Act of Revenge
Page 15
“I see that you’ve been doing some extracurricular work on my time,” he said.
Extracurricular?
That’s it! I can claim it’s for a school assignment.
“I notice that you’ve been doing some research on Daesh,” continued Massina. “ISIS.”
“I want to kill those bastards,” she blurted.
“As do we all,” said Massina grimly. “Who told you to do it?”
“No one.”
“No one?”
It was a way out: offer up the name of someone who’d said it was OK. But that was ratting out someone, which would be against her code.
More important, there was no one to rat out.
“I did it myself.”
“And you found something interesting?”
“Not yet.”
“What did you find?” Massina asked.
“They use anonymous servers and some repeaters, like routing things through Ukraine and the Checkers Republic.”
“Czech.”
“That’s what I meant.” Borya felt her face flush. That was a stupid mistake—she knew what the damn country’s name was.
Checkers. Duh!
“There are chat rooms, and they encrypt stuff,” she said quickly. “Like there are a couple of personalities on there that might be interesting to follow through and see.”
“You’re just free-forming?” asked Massina.
“What does that mean?”
“You’re doing all this on your own, without an agenda. Just talking.”
“I want to find out what I can.”
“That’s a good attitude.”
Maybe I’m not going to get fired.
“Smart Metal computers are for work projects only,” said Massina, once again stern. “For various reasons. Including your safety. Even if that weren’t the case, provoking these people, even getting your identity known to them—it’s very, very dangerous. These people are killers.”
“I know that. B-but—”
“There really can be no buts. Is that clear?”
She nodded reluctantly.
“Does your father know about this?”
“No.”
“You’re to explain everything you’ve done in detail to Mr. Bozzone. And that’s it. Understood?”
“I guess.”
“That is not the right answer.” Massina rose from his desk, angry. “Do not engage these people,” he added. “Understood?”
“OK,” she said meekly.
Massina sensed that he had scared her, but he also realized she wouldn’t stay scared for very long. She was too curious, too adventurous, and she had grown up with a father who was both a spy and a borderline mobster. So when Bozzone came to ask how things went, Massina simply shrugged.
“She’ll stay off for a few days, maybe.”
“As long as she doesn’t use our computers,” said Bozzone.
“I’m not worried about the computers.”
“Neither group that tried tracking her was ISIS.”
“Not yet.”
Two different hacker outfits had tried to trace Borya and the system she was using, launching crude probes on the off-site servers used for the “public” internet computers. Bozzone’s people had, in turn, tracked them to Asian operations, where ISIS had no known connections.
“I’ll watch her,” said Bozzone, with the tone of an older brother being assigned to babysit a younger sibling. “We’ve locked out the sites and her chat functions.”
“I’m sure she’ll look for a way around them,” said Massina. “Keep her safe.”
“I’ll do my best. But—”
“No buts on this,” said Massina. “Make sure it happens.”
42
T’aq Ur, northern Syria—a few hours later
Chelsea studied the image from the Nightbird UAV circling above Palmyra. Flying at 15,000 feet, the aircraft was mapping every magnetic field in the ISIS-held city. Every motor, every current, was measured and recorded by the aircraft’s powerful sensors. Once the data was gathered, simple filters would identify different motor types, showing the likely locations of computers, for example, or air conditioners—both likely markers of high-ranking Daesh commanders.
“Which one of these is the prison?” asked Johansen, standing over her and trying to make sense of the splotch-covered map.
Chelsea zoomed out and overlaid the display on the afternoon’s satellite image.
“Here,” she said, pointing to a square at the lower right-hand corner of the screen.
“Nothing there?”
“One computer,” she told him, checking the data quickly.
“They’re not using it as a headquarters?”
“Doesn’t look like it.”
The regime had emptied the prison some months before, then blown up most of the buildings with crude barrel bombs. But two buildings remained intact, and Johansen’s original intelligence had indicated it was being used as a headquarters.
“Doesn’t match what you’re looking for,” said Chelsea. “Unless Ghadab doesn’t use computers.”
“They all use computers,” insisted Johansen. “They’re pretty modern for people who want to send the world back to the Stone Ages. What about the school?”
Chelsea recentered the image, focusing on a two-story building on the western side of town now used as the operational headquarters of the local ISIS commander.
“Lots,” said Chelsea. “Twelve in the scan, and the bird isn’t done.”
“Good.”
They could blow up the school with the touch of a button—the Destiny drone was orbiting a short distance away. But it was at best a secondary target—unless Ghadab was inside.
“Here’s a site that wasn’t mapped,” said Chelsea, moving the image farther south. “It’s a house. There are at least twenty computers there, and three good-sized air conditioners. Look.”
“Is there an internet connection?”
“Can’t tell. But there’s a cable line. You can see where it goes underground.”
“Put it on the list to watch.”
“Already have.”
The UAV had found clusters of six or seven computers in three other buildings that had not been ID’d for surveillance by the CIA. Two were at small businesses on the western end of the city, closest to the ancient ruins. The last was within a hundred yards of the wall where Turk had been when he spooked the guards.
“There’s a bunker up here that you had marked as abandoned,” Chelsea added, showing him a location several miles north of the city. “Six computers there, printers. Everything on standby, though. The power profiles are low coming in, so I’m extrapolating.”
“Not being used?”
“No.”
“Put it on the list anyway.”
“Already did.”
“The list is getting pretty long,” said Johansen. “Sometimes I think we’d be better off leveling the whole city.”
While Chelsea was ferreting out potential targets, five three-man teams were crossing the desert south, preparing to plant a web of video and ELINT bugs around the city.
Two teams would enter the city on the western highway with commercial traffic after morning prayers; there were generally a half-dozen trucks entering at that time, and the guards tended to be blasé. The infiltrators were the best Arabic speakers in the group, and to a man, looked as if they’d been born in Syria. Their targets were buildings near the city boundary.
Two other teams would enter from the fields to the south, disguised as farmworkers going home for a noonday meal. Their targets were outside the main area of the city, less heavily traveled; they, too, were competent Arabic speakers, though two had papers identifying them as foreign workers as a cover for their looks.
The fifth team, which included Johnny Givens, would plant bugs in the most heavily trafficked and dangerous part of the city. Their mission was not only the riskiest, but it also had to be completed before the others: besides the bugs, they we
re planting boosters that were needed to transmit data from the other sensors. Without the boosters in place, the other bugs couldn’t be turned on. The mission was so risky it would be done by bots under cover of darkness.
They chose an abandoned archaeological dig at the city outskirts as their command post. Sitting on the lee side of a hill, the digs were seventy-five yards from a former Syrian army compound. That, too, was abandoned, except for a Daesh military commander and his family. En route to the main objectives, one of the bots would plant a bug to cover the home as well. Black-shirt patrols ran at roughly two-hour intervals around the city each night; the bots’ incursion and route was planned accordingly.
At some point in the war, a flight of Russian aircraft had launched a bombing raid against the city with spectacular results: they had managed to miss every one of their half-dozen targets. Most of their bombs had landed on vacant land near the excavations. Johnny and the others parked their truck in one of the craters, lugging their gear to a knoll at the edge of the archaeological site.
They launched a Hum. Christian trotted to a second hill on their eastern flank, commanding the roadway from the city; Turk and Johnny got the robots ready for their mission.
Nicknamed “koalas,” the bots had been preprogrammed with GPS and satellite data. About a fifth of the size of their namesakes, each unit had twelve legs, six on top and six on the bottom. The legs had three small toes with claws that could grip and enable them to climb—like actual koalas.
“How do you know if they’re right side up?” asked Turk.
“I don’t,” answered Johnny.
They had to wait through a lengthy startup routine. One of the units did not respond to the test. Johnny replaced it—he had two backups—then launched each unit individually with verbal commands. One after the other they marched off, kicking up a trail of dust.
“Out little army,” said Turk as Johnny sat down in front of the control unit. His tone was somewhere between a sneer and admiration.
Their small size and legs made the bots hard to see, but it also limited how fast they could go; 2.5 mph was their top speed. To reach the city where their targets were, they needed to first cross about a thousand yards’ worth of open terrain, enter and traverse the empty compound, turn into an alley, and cross the back of another yard before reaching the streets. Stopping periodically to consider data from the Hum and a Nightbird controlled by Chelsea back at the base, it took nearly twenty minutes for the lead bot to reach the compound. The units seemed overly cautious to Johnny, but short of taking over each one individually, there was nothing he could do.
The bots split up as they approached a row of houses on the other side of the empty compound, beginning to scatter as they sought out their targets. The houses were occupied; several had people sleeping on the roofs, common in the warm Syrian nights. The bots slowed precipitously as they neared the houses, stopping whenever any of the sleeping bodies moved.
“We’re way behind schedule,” said Turk. “At this rate we ain’t gonna make it. By a lot. You gotta speed us up.”
“The only thing I can do is remove the safety protocol,” said Johnny.
“What’ll that do?”
“They won’t stop and update their data.”
“Do it.”
“Yeah.”
No longer pausing or worrying about being seen, the koalas moved ahead on the last routes they had programmed. They still weren’t very fast, but at least they were no longer stopping every few seconds.
“I’m hearing a truck,” said Christian a few minutes later. “Coming out of the traffic circle in our direction.”
“Yeah, OK, I’m looking at it,” said Johnny, staring at the Hum’s video screen. “Couple of pickups.”
“Patrol?” asked Christian.
“Early for that,” said Turk.
Johnny watched the vehicles continue toward the traffic circle near the ruins where Christian was perched. The intersection was in an odd place, a remnant of an earlier traffic pattern now shunted by the decision two decades before to route the highway farther east.
“The trucks are going south,” said Johnny.
“Three guys in the back of the lead,” said Christian, watching through the nightscope of his rifle. “All awake.”
“Something new,” sneered Turk.
The lead truck drove south toward the center of town—and their target buildings. Johnny started to relax—then saw that instead of following, the second vehicle turned right, then took a quick left directly in the path of four koalas. Before he could order the bots to retreat, the truck was on them. It missed the two bots closest to the corner, but caught the other two midway across the road.
You gotta be kidding me! Murphy’s Law, right?
No, my dumb decision.
Stunned, Johnny stared at the overhead image for a few seconds before switching to manual control on K4, one of the koalas that had been hit. The bot responded with a diagnostic signal indicating that it had lost mobility. K6 gave him the same code.
All of the other bots were still active. Cursing himself, Johnny put them back into cautious mode. Each immediately stopped and reassessed their surroundings and path.
“We lost two bots,” he told Turk.
“Shit. What do we do?”
“We can have units pick them up on the way back,” said Johnny. “The question is how to get video bugs into the two spots they’re going to miss.”
There was only one backup, and it couldn’t carry all the bugs they had to place. And there wouldn’t be enough time to recharge one of the bots when it returned—that took an hour and a half, which would surely take them past dawn.
Johnny dialed into the secure com link to confer with Chelsea about possibly moving some of the bugs so they wouldn’t need to place as many. She suggested a couple of changes, but the most they could lose were two bugs.
While they were talking, one of the pickups circled back toward the koalas. This time, with their protocols back in place, the units scurried for safety.
Scurry being a relative term.
The vehicle zoomed past the buildings, continuing north toward the traffic circle. It drove north through a large residential area, then headed past a mostly abandoned slum of shacks and refugee housing, speeding to a pair of ruined buildings just short of the hills north of town, a good two and a half miles from the highway. Two figures got out, then disappeared in the rubble. The truck immediately backed out and started for Palmyra.
“Chelsea, you see that?” Johnny asked over the radio. “There’s a bunker there.”
“We’re working on it. We spotted it earlier.”
“That’s near the road we were taking out.”
“We’ll give you a new route.”
“Roger that.”
Johnny decided to send his lone reserve koala—K10—to the farthest video spot, then use the first returning unit to plant the last bug by swapping out the battery from the disabled unit. That was harder than he thought—after struggling with the connectors, he had to reboot and reprogram the unit by putting it into “base memory,” feed the GPS target coordinates one at a time, and then go through a series of diagnostic checks with Chelsea’s help. They’d just finished when she told him that Johansen wanted to talk.
“If you have a moment,” she added, joking.
The light note reminded him of home. It was jarring.
“That bunker in the desert,” said Johansen. “You think you can plant a video bug on the roof?”
“Maybe.”
“Good.”
The line snapped off before Johnny could discuss the logistics. There was a clear view of the road from the ruins; no way they could get in there. A hill to the west would give them cover, but even so, the last quarter mile was wide-open; anyone outside could easily see them, and have an even easier shot.
“We’ll be spotted easily,” said Turk. “Look—there’s a video camera. I’m guessing there are others. Can we scavenge the batteries fr
om the dead units?”
“They’re pretty crushed,” said Johnny. “We can’t count on them.”
“No way we get across to the bunker without being seen. I’ll talk to Johansen.”
“No, I have an idea,” said Johnny. “We’ll hold back K3 with the battery from the malfunctioning bot. We’ll use that.”
“So how do we get the other bugs in place here?”
“I say we put it there ourselves.” He held up the screen. “Clear run if we go now.”
43
North of Palmyra—around the same time
Ghadab was too energized to sleep after the operation at Hum, and so after dropping off most of his men, he returned to the bunker. Success would breed success—his people had tasted blood, and would plan and recruit with new vigor.
There were three possibilities of targets, all stupendous. He would cripple a city, do so much damage that the infidels would have to come, and Armageddon would begin.
Which city? Rome, the most impressive.
Boston kept intruding in his thoughts, egotistical, boasting Boston. The mayor, the policeman who claimed to have sent ten martyrs to their reward.
The rich man, Massina.
Ghadab paced up and down the bunker’s center hall. There were many things to do, things that only he should handle: travel arrangements for his scouts, weapons, money. But he couldn’t focus on any of them.
The woman slipped into his thoughts surreptitiously.
He had not had sex with her. Shadaa’s body was pleasing, and it was within his right as a fighter to take her—God’s just reward. But something held him back, something beyond his religious beliefs.
He was pure. But so was she—something in the way she presented herself to him, how she bowed her head in submission.
“Enough,” he said aloud, urging himself back to work. He went to his office and began jotting down his orders to send his scouts to their various assignments.
But even as wrote, his thoughts drifted.
Maybe I’ll go back to the restaurant when I’m done. I should check on the girl to make sure no harm has come to her.