CyberSpace: A CyberStorm Novel (Cyber Series Book 1)

by Matthew Mather

  And they would surely be on high alert.

  Every three-letter agency on the planet must be trying to get inside GenCorp’s systems and hack back these satellites. That made Damon suspicious that anything this Russian outfit could give them would be useful.

  But it was worth a try.

  And there was that ping again.

  Damon decided to take a chance and send a command to the satellites, requesting a reading on the fuel reserves. No action, he wanted to see if he could exfiltrate a small amount of data. He wasn’t sure if his access node could address all the satellites, or only a subset, or even one.

  No response. Not yet. Which brought up another point of discussion.

  “How many ground stations does GenCorp run?” Damon asked.

  “I have no idea,” Terek replied.

  Damon wasn’t an expert on satellites, but he knew more than a thing or two about the antennas he used on his drones. Satellites were similar.

  They had a payload—in the SatCom case, the antennas that were pointed at the Earth to provide data services for mobile devices. Then there was the “bus,” which was what the payload was riding on. The bus typically used a single global antenna pointed at the ground to communicate with ground stations.

  At geosynchronous altitudes, a single global antenna could see the entire planet. Only one ground station was needed. But at five hundred kilometers of altitude, and circling the Earth every ninety minutes, how many ground stations might the SatCom network require?

  The attackers might have taken over the GenCorp networks, but once they knew they were owned, the GenCorp sys admins would have ripped their servers apart.

  Which meant that, logically, the attackers wouldn’t have access to sending up signals to the satellites via the GenCorp ground stations. They would need their own.

  It would take dozens of ground stations around the world to maintain continuous contact with that massive fleet of birds, and even then, it would be intermittent. If the attackers had only one or two ground stations, then it might take hours before Damon’s query was returned.

  A moment later, a message popped up on his screen. Satellites 128 to 256. Readings on their remaining fuel reserves.

  Damon sent another request for readings on battery life. He expanded the request to satellites 0 to 1024. He paused before he pushed send. Exfiltrating data like this was usually the last process in a cyber kill chain. He was skipping a few steps, but he didn’t have time.

  Was it really a connection?

  He clicked enter.

  “I can use it as usual?” Senator Seymour asked.

  He came around the corner into the kitchen from the living room. He was dressed in a fresh suit and tie and looked like he’d just gotten out of the shower.

  Terek said, “Once you’re connected to the meshnet of people nearby, you need to use that app. Voice calls for anyone directly connected, text messages to more distant nodes. You want me to get everyone on your staff connected?”

  “Right away,” the senator said. “And everyone on the Hill. This might be Washington, but the mobile networks aren’t working here either.”

  “I’ll get right on it, sir,” Terek said.

  One of the Secret Service agents had put on a new pot of java. The aroma of it filled the space. Damon needed another cup. His fifth? Maybe sixth. Probably seventh.

  The senator headed for the coffee and poured himself one. “You boys ever going to sleep?”

  Damon stared out the window at the rushing water below. He was tired.

  “Beautiful, isn’t it?” Senator Seymour mused. “That’s the start of the Calico Rapids. You don’t want to fall in there, but if you did, you know what you do?”

  “Swim for shore?”

  “Keep your toes up, keep them downriver of you.”

  “Excuse me, sir?”

  “If you fall into rushing white water,” the senator explained. “You get your feet up so they don’t get trapped underwater. Eyes focused downstream and navigate. That’s a good analogy for life.” He laughed and slapped his leg.

  “That is good advice, sir.”

  Damon didn’t let on, but he remembered hearing the senator tell Mike the same thing earlier. He suspected this was a canned bit of folksy wisdom used on everyone who came to visit. Then again, it might be good advice for anyone who went for a walk out back. That was a steep slope.

  The senator said, “Terek told me you got into GenCorp’s systems. Is that true?”

  “That is a very big ‘maybe.’ We have pingbacks from their servers, and we had one data request come back from a satellite, but it’s too soon to say if we have actual access. They might be ghosting the signal, or spoofing a return, faking it like they did with those messages earlier to make it seem like things are normal.”

  “I’ll connect you with some DOD people and you can compare notes, maybe talk to my team leaders.” The senator put his coffee down. “This massive loss of orbital assets had sent the whole war machine into a tailspin. We’re fighting fires on top of dumpster blazes in the middle of a chemical spill, if that’s not too many metaphors. Our resources are stretched to breaking.”

  The mention of fires made Damon think of that young woman, Pauline. She kept creeping back into his thoughts when he should be thinking of more critical things.

  “But that’s not to say we don’t have solutions,” the senator said. “Work the problem, don’t let the problem work you. We have a lot of smart people out there. The navy and army still have maps, and most systems are designed to work without GPS using inertial guidance, but everyone is scrambling. It’s only been a bit more than a week we’ve been dealing with this, and two days since this announcement by the Islamic Brigade about the hijacking of the GenCorp assets.”

  “But someone at the DOD must have suspected?” Damon said.

  “It was a hell of a smoke screen these bastards put up.”

  “Diversion, you mean?”

  It was the same tactic someone would use in a cyberattack. Mount a denial-of-service attack on the server front end, keep the defensive team busy, then sneak a payload in through a covert channel on the back end.

  Damon said, “Didn’t anyone on your teams find a fail-safe on these things? Can’t we shoot them down?”

  “That would make the debris fields worse,” Terek said.

  “They’re already doing something,” the senator said. “This is the US military we’re talking about.”

  “Brute force?” Damon said. “Jamming the hell out of them? Overwhelm the signal-to-noise ratio coming at their global antennas? Even if you can’t get into the network, you can stop any communications.”

  “They’ve tried that. Doesn’t seem to work.” The senator paused as though considering whether to say anything more. He then added, “This is borderline classified, but we are already using directed energy weapons to take out the rogue birds. No debris. Turns them into orbiting slag.”

  “Lasers?”

  “They picked off quite a few already. Listen, you boys have any more success on this, getting into those satellites, and there’ll be Congressional Medals in it.” He clapped Damon’s shoulder. “We’ll get you a Presidential one this time. I’ll be back in a few hours. I’m leaving one of the Secret Service detail, George”—he nodded at the guy who had filled the coffee machine—“here. He’ll take care of you. Susan is upstairs with the kids. Anything else you need?”

  Seven a.m. and still nothing from the second request to the satellites.

  The fact that Damon was getting pings seemed to indicate he had access to the GenCorp telemetry servers, which begged another question.

  “Why wouldn’t they have bricked all their servers?” Damon said to Terek. “I mean, the second you know you’re hacked, that someone else has control of your servers—the first thing you do is deny access. Worst case, you unplug everything.”

  “Bricking” something, in hacker talk, meant turning it literally into a useless hunk of metal, an inert
brick. Smashing with a hammer often accomplished the trick, but there were more subtle ways.

  “You don’t have physical access to satellites,” Terek said. “Not once they’re up there. Can’t reach up and flick a physical switch to turn them off. But isn’t that your super-secret project?” Terek yawned. “I think I’m going to hit the sack. Just for an hour.”

  Damon noticed Terek’s hand going to his pocket.

  Damon got up and went to the coffee pot. “I’ll stay up, wait to hear from Mike and Chuck.”

  He turned to Terek, and without letting it look like he meant it, slopped hot coffee right onto Terek’s midsection.

  Terek yowled. “Oh my G—!” He hopped up and down.

  Coffee spattered onto the marble floor. George, the Secret Service guy, offered to get napkins. Damon shook his head, apologized profusely to Terek, and attempted to sponge his jeans down with a tea cloth from the counter.

  “You better go change,” Damon said. “I’m sorry, I’m in a daze.”

  Terek shook his head, then walked off. Damon waited for him to leave before he looked in his hand. At the USB drive he’d stolen from Terek’s pocket.

  Chuck and Mike had to be at Virginia Beach by now.

  He eyed the USB drive. Something else might be more critical right now.

  CHAPTER 36

  WATER.

  I hated the water.

  A howling wind blew riffling waves across puddles on the road.

  It was 9 a.m., but almost dark. The sun obscured behind a barrier of angry clouds stacked up like a churning cement wall over the North Atlantic. We parked the BullyBoy on South Atlantic Avenue, at the address Terek had sent us. Three- and four-story vacation homes on stilts, with garages on the ground floors, lined a street of broken pavement.

  I said, “Sure we should park here?”

  Chuck stopped us on a sandy stretch of sidewalk bordered by orange signs that warned there was no parking. That wasn’t what I was worried about. To our right, over the public access bridge, surging gray waves thrashed the beach, pounding spray high into the air that the wind sucked over us in a salty mist.

  I checked my phone. No messages. Which meant no data connection.

  It was supposed to be a three-hour drive in from the senator’s house, but we’d been stopped twice on the way around DC. We also made a stop at the entrance to the Naval Air Station Oceana and asked about civilians. The young man at the guard desk said that all civilians from air passenger aircraft had been discharged the day before.

  I told him Lauren’s name and asked if he could run it through the system, but he said there was no system to run it through. There was a mountain of papers, he said, but we would need authorization. Which would take time.

  I asked if she could have been taken somewhere else.

  The young man only said that we better get somewhere safe, because he thought a big storm was coming. He didn’t have any more information than that.

  He wasn’t kidding.

  A pounding roar as a wave hit the beach. Foamy spray catapulted into the air. On the last bridge crossing onto the barrier island of Virginia Beach itself, a few cars had been going the opposite direction, but none had been going the way we were. One car flashed their lights at us: Are you crazy?

  “You sure this is the place?” Irena asked from the back.

  Chuck replied, “Aqua Lane and Atlantic Avenue, right? Sound watery enough for you?”

  Twisting and turning the last few blocks without access to GPS on our cell phones had been maddening. How many Atlantic Avenues were out here? I would have wagered a few dozen.

  I held up my phone. On it was the image Terek found, the one with Lauren. A three-story house on stilts with white balconies in the background. It could have been almost any along this road. In all of Virginia Beach, to be honest.

  Terek had found the image on the social media page of this woman named Emily Simmons. A quick look through other pictures on her profile and we found pictures of her in Hong Kong. She worked for American Airlines as a flight attendant. Made sense that she might have been on the same flight as Lauren.

  Terek said he had set up a background process to look for facial recognition hits on Lauren, on the chance something was posted with her in it. He and Damon had collaborated on getting the process set up, but they didn’t really expect it to work.

  Until it did.

  We tried calling Emily Simmons at a number Terek dug up, but no one answered. We checked her social media page again and again, but there were no new posts. We had no idea why she had taken a picture of herself with Lauren.

  “Let’s get out and have a look around,” Agent Coleman said from the back.

  I think he just wanted to get out of the back seat. He was a big man.

  The gull-wing doors of the BullyBoy opened and I was greeted by a pelting rain that attacked horizontally. I stepped out of the truck.

  Into ankle-deep water.

  In the two minutes we’d sat in the car after Chuck parked it, an advancing front of water had streamed down the street from the south. The water surged across the road and into the lawns and thrashing palmettos of the houses across the street.

  Red-brown clouds scudded overhead. The wind almost picked me up as I left the car.

  “Which way?” I shouted to Chuck.

  Agent Coleman stepped out behind me and leaned into the gale. Irena got out of the opposite side and held onto the door for balance.

  “That way,” Chuck called back over the wind. “Six-fifty to eight hundred Atlantic.”

  The range of addresses Terek had given us, his best estimate from the background of the picture of Lauren. In the middle of the row was a tall house with bright blue awnings over the windows. A grassy embankment ran up both sides to the first floor. Two-car garage on the bottom level.

  “We go door to door?” I asked Agent Coleman.

  “That is the plan.”

  He didn’t seem optimistic. He kept glancing at the pounding surf. I couldn’t stop watching it either. Another wave front rolled down the street and slopped against my ankles.

  The wind picked up, and then, as if it was hitting its stride, really threw itself into gear. A fresh squall thundered into us. I stumbled back. Agent Coleman caught me.

  “We go in pairs,” he said. “One team to each side.”

  Bent almost double to stay stable in the wind, Chuck made his way toward me. “Look at that.”

  The tower of clouds moved in menacing slow-motion and rotated to the right as far as we could see into the rain-soaked distance. The gusting wind brought fat raindrops, pelting us like watery bullets. I shielded my face.

  Chuck almost yelled in my ear, “Two weeks ago it was down in the West Indies. Ten miles per hour. Two weeks. That’s got to be it.”

  “What’s got to be what?” The water was at my ankles now.

  The churning wall loomed. The sheer scale and lurking power the most awesome and terrifying thing I’d ever seen. Bits of paper and plastic blew past and ripped skyward. Lightning flashed in the foggy distance over the Atlantic.

  Water streamed past as though we stood in a river, already as deep as the tops of my ankles. The crashing waves over the sand break crested ever higher. They seemed to be ten feet above me.

  “We better hurry,” I said breathlessly.

  We crossed to the other side of the street to get out of the worst of the wind’s fury. If Lauren had been here, there was no way she would stay, not looking at what we were looking at.

  We hadn’t received any warnings from Leo’s staff or seen anything on TV, but then, nobody knew it was coming. Like when the big one hit Galveston a hundred years ago—nobody had any warning at all.

  Chuck grabbed my shoulder. “You’re not kidding, come on—”

  “Hey,” I said.

  He shielded his eyes and tried to follow my hand as I pointed at a figure running from a house three doors down.

  The three-story structure with bright blue awnings had a d
ish on top of it, like one of those old satellite receivers—but bigger, like the ones nobody used anymore that rusted on the top of sports bars. Except this one looked brand new, and very out of place.

  The running figure glanced at our truck, then splashed away through the water toward a car parked under an awning. The hair. That awkward loping gait as the woman tried to break into a run. I’d know her anywhere.

  Two men ran out of the house after her.

  Lauren.

  CHAPTER 37

  DAMON WATCHED THE bluebells dance back and forth. The brief calm of the early hours had shifted. The sun was up somewhere behind the clouds, and a fresh morning wind whipped the oaks and beeches, stripping away leaves in gusts that bent their branches.

  A storm was coming.

  His laptop pinged. It was a return response from the GenCorp systems.

  Damon checked his clock. 9:14 a.m.

  More than three hours since he’d sent the request. He was relieved he’d gotten a pingback, that the heart of data connection was still beating, no matter how slowly—but he was also confused and wary. Why was it so slow? What did it mean?

  He opened the data packet attached to the message. Might as well have been opening a bomb. He cringed as he clicked. The key depressed and rebounded.

  No explosion. Not even a beep.

  But then that’s exactly what would happen, even if he’d been compromised. He was running a clean UNIX shell that was sandboxed off from the rest of his system, memory, and processes, so he would wipe it clean—but still, with an adversary as sophisticated as one that could pull off the attack on GenCorp, anything was possible.

  Expect the unexpected.

  He opened a plain text file. A list of numbers from 0 to 128, with the corresponding percentages of remaining fuel for each of six thrusters. Several on the list returned with a logical fail, which meant, he guessed, that they weren’t in contact. Destroyed or otherwise. Most of them were intact.