Rules of Engagement

by David Bruns

  “All ahead full, Mr. Wei,” he shouted. “Let’s show these thieving Japanese fishermen the power of the Chinese navy.”

  “Aye, aye, sir,” came the faint reply. The bow wave grew wider. He gripped the railing.

  Wei appeared at his side. He leaned in and shouted in his captain’s ear. “New radar contact, Captain. Classified as a fishing vessel.”

  Li stepped back into the shelter of the bridge, his ears ringing in the stillness. The radar operator stepped to the side so the captain could view the screen. “Only six thousand meters off the coast, Captain. Well within our territorial waters,” Wei said.

  Li nodded, pinching his lower lip. Perfect. A golden opportunity to set an example with these Japanese fishermen, let them know there was a new Chinese captain patrolling these waters and he was not about to let anyone violate the sovereignty of the People’s Republic of China.

  “Set an intercept course, Mr. Wei.”

  The ship came into sight. The Yangcheng reduced speed, and the OOD brought a pair of binoculars to his captain on the bridge wing. As they suspected, a Japanese trawler, barely making way, but no nets out. Lit up like a Spring Festival parade.

  “Rig ship for shouldering operations, Mr. Wei.”

  “Captain?”

  Shouldering operations, where a ship would bump another to alter its course, were normally done in daylight, although there was no regulation against doing them at night.

  Be bold, Li thought. You are in command.

  “Did I not make myself clear, Mr. Wei?” he said in a voice loud enough for the whole bridge to hear. “Rig ship for shouldering ops.”

  The general-quarters alarm rang, and the Yangcheng filled with the sounds of running feet, his men taking their stations.

  Li took the radio himself. “Japanese trawler, this is the People’s Liberation Army Navy warship Yangcheng. You are violating the sovereign waters of the People’s Republic of China. You will turn back to sea. Immediately.” He nodded in satisfaction at his bold tone.

  A long blast of Japanese, interspersed with blasts of static, came back.

  “Where’s our translator?” Li demanded.

  “Petty Officer Wu is on leave, sir. The only Japanese speaker on board is Seaman Hai.”

  “Well, get him up here!” Li fumed. He would have words with the senior enlisted man who set the watch stations. Translators should be part of the watch rotation.

  Seaman Hai was a skinny, acne-pocked kid still in his teens. His eyes were wide with apprehension as he stepped onto the bridge. “Reporting as ordered, sir,” he said to the OOD. Wei pointed at the captain, who was pacing between the radio and the radar station.

  “You speak Japanese?” Li demanded.

  Hai nodded. “Yes, sir,” he whispered.

  Li thrust the radio handset at him. “Talk to them. Tell them to move out to sea.”

  A long exchange ensued between Seaman Hai and the Japanese trawler. “They say they are making best speed, but their ship is slow,” Hai said. He shifted from one foot to the other. “Their accent is very strong, and they are talking very fast. My translation is limited, sir.”

  Li nodded. “Tell them to turn to seaward. We will escort them.”

  Another long exchange as the trawler made minimal progress away from land.

  The OOD approached Li. “Captain, they may have engine trouble. Maybe we should wait until morning—”

  Li raised his binoculars. “They have men on the fantail. They’re putting out nets! They’re just ignoring us.” He dropped the binoculars. “All ahead two-thirds, Mr. Wei. Let’s give them a push in the right direction.”

  The radio erupted in another volley of Japanese and static. Seaman Hai looked frozen to the deck.

  “Captain, I recommend we—” the OOD began.

  “Mr. Wei, I have the conn.” On the ship-wide system: “All hands stand by for shouldering operations.”

  As the announcement rang through the ship, Wei tried one more time. “Sir, we’re moving quite fast—”

  “You stand relieved, Mr. Wei.”

  Captain Li stepped up to the bridge window to better judge his speed and angle of attack. The bright lights of the trawler made for an easy target and he could see the Japanese men watching him from the fantail.

  He’d done this simulation a hundred times. Match their course, take an oblique angle, and bump them as his ship went past. Normally, the drill called for the shouldering ship to match speed, but the trawler was barely moving. He’d give them a glancing blow, a tap and nothing more.

  “All ahead one-third,” Li said.

  “One-third, aye, sir.”

  The speed didn’t die off as fast as in the simulator and Li considered putting on a backing bell to drop his speed. Not needed, he decided. He’d just clip them on the way past.

  The water at the stern of the trawler boiled as they tried to get away. Li’s lips curled back in a smile.

  Finally, you start your engines, you lying Japanese bastards.

  “Captain, I think maybe one of their engines is out! Recommend we break contact!” Wei had binoculars to his eyes and his voice cracked with concern.

  Li raised his own binoculars. Wei was right: the boiling of water was only on the starboard side of the fantail. He watched the fishermen scramble away as the Chinese frigate bore down on them.

  Then, under the force of one engine at full power, the Japanese trawler began to turn—right into the frigate’s path.

  “All back emergency!” Wei screamed. “Hard right rudder!”

  The helmsman hesitated, looking from his captain to Lieutenant Wei.

  Those precious few seconds were all it took. The lights of the trawler flashed by the bridge of the Yangcheng and Li heard the sickening crunch of metal on metal. The Yangcheng slowed for an instant, then plowed forward.

  Li raced to the bridge wing. The bow of the trawler was gone—sliced off by the sharp keel of the frigate. The fishing vessel, her front a gaping hole, plowed into the next wave and sank out of sight.

  CHAPTER 17

  Tokyo, Japan

  The subway tunnel was damp and warm. Rafiq stripped off the bright yellow jacket of the Tokyo-based Nikkei-Addams engineering firm and dropped it to the ground. He left the white hard hat on and grinned at So-won.

  “We’re in,” he said into his radio.

  The young woman pulled the mask away from her nose and mouth. “Can I take this off now?”

  Rafiq struck off down the tunnel without answering her. He’d come to Japan prepared to dig another tunnel. In fact, he’d gone to great lengths to select North Koreans with Japanese ancestry—a relic of the “comfort women” from World War II—for his team. So-won was obviously of North Korean descent, and her mannerisms did not allow her to blend in with the Japanese population. Nevertheless, Rafiq trusted her and only her to do the connection and upload, so he solved the issue by making her wear a face mask in public, a common enough practice in Japan.

  It turned out all his advance planning wasn’t needed. In the few months since he had selected the dig site, the Tokyo Ministry of Transportation had started work on a new subway extension less than a kilometer from the gates of the Yokosuka naval base. The telecom junction box he needed had already been uncovered.

  A mixed blessing, he soon found.

  “Their network admins will certainly be on alert for any suspicious activity,” So-won told him. “Beijing was easy. They never suspected anyone could access that junction box, much less tap into it. This one could be tougher.”

  Rafiq considered the problem for a full day before deciding to move forward. To increase their chances of success, he planned an additional level of subterfuge. While they were accessing the Japanese network, he would have a team launch a dedicated denial-of-service attack as a distraction.

  So-won entered the chain-link fence surrounding the telecom junction box and opened the relay center. The interior of the junction box was a wall of blinking fiber-optic connections, easily t
en times the size of the dedicated box in Beijing. Rafiq fretted. This might take longer than he’d planned.

  The young woman set up her suitcase and started connecting alligator clips to the lines. She quickly determined which block to probe, but she needed to find the lines dedicated to the naval base. Thirty minutes ticked by before she said, “I’m in. Tell them to go ahead.”

  Rafiq tapped out a secure text and received a one-word reply.

  So-won stared at her screen, monitoring traffic levels. Another twenty minutes crawled by, leaving Rafiq wondering if their attempt to ghost-net thousands of Chinese computers into spambots directed at the Yokosuka naval base was going to get him the reaction he wanted.

  “It’s working, Chul,” the tech whispered in Korean. “They’re reconfiguring their servers now.”

  Rafiq had been briefed that this was standard practice. If the network detected an attack, the first defensive measure was to wall off its most critical servers from the outside world—except Rafiq and his technician were already inside. While the Japanese network admins worked feverishly to protect themselves from the exterior denial-of-service threat, Rafiq would be uploading the program to their servers.

  “Do it,” Rafiq said, glancing at his watch. “Hurry.” Nearly two hours gone.

  “Nani o shiteru no?” What are you doing?

  Rafiq whirled to find an older Japanese man in the tunnel. His heavy workman’s coveralls were unzipped to his waist, and a dented metal lunchbox dangled from his hand. His broad smile faded at the sight of a foreigner in the secure work area.

  Rafiq scooped up the bright yellow jacket with the fake ID tag. “Nikkei-Addams,” he said, in deliberate syllables, in English. “En-gi-neer-ing.” He motioned at the roof structure.

  “Ah,” said the old man brightly. “Engineering,” he repeated. His gaze shifted to the tech in the cage. “Tele-comm,” he said.

  Rafiq smiled and stepped between the man and the fence containing the junction box. “That’s right, telecom.”

  But the worker kept moving forward. Inside the cage, So-won looked up. Her eyes met the worker’s. Too late, Rafiq saw she’d forgotten to put on her mask. As if to accentuate the issue, So-won let out a curse in Korean. There was no mistaking her North Korean accent.

  The worker stopped short, a puzzled expression on his face. “Korean?”

  Rafiq lashed out with a right hook that sent the man to the ground. The man’s eyes grew wide as the big foreigner knelt on his chest and wrapped his hands around his neck. His cries reduced to choking gurgles, then nothing. Rafiq waited until the man’s legs stopped moving; then he stood.

  “Are you finished yet?” he snarled at So-won.

  She shook her head. “Ten more minutes, at least.”

  Rafiq’s blood was up now. Taking a life excited him in a way he didn’t understand but enjoyed all the same. He jogged to the end of the tunnel, the way the worker had come in. Was it possible the man was just early for his shift? Or were there more workers in the area?

  When he strode back to the telecom cage, So-won was packing up the suitcase with shaking hands. She handed him the thumb drive containing the source code.

  “You uploaded the program? You’re sure?” Rafiq grabbed her arm in a tight grip.

  She nodded, her eyes cutting to the dead body a few feet away.

  He released her. “Put your mask on.” Rafiq slipped on his yellow jacket and grabbed the worker by the collar, dragging him back the way they’d come.

  As they exited the tunnel into the wide expanse of what would someday be a new subway station, Rafiq spied a backhoe. He loped toward it, the body bouncing along behind him. He dropped the corpse, swung into the operator’s chair, and started the machine. The deep rumbling made a fearful noise in the space.

  He raised the bucket. “Put his head under the bucket,” he called to So-won.

  She was trembling all over and the dead man’s body was heavy, but she did as Rafiq directed. He leaned over to make sure the alignment was right, then released a lever. The heavy metal bucket, its edges shiny from wear, crushed the unfortunate worker’s upper torso and skull.

  Good luck figuring out he was strangled, Rafiq thought.

  He shut off the backhoe, and silence settled over the area. Rafiq swung down, dropping lightly to the ground next to the partially crushed corpse. So-won’s eyes were wide over her white face mask.

  Rafiq grinned at her. “That’ll teach him to show up to work early, right?”

  His laugh echoed in the pit.

  CHAPTER 18

  US Cyber Command, Fort Meade, Maryland

  Midshipman Fourth Class Michael Goodwin leaned back in his chair, watching his screen. It was hard to believe he was seeing an actual hack take place on an actual bank. To make it even more surreal, his job was just to watch it happen.

  “If it’s not in our national interest,” Lieutenant Jackson said over his shoulder, “we don’t touch it. We just observe and learn.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Nice job on the entry, Goodwin. The Dubai Islamic Bank is no pushover on network security.”

  “Thank you, ma’am.”

  He was far ahead in his classes at the academy. Far enough, in fact, that he was released to Cyber Command for a three-day weekend once a month, along with Ramirez and Everett. Working as part of a team was a new experience for Goodwin. To his surprise, he found he kind of enjoyed it. His teammates balanced him, made him better. Dre Ramirez could visualize and write code faster than anyone he’d ever met, and Janet Everett saw the big picture, helped them focus their energy on the right areas.

  Lieutenant Jackson and Mr. Riley had taken to calling them the Triad. Michael smiled to himself. For the first time in his life, he was part of a gang. Ironic, considering he’d spent most of elementary school trying to stay out of gangs.

  Back in his old neighborhood in Lennox, gang life was the only life. When he closed his eyes at night, Michael could still hear the big jets coming in for a landing at LAX, their screaming engines shaking the walls of his tiny bedroom. Funny, after a while, even a noise that loud became background. You just stopped hearing the jets.

  Same with the gunshots.

  His mother was killed in a drive-by shooting when he was ten. A stray bullet, the cops said. The gangbangers hadn’t even been targeting his house. His mother was just collateral damage.

  If he concentrated he could remember the contours of her face, the way her skin crinkled when she laughed, the rumble of her voice when she sang him to sleep between the cries of the screaming jets.

  And then she was gone. Erased from his life.

  Although he didn’t know it at the time, Michael was “on the spectrum,” as the current lingo went. He didn’t experience emotions like other people, that’s what the doctors told his mother. Maybe not, but he felt a hole in his heart when his mother disappeared, no matter what they said he had going on in his head.

  Miss Eustace came into his life at that point and everything changed for Michael. What had been his disability magically became a skill set people found amazing. Private boarding schools, early acceptance to MIT, and then a visit from Mr. Riley and off to the US Naval Academy. Michael’s life was not his own, but right now he was okay with that.

  “Earth to Michael.” Dre waved her hand in front of his face. “Come in, Michael.”

  “Sorry. What’d you say?”

  Everett laughed. “Lieutenant Jackson wants us to follow this hack and file a full report. Are you up for that or do you need a break?”

  Michael straightened in his chair. “No, I’m good. Just spaced out there for a second. I’ll figure out how the hacker got in if you guys want to backtrack and figure out who he is.”

  Janet nodded. “Let’s do it.”

  Michael submerged himself in the code. It was odd. He wasn’t good at writing code, but he had a knack for reading it. The trick was not to absorb every line but to try to see through the body of the program … like trying to
see a 3-D picture. If you stared at the dots, you’d never see the picture. But if you let your mind relax, the picture popped into view.

  Using the Cyber Command toolbox, he set to work following the hacker’s digital trail within the bank network. This guy was professional, almost surgical with his movements. After a solid hour, Goodwin isolated his entry point to a vendor’s network.

  “We tracked it back to the Russians,” Janet said. “The Golden Bear.” Pseudomilitary groups like this one were covertly funded by Putin’s government to collect information that could be used to disrupt government operations all over the world.

  Jackson circled back to them for an update. She swore under her breath. “We’re finding these guys all over the place. See if there’s any chatter about that zero-day flaw being sold on the vulnerability markets in the last few weeks. They probably bought their way in.”

  Dre pulled up a new screen. “I’ll do it.” New weaknesses in software were being discovered all the time. Some enterprising criminals had figured out a way to set up an auction site to sell these vulnerabilities to the highest bidder.

  “Stay on it, you three,” Jackson said. “Janet, you’re in charge of writing up the report.”

  “Yes, ma’am. As soon as our plebe figures out how they got in in the first place, I’ll have it ready for your review.”

  Michael looked up, his feelings hurt. Then he saw smiles all around. They’re teasing me, he thought. He curved his lips into a grin.

  “You’re not losing your edge, are you, Goodwin?” Lieutenant Jackson said.

  “No, ma’am,” Michael said. “As long as I’ve got my teammates with me, I’m good.”

  Janet and Dre exchanged glances.

  Michael frowned. “Did I say something wrong?”

  Dre punched him on the arm. “Nope, you’re good, plebe. Now get back to work.”

  CHAPTER 19

  Hong Kong, China

  Despite the late hour, Kong Sung-il left the North Korean Consulate General building with a spring in his step. The door on his limousine closed behind him with a satisfying thump.