He could hear Jin Two describing how he was engaging one-on-one with his target, but it was distracting. He dropped the volume on that frequency, and as he did he heard a loud pulsing in his ears. He knew what the noise meant before he heard the words from his radar warning receiver: “Alert. Alert. Radar lock on.” Despite being blinded by the rising sun, the oncoming fighters had seen him on their radar. Chen Fei switched the laser to automatic antimissile fire and flipped his own radar from standby to scan. Almost as soon as he had, the laser control panel went from green READY to red FIRING.
Chen Fei noted four short bursts recorded on the panel as the laser shot out to where it thought an incoming missile would be. Immediately, he saw two small flashes in front of and below his aircraft. His laser had blown up the incoming missiles. With the laser now slaved to his target-acquisition radar, he fired back, hitting two bursts. The explosion below him was instant and much brighter than the destruction of the air-to-air missiles. He had destroyed another drone.
Jin Three had fired at almost the same time, causing another explosion, another aircraft destroyed. “Splash number three,” his wingman called out. Chen Fei checked his radar to find the other two aircraft in front of him. They were climbing fast, probably on afterburners, trying to get above him for a look-down, shoot-down kill. He caught a yellow glow in his peripheral vision and quickly looked down at his laser control panel. The blinking yellow light showed the word CHARGING. He could not fire. The eight bursts he had fired had dropped the power level below the minimum. As Chen Fei thought for the first time how much trouble he would be in if his expensive laser-carrying aircraft were destroyed, he pulled back hard on the joystick and went to afterburners on the engine, standing his aircraft straight up for a 10G climb.
The dark of the cockpit was suddenly flooded with light as the door in the back of the room was thrown open. Colonel Zhang burst into the pilots’ cockpit room. “Break off the attack and get those birds out of there now!” No one was supposed to enter when pilots were remotely flying their aircraft; they could lose control and crash their vehicles.
Chen Fei stood to attention, pulling off his headset. “Colonel Zhang, we are in the middle of the test.”
“No, you are not! The target drones are still aloft, about fifty kilometers further south. You are shooting down real PLA fighter aircraft! And they have real pilots in their aircraft!”
An alarm sounded and Chen Fei looked back down at his cockpit. While he had been standing at attention, a PLA fighter had shot a radar-guided missile at his RPV. Chen Fei had not noticed or responded. The automatic antimissile laser had not enganged because it was still recharging. On the front screen of the wraparound cockpit windshield, words appeared in red on a black background: “Your aircraft has been destroyed.” For the first time, Chen Fei was glad that he was not actually in his aircraft.
0630 PST
Marine Desert Training Facility
Twentynine Palms, California
Jimmy Foley had risen early at the visiting officer’s quarters, donned his running gear, and set out to do five miles in the cold morning desert. He needed the exercise, but he also wanted a chance to think. As he stretched outside the VOQ, he realized that it was now four years since he had run the New York Marathon. He had finished in three hours and nine minutes. Not bad; it had qualified him for the Boston Marathon, which he had never gotten around to running. Now, four years on, he wondered if he could do it in under three-thirty. He headed out, thinking again about the idea that the rich would soon be able to buy spin-off technology from the Pentagon, exoskeleton suits, giving them great strength and tying their bodies into cyberspace for diagnostics. He laughed out loud as he ran, thinking about what his new friend Soxster could do with that.
He had woken up twice during the night, anxious about the meet with TTeeLer this morning. The FBI’s L.A. field office had taken charge of the planning after Jimmy had reported in to the Intelligence Analysis Center and they had passed word to FBI headquarters. Already FBI personnel were working behind the counter at the 7-Eleven, the dry cleaners next door, the used-car lot across the street. He wondered whether the Feebs would get anything more out of TTeeLer than he had. Chances were he would just clam up until a U.S. Attorney gave him immunity in writing. The running was coming easier; he was moving smoothly down the road. The anxieties of the night were giving way to the rising endorphins from the run, but he realized that he was going to have to find his own way to geo-locate the ranch where TTeeLer had worked. Or maybe Soxster could do it.
As he turned a corner by a barracks, Jimmy saw a company of Marines jogging toward him, returning from their morning five-mile run. Despite the cold, they were in tan shorts and T-shirts, not spacesuits. As he approached them, he yelled out, “Hoo-rah!” Some gave a weaker “Hoo-rah” in return. He missed the camaraderie, the certainty of being a Marine. He did not miss Iraq. If he had had an exoskeleton suit in Iraq, he thought, he might never have been injured, might never have lost that year in hospitals in Haditha, in Ramstein, in Bethesda. He might still be in the Marines, be a major by now.
But he had found a good place in the NYPD. And he had found Janice. Never thought he’d marry an investment banker, but he had and it was working. She wasn’t clingy or possessive. She gave him his space. They had their separate careers; some people thought they had their separate lives, but they were wrong. How many married couples could still have videophone sex like they had had last night? When they were actually together in the same place, it was even better, perfect. The two weeks on Mustique at Christmas had been heaven. As he thought about diving with Janice in that turquoise Caribbean undersea world, he realized he was approaching the giant baseball field where he had seen the game last night. As he ran up the sandy slope, he heard yelling from the other side.
Below him, as he hit the crest of the dune, he saw dozens, maybe scores of the black-spacesuited Marines spread out across the field. Regular Marines and civilians were scattered around, attending to the suited supermen. He spotted Dr. Rathstein talking to six men at a table at the bottom of the dune. They seemed agitated. He jogged up to them.
“Jimmy!” Rathstein seemed startled to see him. “You already heard what happened?”
Foley caught his breath, filling his lungs. “No, Doc, hadn’t heard. What did happen?”
Dr. Rathstein signaled for the men with him to step away, to go about the mission he had given them. “It’s awful, Jimmy,” he said, running his fingers through his hair. “On this morning’s exercise, we lost touch with Echo Company. All the telemetry from their suits shut down. We came out here looking for them and found them like that….”
Jimmy looked at the troops in the spacesuits. Some were standing in the parade rest position, legs spread apart, left hand in the small of their backs. Some had both hands behind their necks. Others had their arms spread out behind them, as though they were about to take flight. A few had their arms up, as if surrendering. None were moving.
“We’re trying to get them out of the suits now, but they’re all asleep. Looks like the suits gave them a big dose of painkillers and sleeping agent, then the suits froze up, turned off. I think some kids have OD’d.” Rathstein turned and looked out at the statue-like men of Echo Company. “It will be the end of the program,” Rathstein continued. “The Marines will shut it down. I can hear the generals now: ‘Can’t have our boys attacked by your suits, Doctor. What if it had been war?’”
Foley thought that the man was actually about to cry. “How did it happen?”
Rathstein shook his head and said, “I have no fucking idea.” A gust of wind blew sand onto his face.
0730 PST
Base Operations Center
Marine Desert Training Area
Twentynine Palms, California
“Soxster, this shit is not funny,” Jimmy Foley said into his headset. “I got a hundred Marines in sick bay out here, drugged up like dopeheads.” Foley was standing in the middle of Navy investigators and M
arines who had set up a command post to figure out what had happened and prevent it from happening again. They were also contacting the families of the hospitalized Marines from Echo Company.
“No, Jim, really I know—it’s just the dog bots, man. You gotta admit that was great. Thousands of silly-rich guys shitting their pants as their status symbols go nuts and attack them, after having posted their tax returns and medical records in chat rooms all over cyberspace.” Soxster could barely get the words out between laughs. “Every hacker at Infocon Alpha in Vegas will be claiming credit.”
“People got hurt, a couple died, dude,” Jimmy intoned in his deep voice. “So who the hell did it?” He could hear Soxster tapping away on a keyboard. He waited.
“Okay. So the hack on the Marines was an RF signal to get around the firewall on the base network. Short distance. They called the server they used ‘Mini-UAV3.’ So maybe they bounced the signal down onto the troops from a mini-UAV flying above the base. Those things are so small, nobody woulda seen it,” Soxster said, still clicking away on the other end of the call.
“Those things are like toy airplanes, they don’t fly very far,” Jimmy noted. Soxster didn’t reply. He was onto a lead, doing a route trace-back, his mind running down digital corridors in cyberspace. He had called up the record of his first chat room meet with TTeeLer, when he was still at the ranch. TTeeLer had used an anonymizer, a server meant to hide his tracks and obscure his real online identity. Soxster was now into the anonymizer’s billing record.
“This is all for national security, right?” Soxster asked as he sped ahead. “You got a Get Out of Jail Free card, Jim, right?”
“Yeah, yeah, sure, whaddya got?” Foley asked, wondering whether he could get an ex post facto waiver of a few laws, or whether they would even get caught in the first place.
“Okay. So when TTeeLer was chatting with me, he was originating on PacWest’s network, in southern California, coming out of the telcoms hotel in downtown L.A., let’s see, shooting out east to the giga-router in the San Bernardino hosting center, on to the Desertnet Internet Service Provider….”
“Good, good, then what?” Jimmy urged him on.
“Hang on, hang on, dude, you think this shit is easy?” Soxster mumbled as his fingers flew across the keys. “Hold your pee.”
Jimmy said nothing, but his breathing sounded heavy on the line. He began counting ceiling tiles and trying not to think of how many laws they were breaking.
“Desertnet’s main router is on Ocotillo Ave. in Twentynine Palms. The packets came in from a smaller neighborhood router up Del Valle Drive and into them from a WiMax on Rainbow Canyon Road. It gets a relay from a WiMax transmitter that’s named ‘Bagdad Road.’ You got a Bagdad out there? Isn’t there a letter h in Baghdad?”
“You gotta be kidding me. A town called Bagdad?” Jimmy shook his head. “I had a bad enough time in the real Baghdad. What’s with one here?”
On the other side of the country, in the Dugout, Soxster ran one more check. “Well, unless I am badly mistaken, the ranch that TTeeLer was operating out of with the other hackers is within about two miles of that town. And they have a really wideband satellite dish. Look for the dish.”
“You’re the man!” Jimmy yelled in the Marine base’s operations center. “Sox, I love you, buddy.” He realized that a Naval Investigative Services agent was looking at him oddly. “Not you, this guy in Cambridge. Never mind. Look, we need some helicopters.”
1435 PST
Route 101
Santa Rosa, California
“I am perfectly fine. They released me,” Susan insisted into her mouthpiece as she accelerated to pass an eighteen-wheeler. “Sam, I don’t care. You can call the attending yourself. Her name is Isabel Moreno and she actually saw me. You are doing long-distance diagnosis, Dr. Benjamin.”
“I don’t need to call her. If you had a concussion, even a minor one, you should still be under observation and bed rest. Any first-year would know that,” Sam Benjamin insisted from his office at Johns Hopkins Medical Center in Baltimore. “Besides, it doesn’t sound from the press reports like anyone near that blast would have only a minor concussion.”
Sam was the grounded one in the relationship, the practical one who did the planning and the worrying for both of them. He admitted that Susan was “more creative,” but he thought it was the kind of creativity that most often emerged from chaos. As he stood by a nurses’ station on the sprawling medical campus, he pictured his girlfriend about to pass out behind the wheel on some crowded California freeway. And, as usual with Susan, there was nothing he could think to do about it.
Susan put the car on automatic freeway mode so that she could concentrate on the call. “Look, I’m going to take it easy. I’m driving up to wine country north of San Francisco. I’ve been invited by this famous computer scientist to visit him at his vineyard. It will be very restful, bubele, really. Besides, how many days has it been since you had eight hours’ sleep, so look who’s calling the kettle black.” Susan knew how to counterpunch, how to get his hot buttons: using his grandmother’s term of endearment for him, putting him on the defenses, playing on their racial difference.
She heard Sam exhale in exasperation at the other end of the call. “Okay, Suz, call me later today. And don’t push yourself too hard. If you start getting dizzy, go lay down.”
“Thank you, Dr. Benjamin. Would you recommend I pull over first?” she said, and chuckled. “Don’t answer that. But there is a professional question I have for you. What do you think about connecting human brains to machines, to computers?”
“You don’t need it,” he joked. “Seriously? We’ve been doing it for over a decade. It’s the only way to cure some forms of depression. You place a small battery behind the neckbone and run a wire deep into the central cortex. I do about one a month. There are lots of other applications, too—epilepsy, some forms of Alzheimer’s. The guys over at the Marvin Center for the Brain here are doing all sorts of other experiments. If you pass out and end up with brain injury from a car crash, you can find out for yourself. So don’t push yourself too hard today, for once.”
“Yes, Doctor. No, seriously, I will, promise. Listen, I have to get off the highway now. I will call you later. Love you. Bye.” She took control of the driving back from the autopilot program and put the car onto the exit ramp for River Road. It was her first time to Sonoma County and its Russian River region. As she drove down River Road to Westside Road, following the car’s navigation system, she thought how different it was from the nearby Napa Valley she’d visited several years before. Where Napa was filled with tourist traps, buses, and wine-tasting rooms, one right next to the other, this area seemed more about growing the grapes. Field after field of vines stretched out alongside the narrow road.
When she’d told Soxster that Will Gaudium had agreed to see her and had suggested she come to his vineyard, the Cambridge hacker had insisted that she stop at the Kistler winery. “Kistler is the best American chardonnay, period. Remember I told you? You gotta stop there if you’re in Russian River.” Now she sat in the nearly empty parking lot, looking at the small, neat, stone building. She was glad for a chance to catch her breath. After a moment, she strolled down the beautiful stone walkway, past the little meditation pool and miniature waterfall, past the door to the tasting room, to the observation deck above the vineyard valley below. Spring was just beginning to bring green back to the valley’s palette and to awaken the sleeping vines.
How would she explain to Sol Rubenstein why she was meeting with a retired corporate computer guru, when things were blowing up somewhere every day this week and the Pentagon was developing options to respond by doing something to China? Sol and Rusty had given her great flexibility. They had great confidence in her ability to think differently than the straitjacketed Washington bureaucracy. Indeed, Sol had stopped her from being part of the FBI-led investigation so that she would not be prejudiced by their assumptions. That had pissed her off initially, bu
t now she was glad at what they had done.
Following her own instinct, with help from Margaret Myers, she had focused on what was being attacked, not who was attacking. That had brought her to SCAIF just in time. As disturbing as her partial memory was of the incident at SCAIF, it was what she had learned there before the attempted bombing that had really left her chilled. Sitting on the bench overlooking the valley, she called Professor Myers in Boston.
“Megs, before you say a word, let me just say I’m fine. Not even a scratch.”
“I know, dear. Soxster pulled up your chart from the hospital. Oops, I’m not supposed to say that.” Myers chuckled. “Where are you now?”
“In Russian River. I’ve got an appointment with the tech guy you told me about, Will Gaudium.” Susan felt a calm coming over her from the beauty of the place.
“Well, if you’re thinking you want to find out where some of the zero-publicity technology breakthroughs are, he’d be the man to know,” Myers replied, looking out on the scullers on the river. She had never seen them this early in the year before.
“We have to find out where the leading-edge technologies you talked about are, some of the hidden ones without U.S. government funding, before they’re set afire or blown up,” Susan said, standing up and walking to the edge of the balcony over the vineyard valley.
“Well, Susan, if you can get Gaudium to talk to a Fed, you are going to the right source. He’s so worked up about the risks of the new technologies that he’s made it his business to know about them.”
“I don’t think it will be too hard for me to seem worked up about it too, Megs. Some of what I’m learning is…well, I was going to say scary, but let’s be professional and just say that it raises many complex policy and ethical issues.”
“Remember: facts, gaps, theories, then analysis,” Myers chanted. “Problem is, we are short on everything but gaps. Off to class now. Call me if you need me. Be careful. Ciao.”
Breakpoint Page 13