CyberStorm (42 page)

“I’m going to die anyway,” he cried, laughing, turning his head away from me.

The eagle circled and circled in the distance.

“Take care of Ellarose for me, and Susie. Try to take care of them. You promise?”

“You’re not going to die, Chuck.”

“Promise me you’ll take care of them.”

The eagle blurred through my tears.

“I promise.”

Taking a deep breath, he put his arm back in its sling.

“Enough of that,” he said, getting up. The river gurgled and splashed. “Let’s get back.”

Wiping my eyes, I got up, and we silently began back up the trail.

The sun was going down.

Day 64 – February 24

I WAS OUTSIDE with Susie when I heard the trucks.

Lauren had found some old seed packets, carrots and cucumber and tomato, in a corner of the cellar. The packets were ancient and yellowed, but perhaps the seeds were still good. So we’d gone out and dug up a patch of ground, one that would get the most light, and started carefully planting them.

Chuck was inside, resting, and Lauren was making a fire to prepare some bark tea. Ellarose was lying in the grass on her back, staring up at the clouds in the sky and chewing on a twig Susie had given her. She looked like a hundred-year-old baby, shrunken and wrinkled, with red, peeling skin. She’d developed a fever and had been crying all night. Susie kept her close, always, never more than a few feet away. It was heartbreaking.

We’d given Luke his own small shovel, a rusty trowel, and he was industriously digging up bits of earth, smiling at me with every shovelful, when an alien growl floated up through the trees. A slight breeze ruffled the leaves, and I stopped digging, going completely still, and listened hard.

“What is it?” asked Susie, looking at me.

The wind died down, and there it was again—a low rumble, a
mechanical
rumble.

“Get the kids downstairs. Now!”

She heard the rumbling too, and she got up from her knees, grabbing Ellarose and then Luke by the arm. I ran to the house, jumping up onto the smashed back deck.

“Lauren, get downstairs!” I yelled as I entered through the porch door. “Someone is coming! Get that fire out!”

She looked at me, shocked, and I grabbed one of the bottles of water from the counter and quickly crossed over to her. I dumped the water on the twigs she had lit and then kicked them apart, stamping on the cinders.

“Who is it?” she asked. “What’s happening?”

“I don’t know,” I yelled back as I ran up the stairs to get Chuck. “Just get in the cellar with the kids and Susie.”

Upstairs, Chuck was awake and already staring out the window.

“Looks like army trucks,” he said as I entered his room. “I could just see them for a moment on the ridge lower down. They’ll be here in a minute.”

I helped him down the hallway and stairs, grabbing the rifle as we passed onto the front porch. Standing still for a second, we couldn’t see them, but we could hear them, and the sound was getting louder.

“Leave me here,” said Chuck. “I’ll talk to them, see what they want.”

I shook my head.

“No, let’s get in the cellar. They can’t know we’re here. We’ll hide, try and see who they are.”

Chuck nodded and, with his good arm around me, limped down with me to the cellar doors. Susie had done a good job of rebuilding the doors from some plywood. As we reached the stairs down, the girls were staring up at us. Susie was holding a .38, and so was Lauren.

Hopping down the stairs, we closed the doors behind us just as we heard the trucks crunching on the gravel on the driveway. Quietly, I mounted the stairs, trying to get a view of what was happening outside through a crack.

“There are two trucks,” I whispered. We could hear the sound of feet hitting the gravel as the truck doors thudded shut. It sounded like there were a lot of them.

“Is it our guys?” whispered Chuck urgently.

“What do they want?” said Susie quietly, holding Ellarose in her arms, trying to keep her quiet.

Through the tiny crack I angled to get a view. They were wearing khaki-colored uniforms, but that didn’t mean anything. And then I saw a face, an Asian face, and he looked my way. I ducked down.

“It’s the Chinese,” I hissed, backing down the stairs.

I picked up my rifle and kneeled on the hard-packed earth floor. Above our heads we could hear muffled voices and their boots walking around the house.

Chuck squinted in the dim light, listening. “Is that Chinese?”

It sounds Chinese.

The boots stopped, and then we heard someone going up the stairs and then back down and out onto the porch.

“Maybe they’re just having a look around?” said Lauren quietly, hopefully.

And then—

“Mike!” someone outside yelled.

Are they yelling my name?

I looked at Chuck, frowning, and he shrugged back. The voice was very familiar.

“Mike! Chuck! Are you guys here?” yelled the voice again.

I looked around the cellar at everyone.

Is that Vince’s voice?

“We’re down here,” called out Susie.

“Shhhh,” I said angrily, but it was too late.

Footsteps thumped across the grass, and then one of the cellar doors opened. Leaning back, squinting into the light, I pointed my gun at the door, just as Vince’s head appeared.

June 29

THE BABY SCREAMED and screamed in my arms. It was slippery, still wet, but I held onto her—and smiled.

“It’s a girl,” I said, tears streaming down my face. “It’s a girl.”

Lauren looked at me. She was soaked in sweat. I took a step over and handed her our baby.

“She’s so beautiful,” I whispered as I put her in Lauren’s arms. It was very warm, hot even, and I was sweating almost as much as Lauren. “What do you want to call her?”

Lauren looked at the baby, laughing, and then looked into my eyes.

“Antonia.”

I laughed, nodding. “Tony’s a good name.”

“Can we take her?” asked the nurse.

Lauren nodded, and the nurse reached over to take Antonia.

“She looks perfectly healthy,” said the doctor, wiping his hands and walking over to the windows. “Can I?”

I looked at Lauren, and she nodded, so I nodded too.

The doctor smiled and pulled back the curtains, revealing a crowd of faces in the hallway—Vince, Chuck, Sergeant Williams, Lauren’s mother and father, and more. We were back in Presbyterian Hospital in New York, the same place that we’d evacuated in what seemed like a different world just a few months ago. Susie was holding up Luke so he could see. I gave two thumbs-up, and they erupted into cheers.

“You okay?” I asked Lauren.

The nurse and doctor were cleaning Antonia, giving her a quick physical exam. The doctor looked toward me after a minute and then walked over, holding Antonia, giving her back to Lauren. After everything we’d endured, we’d decided not to find out the sex of the baby beforehand. She was a gift we wanted to uncover one small piece at a time.

“Bring your friends in if you want,” said the doctor. “Everything is perfect. It’s a minor miracle after everything she went through.”

I smiled at the doctor, and then down at little Antonia, before waving at the window for everyone to come in.

Chuck burst through first, holding a bottle of champagne in his artificial hand and four flutes in the other. They’d had to amputate his hand in the end, even after getting into the hospital, but he had money and good insurance. The robotic prosthetic they replaced his hand with was amazing. Even better than his old hand, Chuck liked to joke.

Gripping the bottle, he popped the cork off as everyone came into the room to congratulate Lauren and have a look at Antonia. I walked toward him as he filled two flutes, the champagne overflowing and spilling onto the floor.

“Here’s to never giving up,” he laughed, handing me a glass. “And, of course, to Antonia.”

Vince joined us, taking a glass from Chuck.

“And here’s to being wrong.”

I laughed and shook my head.

“To being wrong.”

It was the first time we’d laughed about it, and it felt good. Drinking our toasts, we watched the crowd gather around Lauren and Antonia.

I’d certainly been wrong, but then the whole world had been wrong.

It both had, and hadn’t, been a Chinese army base in the middle of Washington.

The Chinese had been
invited
to set up a temporary camp in the middle of Washington. It was only there for a few weeks, part of a massive international humanitarian relief effort of equipment and manpower to help the East Coast dig itself out from under the “CyberStorm,” as the media had started to call it.

The scale of the disaster wasn’t apparent for the first two weeks, at least from the outside. Communications had been totally disrupted, and the patchy reporting authorities did get indicated that power and water and emergency services would be quickly restored. In most parts of the country they were, all except for Manhattan.

By themselves, the cyberdisruptions would have been temporarily crippling, but combined with a crumbling New York infrastructure where aging pipes, long corroded by seawater, burst when they froze up from the water stoppage and cold temperatures, and the heavy snow and ice that had downed power and telephone lines and blocked roads—all together it had created a deadly trap that killed tens of thousands of people.

“You okay, Mike?” asked Chuck.

I smiled. “You’re not mad anymore?”

“I was never mad
at you
, more at this whole situation. I just needed a little time. We all did.”

It was nearly four months since we’d been rescued, and it had been a hard four months. Ellarose had been hospitalized for malnutrition after losing nearly half of her body weight, and Chuck had been in the hospital for over a month as well. All of us had been sick.

I turned to Vince. “I still don’t know how to thank you.”

Tony had dropped Vince off near his family’s place towards the end of January, and within a week or so they had power restored and things had started to return to normal. He’d tried to track us down and eventually had gotten in touch with Lauren’s family.

When nobody had heard from us, they’d searched for Chuck’s place, but the electronic land registries weren’t back online yet, so they couldn’t get the address of Chuck’s cabin. Vince had an approximate idea of the location, so he’d led a search party up into the mountains to find us.

Vince looked at the floor.

“It’s me that should be thanking you. You saved my life too, letting me stay with you in your building.”

Hiding in the cellar when Vince arrived, I’d seen what I thought was a Chinese soldier, but in reality it was an American soldier, an Asian-American of Japanese descent as it turned out. But in my paranoid mind, it was only possible for me to see one thing.

It’d been the same on my walk into Washington.

I’d already decided it was the Chinese that had attacked us, so everything I’d seen had just reinforced my prejudice. Climbing out onto the roof of the museum, by chance I’d been right in front of the Chinese Corps of Engineers. They were there because the Chinese were the only ones that had replacements for, and the skilled manpower to install, the twenty-ton electrical generators that had been wrecked.

If I’d bothered to look more closely when I’d been on that roof, I would have noticed, further away from me, Indian and Japanese faces, and even French and Russian and German ones. The entire international community had rallied to America’s side once the scale of the disaster had become known, especially when it began to emerge exactly
what
had happened.

I put my glass of champagne down on a side table. After not sleeping, the alcohol was making my head swim.

“I think I’m going to get a coffee,” I announced. “Anyone want one?”

“No thanks,” replied Chuck. “Do you want me to come?”

“Why don’t both of you congratulate Lauren. I’ll be back in a second.”

They nodded and wandered over to the rest of the crowd while I stole off toward the door. Shutting it gently behind me, I made for the vending machines. Today’s edition of the
New York Times
was lying on an attending table, its cover announcing, “
UN Security Council Issues Cyber-Armistice and Forgiveness.
”

I picked it up and began reading.

It was slightly ironic that it was the Iranians who had saved the day by first admitting to some part of the CyberStorm, bringing the world back from the brink of destruction. Of course, they probably hadn’t
meant
to save us, but then it was hard to tell in this new world, where nothing was what it seemed.

As we’d heard on the radio what seemed a lifetime ago, at the start of the third week of the CyberStorm, the Ashiyane group had claimed that they’d released the Scramble virus to attack logistics systems. They’d announced that the Scramble virus was retaliation for the Stuxnet and Flame cyberweapons that the United States had unleashed against Iran. To muddy the waters, they’d released it at the same time the Anomymous hacker network had started its denial-of-service attack against FedEx.

After this, forensic network investigators in China were able to unravel a chain of events that included a splinter group of their own Peoples’ Liberation Army unleashing a cyberattack on the US. Following the dominoes of the CyberStorm back to their origin, the investigators found that everything had started with a power failure in Connecticut, and they tracked this back to an attack by a Russian criminal group.

Bit by bit, it became clear that this Russian criminal gang had hacked into the backup systems of hedge funds in Connecticut, inserting a worm designed to modify backup financial records when the power at the hedge funds’ primary locations went out. It was the Russian criminal group that had initiated the first power outages in Connecticut in an attempt to siphon money from the hedge funds.