Trident Code (A Lana Elkins Thriller)

by Thomas Waite

“Patience, patience,” Oleg wrote back. Even if PP was correct that it was a greatly overrated virtue.

  “Must target very carefully,” Oleg typed. “Shave off portions of WAIS. Show them we’re serious. Raise sea level a foot or two.” Good-bye Miami, Amsterdam, good-bye parts of London, New York, Boston, and other cities too numerous to name.

  Oleg knew, naturally, that you roll the dice when you bomb the ice because the awakened giant of WAIS, well, it could become chaos theory in action. Only this time it wouldn’t be a butterfly flapping its wings in China, but a Trident II in Antarctica persuading those reluctant Arctic countries to leave the oil and gas fields on the top of the world.

  They’d have to, anyway, because they’d all be in crisis.

  But not Russia.

  The strongest men in the Kremlin privately, quietly, had long ago given the go-ahead to certain Russian explorers to claim the entire Arctic for the motherland. The rest of the world laughed when Artur Chilingarov sailed a submersible to the floor of the Arctic Ocean, planted a titanium Russian flag in the seabed, and claimed all of the Arctic for the Russian Federation. To make his point even clearer, the intrepid Chilingarov rose from the ocean floor with words that were cheered by the country’s true patriots: “The Arctic is Russian. We must prove the North Pole is an extension of the Russian landmass.”

  What the rest of the world didn’t know was that with another wink and a blink, the same powerful men had also let it be known to an intrepid hacker named Oleg Dernov that his project was viewed most favorably from on high. Never a direct word—and wholly hands off—but Oleg’s project had been blessed just as the minor efforts of lesser hackers had long been.

  With the WAIS in the ocean—and massive emergencies all over the planet—who could possibly stop the Russians from exploiting the wealth that was properly theirs? They would sell the gas and oil to pathetic, broken countries, while having the technological capacity to suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. Russia could raise and lower temperatures to reward friends and punish foes.

  It wouldn’t be the Russians’ fault that history and destiny had seen to their safety and security. The rest of the world would be so preoccupied with simple survival that they’d scarcely have a moment to notice Russian extraction of gas and oil in the north.

  “So when? When!” Uno asked.

  “When I say. You have twenty-four hours to get ready. Go to work. Report back. Then you can launch the missile with the single warhead.”

  So Florida, get in your boats. Amsterdam, pull on your boots. Washington, break out your ditch bags.

  And that would be just the beginning.

  Oleg signed off with Uno but undertook some more direct hacking of his own. Nothing so challenging as trying to hack into the White House network. Now he was just tracking down Alexandra’s deadbeat dad so he could put his fund-raising idea into action.

  It didn’t take Oleg long to find him, or to fill out the online form for a life insurance policy that would benefit the girl if something “unforeseen” should happen to her father. A really big policy with a special accident clause.

  Oleg knew the little love of Galina’s life needed the money. So the big love of her life would provide it.

  “Always be generous to the women you love,” PP had often said.

  With a final click, Oleg prepared to follow his sage advice.

  But there was something else PP had always said about girls. It was even more important, if Oleg remembered correctly. That’s it, he recalled with a smile. PP had called it “the key to happiness.” The old man had been dandling Oleg on his knee when he whispered these wise words into his ear for the first time: “The secret to a really happy life, firstborn son, is to always tip the really hot chicks.”

  It hadn’t meant much to the six-year-old, but PP had repeated it every year on Oleg’s birthday until finally, when he turned fourteen, PP’s generosity found genuine meaning.

  Before calling it a day, Oleg turned his attention back to Uno, finding that his protégé and his onboard help were maintaining command of the Delphin’s Missile Control Center.

  Oleg studied the scene in the Center of Submarine Control, COC, located in the upper level of the Operations Compartment. He couldn’t help but admire the dazzling computer touch screens and the green, orange, and blue glow from the Attack Center, Ballast Control, and other displays reflecting on the faces of the sailors who stared so intently at them—the pure dynamism of America’s weaponry. Like Disneyland for death! Or, as Uno had put it, “a very exciting video game.”

  Oleg knew that with all those dazzling technologies now under his command, there would be little to stop him from launching a direct hit on the WAIS. Massive fireworks would light up the Frozen Continent and unprecedented flooding would devour much of the world.

  CHAPTER 7

  LANA HAD SHED HER elegant heels to keep running from the National Cathedral, and now had the Prius in sight when one of Holmes’s aides texted that the deputy director was calling an emergency session at NSA headquarters in an hour. She had assumed they’d be meeting tonight: a threat of unprecedented magnitude demanded immediate action.

  When she’d received the message about the threat she should have turned right around and told Emma that she might bed down at Fort Meade tonight.

  Too late for that now. Text her.

  Lana slowed just enough to put her digits to work—“Working late. Don’t want u home alone. Ask Tanesa to stay with u.”

  Holmes’s aide sent another text with a detailed map of Antarctica and a color-coded view of the WAIS that highlighted the ice sheet’s most vulnerable point. It lay just west of the Transantarctic Mountains, which ran roughly north and south like a fragile spine.

  Even staring at the announced target, Lana could not help but experience a measure of comfort. At least the aim wasn’t to vaporize Washington, New York, Paris, Berlin, London, or any other major city.

  But that first flush of relief faded quickly. While she was glad to know that mass incineration of citizens wasn’t on some terrorist agenda—if the hackers’ communiqué about bombing Antarctica could actually be trusted—she also recalled that a slow-motion catastrophe, by thermonuclear standards, would be triggered if the WAIS were hit.

  She wasn’t an expert on Antarctica, but knew that scientists worldwide already considered it one of the major worries of climate change: if the whole ice sheet were cleaved from the continent by the warming, or a massive bomb, seas would rise by a staggering eleven feet, in a matter of days.

  WAIS was such a looming topic for the U.S. Task Force on Climate Change that it was slated as the subject of next month’s meeting in Annapolis, which now sounded like an academic exercise with the real threat of a nuclear missile strike—or strikes—on the planet’s southernmost region.

  Lana threw herself behind the wheel, wondering what an eleven-foot rise in the waters of Chesapeake Bay would mean. She was tempted to do the research then and there but weightier concerns saw her speeding out of the car park.

  Not for long. She had to hit the brakes quickly, then fought traffic for blocks, noting the unworried faces of so many drivers and pedestrians, including the young couples, hand in hand, who were crossing at streetlights blissfully unaware of the impending peril.

  If they only knew.

  This was so unlike last year, when the whole country became aware of the attack with the speed of a blackout. That assault had come with no warning, taking down the grid and setting off a nationwide power outage on a balmy September morning. No couples had strolled hand in hand with traffic jams seizing virtually every intersection. Then train derailments began across the country, along with pipeline explosions and a vicious array of other cyberattacks, all of which were brutally visible, even if the cyberterrorists themselves had been wholly absent to the eye.

  A nuclear attack on the WAIS, on the other hand, would be
so far removed by comparison that most citizens of the U.S. and the rest of the world would feel little impact initially—but then the waters would begin to rise and all too quickly the horrifying ramifications would sink in.

  It took Lana almost a half hour of grindingly slow city traffic to escape to the Beltway, which wasn’t exactly the Indy 500, either. But at least the Prius was plodding along now.

  Her thoughts quickly focused on the agents of the threatened apocalypse. She knew that word was far overused, but a sudden and radical rise in sea levels, with its consequent smothering of coastlines that had been stable for the last twelve thousand years, certainly did not make the term seem like a stretch. And all of it would happen in the geological equivalent of a blink.

  Taking the HOV lane, she powered past miles of lone drivers on her right, feeling no compunction at all because she thought her car carried plenty—the weight of the world. Without the congestion, she felt free to think, but she still could not wrap her head around the idea that any country powerful enough to put this catastrophe into play would actually commit such a self-destructive act. Yet only a highly trained and immensely sophisticated cyberunit could have hacked the navy’s communications and, with accomplices onboard, hijacked the Delphin. Those hackers now threatened to launch an attack that would change the very contours of the continents for millions of years to come.

  Millions?

  She could scarcely make sense of her own well-reasoned conclusions. Communicating this to the public would be unfathomably difficult. The attack last year had set off savage displays of panic; she could hardly grasp what would happen this time around—and didn’t want to.

  Lana had yet to hear back from Emma, so she tried again, adding “ASAP!” before hitting “send.”

  Respond, Em, come on.

  The next instant she was back in professional mode, wondering when the cyberattackers—Murderers, that’s what they are—were going to launch their lethal assault. The communiqué, which had been boldly sent to the White House and cc’d to Holmes, didn’t reveal a countdown. Shrewd—from the unknown enemy’s point of view. Whoever had decided on that strategy might have borrowed a page from last year’s attackers who toyed with turning the grid on and off to keep everyone in a near panic. And then they turned it on with the vow to shut it down for good at any second, which had unleashed mass hysteria.

  But what would Americans—and everyone else in the world—make of seas rising past shorelines and engulfing entire island nations and other vulnerable low-lying countries? Even in the developed world, whole cities and smaller communities would disappear under floods of Biblical proportions. Trillions of dollars’ worth of water treatment plants and sewage facilities, hospitals—emergency services of all kinds—along with nuclear power plants, naval bases, and scores of defense installations, would disappear. So, of course, would hundreds of millions of people. Hiroshima and Nagasaki countless times over, but instead of fires raining from the sky, there would be relentless flooding by the seas.

  She texted McGivern: “Is Besserman there?”

  “Running late, but coming,” she replied.

  Excellent. Clarence Besserman was one of the government’s top experts on climate change’s impact on national security. He was also an ex officio member of the Joint Task Force.

  Lana rolled up to Fort Meade’s front gate, eyed closely by security personnel who waved her through. That had never happened before. But she was stopped seconds later by a band of marines from the service’s Fort Meade detachment, one of whom tapped the passenger window and jumped into the seat a moment later.

  “Ma’am, drive up to the door and deploy. I’m going to park your car. Your keys will catch up to you, along with the car’s location.”

  Lana did as directed, pulling up to the biggest of the NSA buildings, the one with what appeared to be a white tray cake plopped on top. She popped the trunk and hopped out.

  “Thank you, sir,” she said to the young marine.

  “Thank you, ma’am. Godspeed,” he added.

  She grabbed her computer case out of the trunk and rushed inside.

  An NSA security guard was waiting to escort her swiftly to the SCIF, the secure conference room that was starting to feel more familiar than her own office at Meade.

  She checked her watch: 10:30 p.m. Just before entering the electronically secured enclosure, she tried Emma again, apologizing to a pair of NSA guards waiting to clear her for entry to the room.

  Lana tried texting Tanesa this time. No sooner sent than replied to: “Got Em at my house.”

  “Thx!” Lana answered before surrendering her devices and enduring the critical security protocol, which included signing off on the procedure. At least her daughter and Tanesa and children everywhere were peacefully ignorant of the threatened assault. But for how long?

  That was the first question Holmes raised: “What’s our countdown look like? Any ideas?” The deputy director looked every day of his seventy-eight years.

  Admiral Wourzy, the chip counterfeiter, said he thought the enemy would strike in a matter of hours. “Or, more to the point, any time now.”

  “Why?” Holmes asked with unusual impatience.

  “Now that they’ve announced their target,” Wourzy replied, “they’ll move quickly rather than risk shutdown. And once the attack has taken place, it gives them breathing room while chaos breaks out.”

  “Or it gives us a means of tracking the hackers to their lair,” said the lean, bearded Tenon, once more speaking up early in a meeting, as if always fearful of being overlooked.

  “In classic terrorism, that often holds true,” Wourzy replied, “because the terrorist leaves behind physical evidence. But this has been engineered by hackers who are much harder to locate. To put it simply, this isn’t like tracking an ISIL missile fired from the Iraqi desert. Plus, they’ve got to know we’ll do everything we can to find and sink that sub, so I’d say the good money’s on a fast launch.”

  “Find the sub?” Holmes asked. “What are you—”

  “We’ve lost the Delphin,” Admiral Deming answered. “They moved it into a deep trough and rigged for ultra quiet. The sub has the latest in sound-suppression technology. They’ve shut off all nonessential equipment, slowed down the fans, and reduced speed to less than ten knots. We’ve got two destroyers racing to the southern ocean now but they’re going to have a helluva time finding the Delphin.”

  “How did we lose them?” Holmes sounded incredulous. “We had them literally in our sights before.”

  “That was when they used the buoy, and we saw them from the air,” Deming replied.

  “Believe me, I know how we saw them,” Holmes fired back. “How long have you known this?”

  “Minutes,” Deming reported. “The admiral and I found out walking in the door here.”

  “What about the destroyers?” Holmes persisted.

  “They were also too far away when the Delphin went to depth, and the hackers and their accomplices certainly appear to know their topography.”

  “And the sub’s Operations Compartment,” Wourzy added. “I’ll give you odds-on that navigating the underwater canyons is the least of the challenges they’ve overcome. They’ve had plenty of practice of playing around with the navy’s computers,” he said with raised eyebrows.

  An overt reference, Lana was certain, to a cyberincursion revealed by Snowden. As early as three years ago hackers had infiltrated a navy computer system. Iranians were suspected in that attack. A security upgrade—more layers, network segmentation, and enhanced monitoring—had been implemented, which made Lana doubtful that the Iranians had a part in the Delphin’s takeover, largely because they always seemed too inept to avoid leaving their fingerprints on whatever havoc they caused.

  The U.S., of course, had proved equally clumsy—the Iranians would say even more so—with its infamous Stuxnet attack on Iran�
��s nuclear centrifuges. While renowned among experts for its almost flawless code, the U.S. was implicated when the worm escaped Iran’s Natanz plant and made its way all around the world. But when a cyberattack was executed well, anonymity made responding quickly and forcefully almost impossible. There were plenty of potential culprits, but getting confirmation of a single one was much tougher. And now Lana and her colleagues were up against an enemy unlikely to ever claim credit for an environmental disaster that would devastate every continent on earth.

  Clarence Besserman arrived late, looking as if he’d stepped from a World War II Defense Department photo, even though the climate-change expert was in his early thirties. He sported the wet-look haircut of a military attaché and a bow tie that could have been filched from the collar of Winston Churchill himself. Like the late British prime minister and war hero, Besserman was chubby. In Lana’s view, he fit the very definition of that word: cheeks, arms, chest, legs, everywhere she looked he carried a few extra pounds of padding. But not obese, not by any means.

  Despite the starched bow tie and carefully oiled hair, he was disheveled with his shirttail hanging out of his pants. It wasn’t simply that he’d been rousted late at night for a meeting, though, because Besserman always looked like he slept in his clothes. Only his computer looked crisply intact as he pulled it from its case, likely because his screen wasn’t yet visible. Lana would have guessed his desktop might also need some ordering. But there was no disputing Besserman’s brilliance.

  Holmes, she noticed, looked on the verge of saying, “Glad you could make it, Clarence,” but the younger man looked so flustered that the deputy director might have spared him out of charity alone.

  “You have something for us, I gather,” Holmes actually asked him.

  Did Besserman ever. He launched right into the geopolitical implications of a rapid rise in sea levels: “We just ran our first climate-change war games last week. To prepare for the Task Force presentation next month, we looked at who the actors might be in a similar attack on the ice sheet. We weren’t gaming with a nuclear-armed submarine in mind because we didn’t think the hacking and takeover of one was possible. A lack of imagination on our part, clearly. But we did decide after extensive analysis that hackers targeting the WAIS in any manner would have to be other than a state actor. No country with the ability to bomb the ice sheet into the ocean would ever have enough to gain to make it worth their while. But here was the quandary: No individual hacker would have the means to launch an ICBM in such a precise fashion. So before the Delphin was taken over, that was our conundrum and why we concluded such an attack was highly unlikely.”