by FX Holden
Daei flicked ash from his cigarette and looked up at the flag flying on the superstructure above him. “Six men in the Republic have been entrusted with the most powerful weapons Allah has seen fit to supply us with. Two of those weapons are under the command of the Revolutionary Guard Corps. Two are under the command of our Aerospace Force. Two have been allocated to the Navy and one of those…” he pointed with his cigarette at the activity on the deck below, “… is under your command.”
“It requires the assent of the two most senior officers aboard to fire it, and only on the express order of the Supreme Commander,” Rostami said carefully. “With the Admiral’s flag on the Sinjan, I could not use the weapon without your assent.”
“Yes, yes. I am less worried about what you would do while I am here than what you would do if I was not. Or if I was, for some reason, ‘incapacitated’.”
“Inshallah, that will never be the case,” Rostami said quickly.
“Inshallah. But tell me, when you look in your heart, is there any doubt that if the order came, you would do what was needed?”
Rostami answered immediately. “None, Admiral.”
Daei drew thoughtfully on his cigarette, the tip glowing red in the darkness. “Really? None at all?”
“No, Admiral, I will do my duty, as will every man aboard.”
Daei dropped his cigarette and ground it under his boot. “That is disappointing, Captain. It is a terrible responsibility our Leader has placed on your shoulders. The power to take thousands, maybe even millions of lives. It should never be exercised lightly, blindly, or unquestioningly, is that clear?”
Rostami blanched, surprised at the rebuke. “Yes, Admiral. But as you know, neither I nor any of the men on this ship have been briefed on what warhead is being loaded on that missile. Whether it is conventional, chemical, biological or nuclear … it is just another missile to us.”
Daei put his hand on Rostami’s shoulder and squeezed it. “If I, or anyone else, gives you the order to use that particular weapon, I want you to question me. I want you to look in your heart and ask yourself if there is any other option, any other alternative we have not considered. I want you to find that option, or that alternative, and present it to me. And if I insist upon using that weapon nonetheless, I want you to look into your heart and do what is right. Is that clear?”
“Admiral, I … I’m sorry,” Rostami stuttered. “Are you proposing I should disobey your order?”
“The Quran teaches there are two kinds of leader, Rostami,” Admiral Daei said gently. “Those who call people to do what is good, and those who call them to do what is bad. On resurrection day, those who call men to do bad deeds will not be saved.” He patted Rostami’s back before turning back toward the stairs. “You and I do not want to be among them.”
Mississippi Road, Russett, Maryland, May 17
People who didn’t know the Director of National Cyber Security expected Tonya Dupré to work out of the Directorate’s offices inside the Fort Meade NSA campus. But you’d be disappointed if you looked for her there. Unless she was forced to, Tonya never even left her apartment overlooking the Little Patuxent River.
Because the thought terrified her.
Tonya Dupré lived her life on the spectrum, balancing the job of running a key government agency with managing her social anxiety disorder symptoms as best she could, by hiding them from the world around her. And she was very, very good at that. Raw talent had only gotten her so far in her career, and she’d quickly learned that only those with connections and networks were promoted into the jobs she coveted. Jobs where she could have control and influence, where what she did had impact. But those jobs went to the men and women with the easy smiles, the warm handshakes and the amusing stories. If Tonya Dupré found herself unexpectedly in a group of people without an agenda in front of her – a party, for example – she started trembling, got palpitations and felt physically ill.
Six months into her second job, she’d realized that she was going to begin and end her working life assigned to obscure corners of the NSA where skills in human relations were optional, unless she did something radical to bend the world to her needs. This realization coincided with another. Her anxiety only manifested when she was physically together with other people. Seated in a teleconference with a dozen people, she felt no anxiety at all. Called on to stand in for her manager and address a virtual global conference of hundreds of the world’s leading cyber security professionals, she was praised in feedback for being both informative, charming and amusing. In real life, Tonya sucked the life out of a room, creating a vacuum of social energy around herself that caused people to edge away or leave her alone, which was in fact what she deeply desired. On screen, though, Tonya had presence.
She thought hard about how to turn her disability into a strength. As a ten-year-old child she’d had Guillain-Barré syndrome, a rare disorder in which the body’s autoimmune system aggressively attacks the nervous system. She’d been mocked by her ‘friends’ at school when the tingling and numbness had first manifested and had started skipping school to avoid them, which was probably either the root cause or the first sign of her anxiety disorder. Three weeks later, getting worse by the day, she was sitting at her school desk, numb and having difficulty breathing, the children around her throwing balls of paper at her trying to get a reaction, laughing at and teasing her, when she collapsed. She was immediately hospitalized. She was given high-dose immunoglobulin therapy, which interrupted the attack on her nervous system, and was soon transferred to a rehab unit and, six months later, released.
She refused to go back to school and had been home tutored for the rest of her schooling.
She decided to leverage that history to create a narrative around herself that could play to her few social strengths. Early in her NSA career she told her manager about the Guillain-Barré episode and asked for permission to work from home more. Remote working had become much more commonplace following the COVID-19 pandemic, and her request was granted. She paid from her own pocket to have a hardened optic fiber landline laid into her apartment so that she couldn’t be denied any opportunities to work on secret projects due to her work situation. She told colleagues around her she had to be careful to minimize physical contact with friends and colleagues because she was scared of a relapse of Guillain-Barré. Most accepted the story without question.
Overcompensating for her physical absence, she was hyper-present in the virtual space at NSA. She never sent a message if she could facetime a colleague. She attended ninety percent of meetings virtually and a therapist gave her the coping skills to attend the meetings she needed to attend in person.
And she was very, very good at her job. She led a series of matrix teams on small projects and then a breakthrough project landed in her lap. One of the roles of the Directorate of National Cyber Security was to support the US Warfighting effort. The US Defense forces had been pursuing the concept of All Domain Kill Chain capabilities – the ability for everyone from a general to a Marine company commander in the field to be able to pull on the combined resources of land, sea, air, cyber and space commands if needed to complete their mission.
But they lacked the AI needed to take a request from a commander in the field, assess what was needed to fulfill it, find and allocate the available resources and then focus them in support of that commander. Tonya was assigned to a project that failed, and decided that the problem was that they were trying to teach new skills to commanders in the field that were simply too complex; even the best of them were drowning in command sequences and data overload. Their mistake, Tonya felt, was that they were thinking of the AI as a tool a commander would carry with them, like a radio or infrared scope.
Tonya asked her new team to try to make the AI less like a tool and more like another member of a combat squad. A grunt, just like the other grunts the officer commanded. That meant you had to be able to give it orders in the same way, and it had to be able to reply to you in the same simple wa
y – yes sir, no can do, sir, or how about we try this instead, sir.
The Heuristic Ordinary Language Machine Extrapolation System – HOLMES – was born. Unlike some of their earlier laptop-based concepts, HOLMES wasn’t something physical you carried around with you. It was a cloud-based system that was always with you, everywhere you needed it. If you had a radio link, a satellite link, a wifi or cell phone connection, HOLMES was with you.
Tonya’s team realized they’d met the project requirements when they’d been monitoring a field trial of HOLMES in South Korean military exercises. A US Army platoon had been pinned down by a heavily fortified South Korean position and was unable to move to flank it without taking heavy losses. Seven thousand miles away they’d heard the following exchange from the platoon leader.
“HOLMES! What the hell is that in front of us?”
“Captain, my analysis indicates the enemy position comprises about twenty entrenched troops, two fifty-caliber machine guns and an 80mm field mortar.”
“Options?”
“I recommend a long-range precision fire strike with antipersonnel munitions. When the strike hits, I will give you the signal to move out and flank. Your orders, Captain?”
The Cyber Security team could hear the sound of heavy machine gun fire and the crump of a mortar smoke round landing nearby. Even though they were just exercises, they sounded terrifying.
“Call it in, HOLMES!”
“Yes, sir. Precision strike ordered. Fifteen seconds to impact. Ten seconds. Five…”
“Fox platoon, get ready to move!” the Army Captain called.
“Strike,” HOLMES announced. He then consulted with the exercise referee, also an AI. “On target. Enemy suppressed.”
“Move out!”
The Korean position had been taken with minimal ‘casualties’. In her apartment in Russett, Tonya had done a little dance. In a matter of seconds, and based on a couple of verbal commands, HOLMES had pulled down data from satellites and orbiting drones, analyzed the audio feed coming from the platoon commander and other troops in his unit, together with audio feeds up and down the line of engagement, to determine the size and nature of the force opposing the platoon. It had cued several options for fire support and proposed the one with the highest probability of success to the Captain – the long-range precision missile – but it had also identified options such as a drone or other air strike, which would have taken longer to effect, or a mortar barrage which may not have been as accurate. Though it all happened in the background, HOLMES had negotiated available fire support options and was ready to go with whatever the Captain ordered if he rejected HOLMES’ first suggestion. Again pulling on overhead surveillance, HOLMES had conducted an instantaneous strike damage assessment to be sure the target had been hit, and relayed this to the Captain so his platoon could break out and flank the enemy position.
All of this had been done in less than a minute, and with four entirely verbal interactions.
NSA personnel policy didn’t stretch to paying for gifts for government employees, so Tonya had immediately gone online and with her personal credit card ordered a bottle of champagne delivered to every one of the twenty or so members of her development team.
She’d been given the task of ensuring the NSA-wide implementation of the HOLMES platform, and her team had grown from twenty to nearly a hundred before she was promoted, then promoted again. HOLMES was now being used for everything from All Domain Kill Chain support on the battlefield to intelligence analysis within the NSA and even strategic decision support at the level of the Joint Chiefs.
And Tonya Dupré, the woman most of her staff had met only over a telepresence link, was now Director of National Cyber Security and a member of ExComm.
She still kept up a high volume of interaction with all of her leadership team, with her network in other agencies and in government, and made sure she had face time with every single one of her 300 or so employees as part of their onboarding. And she still had HOLMES.
Putting her feet up on her desk and looking out of her apartment window over the forested verge of the Little Patuxent River, she spoke to the seemingly empty room.
“HOLMES, update your estimate of the timeframe for the possible cyber attack phase of an All Domain Attack on Israel, and report.”
Yes, Director. Updating. Do you have a specific question?
“Your latest estimate regarding the initiation of cyber and space-based hostilities against Israel?”
Yes, Director. Space-based operations first. Russia has moved the Kirov-class cruiser Pyotr Velikiy into the eastern Mediterranean. It is now in position to launch blinding anti-satellite laser and Nudol missile attacks on the Israeli geostationary satellite network at short notice. It and its escorting missile destroyers are also able to provide potent anti-air and electronic warfare cover of the airspace over Israel if needed.
“So the space assault assets are in place.”
Yes. Cyber chatter has dropped to a very low level. As you know, this is indicative of either one of two states: the attack has been aborted, or the attack is imminent. Given all other indicators, I believe the second to be the case. The phase 1 space and cyber attack is imminent.
“Imminent meaning?”
Four to six hours, Director.
“Confidence?”
High.
“Damn. Is Mossad reacting yet?”
At your request, NSA and Cybercom have already been in communication with the Israeli Defense and Security services. I do however suggest a one to one between yourself and the head of Israel’s SIGINT National Unit, Unit 8200, to ensure they understand the urgency of the intelligence they’ve been provided.
“Can you get him on the line now please?”
Certainly, Director.
Tonya picked up her laptop and walked out to her kitchen, pulling open a cupboard and pouring herself a neat bourbon as she opened a secure comms window. Moments later the face of the head of Israel’s Unit 8200, Colonel Ari Zuckerman, appeared as a pixelated blob on her screen that quickly resolved itself into the image of a narrow-faced man with dark swept-back hair and a black beard with a single grey stripe down the chin. He was wearing a suit, not his army uniform, which indicated she’d pulled him out of a meeting, probably with civilian contractors.
“Madam Director,” he said. “Your assistant said it was something urgent? This is about the expected attack on our cyber infrastructure, I assume?”
“Hello, Ari, yes, I’m afraid. You’ve been briefed?”
“I have, and our preparations are well advanced, but I appreciate the courtesy call. I never know how much weight to put on such interservice briefings. The fact you called in person tells me we need to increase our preparations. How much time do we have?”
“Four to six hours is our best estimate,” she told him. “They’ll be going after your cellular comms, internet, air traffic control, utilities, international data traffic like banking, military and civilian satellite networks, recon assets … a coordinated, brute force, multiple vector space and cyber strike.”
“I can be honest with you, Tonya. If this is an All Domain Attack, we could be screwed. Our command and control systems rely on military satellite comms. Our backup in case our satellite links go down is cell phone and landline. If they successfully take out both satellite and telecommunications, we will be back in the stone age. And I mean radio and motorbike courier style stone age. We’ve wargamed it, sure, and I’ve been screaming about it to the high heavens ever since we got our first reports about this Operation Butterfly, but no one up the chain here really believed Russia would support such an attack. This is feeling like it could be our Pearl Harbor.”
“I know. All I can say is, plan for the worst. No one else has ever faced what you are about to face. Call me if you can see any way we can help, any way at all.”
“Unless you can book us bandwidth on the US mil-sat network, I can’t think of anything more right now.”
“Good luck, Ari.�
�� Tonya cut the call. “HOLMES, what is your damage estimate?”
Would you like the estimate in US dollars or Israeli shekels?
“Dollars, and lives.”
The space and cyber phase of the All Domain Attack will see a hit of eight to eleven percent of Israeli GDP or 30 to 36 billion US dollars next year alone. Excluding any lives lost in a military conflict scenario, between 2,000 and 5,000 deaths will result due to compromise of the Israeli healthcare and hospital system, cellular networks, joblessness, collapse of small and medium-sized businesses and related mental health issues. The range in these estimates is dependent on the success of the Israeli defense.
Tonya felt her gut tighten. No wonder her opposite number, Ari, had sounded so forlorn. Even with their best efforts, Israel was facing an economic wipeout that would impact it for years.
“HOLMES, you still assign a high probability to the likelihood this is an All Domain Attack? Not just a limited cyber and space-based operation?” Tonya had gone into the recent ExComm meeting armed not only with her own theories around what Iran, Syria and Russia were planning, but with a conviction based on the analysis provided to her by HOLMES. She still hoped beyond hope that the AI was wrong, or had revised its conclusions. Her heart fell as soon as the AI spoke. She’d given her personal version of HOLMES a comforting Southern accent. It didn’t help.
Yes, Madam Director, that is still the scenario with the highest level of probability. I have the following assumptions at high probability. Syria hopes to regain control of the Golan Heights from Israel and is willing to use military force to do so. Iran hopes to force Israel to negotiate a peace treaty involving curbs on nuclear weapons and missile systems. Russia hopes to reduce what it sees as the destabilizing military power imbalance between Israel and its neighbors and cement its role as the pre-eminent regional superpower. The confluence of these ambitions, combined with the observed and reported cyber, space, air, land and sea military activity centered around Israel, support the high likelihood of the planned operation, dubbed Operation Butterfly in Syrian intercepts, being a full-scale All Domain Attack.
