Cold Warriors (A Special Agent Dylan Kane Thriller, Book #3)

by J. Robert Kennedy

  Damned competence.

  He fired a message to Morrison that he was ready, then a text message to Sherrie.

  If you’ve got a minute, come see me.

  A message immediately popped back from Morrison indicating Op Center 3 was tasked to him, then a text from Sherrie arrived.

  In meeting, 30 mins?

  His thumbs flew over his Blackberry.

  I’m running an op in OC3. I think I’m going to die!

  He downloaded his code to a memory stick and locked his computer, thanking God and Sherrie for not being on Red Bull right now. His heart would have probably stopped after it raced past 200 beats a minute. As it stood, he was probably approaching 180. He took a deep breath then a drink of water, closing his eyes and trying to picture something that made him happy.

  Right now all he could picture was high school, sitting at Dylan Kane’s dining room table and helping him with his math. He had to admit he was surprised it wasn’t something with Sherrie that had popped into his head while seeking that safe place, but as he thought about it, every moment since he’d met her he had been on edge. It wasn’t her fault that he required a guard detail, it was just that he had been under tremendous pressure accompanied by too many bouts of pure terror since they had been together.

  With Kane, in their youth, he had always felt safe when his older friend had been around.

  Kane, I wish you were here.

  He pushed himself from his chair as the phone vibrated.

  Good luck! I’m so proud of you!

  Leroux grunted.

  You wouldn’t be if you knew how desperately I wish I was wearing Depends right now.

  Instead he just sent Thanks.

  As he headed for Ops Center 3 he took deep, steady breaths that seemed to increase with frequency the nearer he got, to the point where he was almost hyperventilating. He dodged into a bathroom that was thankfully empty and turned on the cold water at one of the sinks, splashing it on his face as he tried to calm down.

  A toilet flushed and he nearly shit his pants.

  The door to one of the stalls opened and a man stepped out he recognized from another section—Donovan Eppes. He had at least ten years on Leroux, and was someone he had always envied in the confidence department.

  “Hey Chris, what brings you to this end of the building?”

  Leroux grabbed a paper towel and dried his face.

  “I’m running an op in OC3,” he said, not believing the words as they came out of his mouth.

  “First time?” asked Eppes as he washed his hands.

  “Yeah.”

  “Man, I remember my first time,” said Eppes as he lathered his hands with soap. “I was so effin’ terrified I almost shit myself. Before I even got to Ops I vomited three times. I remember the controller I was leaning over gave me some Tic Tacs because I was killing her with the smell.” Eppes laughed and turned off the taps. “But I did it, it was a success, and the next time was a million times easier.” He dried his hands and tossed the paper into the garbage can. “You’ll do fine. You never would have been assigned command if they didn’t think you were capable of taking it.”

  Leroux smiled, his head bobbing slightly as they walked out of the bathroom together.

  “Mistakes happen,” muttered Leroux.

  Eppes laughed. “They do, but that’s why we have an office in Alaska!” He laughed even harder.

  “You’re not helping.”

  Eppes slapped Leroux on the back.

  “Don’t worry about it, Chris. I’m just trying to loosen you up. You’re going to do great.”

  Eppes retreated down the corridor Leroux had just come from as Leroux resumed his rush for Ops Center 3, surprisingly a little calmer than he had been, Eppes’ pep talk actually doing its job.

  If Eppes was scared, then it’s okay for me to be scared.

  He breathed a little easier and as he turned the corner, two guards stood on either side of the door marked OC3/Restricted Access. He swiped his card then placed his right hand on the scanner.

  “Thank you, Mr. Leroux, you may proceed,” said the guard manning the scanner. The other one opened the door.

  “Thanks,” said Leroux, stepping through and into the Operations Center.

  And all of his anxieties came rushing back.

  There were a dozen terminals, about half manned, along with a dozen large screens laid out in a curved grid fashion at the front of the room. The entire room was jet black, the ceiling and walls covered in sound dampening materials and devices to reduce any echo should the room begin to get loud. At the back of the room, slightly higher than the rest, were two stations, one occupied by a woman he recognized, the sign etched on the front of her station indicating her position—Ops Center Coordinator.

  She looked at him and smiled.

  “Mr. Leroux, I’m Shirley Dimka, OC Coordinator. How may we assist you?”

  The room was staring at him now and his palms started to flow sweat freely from the pores. They’re not staring at you, they’re waiting for you! He took a deep breath and focused on Dimka.

  “Nice to meet you,” he forced out with a nervous smile. He put his hands on a safety rail that rimmed the platform the two command stations sat on and looked down into the pit, but actually at the back wall, the light dim enough he hoped no one would notice. He raised his voice slightly, praying it didn’t shake too much. “My name is Chris Leroux, I’m a senior analyst here. I’m sure you’re all aware of the Crimson Rush situation. Our intel tells us we have up to one thousand of these devices on American and allied soil, and the activation codes have been sold. Our job today is to try and find who received the transmission containing those codes.” He reached into his pocket and retrieved the USB key containing his program. “I’ve written a program that we will insert into the malware’s update website—for lack of a better term—that will modify the malware running on infected computers the next time they are connected to the Internet. This program will then check the user’s computer to see if they accessed the file containing the codes that was downloaded to their PC. In theory, only the intended recipient would know about the file’s existence, so they should be the only ones to access it.”

  A hand popped up from the pit.

  “What about virus scanners or some other routine? Couldn’t we be dealing with millions of accesses?”

  Leroux shook his head.

  “No. First, if they had a virus scanner, they most likely wouldn’t have the malware in the first place, and second, I’ve accounted for that. A virus scanner, or other type of active scanner, would touch the file immediately upon arrival. The code compares the creation date of the file on the hard drive, and the last touch timestamp, and if they are within three seconds of each other, flags it as a false positive. I’m hopeful we should have a very small number of positive hits to sort through when we’re done.”

  The man nodded as if satisfied with the answer, and Leroux suddenly found himself feeling a lot better. His voice was strong, his hands weren’t leaking anymore, and his breathing had steadied.

  Large and in charge!

  “Any other questions?”

  “How long will it take?”

  Leroux shook his head.

  “That’s the tough one. We might need to run the program for hours, days or even weeks, and may never get the answer we’re looking for if the perpetrator has shutdown. What we’re hoping for here is that the malware program is used for secret transmissions within the organization, assuming there is one, which means they will have left their computers infected, and connected. If they have, we should find them in the list of positives. If they haven’t, then we’ll never find them. It’s a gamble, but it’s all we’ve got.”

  Heads bobbed around the room, and Leroux turned to Dimka. He handed her the USB key.

  “Is this the code?”

  He nodded.

  “Upload instructions are on the USB in the ‘read me’ file.”

  Dimka looked down into the p
it.

  “Conway.”

  The one who had asked about the virus scanners jumped up and grabbed the USB key. As he began to read the contents, Leroux stepped over to Dimka’s desk and bent over.

  “Is it okay if I check to make sure he does it right?” he whispered.

  “It’s fine and they expect you to. Just remember they’re professionals who do this every day, so you don’t need to micromanage. At this stage however, since you wrote it, and since this is the most important part, definitely feel free to double-check.”

  Leroux smiled, then as casually as he could manage, he rounded the platform, stepped down to the main level and approached Conway’s station. Conway already had the instructions opened in a window on one of his screens, and was following them on another with a second tech double-checking each step before they executed them.

  Conway looked up at Leroux then back at his screen.

  “Everything is smooth so far, sir.”

  Sir! It sounded so strange coming from people at least his age. He wondered if they felt weird saying it.

  “Excellent.”

  Excellent? Are you kidding me? Please don’t follow it up with “Good work” or something lame like that!

  He remained silent, watching each step being executed. Conway hit several keys, then hit a button and one of the large screens came to life showing a macroscopic depiction of the Internet, a massive number of lines, almost hub and spoke like in appearance, spread across the globe, the heaviest concentrations in North America, Europe and the Asian Pacific rim with the borders of densely connected countries like South Korea and Japan almost impossible to distinguish behind the lines indicating Internet linkages.

  Conway executed several more instructions and then another display went live with several statuses shown.

  Malware Status: Uploading.

  Number of Downloads: 0

  Number of Positives: 0

  “Final instruction uploaded, sir.”

  “Great, now we wait,” said Leroux, returning to the platform and standing at his station.

  “Why don’t you take a seat,” suggested Dimka. “This could take a while.”

  Leroux smiled at her appreciatively, and sat down. He moved the mouse and the three displays arced in front of him, recessed into the station so he could easily see over them and into the pit where the analysts were working, came to life.

  “Malware update has been successfully uploaded,” came Conway’s voice from below. It was low and he could barely hear him. He looked at his desk and noticed the headset sitting there. He put it on and Dimka slid over with her chair. She pointed at a red button on the station. “Press that to talk. Let it go when you’re done otherwise they’ll hear everything you say,” she said with a wink.

  He nodded and adjusted the headset to be comfortable, then looked at the large screen showing the status. Conway’s voice echoed the status update as it appeared.

  “Test malware update successful.”

  Leroux pressed the red button, leaning forward, forgetting for a moment that the microphone was attached to the headset and immediately in front of his mouth, no matter where he turned.

  “We should begin to see activity any moment now as logged in computers pull down the update. Depending upon the size of the infection, this could be very slow”—suddenly the Number of downloads count started to spin rapidly—“or it could be very quick.”

  Leroux had a hard time hiding the excitement as the counter spun and the screen showing Internet traffic suddenly burst into color, the white lines of earlier rapidly being replaced by a rainbow of colors, shooting out across the globe as the downloads were traced back to their infected computers.

  He realized his finger was still on the button, and decided an explanation might be in order.

  “The yellow lines indicate requests for the malware update, the green indicate that the update was successful and that the detonation code file had not been accessed on that machine, and red lines, should they appear, are machines that have accessed the file and need to be investigated.”

  He removed his finger from the button and leaned back, staring at the Number of Positives indicator stubbornly stuck at zero. He looked back at the rapidly updating map and smiled.

  It’s like I’m in War Games!

  As the download indicator flipped past ten thousand, he felt his chest slowly tightening as the Positives indicator continued to refuse to budge.

  What if this doesn’t work?

  Then another thought occurred to him.

  What if it works, but it’s too late?

  Outside Nawa-I-Barakzayi, Afghanistan

  Seven years ago

  Dylan Kane lay on the cold hard ground, his position well hidden from the insurgents below. He had been holed up in the ruins of what was once the humble home of a farmer, it now abandoned for years in the middle of almost nowhere, the family either having fled, or more likely dead. That was Afghanistan today, that was Afghanistan before we came, and that was Afghanistan for the past thousand years.

  Brutal, bloody, and completely unprepared for democracy.

  This was the Stone Age.

  But his views on his government’s orders were irrelevant. He worked for his country, he followed his orders unless he felt them illegal. And in the CIA, that was a fine line, with many of his missions illegal in the view of many.

  Today he was targeting Baseer Khan, third in command of al Qaeda and one of bin Laden’s most trusted men. Intel had put him in the area, and word on the dirt path was that his sister was getting married in the village that lay only a mile from his current position, and that wedding was today.

  Kane had been sent in advance to confirm, and two F-22 Raptors were in the air at all times since, awaiting his signal.

  Suddenly a thirty foot wide spider appeared in front of him and he shoved himself away from his weapon, reaching for his knife instinctively knowing he couldn’t make a shot. As he drew the blade his conscious mind kicked in and he began to laugh as he saw the camel spider scurry over the barrel of his M-24 Sniper’s Weapon System, it having appeared in his scope as something out of Eight Legged Freaks or Starship Troopers.

  He shook his head with a smile, put his boot to the creature lest it decide to check out his bits and pieces, and returned to his position, his racing heart calming down.

  I hate spiders.

  A three vehicle convoy was racing into the town and he took a bead on the middle vehicle, cursing at the lost opportunity to take them out before their arrival. They came to a halt in the town square and armed guards swarmed out of the lead and trailing vehicles, the front doors of the middle vehicle opening as the area was scanned. The square quickly filled with curious onlookers, the sign of guns not a reason to flee in these parts.

  This was solid Taliban ground, no matter what the brass would have the public believe. This war was unwinnable for there was no enemy territory to take. Loyalties went to the highest or most brutal bidder, and Afghanistan’s only hope of freedom from the yoke of Taliban oppression were the warlords. Restore the warlords, arm them, and let them deal with the Taliban.

  And don’t expect democracy with equal rights for all.

  Afghanistan was decades if not centuries away from that.

  Improve their economy with trade and modern communications if they wanted it, then flood them with Western culture through movies and music and the Internet, and let people see there was another way. Eventually Westernized pockets, most likely in the cities, would begin to evolve, and gradually spread. But forcing it on an unwilling, ignorant, illiterate population like was being tried?

  It was a recipe for complete and utter failure.

  The rear doors of the middle SUV were pulled open and Kane smiled as two figures stepped out, the one on the passenger side Baseer Khan himself. Kane activated his comm.

  “Castle-Keep, this is Sierra Four, come in, over.”

  “Sierra Four, this is Castle-Keep, we read you, over.”

&nb
sp; “Castle-Keep, I have eyes on primary target, relaying coordinates now, over.”

  He lased the target with his laser target designator and transmitted the GPS coordinates.

  “Sierra Four, we have the coordinates, dispatching Package Echo Two to your position now, ETA sixty seconds, advise when ready, over.”

  “Roger that, out.”

  Kane followed Baseer Khan through the scope as he shook hands, surrounded by dozens of people who greeted him like a hero. And that was part of the problem in Afghanistan. There was no TV, no radios, no Internet, no newspapers. Ninety plus percent of the population couldn’t read and didn’t have electricity. Their news was delivered by word of mouth, and they believed whoever they trusted, which were not people sent from the new central government in Kabul or foreign soldiers talking through translators.

  It was the people they had grown up with.

  Did they care about 9/11?

  They’d never heard of it, calendars meaningless.

  The Twin Towers?

  They couldn’t even fathom buildings so high, so even if they heard the story, they wouldn’t believe it.

  Thousands of innocents dead?

  That was daily life in Afghanistan. Why cry over it?

  That foreigners were here to free them from their oppressors?

  What? Like the Soviets? Throughout Afghanistan’s history foreigners had invaded their soil for various reasons, from Alexander the Great to Genghis Khan, from the British Empire to the Soviet Union. Now it was the United States and its allies. To the average Afghani there was no distinction, all they knew was the current batch of invaders weren’t locals, and had to be repelled.

  Which meant a hero’s welcome for those who tried.

  Kane radioed in the strike confirmation as he continued to lase the target. Khan made a hand motion and his guards quickly cleared a path as he approached the rather large house—by rural Afghani standards—several adults greeting him outside, then ushering him inside. The crowd in the square dissipated and Kane lased the house, the package that was about to be delivered more than capable of taking care of the mud and stone to get to the juicy al Qaeda center. Khan’s guards surrounded the house, keeping any who would approach at bay, which was fine by Kane since it would keep collateral damage to a minimum.