by Tom Clancy
The covert squadron would be getting some support staff, mechanics, and flight operations personnel from here in Iwakuni, but the bulk of the ground crew would be Taiwanese Air Force men and women secretly moved to the base.
Trash knew he and twenty-three other guys were not going to fight off the Chinese if they attacked Taiwan. He wondered if this entire exercise was nothing more than politics, showing the ROC government that even though the Reagan and the other carrier in the Pacific weren’t getting too close to the danger, the United States was willing to stick a few of its own boys right there in the middle of the strait.
It pissed him off to think of himself and his friends as pawns in a geopolitical chess match, but he had to admit, he was glad for the opportunity to get back in the action.
The flight to Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport went without incident, other than the fact twenty-four American men, age twenty-six to forty-one, all with military haircuts, sat in ones and twos throughout the cabin and ignored one another. On the ground they passed breezily through customs, and then met up in the lobby of an airport hotel.
A couple of guys whom Trash took for DIA operatives led them to a bus, which shuttled them to a closed portion of the big international airport.
They flew in a ROC C-130 transport aircraft from Taipei to Hualien Airport, a commercial airport in the middle of an active military base on Taiwan’s eastern shore. The ROC Air Force flew F-16 fighters off the runway year-round, and the civilian portion of the airport had been closed indefinitely for “military training maneuvers.” Trash and the other Marines had been told they would be kept away from the vast majority of base personnel to minimize the possibility of leaks.
A Hawkeye owned by the ROC Air Force was also staffed with American air combat officers, and it provided command and control for the flights.
The Americans were ushered into a large bunker built into a hillside near the runway, where they found twenty-two used, but in good condition, F/A-18C Hornets, as well as living quarters and operational areas set up for the Americans.
Thirty-three hours after being awakened in the middle of the night on the Ronald Reagan, Captain Brandon “Trash” White and Major Scott “Cheese” Stilton walked out of the secure area with their helmets over their heads, following the operational security orders given to them by the DIA.
On the tarmac they both inspected their aircraft one last time, and Trash climbed into the cockpit of “his” Hornet, 881. Cheese climbed up the ladder and stepped into the cockpit of his assigned aircraft, 602.
Soon they were back in the air, flying CAPs over the strait, and—and this was the best part for Trash and the other Marines—returning after their mission to land on a real runway—a long, wide, flat, unmoving piece of asphalt, not a bobbing postage stamp in the middle of the ocean.
FIFTY-TWO
Gavin Biery had spent the past week since returning from Hong Kong locked in his laboratory picking apart the secrets of FastByte22’s handheld computer.
Now that FastByte22 was dead, Gavin knew the only clues the young hacker would ever reveal were locked within the circuitry, and it was his job to expose them.
The device had been difficult to crack. On the first day of working on it, he realized FastByte22 had booby-trapped the machine with a virus that would launch against any computer, Bluetooth-receiving device, or other peripheral that was attached to it in any way. The virus would then deliver a RAT payload into the infected device that would take a snapshot of the user on the other side.
It was an ingenious piece of code, and it took Gavin two full days to circumvent it.
Once inside the drive and through the encryption, he found a treasure trove of information. Almost all of the notes he found were in Chinese characters, of course, and Zha was a note taker. Biery was terrified about the possibility that the machine had other virus booby traps installed, so he had a Mandarin-speaking translator from the third floor come into the room after submitting to a pat-down, and this poor young man then had to hand-transcribe hundreds of pages of document files onto a legal pad for translation back at his desk.
While the documents were being transcribed, Biery looked through the executable files and discovered other secrets.
A complicated custom-coded file-uploading system on the device was at first a mystery to Biery. Looking through the source code of the program, he could not for the life of him discern what made it different from all the commercial file-uploading applications available for free. It seemed to be an overly complicated Rube Goldberg piece of software.
He was certain there was something to it; FastByte22 was not the kind of hacker to build something so bloated just to pass the time, but he put it aside and kept hunting through the device.
—
In the end, the Chinese translator unlocked the secret of FastByte22’s computer. The Mandarin notes, it seemed, were ruminations that Zha had in his time away from work. Ryan had explained to Gavin that when they tailed FastByte through the streets of Hong Kong, and even when he sat in the strip club, he seemed to always be typing away on the computer. Biery understood the kid; he was the same way. In his time away from work Gavin was always on his laptop at home or making little audio notes to himself in his car, ideas that just came to him in that moment that he wanted to record for later.
Most of Zha’s notes were just his ideas, and many of them were silly or downright weird: “I want to break into the website of Buckingham Palace and place a picture of Chairman Mao over the Queen’s head,” and “If we were able to fire the stabilizing rockets on the International Space Station, could we hold the world for ransom to prevent the ISS from crashing into a satellite?”
There was also a detailed plan to take control of a diabetic’s insulin pump remotely by going through the attached low-power superheterodyne receiver and hacking into it with a directional antenna, presumably for the purpose of increasing the flow of insulin into the person’s bloodstream to kill him from up to one hundred feet away. It was clear from the notes that FastByte22 had done some testing on the equipment itself and had recently ordered a receiver from a company in Marseille to be sent to a P.O. box in Mong Kok.
Many of Zha’s notes revealed to Gavin that the dead Chinese hacker had possessed a brilliant mind with a fertile imagination.
But many more of the notes contained important pieces of intelligence value. “Discuss with Center the discovery regarding the hydroelectric dam fail-safe measures.” And “Ukrainian command servers are only as stable as the local power grid. Kharkov = better than Kiev. Discuss with Center the need for Data Logistics to reroute traffic away from Kiev before adopting next phase.”
Most of the notes posed more questions than they provided answers for Biery, but he did find the explanation for the large, complicated file-uploading application. From a note Zha had made just one week before his capture by Navy SEALs, Gavin learned the software was a handmade piece of malware Zha created that would allow a hacker to upload a virus via Cryptogram, the instant-messaging system Center used that was thought to be virtually hackproof. Gavin had studied Cryptogram when it came out, but he’d not delved deeply enough into the software to where he could easily recognize the code Zha wrote. Once he had the simple explanation from the Mandarin text document, he went back into the code and saw there was nothing at all simple about the uploader itself. It was brilliant and intricate, and Biery saw in the different way the code was written that a large team of coders had been involved in constructing it.
That was interesting. Back in Hong Kong, Zha had been seen with other well-known Chinese hackers. Here was more evidence that they were, in fact, working together on high-level computer malware.
The second big revelation from FastByte’s handwritten notes was even more of a bombshell. The young Chinese hacker used code words to signify people and general names to signify places, and Gavin realized quickly
that he would not be able to break the code without being inside Zha Shu Hai’s head. But Zha slipped up in one of his documents. He had mentioned the “Miami command server” four times earlier in a long note to himself about exfiltrating data from an unnamed U.S. defense contractor, but the fifth time he referred to the location as the “BriteWeb command server.”
Gavin immediately left his sterile lab, rushed to his office, went online, and searched for BriteWeb in Miami. He got an instant match. It was a Web-design and data-hosting outfit located in Coral Gables. A little more digging showed him the business was owned by a holding company on Grand Cayman.
Gavin picked up his phone, called in one of his employees, and told him to drop everything and dig into the holding company.
An hour later Gavin was back on the phone, this time calling Sam Granger, director of operations.
“Morning, Gavin.”
“How soon can you get everybody into a conference room?”
Granger replied, “You’ve got something?”
“I do.”
“Come up in twenty minutes.”
—
Twenty-five minutes later, Gavin Biery stood at the end of the conference table. In front of him was the entire complement of Campus operators, along with Gerry Hendley and Sam Granger.
“What do you have for us?” Hendley asked as soon as everyone was settled.
“I’ve got a long way to go before I’ve unlocked all the secrets on the device, but in the meantime, I’ve located one of Center’s command servers.”
“Where is it?” asked Chavez.
“Miami. Coral Gables. Southwest Sixty-second Place.”
“Miami?” Granger was clearly surprised. “So this is the command-and-control location of the hacking operation? Miami?”
“No. This is one of the places a botnet run by Zha and Tong sends data that it steals from hacked machines. It looks as though this is not just some benign server being hacked as a data drop location, though. You can tell by how the company is set up that the owners of this server knew good and well they were going to be using their hardware for nefarious purposes. It’s an underground-economy server. Definitely run by shady bastards. They have a drop point nearby, so they can pick up cash and goods.”
“We are talking about criminal acts?”
“Yes,” Gavin said, “there is no doubt. They are hiding the identities of the owners of the server behind front companies and bogus registry information. The owner of the company is Russian, his name is Dmitri Oransky, he incorporated in the Caymans, and he lives in the U.S.”
“Shit,” said Granger. “I was hoping . . . expecting it to be somewhere out of the country.”
Gavin replied, “There will be other command servers in a botnet this large. Some will likely be in the U.S., others will be overseas. But this one is definitely part of the operation, and the guys running it definitely aren’t playing by the rules.”
Driscoll said, “If it’s attacking the U.S., why would it be here in the U.S.? Don’t they know that makes it easier for us to shut it down?”
“Bad guys love putting their servers in the U.S. We’ve got a stable power grid, we’ve got cheap and widespread broadband, and we’ve got pro-business policies that cut out a lot of red tape that the gangsters don’t like. They can be pretty sure that a truckload of soldiers or cops isn’t going to show up in the middle of the night and haul them and their equipment in without the Feds jumping through months of legal hurdles that give them time to pull up stakes and hit the road.”
Gavin saw most of the men at the table did not really understand. “They think they can hide the origin of their command servers, so why not put them right under our noses? The fact is that it works pretty damn well ninety-nine percent of the time.”
Dom Caruso said, “Even if Miami isn’t the nerve center of the entire operation, it’s clear this Coral Gables address is a piece of the puzzle, and we need to check it out.”
Sam Granger put up a hand. “Not so fast. I’m leery about sending you guys on an op on U.S. soil.”
“Not like we haven’t done it before.”
“True, the Nevada op, for example. But that was a different situation. We know Tong and his people, whoever the hell they are, have targeted us directly, and they have evidence that could close us down easily. This isn’t the time to be running and gunning against Americans in America. None of Jack’s dad’s pardons will do us any good if you get ID’d and picked up on a local or state rap.”
“Look,” Jack Ryan said, “our enemy is foreign, that much is clear. Just some of their resources are here. I say we just go down and take a look. I’m not talking about gearing up in body armor and hitting the place, just some recon. We get a couple of snapshots of the guys working down there, poke around into their backgrounds and known associates, and that can lead us to the next link in the chain.”
Granger shook his head. “I wish we could, but that’s a slippery slope. Your dad did not set up this operation so that we could spy on Americans.”
Jack said, “Assholes are assholes, Sam. It doesn’t matter what color their passport is.”
Sam smiled at this, but it was clear his mind was made up. “We tip off the FBI about the command server. We’ll figure out the details of how we are going to go about notifying them. But in the meantime, The Campus stays out of it.”
Dom and Jack both nodded. Neither man really got it, but Sam was their boss, so that was that.
—
The meeting broke up soon after, but Gavin Biery asked Ryan to follow him back down to his office. Once there, Biery said, “I didn’t want to discuss this in the meeting, because at this point all I have is a theory, but I wanted to tell you about it, because it may necessitate some work on the operations side of The Campus.”
Jack said, “Lay it on me. Since we can’t go to Miami and investigate, I’d appreciate some work.”
Gavin held up a hand. “This is nothing for you to do now. This may take days and days. But with a lot of work, I might be able to reverse-engineer two pieces of malware I found on Zha’s computer and, with it, make a pretty powerful weapon.”
“What kind of weapon?”
“Zha built a covert delivery system that allows someone to sneak malware through Cryptogram, and he booby-trapped his device with a virus that infects any device that connects to it with a version of his RAT software.”
“The thing that makes it where he can see through the camera.”
“Right.”
Jack slowly understood. “So . . . you are saying you might be able to construct a new virus that could be delivered through Cryptogram to infect the computer on the other side, and then take a picture of what’s on the other side?”
Biery nodded. “Again, this is theoretical. And on top of that, you would have to find a computer that someone uses to connect with Center. Not Zha’s handheld, because Center will know that device is burned and he would never establish communications. And not the Istanbul Drive, for just exactly the same reason. But a new device, used by someone Center trusts. If Center opened up a Cryptogram conversation, accepted the digital handshake of the other party, then accepted a file that was uploaded by another party . . . then we might be able to get a look at Center.”
Normally Jack saw Gavin light up when he talked about what he could do with computer code, but Gavin seemed to be a lot more subdued than usual.
Jack wanted to encourage him. “You do realize how important that would be for The Campus? Shit, how important it would be for America?”
Gavin said, “No promises, though. It’s not going to be easy.”
Jack patted him on the arm. “I’ve got faith in you.”
“Thanks, Ryan. I’ll work on the code, you work on finding one of Center’s people stupid enough to play along.”
—
Two hours later Ryan was at his desk. He felt a presence, then looked up to find Dom standing behind him with a smile on his face.
“Hey, cuz. Any big plans for the weekend?”
Ryan shook his head. “None. Melanie says she’ll be working Saturday. Figured I’d come in here and mess around. I guess we’ll hang out after that. Why, what’s up?”
“How long has it been since the two of us have gone on vacation together?”
Jack looked up from his monitor. “Have we ever gone on vacation together? I mean, other than when we were kids?”
Tony Wills, Jack’s cubicle mate, was away to lunch, so Caruso slid his empty chair over and sat down in it. He moved closer to Ryan. In a conspiratorial tone he said, “Too long, then.”
Jack sensed trouble. “What’s on your mind, dude?”
“We’ve been working hard. I was just thinking we might push off early this afternoon, do a quick weekender somewhere. Just two guys blowing off a little steam.”
Jack Ryan cocked his head. “Where were you thinking about blowing off this steam?”
Dom Caruso did not reply. He just smiled.
Jack answered his own question: “Miami.”
“Why the hell not? We fly down commercial, get a couple of rooms in South Beach, eat some good Cuban food . . .” He trailed off at the end, and again, Ryan finished the thought.
“And we pop over to Coral Gables, maybe do a quick peek at Southwest Sixty-second Place. Is that your plan?”
Dom nodded. “Who’s gonna know? Who’s gonna care?”
“And we don’t mention it to Granger?”
“Do we have to tell Granger what we’re doing every weekend?”
“If we aren’t going to tell Granger or anybody else here, what’s the point of going?”
“Look, we won’t get too close, we won’t compromise ourselves. We just go for a little look-see. Maybe get tag numbers in the parking lot, follow some computer nerd back to his computer-nerd apartment and get an address.”