Threat Vector

by Tom Clancy

  “Especially us,” the President said. It was not a question.

  “Exclusively us,” the SecDef replied.

  “What about their aircraft carrier?”

  The chairman of the Joint Chiefs said, “Mr. President, the Liaoning, China’s carrier, is a source of national pride, but that is all that it is. It is no exaggeration when I say we have three mothballed aircraft carriers, the Ranger, the Constellation, and the Kitty Hawk, that are still in better condition than that old piece of retrofitted junk they bought from Russia.”

  Ryan said, “Yes, but despite its bad condition, is that carrier giving them the impression that they have a blue-water Navy? Could that make them dangerous?”

  Obermeyer answered, “That might be their assumption, but it is an assumption that we can relieve them of quite easily if this should turn into a shooting war. I don’t want to sound overly boastful, but we could put that carrier on the bottom of the sea on day one.”

  Ryan said, “Short of sinking their aircraft carrier, what other options do we have to show that we take their threats seriously?”

  PacCom Admiral Jorgensen said, “The North Carolina is in the SCS right now. She’s a Virginia-class fast-attack boat. One of our most stealthy.”

  Ryan gave Jorgensen a long look.

  The admiral said, “I’m sorry, Mr. President, I did not mean to patronize. You know about Virginia-class boats?”

  “Yes, and I know about the North Carolina.”

  “Apologies. I briefed your predecessor . . . and sometimes I had to fill in some details.”

  “I get it, Admiral. You were saying about the North Carolina?”

  “Yes, sir. We could have her make an unscheduled port visit at Subic Bay.”

  Ryan liked that. “Just surface right there in the danger zone to show China we aren’t going to lie down and play dead.”

  Secretary of Defense Burgess liked it, too. “And show the Filipinos we support them. They will appreciate the gesture.”

  Scott Adler held a hand up. Clearly he did not like the idea. “Beijing will see that as a provocative act.”

  “Shit, Scott,” Ryan said. “If I eat Italian tonight instead of Chinese, Beijing will see that as a provocative act.”

  “Sir—”

  Ryan looked to the admiral. “Do it. Make all the typical statements about how the port visit has been scheduled for some time and the timing is in no way meant to signify blah, blah, blah.”

  “Of course, sir.”

  Ryan sat on the edge of his desk and addressed all his guests now. “We’ve said for some time that the South China Sea was the most likely place for bad stuff to happen. As you can imagine, I am going to want a lot of information from all of you on this one. If you have anything you need to discuss with me personally, just get with Arnie’s office.” Jack looked to Arnie van Damm. “This subject goes to the top of the batting order. If someone in this room wants a few minutes of my time, I don’t want you sending me on a meet-and-greet with the Girl Scout who sold the most Thin Mints last year.”

  The room laughed, as did Arnie, but he knew his boss was serious.

  TWENTY-ONE

  The annual DEF CON Conference in Las Vegas, Nevada, is among the largest underground computer hacking conventions in the world. Each year as many as ten thousand computer security professionals, cybercriminals, journalists, federal employees, and other tech enthusiasts come together for several days to learn about new techniques, products, and services and to enjoy speaker presentations and competitions pertaining to all aspects of hacking and code breaking.

  It is an annual Woodstock for top-level hackers and tech geeks.

  The conference is held at the off-strip Rio Hotel and Casino, and most attendees stay there or at one of the many nearby hotels, but each year a group of old friends pitch in together to rent a house a few miles to the east in Paradise.

  Just before eleven p.m. Charlie Levy pulled his rented Nissan Maxima into the driveway of the luxury vacation home at the end of South Hedgeford Court, in a neighborhood of quiet residential streets full of zero-lot vacation rentals. He stopped at the gate, rolled down his window, and pressed the intercom button.

  While he waited he looked around him at the high iron fence lined with palm trees and the landscaped driveway that led up to the six-bedroom house. He and a group of longtime DEF CON attendees had rented this same home for ten years now, and it was good to be back.

  After a beep from the call box a nasal voice said, “DarkGod? What’s the password, you fat bastard?”

  “Open, sez me, you piece of shit.” Levy said it with a laugh, and seconds later the driveway gate silently opened.

  Charlie stomped on the gas pedal and burned rubber in the drive, squealing his tires loud enough to be heard by those up in the house.

  Charlie “DarkGod” Levy was not a founding member of the DEF CON conference, but he’d been coming since 1994, the year after it started, and as a member of the old guard, he was something of a legend.

  Back in ’94 he’d been a freshman at the University of Chicago, as well as a self-taught hacker who cracked passwords for fun and wrote code as a hobby. His first DEF CON had been an eye-opening experience. He found himself a part of a huge group of like-minded enthusiasts who were careful to not ask anyone what they did for a living, but instead treated everyone with equal measures of suspicion and bonhomie. He’d learned a lot that first year, and more than anything, he learned that he had an intense desire to impress his peers with his hacking exploits.

  After college Levy was hired by the computer gaming industry as a programmer, but he spent the majority of his downtime on his own computer-related projects: building and configuring computer software and working on new malware and penetration tactics.

  He hacked every device with a processor known to man, and each year he took his trip to Vegas to show his friends and “competition” what he had done. He became one of the major presenters at the conference and garnered something of a cult following; his exploits were discussed on Web chat boards for the rest of the year.

  Each year Charlie Levy had to outdo himself, so he worked harder and harder in his time away from the office, dug deeper and deeper into operating systems code, and sought bigger and bigger victims to attack.

  And after his presentation at this year’s conference, he was sure, the whole world would be talking about Charlie Levy.

  He climbed out of the Maxima and greeted five friends whom he hadn’t seen since last year’s meeting. Levy was only thirty-eight, but he looked a lot like Jerry Garcia, short and heavy, with a long gray beard and thinning gray hair. He wore a black T-shirt with the white silhouette of a busty woman and the phrase “Hack Naked” written underneath it. He was known for his funny T-shirts that stretched across his fat frame, but this year he had been careful to pack a few button-down shirts as well, because he knew that after his presentation on day one of the conference, he would be doing a lot of media interviews.

  He unpacked his suitcase in his room and then met his friends down at the beautiful backyard swimming pool. He took a Corona from a full ice chest, made a few minutes of small talk about what everyone else had been up to in the past twelve months, and then stood by himself near the rock waterfall so he would not have to answer questions about his own activities or what he had in store for tomorrow.

  Looking around him, Charlie Levy saw tech royalty. Two men were Microsoft execs who flew in from Washington state this afternoon. Another guy was a technical director at Google; he was worth more than the Microsoft guys combined. The remaining two were just mere millionaires; one worked the hardware side at AT&T and the other ran the IT department of a French bank.

  Charlie was accustomed to feeling a bit like the odd man out at these annual get-togethers.

  Charlie was a video-game programmer, and it pai
d well, but he had turned down a decade’s worth of promotions because he did not want to be rich.

  No, Charlie Levy wanted to be a legend.

  And this would be his year.

  Tomorrow he would reveal during his presentation his discovery of a zero-day vulnerability he had exploited that allowed him to infiltrate JWICS, the Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communications System—known as “Jay-Wicks,” and through it Intelink-TS, the top-secret secure intranet used by the U.S. intelligence community to transfer their most highly classified data.

  Charlie “DarkGod” Levy had—and he planned to use this as a punch line during his opening comments—wormed his way inside the CIA’s brain.

  Although the CIA’s website had been brought down several times by “denial-of-service attacks,” Levy would be the first to claim, and to prove publicly, that he had hacked into actual top-secret CIA cables, thereby reading classified information sent between CIA Langley and CIA stations and officers abroad.

  This would be huge news in the amateur hacking world, that a “garage hacker” had infiltrated America’s spy agency, but this was not the most interesting part of Levy’s discussion, for the very simple reason that Levy would also announce that he had proof that he was not the first to do this.

  When Charlie entered Intelink-TS and began poking around he discovered that another entity had beat him to it, and was, at that very moment, reading CIA message traffic via a RAT, a remote-access Trojan.

  Charlie had the screen shots of the intrusion, the code, a thumbnail sketch of the entire brilliant RAT itself.

  It was clear to Charlie that the malware was brilliant and he had already decided he would not mention that the RAT the other hacker used was several orders of magnitude more advanced than the code he had managed to put together to access the zero-day vulnerability.

  This was an absolute bombshell, and in the thirty-five days since Levy had made this discovery, he’d told no one about it.

  He looked around the pool deck at the glitterati of DEF CON here with him, and he knew that in twenty-four hours they’d have to take a number to talk to him.

  This DEF CON would be his coming-out party.

  Of course Levy knew it was inevitable that he would catch a lot of grief from the government about not only his successful hacking, but his revelation that he knew good and well that someone else was privy to America’s deepest, darkest secrets, and he had not alerted the authorities. He thought he might get harassed by the Feds for what he had done, but he also pictured tens of thousands of members of his community coming out in support of him and standing up against the government.

  Getting harassed by the Feds was a rite of passage.

  There was one more chapter to Charlie Levy’s story, and this he would also reveal at tomorrow’s presentation.

  The mystery hacker on the CIA network had discovered Levy’s intrusion. His RAT had been so well built it was able to recognize when someone pushed into the network by the same means as had he.

  How did Charlie know this? Because the hacker contacted him via instant messaging two weeks ago, offering DarkGod money to work remotely for him on other projects involving JWICS and Intelink-TS systems.

  Levy was stunned when he realized he had been identified, but he knew there was no way in hell the mystery hacker had ID’d him through Intelink-TS. Levy was confident in his methods of attack concealment; he performed his digital breach of the CIA network over a complicated series of hops and proxies that would completely mask the machine of origin. The only explanation he came up with for how he was discovered was his research into JWICS, Intelink-TS, and the protocols and architecture used by the networks. Some of this research had been performed on open networks that, theoretically, could have been monitored by the mystery hacker.

  Somehow, the mystery hacker was smart enough, and his visibility over the Internet was pervasive enough, that he’d deduced Levy’s involvement.

  When Levy declined the offer to work with the other entity—Levy did not want to be someone else’s hired gun—his computer came under heavy persistent attack from a wide variety of sophisticated cyberthreats. The mystery hacker was doing his best to infiltrate Levy’s computer. But DarkGod was no mere mortal when it came to computer security, and he took up the challenge as if he was playing chess with the mystery hacker and he had, for the last two weeks, anyway, managed to keep all malware off his machine.

  Charlie Levy fully expected his new nemesis to be present at DEF CON, or else at the Black Hat conference, a more corporate convention for security professionals that would take place the following week here in Vegas.

  Charlie hated to think that the son of a bitch might try to steal his thunder.

  —

  It took a while for Levy to loosen up with the rest of the guys, but by three a.m. he’d downed close to ten Coronas and he was feeling no pain. It was always like this on the first night, when the booze flowed out at the pool. Although all of the other guys were married with children now, they came to Vegas with the dual objectives of getting as drunk as possible and carrying on and even expanding their legendary exploits around DEF CON.

  The Google guy had just stumbled off to bed, but the rest of the crew was still out by the pool, drinks in hand. Levy reclined on a chaise longue with a fresh Corona while the Microsoft guys smoked Cohibas next to him and AT&T and French Bank reclined on pool floats in the water with their drinks and their laptops.

  —

  While the party slowly died down at the South Hedgeford Court home, at another vacation rental five doors down on East Quail Avenue the glass patio door slid silently open. The home was pitch black and appeared unoccupied, but out of the darkness eight men stepped into the moonlit backyard, walked around the covered swimming pool, and made their way to a wooden fence.

  Each man carried a black backpack on his back and a handgun equipped with a long suppressor in a holster on his hip. One at a time they climbed the fence and dropped down into the next yard, their movements stealthy and quiet.

  —

  AT&T looked up from his laptop while he floated on the pool chair. “Hey, DarkGod. We’ve all talked about our presentations, but you haven’t said shit about your topic.”

  One of the Microsoft guys blew out Cohiba smoke and said, “That means Charlie’s talk is either really good or really bad.”

  “Wouldn’t you like to know?” replied Charlie, slyly.

  French Bank shook his head; he paddled with his hand to turn himself toward the men on the deck. “If it’s anything like two years ago when you cracked into the Bellagio’s physical plant and increased the pressure on the fountain pumps, I’ll pass. Squirting a few dozen tourists is not my idea of— Hi. Can we help you?”

  The rest of the men at the pool turned their heads, following the direction French Bank was looking. There, in the moonlight just out of the lights of the pool deck, several men stood in a row, facing the pool.

  Charlie sat up. “Who the hell are you guys?”

  The Corona in Charlie’s hand exploded with a pop, and he looked down. His “Hack Naked” shirt was ripped, and blood drained from his chest. A second hole next to the first appeared as he watched.

  A third round struck him in the forehead, and he flipped back on the chaise, dead.

  The two men in the deck chairs were sluggish from the alcohol, but they both managed to stand and turn. One made it a few feet up the deck toward the house, but both were cut down by suppressed handgun rounds to the back.

  One of them tumbled into the swimming pool; the other fell back over his chair into a small rock garden.

  The two men on the pool floats were helpless. They both screamed out, but they were gunned down where they lay, their dead bodies draining blood into the clear water along with the blood from the Microsoft man floating facedown nearby.

  When
everyone at the pool was dead, Crane, the leader of the unit, turned to Stint. In Mandarin he said, “There should be one more. Find him.”

  Stint ran into the house with his pistol in front of him.

  The Google man had slept through it all, but Stint found him in his bed, and put a single round through the back of his head.

  Out by the pool, three of the men used small flashlights to pick up the spent shell casings, while three more men went back inside, checking room by room to find DarkGod’s luggage. They went through it and took his laptop and all his peripherals, his papers, thumb drives, DVDs, mobile phone, and anything else other than clothing. In place of all this, they left a handful of DVDs and thumb drives of their own, and a mobile phone spoofed with Levy’s number and data that they downloaded from his device.

  All this took more than ten minutes, but Crane had been given several objectives, and he’d been ordered to be perfectly thorough.

  Soon all four were back out on the pool deck. The swimming pool water was bright pink now. On Crane’s command, Wigeon unzipped his backpack and took out three small bags of high-quality cocaine. He tossed these in the grass near the fence, with the intention that the drugs would be found with the bodies and this entire event would appear to be a nefarious deal gone bad.

  That none of the men had any drugs in their bodies could be explained by the fact that the deal had gone belly-up and the guns came out before anyone had time to partake in the drugs.

  Finally Crane ordered everyone but Snipe back to the safe house, and the six men departed.

  After they gave them time to get clear, Crane and Snipe stood on the side of the beautiful pool and unscrewed the silencers from their FN Five-seveNs. These they slipped into their backpacks. Then they aimed their weapons high above the horizon to the south, just below the hazy half-moon, and then both men opened fire.

  They fired individual rounds and short volleys in a chaotic cadence, until both weapons were empty and the handguns’ slides locked open. They then quickly reloaded, holstered their guns, and kicked the fallen spent shell casings in all directions. Some of the hot brass fell into the bloody pool, where it sank to the bottom; other casings rolled into the grass; and more rolled farther away along the decorative concrete deck.