“Dad!” Luke yelled.
I spun around.
My son ran toward me. He held one hand above his head.
CHAPTER 17
WE DROVE NORTH as the sun climbed into the sky. A furnace of a day. The mercury topped a hundred before the clock hit noon.
Irena had barely slept, and Chuck tended to be restless and unhappy when he wasn’t commanding, so he drove while Irena slept in the front passenger seat with a new hand-drawn map draped across her knees. Luke and I took our spots in the jump seat in the back, with Damon and Terek in the middle seats.
Damon and Terek had their laptops wired together again. The two of them were almost glued at the hip, like conjoined hackers. They were analyzing the data they had downloaded from the space debris system the day before. Every now and then, they exclaimed as they watched a satellite collision or shared some insight.
The rest of us half-listened.
Luke smiled a goofy, gummy grin at me. He held up his prize in his left hand and showed me. His left incisor.
Both front teeth were missing now.
He’d run at me in the cafeteria with his other front tooth above his head. He said it’d come loose in the crazy car when the tornado was chasing us, said he would keep it in his pocket until we got home.
So the tooth fairy could find us, he said.
His grin widened to expose the tiny button teeth in his gums. I laughed despite myself as I realized my son wasn’t just humoring me. He was trying to cheer me up. I did my best to smile.
The night before, we had left the hospital and driven back up to the Calvary Baptist Church. Irena worked well into the night, doing her best to help the injured people who came in from the darkness.
When I awoke at daybreak, Chuck had already done a round of the area. The dog’s owner had shown up. We returned him. A joyous reunion.
We woke Irena at about 7 a.m., about the time she had only just gotten to sleep. The pastor bundled some snacks for the road, which we tried to refuse, but he insisted. By 8 a.m., we were back on the road and heading north.
Not more than eight hours to Nashville, Chuck said. But that’s what he’d said two days ago.
The traffic was light.
I mostly watched the pine forests sweep past and wondered where Lauren was. I watched the blue skies for planes, but where the air had been full of them when we left New Orleans, now there were only birds. No white contrails, no distant specks crossing the blue.
No airplanes up there at all.
When we passed rest stations, we stopped for a few minutes. I tried the pay phones, but none of them worked. Damon explained, again, that communications in rural areas, even rest stations like this, worked off mobile networks. Between the big cities, no wireless, no mobile, no TV.
Everything cut off.
The truck stops seemed like they had been hit by bombs. Shelves cleared, even of junk food. Trucks were still rolling on the highways, but Damon wasn’t sure how much longer that would last.
“Two days GPS has been down,” Damon said.
A huge eighteen-wheeler switched gears and pulled out behind us. The engine roared as the trucker accelerated. Luke leaned to the window, made a fist, and pulled down twice. The truck’s air horn sounded off in two blasts.
Luke smiled and waved.
“These guys are all still pulling the loads they started with before this all started,” Damon continued. “Another day or two and supply chains will start to break down.”
“Computers are still working, aren’t they?” I said.
“Sort of, but those systems don’t have position-tracking data anymore. They don’t know where their fleets of trucks or containers are.”
“Can’t they do it by hand?”
“To a point, but these networks have been optimized to work with GPS. A few days without a connection, and things can bend. Like the mobile phone networks. But more than a few days, and they’ll break.”
“These guys won’t get lost,” Chuck said from the driver’s seat. He waved at the trucker too. “They know where they’re going.”
“I think you might be surprised.”
“And I think you’re not giving them enough credit.”
“Getting from point to point isn’t the problem. It’s downstream, literally. At the port where Grandma Babet works, the containers aren’t getting off ships. And the ships are stacking up, taking longer to find their way in from the ocean.”
“The captains aren’t going to get lost either,” Chuck said. “Like all those airplanes didn’t get lost.” He glanced back at me. “Everyone got down safely, as much as the cable news was predicting Armageddon.”
Damon looked at me as well.
He didn’t say it, but not everyone had gotten down safely. There were reports of another air crash. One in China. Possibly others, but the media was overwhelmed with conflicting stories of riots and protests in a world spasmed by the loss of normal communications.
“Terek,” Chuck said, “tell them what you told me, about the government turning off GPS last year? On purpose? When was that?”
“Fall of 2019, the American Air Force turned off GPS in Nevada.”
Damon said, “They do their regular Red Flag exercises every year. That’s not new. They train pilots to execute strike missions without GPS. They don’t turn it off as much as block it locally.”
“Hundreds of flights going over Arizona to Nevada lost signal,” Chuck said. “That’s not nothing.”
“Nothing compared to the actual switching off of GPS in the summer of 2019 and the winter of 2020.” This time Terek looked up from his laptop at Damon. “Those were widespread outages. Complete signal loss.”
Damon didn’t reply, but nodded his agreement.
“They never admitted it,” Terek said. “But the US government must have been testing what would happen to the civilian infrastructure with an unannounced GPS failure, including the loss of timing signals.”
“So they knew this might happen,” I said.
“Or maybe they’re the ones doing it,” Chuck countered.
“You seriously think our own government has shut off GPS and crippled the country?”
“They did it before.”
“As a test.”
“Maybe this is a bigger test.”
“People have lost their lives.”
Chuck weighed the point. “I agree that’s a long bridge to cross, but…” He paused. “If we can switch off our own GPS, what’s stopping the bad guys from doing it? Damon, you said that any capability we have ourselves, an adversary can steal?”
“I meant any information,” Damon replied. “Any piece of information we have on a computer, you have to assume an attacker could find it.”
“But doesn’t that apply to anything controlled by a computer system?”
“Yes and no.”
Chuck said, “I heard that our own nuclear codes are still controlled by floppy disks and computer technology from the eighties.”
“That’s actually a defensive posture now,” Damon replied. “Means you can’t access them via the internet and modern protocols. Which makes stuff very difficult to get to.”
“And that’s a good thing?”
“I would say so.”
“The Russians,” Terek said.
“What about the Russians? They’ve lost their global navigation system as well.”
“So they say,” Terek said. “Russians have been attacking the global navigation systems for the past decade.”
“Blocking it?” I asked.
“Spoofing.”
“Spoofing?”
“Not removing the signal entirely, but changing it so the receiver doesn’t know the difference. Back in 2013, in the Black Sea by Ukraine, my home country, dozens of ships got lost when anomalous GPS signals were received over a few days. The International Space Station has been tracking suspected GPS spoofing incidents at ten global locations over the past decade. Over ten thousand of them.”
&nb
sp; Chuck said, “They were using the space station to track that? The space station that was just destroyed in orbit?”
“Again,” Damon said. “Not blocking, but spoofing.”
“That’s right. Thousands of ships and aircraft have been fed the wrong positional data in hundreds of incidents over the years.”
“I’ve heard of this,” Chuck said.
“There was a high correlation between those incidents and the movement of Russian politicians,” Damon said. “It was defensive.”
“You’re defending the Russians?” Terek looked up from his laptop again.
“If anyone, maybe the Chinese. I haven’t heard anything about their Baidu system lately. It seems like it might be the only geopositioning system still intact. Does anyone have a Chinese phone?”
Everyone in the car shrugged. We all had Apple devices.
“Spoofing?” Chuck slowed the car. “That sounds like a cyberattack.”
I leaned forward to get a look at the road to see why he was braking. A line of cars and trucks snaked up the next hillside. What looked like police cars lined the road to each side, their lights flashing. A line of olive-green trucks bordered the cops.
“You’re right,” Damon replied to Chuck. “It is a kind of cyberattack. The problem is nobody knows how to respond. There hasn’t been any real space-cyberspace power theory put forward.”
I said, “Nobody knows how to respond to an attack like that?”
“This is why we’re in this mess. When someone attacks your ship, standard military power theory is that you respond by attacking one of their ships.”
“An eye for an eye,” Chuck said.
“Proportionality. Or super-proportionality. If they hit one of your ships, you sink ten of theirs.”
“Deterrence.”
“Problem is, in this case, India hit one of Pakistan’s satellites. So they responded in kind, and within a day, we had a cascade of unintended consequences that affected the entire planet.”
“Like a cyberweapon,” I said.
“Right. Congestion is a problem in both space and cyberspace. In cyber, we have malware and spam and bots that clog up the bandwidth, but in space, the equivalent is orbiting garbage and debris. What’s happening now, it’s not like a conventional bomb. They don’t have any idea what the blast radius of unleashing attacks like this might be. Cyber and outer space are similar in a lot of ways.”
“There’s one big difference,” Chuck said.
He nudged Irena awake as we edged forward in the traffic. There was a roadblock ahead. State Troopers were pulling people over. Not only State Troopers, but other men and women in camouflage holding automatic weapons.
“The big difference,” Chuck continued, “is that with cyber, you can’t tell who attacked you, which means you can’t even figure out who to retaliate against. But with space stuff, you know whose rocket that was. They can track where a missile came from. India and Pakistan, they launched these.”
“India is still denying it.”
“Like Iran tried to deny shooting down that airliner a few years ago. Because they didn’t want their own people blaming them. The Russians, Chinese, British, and Americans all confirmed those missile launches. Who are you going to believe? Them, or the Indian government?”
“Like I’ve been saying,” I said, “better them shooting down satellites than launching nuclear weapons at each other.”
“I hope you’re right,” Chuck said.
“There’s another big difference,” Damon said.
Chuck rolled down his window. We didn’t have a chance to hear what Damon’s next point was.
“Good day, officer,” Chuck said. “What can we do for you?”
The State Trooper had on a tan shirt with khaki pockets, which matched the slightly too-tight pants he wore over scuffed black boots. He was a thick-set young man with corn-fed cheeks.
He leaned down to bring his face level with Chuck’s. The officer’s eyes scanned Irena—who had shorts on, and whose bare legs were stretched up on the dash—paused on Terek and Damon, and stopped to nod at Luke, who waved.
“We need to do an inspection.”
“What are you looking for?”
“Please, sir, pull over.”
The car in front of us had pulled to the side. A camouflage-wearing soldier with an automatic weapon slung over his back popped the trunk. Chuck followed the officer’s hand signals and parked the Range Rover.
The young officer inspected the front of our truck and pulled a branch from the grill. He ran one hand over the dented and chipped hood, then leaned in to inspect the windshield.
“Stuck in a hailstorm coming out of Louisiana,” Chuck explained, his window still down.
“Got you good.”
“You should see the other guy.”
The officer didn’t even crack a smile.
“Everyone, please step out of the vehicle,” the officer said.
Damon and Terek stowed their laptops, and the officer indicated that they should leave them in the car. The back doors opened. I squeezed out to follow Damon onto the grass of the divider. Over the honking cars and shouted instructions, cicadas hummed in the distance. Going out into the heat felt like stepping into a steel foundry.
“You okay?” I asked Luke.
His face was red and puffy from sleep. He nodded.
The officer smiled at him, then said to Irena, “Ma’am, please leave everything inside the car.”
She had her backpack halfway out. “Everything?”
“Everything.”
She tossed the bag back in.
Four soldiers approached, two men and two women, head-to-toe in camouflage and all holding automatic weapons on harnesses. The officer nodded to them. One of them, a young man, smiled at Luke, then slung his weapon around his shoulder onto his back and opened the driver’s side door. The other three opened other doors.
“National Guard?” Chuck asked the officer.
“They’ve been called out all over the country. There were riots in Detroit and Los Angeles last night.”
“Over what?”
“Local governments instituted curfews over looting. Emergency services are…” The officer’s face pinched. “Some people are taking advantage.”
“Is that what these roadblocks are about?”
The officer’s face returned to impassive. “Can’t say what this is about, sir.”
“Is there anything else happening out there?” I asked.
“Anything else, sir?”
He was standoffish, but polite.
“We’ve been off-grid since last night.”
“Everyone is off-grid now, sir.”
“I mean, any new developments since last night? On the news?”
“War broke out between India and Pakistan.”
That wasn’t exactly news. “I knew that, the anti-satellite—”
“I mean, war has really broken out.”
“How do you mean?”
One of the soldiers ducked her head out of the car and gave a signal.
“Are any of you armed?” the officer asked.
Chuck said, “I’ve got a Glock. Full disclosure, it’s loaded. Another magazine is in the truck, in my bag in the back.” He produced the weapon from the holster under his shirt. “I’ve got a license.” He produced his wallet.
“In my handbag,” Irena said. “A SIG Sauer. Also loaded.”
I didn’t know she had a gun. Chuck and I exchanged a quick glance. Then again, we hadn’t asked.
“Nine millimeter,” Irena added. “My papers are in the glove box.”
“Are you all American citizens?”
“We are.” I brought Luke next to me. Chuck raised his hand and nodded, as did Damon.
“My brother and I are Ukrainian,” Irena said. “Our passports are also in the glove box, together with our immigration docs. As I said.”
The officer nodded at the young Guardswoman who was searching the passenger area. She opened t
he glove compartment and nodded back.
“Ukrainian?” the officer asked. “Isn’t that like Russian?”
“This is very different than Russian,” Terek said.
Chuck said, “It’s okay, the officer doesn’t mean anything by—”
The officer cut him off. “Sir, please do not presume to know what I mean and do not mean.”
Chuck blinked. He closed his mouth, paused, and then said, “Yes, sir.”
“How are y’all traveling together?”
“We—”
“I go to school with them,” Damon interrupted Chuck. “In Boston. I go to MIT.”
“The Massachusetts Institute of Technology?” The young officer’s eyebrows raised, the edges of his mouth angling down. “How long have you known each other?”
“A few years.”
Chuck gave Damon a look, but didn’t say anything.
The Range Rover’s doors closed one at a time. The young soldiers each waved an all-clear signal to the officer, then moved on to the next stopped car.
“Please get back in the vehicle and go on your way,” the officer instructed, his gaze already forward. “You have a nice day,” he said to Irena as she passed by him. “And y’all should stay off the roads if you can. There’s a lot of roadblocks. Not all of them are us. You be careful. And be careful with those weapons.”
I waited until Chuck had pulled back onto the Interstate before asking, “Not all of the roadblocks are us? Who is ‘us’? And who would ‘them’ be?”
CHAPTER 18
DAMON SLOUCHED IN the backseat and eyed Chuck at the wheel. Irena had been doing great driving, and this was her truck. Why did he need to get behind the wheel? He always needed to be large and in charge.
If the guy wasn’t disabled, Damon might tell him off more. That wasn’t true. Damon hated confrontation, and truth be told, he was a bit handicapped himself. He suspected he might be diagnosed as slightly autistic if he was ever tested.
But he didn’t like the way Chuck dominated every situation. On the other hand, you learned to either accept your friends the way they were or go your own way, and Chuck had become a big part of Damon’s life in the past six years.
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