Starfish Prime (Blackfox Chronicles Book 2)

by T. S. O'Neil

  Van Achtenberg smiled broadly. “Chavez has given us priority for use of a National Guard company headquartered in Puerto Ayacucho, but we shouldn’t need them. I’ve brought in twenty-two of my best men from First Recce that will form a personal security detail for you and provide security to the base.”

  The colonel nodded, “my lodging?”

  “Your quarters are in the old plantation house that sits on the edge of the launch complex. We had it thoroughly cleaned and fumigated, and stocked with food and drink per your dietary requirements, so I think you will be comfortable. Unfortunately, it is not air-conditioned, but I had a window unit installed in the bedroom. Regarding your requirements for an office, there is an old ice house on the property that was previously used as an office. It is air-conditioned, very well insulated, and hence soundproof. I had them hook it into the fiber circuit so you will be able to access the network from there, which should make things easier as the road to the launch site is subject to flooding. It will also make an adequate holding cell as there is a small windowless section that can be secured.”

  “Excellent! I wish to talk with the medical worker who likes to share information with NGOs immediately.”

  “I will have him brought to you. Per our earlier discussion, we hired his daughter as your personal maid. He seemed visibly distraught when we took her.” said Van Achtenberg

  “Good” Stal’s interest suddenly peaked. “Perhaps that will better insure his cooperation. How old is she?”

  “A teenager―sixteen, I think.”

  “Has anyone else touched her?” asked Stal.

  “No. According to the girl’s mother, she’s a virgin.”

  The colonel smiled. “If things continue at this pace and there are no mistakes, we should be operational by the end of March,” said Van Achtenberg.

  “We had better be. The Supreme Leader of the Iranian Armed Forces will be here on March thirty-first. The Iranians don’t deal well with disappointment.”

  After they left Cuidad Bolivar, they would follow the path of the Orinoco, crossing numerous tributaries and arriving at the installation at about three the following morning. The four semitrailers would follow along behind them at their own pace, allowing the colonel and his colleagues to pre-clear the shipment through the various police and military checkpoints with a letter signed by the big man himself.

  The colonel was satisfied that the project was on track for the time being. Of course, there was a lot more to be done before he could deliver his Iranian clients a truly effective magic bullet. Stal leaned back in the plush leather seat, closed his eyes and was soon asleep.

  Chapter Fifteen - Logistics

  Isla de Bartolomé, CO

  The Marine Special Operations Support Group was responsible for providing the special operators with logistical support, including all classes of supply, from major end items such as vehicles to the MREs and B-rations necessary for subsistence. Log flights began arriving during the early afternoon, as if they were standing by on the flight line until an ultimate destination was selected.

  The loggies arrived in a combination of MV-22 Ospreys and one airdrop involving three KC-130J Super Hercules cargo planes. The first sorties brought in lightweight, rough-terrain forklifts to rapidly transport the supplies from the edge of the airfield to the ten C-huts that comprised the FOB. The forklifts shuttled three-kilowatt electrical generators, stacks of rations, ammunition, electronics, and other supplies to various buildings within the base.

  The first order of business was to set up a working tactical operations center (TOC), a Special Compartmentalized Intelligence Facility, and a computer lab to facilitate train-up of one white hat hacker. Munitions were transported to a sheltered location among several small hills where they were secured by concertina wire, command detonated anti-personnel mines, and surveillance cameras, as there would be no troops to spare to guard the lot.

  Ramos’ world had been upended. He was anxious, if not nervous, about the sudden turn of events. He wandered to the side of one of the C-huts that was formerly designated a smoking area to indulge a habit virtually all his health-conscious friends frowned upon. He sat down on top of one of the two weather-beaten picnic benches, shook out a Colombian Marlboro, flipped the top of his battle-scarred Zippo to light it, and inhaled deeply.

  The nicotine had the desired effect―he relaxed a bit and exhaled out a cloud of smoke. The counter-narcotics captain wandered in front of the alleyway headed to the TOC. Ramos waved him over and offered a smoke. The captain shook his head. Another health nut, he thought.

  “Thanks for the favor,” said Ramos.

  “No problem, it was the least I could do. Good luck to you―by the look of things, you’re going to need it,” replied the captain.

  “Yes, it does seem that things are getting interesting.” Ramos purposely understated the significance of the developing events. As if to punctuate Ramos’ statement, an MV-22 Osprey roared overhead preparing to land.

  “Are you leaving?” Ramos inquired.

  “Yes, it would seem that the chess master has made another move,” replied the captain.

  Ramos adopted a puzzled expression. “I’m actually more of a poker player.”

  “I mean it seems that these Norte Americanos will risk anything to get whatever they are after. Just make sure you don’t find yourself sacrificed like a pawn.”

  “Don’t kid yourself, mi Capitan Lopez,” he said, finally remembering the man’s name. “It doesn’t matter whose flag we fight under as everyone in this business is cannon fodder if the need arises.”

  Ramos flicked his cigarette onto the ground as if to punctuate the point. He hopped off the table, patted the captain on both upper arms in a quasi-embrace, shook his hand, and offered a traditional parting farewell. “Vaya con Dios.”

  “You too,” replied Lopez and then he was gone.

  ***

  “Come with me.” LtCol Freeman summoned Michael from the operations hut. He then escorted him to another building at the end of the dirt road that formed the main street of their C-hut village. He entered and a young Marine turned away from tinkering with the internal components of a server, stood up and regarded the two officers with rapt attention.

  “The critical dependency of this op is the ability to hack into a computer network and upload a payload. If you can’t do it now, you’ll be able to do it by the time we are done training you. Meet Sergeant Ellis Howell, your instructor.”

  The kid looked like he was all of sixteen years of age. He was of slight build and had wispy blond hair that was slightly longer than allowed by the Corps’ notoriously strict grooming standards. Michael figured the kid was taking advantage of the looser standards MARSOC, and other Special Operators adopted while deployed to better blend with the local populace. He shook the Sergeant’s hand.

  “Give the captain a rundown on your qualifications, Sergeant Howell.” said Colonel Freeman.

  “Black hat hacker for a few misspent years in my early teens. Broke into just about every federal network I could think of―I got caught after I hacked into a federal credit union and transferred thirteen million dollars into an account in the Cayman

  Islands. I was arrested when I showed up to withdraw the funds.”

  “He was just seventeen and got treated like a youthful offender. The judge was a traditionalist and former Marine. He offered him a choice: four years in a federal prison, or an equal number of years in the Corps,” said LtCol Freeman.

  “I think I would have had an easier time in prison,” quipped Ellis.

  “Yeah, but think of all you’d be giving up,” replied Freeman as he turned towards Michael.

  “You’ve got eight hours to get Captain Blackfox trained. I’ll be back at sixteen hundred to take him for a practice jump,” said the Colonel as he turned to leave. Michael looked around the interior and was amazed, but not really surprised. The MARSOC loggies had been busy―the hut had been rapidly transformed into a functional computer lab.


  Three long green tables lined either side of the building, and each table held two laptops. In the center of the room sat a tower hosting a server, several switches, and a power supply. The plywood shutters had been nailed shut. Windows and two large window air-conditioners had been installed and connected to a sandbagged three-kilowatt generator located a short distance away.

  “This is a rough mockup of the network that you will encounter. Each table represents a separate building. All the locations are connected via fiber link. You need to be able to remotely break into one of the end points and upload a payload. But before we get started, walk me through what you would do and how you would do it so I can gauge how much remedial training I will need to give you.”

  “What operating system?”

  “Microsoft XP or a Chinese copy,” replied Ellis.

  “Piece of cake―or it should be if you have the tools.”

  Howell nodded thoughtfully, measured his words, and then responded. “We did a drug deal for a hacking kit from some Air Force cyber-warfare types, but it was mostly outdated crap. I downloaded some current stuff from some black hat sites I still use to keep my skills current, which are much better for what we want to do.”

  “Are there any specialized log-on access controls, like biometrics?” asked Michael.

  “Pretend that there are,” replied the sergeant with a smile. “Is there a workaround?”

  “The password is tied to the fingerprint, so there will still be a hashed password stored locally on the machine of whoever logged on to the computer. Just unplug the biometric reader and grab the password file, decrypt it with a password-guessing program, then log in. Crack the network and upload the code,” replied Michael.

  “Fair enough, but what if you couldn’t touch the computer?”

  “We do the same thing remotely.”

  “The buildings that make up the installation are all connected by shielded fiber-optic cabling installed in PVC piping. There should be access points, but you’re going to have to look for them. They will normally run in straight lines between the buildings, and you should be able to locate them with a pipe and cable locator,” he said as he handed Michael a small L-shaped electronic meter. “We’ll test it out later this afternoon.”

  “Seems like you have pretty good information. How did you come by it? Got a man inside?” asked Michael.

  “That’s above my pay grade sir,” replied SGT Howell dryly.

  He pulled a whiteboard over in front of Michael’s chair and began drawing a rough map of the layout of the facility in black, erasable Sharpie marker.

  “The fiber cable to be tapped needs to be stripped down to filament and placed in a little vice-like device called a micro-bend clamp.” He drew a picture of a U-shaped clamp and pulsing cable.

  “The light pulses leaking from the cable are detected by the optical photo detector and sent to an optical-electrical converter. The converter changes the light pulses to electrical IP data that is placed on an Ethernet cable attached to the laptop I will supply you. The laptop will be running sniffer software and should provide you with a view into the data streaming across the tapped fiber cable. Government agencies sometimes encrypt data to avoid the risk of cable taps, but we have not detected it up to this point. I think they believe their isolation is the best security,” said Howell.

  “And if it is encrypted?” asked Michael.

  “Then our part of the show is over, replied Howell. But there are other things worth worrying about.”

  “Such as?”

  “They might be monitoring the cable with a fiber intrusion detection device. These monitors can detect minor changes in the characteristics of the light traveling over the fiber. This will be most obvious when preparing it for a tap. How about a break?”

  Michael nodded. “I feel like my head is going to explode with all the knowledge you’re feeding me.”

  “You need some brain food? I’ve got Jimmy Dean breakfast sandwiches and some pretty decent dark roast coffee with my Keurig coffee maker: Green Mountain Coffee Roasters, Double Black Diamond,” offered Ellis.

  “You’re kidding right?”

  “I never kid about food. The first thing I learned in the Marines is that creature comforts were damn hard to come by and that goes double in MARSOC, so when I pack for the field, I take it with me.” Ellis walked over to a white cooler with a YETI label attached to the front and withdrew four disk-size objects wrapped in butcher paper.

  “One or two, Captain?”

  “Two, thanks,” replied Michael.

  They spent the morning working on the various methods for hacking into the network based on several different scenarios. After a lunch of cold Italian subs, chips and diet cokes, SGT Howell shifted gears and began a discourse on multi-function viruses and SCADA computer systems used to control most modern computer controlled machinery such as electric generating systems. Once that was done, he began a short discussion of the STUXNET virus.

  “It was a very sophisticated worm used to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities, specifically the network of the supervisory and control systems that controlled their centrifuges. It caused their systems to run at a very high rate of revolutions while the gauges registered normal operation, until the system blew. It brought their nuclear program to a virtual standstill,” explained Howell.

  “Who developed the virus?” asked Michael, although he already knew.

  “Who indeed.” replied Howell. He walked to the back of the hut where a grey metal field safe sat atop a table, spun the dials back and forth, turned the lever and opened the single drawer. He withdrew a small padded manila envelope, approached Michael and handed it to him.

  “Don’t even ask where this came from,” said Howell. Michael withdrew a black flash drive and examined it.

  “That is a ten Gigabyte flash drive hosting the virus you will upload. It’s based on STUXNET, but it’s an improved version.

  “Ten gigs?” asked Michael.

  “Yeah, I don’t know why they gave me a drive that big as the worm is surprisingly small; less than a third of a Megabyte.”

  At 1545, Sergeant Howell packed the laptop and various hacking devices into a padded hard sided container that easily fit into Michael’s rucksack. As promised, LtCol Freeman returned at 1600 looking for Michael. He opened the door and summoned SGT Howell outside.

  “How is he doing?” asked the colonel.

  “He’s a quick study. I think he can handle it, replied Ellis,

  but there are a lot of unknowns.”

  “Roger that. To quote Donald Rumsfeld; ‘some are known unknowns, in that we know what we don’t know, and others are unknown unknowns,’” replied the colonel.

  “If I recall correctly, that means there are things we do not know we don't know,” replied Ellis.

  Chapter Sixteen - Practice Jump

  Isla de Bartolomé, CO

  The other members of the team said little to Michael. He expected to be an outsider even to the two Marines he served with briefly while in Second Recon―the Team Gunny named John Grimes and a redheaded corpsman called “Murph” for Sean Murphy. Murph had been a paramedic in Boston during a previous lifetime and had at least nodded in recognition when Michael was introduced to the team.

  Two of the more colorful members of the team, Jamie and Jerry Olsten, aka the Havoc Twins, were two adopted brothers who grew up on the upper coast of California, in Humboldt County, with a dinosaur hippie couple intent on growing marijuana to support a growing adopted family. The plan came to a miserable end when Pop Olsten was killed by a bullet to the head while harvesting the year’s bumper crop of Humboldt

  County’s finest chronic.

  The boys weren’t twins, or even biologically related and yet they looked remarkably alike―they were of similar size and both had blue eyes and blond hair. While they were still toddlers, their mother took what money they had stashed and fled to Costa Rica, where she opened up a restaurant offering uniquely named California cui
sine such as the ‘Humboldt County double- baked herbed chicken.’

  They learned about surfing at Jaco Beach and picked up Spanish from the locals who worked in their mother’s restaurant. They reached enlistment age and made plans to return to the United States intent on joining the Navy SEALS, as they had just seen a movie of the same name. While getting their passports issued at the US Embassy, they had occasion to talk to one of the Marines who was just getting off duty and had, coincidentally, recently served a tour as a Marine recruiter. He regaled them with tales of Force Recon and denigrated the SEALS as a street gang without adult leadership.

  They returned to California and promptly enlisted in Marine Corps Infantry on the buddy program. After a mandatory one year spent as ground-pounders with the infantry, they passed a rigorous physical assessment test and their transfers to Battalion Reconnaissance were approved. Eventually, the two proved their worth and made the more selective accession into Force Recon. They served in Operation Iraqi Freedom and did a six-month tour of Afghanistan. It was there they earned the nickname the Havoc Twins for their proficient and prolific use of the M203 grenade launcher.

  Their platoon was badly outnumbered and pinned down by a Taliban patrol during the early morning hours and air support was unable to get them any relief. The twins left the platoon’s perimeter without permission, sought high ground, and rained thirty-three forty millimeter HE grenades down on the heathen savages. The few that were left were dispatched by accurate aimed fire from their M16A2 rifles.

  The only thing that kept them from being awarded the Navy Cross was the fact that their Platoon Commander had not ordered them into action. He was a stickler for the chain of command and it was only after the intervention of the Battalion Commander that they were put in for Bronze Stars with V devices. They were actively recruited by MARSOC while still deployed when a mobile recruiting team learned of their balls to the wall heroism.

  Everyone knew Michael was here under a cloud, but he didn’t care. The eyes of fortune weren’t smiling at him for the moment, but he would make his own luck. He was as sure of that as he was that his father would do the same. He would just deal with the task at hand and see what that would get him.