Rules of Engagement

by David Bruns

  But the sky was full of missiles now as the attacking warheads split into quarters and entered their terminal descent.

  Shiny chaff clouds sprouted from the Reagan and her escorts, a final effort to fool the incoming missiles.

  Captain Henderson hurried to the door just as the IMC blared out, “Missiles inbound, brace for impact.”

  CHAPTER 53

  US Cyber Command, Fort Meade, Maryland

  Don wanted to pace, but the tight space of the SCIF did not allow it. Goodwin and Ramirez hunched over the workstations, with Everett seated on a spare chair she had wedged between them. The three of them spoke in low voices as they concentrated on the screens.

  “How much have we downloaded?” Don asked.

  Ramirez checked her monitor. “Twenty percent, sir.”

  “Any idea what the third section of the master program is for?”

  Ramirez shot a glance over her shoulder. “No, sir.”

  “Not even ideas?”

  “Sir?” Everett’s voice held a note of irritation. “Maybe you can let them work the problem. We’ll call you if we find anything.”

  “Sorry.” Don pushed toward the door. “I’ll be on the watch floor.”

  He was surprised to find General Price waiting for him. The J2’s normally calm features were pinched with worry. “You were right, Riley. We checked the Japanese command and control network and found the same trash code. They’ve been infected as well.”

  Don absorbed the new information. “But so far whoever is behind this has only activated the Chinese network. What does that tell us?”

  Price grimaced. “That’s what I want to know. If it’s not the Chinese behind this, then who? Russia? Would they be that stupid? Putin likes instability, but he likes instability he can control—and what do they have to gain from a shooting war in Asia?”

  “Takes the pressure off them in Europe,” Don said.

  “Putin’s an egomaniac, but he’s not a fool. He knows when countries start blowing up each other’s shit, it doesn’t usually stop at a border.”

  “North Koreans?” Don ventured.

  “Latest intel I’ve seen says they don’t have the juice for this,” Price said.

  Don flashed on Rafiq Roshed. “Are you sure about that, sir?”

  “You know something.” Price didn’t make it a question.

  “Maybe.… The most important thing right now is to figure out what this program does.”

  “Good point. Where are we on that?”

  “Not far enough. We’ve isolated the program on the Chinese network and we’re downloading it in packets to avoid getting noticed. So far, we’ve got twenty percent in house. Meanwhile, we’ve got the mids studying it to see if we can figure out what it does.”

  Price shook his head. “Midshipmen. I never thought I’d see the day where technology moved so fast we had to bring in baby officers just to keep up.”

  Don resisted the desire to roll his eyes. “These three are special, sir.” He tried to change the subject. “Have we given any thought to telling the Chinese they’ve been hacked?”

  “Well, you can ask the president yourself when you brief him in an hour,” Price replied.

  Don paled. “Sir, we don’t know enough to give him good advice yet. I need more time.”

  “Time’s up, Riley. While we’re screwing around in the virtual world, real missiles are flying around in the real world. People are getting killed. If you really believe the Chinese are being used, then you need to tell the commander in chief.”

  An alert sounded on the watch floor indicating another communications interruption. As Don watched, the front wall screen went blank. Operators looked up from their workstations in alarm. A few stood. “Anybody else offline?” someone called.

  Price looked at Don. “Get that program downloaded, Riley. I don’t care if the Chinese find us. Do it!”

  Don rushed to the SCIF, tapping his foot as he paused to scan his retina. He burst into the secure area. “Download the entire program from the Chinese network. Do it now.”

  Kang stared at him. “Mr. Riley, we’re only at twenty-two percent. If we try to download it all the Chinese will—”

  “Do it! That’s an order.”

  Ramirez’s hands flew across the keyboard. She punched a final button. “Downloading now.”

  Goodwin watched from the other screen. “Twenty-seven percent, twenty-nine…”

  “They’ll be onto us any second now,” Kang said.

  “Thirty-eight.”

  “They found us,” Ramirez said. Several seconds later, her screen went blank. “Download’s terminated.”

  “How much did we get?” Don asked.

  “Forty percent,” Goodwin said.

  Don nodded. “Okay, we’ve got a partial download and what you were able to observe online. Get to work. We know this thing is in Trident. It’s just a matter of time before whoever’s behind this turns it on. I want to know what it does and how to kill it—before it’s too late.”

  “I think we figured it out, sir.” Goodwin’s voice was cool.

  Everyone in the room stared at the midshipman.

  “Go on, Goodwin,” Don said.

  The young man shot a glance at Everett, who nodded. “I think the third part is a machine learning module,” Goodwin said finally.

  “You mean like artificial intelligence?” Kang said.

  “No, ma’am. The term ‘AI’ implies sentience. This is a program, not a being.”

  “It’s teaching itself how to play war?” Johnson said.

  Ramirez jumped in. “Not exactly, sir—at least not yet. Someone is feeding it examples, molding its behavior. After enough inputs, it will start to act independently. To think on its own.”

  “And now this thing is in our system?” Kang said, looking at Don. “It’s in Trident?”

  Don bit his lip, then nodded once. “Who’s teaching it?” he said.

  The midshipmen looked at one another.

  “Not good enough,” Don said. “We’re looking at a situation where the greatest navy in the history of the world is in the hands of a rogue computer program. Figure it out. Now.”

  CHAPTER 54

  White House Situation Room, Washington, DC

  The president looked down the long table at Admiral Trafton, General Price, and the heavyset young man next to him. The room around him was packed to capacity. In addition to the normal national security, cabinet, and military representatives, he’d invited the House and Senate leadership from both parties. Lord knew he was going to need all the political cover he could muster for this one.

  He consulted the page in front of him. “Mr. Riley, I see your boss has generously offered you up as a subject matter expert on this cyber problem. Please explain to the room how it is that the Chinese have attacked us but are not responsible.”

  Riley tugged at his collar. The president felt for the man. The room was hotter than usual, and the laser stares of the nation’s most powerful people didn’t make it any more comfortable.

  “The Chinese were hacked, sir. In simple terms, someone uploaded a computer virus that managed to seed their entire network with what looked like stray bits of code. When the hacker turned on an assembly tool, it built a new program inside the Chinese network and took it over.”

  “Define ‘took it over,’” said the secretary of defense.

  “The program has hijacked their existing command and control structure. Whoever’s behind this can intervene in their communications at will.”

  “You mean to tell us this virus can send out an order to attack an American ship and the Chinese brass doesn’t even know it?” the secretary said.

  Don nodded.

  “So why can’t the Chinese just turn it off?” the CIA director asked.

  “Initially, they probably didn’t know it was there, sir,” Don said. “The master program exists outside of any monitoring systems on their network.”

  “But they know it now,” said the CIA
director.

  “Probably. I’m sure they figured out they’d been compromised when their field commanders started firing on American ships without legitimate orders from the top brass in Beijing.”

  “So why haven’t they dealt with it themselves?”

  Don drew in a deep breath. “The only sure way to get rid of this is to take their entire network offline and reload everything from scratch. They would be without communications for twelve hours, maybe longer. Right now, everything works ninety-nine percent of the time—except when the program intervenes and sends a rogue order. That might only be one message in ten thousand. They might be playing the odds that they can limp along until they figure out a way to debug their system.” Don hesitated. “What the Chinese probably don’t know is that they’re on the clock.”

  “Meaning?” the president asked.

  “The program has three parts, sir. There’s the monitoring, the intervention, and a third part that we’re only just now figuring out. It appears to be a machine learning component. Someone is teaching this master program how to use the Chinese military to conduct war.”

  “You mean like an AI?” asked the secretary of defense.

  “More basic than that, but the same idea. At some point, this program will run on its own with no outside intervention required. At that point, it might be too late to shut it down.”

  “And you know this how?” asked the Senate majority leader.

  Don looked at Price, who nodded. “We hacked the Chinese, sir. We saw the program in action. It’s a preview of what’s going to happen to us.”

  The Senate minority leader jumped in. “But we’ve got a backup communications system, right?” Don recognized that he was a member of the Armed Services Committee who had approved the funding for Trident and later for Piggyback.

  Price shook his head. “No, sir, I’m sorry. When we made the decision to link the Trident intelligence system to the military command and control network, we compromised both. Trident is infected. It’s only a matter of time before they take over our network.”

  The chairman of the Joint Chiefs weighed in. “That means we’re going to need to…”

  “Shut down the entire military command and control network and the intelligence-gathering network. Both of them. At the same time,” Don said. It wasn’t hard to interpret the expression on the chairman’s face. The Chinese and American militaries would be completely vulnerable. What would the Russians do with that kind of power?

  The president cleared his throat. “There’s one piece of this puzzle you haven’t discussed, Mr. Riley. Who’s responsible?”

  The chairman muttered something about the fucking Russians under his breath.

  Don shifted in his chair. “The Russians are at the top of the list. They have the skills to pull this off, but they lack the motivation. What do they have to gain by training a program to coopt a country’s entire military and then setting it loose? Pardon, sir, but there’s only one way that scenario ends: total destruction. This program will eventually make it into the Chinese Second Artillery Corps nuclear strike forces. There’s no way this conflict stays limited to us and the Chinese. It’s even possible the Russians were hacked and nobody knows it yet.”

  The president leveled his gaze at Riley. “I assume you have a theory, Mr. Riley?”

  Don shot a confirming glance at Price and said, “Rafiq Roshed.” A stir went through the room. Everyone knew the name. “We know he’s in North Korea. If he had enough time and money he could pull this off. And the motivation fits: chaos. He wants to see the world burn.”

  “Do you have any evidence to back that up, Mr. Riley?”

  “Not yet, sir.”

  “Then find some.” The president’s eyes swept around the table. “Defense, what are we going to do in the meantime?”

  “Sir, I’ve met with the Joint Chiefs. We recommend we withdraw all naval assets from the western Pacific and reset our force structure.”

  “What about the Japanese?” the president said. “Or the South Koreans, for that matter? They can’t withdraw, and they can’t stand down with Kim Jong-un breathing down their necks.”

  The secretary of defense shook his head. “We don’t have a choice, sir. If the Chinese attack we have to respond in kind. Whether their military leaders are in charge or not, we must defend ourselves. The only way we avoid more bloodshed is by not being in the line of potential fire.”

  “Wait! You want to run away?” said the Speaker of the House. “After having one US Navy aircraft carrier sunk and two others gravely damaged, you want to cut and run?”

  The president trained his gaze on the Speaker, who glared back. The Speaker was a wiry man, on the shorter side, with a weak chin and pale blue eyes. This was his biggest problem. While the president tried to save lives—hell, maybe even save the world—he had this self-righteous asshole lobbing sound bites at him.

  “I’m glad you brought that up, Mr. Speaker. I invited you here so that you could get the whole story. That kind of talk doesn’t help anyone. We need to be together on this. American lives have been lost, American blood spilled, but if we don’t work together, this gets much, much worse.”

  The Speaker pursed his lips and exchanged glances with his Senate counterpart. “You can count on us.”

  The president thanked him, but he didn’t believe him for a minute. “Mr. Chairman,” he said.

  “Sir?”

  “I want to see a campaign plan to hit the Chinese mainland, defeat the PLA on their own soil. If Mr. Riley’s theory doesn’t pan out, we’re going to end this thing before it spins out of control.”

  CHAPTER 55

  Pyongyang, North Korea

  In the years Pak Myung-rok had worked directly for the Supreme Leader, he had seen dozens of people experience the wrath of Kim Jong-un. Powerful men, with decades of experience. Especially generals. Kim loved to destroy high-ranking military men, especially ones with ideas about modernizing his armed forces in ways inconsistent with the Supreme Leader’s vision. Some went to face a firing squad, some to reeducation camps, and some were just never seen again.

  Pak’s theory was that Kim associated him with a life separate from North Korea. Western luxuries, beautiful women, the thrilling intrigue of thumbing his nose at the Western world, all the while living apart from the façade of their collectively shitty existence in North Korea. Pak had convinced himself that the Supreme Leader actually liked him. He might even go so far as to say that the Supreme Leader wanted to be Pak. In short, Pak Myung-rok had lived a life immune to the ire of the most powerful man in the DPRK.

  That was about to change.

  Pak felt his knees quiver and wondered if they would bear his weight. He turned the door handle and entered the boardroom. The polished wood table was turned lengthwise in the room, facing the door. Kim sat in the center of the long table in a high-back wood and leather chair. His advisers ranged on either side of him: generals, intelligence officers, his personal astrologer, and some faces that Pak had not seen before.

  None of them looked like they’d slept, but the Supreme Leader looked particularly worn. His heavy jowls sagged even more than normal, and his brush cut was rumpled where he’d run his hands through his hair.

  Pak scanned the crowd, seeking out a covert signal of support. He found none.

  I’m a dead man. He bowed so deeply his lower back cracked. I should have run.

  He flashed back to his last meeting with Rafiq. The signs of the man’s mental disintegration were there if he had just taken the time to see them. The mood swings, the disinterest in money, the warning for Pak to leave …

  “Rise,” Kim said.

  Pak straightened, averting his eyes.

  “What have you done?” Kim’s voice was flat, without emotion.

  Pak was used to the Supreme Leader’s tantrums when he was displeased. The childish outbursts, throwing things, red-faced screaming—Pak had even seen Kim’s father beat a man almost to death with a golf club—then a swift
sentence. Pak was prepared for all possible moods and actions of the most powerful man in his life—except for this one.

  He’s afraid, Pak thought. He’s afraid for his own life. And I can work with that.

  “Excellency, it seems Jung Chul has taken advantage of your generosity—”

  “This is the work of your pet foreigner?” said General Zhu, seated at the Supreme Leader’s right hand. “He’s started a war between the Chinese and the Americans. If we are blamed for this—”

  “I can make sure that does not happen,” Pak said quickly.

  “You know where he is then?” Kim asked.

  Pak nodded. “Yang-do Island, near Hwadae. There’s an abandoned bunker there.”

  “Excellency,” said Zhu, “I will personally lead an assault on the island and destroy this traitor.”

  “I wouldn’t advise that, General,” Pak shot back. He had the full attention of the room now. Time to close the deal. “Do you believe that a man clever enough to hack the Chinese, the Japanese, and the American military networks will not have contingency plans in place to ensure his survival? He has his own soldiers; he will resist.” He stopped. Kim was staring at him, his face reddening by the second.

  “He hacked the Americans?” Kim said, his voice rising in pitch. “Who gave him permission to hack the Americans?”

  Pak blanched. “I don’t know that he did, Excellency. But how else could you explain the Chinese being able to sink an American aircraft carrier?” He knew the Supreme Leader secretly lusted after the US Navy’s carriers. He kept a scale model of the USS Ronald Reagan in his private chambers.

  The Supreme Leader’s face regained some composure, but Pak felt the general’s eyes on him. The room was listening to him now, but he was far from safe.

  “Excellency,” Pak continued. “Jung Chul trusts me. I can get close to him, get him to stop this madness.” He shot a glare at the general. “If necessary, I will deal with him myself. Permanently.”