by James Phelan
Walker headed over. General Brokaw stayed put. Walker could see why when he got there—a set of crutches lay on the floor to the side of the sofa.
“Walker, right?” General Brokaw said.
“Yes, sir,” Walker said. “Class of ninety-nine.”
“What rank did you leave the Air Force?”
“Lieutenant Colonel, sir.”
“You got the Air Force Cross.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And multiple Purple Hearts.”
“Three, sir.”
“Yes, I remember.” He looked to the television. “I had to check in on you, occasionally, for my daughter.”
Walker was silent. He didn’t know what to say. Monica had kept tabs on him all this time? Just to be sure he was okay? How that may have sat with the General seemed moot in light of current circumstances.
General Brokaw said, “You know where those Purple Hearts came from?”
“Sir?”
“They were made during World War Two,” said the General. “We made about a million of them, figuring that we’d be invading Japan and that we’d need them. The bomb fixed that. And they’re still giving out those medals; have been in every war and conflict since.”
Walker was silent.
“What are you doing here?” General Brokaw asked.
“I want to help.”
The General looked to Walker, who was standing to attention in the middle of the lounge room.
“At ease, Walker, and sit down,” the General said. His voice was low and gravelly, the result of years of cigars and whisky, Walker could see from the bar in the corner and the glass on the side table by the sofa and the stubs of cigars in the crystal ashtray and the smell in the air.
Walker sat on the closest armchair.
“Where you at now?” General Brokaw asked.
“Freelancing, sir.”
“Ditch the sir crap. Last I heard you were at the CIA.”
“I was.”
“Didn’t suit?”
“For a spell. Near on a decade.”
“I read that you saved the Vice President last year.”
“I was there.”
“I didn’t vote for the guy, let alone his boss.”
“Unbiased duty, and all that.”
“I’m too old and cranky for that shit now. But sure, good job.” The General stared at Walker. Almost a minute passed. There was no volume on the television, only subtitles. The General’s eyes were red and wet, not with sadness but with anger and despair. “What can you do to help?”
“I can talk to Monica.”
“That’ll help?”
“I believe so.”
“How?”
“I won’t know until I talk to her.” Walker looked from General Brokaw to the empty space next to him, a blanket curled in the corner of the sofa as though a person had been seated there in the cold hours of the morning and since departed. “Where is she?”
The General looked back to the television as he said, “She’s gone.”
16
“Monica left half an hour ago,” General Brokaw said.
“Where to?”
The General didn’t take his eyes off the screen when he said, “LA, where she lives.”
“They let her go?” Walker motioned to the FBI guys, out of sight, one in the hall and one in the kitchen, covering the front and rear doors.
“Yes,” the General said. “The assistant SAC from the LA Field Office came to brief us on all they’re doing to try to locate Jasper. Monica asked to be at home, agreed to the same kind of FBI and police presence there, and she left with him.”
“Can I have her address?”
General Brokaw looked to Walker. “What for?”
“I need to ask her some questions.”
“The FBI Assistant Special Agent in Charge asked us about Jasper. If there’s anything we suspected, of him being in danger, any threats, any associates that may have wanted to do foul by him.”
“And nothing was gleaned?”
“Nothing. Monica mentioned some of his late career Army stuff, something he worked on, but that was it.” General Brokaw looked at the image of his son on the television screen. “Besides, Jasper’s never been much of a figure to have close friends and associates. Nor family, for that matter.”
“Never married.”
“No. Never close, to my knowledge.” He chewed at his lip, then added, “Never close to anyone in the family. Out the door at eighteen and seen maybe once a year. Didn’t matter to me. His mother was upset.”
“Sir, your wife?”
“Passed. Four years back.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”
“Not yours to know. How’s your family?”
“My mother died a couple of years ago.” Walker hesitated, then added, “My father too, not that long after.”
“I’m sorry for your loss, son.” General Brokaw looked at the fireplace. “So, tell me, Walker, what do you think you can do that the FBI can’t?”
“All that I can, sir.” Walker knew that adding the honorific of sir, when told not to, gave his statement credence that only military men could and would understand; it carried with it the weight of oaths and sacrifice and respect and said, I will move heaven and earth to help in any way that I can because we are in this together: we are family.
“Why don’t you help me to my office,” the General said.
Walker got the crutches and helped the General to his feet. He offered to aid him but the older man moved with practiced rhythm. Walker couldn’t see any obvious reason for the crutches and didn’t ask about it.
In the hallway, the FBI agent stood from his chair, appropriated from the formal dining room opposite, but the General growled at him and he resumed his position.
“Meet you at the top,” General Brokaw said to Walker. “No point you watching my arse all the way up. This ain’t the damned Navy.”
Walker humored the old guy with a chuckle and waited for him at the landing.
Ascending the stairs was slow going for General Brokaw. The carpet runner had wear marks in it from frequent such journeys. Walker wondered how long he had been like this; if it was long enough to make wear marks in the carpet like that, then why didn’t he get one of those mechanical chairs installed on a rail to get him up and down? Or move house to a single story? Pride, and memories, Walker figured, that’s what kept him doing this, and doing it here. But the guy was late sixties, and while overweight he didn’t seem so out of shape or beyond it that he should be in this physical situation.
Even the best and brightest break down, even those we care about most, his father had once said on hearing the diagnosis of his mother. It doesn’t mean it’s fair, or that it’s for any reason other than damned stupid luck, he’d added. That was as much as David had ever spoken of the matter with his son.
“Here,” General Brokaw said, turning left at the landing and heading through a door to a dark-wood-paneled office. There was the obligatory Me Wall, just as Walker had pictured. There was a photograph of a previous Vice President, who’d been in office when Walker was a cadet. He remembered the visit to the Academy, and the Vice President’s address, all chest-beating stuff about how the war on terror was being won because of brave men and women like those assembled.
“Shut the door,” General Brokaw commanded, interrupting Walker’s thoughts.
Walker did so. The study was a corner room and two walls had picture windows with padded seating built in to the deep bookshelves, stacked with reference books and trinkets from a life served around the globe in the armed forces.
“Sit,” General Brokaw said.
Walker sat in a chair opposite the desk. General Brokaw leaned his crutches against the desk and sat on the edge of it. The hulk of old mahogany didn’t protest.
“No BS,” General Brokaw said. “Lay it out. What can you do?”
“You heard what I did at the Stock Exchange, the thing with the Vice President,” Walker
said. “Before and after that, I’ve been working on a long-term assignment with a specialist investigative unit. This is a part of the deep op we’re working on. And while the FBI and NSA and all those guys may well find your son, I’m here to do whatever it is I can to help you and your family and avert what is planned in these cyber attacks.”
“Okay . . .” General Brokaw said. “Do you have any leads? Do you know who has my son?”
“No.”
“And you really think Monica may have some more ideas?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Maybe Jasper was more forthright with her,” Walker said. “Maybe he told her things that he couldn’t tell you.”
The General looked at Walker for a long moment, with something behind his eyes that Walker couldn’t read. Then General Brokaw looked away.
“I doubt that.”
17
“Tell me, Walker, what does cyber warfare mean to you?”
“It’s another language,” Walker said. “Or, rather, it’s a new weapons system. Something I’m not current on. I see it for the awesome power it can wield, but I can’t deploy it myself.”
“You’re part right, it is awesome.” General Brokaw was silent as he got up and moved around to the other side of the desk, hobbling without his crutches but always with a hand on the desk top. He sat in a worn leather chair. “But don’t think of it as a weapons system. Think of it as a whole new branch of warfare. It’s asymmetric to the square root of we’re screwed, if you get my meaning. My final couple of years were at the Pentagon. Cyber’s the next big thing, and it has a lot of brass scared.”
“State and non-state actors can cut us down to size,” Walker said. “And we have to think about the reality that we are fighting opponents who are as well armed and informed as we are—and this is the only battle space where that’s the case.”
“Why?”
“Our hands are practically tied up with all kinds of laws.”
“And that’s the rub, see? There’s no rulebook here, no global set of standards or defined combat space. There’s no Hague or Geneva conventions putting restraints on cyber warfare, or treaties governing the number of nukes we can have or even some kind of informal understanding of mutually assured destruction to keep these young punks from pressing their damned keys. It’s a mess. I mean, hell, we don’t even know what an act of cyber war is, do we? It ain’t defined any place I can think of.”
“Do you think this is the first shot in a cyber war?”
“I think those shots were fired a long time ago, by all kinds of parties. We’re fighting this on all fronts.”
“How do we respond to a serious act of cyber war?”
“Exactly. What is our response going to be?”
“Depends on the attacks.”
“Sure. What if someone wipes off a trillion dollars from our economy? What if they melt down a nuclear plant or two near a populated area? What’s that worth? What do we do about it? Send in the tanks and carriers and B52s? Where does that response start—and where does it end?”
“We would have to think about our first line of defense, and what’s beyond that. Guys like your son,” Walker said. He sat forward with his elbows on his knees and his hands together. He remembered a few conversations like this with the General. It was a test. To see if the person was worthy of greater respect, and a reward—usually in the form of being chosen for a special assignment on or off base. Conversations like this had changed after he’d spent that time with Monica. Not that he let the General know, but it changed things, within Walker, that knowledge. And the General sure did know now. And the way in which Walker participated in this conversation would dictate whether he would earn the reward. “There are laws in place to react, but what do they mean, in practice? What does it mean to take over civilian infrastructure, when over ninety percent of the US military communications travel over public networks?”
“You think they’ll force Jasper to attack civilian targets?”
Walker shrugged.
“The writing has been on the wall about this for a long time,” General Brokaw said. “And we’ve done far too little about it in terms of gettin’ prepared.”
“We’ve got a Cyber Command.”
“Sure, but we need better than that. Something with teeth. Bigger. See, Walker, in the Gulf War, a new military revolution emerged. A transformation, from the mechanized warfare of the industrial age to the info warfare of the information age. Information warfare’s a war of decisions and control, a war of knowledge and intellect. Is that how you see it?”
“Yes,” Walker said. “And it’s changed since then.”
“How?”
“Information warfare has gone from preserving oneself and wiping out the enemy, to preserving oneself and controlling the opponent. At least, that’s what other state actors like China and Russia and Iran have in their mindset. Electronic warfare, tactical deception, strategic deterrence, propaganda warfare, psychological warfare, network warfare, structural sabotage. They want to vanquish, conquer and destroy—as deviously and pervasively as possible.”
“We don’t do that?”
“Not on the scale that they do.”
“Why?”
“All those laws I was referring to before. And because we’re more about building up our defense and preparing for retaliation, being on the back-foot. Plus there’s the talent pool—we should have the best experts in the world available to us on this, but the military will never compete with Silicon Valley salaries in attracting and retaining talent.”
“But it can appeal to recruits through its national-service ethos and its proximity to the action, like it did with Jasper.”
“Sure. And all that said, we’ve been good at scooping up electronic and signals intelligence. The best.”
“What makes us the best?” General Brokaw prompted.
“We have the best gear to do it. The NSA practically hoovers up every written and spoken word on the planet, and they can decrypt past any protections. We can hear every conversation we want to. We have the biggest eyes and biggest ears.”
“Yes,” General Brokaw said. “But we’re the ones spending the most in R and D on weapons systems across the spectrum, so these other actors think ‘Why bother doing that—why not just steal the plans for fifth-generation fighter jets?’”
“Which they’re doing.”
“Which they’re doing.” Brokaw leaned back in his chair. “What will it take for us to change our playbook—to be able to act like them? To start attacking their servers on a daily basis and stealing all the data that we can get our hands on.”
“A Pearl Harbor,” Walker said, matter of factly. “A cyber Pearl Harbor, and we’d be there. The country would rally. The landscape would change. It’d be like when Roosevelt said we’ll build fifty thousand aircraft for World War Two.”
“And how many did we build?”
“Three hundred thousand.”
“Three hundred thousand,” the General repeated, although Walker knew he already knew the answer. The old man looked as though he had come to a conclusion. “Walker, do you care for my daughter?”
Walker paused, just a moment, thrown a little by the question. “Yes.”
“Yet you hesitated just now.”
“Sir—I—a lot of time has passed. But of course I care for her. And I’ll do all I can to get your son to safety.”
“You won’t put my girl in unnecessary danger to achieve that?”
“No.”
General Brokaw neither spoke nor moved for a minute. He was weighing up options. In the end, perhaps he figured: what’s the harm in someone capable wanting to help? At least, that’s how Walker read the response when General Brokaw said: “You really think you can find something out from talking with her? Something that will help find Jasper?”
“You said yourself that she knew about his Army work,” Walker said. “What was that?”
He said, “You can ask her about th
at yourself.”
“You’ll give me her address?”
“You dim or hard of hearing or both?”
Walker smiled. The General did too, the first Walker had seen. He opened a drawer in the desk and looked at its contents, hesitated, then retrieved a small book, flicked pages and read out an address.
“Got that?”
“Got it,” Walker said. He pointed to last year’s edition of a Rand McNally California road atlas on the General’s desk. “You mind?”
“Go for it.”
Walker checked the address, memorized the route, closed the book.
“You going for a long drive north?” Walker said, seeing that the General had marked the section along the Oregon coast.
The General nodded. He showed an older version of the map book, again with marked pages. “I had long planned on the drive with my wife, but we never got to do it. So, I’m seeing what’s still there, and I’m, well, I hoped I’d do that drive later this year. We’ll see.”
“You’ll do it. This will work out. I’ll find Jasper.”
General Brokaw appeared pensive, then said, “So, are you working on this alone?”
“Yes,” Walker said.
The General gave him a measured stare.
“Because of the nature of this investigation,” Walker said, “because the FBI and NSA will be watching and listening to and reading every communication related to your son and the attacks, I’m working on my own.”
General Brokaw didn’t react. After a moment he said, “You last served in the 24th Tactical, right?”
“Yes.”
General Brokaw nodded. Then he reached into the desk drawer and pulled out a black plastic box, which Walker recognized, because he’d been issued something similar once but had not been allowed to keep his.
“See this?” General Brokaw said, opening the clasp and pulling out the service automatic. It was an M1911, a Colt .45, the official side-arm of the US military for seventy-five years until the mid-eighties. “You have use for this?”
Walker met the General’s eye. “Yes, sir.”
18
Walker had a hundred miles of the black ribbon of the Interstate 5 ahead of him.
