by Tom Clancy
“Good evening, Comrade Chairman.”
“I have important news. This call serves to initiate your sanction authorizing Operation Earth Shadow.”
“Very well.”
“When will you begin?”
“Physical assets are in place, as you requested, so action will begin immediately. Once these are completed, in a week, two weeks at most, we will begin cyberkinetic operations. Things will proceed very quickly after that.”
“I understand. And how are the preparations for Operation Sun Fire?”
There was no pause. “Preparations will be complete as soon as we receive a shipment of hardware on the way from Shenzhen, and bring it online. In ten days we will be ready. I await your orders.”
“And I await mine.”
“Comrade Chairman?”
“Yes, Doctor?”
“I feel it my duty to remind you, once again, that key aspects of Earth Shadow, once initialized, are beyond my capability to rescind.”
Chairman Su Ke Qiang smiled into the phone. “Doctor… I am relying on our inability to reverse course once Earth Shadow begins. Civilian leadership has sanctioned us to tip the first domino in the row as if we can simply stop the momentum before the second and third dominoes fall. The will of our president is strong at the moment, here before the onset of adversity. If he wavers under pressure, I will stress to him that the only way is forward.”
“Yes, Comrade Chairman.”
“You have your orders, Doctor. Do not expect to hear from me again until I contact you with sanction to initiate Sun Fire.”
“I will continue to report through channels.”
“I wish you fortune,” Su said.
“Shi-shi.” Thank you.
The phone went dead in Chairman Su’s hand, and he looked at it with a chuckle before placing it back in its cradle.
Center was not one for small talk.
FIFTEEN
Silicon Valley is home to Intel and Apple and Google and Oracle and dozens of other major technology companies. In support of these firms, hundreds if not thousands of smaller businesses have sprung up in the area in the past twenty years.
Menlo Park, California, is in the Valley, just north of Palo Alto, and its office buildings and business parks house hundreds of high-tech start-ups.
In a midsized complex on Ravenswood Drive, just up the road from mega-tech research firm SRI, a sign on a glass door reads Adaptive Data Security Consultants. Below this, the sign claimed the company shared the same daytime hours of operation as all the other small tech start-ups that shared the business park. But the night security officer who drove by the business in his golf cart at four a.m. was not surprised to find several cars in the lot that had been there since his shift started six hours earlier.
The principals of ADSC, Lance Boulder and Ken Farmer, were well accustomed to working long hours. It came with the territory.
Lance and Ken had grown up next door to each other in San Francisco, and they all but lived on their computers in the early days of the Internet. By the time they were twelve the boys were building machines and customizing software, and at age fifteen the two friends had become accomplished hackers.
The hacking subculture among intelligent teenage boys was a powerful force for Ken and Lance, and they began working together to break into the computer networks of their high school, local universities, and other targets around the world. They did no great damage, they weren’t involved with credit card fraud or identity theft, nor did they sell data hauls to others — they were more in the game for the excitement and the challenge.
Other than a few graffiti attacks on website homepages for their school, they did not cause any harm.
But the local police didn’t see it that way. Both boys were picked up for computer graffiti that was tracked back to them by their junior-high computer teacher, and Lance and Ken immediately confessed.
After a few weeks of community service they decided to reform their ways before they became adults, when such brushes with the law would stay on their records and could seriously affect their future prospects.
Instead they focused their talents and their energies in the right direction, and gained admittance to Caltech, majored in computer science, and then took jobs for computer software companies in Silicon Valley.
They were model citizens, but they were still hackers at heart, so in their late twenties they left the corporate world to start their own company, specializing in penetration testing, or “pentesting,” known in the computer networking world as “ethical hacking.”
They hired themselves out to the IT departments of banks, retail chains, manufacturers, and others, and then endeavored to break into their clients’ networks and hack their websites.
And soon they boasted a one hundred percent success rate hacking their customers’ systems.
They developed a reputation as some of the best “white hat” hackers in Silicon Valley, and the big antivirus companies, McAfee and Symantec, tried to buy them out several times, but the two young men were determined to grow their company into a powerhouse of its own.
Business grew along with their reputation, and soon they began pentesting networks under government contract, attempting to break into so-called bulletproof systems run by top-secret government contractors, looking for ways in that the black-hats — the malicious hackers — had not yet found. Lance and Ken and their two dozen employees had excelled in this task and, flush with fresh government contracts, ADSC was poised to expand again.
The two owners had come a long way in five years, but Lance and Ken still knew how to work twenty hours a day when a project demanded it.
Like tonight.
They and three more of their staff were working overtime because they had found a new exploit in a Windows server component that could be potentially calamitous for any secure government network. It had revealed itself during penetration testing on the network of a government contractor headquartered in nearby Sunnyvale, California.
Lance and Ken had discovered the vulnerability in the software, then they had built their own Trojan, a malware that leeches on to a legitimate process, and used it to climb into the secure network. From here they were astonished to find they could execute an “upstream attack,” using the company’s connection to the U.S. Department of Defense’s secure network to make their way into the bowels of the U.S. military’s most secure information databases.
Everyone at ADSC knew the implications for what they had found. If a smart and determined hacker discovered the vulnerability before Microsoft patched it, the black-hat could build his own virus to steal, alter, or erase terabytes of crucial data necessary for war fighting.
Lance and Ken had not alerted their customers, the DoD, or their colleagues at Microsoft’s Digital Crimes Unit yet; they knew they had to be certain about their findings, so they tested through the night.
And this critical project would be going at full steam, even now at four in the morning, if not for one significant snag.
The power had just gone out in the entire office park.
* * *
Well… that blows,” Lance said as he looked around the dark office. The glow from the monitors in front of the five men working there was the only light in the room. The computers were still running; the backup battery power supply attached to each machine kept the men from losing their data, although the batteries would keep the devices juiced for only an hour, so the men would need to power down if the electricity did not come back on soon.
Marcus, one of ADSC’s lead data-flow analysts, grabbed a pack of cigarettes and a lighter from the drawer in his desk and stood up. As he stretched his arms and shoulders over his head he said, “Who forgot to pay PG and E?”
Pacific Gas and Electric was the local utility, and none of the five young men in the room thought for a second the culprit was a missed payment. The office had two dozen workstations, several high-capacity servers in the basement server farm, and dozens of other electr
onic peripherals, all of which drew power from the grid.
This was not the first time they’d tripped a breaker.
Ken Farmer stood up, then took a quick swig of lukewarm Pepsi from a can. “I’m going to take a leak and then I’ll go down and flip the breaker.”
Lance said, “I’m right behind you.”
Data-flow analysts Tim and Rajesh stayed at their machines, but put their heads in their hands to rest.
A resilient, powerful, and utterly secure computer network was a necessity for a company whose business plan consisted of tracking down computer hackers, and ADSC had the tools and the protocols in place to make sure that any cyberattacks targeting their company did not make it through.
Lance and Ken focused great attention on making certain ADSC had all but bulletproofed its network.
But they did not place the same attention on the physical security of their property.
* * *
One hundred twenty yards from where Lance and Ken and their three employees stretched and smoked and pissed, a lone individual walked in the heavy mist hanging between trees alongside dark and quiet Ravenswood Drive, approaching the business park that housed ADSC. Other than the early hour and a slight altering of his path to stay out of the direct light of the streetlamps, the figure in no way appeared out of the ordinary.
He wore a black zip-up raincoat with the hood down, his gloved hands were empty, and his pace was a leisurely stroll.
Some thirty yards behind him, a second man walked the same path, but his pace was faster and he closed on the man ahead of him. He too wore a dark raincoat with the hood down.
And twenty yards behind the second pedestrian, a third man jogged up the path, rapidly gaining on the two ahead of him. He wore dark running clothes.
All three men formed together just a few yards in front of the parking lot of the complex, the jogger slowed to match the pace of the other two, and here the three turned as one and stepped onto the property.
With a continued air of nonchalance the men flipped the hoods of their jackets over their heads. Each man also wore a black fleece gaiter around his neck, and simultaneously they pulled these up with gloved hands until their faces were covered from the bottoms of their eyes down.
They stepped onto the small parking lot that would have been illuminated if not for the power outage.
All three reached under their jackets and pulled Belgian-made semiautomatic pistols, FN Five-seveNs. Each weapon carried twenty-one rounds of 5.7x28-millimeter ammunition, a potent handgun caliber.
Long silencers protruded from the muzzles of their guns.
A man with the call sign of Crane was in charge of the small unit. He had more men — seven in total served under him — but he felt his ingress would not require his full squad, so he brought along only two of his assets for this phase of the mission.
And he was correct. ADSC was not a hard target by any stretch of the imagination.
* * *
A single security guard worked on the premises, patrolling the office complex in a golf cart at this time of the early morning. He was cocooned in a zippered plastic weather enclosure to keep the mist off him.
When the lights had not come on after thirty seconds or so, the guard reached to his belt and pulled off his iPhone. He knew that of the six companies with offices here on the property, only a few guys at ADSC were actually on site early this morning. He decided he’d call them to see if they needed him to come over with a flashlight.
As the guard scrolled through his contact list, movement in the dark outside his plastic shell caught his eye. He glanced up and to his left.
* * *
Crane fired a single round through the clear plastic enclosure and into the forehead of the security guard at a range of five feet. Blood and brain matter splattered inside the enclosure, and the young man slumped forward. A mobile phone slid out of his fingertips, and it fell between his feet.
Crane unzipped the plastic, felt around in the pockets of the dead security guard, and retrieved a set of keys.
The three men then continued around the side of the building. It was dark back here, except for the single orange glow of a cigarette.
“Hey,” came an uncertain voice from behind the glow.
Crane raised his Five-seveN and fired three suppressed rounds into the darkness there. From the flashes of the muzzle blast he saw a young man tumbling back through an open doorway that led to a small kitchen.
Crane’s two hooded assets ran forward and pulled the dead man back outside, and then they closed the door.
Crane pulled a walkie-talkie from his coat. He clicked the push-to-talk button three times.
Together the three men waited at the side door for thirty seconds. Then a black Ford Explorer appeared in the parking lot, racing forward with its lights off. It slowed and parked, and five more assets, all dressed the same as those already at the door but also wearing large backpacks, poured out of the Explorer.
The unit members had designated call signs, each man named after a different type of bird — Crane, Grouse, Quail, Stint, Snipe, Gull, Wigeon, and Duck. Crane was trained to lead, and the others were trained to follow, but each and every man in the team was trained to kill.
They had memorized the layout of the property from the building’s blueprints, and one of them had with him a schematic for the server farm in the basement, and together they entered through the kitchen door, moving silently in the darkness. They left the kitchen, headed up a hallway, and entered the front lobby. Here they split into two forces. Four men went to the stairwell; four more headed straight back, past the elevators, and toward the main lab.
* * *
Lance Boulder had pulled a flashlight from a toolbox in a closet near the kitchen, and he used this to head up the hall toward the stairwell to check the UPS system, the uninterruptable power supply battery unit that would be keeping his servers running. He hoped like hell that the breaker was, in fact, the culprit. He decided to check to see if power was out at the entire office park, so he took his BlackBerry from his belt and began typing a text message to Randy, the night security guard on the premises.
When he looked up from the BlackBerry he stopped dead in his tracks. There, just a few feet in front of him, his flashlight shone on a man dressed head to toe in black. Behind him were more men.
And then he saw the long handgun in the hand of the man in front.
Only a slight gasp passed his lips before Crane shot him twice in the chest. The silenced rounds barked in the hall. Lance’s body slammed into the wall on his right and he spun to his left, then pitched over facedown.
His flashlight fell to the floor and illuminated the way ahead for the four killers, and they advanced toward the lab.
Ken Farmer was taking advantage of the power outage in his building. He had not left his desk or his computer for more than six hours, so now he was just finishing up in the bathroom. The emergency lights did not reach the hallway by the bathroom so, as he opened the door to return to his office, he literally had to feel his way for a few feet.
He saw the silhouettes of the men ahead, and he immediately knew they were not his colleagues.
“Who are you?” he asked. He was too shocked to be scared.
The first man in the group walked up to him quickly, then placed the hot tip of a pistol’s silencer on his forehead.
Ken raised his hands slowly. “We don’t have any money.”
The silencer pushed him back, and he walked backward into the dark lab. As soon as he entered he saw black forms move around him, past him, and he heard the shouts of Rajesh and Tim, and then he heard the loud thumps of suppressed gunfire and the tinkling sounds of spent casings bouncing on the tile floor.
Farmer was led back to his desk, turned around, and placed in his chair by rough gloved hands, and from the light of the monitors in the room he saw Tim and Raj both lying on the floor.
His mind could not process the fact they had just been shot dead.
&n
bsp; “Whatever you want… it’s yours. Just please don’t—”
Crane moved the silencer of his Five-seveN to Ken Farmer’s right temple and then, at contact distance, he fired a single round. Bone and tissue sprayed the carpet, and the body fell onto the red mess.
Within seconds Stint called on the radio. In Mandarin he said, “Building secure.”
Crane did not respond on the walkie-talkie, but instead he took a satellite phone out of his jacket. He pressed a single button, waited a few seconds, and then, speaking Mandarin himself, said, “Power on.”
Within fifteen seconds the electricity returned to the building. While four of Crane’s assets stood guard at the entrances to ADSC, three more assets went downstairs to the basement.
Crane sat at Ken’s desk and opened Ken’s personal e-mail. He began a new message, then added everyone on Ken’s contact list to the address line, which ensured more than one thousand different addresses would receive the note. Crane then reached inside his jacket and pulled a small notepad, upon which a letter had been written in English. He transcribed this into the e-mail, his gloved fingertips slowing his typing speed to a crawl.
Family, Friends, and Colleagues,
I love you all, but I cannot go on. My life is a failure. Our company has been a lie. I am destroying everything. I am killing everyone. I have no other options.
I am sorry.
Peace, Ken
Crane did not hit send; instead he spoke into his walkie-talkie. Still in Mandarin, he said, “Ten minutes.” He stood and stepped over Farmer’s body and headed to the basement, where the three others there had already begun the process of attaching a dozen homemade explosives in and around all of the servers. Each device was carefully placed near the hard drives and memory boards of the servers, ensuring that no digital records would remain.
Wiping the drives clean would have taken hours, and Crane did not have hours, so he had been ordered to take a more kinetic approach to his task.
In seven minutes they were finished. Crane and Gull returned to the lab, Crane passed his pistol to Gull, and then he leaned back to Farmer’s keyboard and clicked send with the mouse, distributing the disturbing mass e-mail to 1,130 recipients.