Somebody’s head was gonna roll for this, for damn sure.
He sure hoped it wouldn’t be his. . . .
1
Net Force HQ
Quantico, Virginia
Four-Star Army General Patrick Lee Hadden—should have had five stars, but the continuing War on Terror wasn’t an officially declared conflict. There hadn’t been one of those for a long time, not since WWII.
The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff was a most unhappy man. He said, “Okay, you’ve seen recordings we did with the MP sergeant and his PFC, and other personnel inside Fort Stephens. You’ve seen the reconstruction as put together by our computer people. What you did not see were the actual recordings from the gate camera, or any other security cameras on the base, because the attackers shut those off just as easily as they did everything else, including opening the gates and getting into the base.”
Net Force Commander Thomas Thorn nodded. “Yes, sir. And you want to know how they did it.” They were alone in Thorn’s office, which was pretty amazing—Hadden could have called the meeting in his office. There was no way Thorn could have turned down that invitation.
“No, I don’t give a rat’s ass how they did it. What I want to know is who they are and where they live. If the way to get that information is to figure out how they did it, fine, if that’s what it takes. Those men got into my shiny new high-tech Army base and did damage to it. Not much, but any is too much. I want them, I want their heads on a platter and their bodies roasting over a slow fire, and I want it yesterday.”
Thorn didn’t smile. When the Chairman of the JCOS said something like this, he might be joking. Then again, he might not be. And since Thorn and all of Net Force had left civilian control, shifted from being a branch of the FBI to the military, General Hadden was their master. Thorn didn’t like it, but he had to either live with it or leave, and he wasn’t ready to walk out just yet.
“The Army’s computer people tell me what happened, and even how it happened, in theory, but that’s not what I need. I want these bastards tracked down.”
“You’ve got some pretty good people in the Army.”
“That’s right, we do. But your people are better—and you are in my Army now. What you did to break up that Chinese thing? That was outstanding work. I need you to get me these people, General.”
General. The man forgot who he was talking to. Thorn was a civilian, and a “Commander,” but no way a general.
Hadden must have seen it on his face. Not that it would have taken a particularly perceptive man to see that. Thorn’s surprise—and his anger—were undoubtedly very apparent. “It’s a new technicality,” Hadden said. “You’re heading up a military outfit now, son. And besides, we’ve promoted Abe Kent to general and he reports to you. You need a commission and a rank higher than his, so no more ‘Commander.’ You are now ‘General Thorn.’ Two stars to Abe’s one.”
Still stunned, Thorn said, “You can’t do that! You can’t draft me!”
“Son, if I want, I can get a million GIs, swabbies, jarheads, flyboys, and National Guardsmen to stand on their heads and whistle ‘Dixie’ in four-part harmony. The President will have to sign off on it, of course, but the new Terrorist Powers Act gives me all kinds of leeway. I’ll have the paperwork put through—it’s a done deal.”
Thorn blinked. Whoa. This was getting really strange. But, as he thought about it, it did make a certain twisted sense—from their point of view, anyway.
“Can you do this job, Thorn?”
“General” Thorn gave him a little half smile and nod. “If it can be done, yes, sir. I’ll have Jay Gridley contact the Army computer experts and pick it up.”
“Good.” Hadden stood. Thorn stood, too. “My aide will provide the information. Your man will go through you and General Ellis.”
He turned and marched out of the room, leaving Thorn standing there alone.
“General Thorn? Sweet Jesus.”
A thought hit him. Some of all this, now that they were no longer part of the FBI, was tolerable because he knew he could walk away if it ever got too bad. But now that he was in the military, could he still quit if he wanted to?
Damn.
Marissa was going to love this.
Fort George H.W. Bush
Clinton, Arkansas
There were two guards inside the kiosk at the south entrance, and a third man outside.
Lying in the wet grass in his gillie-suit, Carruth watched the guards through powerful binoculars, the magnification such that he could see the faces of all three. They looked bored.
You’d think the Army would be on high alert after the hit in Oklahoma. But that was the Army—they weren’t the Navy. . . .
The ex-SEAL grinned. Don’t worry boys, your lives are about to get interesting.
He thumbed the LOSIR microphone to narrowcast a message to Hill. The light used to transmit wouldn’t be detected by a radio scanner, and it was a different spectrum than the Army guys used in their own LOSIR systems.
Patrick Hill was the gearhead, an über-geek who could build most of the electronics they carried from scratch, but who also could kill sixteen different ways with the soldering iron he’d use to do it.
“Any eyes?”
“No, Boss, clear canopy for the next twenty. No sonics, radios, or LEDs active. Passives either, as far as I can tell.”
Good. They were clear from satellite recon, and no active sensors were operating. Of course there weren’t supposed to be, according to the specs that the chief had given them, but a man like Carruth didn’t leave things to chance. Weren’t-supposed-to-be could get you killed quick.
“Give them the sig,” he said.
“Roger.”
Hill would signal the other two men on their team, and start the clock ticking.
Carruth slid forward on the wet grass, letting the cold soak into him, doing his best to become part of the landscape. Smooth movement, slow and steady was what won this race. Leaves and twigs pressed against him as he moved.
Damn, it was wet. He could use a mask and snorkel. . . .
Twenty-five meters. Twenty. As he slid forward, he could hear the sound of the ambulance as it rolled up to the gate.
The guards looked a little more animated. One of the men in the guardhouse stepped outside, exactly as Carruth had expected—and the scenario had predicted.
That left only one inside the shack.
Carruth crawled faster now. The slowly moving vehicle had captured the attention of the guards—they’d be looking southwest.
When Stark stopped the ambulance and started to talk to the guards, Dexter, his copilot, would shoot the guards, using an air gun firing special hypodermic darts. Once they hit, lightweight capacitors in the darts would release several thousand volts. Low-amperage, but it didn’t take much under the skin. Zap, the guards would go down, out and probably not dead, though that didn’t matter, and no big bang for anybody to overhear.
The ambulance slowed to a stop at the entrance.
“Howdy.” Stark’s voice, flat and nasal. “We’re here to pick up a Major Kendrick—seems he busted his hand up pretty bad, and the base doctors wanna send him out.”
The guard seemed to relax. It wasn’t uncommon for such transfers. “Yes, sir,” he said. “I’ll just check with the OIC—he didn’t tell us you were coming.”
Two dull whuuuuft! sounds punctuated the guard’s words.
Carruth was at the guardhouse now, low, so he wouldn’t be seen. The ex-SEAL slid smoothly upward and saw the guard inside turning toward a monitor.
“Hey, Sarge?” Carruth said as he stepped into the room.
“Yeah?” The man started to turn.
Carruth darted him. “You lose, Sarge. Sorry.”
The guard fell heavily to the ground.
Carruth and Hill slid into the ambulance with Stark. Dexter had already taken his place in the guard’s hut. The gate slid open. Not as heavy as the one in Oklahoma, but stout enough so that ramm
ing it would have been a waste of time.
Ahead was the barracks.
Stark had been telling the truth at the gate—they really were here to pick up Major Kendrick. The principal lock on the armory was a biometric palm scanner. The device used infrared light and ultrasound to read the pattern of veins underneath the skin, a signature as unique as a fingerprint or retinal scan. They hadn’t been able to get the matching file from the camp’s computer, so they had to do it a different way.
The problem was that the scanner also read the temperature of the hand while the ultrasound checked on the arterial flow. Dead hands tended to cool pretty quick, and no blood circulated, so they needed Kendrick alive. Microwaving a hand to body temp might be a viable option, but faking the live arteries was impossible. Different than the hit in Oklahoma, but you had to adjust, that was the name of the game. Roll with the punches, and don’t get caught flat-footed . . .
The three of them entered the building. Stark pushed the collapsible stretcher. They made no attempt at stealth. One of the oldest tricks in the book—look like you belong, and you won’t be questioned. The three moved down the hallway to Kendrick’s room. Once there, Carruth opened the door and stepped in. Kendrick was asleep, and the quick injection he gave the man would keep him that way.
They rolled Kendrick to the ambulance without incident.
They drove to the armory. The building was a large warehouse within a carefully guarded perimeter. It was good security—human guards outside and technological ones inside.
Again, they darted the guards. Stark took over at the kiosk, while Carruth and Hill drove inside.
At the outer door, Kendrick’s hand worked exactly as advertised. Patrick did some kind of geek-magic and opened the electronically controlled inner door.
“You ready?” he asked.
Carruth nodded.
Things were about to get hot.
The warheads couldn’t be removed without activating indicators well away from the armory. Such alarms were active at all times, part of SOP for keeping track of the weapons. So they had to move fast.
“Go.”
The target they were after was a big one—approximately three hundred pounds. They pushed the stretcher—now clear of Kendrick—close to the rack, and rolled the device onto it. An audible alarm went off.
Hill smoothly tightened two nylon safety belts as Carruth pushed the nuke toward the door. They hurried.
They made it to the ambulance. Carruth drove while Hill locked down the warhead.
Go-go-go—!
They sped toward the armory perimeter, hearing sirens approach. Stark ran, hopping in while they were still moving.
They were halfway to the gate when the world flickered and jumped, making Carruth slam on the brakes.
“Damn machine!”
Carruth smacked the side of his heads-up display and the image stabilized.
This is what happens when you buy cheap.
Carruth thought VR training was for shit—no amount of pretending to crawl through the forest prepared you for the real thing. The cold, the bugs—VR just didn’t cut it. Sure, the spacing of the base, the time factors, and the movement could be worked with their setup, but the little random things—Kendrick deciding to go pee, or being out on a date—those could never be factored in accurately.
But their current operations budget didn’t cover full-scale mockups. Or as the boss had put it, “You can spend the money on your field gear or your training gear, you choose.”
So they’d compromised. The system they were using wasn’t full VR—it mixed real-time computer graphics and a heads-up display with simulated models. The guards and base were all VR, spun on the Kraken Cluster back at camp, and ’cast to their headsets. But the crawling through grass, climbing, and driving were for real.
They hadn’t bothered with much training for the other attack. That had been simple hit-and-run—get in, do damage, and get out. And there, they’d had all the computer codes. Because this one was more complicated, training was a necessity.
But it was worth it. The attack would drive the price of their U.S. military base information through the roof. And on a more personal level, Carruth was looking forward to the black eye it would give the military.
Teach them what happens when they mess with me.
They made the entrance and picked up Dexter without any problems. By then, the ambulance sirens and flashers were running.
Code three, and they were out.
Hill called out the time. Armory-to-exit was the best they’d done yet.
They were just about ready.
2
Pentagon Annex
Washington, D.C.
Jay Gridley, head of Net Force’s computer section, leading expert and master of virtual reality in all its intricate, complicated forms, couldn’t remember the last time he’d been this tired. His eyes burned, and felt gritty when he blinked. His body had that brittle feeling, like a piece of glass, as though something would shatter if he moved too fast.
The days when he could sit up in VR all night long, then go all the next day without sleep were gone. When had that happened?
That’ll teach me.
Little Mark, his darling baby boy, had run out of milk the night before, and Jay had gone out to the local 7-Eleven instead of the supermarket where they normally shopped. It was closer and faster. That’s why, he had explained to his wife, Saji, they called it a convenience store. . . .
Apparently, as it turned out, however, 7-Eleven cows weren’t the same as Safeway cows.
So at 3 A.M., when the boy had discovered the agony of gas pains, Jay had to get up and take care of him. Saji was pissed off. “What was it you said, Mr. Genius? Milk is milk, no big deal? Tell it to your son. . . .”
Nobody got any more sleep. The time he’d saved going to a convenience store had not been convenient at all. Nosiree . . .
To top it off, he’d been scheduled to brief General Ellis on the computer problem at 7:30 A.M. at the Pentagon Annex. Why so early? Why couldn’t they do it in VR? Because the military said so, that’s why. Screw ’em all. Jay liked being the honcho at Net Force, he’d gotten to match himself against some sharp players, but this military crap was for the birds. Maybe it was time to start thinking about changing jobs.
Jay hadn’t met General Ellis before, and was curious to see what his boss’s boss looked like, although he wished he could have been a bit more rested.
Although if what Thorn was saying was true, he was about to be a general, too. Couldn’t swing a dead cat without hitting one of those these days. Jay wasn’t sure he liked any part of that.
“Sir, the general will see you now.”
Jay stood up and followed the far-too-fresh-looking secretary through a short, dark hallway, and then into the general’s office. Jay’s personal guard and escort stayed in the waiting room.
A picture of the President hung on the wall, along with several photos of an older man shaking hands with various dignitaries. Books cluttered dark-grained bookshelves, and small trophies occupied those areas that weren’t held by books: ammunition, models, and other pieces of hardware. A painting of a bayou that could have come from one of Jay’s own VR scenarios hung on one wall, cypress trees thick with Spanish moss crowding a red-hued waterway, itself tinted by a setting sun.
Eclectic.
Behind the desk sat a man in his mid-fifties, fighting the battle of the bulge and losing. He was pale, and had hair going from gray to white.
“Mr. Gridley.”
The words were stretched out: “Mist-uh Guriddleeee.” A song of the South. Texas? Louisiana? Somewhere down there.
“That’s me,” said Jay.
“Your boss tells me you’re the best bug-squasher we got.”
Jay couldn’t help but grin. He’d never heard that precise phrase put to it before, but it fit. Always nice to hear the word “best” associated with his name, anyway.
“I guess you could call it that,” he said, “
although I don’t think that’s what we’ve got here.”
“So, tell me, what do we have here?”
“Well, sir, basically someone has put together something that I call the ‘Archimedes Effect.’ ” Jay saw the blank look on the general’s face. “From Archimedes’ quote. ‘Give me a lever long enough, and a place to stand, and I will move the world’?” The general still looked blank. “It’s technically called a Distributed Computer Project, or DCP, a piece of software that runs on thousands, maybe tens of thousands, of different computers. The program hunts for answers, or, in this case, scenarios, for how to crack Army base security, and when it gets them, it spits them back out. Those are the ‘lever long enough,’ if you see what I mean.”
General Ellis nodded. “Tens of thousands?” he asked. “How does it do that?”
“The software is distributed by a server. After it gets run on the host computers, it sends partial work-packets until the job is complete. At that point, the server redirects the packets back to the server, where pieces of the solution are put together.”
The general frowned.
“The idea was first used in the late nineties. The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence sent out a DCP that worked to search streams of radio-telescope data they’d collected for signals. They’d send out a block of information that was a portion of the search area, and the software on the host machine would process it whenever it wasn’t busy doing something else.”
The general was still frowning. Better reset the listening clock here, Jay, or you’ll put the man to sleep. “The result was like having a huge supercomputer, but broken up into lots of small units.”
“Okay, I got that part—but where are these machines?”
“All over the world. The way it works is the attacker put the thing on the Internet, and people who thought it might be amusing downloaded it. And the interesting part is, whoever did it put it out in the open, disguised as a computer game—a science-fiction scenario called The War Against the Bugs. Only, the designs of the alien bases, in a galaxy far away, were the same as those of Army bases on Earth.”