The most annoying thing about the preempted Super Bowl attack was that, coming just after halftime as it did, the American politicians were able to say that the mega-star’s flashy performance at halftime had over-taxed the Superdome’s circuitry, causing the failure. Not only did he not get any credit for the attack, most Americans were blithely unaware that one had even taken place. Even his cousin, a customs inspector in Seattle, didn’t know that he had been responsible for the power failure.
He was sure that would not be the case today.
He laughed when he thought about the many other times that he had allowed himself to get caught by cyber security as he probed their systems—the fools thought that they had stopped him, but they had only stopped what he had allowed them to see, in order to give them a false sense of security as he penetrated their networks. His finger poised over the “Enter” key, he was ready to make the lights go out all over the United States. By causing spikes throughout the country, he was hoping to fry the Americans’ transformers and circuit breakers and then use cascading failures and spikes to take down the rest of the power net in the United States. He wasn’t sure how long it would last or how far he would get, but if he could black out the key military and civilian nodes, he would be very happy. Others in his unit would take down internet servers, communications facilities and banking networks. It was a very organized cyber attack, the likes of which the world had never seen.
He counted down, “Three.”
“Two.”
“One.”
“Lights out! This is it! Take them all down now!”
His men and women began typing on their keyboards and systems began to fail all across the United States. LTC Huang looked at his monitor, smiled, and pressed the key that would launch the program that would unleash his own brand of chaos. He had named it ‘Anarchy.’
Terminal 46, Port of Seattle, Seattle, WA, 1359 Pacific Daylight Time
Similar to ongoing events at the M.V. Erawan, the Customs inspector going onboard China Ocean Shipping Company’s M.V. Hanjin Kingston was also met with a pistol to the head and was escorted below. At 261 meters (856’) in length, the M.V. Hanjin Kingston was a big container ship that had just docked at the southern end of Terminal 46 in downtown Seattle. The Hanjin Kingston had also gone through a similar modification as the Erawan; although it still looked like a container ship from the outside, complete with several hundred 53’ containers stacked along its deck, its interior had been modified to carry troops, in this case the 1st and 2nd Battalions of the 144th Mechanized Infantry Division’s 489th Mechanized Regiment.
Like the soldiers of the 372nd Amphibious Regiment onboard the PLAN Long, these soldiers were members of the 42nd Group Army, and it was not the first time they had fought Americans. They had been part of the initial Chinese force that had crossed the Yalu River in October of 1950 to help defend North Korea and had fought against the United States’ Eighth Army for the next two years. Having not been successful in their quest to defeat the Americans in the Korean War, the members of the 42nd Army were looking forward to a better showing this time.
First off the ship were the men and women of the 1st Battalion of the 489th Mechanized Regiment. The 1,000 men and women of the battalion were organized into six operational companies of about 150 soldiers, each, as well as a Headquarters Company that oversaw the operations of the battalion. Having practiced disembarking the ship many times during their preparations for the operation, the soldiers quickly formed up and began leaving the pier area at a jog, with the exception of Company A, which dispersed throughout the pier area to set up a perimeter and provide security.
The first company to form up, Company B, went immediately to the southern end of the port facility, where the United States Coast Guard Cutter Midgett (WHEC-726) was docked. The USCGC Midgett was a 378’ long, high endurance cutter that was home-ported at the U.S. Coast Guard Station, Seattle, just south of Pier 46. Most of the 24 officers and 160 enlisted crewmen were not onboard at the time, and the duty section sailors that were onboard were completely unprepared for the 150 soldiers that came running up to the ship and swarmed aboard. Immortalized on the cover of the 1979 Jefferson Starship album Freedom at Point Zero, the Midgett was built to enforce fisheries and drug interdiction laws in the Bering Sea, Gulf of Alaska and Central American waters. The men and women on board were not armed, and it was captured without loss of life on either side; overwhelmed by the heavily armed Chinese soldiers, the crew of the Midgett surrendered without a shot being fired.
The soldiers of Companies C and D proceeded south past where Company B was securing the USCGC Midgett, with Company C attacking the Coast Guard Station Headquarters building, while the men and women of Company D continued down the Coast Guard pier to where the United States Coast Guard Cutter Healy waited. The soldiers of Company C quickly overran the personnel that were currently on duty in the drab, gray concrete building, and the building was secured without loss of life on either side. Unarmed and unexpectedly faced with an overwhelming number of armed soldiers, the Coast Guard personnel could do nothing except put up their hands and surrender.
Several of the Healy’s crew witnessed the Chinese assault on the Midgett from across the narrow inlet between the piers, so they were marginally better prepared to withstand the assault force than the crew of the Midgett. Unfortunately, ‘marginally better prepared’ only meant that they had 30 seconds notice rather than none at all. Even worse, the USCGC Healy (WAGB 20) was an unarmed polar icebreaker, and it had neither been designed nor equipped to repel boarders, especially heavily armed ones that outnumbered its crew. The crew’s acts of defiance were limited to trying to pull up its gangway so that the Chinese troops couldn’t get onboard and locking its exterior doors while the crewmen and scientists that were onboard at the time tried to call for help.
Despite the limited amount of preparation time, the crew almost succeeded in detaching the gangway from the ship before the Chinese soldiers arrived; however, they were forced to stop when one of the Chinese riflemen fired a warning shot past the crewmen’s heads. The sound of the ricochet whining off the side of the hull was sufficient to stop all efforts, and the Chinese troops quickly came aboard. One of the Chinese soldiers carried a number of breaching charges; it did not take him long to blow open one of the doors, and the soldiers quickly infiltrated the interior of the ship. Although the crew completed several phone calls prior to the Chinese making it into the interior of the ship, they were unfortunately made to the Coast Guard Station offices, which were already in Chinese hands. The crew of the Healy did not succeed in raising the alarm.
While the 1st Battalion secured the Coast Guard facilities to the south, the 300 soldiers of Companies A and B of the 2nd Battalion got into the 30 black vans that had been parked at the pier for their use and proceeded out of the port facility. Heading east on South Atlantic Street, they made good time to 1st Avenue, as Company E of the 1st Battalion had stopped traffic the first two blocks. Reaching 1st Avenue, the convoy diverged, and ten vans continued east on onto Edgar Martinez Dr., while the other 20 turned left onto 1st Avenue. Ten of those vans stopped in the first block of 1st Avenue, while the other ten turned right at the first light onto Royal Brougham Way, where they stopped. As the last vehicle moved into position, a signal was given, and the soldiers began exiting all of the vehicles simultaneously.
Captain Ma Gang, the company commander of Company A, 2nd of the 489th, paused as he got out of his van and surveyed his surroundings. There were quite a few people on the sidewalks who stopped and stared at the large numbers of armed, Asian men getting out of identical vehicles, as well as the two other companies that could be seen coming around the corner at a jog. Some appeared concerned, while others looked quizzical, wondering if they were in the middle of a movie scene being filmed. Some, correctly, even looked frightened and started moving away from the heavily armed men. None, however, seemed to be a threat to his ongoing operation. How these people became world leaders was b
eyond him, the Captain thought.
Shrugging, he turned back to his objective. He could hear the cheering from inside as he marched toward the gates of Safeco Field, home of the Seattle Mariners.
Terminal 30, Port of Seattle, Seattle, WA, 1359 Pacific Daylight Time
The China Shipping Container Lines ship M.V. Xin Beijing freighter pulled into Terminal 30, where it normally offloaded. The Xin Beijing was one of China Shipping Container Lines’ biggest container ships, over 1,100 feet long and carrying 7,450 containers. In addition to all of the containers that it had brought with it on this trip, it also carried the 3rd and 4th Battalions of the 489th Mechanized Regiment.
As a mechanized force, the two battalions were normally equipped with armored personnel carriers and infantry fighting vehicles for transport and combat. For this operation, though, there was no easy way for them to be reunited with their combat transportation, nor were there enough of the black GAC vans available for them to use; beyond a mere handful for emergency use, all of them were gainfully employed elsewhere. The initial planning stages had taken this possibility into account and had devised an alternate means of transportation.
While Companies A and B of the 3rd Battalion provided security around the port facility, the engineers went to the southern portion of the port and began hot-wiring all of the semi-truck cabs that were staged at the port and drove them back to where the ship had tied up. As each container came off the ship, it was attached to a cab and loaded with troops, for the solution to the transportation problem had been to make modified containers. A simple and elegant solution, each container had the combat seating used in transport aircraft mounted onto both sides of its interior. There was enough room for a platoon of troops to sit on the webbing on each side of the container, with room in the center of the container between the two platoons for the soldiers’ packs.
The containers were quickly unloaded from the ship, with the troops waiting in formation on the pier. As each container was attached to its cab, it was quickly loaded with two platoons of soldiers and sent on its way. The 3rd and 4th Battalions of the 489th Mechanized Regiment were quickly deployed to their positions throughout Seattle.
White House State Dining Room, Washington, DC, 1700 EDT (1400 PDT)
As could be expected for a State Dinner, the food had been outstanding, the Chinese Ambassador, Fung Qiang, noted with the air of a man who was eating his last supper. The Chinese had coordinated with the United States for it to be a traditional American “supper” with the first course starting promptly at 1600. Right on schedule, the d’Anjou pears with farmstead goat cheese, fennel, black walnuts and white balsamic had been served at 1601, followed by the second course of poached Maine lobster with orange glazed carrots and black trumpet mushrooms at 1620. After a palette cleansing lemon sorbet, the main course of dry aged rib eye with buttermilk crisp onions, double stuffed potatoes and creamed spinach was served at 1640. The ambassador had to laugh at the irony of the wine choice that was served with the main course, a 2005 Quilceda Creek cabernet ‘Columbia Valley,’ as the winery was located in Snohomish, Washington…just a couple of miles to the north of Seattle. They probably wouldn’t be getting many more bottles of this label for a while, he thought with a grin.
It was a shame that the Chinese President couldn’t have been here, the ambassador thought; he would have savored the irony. As planned, though, he had “fallen ill” earlier that morning and had to cancel the rest of the morning’s and afternoon’s scheduled events. He hadn’t even been able to make the State Dinner that had been planned in his honor; the ambassador was attending in his place. Very few people knew that the president had actually been sneaked out of the embassy and onto an Air China flight that had already left the country, but the ambassador knew that the president was already more than halfway home by that point and well out of reach from any American retribution. Of course, that left everything to fall on the ambassador’s shoulders, but he found himself curiously looking forward to the role that he had to play in today’s events. Over the course of history, there were very few people that had the opportunity to say and do what he intended this evening.
The dessert was just being served at 1700 when the lights went out. There was a short scream, and then a crash as a platter of old-fashioned apple pie with vanilla ice cream servings hit the floor. After the space of a heartbeat more, the backup generators came to life and the normal lighting was restored.
Standing up, the ambassador got the attention of the President of the United States and said simply, “Mr. President it is my duty to let you know that we are at war.”
United States of America, 1400 Pacific Daylight Time
The power failed at 1400.
It didn’t matter where you were; if you were using anything electrical at 1400 Pacific Daylight Time, it stopped working within a few seconds of that time. A few areas that were not attached to the power grids of the United States continued to function, but for over 93% of the people in the United States, the power went out at 1400. People in Canada fared slightly better, as only 64% of the people there lost power, due to the fact that Canada was largely more rural than the United States. If you lived in one of the major metropolitan areas like Toronto, Montreal or Ottawa, the power ceased at 1400. Vancouver, British Columbia, located 140 miles to the north of Seattle, was particularly hard hit; although it was only the 8th largest municipality in Canada, almost all areas of the city there lost power and landline phone service, as well.
For people within the electricity generation and distribution industries, this outage was not as much of a surprise as many people in the United States might have thought. With electricity usage skyrocketing for the past couple of decades, the aging electrical infrastructure was ripe to fail, as had been noted in the aftermath of many super storms that had rocked portions of the United States. In many cases, it had been weeks (and sometimes months) before the power was restored to all of the customers in the affected areas.
Politicians had discussed fixing the system for a long time, but hadn’t made any actual progress. In 2007, President Bush signed legislation to modernize the energy grid and a little improvement was made during the initial years of the Obama administration. Then sequestration hit, though, and the money needed to make significant progress with the system was siphoned off to fix Medicare, Social Security and a variety of other entitlement programs that were more important to politicians worried about losing votes than they were making lasting progress on their country’s infrastructure. The electrical power distribution system was on its last legs; prone to failure and unable to support itself. It could not withstand the knockout punch that the cyber spies gave it.
In 2009, national security officials stated publicly that the U.S. electrical grid had been penetrated by agents of China, Russia and other countries. The officials expected that the spies had mapped out the power grid and were well aware of both the critical nodes and what it would take to knock them out. Although the potential saboteurs hadn’t damaged the system, they had left behind software programs, some of which security officials later found. It was surmised, correctly, that these programs would be used in the event of a war to turn off portions of the U.S. power grid. While American officials worried periodically in the press about attackers taking control of electrical facilities, especially nuclear power plants, behind closed doors they worried non-stop.
They had already seen catastrophic examples of what was possible demonstrated outside the United States. In 2000, a water treatment plant in Australia was rigged by a disgruntled employee to release over 200,000 gallons of sewage into nearby parks, rivers and onto the grounds of a major hotel. In 2008, the power equipment in several regions of Brazil was compromised by cyber attack, with extortion demands for ransom sent to officials shortly thereafter. With over 70,000 cyber security breaches occurring yearly in the United States, it wasn’t a matter of ‘if’ the power grids would be compromised; it was only a matter of ‘when.’
Congress
had spent billions in secret funding to try to protect government networks. They didn’t spend enough.
Washington State Convention Center, Seattle, WA 1400 Pacific Daylight Time
The power went out at almost exactly 1400 on Captain Liu Fang’s watch. Along with the lights, the air conditioning also shut off, leaving the main conference hall not only dark but quiet. After a very brief pause, just long enough for people to start to talk nervously, the emergency generators fired up and the lights came back on, along with the background noise of the air conditioners starting to come back online. The Guangzhou People’s Symphony Orchestra had ceased playing about 15 minutes prior and had stacked all of their instruments in the back of the conference room near the Skybridge over Pike St. The orchestra had then gone into rooms 4C-3 and 4C-4 to change. Captain Liu had listened to them playing earlier and had been very surprised; they were actually quite good, far better than he would have expected under the circumstances.
In fact, all aspects of the conference had gone very smoothly (including his own lecture on overcoming language barriers in international trade), and he expected that, had the conference ended at 1350, most of the attendees would have gone home with good memories of the conference, as well as a lot of good information learned from it. Up to this point, there weren’t any give-aways that the conference was anything other than what it seemed; the lectures and round table discussions were all well attended and had the right people moderating them. There was certainly no lack of exhibitors; all of the space they had available was taken up with a variety of new import automobiles, as well as foreign automakers’ new concept cars. He saw several that he hoped would be sold in China in the near future; assuming he survived the next couple of weeks, he wanted to buy one!
Red Tide: The Chinese Invasion of Seattle (Occupied Seattle Book 1) Page 10