DEAD BEEF (Our Cyber World Book 1) (40 page)

Chapter 51

The message appeared on Brother Spencer’s screen as soon as he probed the first cell tower. “Julian, it’s been fun, but it’s time to stop. Your location is 10 miles north of Fort Collins, in an old abandoned warehouse. I can have a Collections team there in less than 10 minutes. Fold it up and say goodbye to your friends. Please, Julian. Remember I love you like a brother. Don’t make me do this.” The GPS coordinates followed.

Masoud and Brother Spencer, a.k.a., Julian stared at the screen in disbelief. Masoud made a call in his radio and a conversation ensued in Arabic, ending with Masoud barking what sounded like commands.

“There’s no one out there,” Masoud said. “We have strong brothers in Jihad outside, and they’re well equipped to withstand an attack.” Masoud reached into a long skinny bag and extracted a long curved sword. “Nonetheless,” he was saying, “we are operating on borrowed time. It’s time to press the attack.”

“Brother, I told you,” Julian said, “I have some adjustments to make to the code. These missile control centers are running some old-school stuff, and the new stuff won’t work on them.”

“You wouldn’t be stalling, would you, bro’ Spencer?” Masoud asked, turning the sword this way and that so that Julian could see it glistening in the light. “Let us get on with it. Even if your code is not perfect, Allah will grant you success.”

“I told you before. I don’t put out crappy work, bro. It reflects poorly on me... and on Allah who makes all things perfect, right?”

Masoud’s expression hardened. “Do not play with me, Julian. I know what you have been doing, stalling for days and giving us the run-around. Yes, your code and hovercrafts are excellent, and it is time to use them! Do it before I execute you like the
Kafir
you are.”

Julian went to work, now strongly suspecting he would get the infidel treatment by execution no matter what he did or how this ended.

“Hovercrafts aloft,” the president and his Situation Room team heard Martin Spencer say. Using the spare bandwidth that cell tower connectivity gave him, Martin Spencer and his team were piping a computer view of the Wyoming, Nebraska, Colorado (WNC) area via secured connection. It began to fill with dots in three separate locations.

Spencer read out the GPS coordinates for his field teams, then said, “Nebraska location, counting seventy-five, seventy-eight, now eighty nodes and holding. Colorado at full strength, eighty. Wyoming seventy-seven, seventy-nine, eighty.”

A minute passed, and Spencer added, “Holding at eighty times three, two hundred and forty total nodes. This attack will take longer. We’ll make sure of that. Happy hunting. Going radio-silent on our end.”

In the Situation Room, they watched in silence, as the swarms of hovercraft moved across fields of green. Even in the two dimensional view, the movement of the hovercraft was eerie in its bee-like motion. Then the view switched to a 3D angle of view to show altitude.

Odehl felt a chill going down his spine. “Jesus!” he said, and he wasn’t the only one in the room that said it.

Beloski was driving the pickup truck, and Cynthia admitted to herself that he was doing a fairly good job of it. That would be fine, so that she could be hands free in case gun play was required. Cynthia was pretty sure it would come to that soon.

An Israeli team followed her in a Suburban to complete a 2 vehicle team, which along with the Israeli helicopter team flying above, was supposed to cover the Nebraska sector. They wouldn’t get that far. A few miles east of I-25, the helicopter team spotted a swarm of hovercraft coming east, headed right for them.

“Team #2, you have inbound, 40 hovercraft in total, another 40 on a holding pattern two miles beyond.”

“They’re coming straight for us!” Beloski said.

“Keep it straight and smooth,” Cynthia said. A moment later she was crawling out the passenger window and maneuvering her body to get to the bed of the truck. She went slowly and carefully, then at the last second, dove for the bed.

Cynthia had planned what came next. She wore the harness Leticia had used in Mammoth to make the rappel drop from the fire lookout. She knelt on the bed of the truck and using two tethers she’d arranged before they set out, she latched herself in. Now it was just a matter of taking the AK-47 she had left on the bed of the truck, standing, and steading herself on the roof of the truck cabin to aim her rifle. She hoped she could do that last part without eating too many bugs.

Such a thought vanished when Cynthia saw the hovercraft closing in. She heard them, too, a mechanical flying bee hive. They were flying in a wide triangle, one in front, two behind it, three behind the two and so on, fifteen in total.

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Martin has said twenty inbound. Where were the remaining five hovercraft? She heard a louder and higher pitch whine up above. Five hovercraft were circling the helicopter. They moved erratically and unpredictably, but fully in control, at all times maintaining their quarry surrounded. She could see flashes of gunfire coming out the side of the helicopter. The airborne team were trying to shoot down the drones, and failing.

Down at her level, the formation of fifteen hovercraft continued to close in. Cynthia began to fire two round bursts. The hovercrafts banked hard right then left, and began to zigzag violently, all the while maintaining their formation. She heard more gunfire up above, and she looked up just in time to see one of the hovercraft slide away from the other 4, then seemingly throw itself into the helicopter’s tail rotor. It connected with a spark, and the helicopter began to spin out of control.

Below her Beloski was yelling something, but Cynthia could not take the time to make out what he was saying. The hovercraft formation was now right on top of her. They broke formation, their small engines whining violently as they began to fly in every which direction, left, right, down, up.

Cynthia turned around just in time to see the Suburban careening out of control, first accelerating then veering left and stopping after the engine cut out. She was looking on in disbelief when to her right she heard a clank followed by an explosion. The helicopter had crashed.

The hovercrafts came back around and caught up with the truck. They began to swarm around it. Afraid one of them would hit her, she dropped to her knees and tried to aim her rifle to take a shot. It was no use, Cynthia said to herself. They were moving in crazy, unpredictable ways, and shooting at them would be a waste of ammunition.

Beloski stopped the truck and got out, crouching. “What the hell do we do?” he asked.

“They stopped that Suburban,” Cynthia said.

“Of course they did,” Beloski replied. “They took control of the Suburban’s computer.”

“How?”

“Does it matter?”

“How come it didn’t work on us?” she asked, hearing their engine still idling.

“We don’t have electronics on this truck.”

Cynthia remembered Martin poking under the hood at the rendezvous point off the 395.
Good
, he had said.
No electronics
.

“We should go see if they have any survivors,” Beloski said now. By now the hovercrafts had given up and were flying away, toward the north.

Cynthia saw the occupants of the Suburban running toward the crash site, and she said, “They got it. We need to go after those things.”

Beloski hopped on the driver seat, and a moment later they too sped north.

Martin muttered under his breath.

“What are you seeing?” Chana asked.

“IP-hopping,” Itzak said. “It makes it harder to lock on and connect to a device.”

“Well, right now this one is just about impossible to lock. Rather than using a long string pattern that you could eventually decode and anticipate, this hopping is totally random. I have no idea how to break in. Even if I generate my candidate IPs randomly... well, it might work, I just wouldn’t initially know which node I’m hooking.”

“Do we pull the big lever, Martin?” Sasha asked.

“What is this big lever?” Chana asked.

“If I’m not locked in 60 seconds, do it.”