Rules of Engagement

by David Bruns

  The facilities were perfect. The personnel he’d recruited, not so much.

  In the past, when in the throes of planning a major operation, Rafiq experienced calm, a satisfaction drawn from being deeply knowledgeable of every detail, completely in control of his emotions. His results spoke for themselves: All on his own, he’d come within a whisker of detonating a nuclear device on US soil and had masterminded a series of worldwide terrorist attacks—and lived to tell the tale.

  Pak’s cyber mission should be easy by comparison. He had the backing of an entire nation. He should be supremely confident about this operation.

  Except he wasn’t.

  Even worse, he didn’t know why.

  The snow-covered ground sparkled in the light of his headlamp. They were on another night march, with Rafiq setting a grueling pace. Not that his team of North Korean commandos needed additional exercise—they were in peak physical condition—but because he wanted to provoke them.

  The idea for the forced march had formed earlier in the day, when he was watching the men eat. They were all here because they were assigned to him. There was no unifying cause, no factor to motivate them, no sense of mission. Add to that, Rafiq was an outsider. These soldiers had been raised in a closed society. From birth, they were fed the lie that everyone who didn’t look like them was an untrustworthy outsider—and Rafiq definitely did not look like them.

  They reached the high point on the island, a windswept patch of rock half the size of a soccer pitch. To the west, he saw the city of Hwadae, where their power and internet connections came from, and to the north, the distant halogen lights of the Musudan-ri missile complex.

  “Take a break,” he called in Korean.

  He heard someone deep in the ranks make fun of his accent.

  Rafiq slowly turned. The wind turned the sweat on his cheek to ice, and his breath smoked in the air.

  “Who said that?”

  No one spoke. Their combined exhalations fogged the air within their ranks, then were whipped away by the breeze.

  “No one wants to speak?” He pointed at a random man. “You. Stand up.”

  The man stood, his eyes searching back toward his comrades.

  Rafiq stepped forward and punched the man in the throat. He went down gagging. A ripple of discontent ran through the squad.

  “I’ll ask again: Who said that?”

  No response. Rafiq pointed at another random soldier. “You—”

  “I said it.” The man who stood was half a head taller than the rest, and well muscled. One of the few who had received proper nutrition as a youngster. Probably a politician’s kid.

  Rafiq motioned him forward. “What is it you wanted to say?”

  The soldier smiled and shot a look back toward his comrades. “We are professionals. We don’t need some fucking foreigner telling us how to prepare for an operation.”

  “You doubt my orders?”

  The man shook his head. “I doubt the judgment of a foreigner.”

  Rafiq slid his knife out of its sheath. He pointed the tip at the soldier. “You want to teach me a lesson? How about right now?”

  The man’s face hardened, and he whipped out his own blade. The blade reflected the combined light from the squad’s headlamps.

  “Ryoko, not a good idea,” one of his comrades called.

  “I’m going to teach this fucking foreign pig a lesson about the Supreme Leader’s finest troops.” He moved forward in a fluid motion, his knife slashing silver against the night sky.

  He was fast, Rafiq could see that, and he knew how to handle a knife. But he was also young and cocky about his ability to take on an older man, and a foreigner. He stepped into the soldier’s attack, allowing the blade to cut into his heavy jacket. He felt the edge bite into his flank, but Rafiq was close enough now to trap the soldier’s knife hand. With his free arm, he smashed an elbow into the younger man’s face, breaking his nose. He released the soldier’s arm and let him stagger back.

  The soldier dropped his knife, putting both hands up to his face.

  “I give,” he said in a thick voice.

  “Yes, you do,” Rafiq said. He let his anger take over, let his rage at the years of exile drive him forward. In one sweeping motion, he stepped forward and drove his knife up through the man’s jaw and into his brain. He let go of the hilt and the soldier fell back into the snow. The warm blood flowed dark, steaming in the cold white light of the headlamps.

  “Anyone else want to teach this foreigner a lesson?” he barked at the squad.

  The only answer was the wind. Even the smoke of their breaths seemed to have stopped.

  “Good.” Rafiq said. “We leave for Beijing in the morning. Leave the body for the rats.”

  Rafiq could feel the cut in his side bleeding freely. It would need stitches. He turned on his heel, careful not to let the men see any sign of his injury, and breathed deeply. A smile of satisfaction warmed his face.

  Now they had a unifying cause: their fear of him.

  CHAPTER 12

  USS Blue Ridge (LCC-19) South China Sea

  Vice Admiral Martin Cook, Commander, US Seventh Fleet, put two fingers to his lips and let out a shrill whistle in the confined space of the Joint Operations Center, or JOC, the admiral’s command and control center buried deep in the superstructure of the massive USS Blue Ridge. The hubbub of multiple conversations ceased.

  “Let’s work the problem, ladies and gentlemen. Chief of Staff, status report.”

  Captain Bernard “Sauce” Benson spoke up in a crisp voice. “Admiral, we appear to have two separate incidents of Chinese aggression within the fleet operating area.” He nodded at the operator to project the information onto the 3-D BattleSpace table display and whipped out his laser pointer.

  “The Chinese have two destroyers harassing a Japanese patrol craft in the waters off the Senkakus, south of the Japanese mainland.”

  “Define ‘harassing,’” the admiral replied.

  “The two destroyers are riding herd on either side of the smaller Japanese boat, broadcasting their usual line about the Japanese invading their territorial waters.”

  “Any contact? Is our Japanese friend just crying wolf?”

  “No, sir, no contact. Threatening actions—but they seem to be operating a lot closer than normal—and the usual BS about territorial waters.”

  Cook nodded, relaxing the tiniest bit. The Chinese were contesting every rock in the waters around their mainland as theirs by historical decree. The Japanese Senkaku Islands—or the Diaoyus, as the Chinese called them—were a string of rocks stretching from the Japanese archipelago south to Taiwan. Same argument, different day. He sorely wished someone had shown the balls to stand up to the Chi-Comms thirty years ago when all this bullshit started. Now the United States was just pissing in the wind. Hell, the Chinese probably claimed the wind as theirs, too.

  “All right, let’s get some eyes on the situation. What’s next?”

  Benson directed the operator to change the BattleSpace display, zooming out, then back down to a map of the Paracel Islands, off the coast of Vietnam. Cook gritted his teeth as he studied the familiar terrain. Following their stunning success in building working naval bases out of the Spratly Islands, south of the Philippines, the Chinese promptly set to work trying to further advance their claim on the Paracels.

  Any idiot with half a brain could see what they were doing. If the Chinese controlled both groups of islands, they effectively created a choke point for shipping in the South China Sea. If the main mission of the United States Navy was to keep the shipping lanes open across the globe, then in his book, this constituted a big problem.

  “What’ve we got, Sauce?” he said to the chief of staff.

  “Same thing, sir. Two Chinese ships ganging up on a small contingent from the Philippine Navy. The language is the same, but they’re a lot more aggressive than usual. The Filipinos are asking for assistance, sir, as are the Japanese.”

  “Assistance, hu
h? What are our options under current rules?” The Rules of Engagement was the guiding document for everything they did in-theater, and it stated in plain language that they were not to escalate a situation with the Chinese. Cook knew the answer to his question, but having his chief of staff ponder it gave him a chance to think. Besides, maybe Benson would come up with a creative option he hadn’t thought of.

  Cook certainly hoped so, because in this particular scenario, the rules didn’t sit right with him.

  He raised his eyebrows at Benson. “Well, Sauce, what are our options?”

  “Not a lot of good ones, sir. The Ford is on station near the Paracels. I recommend we reposition her closer to the scene of the incident. Show the flag.”

  Cook stroked his chin. First the P-8 Poseidon getting nearly sideswiped by a pair of Chinese fighters on a routine flight from Okinawa to Singapore, now two Chinese maritime challenges in two different parts of the South China Sea at the same time.

  Something was rotten here. Very rotten.

  Cook straightened up. It was time for some definitive action. “All right, here’s what we’re going to do. See if we can get some fighters from Okinawa to overfly the Japanese ship in the Senkakus. I want those fighters to buzz the Chinese destroyers as close as allowable under the ROE, but no closer. Supersonic flyby is authorized. Let’s make some noise over these assholes. Second, direct the Ford to initiate immediate flight operations. Let’s fill the sky over our Chinese aggressors with some good old US of A flying metal. Any questions?”

  Benson nodded. “Aye, aye, sir.” He whirled around and began issuing orders to the watch standers. When the JOC had resumed its typical high-energy hum of operations, Cook motioned for Benson to join him. They passed through a series of hatches, emerging on the Flag Bridge. A stiff wind greeted them.

  Cook turned his back on the long blue line of horizon and crossed his arms. “That was a clusterfuck in there, Sauce,” he said.

  Benson flushed. “I’m sorry, sir, I—”

  “Not your fault, Sauce. I should’ve seen this coming. When was the last time the Chi-Commies ran two naval interference ops at the same time? Answer: Never. What if one of those Chinese ships had run into a Japanese boat? Is that an act of war? Do we engage?”

  Cook leveled his gaze at his chief of staff. “The Chinese are stepping up their game, and our pants are down around our ankles. I want some goddamn clear guidance from Pac Fleet or higher. If this happens again, I want a plan in place to make sure these bastards go home with a bloody nose or at least some wounded pride. Get on the horn and get me some answers.”

  Benson set his chin. “Right away, boss.”

  CHAPTER 13

  US Cyber Command, Fort Meade, Maryland

  Midshipman First Class Janet Everett focused on her single computer screen. She was acutely aware that Goodwin and Ramirez were running the same exercise as she was, but on multiple screens. Ramirez had two monitors engaged and had probably hacked together a nice piece of code to do all the work automatically. Goodwin was running three screens, his finger on the down-arrow key, eyes shifting from screen to screen looking for anomalies.

  She was near the top in her graduating class at the academy and these two made her feel slow. She focused harder on the screen. Slow and steady wins the race, she told herself.

  The three of them were running a random security audit on a DOE agency—she didn’t even know which one—decrypting their SSL streams for suspicious activity. Not exactly glamorous work, but Mr. Riley assured her that some of the greatest hacker discoveries had come from good old detective work.

  And so Janet and her two midshipmen friends were spending their second holiday camped out at Fort Meade. According to Riley, Christmas break was an especially good time to survey government organizations for suspicious activity, since network usage tended to be low.

  She saw an outgoing ping on the network. She followed the signal to a URL, nucleartreaty.org. Odd to have an outgoing packet from a secure government site relayed to a .org site. She used her network admin access to check the system. There were only twenty or so users logged on, and none of them had sent the file.

  Janet shot a sideways glance at Ramirez and Goodwin but hesitated to say anything. She wasn’t even sure if they were looking at the SSL stream from the same agency. No, she would make sure this was an actual hack before she called it.

  She ran back through the logs, looking for another ping to the same outside URL. It took her another half hour of backtracking to find it. Janet stared at the screen, a growing sense of excitement bubbling up in her chest. It had been five hours between pings. She scrolled back through the historical record, seeking the time stamp from five hours prior.

  There it was. The same .org site receiving another outgoing packet.

  “Hey, guys, I think I’ve got something here,” she said to Goodwin and Ramirez. “Come check this out.”

  She quickly recapped the random pings and external website. Ramirez scrambled back to her station and typed in a quick search. “Website is registered to a Richard Grayson.”

  “You need to let Lieutenant Jackson know about this,” Goodwin said. “This is really good work, ma’am.”

  Janet felt a glow of pride from the praise. Sure, he was only a plebe, but he was easily the best hacker she’d ever met. “I told you to call me Janet when we’re out of the Yard. When we’re away from the academy, we’re equals, Michael.”

  “Okay, Janet,” he replied with his slight, lopsided grin. “It’s still good work.”

  Janet raised her hand. “Lieutenant Jackson, I think we’ve found something.”

  Jackson, who was doubling as the watch supervisor that day, made her way to Everett’s workstation. Her eyes grew wide as Janet laid out her case. She touched the microphone at her throat. “Listen up, all watch standers, we’ve got a possible hack in progress.” She nodded for Janet to put her monitor on the big wall screen. “Our midshipmen trainees may have uncovered something big here. They’ve identified an outgoing ping of a zipped file leaving the Department of Energy at regular intervals going to a dot-org website registered to a Richard Grayson.”

  “Dick Grayson. The site is registered to the superhero Nightwing. Classic hacker move,” one of the watch standers called out.

  Jackson nodded. “Agreed. Let’s find out where this hack is coming from and how it got there.” She turned back to the midshipmen. “Good job, all of you.”

  “It was Janet, ma’am,” Goodwin said. “She’s the one who found it.”

  Janet found herself blushing. “How can we help?” she said to cover her embarrassment.

  “We need to determine the five w’s on this case: who, what, when, where, and why. You’ve already given us a good starting place, but now the real work begins. We need to find out as much as we can without tipping off the hacker. From the looks of it, these guys have been there for a while, which means they’re dug in and probably have backup systems in place if we try to shut them down. There’ll be an executable file on the network somewhere that’s running the show—probably embedded. We need to find that file.”

  “We’re on it, ma’am,” Janet said.

  Jackson smiled. “I’m sure you are.”

  Janet turned to her friends. “Let’s do this, guys. How do we track down this executable?”

  Ramirez posted her chin on her fist. “Well, there’s got to be some kind of pattern to the usage, right? I mean, the hackers are using this program to capture data, zip it into a packet, and send it off-site. They need to feed the outgoing stream, which is on a schedule.” She sat up and pulled her rolling chair toward the monitor. “It stands to reason the executable is on a schedule, too. Maybe I can write a script for Michael that feeds him all the programs with a regular start-stop cycle and he can look for a pattern.”

  Janet shook her head. “That’s got to be thousands of programs, cycling all the time. We’re talking millions of lines of code.”

  Ramirez was already hammering at h
er keyboard. “It’s the best we’ve got for now.”

  Within the hour, she’d hacked together a monitoring program to allow Goodwin to see the inner workings of the Department of Energy network. The young midshipman had set up his three monitors in a band shell–style arrangement so he could watch all three without moving his head. Ramirez routed the feed to his screens, and they waited.

  Michael sat perfectly still, his eyes scanning across the code as it rolled down his screens. Minutes turned into hours, but the midshipman sat still as a stone.

  “What’s he doing?” said a voice from behind Janet.

  It was Don Riley. “Sorry, didn’t mean to startle you,” he said. “Jackson called me. Said you guys had uncovered a hack in progress. He’s looking for something on the DOE network?”

  “Dre wrote a program that lets us look for a suspicious start-stop cycle on the network. He’s looking for a pattern in the data, hoping it will lead us to the hidden executable.”

  “By himself? Can he really watch three screens at once?”

  Janet shrugged. “If anyone can do it, it’s Michael. He’s been at it for nearly three hours without a break.”

  “I got it,” Michael said. “At least, I think I do. Stop the feed, Dre.” His normally calm voice held a trace of excitement. Using his cursor, Michael highlighted one line of code on each screen. “These all point back to a DLL file.”

  Ramirez already had the file open and was scrolling down the screen. “Holy shit, you did it, Michael! This has got to be it.”

  Jackson crowded close, peering over Ramirez’s shoulder. Janet watched the lieutenant’s eyebrows arch up, and then she looked back at Don Riley, nodding.