Dark Winter

by Anthony J. Tata

  “There,” Mahegan said.

  The white-hot image showed a large man running through the woods, holding a cell phone out, perhaps using it as a light.

  “He’s headed to that truck on the shoulder about a mile away,” Owens said.

  “Launch our drone?” Cassie asked.

  “Real quick,” Mahegan said. “Patch, you do that. Cassie and Sean, grab your go bags and ours.”

  “Shit. The drone was my idea,” Cassie said.

  “Go,” Mahegan replied. “Patch is in the chair.”

  “Launching,” Owens said.

  “Roger. We’ve got General Savage inbound, so be careful.”

  Owens launched and remotely maneuvered the midsize Cobra drone onto the asphalt runway adjacent to the barn, revved its engine, and launched it for takeoff. Through the drone’s camera, they could see the speck of light that was Savage’s inbound XC-17 command and control jet.

  “Okay. The runner is on the southwest quadrant. Guns ready?” Mahegan said.

  “Roger. Got him,” Owens said. The drone slowed as it followed what Mahegan believed to be a spotter or scout that had perhaps somehow followed them from the bar in Detroit.

  “There’s a firebreak about a hundred yards ahead. Get up there and put it in hover mode with guns ready,” Mahegan directed.

  “Roger that.” Owens maneuvered the drone to a long gap in the trees that the forestry service required landowners to create if their farms were over one hundred acres and more than two-thirds woodland. The purpose was to prevent a single fire from consuming an entire woodland and spreading beyond one landowner’s property. The dirt road was maybe twenty yards wide—a long, straight ribbon. The runner would have to cross it to get to his vehicle along the road. They could see the thermal image of the man maneuvering toward the firebreak.

  “Here he comes,” Mahegan said, staring at the screen.

  “Guns active,” Owens replied.

  The man slowed as he approached the firebreak, perhaps sensing its danger to him. Seeming to catch his breath against a tree, the runner held the phone to his ear.

  “Don’t let him make that call,” Mahegan said.

  The drone’s machine guns whirred in the audio feedback as the rounds impacted into the tree, the ground, and the runner. The phone flipped into the air, its screen brightly lit on the display. The man went down to one knee, then slid to another. He began to crawl. Like a turtle homing in on its beach, he began sliding across the firebreak toward his car a quarter mile away.

  “Put a missile up his ass,” Mahegan directed. “See if we can intercept whoever he was talking to.”

  “Only got two.”

  “Fire one on him and then one on the truck on the road.”

  “Any chance this is a stupid kid messing around?” Owens asked.

  Mahegan paused. “I don’t believe in coincidences like this.”

  “Roger.”

  The small rocket smoked from the wing of the UAV and impacted within inches of the crawling man, who went motionless.

  Mahegan hoped he was lifeless. “Any guns left?”

  “Nothing. Just one missile.”

  “Okay, hit the truck and let’s go.”

  Owens tilted the drone from hover to airplane mode, flew it to the truck, hovered, and put the last missile on a Ford F150 that exploded into a bright fireball.

  “All right. Let’s go,” Mahegan said.

  As Owens was landing the drone, Mahegan walked over and unlocked the Washington, DC prison cell. He placed noise-cancelling headphones on the woman. Then he slipped a sandbag over her head. “Get up.”

  The cook had been laying in the fetal position, but stood when Mahegan pulled her up by the handcuffs. “Where are we going?” the woman shouted.

  Mahegan said nothing.

  They walked outside and a quarter mile to the runway where General Savage’s experimental C-17 Globemaster was turning to prepare for a quick offload and onload. The ramp dropped and two men dressed in cargo pants, tight-fitting long-sleeve shirts, tactical vests, and modified combat helmets deplaned. Mahegan recognized them as long time operators, Hobart and Van Dreeves. Good men. Faithful to their nation. Always in the fight.

  “Hobart. VD. Good to see you. Got three prisoners in there. Cassie worked them. Might be more to get from them. You’ll need Korean, Farsi, and Russian interpreters,” Mahegan said.

  “Roger,” Van Dreeves said. “Got the perfect man deplaning now.”

  Mahegan looked up and saw a civilian walking down the ramp carrying a rucksack. He didn’t recognize the person, but he didn’t need to.

  “We will probably just secure them and keep moving west. This thing’s moving pretty fast. Old man has every team assigned somewhere against Korea, Europe, or the sandbox,” Hobart said.

  “Roger. Sounds about right. See you on the high ground,” Mahegan said.

  They clasped hand to forearm—the warrior shake—did a shoulder bump, and walked in opposite directions.

  “What’s going on!?” the cook shouted. “Where are we going?”

  Mahegan knew the cook couldn’t hear him through the noise-cancelling headphones, but he was feeling the buzz of combat—that adrenaline rush of making a difference. The high of hanging out the door of an airplane before putting paratroopers on target or the energy of vanquishing an enemy in brutal hand-to-hand combat. He’d done it all, but perhaps the stakes had never been higher.

  Where were they going? He was certain of only one thing.

  “To prevent a dark winter,” Mahegan muttered. “Nukes.”

  CHAPTER 6

  A DRIVER PICKED GORHAM UP IN AN ARMORED TESLA AND SOON HE was through the gated entrance to his headquarters. He always went there first, even though his personal residence was fifty miles to the north, straight line distance. He waited as the biometric readers scanned his eyes, checked his facial features, swabbed his cheek for DNA, recorded his handprint, and conducted a bug and bomb sweep of his car. Satisfied, the mechanism triggered the garage door opener.

  With his driver pulling into the garage, he slumped forward in the back seat, resting his head on the padded leather. Such careful planning. Would it all be undone? Not if he executed now. He sat upright and gathered himself, running a hand across his face.

  His driver’s eyes caught his in the mirror and Gorham said, “Don’t look at me.”

  The driver broke eye contact and turned his head away.

  Gorham thought through the problem sets—the Russians, the briefcase, and the hacker. The Russians were the key. Seven thousand nuclear weapons. If Khilkov did not show, he could leak to the press that the Russian system was down and that they were defenseless as the brush fire along the Estonian-Russian border simmered.

  Then there was the issue of the briefcase. It was a simple device, but if someone knew what he were doing, he would figure out the microdevices that delivered the Internet bomb and embedded electromagnetic pulse to that grid system in Detroit.

  Lastly, the hacker. Who was he? How had he been able to penetrate the formidable Manaslu defenses? Gorham had teams of the world’s best hackers running offensive and defensive cyber drills every day. It was unthinkable that someone had cracked through their system in the Deep Web and had learned of his idea.

  He pushed himself up from the rear seat, knowing that he needed to execute now. He looked in the rearview mirror, saw the crow’s feet forming around his eyes. Since when did I have those? While he enjoyed the planning and preparation, the magnitude of the situation weighed on him occasionally.

  He shook it off, opened the car door, and marched into the headquarters basement.

  “You in HQ or the compound?” Shayne said. Microphones lined the walls of the headquarters corridors.

  “Compound. See you in a few minutes.”

  “Okay.”

  Gorham passed the security tests again to get inside his own building. Big men with barrel chests nodded at him as he walked through the security scanners. He took an elevato
r down to the portal he had constructed and stepped into his version of Elon Musk’s Hyperloop. Of course, Gorham called it the ManaLoop, because it sped at over Mach One. He stepped into the vehicle that looked like a space shuttle without wings. Pressed a button that closed the door. Pressed another button that activated the magnets that levitated the car. Buckled his seat belt. Then pressed another button that rocketed the ManaLoop at nearly 1,000 miles per hour to his compound fifty miles away. He was there in a little over three minutes. A quarter mile a second. One mile every four seconds. Fifteen miles every minute. The transport glided to a halt. The door opened. He walked into the command post he’d had created in the basement.

  One of his few friends, Shayne was seated with his back to him, pecking away at the keyboard, ones and zeros flying across the screen.

  Even then, Gorham wasn’t sure how close he could ever be to anyone. Like his self-optimizing algorithms, he was constantly trying to evolve, improve and perfect. He wasn’t sure anyone could forever live up to his expectations. Long ago he had given up the illusion that he would find some peaceful state of satisfaction and cruise through life. On the contrary, he was obsessively building his empire until he had literally hit walls in all directions. It was impossible to be more famous, more powerful, richer, more liked, or more benevolent. How much fun, sex, love, and debauchery could $100 billion buy someone? He’d been through those phases as fast as he’d built the company and overtaken the fabled FANG companies: Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, and Google. The market pundits had changed the acronym to MFANG, appropriately placing Manaslu at the front. The joke was that the “M” was silent, because Manaslu had attacked with stealth. They seemingly came out of nowhere.

  So, what next? He walked through another biometric chamber, which confirmed his gait, handprint, DNA with a sterile Q-tip swab in the mouth, eye scan, 107-point facial recognition, and voice recognition.

  “Ian Gorham,” he said. A series of green checkmarks popped up next to each of the categories. As he waited for confirmation, which took a few seconds, he reflected.

  His new, fantastic idea struck him one day when he was watching television on one of his liquid plasma wall televisions, eight feet wide and ten feet high. The news was informing him of another affront to humanity by the American president; another insult to someone’s faith; another dig at the media; another rogue missile strike somewhere. It all began to run together for Gorham, who believed that in this day of Internet and information, borders were meaningless. Nation states no longer mattered. The world was one united people and the only way to unify the global citizenry was to use the forces of nationalism to destroy the very same ideology. From the security of his walled, gated, and fortified compound, Gorham believed that there was a better way ahead for the world. And that way was his way—the global way, the unified way.

  But first burn the world to the ground, so that he could rebuild it. Like razing a dilapidated neighborhood and rebuilding in its bulldozed lot. He would construct the global community that he knew could exist . . . must exist if the world was to survive.

  As their corporate motto said, they were Bringing Genius to the World!

  Gorham had at his command the world’s largest search, home delivery, and social media conglomerate, which he had named Manaslu after the treacherous Nepalese summit that few dared to climb. More dangerous than Everest and nearly as high, Mount Manaslu was the ultimate challenge in Ian Gorham’s mind. Because his wealthy father met his Nepalese mother ascending the Himalayan Mountain, Gorham had proudly named his company Manaslu. The unique L-shaped and jagged snowcapped Manaslu peaks were the company symbol, fashioned in the shape of an M. The Manaslu search engine was faster than Google, the social media connections had surpassed Facebook, and the retail endeavor had rapidly overtaken Amazon.

  Manaslu’s algorithms optimized searches, friendships, and purchases, and now they were optimizing combat. After the presidential elections, Gorham had quickly established his own version of the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency, something he called the MAP Lab, the Manaslu Advanced Project laboratory.

  “This is how we beat Facebook, Amazon, and Google,” he’d told Shayne, his lead code writer, a twenty-five-year-old seasoned veteran of the hacking world. Like Cher or Bono, Shayne went by a single name.

  Gorham walked up to Shayne sitting at the command terminal in the MAP Lab, essentially the basement of his compound. A bank of fluorescent lights shone across the fifty-yard-wide cavern outfitted with the latest high-tech flat screens, touchpads, hologram fields, servers, radios, videoconference cameras, smartphones, and computers. The hologram fields were the chessboards upon which his ComWar would unfold. Gorham and Shayne had developed the capability to build a three-dimensional hologram of each of their target cities. They also had secure, encrypted communications with the command headquarters of each RINK alliance member—Russia, Iran, and North Korea.

  “Status?” Gorham asked.

  “Well, we’ve got confirmation on Jun. Dead. Drone came in and grabbed a DNA sample and confirmed it in flight back to the automated launch pad. Sent the confirmation to our Dark Web archive and I got a notification that it is a hundred percent match. Our replica U.S. Air Force Reaper drone took off from the Samjiyon airfield simultaneously and has crashed outside of Pyongyang very close to the presidential palace. News media have been alerted by anonymous sources. The Americans are trying to hide the information in their secure servers, but we’re circumventing that with the staged drone crash. In about an hour the world will believe the US assassinated Jun.”

  “Okay, good. Russia? Iran?”

  “Well, one more thing on North Korea. They’ve found me in the nuke command and control system. We’ve been playing cat and mouse, but they’re pretty good.”

  “But you’re better,” Gorham said, anxious.

  “I am,” Shayne said. He hesitated. “I’ve been able to remove one nuke from their access. Everything else they’ve been able to block, and we can’t get at it unless we get the biometric key guy.”

  “Another reason for the meeting in Iran. Get them all there and copy their markers. That way we have redundancy.”

  “Yes, if ultimately what you want, boss, is to control all the nukes in Russia, Iran, and North Korea then you need all three biometric keys. Three human beings. My abilities as a hacker will help us steal their biometric data, but we’ll need Dax to do the dirty work and kidnap them, because nothing happens unless the computer receives their biometric markers as part of the launch sequence.”

  Shayne had found in the Dark Web a reference to the Russians creating a redundancy to their nuclear program where a living, breathing person would be a part of the chain to lock or unlock the nuclear codes. It was an added security precaution, one Khilkov had mandated that North Korea and Iran replicate to ensure synchronization. In addition to the encrypted cyber codes that all nuclear arsenals required prior to launch, Khilkov required a biometricishkiy klyuch—biometric key—to be comprehensively certified before missiles could be launched.

  The combination of the encrypted codes and the human biometrics would prevent doppelgangers or mere hackers from simply stealing the codes or impersonating the authorized launch authority. Not only did they need the crypto, but they needed the person. In today’s world of hacking, information wasn’t safe, no matter how well protected anyone thought it might have been. Having an additional layer of a human in the loop added a low tech, asymmetric precaution to the ever-vulnerable Internet.

  “Okay. I just got off the phone with Khilkov. Give me the details of the Estonia operation, please.”

  “Russia. Total success. The Latvian did his job. The Russians have fired counter battery and the Eighty-second Airborne brigade base is getting chewed up. There’s a significant artillery war happening right now. The Russian president has been notified that the United States has killed Jun. Japan knows, also, by the way. Journalist Luiz Yamashita has been identified as being on the scene and that news is being made p
ublic also.”

  “Good call on that one. Sets up our pending Japan action nicely. China doing anything?”

  “So far, no. As we predicted, China will protect itself, but can’t really get out of its own way to do anything offensively. But Russia, man. The president has put two and two together, so he’s ready to launch. Thinks the Americans are starting the war. He’s conducting a preemptive attack through Belarus.”

  Gorham smiled. Of course, that was what he was doing. The Manaslu algorithms had trained the Russian generals over the last year that the best path to western Europe was to ignore the Baltics and plow through the semireceptive Belarus and barrel headfirst into Poland. Germany, Belgium, and France would be in sight from there.

  Because, why not?

  “I’ve convinced Khilkov to bring the Russian Key. The Iranian Key we know is housed there. And I planted the seed to have the Russians convince the North Korean Key to come.”

  “Yes, that works. I’m blocked in Russia and in North Korea. Iran only has a couple of nukes, but it would make sense that we take control of those.”

  “Agree. So, that’s the deal. We meet to discuss post war spoils, sign the agreement, and the countries get control of their nukes, then we steal it back from them.”

  When Gorham learned that the Russians were allied with the Iranians and North Koreans in preparation for war against the West, he’d had Shayne conduct a deep dive analysis of the techniques of each of the RINK nations.

  Khilkov’s very concern, that someone could hack and steal the codes thereby taking control of the nuclear arsenal, had already happened. Shayne had breached the firewalls and was gathering the data when Russian Cyber Command operators scrambled and ultimately blocked his efforts, but not before he had disabled the fleet of nukes.

  Not good for Russia.

  Now, Gorham had the leverage he needed to discuss post war spoils and potentially steal the biometric data. If he could accomplish both of those missions in Iran, the next seventy-two hours would unfold precisely as he planned. “And we fly to Iran tonight. Of course, Iran needs no provocation to attack Iraq or Jordan, so they’re on board.”