Brain Jack

by Brian Falkner

  Sam watched as the swap file dissolved, crumbling in on itself as the depth charge imploded in its midst.

  Flashing red lights appeared immediately on his TCP scopes.

  “I got predators!” he shouted.

  “Keep them off me!” Dodge yelled back. “I’ve got corruptions everywhere; I gotta stay on this.”

  The hackers were homing in on the source of the depth charge: Dodge. Predator programs, designed to trace Dodge’s signal back to its source and attack it there. Sam keyed his weapons systems, readying a freeze-bot. Whatever server the predator was on, the bot would freeze the central processor, running the CPU around in circles until it was barely alive. Once the server was frozen, he could scan the drive and find and analyze the predator, which would be icebound, unable to shape-shift and easy to detect. Once he had its genetic structure—its central code—he would feed that into the proximity detectors of his sidewinders.

  The lights on his scope flashed brilliant red as one of the predators streaked across the screen, homing in on Dodge’s code trail.

  “Ouch!” Dodge cried. “Something just bit me. Switching nodes now.”

  “Sorry, Dodge,” Sam said. “Had to let him bite to see where he was coming from.”

  He hurled the freeze-bot at the predator, a nasty, writhing malicious bit of code that had burrowed into an e-mail server in Kentucky. He isolated the code quickly and scanned it in, analyzing it line by line himself, not just relying on the automated code scanners built into his system.

  “Hurry it up, Sam,” Dodge said. “I’m getting more nibbles here.”

  “Almost got it,” Sam said, feeding the digital DNA of the creature into his master weapons control. “Okay, code’s in the wire, fellas. Lock and load—let’s blast these guys out of the sky.”

  “Got it,” Gummi and Kiwi both said as they loaded their warheads with the information.

  “I got crawlers all over the place,” Vienna said. “I’m going to need a big cold can of whoop-ass down here.”

  Sam focused on the red predator alerts on his scope, tracing the trail through the complex nodes of the Internet, narrowing down the location of the intruders.

  The one he was chasing disappeared, flitting out through an open port before he could hit it.

  “Hold still, you mongrel,” he said to himself as he fired a sidewinder through the same port. There was a flash on his scope as he did so. “Got you!”

  “Good work, Sam,” said Dodge. “But there’s plenty more where that came from.”

  The sidewinder was one of the most basic of weapons but was highly effective.

  Its proximity fuse meant that if it even got close to a predator, it would explode, simply wiping all the data off the RAM sector where the predator code was. It could cause havoc for the owner of that computer, but that’s what backups were for, right?

  Sam fired off a few more sidewinders in the general direction of the other predators, hoping he might get lucky. The missiles were coded for the DNA of the predator and would just circle around in an ever-increasing spiral, trying to home in on the signature. If they didn’t find it, they would eventually self-destruct.

  “Bull’s-eye!” Gummi Bear’s voice came into his ear, and one of the red dots disappeared from his scope. Sam hammered a stream of sidewinders into the offices of a small ISP in New York and was rewarded with a series of flashes as the missiles took out their targets.

  “I got the source!” Kiwi shouted. “It’s right here in the States. Chicago. Server cluster in a warehouse registered to a shipping company. Looks like it was purpose-built for the attack.”

  “Main router is clear,” Dodge said. “And inoculated. How’s the rest of the network?”

  “Getting there,” Vienna said.

  Zombie added, “Is the air gap holding?”

  “Don’t know,” Dodge said. “Somebody get on a landline to the site. Check with their techs to see if there’s anything suspicious in the wagon circle.”

  “You should see this place,” Kiwi said. “It’s swarming like a wasps’ nest.”

  Sam saw it too. He unleashed a string of sidewinders into the heart of the cluster, but even as he did so, his scope exploded into a fireworks display of colored sparks.

  “Oh, crap!” he said.

  “What’s going on, Sam?” Dodge asked.

  “It’s like a zoo down here,” Sam said. “And I think we just fell into the snake pit. There’s got to be a million of them.”

  “Stay calm,” Vienna said. “Scan them, read them, shut them down. They’ll come in waves, but there can’t be that many different kinds.”

  “There are too many,” Gummi Bear yelled. “We can’t hold them!”

  “You got the address of the warehouse?” Dodge asked.

  “I got it,” Kiwi shouted.

  “Take out their power, now. Get into the nearest substation and kill their power lines. Take out the whole block if you have to. Vienna, notify Chicago PD and get the location to Tactical.”

  Sam slashed his way into the storm of predators. There were all types: vipers, rabid dogs, shooters, blockers, vampires, and other kinds he had never seen before.

  One by one, he said to himself. Take them one by one.

  “Power’s out,” Kiwi yelled. “But they’re still streaming! They must be on a UPS.”

  “Let me have a go at it,” Sam called.

  “Okay, Sam, it’s yours.”

  He scanned the warehouse with a heat sensor, ignoring the haze of marauders buzzing through the networks around him. The UPS showed up clearly, and he ran its signature through a pattern-matching program, comparing it to an equipment database.

  “It’s an HVC9001,” Sam said. “It’s got Power Line Networking. I can take this baby out. Kiwi, I need the power back on for a moment. Can you do it?”

  “Just say when.”

  “Hang on … hang on … Okay, now! Count to three, then shut it off.”

  The 9001 had built-in Power Line Networking, enabling it to communicate directly through the power cables. Sam grabbed the latest firmware updates from the HVC download site and modified the code just slightly before updating the firmware on the motherboard.

  “Give it ten seconds, then pump it with all the juice you can. I took out the voltage limiter.”

  Dodge breathed, “It’ll go sky-high!”

  “Gonna give them a mother of a power spike,” Kiwi called out. “In three, two, one—take that, you code suckers!”

  The red-hot core at the center of the storm on Sam’s scope blinked once and disappeared. He could just imagine what the overloaded spike of electricity had done to the UPS system without a voltage limiter in place to protect it. At the very least, it would have melted down. With luck there might have been an explosion.

  The swarms of predators still circled, but aimlessly, without intelligence behind them to direct them.

  “Good work, team,” Dodge said. “Let’s clean this up. I want those predators classified, neutralized, and stuck on a bulletin board in the lunchroom before those filthy geezers can pick themselves up off the floor and try again.”

  Sam grinned. He had done well. He knew that. New kid on the block and he had—

  A movement caught his eye, and he half turned, just in time to see a black command window appear and disappear on his left-side screen.

  “Dodge,” he said in a voice that was not as steady as it should have been.

  “What is it, Sam?”

  “I think I just got infiltrated.”

  “Not possible. Not in here.”

  “But—”

  Sam was cut off by a shout from the other side of the room.

  “I got a blue screen of death over here. What’s going on?”

  “Crap! Me too,” Vienna said. “I just got wiped.”

  Sam looked around and saw Jaggard sprinting across the room toward them.

  “Shut them down!” he shouted. “Shut them down now!”

  20 | VICTORIA

&nbs
p; Victoria Dean looked again at her radar screen and swore under her breath. There were too many planes and too little time. The computers normally took care of most of the work, but today all their computers were off-line and her head hurt.

  “Get them down,” Taylor, her shift supervisor, said again from behind her shoulder. “Every one of them. I want those birds sitting on the ground until we regain control of our own system.”

  Taylor, a small gray man in a dark gray suit, wasn’t talking to her directly. He was addressing the room. But he was right by her shoulder, which made her feel as though she was the only one not doing her best to achieve the impossible.

  They had 117 planes either on approach or inbound when the computers went haywire. She was responsible for eight of those planes. Over eleven hundred souls.

  There had been several moments of panic as some of the planes had obeyed nonsensical messages on their onboard computer systems, fed from the ground, but most pilots had the sense to check with their flight controller first and did not deviate.

  The challenge now was to get those planes on the ground using old-fashioned voice instruction. They trained for that, sure, but to actually use it was a whole new ball game.

  She pressed the foot switch to activate her radio.

  “Singapore SQ12 Airbus inbound, I have you cleared for final approach on runway two-five right; please confirm visual. Over,” she said.

  The voice came back in her ear with barely a trace of static and a slight Malaysian accent. “SQ12 on visual approach for runway two-five right. I have a U.S. Airlines Boeing 777 just clearing two-five right for the taxiway. Over.”

  “Roger that. The triple seven will be clear before you land. Over.”

  “Roger, and thanks for your help, LAX Control. We have a full load. Over.”

  “Welcome to LA, SQ12,” Victoria signed off.

  “LAX Control, this is Southwest 3567 from Albany, New York. Over.”

  Victoria glanced at her charts and her progress strips.

  “Southwest 3567, continue your holding pattern. Expect an approach for two-five left, but we got a bunch of internationals waiting, and they’re lower on fuel. Over.”

  “LAX Control, this is Southwest 3567. Our UAS just got triggered. Please confirm the reason for this. Over.”

  Victoria involuntarily looked out of the windows, scanning the sky for the plane.

  “Please repeat your last, Southwest 3567. Over,” she said with a sudden rasp in her voice.

  “Southwest 3567 confirming activation of in-flight UAS. We have no reason to believe there are any unfriendlies on board. Please advise if you are aware of a situation. Over.”

  “Damn,” she said. “Taylor!”

  The UAS, or Uninterruptible Autopilot System, was a federal requirement in all commercial passenger jets that flew over American soil. Developed after the 9/11 attacks, it allowed ground-based flight controllers to assume control of an aircraft, flying and landing the plane using the autopilot and auto-landing system. Once activated, there was no way of retaking control from within the plane.

  Taylor was at her right shoulder in a second.

  “What have you got, Dean?”

  “UAS on Southwest 3567 just got activated. A Boeing 787. Did we do that?”

  “Not on my instruction.” He spoke rapidly into a handheld radio. “Are we activating UASs on any of the planes, Simon?”

  The voice sounded thin and tinny through the small speaker in the handheld. “Ah, that’s a negative, Taylor. We have been instructed to avoid all computerized systems until further notice.”

  “Where are they?” Taylor asked, picking up a pair of binoculars off the desk.

  “Southwest 3567, please confirm your course and altitude. Over,” Victoria said.

  The reply came immediately, and the captain’s voice was calm, even curious, rather than worried. “This is Southwest 3567. We are currently passing flight level three-two-zero and heading three-zero-zero. Where are you taking us, Control? We don’t have the fuel for a long flight. Over.”

  “They’re heading for Santa Barbara, maybe Lompoc Airport,” Victoria said.

  “Lompoc is a single-runway commuter airfield. They can’t handle a 787,” Taylor said.

  “Well, after that,” Victoria said, “it’s straight out to sea.”

  “What the hell is going on?” Taylor asked.

  “We got bogeys in the wire,” Dodge shouted. “Inside the building!”

  “Shut it down,” Jaggard said calmly. “They’re all over us.”

  “We were the target,” Vienna yelled. “Everything else was just a diversion. They were going after us all along. How the hell did they get through our firewalls?”

  “Isolate the building,” Jaggard said. “Shut it down and sterilize it. Bring it back up when we’re clear.”

  “I’m still okay,” Dodge said. “I’m staying up, see if I can battle it out.”

  “I’m with you,” Sam said. “I got infiltrated, but I saw it as it happened and blocked the intrusion before they could get a foothold.”

  “Don’t risk it,” Jaggard said. “Shut everything down, isolate the building, and we’ll disinfect—” His cell phone rang, an urgent pip, pip, pip. He grabbed at it and listened intently. When he hung up, his face seemed a shade or two whiter than before.

  “They’re after the planes,” he said. “Air traffic control in Los Angeles has just lost its flight-control systems.”

  “How did they get in there?” Sam asked.

  “Through here,” Dodge said quietly. “Once they busted us wide open, they got access to all areas. Wherever we can go, they can go.”

  Jaggard swore violently behind them.

  “We can’t shut down now,” Dodge said with uncharacteristic vehemence. “By the time we get back up, this country will be a scrap heap.”

  Sam concentrated on his screens. Oily black fingers dripping with poison were sliding through the network around him. He built a protective screen surrounding his and Dodge’s computers, a wall of code, and lobbed fragmentation grenades over it at the intruders whenever they impinged, scrambling the data on the disk sectors they were occupying. So far it was holding.

  “I want to know how they got in,” Jaggard was shouting. “Who’s still up?”

  “I’m on it,” Socks called out from across the room. “Zombie is keeping me together, just.”

  “Get into that firewall,” Jaggard ordered. “Find out how they breached it.”

  “Shoot! Blue screen of death.” Bashful’s voice sounded to Sam’s left. “I’m gone. Sorry, guys.”

  “Dodge, you gotta find out what they’re using,” Jaggard said. “I want its DNA and I want it now.”

  “I’m on it,” Dodge said. “Shut up and let me do it.”

  “There’s a gaping big tunnel under the firewall,” Socks shouted. “That’s how they got in.”

  “How the hell did they get a tunnel through our firewall?” Jaggard asked. “That’s supposed to be invincible!”

  “It’s in the firmware,” Socks called back. “Looks like an exploit.”

  “Can’t be an exploit!” Jaggard said. “Must be a bug.”

  “Nope, it’s a trapdoor,” Socks said. “It’s deliberate, not bad coding.”

  A trapdoor in the firewall, Sam thought as he hurled a frag grenade at a murky pool of the intruder’s code. How could they get a trapdoor in the firmware for the firewall?

  “When was the last firmware upgrade?” Dodge asked, his eyes intent on the screen.

  “Five days ago,” Jaggard answered, then said, “Damn! It must be an inside job.”

  He punched some numbers on his cell phone and started barking commands.

  “Still on the same course?” Taylor asked behind Victoria.

  “I’ll find out,” she said, but the radio preempted her.

  “LAX Control, this is Southwest 3567, advising of a course change. Turning right to nor’east six-zero.”

  “They’re heading back inl
and,” Taylor said. His face reflected in the inactive radar screen in front of her was grave. “Where are they going?”

  Victoria plotted the course change on the chart with a pencil and a plastic ruler.

  “If they stay on this course …”

  “Yes?”

  “San Jose,” she said.

  Those with fried workstations gathered around behind Dodge and Sam, watching their battle against the intruder code. The group was getting bigger. Socks was trying to revert the firmware on the firewall, but the intruders had taken control of that too. He was trying to hack back into it, so far without success.

  “They want us out of the picture so they can use our access to rip through the heart of this country,” Jaggard said behind them. “We’re looking at a potential China Syndrome, guys, and we need some answers.”

  “China Syndrome” was a term that had originally come from the nuclear industry and referred to a catastrophic meltdown, supposedly a meltdown that would go all the way to China.

  A meltdown of the country’s computer and data infrastructure was too frightening to contemplate.

  “Okay, what do we know?” Jaggard asked. “They launched a diversionary attack on a series of nuclear plants, and while we were busy with that, they opened a trapdoor in our firewall and snuck in. They’re in the system and they’ve got control, but as long as we can keep them busy here, we can limit the damage they can do outside.”

  “I don’t know how much longer we can hold them,” Dodge said through gritted teeth. “Every time I get my hands around them, they just disappear and I’m left with a handful of dust.”

  “They’re recoding on the fly,” Sam said.

  “Not possible,” Dodge said. “Nobody is that fast!”

  “Tell them that,” Sam said flatly.

  Jaggard said, “I want Cheyenne Mountain powered up now, but do not—repeat, do not—bring it online until we can confirm that the firewall there is secure. And get hold of air transport—I want all the jets fueled and sitting on the runway now. Team, we’re going to move out to the backup control center at Cheyenne. We’ll resume the fight from there. Dodge and Socks, you and your wingmen are going to keep them busy here. Cover the retreat. Okay, move it, people.”