“I have damn little information to work with,” she said. “We’ve only got what the demonstrators themselves are putting online, plus some footage from the drones.”
“Make your best guess,” said Lincoln. “Get Rafet and everyone the network can reach on the streets tomorrow, supporting Erez and the elected government.”
Dagmar glanced at Ismet.
“I was hoping to get Is-Estragon comfortably settled in his bed, with his medicines and-”
“We’ve got guards that can do that,” Lincoln said.
“I’d rather stay here,” Ismet said. “I won’t be any more or less comfortable in the ops room than at home, and I might be useful.”
Dagmar saw Ismet settled into his desk chair, then got the disk with the email addresses on it and sent out a preparatory email telling people to be ready before noon the next day. She returned to the ops room and asked for updates. Nothing startlingly new had happened, only more of the same. The Skunk Works drones were having their batteries recharged.
While going about their normal tasks the Lincoln Brigade discussed their options. All agreed that Rafet and the various Brigade-controlled networks should create a major demonstration or marches while the authorities were distracted by demonstrations elsewhere, but it was difficult to tell where some of the actions already were and therefore what locations were safe. And of course it was completely impossible to tell which locations would be safe the next day.
They already had scouting reports on any number of locations, all completed before any actions had even started. Dagmar chose three, then sent orders to the Skunk Works for drones to scout them before nightfall.
It was while Dagmar awaited the news from the drones that she heard a series of exclamations from others in the ops room, all in about a ten-second period.
“Damn!” muttered Richard.
“Fuck!” said Byron.
“Crap!” From Magnus.
Dagmar looked up.
“What’s up?”
“408 Request Timeout,” Richard said. “And I’m looking for a page I just uploaded onto a server I know is there.”
“Allah kahretsin s?u Interneti!” Lloyd snarled at his computer through half-clenched teeth.
“Download’s frozen,” Magnus said. He reached for his mouse. “I’ll cancel and restart.”
“And with me it’s an upload,” Byron said. “Motherfucker!”
“408 Request Timeout,” Magnus said.
“408,” said Helmuth. He looked up at Dagmar. “What’s next? 418 I’m a Teapot?”
Dagmar thought for a moment, then turned to Richard. “Are we being attacked?”
Richard considered the question, looked at his chronograph, then considered some more.
“Well,” he said. “They do know we’re here. But all the attacks so far have been on Web pages hosted by our proxy sites, and pretty much stopped there.” He reached for his phone. “I’ll call the base computer centre.” He pressed buttons on his phone, then stopped and looked at the display.
“Out of Area,” he reported in surprise.
“Use the ground line,” Dagmar said. She went to her own office, took her own phone from the desk, and tapped the screen to bring it to life.
Out of Area, she read. Plenty of juice in the battery, but no bars.
When she returned to the ops room, she saw everyone sitting very still and watching Richard as he listened on the ground line to someone at RAF Akrotiri’s computer centre.
“Right,” he said. “Thank you.”
Richard turned to Dagmar.
“They’re having router trouble,” he said. “It’s affecting the whole base.”
“Any time estimate,” Dagmar said, “for when they’ll have it up?”
“No.”
“Any idea of why cell phones are down?”
“He didn’t know they were down until I told him.”
The computer centre at Akrotiri was enormous. It shuffled vast quantities of electronic intelligence from the Middle East to GCHQ in Cheltenham, an installation that was sort of the Barclays Bank of ELINT. Dagmar wondered if she should send Richard down to help the computer centre diagnose its problems, then decided against it-there was no way Richard would have clearance to muck about with their routers. And then she noticed that Byron and Magnus were staring at each other, each with the same expression, stricken and yet glowing with a kind of awe.
“What is it?” she asked.
“Holy fuck,” Byron said.
Magnus turned to Dagmar.
“It’s the High Zap,” he said.
ACT 3
CHAPTER TWELVE
It seemed visibly darker outside, as if a cloud had just smothered the sun. A flight of jets roared overhead, rattling the window in its pane and burying beneath its thunder the sound of ceiling fans and computer cooling systems. Dagmar’s heart churned in her chest, as if she were on the edge of panic. Suddenly she was probing the edges of her perceptions, looking for the clues that a burning Ford or a line of police or a horde of knife-wielding Indonesians was about to come storming through the doors of her consciousness.
Not now, she thought. She couldn’t have a flashback now.
She and Magnus and Byron stared at each other until the jet blast faded. Dagmar tried to regain control of her heart, her breath.
“High Zap,” she said, her mouth dry. “What’s that?”
Byron swallowed, suddenly nervous.
“We can’t tell you.”
Magnus inclined his head toward Lincoln’s office. “Ask Chatsworth,” he said.
Dagmar looked at Chatsworth’s office door, then realized there was something she had to do first.
“In a minute,” she said, and looked at the phone in her hand.
Out of Area, it said. She triggered the VoIP function and saw that it was down as well.
Dagmar enabled the sat phone function. Her nerves tautened as the word Connecting swam into sight on the display, repeating over and over again without any actual connection taking place, and then she almost sagged with relief as her handheld indicated that a signal had reached the satellite and been bounced back.
She walked around the room until she found an area with the strongest signal-sat phones didn’t work well indoors-and then thumbed in Rafet’s number in Ankara. Relief flooded her as the ring tone sang in her ear.
Lincoln had thoughtfully provided the Brigade with sat phones that could connect directly to the satellite, instead of having to go through a ground station at one end or the other.
Rafet answered on the second ring.
“This is Ankara,” he said, in English.
“This is Briana,” Dagmar said. “We’re having some trouble with communications here, and I thought I’d better alert you.”
“Here also,” Rafet said. “Our cell phones are out, and the government seems to have turned off the Internet.”
Dagmar’s head swam.
“That’s happening here as well,” she said.
“So the only way we can communicate is with the satellite phone?”
“Apparently.”
Or send a telegram, she thought. Or a carrier pigeon.
It was a little late in the game to equip every revolutionary with a satellite phone, and in any case she couldn’t afford it. Her plans were in serious trouble.
“Use this phone for primary communication till the Net comes back up,” Dagmar said. “Any word from the drones?”
“The drones haven’t finished their missions yet. But at least they’re still following orders.”
“That’s good news, at least.”
She ended the call and went to Lincoln’s office-knocked once and then opened the door. Lincoln sat at his desk and was staring at his phone while annoyance firmed his face.
“My phone’s stopped working,” he said. “Just as I was about to talk the mayor of Bodrum.”
“Cells and the Internet are down,” Dagmar said. “Byron and Magnus say it’s the High Zap.”
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Lincoln’s mouth opened and the air came out of him in a soft sigh. He seemed to deflate, crumpling into himself like a pumpkin left too long on the shelf.
He was still looking at his phone. He put the phone on the desk and turned to Dagmar. His face was gray.
“Well,” he said. “That’s one we’ve lost.”
“Lost what?” Dagmar demanded. “Phones? The Internet?”
“The war.” Lincoln visibly pulled himself together, his shoulders rising, back growing straight. His hands wandered over his torso as if reassuring himself of his own continued existence. Then he turned to Dagmar, his blue eyes hard.
“Close the door,” he said.
Dagmar did so. She sat on one of the brown metal chairs. Lincoln adjusted himself in his Aeron and leaned toward her.
“Are satellite phones working?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“In that case I need you to call your company in California-we’ve got to see how widespread the damage is.”
A cold wind blew up Dagmar’s spine. This couldn’t be worldwide, she told herself.
She punched the number on her handheld. In the meantime Lincoln was launching his phone’s own satellite function.
In Simi Valley, Helmuth’s assistant Marcie answered the phone.
“Hi, Marcie, this is Dagmar. Any problem with the game?”
“Ah-” Marcie seemed surprised. “No, not that I’ve heard of.”
“Could you call up the Handelcorp Web page? Because I’m seeing some strange stuff, here.”
She heard fingers tapping a keyboard, followed by the slap of the Enter key.
“Everything looks good here,” Marcie said.
“You called it up from the Internet, not our own internal database?”
“Yes.”
“Check to see if the links are working.”
Marcie reported that everything seemed to be in order.
“No problem with the servers? The routers?”
“No. I’d hear the screaming if there were.”
“Right. Thanks. It just must be the local ISP that’s buggering up my signal.”
She pressed the End key and listened to the last few sentences of Lincoln’s conversation with whomever it was he’d called.
“You’ll have to do the checking yourself,” he said. “I’m not in a position to do anything, here.”
Lincoln ended his call and looked at her.
“Everything’s fine in Washington except the weather,” he said.
“Good,” she said.
“I should have realized the problem was local when you told me the satellites were still working.”
It can take out communications satellites? she thought.
Lincoln interlaced his fingers, making a single large fist. He placed the doubled fist on the desk before him and leaned toward her.
“The High Zap isn’t the real name,” he said. “But that’s what we’ll call it, okay?”
“Call what? What are we talking about, Lincoln?”
His lips thinned. His clenched fists thumped once, lightly, on the desk.
“It’s hard to know where to begin,” he said.
“The beginning usually works,” Dagmar said.
“Fine.” The fists thumped again on the desk.
“Back in ’91,” Lincoln said, “a U.S.-led coalition launched Operation Desert Storm to drive the Iraqis out of Kuwait. The allied air forces very quickly achieved superiority in the air and began destroying ground targets virtually at will.
“Throughout the Middle East,” he went on, “a rumor spread that the Iraqi air defenses had been knocked out by a computer virus smuggled into an Iraqi defense facility in a printer. The program was supposed to be called ‘Devouring Windows.’ This rumor persists unto the present day.”
Dagmar mentally reviewed the state of cyber arts in 1991, a task made a little uncertain by the fact she’d been a child at the time.
“That couldn’t have happened,” she said. “Right?”
“No.” Lincoln was scornful. “The story originated as an April Fool joke in InfoWorld magazine. The reason Iraqi air defense sites went down is that we were burying them in cluster bombs.”
“That’s what I’d figure,” Dagmar said.
“So after the war was over, and the rumor started going around, people in Washington-and I was one of them-began to wonder, Well, why can’t we? We-the U.S. government, I mean-created the Internet; we should have the keys to take it down.”
He unclenched his hands and spread them flat on the desk. “It took twenty years and a lot of black ops dollars, but eventually we had the High Zap.” He looked around, at the invisible electronic networks that surrounded his cube of an office.
“Now,” he said. “We’re the High Zap’s prisoner.”
Dagmar considered this.
“How does it work?” she asked.
One hand twirled in the air, summoning up a memory.
“Remember back in the nineties, when people were talking about the ‘Java revolution’?”
“Vaguely.”
“Java creates a virtual machine inside the computer that can run programs of its own. The High Zap isn’t written in Java, but the program works the same way-it creates a very simple, very clean little engine inside a router, living between layers of the TCP/IP. When it’s activated, it refuses any packet that doesn’t have the right prefix. Communication is disabled. So communication is completely shut down until a preset time of deactivation has been reached, or until an order arrives that has the correct code prefix ordering it to quit.”
“And in the meantime,” Dagmar said, “the Internet works perfectly well for anyone with the right codes.”
“Correct.”
“How does the Zap get into the router?” Dagmar asked.
Lincoln narrowed his eyes. “That was another technical problem that took a lot of years to solve. Suffice it to say that it was solved, and that it’s now in every router made in the last six or seven years.”
Does it propagate like a virus? Dagmar wondered. But no-routers were different, had different doors into them, and in any case they were made to route information onward, not keep it in memory… But that meant the Zap had to be installed in them, at the factory, and that didn’t make sense, either, because routers were made in so many different countries by so many different companies.
“The Zap can be localized, as it seems to be here,” Lincoln was saying. “The command can be sent to a particular router, and then forwarded to any other router that responds to a ping in a time of a given fraction of a light-second. Of course, if the area is wide enough, it can go clear up to the Clarke Orbit.” He flapped a hand in the general direction of the satellite that had just carried their voices to North America.
“The moon is only-what?” Dagmar tried to remember the figure. “Half a light-second away?”
“Let’s just say the Zap has all the reach it needs,” Lincoln said.
Dagmar’s mind flailed like a drowning man through the sea of fresh information.
“The Zap takes down TCP/IP?” she said.
“Yes.”
“But cell phones don’t use TCP/IP, and they’re down.”
“Telephones use PSTN protocol,” Lincolon said. “But the controls for the telephone relays use TCP/IP-or they do unless they’re old-fashioned mechanical relays. So the Zap guarantees a slow degradation of phone service-the phones will be all right until you need to give them an order through TCP/IP, and then they start going mad, and then the network goes into a death spiral and crashes.” He gestured to his cell phone. “Apparently the local net ran into a whole complex series of problems and went down fast.”
“Jesus,” Dagmar muttered. “Is there more bad news?”
“Lots,” Lincoln said dryly. “TCP/IP is used by all modern military networks. All modern military satellites. All email. All social media. All local area networks. Voice over Internet. The entirety of the World Wide Web.”
An objection occurred to Dagmar.
“But this was designed to bring down military networks, right?” Dagmar said. “Aren’t they kept physically apart from other networks? How do you get to them?”
Lincoln raised an eyebrow. “In the event that we can’t bring down an enemy by preventing them from ordering online merchandise, sending text messages, and participating in flamewars, we can trash a military net provided we can gain access.”
“All it would take,” Dagmar said, “is a connection left open at the right moment. But you can’t count on that.”
“It could be engineered. Or…” He sucked in breath through clenched teeth. “Actually, that’s where our problems started. Because it wasn’t enough to own the Internet equivalent of an End of Times plague for the Internet, some of our politicians wanted to actually use it.”
“So Bozbeyli is just retaliating?” Dagmar asked. “Or-”
“It wasn’t used on Bozbeyli,” Lincoln said. “Back last spring, the Zap was used on our friends the Syrians-and for good reason, because they were continuing their never-ending quest for weapons of mass destruction. The Israelis wanted to stage an air raid on several sites simultaneously, and they wanted the Syrian air defenses down while they did it.”
“So you start with the rumor of a secret method for crashing an air defense network,” Dagmar said, “and then you end up with an actual secret method for crashing an air defense network.” She shook her head. “You people are too literal minded.”
Lincoln was grim. “I’m a little too close to the action to appreciate any irony, thanks.” He leaned back in his Aeron chair. Cold anger haunted his eyes. “I was against the action, quite frankly. I thought the Internet Apocalypse was too big a weapon to use against gnats-I argued that it needed to be held in reserve for a real emergency.”
“But you were overruled.”
Lincoln shrugged. “I can see their point,” he said. “It was in the best possible cause-and I supposed that, if we acted to confirm the 1991 rumor, it would only add to our mystical air of omnipotence.”
“But,” Dagmar pointed out, “to knock out the Syrian air defense, you still had to get into a military network, not just the Internet.”
“You are not cleared for knowing how we could do that,” Lincoln said. “But we could- provided that we made use of some highly advanced equipment available in a listening station in the mountains of southeastern Turkey-which itself exists only because the National Security Agency, which is normally tasked with electronic spying in that area, wouldn’t share their raw data with us, only their conclusions.” His face assumed the caste of indignation. “When we’d ask how they knew what they claimed to know, they’d just say they couldn’t give us that information. It was… vexing. So we got some black ops dollars and built our own station, and once we could fact-check them, the NSA grew a lot more tractable. But I digress…”
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