These aren’t Mike speaking, either. Mike isn’t speaking. He’s sitting. He’s sitting and trying to look blameless, until and if somebody calls on him.
“It’s like I said. This is what we’ve been looking for, because we’ve known it was on its way in.”
This is the closest thing to Mike speaking. This is Mike’s boss – James Niewendyke, who is Director of the Information Security Directorate of the United States Department of Homeland Security. That is where Mike works.
“For, call it five years now, we’ve known this was coming in, and it was more or less undodgeable.” James Niewendyke is addressing two generals, an admiral, two undersecretaries of defense, the Director of the FBI, three unidentified guys, and two guys with their faces actually fuzzed out on the overhead video links. Also around the real physical table are a handful of high-level DHS guys and a colonel.
“Why now?’ This is one of the undersecretaries. “Why not before now?’
“Because, before now, the guys who had the chops to get into critical systems didn’t have any desire to break anything when they got there. And the guys who really want to hurt us didn’t have the chops.” James Niewendyke takes his glasses off and rubs them with his tie. “But it was always inevitable that some of the geeks would eventually get angry – Kevin Mitnick with a grievance. Or some of the real assholes would get smart – al-Zarqawi with skills.”
“Which is it?” This is one of the generals.
“It’s the second thing.”
“So these are Islamist bad guys?”
“Our early forensics say yes, they’re Islamist bad guys.”
“So then this is just AQO.” This is one of the military guys, an Air Force colonel, from the new Cyber Warfare Command, and in the actual room. He is referring to al Qaeda Online, so-called. “We know this crew, we know what they’re doing.” Mike knows this Air Force colonel fancies himself a cyber-terror expert – but Mike is pretty sure he couldn’t reliably find his own asshole with road flares and spelunking gear. Mike figures he’ll let his boss point up that issue.
“No,” his boss says, with an aspect of thin patience. “You know what they’ve been doing. AQ web sites, jihadi-prop videos, bomb soup. These things spring up, you run D-DOS attacks, you shut down the servers. Maybe you send SAD or SOF out to get them, when you can find them.”
“We also shut down guys running attacks.”
“You shut down guys planning attacks – planning real physical incidents using online comms. And over here we spend all our time chasing hackers around the block – all-American kids who want a screenshot of the Treasury intranet for their desktop. So that’s you working serious bad guys fucking around online. And us working fuck-ups doing serious stuff online. But what I’m saying is that now we’ve got the real deal – opponents who are heart-attack serious, and who are probing drop-dead serious targets in the information infrastructure. And who are getting in.”
“How serious?” This is the other undersecretary.
“DOE. Nuke labs. They only got in for a few minutes. But they got in.”
“And you’re so sure they’re real bad guys?”
“Mike.” James look looks down and across at the patch of desk beneath the younger man’s chin. “How many probes or successful breaches of tier one through four systems in the NII have you caught in these three years?”
Mike looks up and tries to make his face, his voice, like his boss’s. “All in? About fourteen hundred.”
“On how many of those have you gotten a grid reference and sent out a team, or gone yourself?”
“A hundred and twelve.”
“How may of those targets have shot us up when we got there?”
“Domestic or foreign?” This is just Mike stalling.
“All in.”
“One. The one tonight.”
“How many of that team came home?”
“None. Well, me.”
James pins the overhead monitors in turn. “Let me tell you what we’ve got. We’ve got a domestic intrusion cell that we caught in some very interior systems – specifically, the Department of Energy’s Nuclear Test Labs in Idaho Falls. They were about six keystrokes from about ten thousand pages of classified docs on reactors, materials – and weapons. We got lucky and—“
“How classified?”
“So classified they wouldn’t tell me. The classification level is classified.” No one can tell if he’s joking, so nobody says anything.
“We got lucky and they tripped an alarm. The intrusion was extremely well-disguised. But our Mr. Brown here traced it. When we go out to get these guys, with local law enforcement, we end up in an eight-second, thousand-round shootout. We kill two of them, two or three escape out the back door – and our whole team goes down. All the forensics so far say they’re AQ.”
“And Mr. Brown here can trace them?”
“He’s an A resource. That’s why we took the risk of putting him out on the firing line.”
“Put him back.”
Mike thinks even James is looking a little tired now. They’ve all been up for hours. “Mike isn’t officially a field operative,” Jim says. “He’s not trained for CQB.”
“You’re going to need tech in the field.” This is the other general. “Someone onsite to capture data while it’s still actionable.”
“That’s why we send him out. Sometimes. But there are limits to wha—”
“Get him the tactical support he needs, but get him back out there.”
One of the undersecretaries says, “Why don’t we get him onto a team that’s already out there? TF145? They’ve taken down some heavily wired safehouses in CENTCOM AO.”
“No. Not the Task Force. We need a bunch of Rangers shooting everything up with SAWs like we need colostomy bags. This is finesse work.”
After a beat of silence – the staccato energy of the room seems to be ticking down – one of the guys on video link speaks. He hasn’t made a peep before this. And he doesn’t have a face.
“There’s Dick Havering’s team.”
The general stares out the monitor, straight through the room. “Okay, then. Get them tasked. Jim, we’re going to put your boy with some boys in the CAG. That alright with you?”
“Sir.”
And with that and nothing more, the general disappears and the room lights come up. Mike sees James eyeing him as chairs scrape floor.