Dark Winter

by Anthony J. Tata

  “What’s your role?”

  “I’m his go-to guy. Officially I’m the chief technology officer. I go everywhere with him,” Shayne said.

  “Hear that?” Mahegan said to his teammates. “Ian Gorham, owner and founder of Manaslu, was in Yazd, which means he’s got Cassie.” With knife still in place, Mahegan said to Shayne, “Okay, those black grasshoppers that followed us and almost killed us all. You know that your boss was trying to kill you, right?”

  “He would never do that!”

  “He would and he did. If he had his way, we’d all be burning carcasses on the desert floor, including you. Especially you.” Mahegan removed the knife and wiped it on Shayne’s black shirt. A red tear of betrayal continued to trickle down his left cheek. “When we get Gorham, where does he have to be to call off the strike?”

  “He’ll claw his eyes out so you can’t make him do it,” Shayne said.

  “Where?” Mahegan pressured. The knife again. Another red tear slid down Shayne’s face.

  “Idaho. Our headquarters.”

  “Manaslu headquarters in Idaho? It’s that simple?”

  “Nothing simple about it, my man. It’s in the basement of our compound in Idaho. Enough food in there to last five years. The plan was to be back tomorrow before all hell breaks loose.”

  “Okay. How do you contact Gorham?” Mahegan asked. “How do you stop the nukes? How do you defeat the Trojans on all of our weapons systems? Answer those three questions and you’ll live.”

  “Gorham. My iPad. But it’s zeroed out. Wiped clean, I’m sure.”

  “You’re a hacker. A programmer. Don’t bullshit me.”

  A long pause. Though Mahegan’s knife was no longer pressed against Shayne’s face, it was a harrowing threat hovering close by in his clenched fist.

  Shayne swallowed, figured his time had come. “Yes. There is a way. You have to get into each ground control station. The satellites pipe down to mobile command centers that move along with the armies. Somewhere in the middle of the column you’ll find satellite dishes and command vehicles.”

  “Can’t we put a missile on these things?”

  “You could, but everything is backed up in the satellites. We call them ManaSats.” Shayne hesitated. “It will take a few hours to configure another ground station. You’ve got to get the satellites.”

  “But?” Mahegan prodded.

  “You can erase everything with the biometrics in the mobile command posts. There is one individual each president has selected whose biometrics can shut down the ComWar automated attack. They control the nukes, also. Otherwise, everything keeps plowing ahead. It’s like the automated trading in the stock market. Before they put in the circuit breakers to halt trading when it’s going up or down too fast, the markets would crash a million points, you know? The algorithms we put in the ManaSats and ComWar modulate the attack so that it maintains momentum. Never too fast; never too slow.”

  Mahegan thought of his special operations maxim, slow is smooth; smooth is fast. ComWar apparently figured out the same thing.

  “Does anyone have override? Any person able to shut down all three?”

  Shayne smirked. “You need all three people. You’ve got to have all three. But I’m telling you man. The Russian president shot his dude. Bang. Right in the fucking head. Like, just, bang.” Shayne shivered. “Like, blood all over the chamber, man.”

  “What chamber?” Mahegan zeroed in on Shayne’s emotional stream of consciousness.

  “The biometric chamber. I’m telling you. There’s one in each of the RINKs, dude.”

  “RINKs?”

  “Russia, Iran, North Korea. The RINKs.”

  “So, one facility in each country?”

  “Two different things. The command posts and satellites control the conventional weapons. The facilities we built are hardened and have the biometric chambers to identify the biometric keys. Each one is a human. The North Korean is a chick. The Iranian is like Thor or the Hulk. And like I said, the Russian is dead.”

  “So, there’s no shutting down the Russian nukes?”

  “I had them shut down. We just turned them back on. That’s what Iran was all about.”

  Shayne was singing like a bird. Was he telling the truth? To Mahegan, his words had gained veracity with time. His fear had propelled him to a safe place, like an overboard sailor clinging to a life raft. He could breathe, though he had a knife in his eye.

  Mahegan nodded. Shayne would live for now. He pulled the knife away with care. The eyelid was slit, barely. He walked out of the container and into the one where they were holding Spartak. As he was walking, he was thinking about the concept of prisoner’s dilemma. Two prisoners, perhaps complicit in the same crime. Who would defect first? The concept was based on rational actors acting in self-interest.

  But if they were true believers, Mahegan thought—believers in Ian Gorham and all that he had to preach—their reactions may be skewed.

  Shayne was certainly more concerned about Gorham than he was nuclear war. Growing up in the Snapchat and YouTube world tended to mesh virtual and reality. Once you saw the reality, though, Mahegan knew it was impossible to forget the searing images of brutal ground combat. He was a boots-on-the-ground soldier trying to squeeze an Internet code-writing pinhead. Two ships passing in the night.

  As he closed the container door behind him and approached Spartak, he had a different thought. “Who are you?” he asked with a growl.

  “Nobody.” She had used a wash bucket to take a field bath. Her buzzed scalp glistened beneath maybe a week of prickly stubble. She wore cargo pants and a black Under Armour shirt someone had given her primarily so the greasy, smelly cook’s clothes could be burned. In addition to her more professional appearance, Spartak smelled clean. The entire room smelled like soap.

  It all clicked in his mind as he transposed the image of her face in his mind onto the pictures that O’Malley had shown him. “I’ve got forty-eight hours to stop a nuclear holocaust,” Mahegan said. “I had my computer team do some research and it seems that the chief financial officer for Manaslu went missing a month ago. We managed to find some pictures that hadn’t been completely erased, but nice try. You went dark better than most people could. Your name is Nancy Langevin. You’ve been on the run for a month. Didn’t want to leave the country but didn’t want to stay at Manaslu. You knew there was a plan, but were unsure what to do. They found you penetrating their system and tracked you to the bar where we saved you.”

  She looked away then leveled her brown eyes on him. “You didn’t save me. And nice work. Better than ninety-nine percent of the people could do.”

  “You’re the genesis code, correct, Langevin?”

  She paused. “I can shut down all three systems, yes. You do quick work. But call me Spartak, because Manaslu can most likely hear you right now. They have no idea who Spartak is.”

  “Okay, fair enough. You know Tokyo has already been decimated.”

  Spartak nodded. “I didn’t know, but I figured. It was part of the plan.”

  “It occurs to me that Nancy Langevin could be a legend, a fake identity. Which is it? Nancy Langevin or Spartak? Are you a Russian mole inside Manaslu?”

  “Not a Russian mole. Nancy Langevin is my real name, but as I said, call me Spartak. That’s my hacker ID even though I’m American. Russian lineage, sure, but not a spy. I was working a legitimate job for that moron, Gorham. He thinks he could destroy the country and then rebuild it in a socialist image. If I were a good Russian, I would like to see nothing better. However, I’m American. And as a businesswoman, I of course believe it will all be a huge disaster.”

  “We’re getting somewhere. How do we get you into each of the ground servers to shut down the relay from the satellites?”

  “It’s quite simple. We infiltrate each one in three different hostile countries in the next forty-eight hours or we go to Manaslu headquarters in Idaho and do it all from there.”

  “Idaho?” Shayne had
mentioned Idaho. Two intersecting points. They were getting somewhere.

  “Yes. Gorham was insistent on having override capability on everything. He’s a control freak. He has built a very successful business, but that has come at a cost because he must do practically everything himself. And when someone is doing everything themselves, they forget stuff, or miss things.”

  “He missed you adding yourself as a backup biometric override of the ComWar and nuclear systems?”

  “Bingo,” Spartak/Langevin said, pointing a finger at him. “Well, half bingo. Remember, you’ve got to have boots on the ground or very accurate targeting of the command posts to neutralize ComWar. ComWar is conventional. The biometric keys are relevant only to the nuclear arsenals. Gorham kept those two firewalled.”

  Shayne had mentioned that the Keys also could shut down the satellites that were controlling the ComWar conventional attacks. There was inconsistency in their stories. Who was telling the truth?

  “The biometrics can’t shut off the satellites?”

  “No. Only a hacker can do that.”

  Mahegan nodded and continued. “And you were holed up in Detroit, getting lost in the city until they left so that you could suddenly reappear and tell Manaslu security, ‘hey, guys, I’m back. Just going to catch up on some e-mails?’”

  “Something like that.”

  “And now the problem is—”

  “That I’m here in this container and time is wasting.”

  Mahegan shook his head. “That Gorham has put a lockdown on the facility, scanning and looking for you. If you get within a mile of that place, a camera will pick you up and you’ll have his thugs on you in five seconds.”

  “Please. His thugs are pussies.”

  “Stasovich seems pretty tough,” Mahegan said.

  “I can bring Stasovich to his knees. I either combat him or use a honey trap. Either works.”

  Mahegan looked at Spartak/Langevin and could imagine that an attractive woman such as herself would be able to lure a Neanderthal like Stasovich into an ersatz tryst with her to gain her own advantage over him.

  “What happens when we bomb the ComWar mobile command posts?”

  “The ManaSats take over. We launched those a full year ago. We update their software every week. Those satellites are the most current thing on the market today. Max storage, min power, and ultra-high-speed processing. The AI and Machine Learning functions perform almost seamlessly. There’s a delay in the refresh rate of about an hour just because they’re in outer space, which is why we use it as a backup instead of the primary.”

  “We?”

  “They.”

  “You said ‘we.’”

  “I meant they. Don’t get technical on me. You’re getting info. That’s what you want, right?”

  “So, we knock those out of the sky. Then what?” Mahegan continued.

  “You stop the conventional ComWar capability. There is rumored to be some backup in the tunnel complexes in Russia, Iran, and North Korea, but they are rudimentary. I’m doubtful they can push out to the extended forces deployed halfway across a continent or peninsula. Half a billion dollars in Manaslu money is in each facility. Was disguised as nonprofit money to help the indigent. We know that each country hid some of the money, but ultimately, we had the facilities built, blending in with the natural terrain. It was a twofer for Manaslu. First, Gorham got access to the leaders of each country and began business negotiations. Won a few contracts for cyber security and to implement Manaslu social media, online shopping, and targeted advertising. Everyone has heard of Amazon, Facebook, and Google. Manaslu is all three of these in one engine. Those leaders saw dollar signs, or whatever their currency is. What they didn’t realize is that with Gorham and Shayne inside their wires, everything was possible for Manaslu and nothing was really going to happen for those countries,” Spartak/Langevin said.

  “So the biometric key people don’t control the conventional stuff? Just the nukes?”

  “Well, I’m not sure. I know they control the nukes. If you want to shut down the Russian nukes, for example, you need the Russian biometric key.”

  “What if he’s dead?”

  “If he’s dead and his body is more than two degrees in either direction from normal, then you’re screwed. And if the U.S. doesn’t get its system online—I saw in the Deep Web that Gorham took it offline, FYI—then the U.S. is wide open vulnerable.”

  “Yes, I know. We’ve got that figured out. But no way to back up the Russian Key?”

  “Why? Is he dead?”

  “Just answer the question,” Mahegan demanded.

  “I assume Gorham can do it all. Conventional and nukes.”

  “Okay. So, Gorham gets in and can manipulate the systems to respond to his commands? He issues orders to the field commanders? He has the launch codes for nukes? The whole thing?”

  Spartak/Langevin nodded. “I’m sure of the nukes. The meeting in Iran was for him to steal those codes. Every country has handprint, voice, eye, gait, DNA, and facial recognition—everything you can think of—and we built the facility in Iran to steal every piece of biometric data, collect it, assimilate it, replicate it, and then be packaged in metadata that can be used to trigger their nuclear devices. That’s just the offensive capability.

  “For two years Gorham and Shayne have been putting RATs in every major defense contractor’s weapon system as well as the nuclear arsenal. Boomers, GPS guided bombs, and the ICBMs. All infected. The sweet spot is that it will take them and the U.S. forty-eight to seventy-two hours to figure out what the hell has happened, find a way to defend against it, develop that defense, and then deploy it effectively. Meanwhile, you can damn well be assured that Shayne will be swatting that shit down as fast as developers can make it happen.”

  Mahegan said nothing.

  “What?” Spartak/Langevin asked.

  “Who is next after Shayne? Can Gorham write code?”

  “Yes, but he’s not in Shayne’s league. Nobody’s in Shayne’s league. Wait,” she said. “Did you capture Shayne?”

  Mahegan said nothing.

  “You’ve got Shayne, don’t you?”

  “Hypothetically, if we had Shayne, what purpose could he serve for us?”

  “Hypothetically? You’ve got Shayne!”

  Mahegan stared at Spartak/Langevin, whose eyes were round and wide.

  She ran her hands across the buzzed scalp, muttered something unintelligible to herself, then looked back at Mahegan. “If you have Shayne, well. Shayne is the brains behind this entire thing. Sure, Gorham had the vision, but it was Shayne who worked his way into every defense contractor and national security system for these countries. Two years of work. Every day. He was the one who created platforms better than Amazon, Facebook, and Google and combined them as one synthesized entity. That’s how Manaslu has gotten so much traction. Why do you need the others when you’ve got one platform? They’ve got dating sites, everything. If you truly have Shayne . . .”

  Spartak/Langevin paused, looked away at the corrugated metal ribs of the shipping container.

  “Yes?” Mahegan asked.

  “Then you’ve got the world.”

  * * *

  Cassie had been in tougher situations before. At least that was what she kept telling herself.

  The fate of her escape still undecided, she hobbled through the labyrinth until she came upon a rectangular gate with metal bars. Her eyes had adjusted to the darkness, making visible the night sky beyond the rebar. Footfalls chased after her deep in the tunnel through which she had raced. She figured she was maybe thirty seconds ahead of being shot in the back in some nameless medical facility in . . . Jordan? She wasn’t even sure of her general location, only that the man Stasovich had been talking to—Gorham?—had mentioned Amman.

  The staccato sound of machinegun fire echoed through the night. Green and orange tracers painted Day-Glow lines across the black firmament. The tunnel was dank and smelled of decay. Perhaps this was the way the m
edical personnel ferried their corpses. Distant explosions were powerful enough to shake the earth beneath her feet.

  Pushing on the gate, she was greeted with unwelcome resistance. The footfalls grew louder behind her. She inserted the scalpel into the lock that looked like it might take an old fashioned skeleton key. Twisting and turning the scalpel, Cassie muttered, “Come on, you mother,” under her breath. She was inches from escaping with useful intelligence that could possibly prevent a global meltdown. In her gut, she believed that this man, Gorham, was the mastermind.

  Air pushed toward her, a harbinger. Men were shouting and racing along the corridor from behind her, probably being careful to avoid an ambush, but nonetheless moving quickly.

  Click.

  The scalpel had done its job. She turned and saw Stasovich barreling toward her, pistol at the ready. Something told her he wanted a personal kill, not a pistol shot. Cassie pushed the gate open, spun past it, then slammed it shut into Stasovich’s face. Stunned, the man stared at her through the iron bars, a leering prisoner eager to escape. The malicious smirk gave way to a howl of pain as she raked the scalpel across his forehead, left eye, and cheek.

  The big man reached out and clasped her wrist, nearly crushing the bones. She quickly used her left hand to grasp the tumbling scalpel, nicked her hand, righted the blade, and stabbed it into Stasovich’s hand, causing him to release his grip. She reached through the bars and snatched his pistol from his bleeding clutch, a Glock 19.

  She fired at Stasovich, who had ducked and was reaching for her injured ankle. She wasted two rounds on his arm, but managed to evade his vice grip, allowing her to flee around the corner, chased by automatic gunfire.

  She hobbled away into the darkness, moved around a corner, still clasping the scalpel and Stasovich’s Glock. The big Serb’s body at the base of the inward opening gate gave her a few seconds of time. Moving along a dark alley in the complete opposite direction of what she figured her escape route had been, Cassie got maybe one hundred meters before the first rifle shot snapped past her head. She continued to move toward a glow beyond the high stucco walls to her left and right.