The Polaris Protocol

by Brad Taylor

  She didn’t believe him. About whose mistake it was, anyway. She did believe that he thought she’d done the right thing, and that meant a great deal to her. Like it always did. She wasn’t so sure of the team. Although Decoy had winked at her, giving her encouragement.

  But that guy is always trying to get in my pants. Would he have said it if he knew about Pike and me?

  Blood opened the door and said, “VPN’s up. Kurt’s on the line. Time for a disaster report.”

  Pike grinned at him and said, “I don’t think I’ve ever had a SITREP quite this bad where someone wasn’t KIA. This’ll be a record.”

  68

  I exited the bedroom with Jennifer in tow, wondering how I was going to spin this disaster. Well, that’s not true. There was no spin in our world. The facts spoke for themselves, and, unlike on the Sunday talk shows, the repercussions were for keeps. Whatever the reason, we had lost both the American and the Ghost. We’d captured the device, but it was apparently ticking down to a catastrophic GPS outage, and we couldn’t get into the computer to stop it.

  A disaster all around, and spinning words like a politician wouldn’t make the facts any different. Our job was to stop the catastrophe. Their job was to cloak how it was done, using their words to protect us. We each had our missions, and while theirs disgusted me, I understood the necessity of both.

  After some pleasantries, I told Kurt the entire team was in the room, just to let him know who was listening. They were mostly off camera, and I didn’t want him to say something that was only meant for me.

  He said, “I’m assuming since you’re all sitting here the meeting for the device is over. So, give me some good news. I have a council update in an hour.”

  I told him what we had with the computer, then how we couldn’t affect the countdown.

  He said, “And it’s going off in twelve hours?”

  “Was. It was going off in twelve hours. It’s down to about seven now.”

  “Seven. Great. Just perfect. That’s about the same time as Operation Gimlet.”

  “Have them strike early. What’s the big deal with that?”

  “We can’t penetrate the Syrian air defenses with a strike from a carrier group. It’s not like Afghanistan. We don’t own air superiority. Syria is one tough nut to crack, especially for a surgical attack. The strike package is a flight of B-2 bombers from Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri. We need the stealth capability, but the trade-off is reaction time. The B-2s are the only ones that can accomplish the mission, and they’re already in the air. It’s a fifteen-hour flight, and they’re halfway to the target.”

  Shit.

  He continued. “Where’s the American? It’s his computer. Make him crack the code.”

  “Sir, he escaped.”

  I told him about the Ghost hitting the panic button, triggering early, and the meeting devolving into a nest of rabbits scattering at the sight of a hawk.

  He heard the story, then asked the next obvious question. “And the Ghost? Where is he?”

  I took a deep breath, then told that story as well. I saw him put his head into his hands on the screen. I said, “Sir, it had to be done. He was—”

  He looked up and interrupted. “Was what? About to escape? What the hell is going on down there? Where’s Jennifer? How could she let him get away?”

  From the side, away from the team and all by herself, Jennifer said, “I’m here, Kurt. I did what I thought was right. I made a bad call.”

  She looked like she wanted to crawl into a hole. Completely ashamed to be in the room. It aggravated the hell out of me, but I knew if I said something, it would have no weight. Kurt understood we were close, even if he didn’t understand how close.

  It turned out I didn’t have to say a word.

  Kurt said, “Jennifer, I understand you’re a civilian and haven’t been in the military, but the repercussions of this are going to—”

  That’s as far as he got. Blood stood up and moved into view of the camera, saying, “Whoa, whoa, whoa. Sir, with all due respect, she made the right call. I’d have done the same thing.”

  Kurt said, “But you don’t understand what the council is going to say. You don’t understand how this is going to affect our operations. We’ll be pulled—”

  He was cut off by Decoy, who rose and crowded the camera as well. “Bullshit. You don’t get to pick what’s right based on what some council will think. It either is or it isn’t. And Jennifer’s call was right.”

  Kurt leaned back in his chair, rocking and thinking. An operator now working solely in the shark tank of politics, trying to remember what he used to know. What it was like on the ground. He turned back to the camera and said, “Yeah, yeah. Okay, I got it. Maybe I’ve been in DC too long. The call was right. I’m with you, but that doesn’t solve my problem. Pike, you there?”

  I pushed through. “Yes, sir.”

  “You know I’m going to have to pull her. I don’t want to, but I need a head. With the report I’m about to give, I need something to show we’re not all fuckups. She’s going to get flushed. Before you say anything, we’ve got too much at stake. I have to get Oversight Council approval to continue, and I can’t get that without their thinking we’re tracking and correcting. They’ll need something tangible with this disaster of a report. Jennifer’s it.”

  I could see he didn’t believe in the decision. He’d been one of her biggest cheerleaders, against a he-man, woman-hating world within the Taskforce. He had wanted her to succeed. But, like me, he also understood the political dimensions of the fight. Jennifer was going to be sacrificed to allow Kurt to continue. To allow me to continue.

  The irony was debilitating. My team, who had initially hated the thought of a woman in their world, now believed in her as much as they did any man in the Taskforce, and the commander who had fought to allow my experiment to continue, who had believed in her from the beginning, was going to fire her.

  Knuckles stood up, squeezing into the group, now making us look like we were in some sort of carnival picture booth, with everyone trying to get in the frame. The one guy who was always calm, his face now radiated real anger.

  He said, “Tell that pack of pussies if they want to question our decisions they need to kit up and come downrange. I’m with the team. Jennifer’s call was good. Not only that, but it was pretty fucking heroic. Any other organization would be giving her a medal, and those jerks want to cut her free?”

  I glanced at Jennifer and saw her sitting against the wall slack jawed. Amazed at the support.

  Kurt snarled, “I got it, Knuckles. I don’t like it either. That’s the world we live in. You want to find the assholes who are about to destroy our ability to wage war, not to mention our economy, or do you want to get called home? The Oversight Council doesn’t understand the world you live in. Some do, but most don’t. What they do understand is penalty, and I’m giving them Jennifer. It’s the price for playing, damn it. You know that better than most. End of story. Let’s move on to solving the damn problem. Pike?”

  Nobody said anything. The team looked at me, waiting for me to tell Kurt to shove it up his ass. I really, really wanted to, but he was right. I’d dealt with the Oversight Council and had glimpsed into their world. Not lived within it, but had seen enough to realize what he said was true. I knew how they acted and what buttons Kurt could push to allow us to operate. To succeed. In truth, I respected him for putting up with the BS he did to get the job done.

  In the end, I could fight Jennifer’s battle later. Right now, we had a much more serious concern. “Sir, this computer’s locked, so our first course of action is to get it open to shut off the GPS device.”

  “Get it up here. Let’s get the hacking cell on it. See if we can crack that thing before it’s triggered.”

  “I’m not sure you can do that in time. We’ve got seven hours, and this guy was a compu
ter geek. The laptop’s probably got more booby traps than Indiana Jones. We need to find the American. He can open it. Haven’t you guys been able to do anything to neck it down? Who is he?”

  “We’ve got nothing. The guy’s got to be someone on the inside, or he wouldn’t be able to access the GPS constellation, but we’ve looked at everyone in the Air Force, starting with the Second SOPS and moving all the way out to the Fiftieth Space Wing headquarters. Shit, we even looked at the guys manning the gates. Schriever is clean.”

  I said, “We’re missing something. That guy is there. We’re overlooking the footprints. Maybe he isn’t in a uniform. Maybe he’s a contract janitor or something like that.”

  “None of those guys would have clearance. They’d have no access. There’s only one civilian contractor allowed on the floor, and he checked out.”

  “They don’t have more than one contractor on Schriever with a clearance? That’s bullshit. The place is probably overrun with guys like that. It’s full of rocket scientists, and they aren’t in the military. Snowden was a contractor with a clearance, for God’s sake. Did you check them all? Sir, all we need is a thread. We can find him. Shut this thing down. But we need a thread, and it’s there. You guys are missing it.”

  Kurt said, “We’re out of time to fish. The last check took thirty hours to complete. Get the computer up here. We’ll take a swing at it with our guys.”

  Resigned, feeling failure all the way around, I said, “Roger all. We’re ready to fly right now. All I need is some help with customs. We’ll come right into Dulles.”

  From the back of the room, Jennifer interrupted. “You guys are sure this traitor is on the inside?” She was holding the computer, with the clock ticking on the screen.

  Kurt said, “Yeah. No way would he be able to access the GPS constellation otherwise. He’s on the inside. Why?”

  She moved forward, bumping the team out of the way. “If he’s on the inside, he has a security clearance, right? He couldn’t do the work without one.”

  Kurt leaned forward. “Yes? Why’s that matter?”

  “Well, when I got my clearance they did a background check. I had to give them fingerprints.”

  I said, “So what? We don’t have his.”

  She held the computer forward and pointed at the biometric reader next to the keyboard. “Yes we do. We have his thumbprint right here.”

  The team stood in silence for a moment; then Knuckles turned to the screen and said, “You still want to fire her?”

  69

  Arthur Booth banged on the aluminum screen door, causing a racket that startled him. He swiveled his head left and right in a panic, looking for a phantom government team to spring from the ground and handcuff him. He heard, “Calm down. I’m coming.”

  When the inner door opened, a balding man with pale skin said, “Jesus Christ, Booth. You look like shit. What the hell is going on? Why on earth were you in Mexico? You said you were going to Canada to visit relatives.”

  Booth pushed through the door, saying, “Pete, it’s too complicated to get into. You’re a lifesaver, though. I’ll pay you back the money as soon as I can get into my bank account. I lost my entire wallet.”

  Booth walked past him, dragging a suitcase and a laptop. Pete said, “Why aren’t you staying at your place? I don’t get it. Why do you need to stay here?”

  Booth sat at the kitchen table and booted up his laptop, the sweat on his neck mixing with his greasy hair. He said, “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you. I think there are people from Mexico who are hunting for me. I got mixed up in some bullshit down there. I was sweating bullets just getting clothes and my spare computer from my house.”

  He saw Pete’s expression and hastily added, “Wait, wait. It’s not what you think. I didn’t do anything. I was just at the wrong place at the wrong time. I said I was going to Canada because Boeing has a flag on travel to Mexico for anyone with a security clearance. Believe me, now I understand why. It’ll blow over, but I need some space. I can’t let Boeing know about this. I can’t lose my job.”

  Pete said, “Well, you left at the absolute worst time. The AEP upgrade of the constellation is a mess. It keeps throwing out false timing signals, and everyone is going ballistic. We’ve been digging for days and can’t find out why. Of course, the damn Air Force is blaming Boeing. And Boeing is blaming us.”

  Booth thought about his lost computer. About the clock ticking. He couldn’t remember exactly how long he’d delayed the disruption, but he knew full well he’d set it for a catastrophic failure. In the next few hours, America was going to go through a seizure. He no longer cared about punishing Wall Street or stopping drone attacks. All he was focused on now was saving his own pathetic skin.

  When his aircraft had broken ten thousand feet, his first order of business was to slam a margarita, amazed that he was flying back to the United States alive. After that, he’d begun to think about what had occurred. Besides the weird kidnapper who’d taken him—a man who still gave him chills even inside the aircraft—he’d been tracked by a team of Americans. He’d wondered if they weren’t following the killer but knew that was too much to hope for, especially given that the kidnapper had almost tortured him to death trying figure out who they were. The man had been right, though. It had something to do with the POLARIS protocol, which meant they might know his identity.

  He needed to redirect them. Get them worried about something else. Maybe the GPS failure would be enough, but he didn’t think so. The initial reports from his Anonymous contact had been that something was fishy with Grolier Recovery Services, and he wanted to know what had been found. He needed any ammunition he could get.

  He said, “What’s your Wi-Fi password?”

  “Chrystalbean pound pound. Capital C.” He leaned over and saw the website Booth pulled up. “Whoa. Stop right there. Don’t you start mucking around with those message boards. I’ve told you before that messing with those people will get your security clearance pulled, and I want no part of it.”

  Exasperated, Booth said, “Boeing isn’t looking at your router data. Come on. I’m just trying to get some information that could help me.”

  Pete folded his arms across his chest. “You can sleep here, but you will not pull me into whatever you have going on. The MAC address of your computer is tied to the MAC address of my router. Someone can see every ISP you hit, and those message boards are tracked by just about every government agency in existence. Not here.”

  Booth slammed the laptop shut, the pressure he was under breaking the surface. “I’m just trying to chat with a buddy who’s doing some research for me. What sort of friend are you?”

  Pete refused to back down. “The sort who’s willing to send you four thousand dollars on a fucking phone call. Go get some free Wi-Fi downtown.”

  Booth was about to tell him to stick it up his ass and storm out, but the one rational part of his brain that still worked in his cesspool of panic realized it would only leave him exposed. And he could use a beer. Or twelve. Most of the bars in downtown Colorado Springs had free Wi-Fi.

  He said, “Okay, okay. I’ll head to Tejon Street. You want to go? I’m buying.”

  Pete laughed and said, “You mean with my money? Thanks, but I’ve still got some work to do. I’m trying to puzzle out how that timing signal is being twisted. You’ve still got a day of leave left. Better use it, because when you get back, it’s balls to the wall. If we can’t figure this GPS problem out, we’ll be looking for another job.”

  70

  The thermal showed the apartment was still empty. Which, given that we’d had eyes on the front gate leading into the parking lot for the past fifteen minutes, stood to reason. We were waiting on the sun to drop below the horizon, and I needed to ensure nobody entered the apartment in the meantime. There was one heat source in the target, and after analysis by someone smarter than me, it looked like it
was a hamster. I think the wheel-spinning gave it away.

  I looked at my watch, now synchronized to the ticking clock on the doomsday computer, and saw we had less than two hours before the GPS constellation went crazy. Less time than that to call off Operation Gimlet, because they wouldn’t want the aircraft to penetrate Syrian airspace if they weren’t going to drop the bombs. Which, from what I was reading about our chances, was what was about to happen.

  We’d flown straight to Colorado Springs and met a cell of Taskforce computer experts, who’d set up an operations center in the Hampton Inn by the airport. With the thumbprint it had taken less time than our flight from Mexico City to find our target: a contractor working for Boeing named Arthur Booth.

  He’d taken some vacation time a few days before, ostensibly visiting relatives in Canada. The Taskforce had gone to work, tracking his credit cards and cell phone usage. They’d found cellular data and credit purchases that tied Booth to El Paso earlier in the month, but the recent history was blank. He hadn’t used his cell phone or credit cards in days. The last purchase they could find had been for one round-trip ticket to Mexico City from Denver, returning yesterday. He had not used the second leg, which made perfect sense, given I’d seen him at the museum earlier that day running like a girl.

  With Arthur Booth’s personal digital trail a dead end, the Taskforce dug deeper, scanning official domestic databases, probing with a wide net to find some link that would lead them to the target, and had gotten lucky. Arthur Booth had gone through immigration at Dallas earlier today, with onward travel to Colorado Springs.

  Originally ordered to bring the computer to the might of the Taskforce fifty-pound heads in Washington, DC, we’d been redirected midflight to Colorado Springs with a dual purpose. The hacking cell would go to work on the computer here, in a makeshift operations center, and we would go after Booth.

  We’d gotten a dry hole at his apartment, but I hoped something inside there would give us a clue as to where he had gone. Ordinarily, we’d just have sat there waiting, for days if necessary, instead of attempting a break-and-enter, but we didn’t have that luxury this time.