The Autumn War

by Ani Fox

  Why? To give it all away of course. Which makes no sense when one considers how many enemy hands into which much of the gear has fallen. Except that the GPS nodes also collect data. Sensors suites, passive encryption capture, radio signals, Geiger counter readings, photos and such. All part of the deal. Anyone who opens a vault pays me whether they know it or not. Because my villages in bags collect unparalleled data on a part of the Web often least observed and understood. Out there in the sky sit thirty-six interconnected satellites ostensibly used for black banking and secure data transmission for certain parties who broker the ugliest things imaginable. I owned a piece of each satellite and have a very scary little data feed stuck within the guts of these space fortresses. Even better, as the dark and deadly hack into other people’s systems, they piggyback the passive software I’ve Trojaned into them.

  Here’s a strange fact. The world’s best crackers from government encrypters to mercenary cyberterrorists all share a lovely blind side: they assume that all malicious code takes action. Almost every known cyber protocol detects intrusions and attacks, even passive data theft like mine, using a very simple tool. They essentially track movement. If it moves, kill it because the native code stands still. It’s a gross oversimplification, but apt enough for explanation. New data, changes in protocols or directory names, extra phone calls, extra traffic across the feed, something new different or unaccounted for becomes the prime suspect to hunt down and counteract. They all think this way, fight this way.

  From viruses to denial of service to complex Trojan within a Trojan kinds of attack protocols, it’s all activity based. My hardware simply fits within and delivers a duplicate signal of the decoded data to a depository within the dark web. Access to the site does not exist. You can only get it onsite within one of eight existing data centers using secure terminals. Bunkers that talk only to one another and receive massive amounts of data 24/7/365. From the moment the satellites went online, my signal has been part of the noise, the normal portion of static that now makes up the heartbeat of the system. As long as no one inspects the satellites face to face and finds my chip stuck within the guts of the control panel, it’s almost undetectable. Because no one would bother to think it possible.

  Who would physically hijack a satellite’s hardware to create an entirely passive data collection system that cannot be accessed directly? The cost would be on par with, say, disguising an operative as the Security Chief of the Syndicate. For what would appear to be far less immediate gain. So no one looks and my machines continue to gobble up unbelievable amounts of data. And part of that data comes from my vaults.

  Now the location of most vaults are also available using an unrelated secure, but easily hackable, deep web site. My phone had that program but I wouldn’t bother using it. Too many passive watcher protocols looking at who accesses the information. Hans would have someone watching the vaults, if only to keep track of agents on the run. I had reviewed their locations right before the interview and knew where to find my own version of buried treasure.

  I pulled the zodiac onto a shore and humped overland a good three klicks until I found a mark on a tree. My Kutzk name glyph. Some of the bundles were on no grid but mine and lacked the critical GPS seal. Instead they were lined with some very noxious bioweaponry and little high explosive to deter thievery and prevent identification of the contents. I had no idea which kind of village in a bag I’d be finding, just that for once I’d be taking advantage of my own preparations and not loaning it out to The Web.

  It took me a good hour to climb the tree and disarm the traps on and within the vault. Inside I found firemaking tools, several sets of clothes, sunglasses, binoculars, and some cash along with some veterinary antibiotics and painkillers specially crafted to endure long stasis in the elements and some basic surgery tools. Along the lining, inside the explosive itself, I found a hidden encryption decoder to plug into the borrowed phone. I set a fuse and humped out as the remaining gear and all evidence of my passage dissolved in a small local forest fire. It bothered me to damage the woods, but I was playing for very high stakes. I could replant the trees if I survived the week.

  I retrieved the zodiac and took myself another few hundred klicks north, to very sparsely occupied Nova Scotia. Once I found a shoreline I liked, I waded out with the zodiac, and once I had it beyond the shore surf, I sent it to the bottom of the Atlantic with a grenade. It took a lot of effort to swim back to shore, dry off, and get clothed. Then a few more hours to find a hunting cabin in good enough shape to use but clearly abandoned for the season. I barred the door, set a few basic traps, then found a place where the shrapnel wouldn’t kill me if someone charged through the door, ate a ration bar and slept.

  In every book people have ever read about dashing spies, the hero regroups after a skirmish or escape or whatever, get cleaned up, and then goes right back to work. While you can make a case for adrenaline and the magic of raw fear, once you stop moving and your life is no longer in immediate danger, all the sins of your past days catch up and beat you senseless. I’d been banged up hard escaping the hotel, then less than a day later managed to escape in the middle of a firefight through explosions, freezing water, brutal cold, and a full day of backbreaking work. I was spent and needed rest. Lots of it. In the rush, I’d cut myself on something, pulled a couple of muscles, taken shrapnel to the same ankle that had an embedded piece of metal, and chafed much of my skin raw.

  I needed a month in the hospital. What I gave myself was five days in a cabin, eating everything I had, downing antibiotics and painkillers, doing some surgery on my legs and back, and making plans. The cabin owners had thoughtfully stocked a lot of canned goods, beer and rice, as well as had a freezer full of steaks. I ate six times a day, massive doses of drugs, meat, rice with lard, all washed down with beer. Then I slept. For hours on end. Sleep, eat, drugs, check the passive data feeds, and sleep again.

  On the sixth day I woke up and realized I could manage my pain without the drugs. I cooked a lot of steak, no rice, and drank well water. It was time to make my move. I had a fairly good guess how to find Hans and Cassandra. It would require some travel, which meant finding a car. An hour later I was showered, shaved, freshly bandaged, and outfitted with minimal gear and ready to spit razorblades. I torched the lodge and started walking towards Sydney.

  Chapter 7

  Generation Sweet Sixteen

  Sydney, Nova Scotia isn’t exactly spy central, which makes it a fine place to steal a car. For what came next, I didn’t want to rent something and risk cameras. Instead, I trawled the shoreline, looking at picnicking tourists who had left their rental cars and American SUVs parked conveniently within reach of the road. I found a low slung gray sedan that had Ontario plates and some blankets in the back seat. It took me under thirty seconds to break in, hotwire the system and be on my way. The car handled poorly, having been built in the late `80s and potentially riding on the same tires all that time. I took it offroad and spun it around until I had a feel for the dynamics of the ride. As urban camouflage, old sedans are the best. Everybody notices white vans after all those crime shows, but nobody takes an old scratched hunk of steel seriously and they dismiss it as long the driver isn’t swerving or the tailpipe spewing black smoke.

  The all Canada, Sydney to Toronto route can be driven in less than eighteen hours with the right finesse on certain stretches of open road. I took two full days, taking a midnight detour to a junkyard to steal some supplies and several sets of Canadian license plates, courtesy of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service. I arrived in Toronto at sunset of the second day, well fed, somewhat well rested, and armed for all-out war. The passive feeds from the phone, coupled with my military laptop, had given me quite a bit of critical intelligence. The Web had lit up in its version of open warfare. There appeared to be several sides which, for sanity’s sake, I reduced down to factions. Section 22 had thrown down the gauntlet and declared itself openly. They listed nine global locations where neutral parties c
ould essentially register on the payroll and get further orders. In response, the Syndicate and their allies, which included Oslo and the BBW, had simply started killing people who stepped out of line. Pina had stayed true to San Valentin while keeping Oslo’s connection in the dark. It should have been two against one. Except that the Russian Mafiya had also broken away with an amusing level of sarin gas, backpack nukes, and anthrax stockpiled. They were having issues with very angry NATO agencies but had thus far held their own. On top of that, a fourth player had emerged, a shadowy group fronted by some Shining Path splinter cell. My money was on them as Section 22’s backer and the real threat to the New World Order.

  Want to find spies, look for the quiet spots. While espionage and skullduggery had a lot of geniuses, very few of them actually think about data patterns. Instead, they have a stark strategic versus tactical divide. Each local group has a tactical officer who protects them regionally and, at the same time, some other higher up manages the master plan. Worried about counterattacks from the local mafiya or Syndicate? You harden your sight and go black. Need to organize strategy, you order your people to hardened sites for secure discussion. What this looks like to someone who can track it are tire tracks in the mud that simply cease a mile from a location. For example, one might find 400 sets of tracks from a lot of different directions and all of them stop before the city of Toronto.

  Conclusion? There was a very dangerous, very valuable hardened site in Toronto that has a lot of a certain kind of agents traveling to it. In this case, Gen 16 was there along with a lot of these Shining Path headfakers. Conspiracy Central you might say. I had a paper map and compass, ruler and pencil. Over several cups of coffee and a plate of ployes and thick bacon, I drew the lines of every agent who’d been sighted, tracked, overheard or suspected en route. After about thirty scratches, I knew where to hit. But I’m disciplined, and part of why Harv knows better than to turn his back on me, I finish what I start. By line 400, I had found the secondary site where a select few also frequented. I had some pie, read some decrypted reports, spied on Pina’s people’s assessments of the area, and came to the likely correct conclusion that the main site was a staging area for the next phase of world domination run remotely by an elite set of higher echelon agents at the secondary sight, conveniently underneath the Four Seasons Centre where the Opera and Ballet performed.

  Car batteries make terrific electrolysis devices and I had the backseat and trunk full of gasoline, hydrogen trapped in condoms cum balloons, some nasty mixes of diesel, sugar and nails, and a case of dynamite that I’d liberated from the trunk of a cache vehicle outside Drummondville. I’m pretty sure the CSIS was going to be pissed when they discovered I’d raided their larder, but given the public service I was about to perform, I felt entirely okay about stealing their explosives: dynamite, Semtex, and a lot of grenades. The undercarriage of the car had a layer of plastic, which had been soaked in diesel, wrapped in carpet and then another layer of plastic. Once the car started burning, the nitrogen rich plastic would release hydrogen cyanide in thick black tendrils.

  I parked the car in a quiet area, walked eight blocks, and stole another vehicle, this time a heavy SUV with extra-large tires and a cowcatcher in the front. It had vanity plates, chrome hubcaps, and those obnoxious trucker flaps with the naked women. It also had a twenty inch clearance and a lot of heft. I took her outside town, stripped off her plates, hubs, and douchebag paraphernalia, scratched her up and painted a single door gray, the way you see auto body places prep things, and kicked a hole in the bumper. Then I added some fake antennas, a gun rack with a rifle, and slopped a few gallons of mud onto her sides. I put a few extras on the chassis that would be needed later and loaded the trunk area with an arsenal of my own. She looked sufficiently shitkicker to pass as a Saskatoon hunter’s ride, so I took her a block from my zero sight and parked her. Then I humped back to the bomb mobile and started my kamikaze run.

  It was roughly 10 p.m., the city lights burning in an Autumn mist. The weather favored what I was about to do. Perhaps the gods smiled upon me. You cannot effectively sneak up on a secure building. They have snipers, they have look outs and cameras. In this case, they had converted a warehouse type facility with a dock and truck entrance into a forward staging area. They’d have all these in spades. Normally, you either go hell for leather straight in or you peel back the defenses slowly and with great discipline. I did neither. First I turned on the stolen phone, pressed a few buttons and activated a whole slew of encrypted protocols. After that, I drove the car about twenty klicks an hour down the street and dropped onto the road thirty meters from the door. Then I simply turned and fled at a full sprint.

  Reaction time on a sniper team is about fifteen seconds. They need to call and verify the target. Ditto a well-run lookout, and I was assuming Section 22 had good systems in place. That meant I had no more than twelve seconds from dropping to the street before someone opened fire. How fast does a vehicle move at twenty klicks an hour? Over five meters a second, which meant that six seconds later the gray sedan met the doors of the prime site. I had used the back entrance, which was a loading dock with a theoretically secure entrance. What they had done was create a ramp that cut back and forth like a switchback. It would slow down any approaching vehicle and force them to turn twice to enter. My car simply dropped over the edge and flipped onto its roof. Momentum coupled with a drop means something when a four meter long steel frame car is involved and the rolling bomb slid forward with a terrific screech. It rammed the rear dock, flipped up like drunken pogo stick, and did something very lucky. I’d tried for it and rigged the rear bumper to help it along, but it was luck that made it happen. The damned car dropped onto its spinning wheels, still in drive when it hit the dock, ripped open the door and rolled towards the center of the building.

  Mind you, I didn’t see this, sprinting away full force, but I did see the feeds from the cameras later on, and it was a nice piece of work from me and the Fates both. I did hear the thump when some enterprising individual made the profound mistake of opening fire on the vehicle. It blew out the bottom floor and filled the entire building with deadly smoke. Then the armory blew and whatever stockpiles of nastiness Section 22 had went up in a holocaust of pops and thumps. Several adjoining buildings shook and I felt the local gas line rupture before glass and brick rained across the block in a fury of debris.

  Staggered, and with a couple new cuts, I made it to my assault vehicle and took a slow tour around town to reach the secondary site. When you hunt with dogs, you use them to drive your game to the waiting hunters. I had blown the main building to flush my game. Sure, I’d killed some of the nasties back there but the real monsters would have either escaped due to their sheer indestructibility, almost psychic sense for danger, or simply being offsite, as planned. The real dangerous agents, the bulk of Section 22’s Gen 16 agents, would be waiting in the safe house, trying to make sense of the attack and organize countermeasures.

  Through binoculars, I watched as a particularly dangerous looking quartet of huge men shambled into the basement of the opera company. A minute later, a woman with a limp and two very slender scary men walked in behind them, all with cello cases. I waited. One more man, his arm limp and bloodied, followed, his free hand carrying what looked like a bag of groceries. Behind him came a group of commando types, looking clearly like his enemies. So, opportunists had seized the chance to run some of the Abschnitt out of the game. He turned and killed them all in a flash of suppressed gunfire. The bag held a submachine gun.

  I did the prudent thing and rammed him against the wall at maximum speed. He died without even knowing he’d been killed. Then I exited the SUV, which blocked the rear entrance, threw four grenades down the stairs and took cover. They blew the basement windows out for several meters in either direction, and I heard a woman scream. Good. Less agents to fight.

  Then I threw a fire extinguisher with a small Semtex charge down the same stair and waited. The timer popped and a sudden
explosion of foam and white haze floated out the broken windows. I pulled a cloth over my nose and went in to start killing. I started with an automatic shotgun armed with six piece mini-sabot rounds, according to the catalog numbers on the shells. It’s what the SEALs had tucked away in their zodiac’s larder and it had given me a whole lot of reloads. We were all in for a bit of a surprise. The American assault team had armed themselves with a modified version of Dragon’s Breath rounds. Which meant that I had just fired a set of burning magnesium coated shards within a partially magnesium interior. They came out ablaze in a choke of flame three meters long. The recoil was at most half of normal. I had relatively low velocity rounds without the breaching capacity I had needed. The clip of twenty fired in a few seconds, turning the hallway into a seething cauldron of hell. They killed with great effectiveness.

  Luckily, I’d already burned away everything flammable less than a minute earlier. That left only the bodies to smolder. In the hallway lay five well-armed, incredibly large men armed to the gills and ready for total war, all burnt alive and thoroughly dead. Their corpses were strewn across the already dead bodies of the stragglers. Four big men, the woman and her lanky body guards, all looking as if the grenades had cut them in half. Between the first set of blasts and me invading the building less than fifteen seconds later, Section 22 had gotten half a platoon down to the fighting.