CyberSpace: A CyberStorm Novel (Cyber Series Book 1)

by Matthew Mather

  “What?”

  “I mean, if their networks have been hacked, it’s not impossible. Maybe they’re spoofing my friend. I checked his social media, but nothing on there. Tried his personal email, but didn’t get an answer. So what I need, senator, is a direct connection to someone high up. Don’t you have a team over there? You must have sent a team in the second the Islamic Brigade made their announcement?”

  The senator steepled his fingers. “This stays between these four walls?”

  “Of course,” I said.

  Damon and Terek agreed.

  “Over the last thirty hours, we have been in touch with the top levels of GenCorp. Tyrell assured us that he had taken back command of his SatCom network from the attackers. Our tactical cyber team confirmed with them. We thought we were back in control.”

  “And?”

  “They had us for a little while. Smart bastards. They compromised the GenCorp communications servers. Someone pretended to be Tyrell and other top execs, in fact, every damn person there. Someone, or more accurately, probably something. Whenever we send an email to GenCorp servers now, we think a sophisticated chatbot AI is generating responses. That’s the latest.”

  I asked, “So how long since you know you talked to someone there?”

  “Four, maybe five days. We have a SEAL team going in as we speak. We’ll know more in a few hours.”

  The information took a few brain cycles to sink in.

  “Why don’t you take whatever you’re doing into Langley?” Leo said to Damon. “I can send you in right now. We’re literally around the corner from the FBI, the CIA...all those guys are gunning for the same thing. Why don’t you tell them your slant on this?”

  Damon nodded his head in silence, but then began shaking it. “Because our angle involves some unsavory characters who aren’t fans of law enforcement. If we walk into the CIA, they’ll probably know it, one way or the other, and might shut down talking to us.”

  “You have a high-bandwidth connection here?” Terek asked.

  “A secure T1 straight into my office on the Hill.”

  “Can we work here?”

  “Only if you keep me updated on exactly what you’re doing. And I mean every, single, thing.”

  Damon sat up straight. “Of course, Senator.”

  Terek nodded as well.

  Damon asked, “Can you give us any more details?”

  The senator began pacing. “The Russians are pissed off, the Chinese just as mad. And don’t even get me started about the mood at the Pentagon. The Chinese still have three BieDou up there, but that’s not enough for position tracking, and the Russians managed to get two launches—God knows how they did it so quickly—with GLONASS on board, but one of them was taken out by debris.”

  Leo laughed grimly.

  I asked, “What’s funny?”

  “If you told me two weeks ago I’d be an expert on global positioning, I’d have ridden you out of town.”

  “Are we putting up any new GPS satellites?” I said.

  “What I can tell you, is that we still have birds up there.”

  “So they’re moving them around?” Damon asked.

  “I can’t say more than that at this time.”

  Damon said, “The new Block III GPS birds have directional antennas. Any of them left?”

  “As I said.” The senator pursed his lips. “Some good news I can share, is that regional branches of the army, air force, and the National Guard are starting set up of local GPS transmitters on towers in cities, onto drones, anything that gets a device up high.”

  Damon’s eyebrows raised. “Already?”

  “It’ll take weeks, maybe months, but we’ll get there.”

  “What about the power blackouts?” I asked.

  “The utilities are scrambling as hard as everyone else. It’s hard to say what’s going to happen short term as effects cascade down. It’s going to get worse before better.”

  “And India?” I asked.

  “We’ve had their ambassador and a dozen diplomatic staff with their feet to the coals the past week. The best we’ve been able to get is that maybe—maybe—a rogue element of their military ordered the release of the missiles. It’s been made more difficult as the Pakistani military has all but obliterated the launch site now.”

  I was more concerned about nuclear weapons. They would affect the entire planet. “What about radiation? The Russians said there were traces in the air?”

  “Both the Pakistanis and Indians are denying any nuclear strikes. That was easier to verify after we got our initial SIGINT snafus under control. No nuclear war. Not yet, anyway, but the two sides aren’t far from it.”

  “So what was the radiation from?”

  “The Russians are saying it might have been a downed satellite. Traces of radioactive isotopes high in the atmosphere. They’re still livid, and they’re as blind as we are with all the comms and satellites going down. The Red Army is in overdrive. We just learned they sent troops into Latvia last night.”

  “Why?” I asked. “We let them do that?”

  “Let them? How exactly how would we stop them right now?”

  Leo leaned toward me and gazed straight into my eyes, as if he was asking me what to do. “They claim exceptional circumstances due to these attacks, and most of our Congress is with them. We’ve declared a new war on terror and are aligning with the Russians.”

  I said, “Most of Congress?” The way Leo said it, he didn’t seem to approve.

  “This is a knee-jerk reaction. Somebody has definitely attacked us, and the Russians were the quickest to help—”

  “You don’t think it’s this Islamic Brigade?”

  “I think we need more time to evaluate.”

  “With respect, sir,” Chuck said. “When the poop flies into the spinning stuff, it’s often better to make any decision than sit still and get hit.”

  It was a serious moment, but I couldn’t help wondering why so many of Chuck’s sayings seemed to involve the word “poop”. I didn’t have the balls to contradict a sitting member of Congress, but Chuck, well, this was the moment he’d been preparing for his whole life.

  The senator smiled. “You’re not wrong, son. The Russians might be helping, but they might not be.”

  I watched Terek and Irena’s faces as Leo announced that Russia had just stormed their home country. Their expressions didn’t change. Not a twitch. Terek went right back to whatever he was doing on his laptop. I’d heard Ukrainians were more stoic than we were, but there was a steely calm beneath it, like something explosive was lurking just below.

  “It’s about a three-hour drive,” Chuck said.

  “I’m going to come with you,” Agent Coleman said.

  “You don’t need to do that,” Irena said. “I’m ex-army. Ukrainian Tenth Division. I can handle myself.”

  “You’re armed?”

  She nodded and said to Agent Coleman, “Aren’t you needed here?”

  Terek looked up from his computer. “Irena, it is a good idea. I would feel safer if he was with you.”

  “You don’t need to come,” I said to Irena. “You should stay with your brother.”

  She laughed. “Here? I think he’s safe here.”

  “Three hours,” Chuck continued, “down to the Virginia Beach area. I suggest we get at least a couple hours sleep to recharge before—”

  “I found her,” Terek said.

  “Who?”

  He turned his laptop around to me. “Your wife. Lauren. I found her.”

  CHAPTER 34

  LAUREN RAISED HER voice over the sound of the shower. “I’ll be out in a minute!”

  “We need to get going soon,” a voice called back. “You sure you’re okay? You’ve been in there a while.”

  “I’m fine. Just need a minute.”

  She pulled back the shower curtain to make sure the door was locked, for whatever good that would do. It was Billy out there. At least his voice sounded like he was in the hallway
and not in her room.

  He said, “Five minutes and we’re wheels up.”

  “I’ll be ready.”

  Five minutes was all Lauren needed. She moved the shower curtain back into place, just in case.

  For the past day, she had been as sweet as pecan pie, Uncle Leo’s favorite. She had no doubt he had people out looking for her, no matter what was going on. She needed to buy time, do something to tip the balance.

  Lauren told Billy that she understood the delays. That she was so glad her husband was back with the children and that she couldn’t be more comfortable. Made no fuss. She did everything she could to make them think she was perfectly happy.

  Through the tiny frosted window of the bathroom, the sun was already up.

  All yesterday, she’d kept opening the narrow window in her room, and every time someone came in to check on her, they would close it. They said it was hot out, that it pushed the air conditioning too much. They said it needed to be closed. She insisted she needed air. Eventually they gave up. She kept a watch out the window, and saw people walking on the beach. Neighbors? She thought of screaming at them, yelling for help, but there was always one of the men outside.

  Thank God for the wind during the night.

  It had made enough noise that they didn’t hear her breaking that damn window. It was only a foot high and three long, but it was big enough for her to squeeze through. A guard came by every two minutes. She waited till the man passing underneath moved away, then she cracked the glass by covering it with a pillowcase and smacking with her elbow. Picked out the shards and hid them under her bed, then covered the bottom ledge with some of the clothes they’d brought her.

  She could have left that minute, but she wanted to wait for the light.

  Lauren had an edge right now. With this storm coming, some of the people from the beach, if they were neighbors, had to be packing up, getting ready to leave. At first light, she stood a better chance of finding someone out there to help her.

  She decided she needed a weapon.

  Lauren’s fingernails bled as she worked out the last screw holding the shower curtain rod to the wall. She had been working them out, one by one, with a dime she’d found in the nightstand drawer.

  It wasn’t much, but it was something.

  There was no way she was going anywhere with Billy, or whatever the hell his name really was.

  CHAPTER 35

  DAWN COLORED THE sky gold and red and violet over the Potomac. Damon sat next to Terek at the round glass table in the kitchen nook, glass patio doors to three sides of them. A brief lull in the rainstorm brought fleeting glimpses of the sun between fast moving clouds.

  With the first light, Damon watched the backyard emerge from the darkness. Leafy beech trees and oaks surrounded the house. The back of the kitchen opened onto a steep slope of green grass dotted with Virginia bluebells. The hill led down to jagged rocks with churning white water just past them. Damon allowed himself a few moments of daydreaming of Paulina as he watched the water and finished off his fifth—or sixth?—coffee of the night.

  While Mike and Chuck and Irena slept, Damon and Terek had been hard at work.

  Terek tried to track down more images of Lauren.

  He used a tool on the dark web to pattern match that picture to other images from webcams, map databases, and social media sites. He managed to get a high probability hit on the background in the image to a street near Virginia Beach, along a row of vacation homes next to the water.

  There was another woman with Lauren in the photo, a flight attendant named Emily Simmons. No other posts from her since that picture was put up.

  Damon got to work on the satellites.

  He couldn’t believe he had been taken in by a chatbot. He reviewed the messages from his friend at GenCorp. They were short, and devoid of meaningful details. Enough for it to seem plausible they were from someone in a hurry, but nothing specific or identifiable.

  Finding out he’d been tricked pushed his mind into a laser-like focus. Damon didn’t like being fooled.

  He logged back into the Space Surveillance Network, or tried to. His credentials had been revoked. He sent an email to the administrator. In short order, they verified his identity and renewed his access.

  Things had changed in the system.

  Now the rogue SatCom satellites were highlighted in angry red dots, and clusters of the best estimates of the clouds of debris fields in orange. All US military satellites had been removed from the data display, not only the secret-rated ones.

  Any satellites that were still operational were using their thrusters to stay far out of the way of any SatCom birds. A slow-motion game of cat-and-mouse was being played out high overhead.

  While the satellites themselves were moving at six miles per second, the speed with which they could change their orbits was like they were being tugged by snails. It was a slow chase, as the Hall effect thrusters now used on most spacecraft had tiny delta-v capabilities.

  Tiny thrust parameters, but extremely efficient. Damon did some back-of-the-napkin calculations.

  The SatCom satellite’s Hall effect krypton-gas thrusters worked off the electric potential applied to them. The normal operation range was from 0.5 to 1.5 kilowatts, with up to 3.5 kW in maximum thrust, which provided 30 to 160 millinewtons of force. The thrusters were rated at 100 hours of continuous maximum thrust, but he couldn’t find the total size of the reservoir. The satellites were small, at just five hundred pounds each.

  He wrote down equations. Force equals mass times acceleration. Position is a half of acceleration multiplied by the time in seconds squared.

  So, with maximum thrust applied over 100 hours, one of these satellites could be moved about 4,500 km vertically. That was over four days of time. At that point, its delta-v would be 25 meters per second, or 2,200 km a day as it coasted up. So how were these used to attack the geopositioning satellites at 20,000 km of altitude? It would have taken ten days to move one of them that far.

  It was one of many things that didn’t add up.

  The SatCom constellation normally operated at about 550 km of altitude and 53 degrees of inclination in twenty-four orbital planes. There were six thrusters on each satellite, one for each degree of freedom, but even if two of them fired and doubled the acceleration, it would take—he scribbled down more equations—at minimum a week, and even then they would have to slow down and attempt to track the targets.

  That was no small task.

  Space was an awfully big—big—place.

  On the other hand, the hacker-attackers had the advantage of numbers. They could use dozens or even hundreds of satellites out of the thousands in the constellation to mount an attack, but they would have needed to start doing that weeks before this mess.

  Damon did a search online.

  GenCorp had reported malfunctions and loss of communications with a few dozen of its constellation in the weeks running up to the event. This wasn’t entirely unusual for a fleet of that size. It was September 4th when the first anti-satellite weapons had been launched, and then a week to September 11th, when the Islamic Brigade had announced that they owned the GenCorp assets and had been using them as weapons.

  Attacking satellites in low Earth orbit was a much simpler game. A thruster set for twenty minutes could shift a SatCom bird’s delta-v by a tenth of a meter per second, which sounded small, but applied within its orbital plane, that would shift its location by four kilometers over a day.

  Satellites typically had no automated defenses against incoming threats. It was a gentlemen’s agreement, where everyone knew the orbital paths of everyone else’s hardware, and if things got in the way, one or the other would move out of the way. Nobody had ever planned for a contingency where someone would maliciously set one satellite in the way of another.

  Except for the SatCom constellation. They were the first with automated avoidance systems, but those must have been turned off.

  At 3 a.m. Chuck had woken the others,
and they’d left in the big silver BullyBoy. Damon gave them the estimated location of the place in the background of the picture of Lauren. The picture showed Lauren talking to the woman, Emily, with red hair. Neither of them look stressed or upset. They stood next to a Humvee parked in front of a row of beach houses.

  Mike took Damon aside and told him about Terek’s name, how it was the name of a river in Chechnya, but Damon said it meant nothing. It was a Chinese name too, and Damon was half Asian.

  Before Chuck left, Damon demonstrated how he could hack into the BullyBoy. While Chuck was sleeping, Damon uploaded code from the Black Hat event he’d been at. As Chuck walked to the truck that morning, Damon turned it on and made it honk and flash its lights.

  The look on Chuck’s face had been worth it.

  Once the others had left, they decided to test the Russian connection.

  Terek used a clean boot disk on a USB drive on Damon’s older laptop that only ran UNIX. He ran the connection through Tor, for what little good that might do. Running this connection on the senator’s T1 line, connected straight through the US government’s networks, made him nervous that the hackers on the other end wouldn’t reply.

  They did, though, within seconds of the first message.

  After some haggling, the Russian hackers sent login credentials to the backdoor into GenCorp. They wanted money, of course, but Damon impressed the seriousness of the situation. In the end, he sent them a few thousand dollars from his own accounts.

  Damon downloaded the SatCom satellite protocols from a secure government server he had access to. They didn’t need the frequency bands and channel information, since they would be going through whatever base station was still active—but they did need the proper protocols.

  There was no guarantee the Russian hack was even still active, but at about 4 a.m. he sent a ping, and the GenCorp network pinged back.

  Damon had to be careful.

  The first rule of any cyberattack chain was that once you got inside, all you did was collect information and do your best not to let them know you were there. In this case, he was hacking the hackers, and if they sensed someone had broken their perimeter, his access might get shut down. Would get shut down, Damon corrected himself. These were sophisticated operators.