by David Bruns
When he entered the watch floor, So-won looked up in surprise. “Couldn’t sleep?”
Rafiq smiled. “No rest for the wicked. Switch from landline to satellite uplinks.”
“So soon?” she said.
Rafiq ignored her. “Then bring the Japanese network online.”
CHAPTER 48
USS Gerald R. Ford (CVN-78) 65 miles south of Taiwan
Admiral Manolo pursed his lips as he surveyed the BattleSpace display dominating the center of Flag Watch. The holographic representation showed an eighty-mile radius around the Ford strike force. The lieutenant operator, flexing the manipulator on his right hand, waited for his orders.
Manolo looked through the hologram at Captain Henderson. “What’s the status of our AWACS support from the air force in Okinawa?” The damage from the Chinese cruise-missile strike had put a serious dent in their air coverage. They’d lost nearly a third of their air wing, including two of the four E-2D Hawkeyes the strike group depended on for organic early-warning air support.
“Kadena’s got them in the air, sir. They’ll be on station within the hour.”
The admiral growled. He rubbed his face, feeling the coarse stubble grind against his palms like sandpaper. The day had been consumed with damage-control reports, getting the remaining air wing flying again and establishing a functional screen around the carrier. And always hindering their progress were the random comms outages that had continued all day.
The loss of the Hawkeyes partly deprived him of long-range early warning and a solid overall view of his environment. The BattleSpace table worked best with lots of data to process, and the Hawkeyes generated a lot of data.
“Lieutenant, have the Zumwalt move to five miles off our starboard beam.” He watched as the operator reached into the hologram to touch the tiny representation of the navy’s state-of-the-art destroyer. The ship’s information flashed onto the wall screen, along with a command to reposition to their new station. The ship’s acknowledgment flashed on the same screen.
Manolo cursed to himself. They needed better top-down coverage. He needed to see where the goddamn Chinese were! He strode across the room and pushed open the door to Supplementary Plot—or SUPPLOT, as it was called—the tiny top-secret space dedicated to keeping the strike group connected to national intelligence agencies.
“Commander,” he barked at the intel officer on duty, “where’s our satellite coverage? We’re fighting blind out here.”
The intel officer, or N2, had a ruddy complexion and a spare tire that sagged over his belt line. “We’ve got satellites repositioned, sir, but we’re still seeing connectivity problems.”
“Very well,” Manolo replied, even though it was anything but. He returned to his post at the railing overlooking the BattleSpace display. As he watched, the scale of the space expanded.
“Admiral,” said the BattleSpace operator with a note of relief in his tone. “We’re receiving a data link from the AWACS. Processing now.” The operator’s gloved right hand carved the open air as he worked on the virtual display visible in his goggles. Manolo had tried the BattleSpace VR rig as part of his command training, and the damn thing had left him seasick. So much for technology.
The holographic display flickered and two new, red icons appeared. Surface ships. The lieutenant spoke in a calm voice. “Admiral, two new sonar contacts reported from Key West, correlated with AWACS data. Classified as Luyang-class guided-missile destroyers. The ships are on a parallel track with the strike group.”
Finally, Manolo thought. Time for some payback. “Very well. Order the Zumwalt to engage both contacts with long-range missiles.”
He watched as the order went out. The Zumwalt’s status flashed and a spool of data trailed across the wall screen.
“Missiles inbound!” The BattleSpace table blinked red and a cluster of fast-moving red tracks speared across the holographic space. “Admiral, we have twelve inbound missiles. Probable Chinese C-805s.”
Manolo grimaced. In their current damaged state, even one or two of those missiles might finish off the Ford.
“Very well,” Manolo said. “Transfer the telemetry data to the strike force. All ships engage.”
BattleSpace went blank. “We’ve lost the data link with the strike force, sir,” the BattleSpace operator called out, a note of panic in his voice.
The admiral wheeled around. “On any available circuit, transmit in the clear: Incoming missiles, all ships engage.”
He rushed out to Vulture’s Row just in time to see the Zumwalt’s vertical launch batteries release a slew of surface-to-air missiles. On the horizon, forward of the Ford’s beam, the USS Mustin—an Arleigh Burke–class guided-missile destroyer—followed suit with a fiery launch. The air filled with dozens of points of light. There was an explosion as one of the friendly SAMs destroyed an incoming Chinese antiship cruise missile. Then another, and another, and another. He lost count. Six destroyed, seven?
“Missiles inbound. Brace for impact.” The 1MC public-address system rang through the ship.
Manolo walked back inside Flag Watch. The BattleSpace table was still blank. The lieutenant still had the VR goggles on, and his right hand pawed at the open space in front of him as he tried to reboot the system.
His petty officer shadow with the sound-powered telephone headset was back. The whites of his eyes flashed at Manolo in the dimness of the space. Manolo put his hand on the young man’s arm and gave him a squeeze.
A small explosion sounded outside. Chaff, Manolo thought. The air around the carrier would be full of metal confetti in a last attempt to draw away the Chinese missiles. The wind was favorable; it might fool the missiles. At least some of them.
The SeaRAM defenses punched out airframe missiles with a steady beat. The bzzzt of the CIWS started, sounding like a buzzer in the next room. An explosion rocked the ship. Chalk another kill up to the CIWS, Manolo thought.
He gripped a steel stanchion and said to the petty officer, “Hang on, son. This is gonna hurt.”
The heavy steel deck of the mighty ship trembled under his feet, and then a searing light consumed the world of Admiral Han Manolo.
CHAPTER 49
US Cyber Command, Fort Meade, Maryland
Don scanned past the message header info to the heart of the flash message from the USS Zumwalt:
USS FORD ATTACKED BY CHINESE DDGS. SHIP IS ON FIRE AND AFLOAT, BUT DAMAGED BEYOND REPAIR AND SINKING. XO ORDERED ABANDON SHIP. STRIKE GROUP FLAG SHIFTED TO USS ZUMWALT. CDR FORD STRIKE GROUP KIA.
Don cursed under his breath and passed the message to Lieutenant Jackson. An American aircraft carrier sunk? Unthinkable—except it had just happened.
“Six thousand, including the air wing,” Jackson whispered.
“What?”
“That’s the crew of the Ford. More than six thousand people—including my brother,” Jackson said.
“I’m sorry.” It sounded lame. It was lame.
“These comms outages,” Jackson said. “I’ll bet they had a lot to do with it.”
“Look, Lieutenant—”
“Don’t, sir. Don’t say it.” She flung out her arm, encompassing the packed ops center in a violent sweep. “The modern navy, all this technology, the Trident program? Without good comms, it’s just a bunch of junk. They’re sitting ducks out there unless we do our part.” Her eyes flashed at him.
Don wasn’t sure whether to hug her or tell her to take five and pull herself together. He did neither. “So, let’s do that. Assume you’re right. Assume we’ve been hacked. How? Why? Who’s doing it? Unless we can find those answers, we’ll never get anywhere.” He pointed at the workstations. “This is your front line. Get to work, Lieutenant.”
Don watched her go. His speech wasn’t going to go down in the history books as great motivation, but it got the job done. For now.
They’d divided the available staff into different groups, some looking at system architecture flaws, some looking at peer-to-peer protocol, and stil
l others looking at source code for any suspicious malware traces. The three midshipmen had been put into the last group.
Looking for “suspicious code” within a program as complex as Trident was like a cop staring at a random highway at rush hour hoping his murder suspect would drive by. But, as usual, the mids had cooked up some shortcuts to speed up the process.
Goodwin was watching lines of code scroll down four screens at once, his body still, his eyes unblinking, staring at a fixed point. Don knew the kid was somehow processing all four screens, but he was damned if he knew how he did it. Every so often he would stop, highlight a section, and transfer a chunk of code to Everett’s screen for deeper analysis. Ramirez was busy writing small routines to feed Goodwin’s workflow.
Don came up behind them. “Can I interrupt?”
All three stopped what they were doing and spun in their chairs.
“What’ve you got so far?” he asked.
Everett spoke up. “There’s a whole lot of trash in the code. Lines of extra commands that don’t seem to be part of the system, but we have no idea what they do.”
“Michael’s able to find the same code—in different places—across multiple platforms,” Ramirez said, “but we’re just finding bits and pieces, not a whole working program.”
“What if we had a baseline?” Goodwin said.
Don looked at him. “Explain.”
The midshipman stood up. “When you read us into Trident, you told us it was a viral supercomputing network. Each node carries an independent copy of the source code, right?”
“Go on.”
“What if the malware we’re looking for isn’t in the system architecture; what if it’s in each node?” He carved the air with his hands as he spoke.
“Maybe it’s a worm,” Ramirez said.
Goodwin grimaced. “Sort of. It infects like a worm, but it doesn’t hijack a single program, it takes over the whole node. The node becomes a slave to some larger program…” His voice trailed off.
Don considered the young man. “Say you’re right. How do we prove that theory?”
“If Goodwin’s right,” Everett said, “then all we’re finding are bits and pieces of random code. We need to figure out a way to get the whole program.”
Don paused. “We need to infect a new node. On purpose.”
* * *
It turned out they needed to infect four new nodes before they had enough data to make a conclusion. Each time, the infection added thousands of lines of new code fragments, sprinkled throughout the existing programs—the same code fragments, but in a different order each time.
“It’s a jigsaw puzzle,” Everett said.
“So there has to be another program that assembles the picture,” Ramirez added.
“And then what?” Don asked. “What does the assembled program do?”
The midshipmen looked at each other.
“Figure it out,” Don said. “Call Jackson if you need help.”
Don strode out of the main ops center to the adjacent SCIF, using the retina scanner to gain entrance. Two of his best operators were manning workstations. They looked up as he entered.
“Well,” Don said, “how happy is the panda?”
They’d all been relieved to find their back door into the Chinese network still available. For the last few hours, his team had been combing through the Chinese system in preparation for a cyberoffensive that would destroy their command and control network. But before they launched an attack, they needed to find out what was going on inside the Chinese military and why their battle tactics were so different than anticipated.
It just didn’t make sense.
A young woman, a fluent Mandarin speaker and an expert on Chinese cybertactics, stripped earbuds from her ears and shook her head. “It’s the damnedest thing, sir. I mean, the Chinese are definitely ordering these attacks—we found clear evidence—but their military is freaking out that these are phantom orders.”
“But the orders are real?”
Both operators nodded. “Absolutely. Every single one came from Beijing through proper channels.”
“And your working theory is?”
“Somebody’s trying to cover this up?” She frowned. “I’ve studied the Chinese military for years and this makes no sense. Unless someone has hijacked their entire network, these orders to attack the US are the real deal.”
“Is that possible?” Don asked.
“Hijack their entire network without the Chinese knowing they’d been hacked? No way, not possible.”
Don stared at her.
“Sir? Are you okay?”
“Keep at it. I’ll be back in a few minutes with some reinforcements. I have an idea.”
* * *
Don rapped lightly on the office door of his boss, Air Force Brigadier General Tom Price, known as the J2 in the parlance of the military intelligence world.
“Sir, I have an unusual request,” he began.
Price sat back in his chair and pulled off his reading glasses. A wiry man with a fringe of gray hair, he looked more like an accountant than a one-star general. Don also knew the man was whip-smart and possessed a temper that could flare at inconvenient times.
Price pointed his chin at the open chair across from his desk. “Out with it, Riley.”
There was no use beating around the bush, so Don dove in. “I want to read the midshipmen into Happy Panda.”
Price held his gaze without emotion. “You’re right, that is unusual. Explain.”
“They’ve managed to find a bucket of code that’s resident on each node of the Trident system.”
“So I’ve heard, but we don’t know what it’s for. It’s just trash.”
“But what if it’s not? What if there’s another program, an assembly program that uses this code to build another—a much larger and more dangerous—program? What if it just hasn’t been activated yet?”
“To what end?”
Don shrugged. “We don’t know yet. This is just a theory, but we have been able to verify that it shows up on multiple nodes in Trident.”
Price fiddled with his glasses. “I’m not tracking, Riley. What does this have to do with Panda?”
“I think the same program is on the Chinese system—and it’s been turned on.”
“I think I see where you are going with this. You think that by seeing what it did to the Chinese we can make sure the same thing doesn’t happen to us.”
“Exactly.”
Don was afraid if Price twisted his glasses any more, he’d break the frames. The ticking of the wall clock behind Don sounded like a hammer blow in the silence.
“And you’re convinced one of these midshipmen can figure this out? They need access to Panda?”
“No, sir, I’m sure all three of the midshipmen—together—can give us a shot at figuring this thing out before it hits us.” He paused. “If my theory is right, sir.”
General Price threw his glasses onto his desk. He stared at Don for what seemed like a full minute.
“Do it.”
CHAPTER 50
US Cyber Command, Fort Meade, Maryland
Don led the midshipmen into a conference room and pointed to a row of chairs across the table from him. All three slumped to a sitting position wearing the thousand-yard stare of people who had spent far too long looking at a computer monitor.
He passed each of them a sheet of paper. “Remember when I asked you to sign a special NDA so you could look at Trident?”
They nodded. Ramirez scanned the sheet and grinned. “Happy Panda—sounds like a Chinese restaurant.” Everett looked at her and Ramirez stopped smiling. “This is about China, sir?”
Don pointed at the paper. “Read carefully and sign, then we can talk.”
When the pages were signed and returned, Don began. “The working theory you’ve laid out for me—and I’ve sold up the chain of command—is that we’ve been hacked. Someone installed a virus that has salted our operational code with what looks
like trash, the kind of stuff left over from any programming effort. When the time is right, someone activates an assembler routine that uses all these pieces to make a master program. We don’t know who’s behind it, or why, or what this master program does. Do I have it right so far?”
His trio of midshipmen watched him with rapt gazes. Everett nodded for all of them.
“Well, I buy your theory, lock, stock, and barrel. Now I’ll add to it. I think the Chinese got hacked also, and whoever it is has successfully run the assembly routine on their system.”
The midshipmen exchanged glances. Everett spoke. “But we’re in a shooting war with China. What are we going to do? Call them up and ask them?”
Don shook his head. “We’re going to have a look inside their system and see if we can figure out what’s going on.”
“We can do that?” Ramirez asked.
“Happy Panda is an access point. We discovered this flaw in their security and rather than exploit it immediately, we set it aside for a rainy day, for a time when we might need access to their network.”
“A time like right now,” Goodwin said.
“Exactly.”
“And you’re going to let us poke around inside the Chinese military network?” Everett asked. Her eyes shone with excitement, boosting Don’s own mood.
He stood. “Follow me.”
* * *
With Don, his two civilian operators, and the three midshipmen, the SCIF was at capacity. The operators, Kang and Able, gave up their seats to Ramirez and Goodwin but hovered over their shoulders. Don ignored the glares he received from his operators.
“Ignore the data files,” said Kang to Goodwin. “Unless you speak Mandarin, you won’t be able to make heads or tails of them.”
“Let’s take a few of the more complicated lines of code from the seed program and see if we can find them in the Chinese network,” Goodwin said.
