CyberStorm (10 page)

Pam burst into tears, putting her face in her hands and trembling.

“People aren’t prepared because they assume that somebody else will always fix the problem, and they’re usually right," she said tearfully. “But there’s no help out there.”

It was true.

New Yorkers somehow felt invincible, no matter how dependent they were on infrastructure working for survival. In the small town outside Pittsburgh that I’d come from, the power could go out any time from storms, or even a car hitting a pole, but in Manhattan a blackout for any length of time was nearly incomprehensible. Typical emergency shopping lists for New Yorkers included things like wine, microwave popcorn and Häagen-Dazs, and their biggest fear during a disaster was often boredom.

“There’s help in here, Pam,” said Chuck reassuringly. “Come on, sit down and have a cup of tea. We’re about to start the show.” He held up an extension cord and waggled it in the air.

Lauren and Susie went to Pam, putting their arms around her, talking quietly and going into the kitchen to put some water on with the propane burner. Chuck and I went back to plugging in the extension cords to the generator. We were going to power up some lights and the TV to see what was happening on CNN.

“The gossip in the hallway is that it’s more than just one train crash,” whispered Chuck to me. “They’re saying there was a plane crash at JFK, and more all over the country.”

“Who said that?” I asked in a hushed voice, sitting on a box. “They didn’t say anything on the radio.” I sat silent for a moment. “Don’t say anything to Lauren.”

“Did her family get out before the bird flu alert?” asked Chuck. Lauren’s mother and father were supposed to have left for Hawaii the day before.

“We didn’t hear anything,” I said quietly, realizing there was no way we could have heard anything.

“I hope GPS isn’t knocked out in this mess,” said Chuck. “There’s over half a million people in the air at any time, and without GPS the pilots flying over water would be reduced to dead reckoning.”

I plugged in the last of the cables. “Let’s just get CNN on. Should I do the honors?”

Chuck nodded and stood up, handing me the power bar we’d plugged the TV and lights into. He went to sit on the couch and picked up the TV remote with his good hand.

“Everyone!” I announced. “We’re ready to go. Can I get a countdown?”

Lauren came in the room and looked at me. “Just plug it in, Mike. Quit fooling around.”

I shrugged. “Okay, here we go.”

When I plugged the power bar into the generator, several of the lights we’d set up around the room blinked to life, and the TV clicked on. At the same moment, all the other lights in the house came on, and appliances in the kitchen started beeping.

I looked at the plug in my hand in amazement. “How in the world?”

Chuck motioned behind me. I turned to see lights on in the building across from us, shining faintly through the snow squalls, and then my mind clicked.

“The power came back on?”

Chuck nodded, shrugging, while he worked the controls on the remote. The girls had made some tea, and they brought a pot over to the coffee table while we all crowded onto the couch. The TV screen glowed as Chuck found the right channel.

I steeled myself for the worst, expecting to see burning aircraft wreckage in a snowy landscape. The image flickered, blocky and pixilated, going blank and then returning before finally stabilizing.

A fuzzy field of green appeared, unsteady as if being filmed from a helicopter, and then what looked like a field of wrecked houses.
Destroyed houses.
The image panned back to reveal a scene of devastation in a green valley, with the sloping, rocky sides of a canyon rising up into mountaintops in the distance.

“What, is that like Montana or something?” I asked, trying to make sense of what we were seeing. The text below the image was headlined with something about China. “Did the Chinese do this?”

“No,” replied Chuck, “that
is
China.”

The image flickered in and out again. We were getting sound in staccato bursts. I read the text below the image:
Dam failure in the Chinese Shanxi province destroys town, hundreds feared dead.

The sound suddenly became clear
.

“—warning US forces to back down. Both sides are denying any responsibility. An emergency meeting of the UN Security Council has been convened, but China is refusing to attend while the US has invoked Article Five of the NATO common defense treaty.”

“Are they declaring war?” said Chuck. He got up, walked over to the TV, and banged on the cable box. The blocky image stabilized.

“This is Professor Grant Latham from Annapolis, an expert in information warfare,”
announced the CNN anchor.
“What can you tell us about what is happening, Professor?”

“This is textbook cyber-escalation,”
said Professor Latham, looking at the camera.
“Power outages across China have been reported, and this dam accident appears to be one of several critical infrastructure failures, but we have no idea of the scope.”

“Cyber-escalation?”
asked the anchor.

“An all-out attack on computer systems and networks.”

The anchor considered this for a moment.
“Do you have any recommendations for how people could be preparing themselves, anything they could do?”

Professor Latham took a deep breath and closed his eyes before opening them and looking straight into the camera.

“Pray.”

7:20 p
.
m
.

“HIS FEVER HAS definitely broken,” said Pam, looking at the readout from the baby thermometer.

She showed it to me—
101
. I nodded and she passed it to Lauren, who smiled and leaned down into the crib to coo at Luke. His face was still mottled red, but he was fidgeting and crying less.

“And
that
is
definitely
broken,” added Pam, looking at Chuck’s swollen left hand.

Chuck grimaced but smiled. “Not much we can do about it right now.”

“I can wrap it up,” suggested Pam.

“Maybe later. It’s not so bad.”

We’d invited Pam and Rory, along with Chuck and Susie, over to our place for dinner. With the power back on, the mood was more secure but still nervous, and the snowstorm was getting worse. Nearly two feet of snow had fallen already in the last twenty-four hours, with another storm coming close on its heels.

The storm outside, though, was taking second stage to the increasingly surreal drama playing out on the news networks.

Images of the destroyed village in China, and the storming of the US embassy in Taiyuan, had been replaced by images of burning American flags in Tehran. A video denigrating Mohammed had appeared on an Iranian web service and had quickly spread, sparking rioting in Pakistan and Bangladesh.

It seemed the world had turned against us.

The source of the video was unknown, and the Iranians were claiming it was the US government. Images played on TV of the Iranian president claiming that the East Coast storms, power failures, and bird flu outbreaks were the divine hand of God, striking down evil America.

The idea of the video coming from the US government was complete nonsense, and of course denied, but this was just one thing in a long list that governments around the world were denying that day. While apparently nobody was doing anything, something had brought the world to a screeching halt.

The worldwide internet had slowed to a crawl, bringing business and communications down with it. Europe was nearly as affected as America, triggering runs on banks and long food lines, as well as rioting in Greece and Portugal.

The only ones relatively unaffected were the Halal Internet of Iran, China behind its Great Firewall, and North Korea, which was barely even connected to the internet. America was the most connected, however, and was suffering the worst from whatever was happening. Conspiracy theories flooded the airwaves.

In spite of all this, or perhaps all the more because of it, Susie insisted on preparing a proper holiday dinner. Tony was going to join us. I’d even offered to invite Richard and his wife, but Lauren had seemed distinctly uncomfortable at the suggestion.

“Why all of a sudden don’t you want to have Richard here?” I’d teased. Chuck had rolled his eyes at me, but I wasn’t able to resist. “He’s been your best friend lately.”

“I don’t think it’s a good idea,” she’d replied. By that point Chuck was shaking his head at me, and Susie was eyeing me as well, so I let it go.

We were using our apartment for dinner since theirs was full of bags and bottles of water. The girls prepared the food, while Chuck, Rory, and I were watching CNN, drinking a few beers. The image on the TV had been blocky and pixilated all day, with the sound coming in and out, but it wasn’t just us. CNN reported that cable carriers across the country were experiencing technical issues with bandwidth.

Images of tanks surrounding the CNN building appeared from time to time, apparently highlighting the criticality of CNN to the nation. I wondered where the tanks were on our city corners.
A few tanks would be nice about now
.

“It’s snowmageddon out there,” commented Rory. During the day, he’d struggled up to the
New York Times
building, where he worked as a reporter.

CNN played in the background while we talked
. “The Pentagon made very clear years ago that if the United States was subject to a cyberattack that resulted in loss of life, the US military would respond with a kinetic attack.”

I’d spent most of the day trying to help neighbors get their heating working. The power was back on, but the internet was clogged, and the entire building was run on IP networks. The hallways had warmed up, so a large part of the solution had just been for all the tenants to leave their doors open.

“—kinetic attack means with conventional weapons, bombs, and tanks—”

Of course, the Borodins were fine and needed no help. When I’d dropped in, the Russian soap operas were back to playing on their TV while Aleksandr slept in front of them. I was going to bring them over a plate of food after dinner.

“They’re only plowing the big avenues,” continued Rory. “Snowbanks on the sides of Eighth are higher than me now. Port Authority and Penn Station are already overflowing with people.”

“—the president has now declared a national emergency, invoking the Stanford Act to bring the military in for domestic—”

I’d only gone outside the front door to our building. Beyond the awning, the snow was nearly waist deep, and it was below zero and windy. Not the sort of weather I wanted to be outside in, and I was impressed that Rory had braved nearly twenty city blocks to get to work on such a day.

CNN continued in the background
. “Sixty million people are affected by this storm on the East Coast, and though the power has been restored in many places, several million people are still without power, with emergency services still at a total standstill.”

I looked at the TV, listening to the growing list of carnage, and then looked back at Rory.

“Are we at war? Are they bombing China yet?”

I was barely joking.

Rory shrugged. “The main thing we’re at war with right now is this storm. That Professor Latham on CNN earlier was just being dramatic for the cameras.”

“Come on!” I said angrily, pointing at the television. “You’re telling me that all this is a coincidence? China was declaring war yesterday after they said we downed one of their planes. Now the power outages, train crash—”

“He does have a point,” said Chuck. “Somebody is doing something.”

“Yes,” replied Rory, “somebody is doing something, but you can’t go bombing everyone on the planet when the internet shuts off.”

“It has to be China,” I said, shaking my head. “Why else would we have attacked them back?”

“You mean that destroyed village under the dam?” asked Rory. I nodded, and he rubbed the back of his neck, pursing his lips. “You have a point, but the US military hasn’t admitted to the attack. And China didn’t declare war. They’re denying everything. That guy on TV was just the governor of Shanxi Province trying to get some airtime. He’d been shut out of their Politburo process—”

I cut him off.

“Nobody is admitting to anything! This may be a virtual attack,” I said, my voice rising as I stood up and pointed out the window into the swirling snow, “but
real
people are dying out there!”

“Boys!” came a quiet hiss. It was Susie, and she was glaring at us. “Quiet, please! The kids are sleeping.”

“Sorry,” I said sheepishly.

“Could you please switch that off?” she demanded. “I think we’ve all had enough of that for one day.”

“But we might miss something—”

“Mike, if you don’t turn it off, you’re going to miss a really nice meal,” said Lauren. “Come on, you guys set the table.”

Picking up the remote, I looked toward the TV.

“
—the question now is what constitutes use of force, but there has definitely been loss of life. Over a hundred confirmed dead on the Amtrak crash this morning with dozens more still missing, eight suspected deaths from bird flu, and already twelve reported dead from the power outages and looting.”

I clicked it off.

9:00 p
.
m
.

CANDLES FLICKERED in the dim light while we all held hands. In the silence, the wind howled through the darkness outside, rattling the window panes and demanding entry. I wondered what poor souls were stuck out there right now, what convoluted paths had led them to be struggling against the elements, alone and cold somewhere. Lauren’s fingers squeezed mine, and I smiled at her, trying to put the thought of being stranded from my mind.

“Dear Lord, please watch over us and keep these people, our families, safe,” said Susie. “We thank you for this food, and for your gift of life. We pray for everyone’s safety, and that you will guide us to the light.”