Kneel Or Die

by Michael Anderle

CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Pudong Shanghai, China

  Sergeant Lo Chongan was staring with concern at the computer screen in front of him. He was in charge of a PLA unit that was assigned to attack and subvert different financial concerns in the West.

  Unfortunately, his group had been given a particularly difficult group of financial companies to infiltrate. This was due to the fact that they were under the protection of an elite American Internet Cyber-Security company. So far the Americans had been able to counter the many different attack styles his group had attempted. They were almost successful a year ago, but the enemy had implemented new security software which had nullified his unit’s progress. His group had spent the last year trying to find any vulnerabilities in the security protocol. They would attack a small portion of the program that was protecting one of the known companies under this group’s security. When they were able to document a vulnerability, they would stop probing there and use the knowledge to attack another company under their protection. Hopefully, this would provide his group the ability to plant their spyware inside the enemy’s firewalls before the American group could identify and correct their vulnerabilities.

  Sergeant Lo Chongan needed his group to crack this security. It wasn’t that his PLA commanders were impatient. They were actually far more patient with his group’s lack of success than he felt his team deserved. No, it was his other master who was impatient. Sergeant Lo Chongan could feel the dark eyes staring at him every time he left his home at night. If he was lucky he rarely saw The Master. But, occasionally The Master would appear in person to request an update.

  The last update discussion had not gone well. His Master appeared at the meeting already agitated, and her barely concealed anger had made a considerable impression on Chongan. One that stayed with him for the last two months!

  Chongan felt that his team was within thirty days of being able to crack the latest security updates. His team had been within two weeks of their objective just three months ago. But then the latest update had occurred, which shut them out. Lo Chongan had been able to find out, through his contacts, that the security programmer who had implemented that update for the American firm had left the company.

  That was good for his team. Most likely the American company would not be able to protect their clients again.

  His team of eighteen hackers worked in a darkened room and their faces were illuminated by the glow of their monitors.

  His team’s goals were quite simple. Analyze the enemy, infiltrate, take control and then wait. His group would implement silent listening abilities that would send back important information. However, should there be a significant threat against China’s interests, he and many other groups within the PLA would be able to attack the computers with commands that would cripple the ability of those foreign companies to produce anything.

  They would not have their money, their data, their software or even a way to fund their payroll. It would immediately cause millions of jobs to become untenable. The sheer devastation brought about by so many people not able to work would, in and of itself, cause massive repercussions within the societies China fought.

  No country would be able to promulgate war when their businesses supply lines could not operate.

  The Art of War for the digital age.

  Now, Sergeant Lo Chongan and his group just needed to find two more weaknesses and he would be able to finally crack open the bottle of French Champagne he had been saving.

  Libya

  “How little the world understands, no matter how much we let them see. Even with the Prophet’s words written hundreds of years ago, they fail to seek the understanding of our faith and the foretelling of the great Caliphate we are building even now!” The roar of the small group was pleasing to Dawid Zadeh. He had been providing these exhortations to a group here in Libya for the last month. He felt the embrace of the crowd’s attention. All the eyes of those listening alight with the fire of the holy scriptures and the account of what was to come.

  The Caliphate was growing, even now it was being pulled together and strengthened by the hundreds who joined weekly, and the thousands who sent financial help. Dawid Zadeh’s face was serene as he walked across the large courtyard before entering the mosque. The Imam for this Mosque was not pleased with Dawid, or his teachings out in the courtyards, but Dawid was careful not to be rude or disrespectful. The time for declaring Sharia law in this land would happen in the future. The truth that it would manifest was foretold. Whether he was here to see it or not didn’t matter, all that mattered was the duty to continue the effort. It might be his generation, or a generation yet unborn.

  He went out a back passage to the apartment he was staying in, just a couple of blocks away. Half a year ago he moved his allegiance from Al-Qaeda to ISIS due to his belief that ISIS was proper in focusing their push on establishing God’s Principality as it had been ordained. Once Dawid believed that was true, his only choice under the law was to move his allegiance to ISIS. To join them in the Caliphate and move forward to expand its physical borders no matter what the method.

  Now he felt nothing but disgust for those in Al-Qaeda. They were true apostates seeking to stay in the shadows when it was time to come together under the first Caliph in a thousand years.

  He had been in Belgium to help organize the French attacks before moving here to Libya. He had exited his apartment only an hour before a police raid.

  God’s providence.

  Now, he had been given instructions to continue his efforts spreading the word here for a few days before he was supposed to meet a new group to plan another attack. Due to the great success in France, his experience had been requested.

  Dawid Zadeh was pleased to be able to provide his knowledge.

  Pudong Shanghai, China

  Sergeant Lo Chongan had to return early from his lunch, due an urgent request from his Corporal.

  He stepped into the room, sliding the door closed, “Corporal, what is important enough to call me back from lunch? Did we get the last two vulnerabilities?”

  Corporal Liu Jianguo shook his head while keeping his eyes on the screen in front of him, “No sir!”

  Chongan strode over to Jianguo’s desk, “What is it, then?”

  Jianguo pointed to his screen, “Sir, our efforts to breach the defenses have been traced. We are seeing more and more of our second party servers in Europe being taken offline.”

  For the PLA, the second party servers were active servers located in legitimate businesses throughout Europe. These machines did business twenty-four hours a day. However, the PLA group also had very small command and control software which would take small data-command scripts from the PLA and inflate them to full size and then use them as the commands to run attacks. Should a system try to track the command and control software, the best it could do is track it back to the business in Europe. It was the ultimate cut-out. If you tried to take down their software, it would almost invariably take down the critical business server as well.

  Chongan frowned as he leaned over to view the map of the servers in question. Jianguo’s map had over four hundred green locations when everything was trouble free. At that moment it looked like maybe thirty percent of the locations were red. Chongan was surprised as he watched at least another five dots turn red while he was viewing the map. “It was good you called me, Corporal. Have you made any progress identifying the source of the attacks?”

  “No sir, I have not. Further, I’ve double checked the servers that are red.” Jianguo looked up to his commanding officer. “Sir, all of the servers are still on-line! I’m afraid our cut-outs must have been disabled but the next link back failed to notify us.”

  Chongan reached over and hit a button on Jianguo’s touch-based screen, “They are being monitored! Have we implemented the next security protocols?”

  Jianguo turned and hit two keys on his keyboard. The screen was refreshed with an additional window, “Yes sir! I’ve averaged the ping time of t
he affected servers over the last twenty-four hours. I’ve implemented manual shutdown of all communications to any server not responding within twice that average ping time.”

  “How many of the red dots represent a normal safety shut-down?” Chongan watched as his Corporal’s shoulders hunched.

  “None, sir.” Chongan looked back up to his commanding officer, “What are your orders, sir?”

  Chongan considered the implications. If he shut down all of the second party systems, it would block their ability to work and it could take them weeks to rebuild their beachhead. He could implement a timed shutdown. Send out the instructions for the machines to lay dormant for a time and then start listening again. He could… “Send the command to all machines to cease transmitting any data. They are to move into ‘listen only’ mode. We shall see if we can find any communications or probes that are not coming from us. Maybe that will allow us to track the communications back to their source and find the responsible party. If that happens, I will request an attack against whoever is responsible. An aggressive attack should take their focus off us long enough to allow us to hide our assets.”

  “Yes sir, shutting down all communications and moving to listen only mode.”

  Now, thought Chongan, let’s see if we can find the enemy and turn the tables on them.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Washington D.C., USA

  It was Friday afternoon and Don Simmings was nursing a late afternoon half-and-half from the Starbucks up the street, when Barb walked in. He looked up and smiled, “Another week down, another week without a terrorist hit here in the states. We are hopefully doing some good.”

  She dropped into one of his extra chairs. Don had a better chair for his visitors than she had for her desk. She had considered buying a chair and bringing it in, but it rankled her that the team couldn’t get permission to requisition better furniture than what she used in her office. So, she was teaching the system a lesson by keeping her butt in her creaky, cranky, poor back-support chair. The lesson would occur when she had to go on worker’s comp. for six months of reconstructive back surgery.

  Maybe she should just break down and buy herself a new chair. Relieving her back pain was more important than teaching the system a lesson!

  “Have you read the latest reports from overseas?”

  Don gave her a quick shake of his head before sipping on his hot coffee again. “Nope, not unless it came in before eight A.M. this morning. I’ve got a date tonight and I don’t want anything to jinx it.”

  She stared at her boss, “How is an overseas report going to jinx your date tonight? Yeah okay, maybe a local issue, but we do research not street operations.”

  Don shrugged, “This date is very different from the type I normally ask out. She is an opportunity ‘to date up’ I don’t receive very often, so I don’t want anything to upset the apple cart.”

  Barb decided she wasn’t going to understand Don’s situation and dropped the subject. “Well, I’m sure you will enjoy your date and the rest of your night will go swimmingly. Now answer me this, Sir Don-meister, how does someone take out two terrorist training camps and no one has a clue how it was done?”

  “Beats me, but we just took out a couple not too long ago. Those two in Libya when we bombed the hell out of them.”

  “Ok, but we read about that in the newspapers. Everyone wants everyone else to know how much we are helping with the war. And reports on this type of preemptive attack help the people in our country feel safe.

  However, I’ve just read a report where two terrorist training camps were taken out. The first camp, everyone was killed by your run-of-the-mill knife or gunshot wounds. Or, believe it or not, ragged tears across their throats! The ragged tear deaths and the gunshot victim were in the command tent. Everyone else was killed with hand-to-hand weapons.”

  Don sipped more of his coffee. When she had started talking he had just known that Barb had gone and jinxed his date. So far, nothing she said had jinxed anything. “I’m liking this so far, what’s the catch?”

  “Well,” She relaxed back in the chair. God it felt so good! “In this first camp there are massive amounts of wolf tracks, huge wolf tracks.”

  “From scavengers?”

  She shook her head, “Can’t be. The local variety of wolf is probably only a third that size. Hell, there seem to be some tracks that are bigger than anything known to currently roam the earth. Someone is leaving from the University of Alaska – Fairbanks, to go take a look.”

  “Alaska? Why the hell way up there?”

  “The state has the biggest wolf population, so one of the guys who study wolves is running a research grant out of the University.” She shrugged her shoulders, “Beats me, I’m cold enough here, but that isn’t the coolest part of this.”

  “Am I going to miss my date because of this?”

  Barb rolled her eyes, “No! Now stop trying to dodge this. The second base was completely flattened! In fact, the reason that these bases were even found this fast is because a few towns east of the camps saw a massive flash of light early in the morning. We even captured the flash on spy satellites looking for missile firings, so we have the position. Not that it mattered, the locals were on it within a couple of hours.”

  “Ok, a huge bomb and another target gone. Our country just bombed some of their camps back to the stone age so why the interest?”

  “Because the second base wasn’t bombed back to the stone age, it was bombed down to glass. The heat from the main impact location of the bomb was so intense it fused the sand into glass and absolutely flattened everything for a hundred feet around the center. It was like a small tactical nuke went off.”

  Don set his coffee down and put his elbows on his desk, “Small tactical nuke?” She nodded.

  “Was this us?”

  She shook her head.

  “What about a black ops group?”

  Again, a negative shake of the head.

  “What about the Israelis?”

  Another negative.

  “Well, which of our allies has this kind of clout? What does radar say about it? I doubt someone humped a backpack nuke in there to release it. I sure as hell wouldn’t want a nuke strapped on my back.”

  “No one! And there was nothing on the radar! Right now, all of our allies are secretly asking each other ‘did you do that?’ Even the Russians are saying ‘nyet’. In fact, quite a few governments are pretty sure we are responsible.”

  “That’s damned disturbing. What about a competing terrorist organization? What if we have some sort of terrorist vs. terrorist thing going on?”

  She pointed a finger at him. “That is a scary thought.”

  Don agreed, “Yes it is.”

  She smiled, “Just remember I didn’t come up with it, you said it yourself.”

  Don leaned back and covered his eyes from the light above, “You thought it, you just didn’t say it!”

  “I can neither confirm nor deny the accuracy of your statement.” She kept her face blank, but the humor showed in her eyes.

  Don leaned back towards the desk again, “Ok, it most likely isn’t another terrorist agency.”

  Barb looked at him, “Why do you say that?”

  “Because that is what I officially believe until eight A.M. Monday morning, that’s why.” He turned to grab his briefcase, “Did you just ‘find’ this in the reports, or is this somehow connected to something else we are tracking here in the U.S.?”

  “Uh, remember Anthony Chillenni?”

  Don stopped shoving file folders into his briefcase to look at Barb, “Chicago, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes. Then people in England, Germany and the Netherlands just disappeared. As in ‘really, really disappeared’, no body, no nothing!”

  He put the briefcase on his desk, “I remember how those seemed to have links, but how are you connecting these dots?”

  “One of the guys grabbed in the Netherlands was rumored to have more knowledge than the average street
terrorist.”

  “So, we think someone started a line here in the U.S., went to Europe and cleaned house. Then found new information that led to Libya and took action?”

  Barb nodded, “Yes.”

  “Have you put any of this into a report?”

  “No.”

  Don smiled at Barb, “I’ll be able to read such a report Monday at eight A.M., right?”

  Barb’s frown and narrowed eyes stared at Don, “Don, you can be such a dick.”

  Don looked at his watch, “Yes, if you bring me potential problems just three and a half hours before my date, I can be a dick.” He looked up and smiled at Barb, “Don’t tell me you don’t already have plans to follow up on this? Instead of you doing it for free over the weekend, I’m making it a request from upper management. That way, I can put this effort in your jacket for work ‘above and beyond’.”