by Jack Mars
Park smiled. He faced Luke. It had been a long, long time.
Suddenly, Park put his hands across his stomach, left hand over the right. He bent his knees and slowly dropped to the floor. He put his hands on the ground in front of him and crossed them. In the same movement, he crossed his feet and then touched his forehead to his hands. It was the keun jeol, the so-called “big bow,” the sign of utmost respect and reverence. Park held the bow way too long.
They stood in the hallway of the NIS headquarters, this man prostrated before Luke. Luke glanced around. Little knots of people here and there watched them.
Get up, Park, he wanted to say. But didn’t.
When Park stood again, Luke turned to his team. “This is Park Jae-kyu. I don’t know if you can tell, but we used to know each other.
“Park, this is Trudy Wellington, my science and intelligence officer. This is Mark Swann, information systems. And the big man is Ed Newsam, weapons and tactics. These people are the best in the business.”
Park did a normal bow from the waist to each of them in turn. Afterwards, he looked them over. He sucked his teeth and almost smiled again.
“My secretary will take your sizes and order you guys some clothes.”
* * *
They rode an elevator deep into the bowels of the building. A hallway light flashed into the chamber as they passed each floor.
“This man is considered our most important prisoner. He has talked a lot about what he claims to believe is an impending attack, which we have no way of verifying at this time. However, his testimony confirms many things from inside the North which we have believed to be true for some time.”
“For example?” Luke said.
“He says the economy has completely collapsed. He believes it’s from sabotage, but of course we know the minimal extent of the sabotage possible. North Korea is a police state and a closed society. Neighbors spy on neighbors. Family turn in family. Strangers are watched closely by everyone. It’s almost impossible to keep our sleepers alive long enough to commit acts of sabotage. Naturally, we know it’s the UN Security Council sanctions, combined with the brittleness of the North’s command economy, that has caused the collapse.”
“What else?” Ed said.
Park went on. “A famine has begun. The villages are low on food. The elders, because they have already enjoyed long lives, are being allowed to starve to death so that the children and young parents may eat. They are protecting the future, so to speak.
“Morale is low. The will of frontline troops to fight is nearly gone. Anger among the ordinary people is high, and growing all the time. The regime itself may be on the verge of collapse. They no longer have anything to lose.”
The fast-moving elevator slowed to a stop.
“And that, my friends, is the problem.”
The door opened.
“Let’s go see our man.”
* * *
They were deep underground.
They sat in an observation room, watching the man through a one-way mirror. Large speakers were mounted just above the glass. Six people were in the observation room—the four from Luke’s team, Park, and a young woman who was simultaneous translator from Korean to English.
Through the window, the prisoner sat at a long wooden table. He wore a white smock. He didn’t appear to have any clothes on underneath it.
He had probably just eaten a meal, since there was a tray with two empty plates in front of him on the table. He took a long gulp of what appeared to be water. He was leaning back, smoking a cigarette. There was a half-empty pack and a lighter on the table near his left hand. He seemed relaxed enough, maybe because he could smoke as much as he wanted.
“What’s his name?” Trudy said.
“It doesn’t matter,” Park said, then caught himself. He was being too harsh. “When they come across from the North, we have to eye everything they say with skepticism. He may have given us his real name, he may not have. Almost everything he says is impossible to verify.”
“Why is he the most important prisoner alive?” Luke said.
Park gestured at the window. “Listen.”
Two men stood across the small room from the prisoner. They were sharp dressers, business suits, slicked back hair, expensive leather shoes. They looked more like young investment bankers than secret police.
One of the interrogators said something, too fast for Luke to understand.
“Tell me,” the young translator said. “When will the North invade the South?”
The prisoner shrugged and said something.
“Tonight, tomorrow. I don’t know. Very soon. I lost track of days in the wilderness. I don’t remember. When the Great Leader attends the Arirang Festival, an aide will whisper in his ear—the bombing has begun. It has been planned that way, and it will happen exactly that way.”
“And when the invasion comes, why won’t the Americans respond?”
“I told you a hundred times,” said the translator.
“Tell me again.”
On the other side of the window, the prisoner paused and took a long drag of his cigarette. He coughed slightly.
“We have nuclear warheads ready to launch. San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, and Portland will all be destroyed. Honolulu will be destroyed. Japan will be totally destroyed.”
“You don’t think the Americans can stop this?” the young sharpie in the suit said. “The Americans have missiles that can knock your warheads from the sky.”
The prisoner shook his head. “No. They will be unable to launch. Their communications will not function. Their network systems will not function. They will be helpless to stop it. No communications, and in many places, no electricity. Their warheads will sit useless on the launch pads.”
Luke was interested. “Ask him how this…”
Park raised a hand.
“How can this be?” the sharpie said.
The prisoner exhaled air. It was almost a laugh. Then he started speaking.
“The Americans have lied,” the young translator said. “They have a…” Now the woman hesitated. She looked at the assembled Americans. “I have trouble with this concept. He says you have a control of death, or lever of death. It is something for the communications networks. It closes down all communications, and many of the power grids.”
Park stared at the woman, evidently not pleased with her translating ability. He barked something at her in Korean.
Luke didn’t understand what Park said. Luke’s rudimentary Korean moved in slow motion. When Koreans talked among themselves, especially in anger, he could not catch the words. Inside the interrogation room, the men were asking more questions. The observers were missing the interrogation now.
The translator stared at the floor in shame. Her face turned crimson.
“The direct translation is kill switch,” she said. “I think this must be a slang term. He says the Americans have one. It is hidden, but the North Korean government hackers have located it. They can control it now.”
“A kill switch?” Luke said. He looked at Swann. In fact, both Trudy and Ed were looking at Swann as well.
Swann eyes became very wide. He raised his hands and shook his head. Then he stared at the man inside the window with something like awe.
“We need to talk about this,” he said. “Stop the interview.”
Ten minutes later, Park had found them a conference room to use. He stood with them listening to their conversation, but not speaking. They were just down the hall from the observation room. The room was oval, with a rounded ceiling. That gave Luke the sense of it being hardened against bombing. Luke could sense the weight of the building above them. He had counted twenty-eight stories on their way down from the surface.
“It’s impossible,” Swann said.
“Impossible?” Luke said. “How so?”
“It just is.”
“It’s not impossible,” Trudy said. “Egypt had one during the Arab Spring. When the protests became out
right rebellion, the government killed the internet, network communications throughout the country, and half the power grid. It happened very quickly. It can be done.”
“Trudy,” Swann said, “with all respect due, do you have any idea how vast, how complex, and how advanced the information systems are in the United States compared to Egypt? The American internet is the most intricate machine ever built. The intricacy is what makes it robust. No one entity controls it. No one entity can control it. No one entity can pull the plug on it.
“Look, there are countless nodes in the system. There are nearly an infinite number of paths information flow can follow. Take thirty percent of it out, which is a tall order in itself, and within seconds, the data will reroute itself. End users will experience this as systems being down for a minute or two, and maybe a couple of vulnerable ones being down for a few hours. The Egyptians could knock out their own communications all at once, sure. Their networks are less than one percent the size of ours.”
“So that makes it impossible?” Luke said.
Swann paused. He stared at the table in front of him. His hands rested on the table, folded lightly. Luke watched him as he almost seemed to go into a trance. His eyes looked up and to the right. Several minutes passed.
“Not impossible,” he announced at last. “Not easy, but not out of the question. It would take a lot of people working on it to develop it. I feel like something on that scale, it would be hard to keep it secret. And in addition to being able to shut down government networks, you could only build it with the compliance of at least a dozen major companies that control internet traffic.”
Luke gently shook his head at that. Keeping secrets was what the government did. It was entirely possible that at an agency with a black budget, like the CIA or the Pentagon, there could be an entire department dedicated to this sort of thing. No one outside the department might know of its existence, including the people at the agency tasked with overseeing it. Outside the agency? No one would know about it at all.
“But if they managed it, it could shut down communications?” Luke said.
Swann did a sort of head shimmy, his head bouncing side to side at the top of his long neck. “If you could block network traffic, the rest is less complicated. Compared to that, cell phone systems are easy to take down. Power grids communicate internally, and with outside grids and large-scale users, by way of computer networks. So take out the information flow, and sure… you could theoretically take out cell communications, electricity systems, even weapons systems. You could lose communication with missile sites. Air traffic control would go haywire.”
“Everything would go down?” Ed said.
Swann raised a finger. “No. You’ll never take everything out. Land-line telephones would likely still work. You might have satellite communications using battery-operated, hand-held technology.”
“A satellite phone?”
Swann nodded. “Possible. As long as the satellites were still up and functioning, and there’s no reason they shouldn’t be. Once they’re in the sky, many of them are not dependent on Earth-based systems to maintain their orbits.”
“What else?” Luke said.
Swann shrugged. “Hard to say. I mean, it’s never been done before, so this is all speculation.”
“Okay,” Luke said. “I guess the thing to do is find out if the kill switch really exists, and if so, who has it, and how secure it is. We should probably call the President and tell her where we are.”
Trudy looked stricken at the thought of calling the President. It would mean telling her where they were. Which meant giving Trudy up to be arrested again.
“Luke?” she said.
He raised a hand. “Trudy, this has to be done. I promise to protect you the best I can, okay? You just have to trust me.”
Luke glanced at Swann again. “North Korean hackers? Penetrating American computer networks? Are these the cyber-terrorists?”
Swann shrugged. “I never would have guessed that. I would still bet that the Chinese are feeding them the code, or providing them with the hackers. When I picture North Korean information systems, I think of pneumatic tubes.”
Luke and Swann stared at each other. Luke made no move to pick up the telephone. Calling the United States seemed like a dangerous move. By now, they must have figured out that he, Ed, and Swann were the ones who busted Trudy out of jail. Susan and her people couldn’t be too happy about that. Luke had masterminded the breakout, thinking that the end game was they would pick up a piece of valuable intel, then trade it for Trudy’s freedom.
But what was he really offering Susan? A North Korean defector who thought the world was about to end. A man who believed that North Korean hackers would take down not only American missile defense systems, but the entire internet. Luke could almost buy that the North Korean hackers opened a simple dam, or disrupted a subway system. But wipe out whole communications networks?
Come on.
“You probably want to hurry,” Park said. They were the first words he had said in a while.
“Why’s that?” Luke said.
“The prisoner says the attack will start when Kim Song-Il attends the Arirang Festival. Our intelligence reports suggest that’s going to happen tonight.”
CHAPTER THIRTY TWO
10:47 p.m.
The Atlantic Ocean, near the coast of Maryland
At night, the ocean changed.
The diver was among the best his country had ever trained. He had been below the sea hundreds of times. And night dives were his favorite.
He worked with a team of three others. Twenty minutes before, they had dropped into a vast sea of bioluminescence, a billion white and blue shining lights, sketching the line between black water and black sky. The boat they dropped from was disguised as a fishing trawler. Its rusty hull hid the fact that it was a scientific vessel, with sensitive detection equipment trained on the bottom of the ocean.
The four men used their weight belts to quickly sink to the bottom—this close to the shore, the water was only about forty feet deep. They waited until they were nearly halfway down before turning on their lamps. Then the pitch darkness was lit up, casting an eerie glow. A bull shark passed like a white ghost.
For the man, there was no sound but his own breathing, loud in his ears.
The man was proud of what he was about to do. He felt close to these men with him—they had trained as a unit for more than a year. And he felt close, in a different way, to the men in the other dive teams. They were brothers, united by patriotism and a feeling of pride in belonging to such an elite group. Ten groups of four—forty soldiers unequaled in the world.
Even so, there was also a melancholy feeling, knowing that a war was about to start, one his country could not win. He was not supposed to believe that, but he did. His people likely faced annihilation in the coming days, and he would never make it back in time to die with them.
He reached the soft sandy floor of the ocean. His flippers touched bottom, scaring an octopus. The octopus swam away, spraying a jet of black ink that the man lit up with his lamp. He smiled. How he would like to follow the octopus, but there was no time.
Now, all four men scanned the sea floor, looking for what they knew must be right here. They were at exactly the right coordinates. It took five minutes or longer, but eventually he found what he was looking for. He reached down with a gloved hand and swept sand away. Of course. Here it was. It was like a snake, laying in a few inches of sand, just beneath the surface. He pulled it up. It was a wire.
He almost laughed. This wire was no wider than a fat sausage. Inside of it were terabytes of data, the internet, rushing past, between the United States and Europe. There would be more just like this one. The wires lay on the sea floor, very much in the same place people had been laying electricity and telephone cables since the 1850s. Unprotected, unsecured, simply lying here.
Near him, one of his team had discovered another wire. There were several here, at a choke point ne
ar where they entered the United States, and before they spread out to cross the ocean toward different countries far away.
The man pulled a knife from his diving sheath. The knife itself had been invented for the role it was about to play. It was designed to cut easily through the many layers protecting the sensitive information passing through. There was the outer covering of rubberized plastic. There were several layers of insulation and steel mesh. There was a soft buffer to keep the steel away from the cables, and finally, deep in the heart of the sausage, were the internet cables themselves.
The sharp, serrated knife glimmered in the light of his headlamp.
With one deft movement, he cut deep into the wire. He was halfway in before he even tried to exert any force. He grunted, unleashing a storm of bubbles around him. He finished the job with the sawing motion of a man cutting a log.
He let the two halves drop to the sea bed, as above him, vast swaths of international communications suddenly went dead.
CHAPTER THIRTY THREE
11:15 p.m.
The Situation Room, United States Naval Observatory – Washington, DC
Susan was ready to adjourn the meeting.
Really, she was ready for bed. It had been a long day, topping off a whole series of exhausting and wrenching days. There seemed to be no end to it on the horizon. She looked around the Situation Room. The faces of her staff were desultory, to say the least. Tired, tired people, reaching a place where they were no longer capable of making smart decisions.
That was when the first reports came in.
Kurt Kimball took a telephone call at the head of the room. An aide brought him the phone, and Kurt listened with a quizzical look on his face. After a short while, he hung up. He faced Susan across the table.
“That looked like good news,” Susan said, sarcastically.
