.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ Jack said again, before hanging up and turning to Alyssa, who was manoeuvring the car on to the highway. ‘He’s sending a man to meet us at the east gate. He’ll escort us straight to the offices of the Cyber Warfare Division.’

  Alyssa smiled. ‘We’re in.’

  6

  OSWALD UMBEBE SURVEYED the young men and women in front of him with pride.

  They came from all over the world, members of elite special operations forces from a huge variety of countries. Indeed, some of the men and women in this room would once upon a time have been sworn enemies of one another. They may even have faced each other across a hostile battlefield, Umbebe considered as he appraised them. But not now. Now they were brothers and sisters, united within the Order of Planetary Renewal. True believers, all of them.

  Some had been with him from the start, others had been recruited more recently. But all could be trusted, Umbebe was sure of that. He had a sixth sense for such things.

  They were at a disused military airfield, which was to be the staging ground
for the next phase of Umbebe’s strategy. The travel had not agreed with him, and his condition was getting steadily worse. He was in a great deal of pain now, almost constantly. And yet he didn’t let it trouble him. Why would he? There wasn’t long left for any of them anyway.

  He had nearly forty soldiers in this personal attack force, all elite commandos. There would be other elements in the background too, a further sixty men and women with military experience to deal with logistics and security, but the soldiers in front of him now would be the spearhead.

  The main attack force would come in four sections of eight commandos, with another section in reserve. Umbebe had rented land further south where the team had been rehearsing the attack for weeks. They had been at this airfield for the past two weeks, training and acclimatizing to the altitude and freezing temperatures. As Umbebe walked up and down their lines, he could see that they were ready.

  ‘My brothers and sisters,’ he intoned, ‘true believers. The time has almost come for us to make the supreme sacrifice. You are all experts in your field, selected and trained to be the best. And you are.’ He nodded his head to them. ‘It is time now to use those skills to achieve our ultimate aim. The rebirth of our planet!’

  Umbebe could see that some of the commandos wanted to cheer but were held in check by military discipline.

  ‘You will have to kill,’ he continued. ‘We will all have to kill. And, likewise, we will all have to die. But we do so knowing it is for a better world! A new world, free of human vice, industry, pollution; a world where nature will once more reign supreme, allowing the green lung to fill again, to breathe once more.’

  Symbolically, he breathed in deeply. ‘Ah, to breathe air that is clean and fresh. This is what we give to the world. Mankind will be driven from the planet but, if fate decrees it, we will rise again, perhaps wiser than we are today. But that,’ he said, raising his arms skyward, ‘is not in our hands. What will be, will be. Our sole duty is to purge this diseased earth, to wipe the slate clean so that life can start anew and afresh. This is our divine responsibility, and I thank you, my brothers and sisters, for joining me on this crusade.’