by Jeff Edwards
“Yeah,” Sheldon said. “I guess.”
His face was still pointed toward the horizon. “You asked why I would help the Navy guys destroy the submarine,” he said. “That’s why. Because sometimes there aren’t any good choices. Sometimes you have to choose between something bad, and something worse.”
He shivered, and looked down toward the darkly rolling waves. “There are 130 people on that submarine,” he said. “And I don’t want to hurt any of them. But there are millions of people in Washington, and Oregon, and California, and Colorado …”
He turned toward Ann. “I’m a liaison and logistics guy,” he said. “Not a technician, or an operator. I can’t make Mouse do his stuff. That’s your end of the business. So this all comes down to you. If you help the Navy destroy that sub, you’ll have 130 deaths on your conscience. I’m not going to lie to you, Ann. You probably will have nightmares. Hell, I’m just the hand-shaker and the pencil-pusher, and I’ll probably have nightmares. But if you do nothing to stop that sub, and it launches more nukes at the United States …” His voice trailed off.
“I wonder, Ann,” he said quietly, “How many nightmares will we get, if we let a million people die?”
CHAPTER 39
USS TOWERS (DDG-103)
WESTERN PACIFIC OCEAN
TUESDAY; 05 MARCH
0631 hours (6:31 AM)
TIME ZONE +11 ‘LIMA’
“Okay,” Captain Bowie said. “Let’s go around the table again. There’s a solution to this, people. We just haven’t found it yet.”
He looked to his left. “XO?”
The Executive Officer of Towers, Lieutenant Commander Bishop, took a deep breath. “ONI thinks the bad guys have pre-staged explosives at various positions around the ice pack. Maybe there’s some way to detect them. If we can get some helos to over-fly the ice, they might be able to pick up infrared sources, or MAD signatures from the hardware attached to the explosives.”
“That’s a good thought,” Captain Bowie said. “We’ll borrow a couple of helos from Seventh Fleet to try it out.” He looked to the XO’s left. “Chief?”
Chief Sonar Technician Theresa McPherson pursed her lips. “I’m not getting any brainstorms, Captain. All I can think of is the obvious. We slip north, under cover of darkness, and get as close to the ice pack as we dare. We deploy the towed array, and run slow search patterns along the southern edge of the ice. About an hour before sunrise, we pull the tail in, and head south before we get caught with our fingers in the cookie jar.” She shrugged. “If we search three or four nights in row, we might get lucky and catch the sub down near the southern end of the ice.”
“That sub is going to be in creep mode,” the XO said. “Slow and quiet. You think you’ll be able to detect him?”
“It’ll take a lot of luck, sir,” the Chief said. “In these latitudes at this time of year, we’ve got about 14 hours of darkness every night. Over a few nights, that adds up to a lot of search time. If one of the Russian sailors does something careless, like leaning a broom handle against a pipe, it might create a sound-short. If we get lucky, that will put some vibration in the water where our tail can pick it up.”
“That sounds pretty iffy,” Captain Bowie said.
Chief McPherson nodded. “It’s extremely iffy, sir. I don’t think my lucky rabbit foot is going to be big enough to handle it. I just can’t think of anything else to do.”
The Anti-Submarine Warfare Officer, Lieutenant (junior grade) Patrick Cooper, cleared his throat. “Uh … Captain? Is there any way we could try using that Mouse unit without the help of the civilian technician? We’ve got a lot of smart people on this ship, including some pretty savvy computer geeks. Maybe one of them can figure how to program the Mouse unit to do what we want.”
The captain shook his head. “It’s tempting, Pat. And I’ve thought about it, believe me. But we can’t afford to get this wrong. We may only get one shot at that submarine. If we screw it up because we don’t know how to program that damned robot properly, we may miss our only opportunity to end this.”
“Then you need somebody who isn’t going to screw it up,” a woman’s voice said.
The words came from the entrance to the wardroom. The assembled officers and chiefs turned to see the civilian technician, Ann Roark, holding open the wardroom door. Standing in the passageway behind her was the other civilian, Sheldon Miggs.
The Roark woman nodded toward the captain. “Permission to come aboard your wardroom, or whatever. Sorry, I forgot to knock. I’m not exactly up on the finer points of military etiquette.”
Captain Bowie nodded. “Please, come in, both of you. Have a seat.”
The civilians entered the room and found chairs.
“Thank you, Captain,” Sheldon Miggs said.
Ann Roark leaned back in her chair. “I apologize for last night, Captain. I’m not a fighter, as you’ve probably figured out. And I have serious trouble with the idea of killing people.”
Her fingers drummed nervously on the table top. “But we’re here to help. Whatever you need Mouse to do, we’ll try to help you do it.”
Captain Bowie studied her for several seconds. “We’re going to try to destroy the K-506,” he said. “And that means killing over a hundred people. Are you sure you can handle that?”
Ann Roark swallowed heavily, but nodded. “I’m not going to pretend that I’m okay with killing the crew of that submarine. But I understand that it has to be done. And I can shelve my personal issues and do it. I guess it comes down to the choice between something bad, and something worse.”
“It does indeed,” Captain Bowie said. “That’s precisely what it comes down to.”
Chief McPherson raised her eyebrows. “If you don’t mind my asking,” she said. “What exactly changed your mind?”
Ann Roark looked at her coworker, Sheldon Miggs. “Something I read in the Boy Scout Handbook,” she said.
CHAPTER 40
WHITE HOUSE
NATIONAL SECURITY ADVISOR’S OFFICE
WASHINGTON, DC
MONDAY; 04 MARCH
3:12 PM EST
National Security Advisor Gregory Brenthoven looked up at the knock on his door. “Enter.”
The door opened, and Cheryl White from the National Reconnaissance Office walked in, carrying a brown leather briefcase. “Good morning, Greg. Can I bother you for a minute?”
Brenthoven motioned her to the chair on the other side of his desk. “Morning, Cheryl. What have you got?”
White sat down, and extracted a yellow folder from the briefcase. The edges of the folder were bordered with black diagonal stripes. She laid the folder on the desk top, and opened it to reveal a thin stack of photographs.
“Remember when you asked NRO to look for signs of Zhukov’s submarine communications system?”
Brenthoven nodded. “Of course.”
“We haven’t found hide nor hair of it,” White said. “Not yet, anyway. But what we did find was pretty interesting.”
She pointed to the top photo on the stack. “These were shot by Forager 715, one of the Air Force’s Oracle III surveillance satellites, as it passed over southeastern Russia on the twenty-sixth of February. The satellite’s primary surveillance mission was a nuclear reactor facility in Iran, so Forager was on the outbound leg of its orbit when these photos were taken. The altitude was about 500 kilometers and increasing, which is outside of the optimal range window for the satellite’s cameras. The clarity isn’t great, but the shots are readable.”
Brenthoven looked at the satellite photo. A pair of blurred oblongs were visible against a dark background of ocean. “These are ships?”
White nodded, and moved a different photo to the top of the stack. “This is the same shot, enlarged and digitally enhanced.”
In this photo, the two oblongs were clearly ships, with blocky white superstructures running most of the length of each vessel.
“The SAWS operator assigned to Forager 715 ran these enhancements
,” White said. “His name is Technical Sergeant George Kaulana. He processed this image through silhouette recognition, and correctly identified both of these ships as car carriers. Specifically, they’re the Motor Vessel Shunfeng, and the Motor Vessel Jifeng. They’re 20,000-ton Roll-on/Roll-off vessels, or what we call Ro-Ro’s. Both built by HuangHai Shipyard in China.”
“I’m with you so far,” Brenthoven said, “but I don’t have any idea where you’re going with this.”
White shuffled another picture to the top of the stack. The oblong smudges of the ships were much smaller, and the large gray form of a dagger-shaped landmass dominated the upper part of the image. “Both ships were on a scheduled run from China to Mexico,” White said. “According to the voyage plans filed by the owners of record, the ships were supposed to deliver 4,000 Chinese economy cars from Zhuhai to Veracruz. But both ships made an unscheduled course deviation. They turned north, out of the shipping lanes, and pulled in to Petropavlosk, Kamchatka instead.”
Brenthoven tapped a pencil against the top of his desk. “Hmmm …”
“Hmmm is an understatement,” White said. “Four thousand import cars don’t show up on time, and the Mexican importer doesn’t demand an inquiry, and he doesn’t file a complaint. Two merchant ships, worth several hundred million dollars apiece, sail off into Never-never land, and nobody files a piracy report, or sends out a presumed-lost bulletin. Not so much as an insurance claim. And nobody, and I do mean nobody, is asking where those 4,000 cars went. Not the exporter who shipped them. Not the importer who was supposed to receive them. Not the car manufacturer, who’s suddenly out two entire shiploads of shiny new product. Nobody.”
Brenthoven paused, giving these strange fragments of information a few seconds to assemble themselves in his brain.
“We looked up the Mexican importer,” White said. “And he never heard of this shipment. So we tried calling the Chinese exporter. Their company reps won’t return our phone calls.”
She straightened the stack of photos, and slid them back into the yellow and black folder. “There weren’t any cars, Greg. That was a smokescreen. Those 4,000 Chinese economy cars never existed. Those ships were carrying something else.”
Brenthoven nodded. “Our intel sources have been saying from the get-go that Kamchatka is crawling with Asian shock troops. I’ve been pulling my hair out trying to figure out how Zhukov managed to smuggle them in.”
He tossed the pencil on the desk. “I think you just solved that little mystery.”
CHAPTER 41
SEATTLE, WASHINGTON
MONDAY; 04 MARCH
3:52 PM PST
On those rare occasions when he ventured out into the streets of Lynnwood, Jason Hulette looked like exactly what he was: a gangly and plain-featured seventeen year-old boy from a middle class family. Jason was an ordinary kid—or in his own eyes—perhaps something less than ordinary. The real world seemed to regard him as somewhat unsatisfactory, and the feeling was decidedly mutual.
As unremarkable as he might have been in real life, when immersed in his realm of-choice, Jason was an entirely different creature. Within the boundless datascape of the Internet, he was a virtual demigod—known, respected, and even feared under the hacker alias ‘Apocalypse-for-you,’ which he spelled as Ap0kA1yp$e4U, in his own personal brand of the geek proto-language known as Leet.
Jason sometimes shortened his alias to Ap0k, in open homage to his favorite Keanu Reeves movie. The web was not a second life for him. It was the world: the only one that mattered. The physical universe outside of his parent’s front door was a shabby and disappointing substitute.
Jason/Ap0k was the leader and founding member of a loosely organized coven of Seattle hackers who called themselves the d34d kR0w k0n$p1r4$y (Dead Crow Conspiracy). Although he fervently denied it, Ap0k had cribbed the name idea from the famous Texas-based hacker gang, the Cult of the Dead Cow. Original creation was not one of his personal strengths. His best ideas were always adaptations of concepts invented by other people.
The plan he put into action on the fourth of March was no exception. Ap0k didn’t create any of the ideas or technologies involved. He just strung the elements together in a new and interesting way.
With the near-miss nuclear attack now slightly more than forty-eight hours in the past, some of the frenzy was dying down in the western states. The east-west roadways were still flooded with cars as the unscheduled migration surged eastward, but most of the remaining people in the threatened states were starting to quiet down. The world had not ended. The attack had not been repeated, and the U.S. military had managed to knock out most of the missiles, or bombs, or whatever. Perhaps flaming death was not going to fall out of the sky after all.
As life in the Western United States began to settle into a shaky equilibrium, two thoughts occurred to Ap0k. First: Seattle, which was an armpit of a city in his opinion, had not received its fair share of blind panic. And second: the attack itself had not harmed a single person, or damaged a single house, or flattened a single convenience store.
There was plenty of destruction; that was for sure. Car crashes, burning buildings, injuries, and even deaths. But those effects hadn’t come from the nuclear bombs. They’d been caused by the spur-of-the-moment craziness that comes with uncontrolled hysteria.
It slowly dawned on Ap0k that the damage had been a strictly social phenomenon, caused by the rapid spread of information. Or more correctly, the rapid spread of misinformation, as the bombs had all been aimed toward the ocean. The mobs of people who had freaked out and started trashing things had never been in any immediate danger. The threat had not been real. But it had looked real, and it had sounded real. And that had been enough.
To Ap0k, this revelation suggested all sorts of possibilities. Because the rapid spread of misinformation happened to be one of the things that he and his fellow dead crows did best.
On the afternoon of March the 4th, Ap0k and the Dead Crow Conspiracy hacked into the Emergency Alert System computer network for the Greater Seattle area. The plan was to trigger the Emergency Alert System, and seize control of every radio and television station within Area Codes 360, 206, 253, and 425. Then, when they had a million or so viewers and listeners glued to their televisions and radios, the dead crows would inject their own fake broadcast into the network.
They’d recorded the audio track in a walk-in closet, draped with blankets to muffle outside noises. They’d copied the timing and format of an actual emergency announcement, and modulated Ap0k’s voice to sound like the baritone of the real EAS announcer. They’d even screen-grabbed a copy of the Emergency Alert System television banner.
With the recording playing over the background of EAS banner, the announcement looked and sounded just like the real thing. Ap0k was sure that the radio and television audiences wouldn’t be able to tell that the broadcast was fake. He was right.
The dead crows were extremely proud of their handiwork. They were already congratulating themselves for having dreamed up the hoax of the century. Their little scam would go down in history, like the War of the Worlds radio broadcast panic of 1938. People would run screaming, and piss their pants, and overload the 911 switchboards, and drive their cars into telephone poles. The Dead Crow Conspiracy would become the stuff of hacker legend.
At 3:55 PM, Ap0k transmitted the go signal to his hacker buddies. The assault on the EAS server farm began simultaneously, from nineteen manned sites around Seattle, and over a thousand zombie machines, recruited for the task by a Trojan horse software application that hijacked control of infected PCs without the knowledge or consent of the computer owners.
Under the combined onslaught, the firewall and anti-virus engines protecting the servers crumbled in less than a minute.
At 3:56 PM, the bogus emergency announcement created by the dead crows went out over the Emergency Alert System throughout the Greater Seattle area. The message was seen and heard through every operating radio and television in the network footprin
t. Nearly a million and a half Seattle area residents were informed that ten nuclear warheads were screaming toward their fair city, and that all military attempts to intercept the missiles had failed.
There were no such warheads, of course. They existed only in the fevered imaginations of Ap0k and his dead crow buddies. But the residents of Seattle had no way of knowing that. They had no reason to suspect that the warning was anything but genuine.
The recorded voice of the fake EAS announcer went on to inform the million-plus victims of his hoax that the bombs would arrive in twenty minutes. Seattle would be completely obliterated. Everyone who wanted to live should evacuate the city immediately, or perish in radioactive fire.
The seventeen year-old boy who styled himself as Ap0kA1yp$e4U had promised his buddies that the d34d kR0w k0n$p1r4$y would be remembered by history. And so they were.
Jason Wesley Hulette and ten of his accomplices and co-conspirators were arrested and tried for domestic terrorism and treason. They were collectively charged with over forty-thousand counts of manslaughter, more than a million cases of assault with intent to wound, and three-quarters of a trillion dollars in property damage.
The remaining eight members of the dead crows were identified, but none were brought to trial. They had been killed in the panic that burned the city of Seattle to the ground.
CHAPTER 42
USS TOWERS (DDG-103)
WESTERN PACIFIC OCEAN
TUESDAY; 05 MARCH
1821 hours (6:21 PM)
TIME ZONE +11 ‘LIMA’
Sheldon leaned over Ann’s left shoulder. “How’s it coming?”
Ann stopped typing, her fingers frozen in midair above the keyboard of her laptop. “Sheldon, if you ask me that question one more time, I’m going to duct tape your mouth shut.”
“I just want to help,” Sheldon said.