Price of Duty

by Dale Brown

  “Clever, isn’t it?” Nechaeva said quietly. “By mimicking known internal IP addresses so closely, these foreign agents were able to hide their hacking attempts from any routine firewall check.”

  “Clever? No. It’s diabolical,” he muttered. He turned back to his computer, still staggered by what he now saw. “Who is doing this? Who do these spies work for?”

  Nechaeva shrugged. “The American CIA? Our ‘friends’ in Beijing’s Ministry of State Security? The Poles? It is impossible to say for sure.”

  “This is terrible. It’s a disaster. A complete nightmare,” Obolensky stammered. His mind was busy working through the consequences of a security breach. “My God, every piece of advance military-grade software that we’ve developed is at risk.”

  “True enough,” Nechaeva said bluntly. Then she patted him on the shoulder. “If it’s any consolation, we do not think these hackers have been able to penetrate your computer security. At least not yet.”

  “But they’ll keep trying,” he realized.

  She nodded. “Oh yes. And they will succeed, probably sooner rather than later—unless additional precautions are taken.”

  Obolensky seized on that hope. “I’ll contact our IT people immediately,” he promised. “They can strengthen the firewall . . . and institute more rigorous monitoring of those access logs.”

  Nechaeva raised a finely sculpted eyebrow. “You would trust those who have already failed to detect these attempted intrusions? Or who, perhaps, deliberately decided not to report them to you?”

  “What are you hinting at?” he demanded, turning even paler if that was possible. “Are you implying that some of the institute’s own people may be in league with these spies?”

  She smiled coldly. “I have said nothing of the kind, Doctor.”

  “But you think it is possible?”

  Nechaeva shrugged again. “I merely suggest it might be wiser not to rely too heavily on your own resources. Not when faced with an espionage threat of this caliber and magnitude.”

  “Then what can be done?” Obolensky asked desperately, sounding like a drowning man thrashing about in the hope of rescue. “Earlier, you said you were here to help me. What did you mean by that?”

  She reached into her uniform jacket and took out a USB flash drive. He could see the double-headed eagle emblem of the FSB embossed on the small device. “Our best cybersecurity specialists have devised a more advanced set of defenses for your network, Doctor. Their work will add a new and virtually undetectable layer to your existing firewall.” Her mouth twisted in a cold, cruel smile. “Best of all, these defenses will instantly alert us to any new attempts to breach your security—enabling us to trace these hackers back to their lair.”

  “And then what?” Obolensky wondered.

  “If, as I suspect, they are operating on our soil, we will capture them if possible. If not, we will eliminate them,” Nechaeva told him brusquely.

  He shuddered. Something in this beautiful woman’s voice hinted that she would enjoy personally killing the foreign agents trying to break into his secure networks. He found such ferocity frightening. “Kills” in his professional world were antiseptic, largely a question of watching blips disappear from a glowing screen.

  Still pale, Obolensky took the flash drive from her and plugged it into his computer. Immediately a dialogue box popped open. “Prodvinutaya Programma Kiberbezpasnost. Advanced Cybersecurity Program. Run Y/N?” He typed in yes and then entered the password necessary to approve the program for use throughout the lab network.

  For less than a minute, the tiny device quietly clicked and whirred. When it fell silent, he ejected it and gave it back to Nechaeva.

  She dropped it back into her pocket. “Thank you, Doctor,” she said, without any apparent emotion. “The state appreciates your cooperation in this matter. Just as it also requires your utmost discretion.”

  Obolensky nodded quickly. “I understand fully, Colonel,” he assured her. “No one else at NNIIRT will hear about this. Not from me.”

  “For your sake, I hope that is true,” Nechaeva said. A thin, icy smile flitted across her face and then vanished. “It would be a great shame for Mother Russia to lose a man of your intelligence and ability.”

  NIZHNY NOVGOROD

  A SHORT TIME LATER

  Several blocks from the Research Institute for Radio Engineering, Colonel Tatiana Nechaeva paused at a street corner to check her surroundings. To a casual observer, she was merely making sure she could cross safely.

  Her eyes flicked in all directions. No one suspicious was in sight. She was clear.

  Walking quickly in the cold, Nechaeva crossed to the other side of the narrow, tree-lined street. Halfway down the block, she turned into an alley running beside a run-down brick apartment building. After one more quick check to confirm that she wasn’t being followed, she used a key to unlock the building’s battered metal service door and went in.

  Her nose wrinkled against the rank odor of uncollected trash. The dented, rusting garbage cans lined up along cement-block walls were overflowing, surrounded by plastic bags stuffed with rotting food scraps, dirty diapers, and broken bottles. Sanitation wasn’t the strong suit of the apartment building’s part-time superintendent. On the other hand, neither was poking his nose into the affairs of his tenants. All things considered, she thought, his laziness and lack of interest in anything but making sure his rents were paid on time was a net plus.

  So were the other tenants, a mix of working families and single men employed in the city’s factories and other businesses. During the daytime, the adults were either out at work or asleep after pulling exhausting night shifts. Their children were either in school or day care. All of which added up to a building where no one wondered about, or even noticed, the strange spectacle of a uniformed colonel in the FSB coming and going at odd hours.

  Nechaeva took the dingy, garbage-strewn rear staircase to the small apartment she’d rented on the second floor. Most of the lightbulbs were burned out, so she used her smartphone as a flashlight to avoid stepping in the worst messes. At the door to her apartment, she rapped four times, then used her key and went straight in.

  A young man wearing jeans and a sweater swiveled away from the computer he’d been using. “I’m inside their system, Sam!” he said in glee. “I’ve got total access to everything in the NNIIRT lab network. I went straight through their firewall without so much as a peep.” He shook his head in disbelief. “But I still can’t believe this loco scheme of yours actually worked!”

  Samantha Kerr grinned back at him. “There’s always a way in. Sometimes you pick the lock. Sometimes you figure out where they hid the key. And sometimes you just con them into opening the door for you.”

  She unbuttoned her heavy uniform coat and tossed her officer’s cap onto a chair. “Have you snagged that target acquisition and identification upgrade yet?”

  The younger man nodded. “No sweat. A copy’s already on its way to our tech guys at Scion.”

  “Is there any way the Russians can detect what you’ve been doing?” Sam asked. “Or spot you when you go back in?”

  “Not in a million years,” he told her confidently. “The passkey program that nice Dr. Obolensky installed for us includes a cleaner function.”

  “Good,” she said seriously. “Because I have a hunch Mr. Martindale is going to have more work for us very soon.”

  EIGHTEEN

  RUSSIAN RAILWAYS, STAFF OFFICES, MOSCOW

  LATER THAT NIGHT

  Unlike his colleague Yuri Akulov, Taras Ivchenko looked like a man to be reckoned with. Tall, broad-shouldered, and square-jawed, the former intelligence officer had played ice hockey from the age of five up through his graduation from Moscow State University. On the ice, his ferocity and daring allowed him to score more goals than other players, while also spending more time in the penalty box and hospital emergency rooms. He’d stopped playing hockey after the KGB recruited him. Instead, he’d channeled his aggres
sive instincts into the more exciting game of espionage.

  Over the course of his career with the KGB and later the FSB, Ivchenko had become a master of black-bag operations. His elite team of burglars had broken into more than a dozen Western embassies and consulates, stealing secrets, planting listening devices, and accumulating information on cryptographic methods that helped crack some of the codes and ciphers used by the Americans and their allies.

  Now he was using those same skills on behalf of Igor Truznyev.

  Breaking into the ultramodern building housing Russian Railways’ central staff offices had been child’s play in comparison to the exploits of his glory days. The security guards hired by the state-owned railroad firm spent most of their time and energy trying to stop employees from pilfering computers and other expensive equipment. The idea that a visitor might stay past normal working hours and then break into a senior executive’s office would have struck them as ludicrous. Who would be dumb enough to risk going to prison doing something so pointless? After all, the Kalanchevskaya Street building wasn’t a bank or even a repository of precious secrets.

  But they were wrong.

  So far in their joint investigation for Truznyev, Ivchenko and Akulov had been impressed by the thoroughness with which President Gryzlov and Major General Koshkin had camouflaged Russia’s cyberwar operation. Between them, the two men had gone to great lengths to keep any knowledge of their Perun’s Aerie complex within a tightly restricted circle. They’d even made sure that databases belonging to the FSB, the Kremlin, and Russia’s armed forces contained no electronic records of its construction, location, defenses, or staffing.

  Any foreign spy service poking and prying in all the usual ways would never pick up any actionable intelligence about the massive cyberwar center. They might not be able to confirm that it even existed.

  Taras Ivchenko grinned to himself, imagining the stunned looks on Gryzlov and Koshkin’s faces if they ever learned how their carefully spun web of secrecy had been penetrated. Despite all their technological prowess, they’d overlooked the simplest of things—ordinary human weakness and the information routinely collected and stored by any modern railway company. First, the drunken babbling of Ivan Budanov, the Atomflot engineer, had revealed that a special mixed freight and passenger train was used to move nuclear-reactor components from Murmansk to the Perun’s Aerie complex. From there it was simply a question of gaining access to Russian Railways’ signal and traffic logs. Every train moving anywhere along the sixty-two thousand kilometers of Russia’s railroads under centralized control automatically triggered a computer-generated report whenever it passed through a signal or a station.

  Which was what brought Ivchenko to Konstantin Apraksin’s office in the middle of the night. As a senior Russian Railways executive, Apraksin had unrestricted access to its entire corporate database. Best of all, like many computer illiterates, he kept a helpful cheat sheet with all of his passwords and user names taped to the side of his desktop monitor.

  Patiently, Ivchenko clicked through page after page of Murmansk freight-yard records. He was looking for any train departures that matched the range of possible dates Akulov had picked out of Budanov’s vodka-soaked memories.

  A third of the way through, his eyes narrowed. Train Number 967 seemed a possible fit. That was a three-digit code used to identify mixed freight and passenger trains, although it was usually reserved for short-haul commuter runs. He clicked on the number, opening up more detailed records.

  “Kush! Jackpot!” he murmured.

  Number 967 included four heavy-duty electric locomotives. That was no commuter train. Just as revealing was the small tag that told the rail-control system to award it top priority along all sections of high-density track. Nor was there a slated destination. The only thing that didn’t fit was its cargo—listed as imported factory machinery supposedly brought in through the city’s warm-water port.

  Ivchenko shook his head in disgust at such sloppiness. Imported machinery? That was a damned thin cover story. Then he reconsidered. It was probably good enough to fool any railway inspector who checked the train’s freight cars. One jumble of steam pipes, pumps, conduits, turbines, and generators probably looked like another to the untrained eye.

  Slowly, carefully, he began searching through the database—painstakingly tracking the progress of special Train Number 967 as it made its way from Murmansk south to St. Petersburg and from there to Moscow. At Moscow, it turned west onto the Trans-Siberian Railway and then north toward Volgoda. At the Konosha rail hub, Number 967 stopped briefly to replace its electric freight locomotives with diesel engines, and then continued northwest on the nonelectrified line to Pechora and Vorkuta.

  Ah, he thought, here we go. Both cities were near the foothills of the northern Ural Mountains.

  As it happened, Pechora was the end of the line for Train Number 967. The station logs showed that it arrived and was shunted off to a siding. And from that point on, it simply vanished.

  Smiling to himself, Ivchenko closed the files he’d opened and turned off the computer. Between them, he and Akulov had narrowed down the location of the Perun’s Aeria cyberwar complex. It was located somewhere in the Urals near Pechora. And that was close enough for nongovernment work, the former FSB officer thought.

  He supposed Truznyev might want someone to actually visit the distant city to dig up more, but he would strongly recommend against that course. Gryzlov and Koskhin may have missed this particular hole in their security, but neither would be foolish enough to leave Pechora itself unwatched. As soon as anyone connected to Truznyev’s private espionage network stepped off a plane or a train in Pechora, alarms would start ringing all the way from the Urals to the Kremlin.

  Besides, Ivchenko thought, why bother? Once he reported in, his boss would have all the information he needed to make trouble for Gennadiy Gryzlov, should he decide that was either necessary or might be profitable.

  IRON WOLF SQUADRON, POWIDZ, POLAND

  SEVERAL HOURS LATER

  Brad McLanahan finished taxiing the XCV-62 off the runway and into one of the squadron’s largest camouflaged aircraft shelters. By the time he and Nadia finished their postflight checklists, the hangar doors were already closed.

  Martindale and Whack Macomber were waiting for them at the foot of the Ranger’s crew ladder.

  “Well, how did it fly?” Martindale demanded, not wasting any time on pleasantries. “Is the Ranger really as capable as Jon Masters claimed it would be?”

  “Why yes, thank you, Mr. Martindale. It is very nice to see you too,” Nadia said bitingly. “So kind of you to ask.”

  Macomber chuckled—he enjoyed watching the smug, condescending, lordly former U.S. president receiving a shot from someone who wasn’t afraid of his power or authority.

  To his credit, the older man ducked his head in apology. “Forgive me, Major,” he said, with a disarming smile. “I know that you and Brad are tired, but the situation’s a bit tense here . . . and I’ve missed you both.”

  Brad decided to let that bit of politician’s insincerity pass without further comment. Personally, he figured it was just as well that Nadia wasn’t carrying her sidearm. She probably wouldn’t have shot Martindale, but she might have scared the crap out of him. After logging more than twenty hours of total flight time and ten thousand nautical miles, they were both pretty frazzled.

  Instead, he patted the underside of the wing just above his head. “She’s a beaut, sir,” he said. “The XCV-62 may not handle like a high-performance jet fighter, but she’s a heck of a lot more agile than the B-2 bombers I’ve flown in Sky Masters simulators—despite having the same kind of tailless configuration. And based on the real-world fuel-consumption figures we saw, my guess is the Ranger has significantly more range than Uncle Jon claimed.”

  Macomber laughed quietly. “That bastard always did like to play it close to his vest.”

  “It’s a good sales technique,” Martindale allowed, with a slight smil
e of his own. “Always deliver more than you promised.”

  Folding her arms, Nadia tapped her foot impatiently on the floor of the hangar. They all turned to look at her. “You said the situation was bad, Mr. President,” she reminded Martindale. “How bad?” Her eyes were worried. “Have there been new cyber attacks? Is our power grid still down?”

  “I said tense,” the older man corrected her gently. “Which isn’t quite the same thing.”

  “But close enough, for fuck’s sake . . . sir,” Macomber muttered.

  Martindale shrugged. “I won’t argue semantics, Whack.” He turned back to Nadia and Brad. “We’ve made some limited progress in restoring the electrical grid in Poland and the other AFN nations. Between my Scion experts and the various national CERT teams, we’ve flushed the Russian malware out of all the infected transmission-control computers. But it’s going to take a lot longer to restore everything.”

  “If the viruses are gone, why not bring everything back online right now?” Brad asked.

  “Because the initial power surges and blackouts fried a shitload of generators and slagged several hundred kilometers’ worth of high-voltage transmission lines,” Macomber said bluntly. “That kind of equipment doesn’t exactly grow on trees.”

  “Sadly, no,” agreed Martindale. “President Wilk and the other alliance leaders are buying replacement generators and supplies of transmission line wherever they can, but the fact remains that we’re lucky if most of the major cities have electricity eight to ten hours a day at the moment.”

  “And the outlying areas?” Nadia asked. Her grandparents lived in a small village outside Kraków. “How long until they have power?”

  “It could take weeks. Maybe months,” Martindale told her.

  “Jesus,” Brad muttered.

  Martindale nodded. “Which is why the leaders of the AFN are gathering in Warsaw tomorrow evening for an emergency summit. Under the pressure of this unrelenting wave of cyberwar attacks, confidence in the alliance is fraying. President Wilk wants to remind his fellow presidents and prime ministers that we have considerable military and technological capabilities of our own. That’s why Piotr wants us there too—all of the top people in Scion and the Iron Wolf Squadron.”