DEAD BEEF (Our Cyber World Book 1) (37 page)

Chapter 47

The first wave of attacks started at 4 AM, when after dropping off two of the young brothers atop two public parking structures in downtown Cheyenne, Wyoming, two gray SUVs began to release hovercrafts as they drove around town. The two young brothers had laptops and high-powered transmitters which they used to control the hovercrafts and execute the mission commands, just as Brother Martin Spencer had taught them.

The two driving teams released only sixteen hovercraft, eight from each SUV. They headed out of Cheyenne after the release operation. These sixteen hovercraft would not be recovered nor would they receive new batteries since their mission would be brief, well within their two hour charge. They would not be needed for any other part of the overall operation, though Brother Spencer did mention that if the supply of hovercrafts ran low in other parts of the field, a backup plan to retrieve the sixteen could be set in place. For this reason, the two young brothers now monitoring their crafts aloft over the city were instructed to land them at their locations, and stash them in the stairwell, until the time when a pickup vehicle could be sent to collect them.

Ortiz and Beloski were guarding the outside door, while Ochoa and Cynthia tried to get some sleep. Inside the building in what had once served as a functional mockup missile control center, Martin, Sasha and Israeli information technology expert, Itzak, toiled away on their array of laptop computers. The semi-circular room stood well for this purpose. Even in mothballs, it had several hardwired high speed connections to the Internet, a few of which Martin and team were using. As a backup, Martin and Sasha had set up 2 satellite phones, their antennas poking through a window whose glass they had smashed. Cell phone connectivity was a third option, but Martin had elected not to use it unless absolutely necessary. His choice received validation at 4:30 AM.

“It’s started,” Sasha announced.

Martin woke up from a shallow snooze and looked at his computer screen, “They’re going after the cell towers.”

“Just as we thought,” Sasha said. “Trying to add to their COMM link capability by taking them over.”

Martin had locked onto one of the attacking nodes and was probing it for vulnerabilities. “It’s a tough nut to crack,” he said. “Definitely Julian’s chaos-based crap. It keeps shifting on me every time I try to get a fix.”

“Grab the towers, then?” Sasha asked.

“Do it.”

With version 1.x2 code they’d installed the night before into the cell tower infrastructure in the WNC area, Sasha sent a couple of commands.

“Confirmed,” Sasha said after running a couple of diagnostic tests. “They’re ours and offline until we bring them up.”

To anyone talking on a cell phone at that moment, they would have heard a loud piercing shriek, and then a pop inside their cellphones as a capacitor popped open. Idle phones in the on state and connected to the cell tower network would have also succumbed to a component failure. To anyone lucky enough to have their phones off at the time of the outage, upon first use they would receive a text message apologizing for the outage and assuring them that their phone cell service provider was working to resolve the issue.

“Good work,” Chana said behind them. To Sasha's chagrin, Chana had stayed with them once her team left before midnight, noting that she was in no condition for field work and that she could be one more gun to protect Martin’s headquarters if it came to that.

“How is it going with those nodes?” Sasha asked Martin, ignoring Chana’s comment and proximity.

“Almost there,” he said.

“God! Look at how those things move around,” Sasha noted, pointing at the screen where Martin had brought up a version of Google maps that superimposed the moving node locations. “It looks like a swarm of bees.”

That was a good way to describe it, Martin reflected, and the code inside each of these things was behaving much the same way. “Man, this thing is a mess, but I think I got it now.”

Martin executed a command script, and the first node blinked off. Then, he batched the script to latch on to each of the remaining 15 nodes and their IP addresses and executed it. One by one they blinked off.

“Splash and splat,” Sasha said. When Martin didn’t say anything, she added, “What’s wrong?”

Martin shrugged. “That felt too easy.”

At the White House Situation Room, on-the-ground team reports were coming in from Cheyenne, Wyoming. When they felt they had enough information to bring him in, they called the president at around 7 AM.

He arrived sipping from a cup of coffee. “What do you have for me?”

A picture flashed onto the screen. “Sir, our teams have recovered eleven of these so far, still looking for more.” Other pictures flashed by of different hovercrafts, taken from different angles, in varying states of disrepair.”

“That looks like a toy,” the president noted.

“Yes, sir. We’re anticipating these have been modified, based on the way they look vs. their stock appearance.” A picture from the manufacturer’s website appeared. “At a minimum several have been stripped of their video cameras, and an additional battery pack has been added.”

“I see,” the president said. “So these are our feared UAVs. What were they going after?”

“Apparently, cell tower control. Spencer sent us confirmation that his team stopped that, and took control of the towers for himself. They intend to leave the towers offline until they think it’s safe or necessary to bring them back up. Just one thing, sir.”

“Spit it out,” the president said.

“The way Spencer powered off the towers created some issues. People are reporting ear injury and damaged phones.”

The president nodded. “He warned us about unsettling side-effects. If this is the worst we see, we should be happy.”

Back in the warehouse Julian had monitored the way Martin counter-punched the attack. In a bit of transmitted code Julian intercepted, he found an ASCII text string that read. “I loved you like a brother, Julian.” Julian pushed it aside and went on with the postmortem diagnosis.

“You were not able to capture a single tower,” Masoud said.

“Maybe if you had allowed Fayez to work with me we would have succeeded,” Julian replied. “It’s always best to have two sets of hands, and you can bet Martin has at least one other person typing furiously next to him.”

Julian scrolled through pages of disassembled machine code until he found what he was after. “There, that’s what I really needed out of wave 1,” he said. “It would’ve been nice to grab a few cell towers, but this is the real prize. Now I know how Martin counter-punched, and next time his swing will only catch air.”

Masoud smiled and nodded approvingly.

Chapter 48

Though most of the units around Warren Air Force Base received orders to take up defensive positions and not engage the enemy unless attacked, a team opted to investigate an odd incident. Someone had reported a SUV dropping off young men who in turn would sit along the dirt trails that meandered among missile silo fields. This particular sighting took place in the Nebraska sector.

The team, comprised by two Humvees and a helicopter, approached the reported sighting. It was there they noticed what at first appeared to be a cloud of objects hovering and circling two missile silos in no particular pattern. As the team approached, some of the objects re-vectored in the team’s direction. Within a few minutes, no fewer than twenty hovercrafts began to swarm around the Humvees much in the same haphazard patterns they had exhibited around the silos.

A minute later one of the Humvees accelerated suddenly. The driver, who would not survive this incident, was reported to yell that he had no idea what was going on. His attempts to arrest the Humvees erratic acceleration proved unsuccessful, and after speeding across a deserted field for a mile, he lost control, and the Humvee overturned severely injuring all occupants, with tragic results for the driver who broke his neck in the crash.

From above, the helicopter’s crew saw the incident, and soon they saw the second Humvee succumb to a similar fate. The pilot attempted to communicate back to base camp but found his radio non-operational. The helicopter’s instrumentation also became erratic in its readings, and a few moments later, the pilot found he was having difficulty controlling his aircraft. Summoning every bit of his considerable battle-hardened experience, he managed to bring the helicopter to a successful if rough landing.

As best they could, the helicopter’s crew tended to the injured and sent one private back to get help. He never made it. Days later, he was found with a gunshot to the back of the neck.

The rest of the helicopter’s crew and the surviving occupants of both Humvees finally found relief from their mishap when a rescue team sent out hours later located them.

The incident received top billing on the agenda for president's evening briefing. Looking right at the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the president said, “I thought we gave orders to take defensive positions and avoid forays into the field.”

“Training took over here, Mr. President,” the Chairman said. “They saw something suspicious, and they went to check it out. They reported it to their superiors as they were heading out, and their superiors didn’t call them back.”

The president thought about whether to pursue that line of inquiry and concluded it wasn’t worth it. “Please reiterate our orders to stay out of the field, Mr. Chairman.” Turning to Odehl, he said, “Any idea how these hovercrafts would make the two Humvees and one helicopter lose control like that?”

Robert Odehl seemed to hesitate. “Julian ran an experiment and developed a prototype a few months before he left InfoStream. He claimed it would be a new kind of Electronic Warfare or EW, as it is known. His demonstration involved taking control over a Microwave Oven remotely with nothing more than a computer connected to a transmitter... We should probably get Martin on the line to explain it. Since the project was never accepted for further development, not much was written about it. Most of what I heard amounted to jokes about cooking popcorn via remote control.”

The president frowned and turned to one of his staffers. “Let’s check whether Spencer has a few spare cycles for us.”

The first few minutes on the phone, it was Spencer that asked all of the questions.

“Both Humvees lost control, nearly at the same time?” he asked. When the answer came back in the affirmative, he added, “It’s very unlikely both vehicles would malfunction in the same way that close in time. The hovercrafts have something to do with it.” He paused, and the president allowed him the time without asking a question. “The hovercrafts are also EW capable,” he added. “They are probably using fluctuating magnetic fields to impart signals onto the signal traces in the electrical system of the Humvees, and then gaining control to the onboard computer to throttle the engine.”

“Could you explain how that is possible?” the president asked.

“Maxwell’s equations, Mr. President,” Martin replied. “Current turns into magnetic fields, and magnetic fields into currents. Do that at fluctuating frequencies and you can basically send a pulse train. If that pulse train makes it into the computer via its power lines, it could potentially carry commands that take over the computer. It’s like creating a virtual wireless connection, without the Wi-Fi.”

An expert in the room indicated that was not possible. The amounts of power required were too high. Shielding on power lines would also make such a “leak” of energy very small and it would be nearly impossible to carry a train pulse of sufficient amplitude to do what Spencer described.

“There’s a microwave and some popcorn that says you’re not looking at all the possibilities,” Martin said.

“And what other possibilities would those be?” the expert asked.

“That you don’t need a lot of power if you are in close proximity, say 2 to 5 meters, which is about where these drones were articulating at the time the Humvees lost control, isn’t it? Then there’s another possibility.” There was a pause. “What time did you say this incident happened?”

Someone relayed the time, and Spencer said, “That’s right around the time of the attempted takeover of the cell towers. My guess is you’ll find a cell tower not that far from where this happened. My guess is that the hovercrafts were able to control it briefly, just long enough to send your team an Electromagnetic blast.”

Over the line, they heard commotion.

“I’m sorry, Mr. President,” Spencer said. “I’m going to have to get back to my work here. We’re monitoring some unusual activity.”