At the time of the guidance system incident, the technician had commanded the computer to freeze its memory and not reuse any memory that had recently been used and released back to the system. The tech had done a copy dump of the entire memory and he was now manually reviewing the contents of each piece of frozen storage from around the time of the log file alterations.
The worm was very simplistic and had no programmed startup timers or event triggers. The worm had become active as soon as it was introduced to the system. This meant that the worm had been introduced within milliseconds of the first guidance system variances being noticed in Storm Killer’s guidance system.
Even with such a narrow timeline of the worm introduction and the limited number of input stations, the tech had to go through several thousand pieces of frozen memory storage.
Kim was frustrated. The evidence from the first incident was still incomplete and now the second sabotage attempt had stopped all progress by her team. They were now busy gathering evidence from the second attempt and had placed the evaluation of the evidence from the first attempt on hold.
Kim was awaiting a report from Hoch on fingerprint matches from the prints lifted from the three computer workstations. It would go much quicker if they knew which workstation the saboteurs had used. There were a hundred different prints on each workstation. Some of these prints were from people no longer on the station.
“From the number of prints we have found, I doubt the cleaning crew has ever cleaned any of the workstations,” Kim muttered to herself. Apparently, the cleaning crew did not adhere to the checklist item on wiping down the workstations each night. Kim made a mental note to herself to start carrying antibacterial wipes and use them every time she touched a computer pad in the public areas.
“Uh, Ms. Danby, uh, this looks like something,” the tech pointed excitedly at the screen. Kim walked over to tech’s desk and looked over his shoulder. “What have you got?”
“This appears to be the true log in file.” The tech browsed down the image until he came to the log in entries around the time the system variations started. His eyes widened as he pointed to the entry time stamped just fifteen seconds before the worm first appeared.
Kim couldn’t believe the name that appeared. The screen read:
LOGIN TERMASD1 08/21/29 TIME 08163108GMT ACCESS CLASS EXEC USERID=BBOLINO
Brad Bolino? What the hell is going on here? Kim thought to herself. She grabbed the tech’s shoulder and squeezed saying, “Keep this information to yourself until I tell you what to do, OK?”
“Yes, certainly,” the tech replied looking scared and confused.
“Which workstation is it from?” she asked.
“The workstation in hydroponics.”
Kim touched the intercom button on the cell phone attached to her waist and spoke, “Hoch? It’s the workstation in hydroponics. Back burner the other workstations’ prints and focus on those from that specific workstation. Report your findings to me and me alone. Danby out.”
Lt. James strode into the work area carrying a memory stick. “Well, Danby, are you still happy you went behind my back and stole command of this investigation from me? No need, to reply, I know you are.“
Kim started to reply and defend herself, but Lt. James raised his hand, waved her off and continued. “I finished the surveillance analysis. Nobody who should not have been there entered or exited the area around the mainframe during the airlock incident. Except for Dr. Cruz. She had been called to that location by a reported possible electrocution. Apparently, one of the techs had come in contact with a live wire while installing a new air handler for cooling the mainframe.“
“I don’t believe in coincidence, do you, Lieutenant?” Kim asked. “An electrocution in the area right around the time of the sabotage? Who was the tech?”
“A Rafael Denuza, a general maintenance engineer from Southern California,” Lt. James replied. “He has nothing in his background to suggest he had any motive for this. Dr. Cruz’s report states Denuza had suffered minor burns and was having some difficulty breathing when she arrived and it took her about twenty minutes to ensure he was stable and out of danger.”
“Who else was there with them during this time?” Kim asked.
“Well, another tech, Alfred Mooney, was there for a few minutes, but Dr. Cruz sent him to get a oxygen tank from the Doctor’s emergency sled. He was gone for about five minutes. The camera verified he did indeed come out and get a portable O2 bottle from the sled. He apparently had a tough time getting the bottle out of the sled. The bottle’s strap was wrapped around the handle of the emergency stretcher. He was on camera for about two minutes.”
“So, we have three suspects. We have Mooney, who we can verify only two minutes of his absent five minutes. We have Denuza and Dr. Cruz who appear to corroborate each other’s stories, but were alone with no witnesses for about five minutes. Did we get any prints from the reversed input feeds?”
“No prints. But I found a trace of a white powder on two of the wires. I packaged a sample and sent it down on the shuttle last night. Ground Control should be getting a report from the FBI lab later today,” Lt. James reported.
Kim filled him in on the latest information she had.
After the quick briefing, he stood up, heading toward the door. “The camera in hydroponics was reported out of order, so I don’t think we’ll get any video of our culprit. Convenient time to have camera problems, don’t you think? And a very interesting coincidence that the workstation used was in the only area with a known camera problem. I’m going to have Hoch look at the entire workstation area in hydroponics and see if he can find anything. While he does that, I’m going to be checking the broken camera. That is just too much of a coincidence for me.”
He stopped, turned around, and snarled, “I would assume you are going to pursue the Bolino evidence, so good luck. I would hate to be accusing the Station Director of sabotaging his own station. I think you’re in over your head, lady, and I hope I’m around when the axe falls.” He left the room.
Kim had developed a mild crush on the lieutenant. He had always treated her with utmost respect and kindness. He was a very attractive man in Kim’s eyes. They had become close friends and they shared many private thoughts with each other. Kim had always respected his senior rank and, in public, rarely called him anything other than lieutenant.
Kim watched him walk out and sighed thinking, He may be right. Maybe I was too aggressive taking command of this. He is really ticked at me. But he is a professional and is doing a good job. Maybe, when this is over, I can repair our relationship. He really is a fine man!
She thought back to her first meeting with Lt. James five years ago.
21
Five Years Before; Introduced To The Beast
CORDEX had spent mountains of dollars and years of time pushing through the Storm Killer proposal.
They, at first, had needed to convince the insurance industry that Storm Killer had the potential to greatly reduce, or even eliminate, destruction and damage caused by tropical storms.
Once the insurance industry was solidly behind the proposal, they had to jointly convince the United States Congress and two different administrations that Storm Killer was feasible and that the required technology existed already. The final obstacle was establishing a multi-hundred billion dollar project was a reasonable cost when compared to the long-term benefits.
Congress first began listening after Hurricane Katrina all but annihilated New Orleans and the entire Gulf Coast. Even now, years later, the city was just a ghost of its former vibrant self.
But it wasn’t until Hurricane Wynona in the decade following Katrina that Congress and the prior administration was finally convinced to act.
The Florida cities of Tampa, St. Petersburg, and Clearwater no longer existed. At least, they no longer existed as they had prior to Wynona. Now, they existed as small villages scattered among large swatches of flattened piles of rubble that had been office bu
ildings, retail businesses, and homes.
Wynona had hit at the worst possible time. She had churned ashore at celestial high tide. The moon and sun were at their closest positions to Earth and aligned at the new moon phase when Wynona made land. This alignment caused the unusual high tide of ninety centimeters. The storm surge came on top of this high tide.
St. Petersburg and Clearwater were on a peninsula separating Tampa Bay from the Gulf of Mexico. The peninsula was lined by a string of barrier islands down the entire length of the west coast. These islands were where such well-known beach communities as Clearwater Beach, Madeira, Indian Rocks, Indian Shores, Treasure Island and St. Petersburg Beach were located.
Tampa was located due east of Clearwater across the bay at a distance of about twenty kilometers.
Wynona was an immense storm and fed off the hot waters of the Gulf of Mexico. She had achieved category five status a full day before landfall. Her eye came ashore a ten kilometers south of Tarpon Springs, just north of Clearwater, was an old town that had hosted a fleet of sponge boats.
The early sponge industry created a need for eating-places at the docks for the boat crews. Soon, as news of this unusual industry spread, people began to come to the docks of Tarpon Springs to see the sponges brought in. Shops opened so that the tourists could purchase sponges and other souvenirs. Some of the original shops and restaurants were still in operation when Wynona struck, owned by the same families that started them.
The series of tornadoes accompanying the eye wall had flattened Tarpon Springs and the dock area was reverting a marshland as the remaining debris slowly sank into the water.
Because of the eye’s landing site, the storm surge was blown directly through the mouth of Tampa Bay. Billions of decaliters of seawater poured through the narrow mouth of the bay. And the immense storm surge and the high tide caused Wynona to push water up and over the seawalls of lower St. Petersburg. At the storm’s height, St Petersburg became an island. The sea cut across the peninsula from Treasure Island to the northeast through Pinellas Park onward to the bay just south of the Courtney-Campbell Causeway.
A large portion of the west side of Clearwater lay many meters under water. Clearwater Beach no longer existed. Only the top floors of the tallest buildings could seen jutting up out of the water like old Florentine homes in Venice’s canals.
The barrier islands that lined the peninsula’s west coast ceased to exist for almost twenty-four hours until the filthy waters retreated back into the Gulf of Mexico.
Across the bay in Tampa, water poured up and over the city. Even though it was further inland, it suffered the same fate as St. Petersburg. Water stood five meters deep from the edge of the bay all the way to Kennedy Blvd.
While storm surge is the primary destroyer of property and life, Wynona had a second weapon of mass destruction aimed at the Tampa Bay area, wind. Wynona was known to have spawned over one hundred and fifty tornadoes along the west coast and central Florida. The sustained winds of Wynona were measured at two hundred and twenty-five kilometers and hour. Gusts were over three hundred kilometers an hour. While these winds were destroyers for structures built to pre-Katrina building codes. While the tornadoes leveled most structures built to even the most rigid building codes.
Buildings that had survived the floods were blown apart by tornadoes and the cyclonic winds. Over five thousand people died as a result of the combined wind and flood damages.
It was now five years after Wynona and CORDEX was readying their Storm Killer team. It was felt that the team didn’t have a good comprehension of how important their mission would be. If they could kill a hurricane, many lives and many billions of dollars of property damage could be avoided. The CORDEX management decided the only way to give the team the right level of comprehension was to have them actually experience a full fledge hurricane. Of the entire station compliment of one hundred and twenty-eight people, only twenty-eight had actually been in a hurricane. Those twenty-eight were aware of the power of such storms and were sensitive to the desire that Storm Killer succeed in its mission.
Over the last two hurricane seasons, the St. Thomas area had been directly hit by three storms of strength of at least category three. The latest forecasts were that the area would be probable for another storm this season. The odds were also high that the Caymans would be hit.
CORDEX made arrangements for housing of the entire team on one of two small islands within both possible storm tracks.
In St. Thomas, they rented the facility on Little Saint James Island. This seventy-two acre island had a single set of manmade structures that had been the home of Kevin Costner, the actor.
The house had been severely damaged by Hurricane Marilyn, a category three storm, in 1995. Now, rebuilt and converted to a very expensive retreat for the rich and famous, it had four separate bedroom pavilions. CORDEX had removed the furniture from the complex and set up a barracks environment with one hundred army cots, a mobile field kitchen and a medical dispenser. The home had satellite TV and radio for staying connected to the outside world.
The company’s plan was to airlift the hundred-man team to St. Thomas thirty-six hours before forecasted landfall. From the St. Thomas airport, the whole team would be ferried to the island.
And so, on September 1st, one year before Storm Killer was to go operational, the Kim Danby, Lt. Randall James, and Dan Hoch, the designated Storm Killer security team found themselves standing in front of the lone house with ninety-seven other team members watching the ferry boat depart from the island’s single dock.
Hurricane Buford was due to hit the island in twenty-eight hours. The eastern skies were already clouding over in the direction Buford approaching storm center.
This was the first time all three of the team members had been together. Kim Danby had spent training time with Hoch in Houston, but Lt. James, as the unit’s senior officer, had been at the Cape in Florida establishing the protocols and procedures to be used by his team thousands of miles above the Earth.
Hoch and Danby were taking the opportunity to size up their team leader.
Lt. Randall James was a rather striking tall ebony skinned man in his early thirties. His build was one of a man who took care of his body through rigorous exercise. His almond colored eyes gleamed and sparkled with an almost internal brilliance.
When Kim and Dan had inspected his personnel jacket, his file had not given any background prior to his hiring by CORDEX. All prior history was closed to viewing and simply marked, “Classified, Restricted Access”.
Kim flashed a smile at him and asked, “What shall we call you? Is Randall alright”
The lieutenant turned to her and, without any external sign of emotion, replied, “I prefer Lt. James, please. I like to stand on formality Officer Danby.”
Kim was a little taken back by the seeming unfriendliness of the man. She stuttered a reply, “Yes, sir!”
With that short exchange the initial ground rules were set. While Kim and Dan shared a more friendly relationship, they treated their commander as simply a superior officer. From that point forward, he was to be known simply as Lieutenant James and addressed that way.
The security team took up their position in their assigned quarters in the east wing of the house. They would act as the police and security force for the one hundred assembled people during the upcoming exercise of living through a severe hurricane.
The compound was under the nominal command of the proposed management team that the Storm killer station would be turned over to when it was complete and ready for operation. This executive team called the group together, and doled out assignments for each person in the group. Some would act as cooks, others as hurricane preparation squads, others would inventory the supplies CORDEX had left for their needs, and still others would perform duties related to their skills such as the medical team. One group was dispatched to assemble the mobile communications van and run coaxial cable from the van to the house. This would allow the same team to moni
tor the TV and radio reports on the storm twenty-four by seven and provide hourly updates to the assembled group on weather conditions and any safety items they felt would be important to the overall group.
The hurricane preparation squads began to board up the house’s windows and fuel and inspect the twin power generators that provided electricity to the whole facility. Another squad assembled the cots and prepared the bed linens. The medical team established a small infirmary in the room next to the room being used by Lt. James’ security team.
Prior to bedding down in their respective barracks at the end of the day, Kim and Dan took time to run through their Karate Kata, or forms. The Kata is a series of techniques used to develop strength and posture. Currently they were working on Kata for developing leg strength. Hoch had gotten Kim interested in marital arts and was giving her a two to three hour training session each day.
They were using the patio in front of the pool for their training area.
Lieutenant James had been returning from the portable field latrine when he spied his subordinates ending up their practice session. He noted the grace of movement Kim showed and the raw power obvious in Hoch’s frame. He started to walk toward them when they bowed to each other and picked up their towels. As they began toweling the sweat from their brows, Kim leaned forward and gave Dan a kiss. The lieutenant stopped and rethought his uninvited breaking in on his subordinates’ free time. It appeared that there was more to their relationship than just associates.
Lt. James thought, As long as they do their jobs in a professional manner, what they do after hours is their own business. With that he turned and walked away leaving Kim and Dan toweling dry. If he had stayed and approached them he might have heard their conversation after the kiss.
Dan said in a startled voice, “What the hell was that for?”
Kim laughed and replied, “It just a Thank You to a good friend who has introduced me to a wonderful pastime. I love Karate!”
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