Combat

by Stephen Coonts

  It was in this endeavor that the tools and techniques that longbow had provided the legionnaires came into play. By using an account name that he had been given by longbow, Angelo was permitted to “go root.” In the virtual world, being a “root” on a system is akin to being God. Root was created by network administrators to access every program and every file on a host computer, or any servers connected to it, to update or fix glitches in the system. Having root access also allows anyone possessing this divine power the ability to run any program or manipulate any file on the network. Once he had access as a root user on the Army computer system that handled the requisitioning and allocation of spare parts, Angelo was able to approve and move his request through the network without any of the gates along the way having an opportunity to stop it. In this way the request for the 155mm artillery howitzer gun tubes for the infantry battalion in Kosovo was pulled through the system from the highest level of the United States Army’s logistical system rather than being pushed out of it from a unit at the lowest level.

  To ensure that there was no possibility that the request would be caught during a routine daily review, the Chilean hacker needed to get the request as far along the chain as he could, preferably out of the Army system itself. To accomplish this little trick, he used his position as a root operator within the Army Matériel Command’s computer to access the computers at the Army’s arsenal at Watervaliet, in New York State. It was there that all large-caliber gun tubes used by the United States Army were produced.

  Once in the arsenal’s system, Angelo rummaged around until he found six 155mm gun tubes that were already on hand there. Using the actual bin number of the on-hand gun tubes, he generated shipping documents for those items. Copies of those documents were then forwarded to the computers of the Air Force Military Airlift Command. The result of these last two actions would all but ensure that the request would go through. Upon arriving at work the following morning, the Department of the Army civilian employees at Watervaliet would be greeted by Angelo’s instructions for the disposition of the gun tubes issued through the Army Matériel Command’s computer in Alexandria, Virginia. Odds were the DOA civilian would not question this, since all the proper electronic documentation, including a code designating it as a high-priority item, were valid. At the same time the computers at the headquarters of the Military Airlift Command would spew out the warning order that a priority shipment for an Army unit forward-deployed in Kosovo was due in. As was their charter when dealing with such a request, the Air Force staff would immediately allocate precious cargo space on one of its transports headed for Kosovo, assign the mission a tasking number, generate their own mission tasking orders, and issue them to all commands who would be involved in the movement of the gun tubes. When all was set, the Air Force would relay disposition instructions back to Watervaliet, instructing the DOA civilian employee to deliver the gun tubes to the air base from which the designated transport would depart.

  All of this took time, for Angelo needed to make sure that he not only hit every point along the long chain, but that each action he took and document he generated was correct. An error anywhere along the way would result in someone going back, up or down the actual chain, to ask for clarification or a retransmission of a corrected request. The chances of someone catching the hack would, as a result, be all but certain.

  It was only when he had dotted his last virtual i and crossed his last digital t that Angelo noted the time being displayed on the upper right-hand corner of his screen. It was nearly 3 A.M. Shaking his head, the Chilean hacker raised his arms and glanced at his wristwatch. Why, he found himself wondering, had all this taken so long? While he appreciated that he had eaten up a great deal of time searching for the perfect target, and then finding an appropriately useless item to send them, Angelo found he could not explain the disparity. He had, after all, been involved in spoofs that were far more complex and involved than the one he had just completed.

  Easing back in his seat, Angelo considered this incongruity with the same highly developed analytical tools that all the members of the X Legion possessed. Doing so proved to be no easy task, for his eyes were blurry and his mind, exhausted by hours of tedious labor, was not focusing. While there was always the possibility that the fault lay with the American Army’s computers, Angelo quickly dismissed this. They had, as best he knew, some of the fastest and most capable systems in the world. Even when the United States had been in the throes of a major crisis, Angelo had never experienced anything resembling a delay on the networks he so enjoyed hacking. This evening had been a relatively slow evening, with network traffic, if anything, being a bit lighter than the norm. So the young Chilean quickly dismissed this possibility.

  This made his computer suspect. Perhaps, Angelo thought, it was time to run a diagnostic check of his system and clean up some old files, repair any fragmented sectors on his hard drive, and generally clean house. So, despite the late hour and his yearning for sleep, he leaned forward, pulled up his utility tools, and accessed the program.

  Once the disk-repair routine was running, Angelo had little to do but sit back and watch. The images that flashed across his screen were, to Angelo, a bit silly. It showed a little figure, dressed in white with a red cross on his chest, turning a disk. Every now and then, the figure would stop, bend over, and give the appearance of examining a spot on the disk. After a second, the figure would straighten up and continue his search for another “injured” disk sector. Angelo no more enjoyed watching this mundane sequence than he did sitting before a television screen displaying a test pattern. Yet like the late-night viewer too tired to sleep, the Chilean continued to stare at his screen. Even the fact that the little stick figure before his eyes was going about its mindless chores slowly and with jerky motions couldn’t shake Angelo from his inattention.

  In was in this semiconscious, almost hypnotic state that something utterly unexpected happened. The entire screen before him simply went blank. There was no flickering or shrinking of the image that is characteristic of a loss of power. Angelo did not hear the snapping that usually accompanies the tripping of the monitor’s on-off switch. Nor was there a change in the steady hum of the computer itself that would have occurred if hit by a surge. One second the screen had been up and active. Then the next, it was pitch-black.

  After blinking in an effort to clear the glaze from his eyes, Angelo stared dumbstruck at the unnatural blackness before him. Already troubled by the previous problem he had been attempting to resolve, this new development further confused the Chilean hacker. He was just beginning to wonder if the diagnostic tools that he had turned to were the cause of this calamity when, on the left-hand side of his screen, he saw a figure appear. The peculiar figure, attired from head to toe in green medieval armor and mounted on a barded horse, sported a long lance and carried a shield. Mesmerized, Angelo watched as the knight, measuring about two and a half centimeters, rode out into the center of his screen. Once there, the horse turned until the small green knight, lance still held at a forty-five-degree angle, was facing Angelo head-on. The figure paused only long enough to lower his lance and tuck his shield up closer to his body. Then, with a quick swing of his feet, the green knight spurred his mount and charged forward.

  Fascinated, Angelo watched. While one part of his mind wondered where this image was coming from, another part of the young man’s brain found itself captivated by the details of the computer-generated knight and its lifelike motions. As the virtual knight loomed closer and grew larger, more and more details were revealed. Quickly Angelo came to realize that the knight was not all green. Instead, the armor of the growing image before him began to blossom into a motley pattern of light greens, dark greens, browns, tans, and splotches of black, not at all unlike the camouflage pattern worn by modern combat soldiers. Even the bard protecting the knight’s steed was adorned with the same pattern. Only the shield clinched by the charging knight failed to conform to this scheme. Rather, the shield’s background
was as black as the rest of the screen. Upon that field, at a diagonal, was the symbol of a silver lightning bolt, coursing its way from the upper right-hand corner almost down to the lower left. On one side of the bolt there was a yellow zero, on the other a one, numbers that represented the basic building blocks of all computer languages.

  Completely engrossed by the video presentation, it took Angelo’s mind far too long to realize that the advancing knight, filling more and more of the screen before him as it charged home, was not meant to be entertaining. Rather the symbol of military virtue, power, and untiring quests was the harbinger of disaster. When this horrible fact finally managed to seep its way into his conscious mind, the young Chilean all but leaped out of his chair, as if struck by a lighting bolt not at all unlike the one adorning the knight’s grim, black shield. With a jerk he reached for the master power switch in a determined effort to crash his own system before the unheralded knight struck home and did whatever mischief its creator intended.

  Had he been thinking straight, Angelo would have saved himself the trouble, accepted his fate calmly, and enjoyed the show. For the knight he saw was not the initiator of electronic doom, but rather a messenger sent forth from an implanted program within Angelo’s machine to announce that a sequence of destruction designed to destroy the Chilean’s toy had run its course. The South American hacker had been blindsided by an assault launched across the World Wide Web by another cyber combatant, a young boy not at all unlike himself. Like so many other intruders before, Angelo Castalano had been struck down by America’s new front-line guardians, the Cyberknights of West Fort Hood.

  Two

  Virtual Heroes

  The tunnels and chambers that honeycomb the hills of West Fort Hood had been built in another era. They had been part of a national effort to fight a foe that no longer existed, using weapons designed to be delivered by aircraft and missiles that had been relegated to museums. In underground chambers encased by reinforced concrete, nuclear weapons had been stored and assembled before being wheeled out onto the tarmac of the adjoining airfield, where the city-killing devices were hosted in the waiting bomb bays of B-47s. For many years the people of the United States had depended on those bombers to stand guard and protect them from foreign intruders. In time new weapons, weapons that were more precise, more advanced, replaced the free-fall bombs that had once been hidden away under the scrub-covered hills of West Fort Hood.

  Strangely, the usefulness of the facilities that had been little more than storerooms during the Cold War long outlasted the weapons system they had been created to house. When the bombers had flown off for the last time, and the bombs themselves moved to other underground bunkers, new occupants moved into the spaces left behind.

  This subterranean world had much going for it. For one thing, the earth and rock that concealed the underground work spaces created a constant environment and temperature. Other than providing a steady flow of fresh air, little needed to be invested in the heating or cooling of the facility to a round-the-clock temperature of just under seventy degrees. For those who have not had the opportunity to enjoy the month of August in Texas, this was a very big plus. Nor did people need to concern themselves a great deal with physical upkeep. There were, after all, no lawns, walkways, windows, or exterior walls that needed to be tended to. Even the interior was rather robust and carefree. The babyshit green glazed tiles that covered the walls, while monotonous and difficult to work with, made painting all but unnecessary. There were, of course, issues and difficulties that were well-nigh impossible to overcome. For one thing, the all-male draftee Air Force of the early 1950s had far different ideas about the minimum requirements when it came to the latrines than did the mixed workforce that followed them in later decades. And when it came to updating the electrical web that supplied power to everything from the overhead lights to high-speed computers, architects and engineers first found themselves having to redefine the meaning of creativity.

  The attraction of the underground complex, however, went beyond these concerns over simple creature comfort. The very nature of the facility made access difficult. Since there were so few outlets, movement into and out of the underground complex could be readily controlled. The access tunnels which did connect the outside world to the work spaces within were long, straight, unobstructed, and narrow. This permitted security personnel manning the checkpoints at both ends of these tunnels clean fields of fire. The posts themselves, holdovers from the days when topsecret weapons had been stored there, were in fact bunkers. From behind bulletproof glass and using gun ports designed to sweep the entire length of the tunnel as well as the area immediately outside, the military police on duty could employ their automatic weapons to deny entrance into the complex completely.

  This tight control extended to more than the coming and going of those who occupied the complex. Electronic equipment operated within the underground chambers was protected by the same dirt and rock that provided the humans who operated it with a comfortable environment. While not impossible, efforts to eavesdrop electronically from the outside were complicated. Nor could electronic emissions from computers escape, except though the cabling that provided power and communications from the outside world. To prevent this, filters and sophisticated countermeasures at selected points along the wiring leaving the complex denied unauthorized monitoring and filtered out emissions. If the powers that be wanted to, the entire complex could be shut down and isolated in every way imaginable.

  Isolation, however, was not part of the charter for those who currently occupied the West Fort Hood complex, known by its occupants as the Keep. Quite to the contrary. From clusters of workstations that numbered anywhere from four to eight, young men and women sat before state-of-the-art computers, following the day-to-day activities of computer operators throughout the entire United States Army. With the twirl of a trackball and the click of a button, the cybersnoops at West Fort Hood could pull up the screen of any Army computer that was plugged into the World Wide Web or one of a dozen closed-loop systems used by units that handled hypersensitive material. Everything the unsuspecting computer operators “out there” did and saw on their machines could be monitored, recorded, and studied from the complex.

  While the on-screen antics of some of the Army personnel and the civilians who work alongside of them in cyberspace could be entertaining, the residents of the subterranean labyrinths were not concerned with them. Rather, they searched the Army’s network of computers in search of those who did not belong there, young hackers from the outside like Angelo Castalano who used their computers to generate electronic mischief and mayhem on systems the Army depended upon to keep itself going. This, of course, was nothing new and far from being a secret. The hunting down and tracking of unauthorized intrusions into an organization’s computer system by the government and civilian businesses was practiced universally.

  What made the West Fort Hood cybersleuths different than that of other, more mainstream agencies was what they did once they latched on to someone fiddling about in an Army computer. The computer geeks of the FBI, CIA, NSA, Secret Service, banks, and corporations all relied on laws, both federal and international, or protective countermeasures to deal with violators they came across. While this was usually sufficient to do the job, the use of established courts to punish or end unauthorized intrusions and electronic vandalism took time. In some cases, the lack of laws or a foreign nation’s inability to enforce existing laws made retribution impossible. And there were more than a few instances where the nature of the violation demanded an immediate response.

  It was to provide the United States Army with the ability to deliver that response that 401st Signal Detachment was created. Sporting a simple black unit crest with nothing but a zero and a one separated by a lightning bolt, personnel assigned to the 401st went about their assigned duties without fanfare. Together this collection of intelligence analysts, computer experts, and hackers stationed at West Fort Hood was rather unspectacular. The didn
’t sport a beret, worn at a jaunty angle. Nor did they wear a special skills qualifications badge over the upper left pocket of their rumpled BDUs like that given out to paratroopers, expert infantrymen, or combat medics. To those who did not have a security clearance sufficient to read the unit’s mission statement, it appeared that the 401st was simply another combat service support unit swelling the ranks of the Army that already had far too much tail and not near enough teeth.

  Only a handful of senior officers in the Army knew that this was just not so. The 401st provided neither service nor support. It had teeth, real teeth and a mandate to use them. For the fangs that the 401st sported had not been created to serve as a show of force or deterrent. Unlike their more conventional counterparts, the computer hackers who wore the black “Oh Slash One” crest had but one mode of operation: attack. Collectively known as Cyberknights, their charter was not only to find intruders, but to strike back using every means possible. The motto adopted by this quiet little unit pretty much summed it all up in three words, “Seek, Strike, Destroy.”

  From their small workstations tucked away in casements where nuclear weapons once sat, the Cyberknights of the 401st went about their task with enthusiasm. For many of the young men and women assigned to the unit, this was the ultimate in jobs, a nonstop video game played against a foe that was always different, and just as articulate as they in the ways of cyberspace. Most of the “foot soldiers” belonging to the 401st were in their early twenties. With few exceptions they had been recruited by the Army on campuses of America’s most prestigious universities and colleges. The typical candidates targeted to fill the ranks of the cyberwarfare unit were well-educated students who had more ability than they did drive, ambition, and money. Better than half had been on academic probation when the recruiter from the 401st approached them. Faced with the prospect of being cast out into the real world, where they would not have a degree to help them find a job sufficient to pay off student loans and credit-card debt they had accumulated along the way, the Army’s offer was a lifeline.