The Doodlebug War

by Andrew Updegrove

  * * *

  Tim might have been energized by anger against the establishment, but Frank was haunted by the view from the top of the hill along the Columbia River, gazing out over the roof of the enormous, defenseless data center. He’d started to have a recurring dream where a couple of doughboys from World War One used the mortars of their day to blast a hundred craters into the roof of a data center in ten minutes’ time, each large enough to swallow a truck and collectively sufficient to turn the computing resources of thousands of servers into smoldering wreckage. He was not willing, like some politicians, to dismiss Foobar’s promise to conquer the West on its own turf as pure grandstanding. There was, after all, an uncomfortably feasible way to do the job. He realized with a shock that it would be January in a few weeks—the perfect time to trigger such an attack to maximum effect.

  But assuming he was right, how exactly did Foobar plan to attack? There wasn’t a lot of time left to figure that out, and he had only a few enigmatic hints tweezed from mountains of data to work with.

  Tim and Keri hadn’t made a lot of progress decrypting the coded portions of messages, but they had produced something interesting on the code word front as they continued to refine the series of search algorithms they had developed. Now they were looking only for non-common words that, like Hellespont, were used a single time in a message and had low relevance to the rest of the text. This allowed them to screen out almost all the words that were of no interest. Using this search technique, they concluded that “Venice” was the code word for the plague attack and learned that Foobar’s henchman had begun to grow fond of the noun asad al-naml about three years ago. Its use had risen sharply over the past five months, and it was now the second most used word on the list of possible code words they had compiled.

  Translated into English, the word was “antlion.”

  Frank looked up from the report. What was an antlion, besides an oxymoron? He started browsing on the CIA’s extensive intranet to find out.

  The first thing he learned was that an antlion was a really ugly-looking insect, at least in its larval stage. Later on, it would emerge from a cocoon looking like a dragonfly with its second set of wings at the wrong angle, and with a more elegant name as well: antlion lacewing. Apparently, antlions could be found in sandy areas all over the world, and their name derived from their reputation as voracious consumers of small insects, particularly ants. He also learned that antlion larvae were “unusual among the insects” due to lacking an anus. Instead, they stored up their waste internally throughout their entire larval stage. No wonder they were so mean.

  But why would Foobar’s men have chosen the name of an ill-tempered insect for what might be their big attack? Hopefully, the name would provide a clue, as Hellespont and Venice had. But what could that clue be? He kept on reading.

  After hatching underground, an antlion would look for an appealing area of sand and begin digging down, moving backward, and stacking sand on its head. Periodically, it would toss its head backward, hurling the material out of the cone-shaped pit it was excavating. Once that pit was two or three inches wide by a third of that in depth, the insect would bury itself deeper. All that extended upward into its pit would be its enormous, sickle-shaped jaws, each equipped with sharp, hollow tines it used to suck the soft interior out of any prey unlucky enough to find itself in their embrace. Clearly a lifestyle that only someone like Foobar could appreciate.

  Engineer that he was, Frank was fascinated to learn that the secret to the antlion’s success was setting its trap in loose sand and then constructing its pit in such a way that its sides would assume the “angle of repose,” meaning steep enough to be on the verge of collapsing inward but otherwise stable unless disturbed. An insect wandering over the edge of an antlion’s pit would upset the equilibrium of the sand particles on the cone’s surface, turning them into the equivalent of ball bearings that would begin sliding away beneath it. The hapless insect would be left scrambling ineffectually to escape, while the remorseless beastie waiting below used its formidable jaws to fling yet more loose sand around its intended prey. Eventually, the doomed visitor would tumble downward into the maw of its hideous executioner. Frank watched the process unfold in a video clip, and was grateful he was not the size of an ant.

  That was all very interesting, but what did it mean? It sounded promising, what with the ferocious reputation of the antlion, the fact that it set traps for the unwary, and lived a secretive life underground, ready to pounce, but was that all there was to it? Perhaps if he looked into how the word was used in context, he would discover a more useful clue. He looked up the archive of translated Caliphate intercepts and performed a word search. As promised, there were several hits.

  Apparently, “antlion” was also a nickname for an improvised electronic device, the kind of bomb a terrorist would bury under or beside a road and trigger when an enemy vehicle was passing by.

  He snapped his laptop shut in disgust. Just a dead end.

  * * *

  But over the next week, the usage of “antlion” by the Caliphate continued to rise, and at an ever-steeper angle. If it continued to mimic the arc of the use of Hellespont, it would peak in just a few weeks’ time. Frank decided he’d been too hasty in rejecting it. But what could the clue be that was lurking in the choice of an obscure insect with a bad attitude?

  He decided the answer wasn’t likely to be gleaned from analyzing Big Data. He’d have to figure this one out the old-fashioned way, hoping that if he stumbled on the right information, his intuition would come to his rescue. He prepared the way by having Keri compile a list of every common association with the word “antlion” she could find. The result was a list of bulleted ephemera that covered elements as diverse as the origin of the insect’s scientific name, mentions of the bugs in folklore, and references in gardening manuals. He worked his way through the list, roving out onto the CIA’s extensive intranet when an item seemed promising, in hopes of uncovering some bit of additional information that would allow the connection to spring into view.

  In the course of that quest, he learned that while crossing Cape Cod, Henry David Thoreau had likened the landscape to a “bleak and barren country, consisting of rounded hills and hollows” in which he “might tumble into a village before we were aware of it, as into an ant-lion’s hole, and be drawn into the sand irrecoverably.” Interesting, but not likely what he was looking for. Foobar didn’t seem like the Thoreau type.

  He also discovered that the insect was parasitized by other arthropods, including a horsefly larva that cohabitated with antlions in their lairs and lived off their crumbs, as well as by a species of wasp that stabbed antlion larvae with a sharp, egg-bearing spike on its rear end called an ovipositor. Thus planted, the wasp’s larvae would hatch inside, and feed on, their host. The wasp angle sounded like it had the potential to suggest a connection, but he couldn’t make it out.

  Then there was the fact that antlions were in the habit of tossing the lifeless, drained carcasses of their prey over their shoulders and out of their pits. Frank hoped that wasn’t what he was looking for. He wasn’t too keen, either, on the fact that if a winged adult had the ill luck to land in an antlion pit, it was likely to become dinner for the next generation of its own kind. And he didn’t at all know what to make of the fact that the antlion mating technique called for the adult male to attach itself to an adult female, after which the male “hung below her, suspended only by his genital apparatus.” And for up to two hours, to boot. There was even a picture.

  Interestingly, although antlions lived almost everywhere around the world, he learned that they were still usually called antlions in the local language. But not everywhere. Malayalam speakers in India called them pit-elephants. Hispanics in the American Southwest called them toritos, meaning little bulls, and in Tennessee, they were sand lions and ant devils. Meanwhile, they were ancient earth cattle in Mand
arin, but backward-moving bulls in Cantonese. In Korean, they were ant demons, and in Slovenian, little wolves.

  Could any of these variants have a secret meaning to the Caliphate? He felt like he was getting nowhere but persevered, discovering that antlions had long been referred to as doodlebugs in the southeastern states of the U.S., for some reason inspiring many variations on a single bit of doggerel that was to be recited as the observer tickled an antlion’s pit with a piece of straw. The object of the exercise was to provoke its owner to throw sand in the direction of its hoped-for dinner. One version went like this:

  Doodlebug, doodlebug, come out of your hole

  I’ll give you ten dollars and a bag of gold

  In other renditions, the doodlebug might be offered some pie, bread and butter, a grain of corn, or a barrel of sugar; most often, it might be informed that its house was on fire and it had better come home or its children would burn. It might also be asked to make a cup of coffee or catch a blade of grass.

  All of that was pretty devious, but at least not as threatening as the warning intoned in Afrikaans by the children of South Africa:

  Joerie, Joerie, bread and butter,

  if I get you, I will kill you.

  Hmm. That didn’t sound like a particularly convincing argument to use to motivate the desired behavior.

  Even Mark Twain had climbed on board, tasking Tom Sawyer with consulting a doodlebug for advice on a spell. The doodlebug’s resulting thrashing about confirmed Sawyer’s suspicion: the charm had been the work of a witch!

  Frank was despairing of ever making the right connection by the time he learned that in Episode VI of the Star Wars saga, Sarlacc, an enormous and dreadful animal living at the bottom of a sandy pit, was inspired by the antlion. Could Foobar, like North Korea’s Kim-Jung Il, be a closet Western movie freak?

  He gave up with that last bit of information, feeling extremely well versed in the gestalt of antlions in various civilizations but no closer to his goal. What could he possibly do with all of this information?

  He brooded on that for a while. He had to start somewhere, so why not work with the American variant of the name, given that the United States was Foobar’s biggest threatened target. Delving deeper, he learned that the word doodlebug could also apply to an early self-propelled rail car, a 1950s scooter, a 1930s tractor, a midget racing car, and several aircraft, one of which was the pilotless, jet-powered, German V-1 flying bomb. Apparently, the Brits had exercised their traditionally mordant wit to give the V-1 that nickname as tens of thousands of the early drones rained down on London. Which, if any, of these usages was he looking for?

  He worked his way down the list, spending the most time on the V-1, not because it seemed to be a stronger lead, but simply because he had always found the V-1 and its successor, the V-2 rocket, to be fascinating examples of early, cutting edge technology. Eventually he found his way to the site of a small post-war museum built on the ruins of a factory in Nordhausen, Germany, where slave laborers from a nearby concentration camp had been compelled to build thousands of both weapons. While browsing around that resource, he stumbled upon a news article reporting that three years before, persons unknown had broken into the museum. Among the items stolen was the museum’s unique collection of original V-1 plans, specifications, and operations manuals.

  * * *

  18

  Antlion Has Landed

  Frank was reporting his discovery to Tim as they ran through Marla’s neighborhood.

  “So, on the plus side, the timing is perfect—about the same time the word doodlebug starts to show up in the messages, the plans get stolen. Add to that the fact that we’re talking about seventy-five-year-old technology, so the weapons could be made just about anywhere in the world. And while the original V-1s had pretty primitive targeting controls, you can buy GPS-aware navigation units online to steer model airplanes. Using the output of one of those units to control a full-size aircraft-1 wouldn’t be challenging at all. Do that, and you’ve got a pretty close approximation of a modern cruise missile. It can fly low to avoid radar detection; it’s got a range of one hundred sixty miles—probably a lot farther if they used modern aircraft fuel instead of kerosene—and can deliver almost a ton of explosives. You’d only need a few of those to take out each data center.”

  “Sounds interesting. Any negatives?”

  “On the downside, you’re talking about a jet plane over twenty-seven feet long, weighing almost two and a half tons, that was designed to be launched from either a large bomber or a land-based ramp up to one hundred sixty feet long. The ramp was manufactured in pieces to be portable, but individual sections were made out of iron and were twenty feet long. So we’re talking about a big jump here from an RPG launcher or a mortar. If you were trying to transport all that stuff to locations within range of the targets, you’d need several full shipping containers for the launch ramp and another container for each V-1.”

  “Right,” Tim replied. “Foobar doesn’t have any planes to launch anything from, and if he did, they’d be picked up on radar and shot down before they left Caliphate airspace. And you could never get all that equipment into the U.S., much less set up launching ramps without being noticed. Too many of the data centers are near populated areas. So that sounds like a dead end to me.”

  “But you could launch them from ships.”

  “Hah! Good point—and nobody pays a lot of attention to ships until they’re at the dock. I wonder how he’d go about doing that?”

  “I don’t think it would be too hard. You could put the launch rails above decks and cover them with tarps, but I think I’d put two side-by-side rails inside with a blast wall between them and some sort of doors in the bow of the ship that I could open when I was ready to launch. Above each launch rail, I’d have another, longer rail running the whole length of the ship. I could have an entire fleet of V-1s hanging from those rails, where I could get them fueled up and ready to be rapidly moved forward, like on an assembly line. Finally, I’d have big, curved blast deflectors separating the firing section in the bow of the ship from the storage and preparation area amidships. The deflectors would direct the launch exhaust out the sides of the ship.

  “If you set things up that way, each ship could pack a heck of a wallop. If you had a six-hundred-foot-long ship and allowed two hundred feet for the launch area, that would leave four hundred feet for the preparation area. That would mean you could have twenty-six V-1s all fueled up and ready to go, plus the two in the launch area. Add an elevator to the deck below, and you could have another forty ready to bring up two at a time and add to the launch line. That would mean about sixty-eight V-1s per ship.”

  “That’s a lot of firepower.”

  “I’d say so. If you targeted each data center with six V-1s, you could take out eleven data centers per ship.”

  “How long would it take to launch that many drones?”

  “Once you opened the bow doors and launched the first two, I figure the launch sequence would go like this: open the blast deflectors like a pair of gates, move two more V-1s forward, close the blast reflectors while you’re lowering the V-1s onto the firing rails, and then launch. I expect if you set the whole thing up well and had the launch crew really well trained, you could fire a pair of V-1s off every five minutes.”

  “Wow! That’s something. If they launched at night from five miles off shore and set the drones to fly below radar, I bet it would take quite a while for anyone on shore to figure out what was happening, or where the V-1s were coming from. And then they’d still have to figure out what to do about it.”

  “That’s right. Every ship might not succeed in launching every V-1 before we were able to counterattack, but then again they very well might. It’s not like we keep fighters or bombers at the ready to defend against coastal attacks anymore. So even after we figured out what was going on, we’d ha
ve to scramble flight crews, fuel up our jets, and then get them however far we needed to fly them to reach the ships. And meanwhile, those V-1s would be closing on their targets at more than four hundred miles an hour.”

  Tim was clearly impressed. “I wonder how many data centers would be in range?”

  “A lot, I bet, but don’t get so excited—I can’t run that fast. Anyway, I’ve calculated that more than half the population of the U.S. lives within range, so that means you’d expect half of the data centers, more or less, to be within range, too.”

  “Frank, I think you may have hit on it. Head for home and see how far we can take this?”

  “Yup. But don’t run me into the ground on the way.”

  * * *

  It didn’t take long to sketch out the rest of a feasible scenario. Frank tackled the ship aspects while Tim researched the targets and logistics side of the investigation. Frank learned that the most common size ship in use was referred to as a Handysize, and more than 2,000 vessels in this category were spread out across the globe. Most were set up as freighters and were equipped with large cranes and hatches on deck to allow a wide variety of cargo types to be taken on board and then removed again—just right to load and unload the flying bombs. With a typical width of eighty-eight to ninety-eight feet, that meant that launch doors wide enough to let two V-1s pass through could easily be cut through the bow of the ship high above the waterline. Other doors could be cut through the sides to vent the jet exhaust. And it wouldn’t be hard to pick up a few old, worn-out vessels without attracting attention.

  For his part, Tim confirmed that the great majority of the data centers were indeed near large coastal cities. Anyone working for Foobar wouldn’t need more than a laptop computer and a Wi-Fi connection to grab the targeting data using Google Earth. Tim also found several websites that tracked global commercial shipping, showing the points of departure, destinations, owners, and much more for every ship in operation.