by Jack Mars
Kurt stared at her in a way she had never seen before. Kurt Kimball was a former elite college basketball player, a man who was built for contention and competition, a man who had been the Rock of Gibraltar during her entire early tenure as President. But now he looked utterly spent. He looked shell-shocked, the victim of a natural disaster.
“The internet and telephone connections to Europe have just gone dead.”
“Where?” General Walters said. “From this building?”
Kurt shook his head. “No. From everywhere.”
“What does everywhere mean?” Haley Lawrence said. Haley, just one day into the job, was the freshest face in the room.
Kurt shrugged, a jerky motion that suggested someone with Tourette Syndrome, rather than simple frustration. “Everywhere. The entire Eastern seaboard of the United States and Canada seems to have lost contact with all of Europe. Our people are in touch with the telecommunications companies. There are apparently work-arounds that will take some time to implement, rerouting traffic and calls through South America.”
“What about the West Coast?”
“The West Coast is still functioning. But their contact with Europe is routed through Asia. The guess is that the undersea internet and phone wires on the Atlantic side have been cut. The wires tend to be more spread out the further out in the ocean you get. But closer to shore, there are apparently choke points that could potentially be hit by divers.”
“How many divers would it take?” Haley Lawrence said.
Susan raised her hand. “Let’s not worry about that for the minute. I’m sure there will be data available soon enough. Right now, let’s make sure that any choke points like that on the Pacific side are being protected.”
“Good point,” Kurt said.
Suddenly Kat Lopez was at Susan’s ear. She spoke very quietly.
“Susan, a call just came in. I think you probably want to take it.”
Susan looked up at her Chief-of-Staff. “Who is it?”
“It’s Luke Stone. Calling from Korea.”
* * *
“Luke, what are you doing?”
Susan sat alone in her upstairs study. Pierre had come in a moment ago and kissed her good night. The night of their great victory on the domestic front was slipping away on the international front. She longed to just go to bed and lie with him.
The room was dim—yellow light came from one solitary desk lamp. Things were out of control, but she felt like she could fall asleep any second. Her head felt like it was stuffed with cotton. Her eyes wanted to close.
“Susan, I’m in South Korea, with my old team from the SRT.”
“Yes, I heard.”
“I broke Trudy Wellington out of jail.”
Was this the confession hour? “I figured as much. I wish you wouldn’t do things like that, Luke.”
“I had no choice, Susan. Trudy is the best, and you wouldn’t give her to me, so I had to take her.”
Susan rubbed her eyes. “Okay. Is that what you’re calling halfway around the world to tell me? That you committed multiple felonies while aiding and abetting the escape of a woman who is both a mass murderer and a traitor?”
“I want you to pardon her.”
“Luke, I’m sure you know that’s impossible. Please don’t waste my time. We are teetering on the verge of war with China. They just seized one of our submarines in the South China Sea. I don’t have a lot of extra energy for games right now. I was hoping you would participate in this situation; instead, you broke your old girlfriend out of jail and fled the country.”
Susan sighed heavily. Maybe she was going too far, but she was beginning to wonder why she had even taken this call. Luke Stone had been an exceptional agent once upon a time, maybe the best there was, but he had drifted off into his own world. He had become a distraction at best, and at worst, a… what?
A blind alley. Yesterday, he thought a doomsday cult was behind the attacks. Then he engineered a prison break. Now he believed it was the North Koreans. Why couldn’t he just accept what was plain as day to everyone else? It was China. After decades of gradually growing in power and prominence, the Chinese were ready to directly challenge the United States. War was coming.
There was a long pause over the line.
“We can talk about Trudy later,” Stone said. “Please listen to me. I have evidence that the cyber attacks were not carried out by the Chinese, but by the North Koreans.”
“Luke, please.”
“There’s an internet kill switch,” Stone said. “It can take out American computer networks, telecommunication networks, even power grids. Someone… maybe the CIA, maybe the NSA, maybe the Pentagon, developed it. It was probably built by a skunk works—a totally compartmentalized group, secret, cut off from everything, paid for from a black budget that no one ever sees. You don’t know about it, Congress doesn’t know about it, it’s very likely the bigwigs inside the agency where it was created don’t even know about it.”
“Luke, this is crazy talk,” Susan said. “Why would someone do that?”
“Control,” Stone said. “If there were an insurrection, you could just shut down communications nationwide. Or perhaps you could hold the country hostage yourself.”
Now Susan was beginning to wonder about his sanity. “Luke, don’t make me regret calling you in on this case. Listen, you interrogated Li Quiangguo. You found the list of targets. That was all very helpful, but this is going too far.”
“Susan. The North Koreans have found the kill switch. They’ve taken control of it. Their plan is to cut off communications. They’re going to take down our missile response, then launch simultaneous attacks. Nuclear attacks on our West Coast and Japan, and a conventional attack on South Korea, followed by an invasion. They’re desperate. The country is in a famine. They have nothing more to lose.”
Susan let the words wash over her. It was impossible.
“We need to coordinate with China,” Luke said. “The last thing either country wants is…”
The line went dead.
For a moment, Susan thought she had drifted off and come back during a pause in Stone’s little soliloquy. She stared at the phone. “Stone?”
Nothing. Just blank air.
So what? It didn’t mean anything. It was a call from 12,000 miles away, and it got cut off. That wasn’t unusual. These things happened. She returned the phone receiver to its cradle.
She sat in the almost dark room for a long moment. She gazed into the shadows. Everything was vague, ethereal. It was time for bed.
The phone rang again. She picked it up before the second ring.
“Stone?”
“Susan, it’s Kurt Kimball. Now the phone and the internet lines between here and Asia are down. It’s clear that we’re under attack again.”
“Okay,” Susan said. “I’ll be down in five minutes.”
CHAPTER THIRTY FOUR
Timeless (1:45 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time, August 18)
Cyberspace
The bot was not alive. It did not think.
It had no history. It did not know who developed it, and it did not know how it came to be released. It did not know that for more than two years, it had been sitting dormant and sequestered on a secure network server in the sub-basement of a drab office building in suburban Virginia. It did not know the cost involved in creating itself—more than twenty million dollars. It did not know the building where it was housed was owned by the CIA, or that it was mostly empty now, and no one except low-paid security guards ever entered the place anymore.
The bot did not think of itself as bad or good. It did not wonder about the task it was performing—it simply did the task. The bot was an automated network process, nothing more than a small software program released into a network of computers. Its job was to crawl the network, find a way out, and move on to a new network. Once it entered a new network, or a new device, its job changed. It new job was to send a message back to its server.
The messag
e: Here I am.
The bot would then receive a message in return.
Shut down that system.
The bot replicated itself, and doubled its own numbers, once every second.
One second after its release, there were two bots in existence.
Ten seconds after its release, there were more than a thousand.
Thirty seconds later, there were more than a billion.
And counting.
Within two minutes, the number of bots was beyond the comprehension of most people on Earth. A handful of scientists and mathematicians could understand the number, but the vast majority of the human race, if confronted by it, would simply stare at it, turn away in confusion and irritation, or say, “Infinity.”
And still counting.
The bots swarmed through networks like red ants racing along tree limbs, replicating out of control. System after system, network after network, device after device after device, were shut down by the ever-growing swarm of bots.
At a hospital less than a mile from the server where the bots originated, a floor nurse was entering patient record updates on the computer at the nursing station. She took a sip of coffee—it had gone lukewarm—and when she looked back at her screen, it was frozen. A few seconds later, she heard a familiar cry:
“Code Blue… Code Blue…” However, this time the emergency call was different. Every single life support machine in the twenty-person Intensive Care Unit had suddenly shut itself down.
Half a mile further on, a cell phone tower was swarmed by bots. It shut down within seconds, dropping more than seven hundred late-night calls as it did so.
Two miles down the road, a cable television transmitting station shut itself down. In an instant, more than a quarter million TV sets went dark.
Onward the bots went, network to network, swarming everything, shutting down everything.
And doubling in number every second.
CHAPTER THIRTY FIVE
3:16 p.m. Korea Time, August 18 (2:16 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time, August 18)
Headquarters of the National Intelligence Service – Seoul, South Korea
“Okay, kids, I’m up for grabs,” Luke said. “What do we do?”
He had called Susan three more times. Then he tried his former house in the Virginia suburbs, hoping to reach the answering machine. Then he tried Ed Newsam’s house, and Swann’s fancy apartment.
Nothing. No calls were going through to the United States.
They sat in the small conference room—Luke, Ed, Swann, Trudy, and Park Jae-kyu. Swann and Trudy were in front of laptops.
“It’s started,” he said.
“I think we get that,” Luke said.
Swann shook his head. “I don’t mean just the telephones. Systems are crashing. It’s all over the intelligence chat rooms. The shutdown started on the East Coast, near Washington, DC, but it’s spreading rapidly throughout the country. It’s moving through network connections. It seems random because it’s popping up everywhere, but it’s probably just following direct lines through network infrastructure. Systems administrators who experienced it are saying it’s a denial-of-service attack, trillions of self-replicating bots invading networks and clogging them in seconds.”
“How long before it shuts everything down?”
Swann shrugged. “It’ll probably have most systems in the country down in a few minutes. There could be isolated networks still functioning twenty-four hours from now.”
“Missile defense systems?” Luke said.
“I don’t know.”
Trudy spoke up. “It just took down a vulnerable electric grid. Most of northern Maine and New Hampshire, plus southern parts of the Canadian Maritimes and Quebec are now without power.”
“Ugh,” Swann said. “When the larger grids start to go…”
Luke looked at Park. Park was on the telephone, speaking rapidly in Korean. After a moment, he hung up. He was calm.
“Communications are shutting down across the United States. We’ve lost contact with our embassies in Washington, DC, and New York. Our government has lost contact with Korean companies operating inside the United States. Everything is consistent with what the defector tells us. We can only assume that he has good intelligence, and the attack is coming. Kim Song-Il will give the launch order during the climax of the Arirang Festival.”
A realization had been growing in Luke’s mind for sometime.
“It was never the Chinese,” he said.
Park shook his head. “No.”
Luke looked at Trudy. She shook her head as well.
“There is no way the Chinese would push North Korea into a nuclear war. It would be a disaster for the entire region, and the world. No logical actor wants that, and the Chinese, while not always reasonable, are always logical. My guess is the North Koreans have kept this thing a secret from the beginning. I’ll bet the Chinese know nothing about it. We were led astray all this time. The North Koreans led the world astray. And they setup the Chinese. The one nation on earth that feeds them, that protects them.”
“Isn’t it always that way?” Park said.
Luke and Park stared at one another.
“Kim is a madman,” Luke said.
Park nodded. “The Kim family have always been madmen. Since you and I were young soldiers, and before. I’ve lived in the shadow of these men my entire life.”
In his mind, Luke began to run down options. As invasion of the North? There were tens of thousands of American troops here, but it would be the next thing to impossible to get them across the DMZ. By the time they did, Kim would have given the order. Surgical airstrikes? Not a chance. There were too many missile silos, many were hidden, and deep underground.
Pre-emptive nuclear attack?
The nightmare option. No one, in good faith, could take that path.
Ed Newsam spoke for the first time in a long while. He was leaning back in his chair at the far end of the table from the rest of the group. His workboot-clad feet were on the table. He didn’t have a laptop or a tablet in front of him. He wasn’t trying to make telephone calls or research possible solutions. It wasn’t his style.
“What if Kim never gives the order?” he asked.
“What if he never gives…” Park began, confused.
Ed directed his attention to Luke. “You’ve been running around, calling people, trying to sleuth this thing. You also seem to be hoping that somebody—the President, maybe—is going to take this off your plate.”
Ed shook his head slowly.
“Ain’t gonna happen. Anyway, you don’t need to get it off your plate. You just need to focus on eating it. If all this intelligence is correct, the man you want to see is just across the border from here. Are they gonna launch those missiles if the fearless leader has a gun pressed to his head? Will he give the order if he knows that he dies in the next second? I don’t think so.”
Luke stopped. It was a moment of clarity like no other. What Ed was suggesting was so audacious that no one, least of all the North Koreans, would ever expect it.
Park flushed, seeming outraged by such an audacious idea, looking at Ed as if a madman had snuck into his house.
“It’s impossible,” Park said. “Kim is surrounded by bodyguards at all times. Security will be tight at the event. The North is a police state. There is very little freedom of movement. The crowds at these events are vetted beforehand. Only the Communist Party faithful…”
Luke stopped listening as Park recounted all the reasons why it couldn’t be done. He found himself in a silent place, as a picture began to form in his mind. He could see it, just how it would go. No one had ever done it before. It would take a miracle to pull it off.
And that’s why it would work.
“Trudy.” He turned to look at her. Her eyes were wide behind her big red glasses. She looked afraid. He would need to push her past that.
“Luke?” she said, concern in her voice. “It’s crazy. Do you realize what you’re thinking about? You
can’t infiltrate North Korea. If you go, there’s no way you will ever come back.”
“It’s suicide,” Swann added.
Luke paused. Everyone in the room seemed to be staring at him. Then they stared at each other. Then they turned back to him.
Luke watched as the realization sunk in with all of them. It was as audacious a plan as had ever been conceived. It was outrageous. You don’t just go into North Korea and take its leader hostage.
Even so, they would do it.
They had to do it. America was going to be hit by nukes in a few hours, and its defenses were down.
There was no other way.
Luke watched Ed, Ed watched Luke.
Finally, Ed smiled when he saw Luke had come to a decision.
He laughed. “Aw, man. Here we go.”
“I need a history and description of this festival,” Luke said to Trudy. “I need to know everything about the specific event Kim is attending. I need whatever intel is available on the bodyguards he keeps around him. Size, training, age, skills, years of service. I need to know how he travels—how many vehicles, what kind… Are they armored? Are there decoy vehicles? Are there body doubles?”
She shook her head. “I don’t believe this.”
“Trudy, I’m going. With or without your help. Your help makes it a lot more likely that I come back. Okay?”
She couldn’t raise her eyes to look at him. “Okay, Luke.”
“You are madmen!” Park said, increasingly outraged.
“Swann,” Luke said, ignoring him.
“Yeah, Luke?”
He glanced at Swann. Swann was calm. That was good. Swann was able to separate himself from these situations. He had no reason to be afraid. It wasn’t like he was going to drop into North Korea.
“I need satellite imagery of the stadium I’ll be going to. I need a map of the stadium, including basements and sub-basements. I need a layout of the electrical system if possible. I also want to see old clips of Kim’s motorcades in motion. I want to see how they move, how they operate, especially when they’re in transition. Arrival, departure, moving him in and out of venues. I want vulnerabilities. I want holes in their thinking. Don’t assume they follow Secret Service–style protocols. Look for mistakes that are badly out of whack with what we do.”
