Trident Code (A Lana Elkins Thriller)

by Thomas Waite

“It’s simple,” she replied as she welcomed him into her immaculate foyer. “I like Dmitri and your father’s paying me a small fortune to work with him.”

  “Let him work with someone else.”

  “But Dmitri wants to work with me, and he’s making real progress for the first time in years, and—”

  “I don’t care. I pay you plenty.”

  “Not enough.”

  Together they walked into her well-lit apartment’s living room. Galina looked horrible, he realized with a start. Dark circles under red eyes, as though she’d been crying. Maybe he should stop breaking her heart. Set her free like a bird. A nice bird. Not like a dirty gull. But definitely, she should take better care of herself, not let him see her like this. She never knew when he might stop by. Not that she appeared to care what he was saying because she was still talking:

  “Alexandra has—”

  “You’ll get millions when the AAC is running.”

  “But it’s not yet and I need a lot of money because—”

  “I will take care—”

  “Stop, Oleg! You’re not listening.” She’d raised her voice to him. She’d never done that before. “Alexandra has leukemia.”

  Oleg stopped. Now Galina was crying, and he was at a loss as to what to do with her. Alexandra walked out of her bedroom in her blue bunny pajamas with the attached feet, dragging a blanket as she had done when she was a toddler.

  “What’s leukemia, Mommy?”

  Galina rushed to take Alexandra in her arms as Oleg’s phone vibrated. Ukrainian hacker again. “I have to take this,” he said to the rose.

  “I think I figured it out,” the hacker said.

  “Figured what out?” What’s he talking about?

  “The ‘or else?’”

  “Don’t say another word.” Oleg hung up on him even faster this time.

  No telling what the Federal Security Service—or even NSA’s latest-generation Echelon system—might scoop up. Oleg would take no chances with his crowning moment. Not now. Not when he was down to days.

  He turned back to Galina, still holding Alexandra as if the little girl’s life depended on it. He gave them both a big smile.

  “Now what were you guys talking about?”

  CHAPTER 5

  THE APPEARANCE OF NORMALCY in Lana’s home unnerved her. It made her feel eerie this morning. Such was the nature of cyberterrorism. The whole world could be on the very cusp of collapse, yet few, if any, palpable hints of mayhem would appear until it was too late. So while kinetic war—guns and ammo, jets and bombs, choppers and troops—made it explicit that life itself was at stake, the hackers’ hijacking of the U.S.S. Delphin made her feel as if she had a different kind of poison seeping silently, invisibly from under the floorboards as she walked into Emma’s room.

  Her daughter slept on a twin bed across from the one occupied for the night by Tanesa. Their alarm was set for 7:00 a.m., when they would awaken to rowdy rock downloaded by the otherwise staid Tanesa. Despite her admirable restraint in so many respects, the young woman loved her headbanger music with the morning’s first blinks. Emma also did, and Lana supposed that would hold true even on the day she would make her solo debut singing Bach at the National Cathedral.

  Lana kissed Emma on the head so softly she didn’t stir, then inhaled her sleepy scent in a manner not unlike the one she’d cherished fifteen years ago when her baby was a newborn and she’d cradled that dark-haired head in her hand and drawn her close enough to feel her breath. And of course Lana knew why the memory flooded through her right now and left a pang in her belly: life always felt most precious when it was under threat.

  She tiptoed out of the room, knowing that by the time that rock music blasted the girls awake she’d be meeting with the nation’s top cybercommand at NSA headquarters at Fort Meade. And when Emma and Tanesa stood in the National Cathedral, attired in blue satin robes along with the rest of the choir, Lana would find herself in yet another meeting—this one regarding Magic Dragon, the newly discovered Chinese Army hacker unit.

  Lana backed her Prius out of the garage and left behind Bethesda, Maryland, a sleepy, leafy bedroom community, for DC. Most of the townspeople would rise blissfully ignorant of the crisis taking place off the Argentine coast. But a healthy number of the town’s population worked for the CIA, FBI, or NSA, and would learn soon enough of the impending peril, if they hadn’t been informed already. That would lead to a run on gas stations this morning; Lana had topped off last night. The more observant nongovernmental employees in town had long ago dubbed it “panic at the pumps,” having learned that the sudden, otherwise inexplicable lines could foretell a national crisis.

  She merged onto the Beltway, soon passing Reagan International, recalling how last year’s disaster had her studying the skies as she drove to affirm that civilian airlines had been spared—and they had been, but only briefly. She winced, wondering what the latest calamity might bring.

  Lana drove up to the guard station at Fort Meade’s main gate at 6:45 on the dot, plenty of time to clear security and motor to the complex of fifty-plus buildings that formed the heart of the nation’s intelligence complex.

  At a glance, even a novice’s eye would have gleaned the tough security: antitank barriers, ubiquitous guards on foot and in patrol cars, electrical fences, one-way windows, and the vast variety of antennas sprouting from the buildings. But not even the keenest eyes could have spotted NSA’s copper-clad interior walls, which repulsed electromagnetic probes.

  When she arrived at Deputy Director Holmes’s office, his longtime assistant, Donna Warnes, stout and gray and unstinting in her loyalty to her boss and country, directed Lana—with a tight smile of welcome—to a familiar SCIF, Secure Compartmented Information Facility: a room absolutely sealed off from the hydra-headed electronic incursions that daily tried to unveil the agency’s deepest secrets.

  But who was the enemy this time? That was chief among the many questions plaguing Lana and, she was certain, everyone else meeting behind the windowless door still closed to her. She handed over her laptop and personal items to security personnel, black and white burr-headed men with demeanors that might have been chiseled from stone.

  One of them, a former safety for Ole Miss, read her in, which meant he informed Lana that life as she had known it would end if she violated any of the security precepts to which she had long ago agreed. She acknowledged his every word, saw the slight, almost undetectable smile he bestowed upon her every time they met or passed each other since last year’s attack, and signed the obligatory form.

  Another security agent, fully taciturn, held the heavy door for her. No windows inside, either, unless you saw the motion detectors and cameras in the corners of the room as metaphors. They did, after all, provide a view of any unauthorized entry.

  Participants were still settling in as Lana made her way to her assigned seat. They included General Clifford Sprouse, the Commander of the U.S. Cyber Command (USCC), who sat directly to the right of Holmes. The general rose, meeting her halfway around the table for the introduction that Holmes provided with his customary briskness.

  Others were more familiar to her, men such as Joshua Tenon of the NSA, a veteran cyberwarrior who’d had a salt-and-pepper beard before last year’s catastrophic attack on the grid. Today, he tugged nervously on the pure white hair that framed his chin, giving Lana a lascivious stare when he thought she wasn’t noticing.

  Teresa McGivern was present, which came as no surprise to Lana. McGivern had been at the agency “forever,” as she generally put it when queried, and had been slated to retire when the grid went down thirteen months ago. Her display of mettle throughout the ordeal made Holmes recognize, once again, how truly irreplaceable she was. “Sayonara Myrtle Beach,” McGivern once joked to Lana about her postponed retirement dream.

  Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Deming was seated with two senior a
ides across from Lana. She rose to greet him formally, having only “met” him previously in the videoconference called by Holmes yesterday. Deming looked as though he hadn’t slept last night and might have nicked himself shaving this morning. Lana spied a red spot on his neck and a tiny pink smudge just below it on his starched white collar.

  But for Lana’s money, the shocker at the table was Admiral Wourzy, the chip counterfeiter from the California casino, who also happened to be the navy’s chief of cybersecurity. He was short, squat, with hair so black and lacquered straight back that he might have dyed and shaped it with shoe polish. He also appeared unhealthily pale, as though he had, indeed, spent too many hours resting his elbows on the green felt of gaming tables. Just seeing him made her think of gambling, the way a smoker lighting up can make an ex-smoker watch in envy as the tobacco reddens and the addict draws the gray fumes deep into his lungs. She was glad she was in a SCIF with no opportunity to jump online for a quick hand of Texas Hold ’em.

  When Wourzy smiled anxiously at her, she sensed his embarrassment, which she found disarming for reasons that did not register readily. She nodded at him, maintaining a pleasant enough expression, to which he responded by mouthing “Hello,” as though a bond had just been formed.

  Oh, great.

  But Lana had always taken up for the underdog. She could easily imagine how humiliating it would be to find yourself the pariah at the table, someone so clearly tolerated only because of extreme circumstances. But it wasn’t as though he’d sold state secrets. He’d been a buffoon, and would undoubtedly pay for it once his expertise was no longer part of the nation’s triaged response. She’d certainly behaved foolishly at online gambling sites, where she’d watched her money disappear into cyberspace. She’d lost enough in one year to have paid for Emma’s first year at the college or university of her choice. Lana winced inwardly at the memory.

  “What we’re seeing with the hacking and hijacking of the submarine is unprecedented,” Holmes began after they were all in place. “So far, we’re aware of only one survivor. He’s First Class Petty Officer Hector Gomez, who’s in charge of the Missile Control Center. He says he cannot take control of the Delphin or its missiles. But the submarine is operational and Admirals Deming and Wourzy assure us that there must be more than half a dozen men or women running the reactor plant, control room, and missile system.

  “The parts of the sub in view of cameras show dozens of dead bodies. Early this morning we received their demand. They, whoever ‘they’ turn out to be, want all the Arctic nations making claims on the resources of the region to abandon their ‘exploitive practices’ and leave. That was the entire communiqué that first showed up on my home computer at 4:00 a.m. Of course, such abandonment is not going to happen, which they must anticipate.”

  Home computer? That was what resonated most for Lana, and she suspected that was true for Holmes as well. He looked profoundly disgusted over having to admit that his sophisticated cyberdefenses had also been penetrated by the hackers—plural—for surely this was a high-performance team at work. She figured a corps of the NSA’s finest techies was at his house triaging and performing digital forensics on every piece of hardware he owned.

  “Sounds, on the face of it, like it could be Anonymous, or an environmental offshoot,” Tenon said. Anonymous, as the name would suggest, was a band of mostly unknown, decentralized hacktivists who embraced a wide spectrum of progressive and environmental causes—and had made hash of their enemies’ computer systems, which included the U.S. government’s on occasion.

  Lana was dubious. Hacking a nuclear-armed submarine, even with inside help, went well beyond the capabilities of anything Anonymous or its affiliates had demonstrated in the past.

  “We prepared a report just last month,” Tenon continued, “on the increasing militancy of that sector. Although, to be frank, it feels like too easy a conclusion for my comfort, and a task too difficult for what we’ve seen from them in the past.”

  Lana nodded her agreement. The question that troubled her was: What would the hackers do now? Use the submarine as the weapon it was intended to be? Threaten to bomb DC and Moscow if the two most powerful Arctic nations refused to budge? Killing untold millions and spewing sickening levels of radiation over several continents seemed counterproductive from an environmental point of view. Consistency may be the hobgoblin of small minds, but in this case inconsistency would make absolutely no sense if it hailed from Anonymous or its cohorts.

  “So that was it?” McGivern asked. “Just leave?”

  “That’s correct,” Holmes said.

  “How bizarre. No threats?”

  “None,” Holmes replied. “But with a nuclear-armed sub the threat’s implied.”

  “But not with any specificity,” McGivern countered, to which Holmes nodded.

  General Sprouse asked about the hackers’ TTPs: tactics, techniques, and procedures. “Do we know of any digital fingerprints that might suggest any known perpetrators? I’m thinking of APTs and the Chinese.”

  Beijing had made great use of Advanced Persistent Threats, which were essentially gangs so corporate in nature that many worked normal business hours to hack targets with great patience. They often spent years surveilling and doing careful reconnaissance of their targets’ networks and computer systems, carefully probing a target’s cybersystems. Among their favorite malware were Trojans, which provided backdoor access to a computer system, and worms, which spread their virulent code throughout the target. Sometimes their malware was even introduced during the construction of the device, which, theoretically, could include components of a nuclear-armed submarine of sufficiently recent vintage.

  “It’s too early for the forensics,” said Admiral Wourzy. “That sub is almost a completely isolated entity. We have few trails to follow. It’s not like the attack on the grid where there were defined ports of entry.” Trojans and rootkits. “Our Cyber Incident Response is going to be virtually impossible with our limited remote access.”

  He might have been chintzy with his chips, but Wourzy lacked no confidence in his opinions. In fact, Lana would have bet that he was pleased to be back in the game.

  “I find it interesting,” Admiral Deming said, raking his gray hair back as he had during yesterday’s videoconference, “that this attack was launched on the eve of our meeting to discuss Magic Dragon and the Chinese. Are we just looking at it as a coincidence that a new Chinese hacker unit has been identified and, ‘Oh by the way, there’s an unprecedented attack on a nuclear submarine’?”

  “Are you suggesting that they know that we know and that this is payback for their exposure?” Tenon asked the admiral, with another tug on his beard.

  “It’s possible,” the admiral said.

  McGivern was their acknowledged China expert, so when she promptly placed her elbows on the table and steepled her fingers, everyone looked at her.

  “The Chinese are far too invested in the status quo to make this kind of high-stakes move. What’s in it for them? They’re ill prepared, by all accounts, to take over Arctic drilling and shipping, if that’s the end game to what we’re now seeing. Nor does this seem remotely like the Chinese state’s typical MO.”

  “I suppose,” Tenon said, “they could be Chinese hackers operating without Beijing’s approval, or with only the tacit approval of an arm of their intelligence service. China’s suffering devastating droughts in the north and south and have millions of acres of farmland lying fallow. It’s so bad they’re starting to get some religion on climate change.”

  Unlikely, thought Lana. To what end?

  “Are you suggesting,” McGivern asked, “that the Chinese might be adopting the Russian model, letting so-called ‘patriotic citizens’ do the dirty business of hacking opponents? Building deniability into the plan? Because if you are, let me point out a big difference between the Chinese and the Russians. The Chinese have substantial control
of Internet access in their country. They can put up their ‘Great Firewall’ not only to censor outbound connections, but block inbound connections and effectively isolate themselves from most of the rest of the world. The Russians would find it impossible to match that kind of control. The Internet in Russia is almost as much of a food fight as it is here. Moreover, it is still Chinese state policy to grow the economy, not stifle it. They would take a dim view of any of their citizens, or an arm of their intelligence service, hacking and commandeering a U.S. submarine to stymie oil and gas development that would benefit them.” She shook her head, wrapped a wave of gray hair behind her ear, and concluded: “Not the Chinese, and not Chinese renegades. As for Magic Dragon,” she turned her attention to Admiral Deming, “that is a Chinese Army unit, not some rogue outfit.”

  Lana liked McGivern; she gave no quarter to anyone, regardless of rank. Perhaps that was a perk of wanting to retire and being implored to hang around.

  “I think Teresa has brought up an interesting point about the Russians,” Lana said. “But it’s nearly impossible to fathom that any government would sanction this kind of action.” Tenon started to speak but she rode over him: “Yes, I know that there are cyberunits in many countries now, and a lot of them hate us, but would any of them risk life and limb to do something like this? Even jihadists like to pick with care their time and place to fight. Plus the Russians already control about half the oil and gas interests in the Arctic, so why would their leadership countenance such a move?”

  “Only if they knew that it didn’t affect them,” Admiral Wourzy said. “If they were in league with the hackers from the very beginning.”

  “Okay,” Lana said, “but whoever the hackers are they must have some consequence in mind, some punishment in store, when the Arctic nations refuse to pull up stakes. This is clearly not an academic exercise. The planning for this must have taken years. That’s the only reason the Russians would play this hand. So I’d suggest we start thinking very hard about what these hackers can do with their missiles that would have minimum impact on Russia, and maximum impact on the rest of the world. Otherwise, we should start looking elsewhere.”