Storm Tide Rising: Blackout Volume 2 (33 page)

Tic.

Tic.

Tic.

Ch.53

Calculated Risk

Commander Terry Price walked through empty halls, his footfalls echoing loudly in his own ears. With only one shift working on system maintenance, the halls had become empty and desolate in the deep of night. He'd been sending teams out for weeks, groups of men with four or five of the seasoned special operations soldiers and between ten to fifteen conscripts from the facility. Each team had a specific objective to accomplish, but their broader mission was simply to remind survivors that they were not alone.

It had been a difficult decision to begin drawing down the staff at the facility, but Commander Price was sure it was the right one. The large number of men had presented a security challenge that was insurmountable. Enemy agents had been planted among his people, despite Terry's best efforts to keep the staff filtered through his own discretion. He felt the burden of the lives that had been lost because he'd assumed his own security measures would be sufficient.

The Commander stopped outside a heavy set of steel reinforced doors. He took a deep breath, swiped his ID card and keyed in a nine digit access code. There was a series of loud clicks as the electromagnetic relays that controlled the thick steel deadbolts swung open in unison. Commander Price pulled the door open and stepped inside.

As soon as he was past the threshold, a buzzer sounded loudly, and the doors began to close on hydraulic hinges. At this point it would take a force greater than fifty thousand foot pounds to keep the doors ajar. It closed, and there was a heavy thud as the locks slid home and secured the entrance. Terry had long since recoded this set of doors so that only he could gain entry to the server towers and the main core systems. To reach the banks of supercomputers in charge of managing the vast amount of data stored here would take Terry through four more hatches similar to the one he'd just cleared, but that would be unnecessary this evening.

Commander Price stood in a large chamber that had conduit running along the ceiling on the right side of the room and, on the left, the terminal end of a closed ventilation system that fed only this wing of the facility. This originally had been envisioned as the antechamber to the final fall back location of a group of VIP politicians in the seventies and early eighties, should the unthinkable eventuality happen while they were stranded on the west coast. In the event of a nuclear attack, the President and his immediate circle would find themselves in a similarly equipped facility within a three hour flight from any point in the United States.

Once the cold war was over, many sites such as this one had been re-tasked. The outer facility was simply a support structure that had been added to house the staff and to cover the actual intent of the facility as a whole. Even the solar farm on the hillsides surrounding the helipad had been added as part of the facade and to provide power to the crew facility without drawing off the closed nuclear fission system that ran the servers and the data storage components. It was a similar reactor to those that powered nuclear subs for long periods of time, and it had at one point been a precursor to a design destined for deployment in the first manned missions to Mars.

Here, it would provide constant, consistent power to the servers and the supercomputer control system for more than two hundred years. Human intervention typically wasn't needed to monitor the power plant, and the small maintenance that was needed was easily automated, given the spare computing power of the control systems. The antechamber was the bridge between the computer isolation unit Commander Price had spent decades designing and implementing in all four sites. No matter what the facility looked like above ground, the real heart of each site was identical.

The Commander walked over to one side of the room where a small computer sat on a low cabinet. There was an LED monitor, a keyboard and mouse, and the tower on the open sever cabinet underneath the flat top. The computer didn't have any housing. It was only two motherboards connected by ribbons of computer cabling. Commander Price pulled out a small network PCI card and plugged it into an open slot on one of the motherboards. The display automatically opened and began running a series of program installations.

Every time the card was used, the final step before disconnecting was to erase and format the entire unit. The only way to really make sure that it was completely clean was to put it in blank. The auto-run programs that kicked in when it was plugged into the mother board also initiated a reformat first, just in case.

In the entire facility, this was the only system that had direct, active outgoing signal capability that was completely untraceable and completely cutoff from all other networks. It ran on a dedicated fiber network to the other three facility sites—nowhere else. It couldn't access any other system, so it was, therefore, the last means of secure communication among the sites should all other avenues fail.

The Commander waited while the installation programs cycled, and in a few moments a window popped open requesting a pass code, which the Commander entered. He connected an Ethernet line to the network card, and a new window popped open with a simple graphic display. There were three facilities listed, but two were grayed out and unavailable. Commander Price double clicked on the one icon that was active, and a messenger window popped up. After a brief hesitation, Commander Price began typing and hit enter.

{Chief Admin}
What do you hope to gain?

There was a long silence on the other end of the line as Commander Price waited for the reply he hoped would come. This messaging system ran off the old ARPANET code from the original secure network the DoD had established that eventually spawned the World Wide Web. The coding was ancient, but it was predictable. Filter programs on both ends of the line would strip each message and examine it for hidden viruses and bugs. Only the correct code would be allowed through, no matter who sent it.

Finally, the system beeped once.

[Unknown Admin]
What do all men hope to gain? Power.

Commander Price stared at the reply and felt chills run down his spine. The system beeped again as a second message came through.

[Unknown Admin]
I take it Jefferson has been.....retired?

Commander Price felt his pulse race at that comment, and it took serious effort to control his flash of furious indignation. His fingers flew across the keyboard as he typed in his response.

{Chief Admin} 
Retired? He confessed to high treason, mass murder, and insurrection. I executed him.

[Unknown Admin] 
Semantics. You have proven resourceful. Are you interested in a position? A protectorate has suddenly become available...

Commander Price's blood ran cold and his stomach turned. He took several deep, slow breaths to maintain his composure. He knew that whoever was on the other end of the line had to be the person who had set the entire plan in motion, the one who had given the orders that had brought down the United States. This mastermind was trying, deliberately, to get under his skin and to take control of the situation, and he had to keep that from happening.

{Chief Admin} 
Before I executed him, Jefferson told me that the Russians never lived up to their commitments. Do you think you can really hold the nation without their help?

[Unknown Admin] 
Treason is a funny word. You see, I have copies of laws that name who is supposed to take control in a full national emergency where the C in C is either dead or incapacitated, and it isn't you, Commander Price. The legitimate authority rests in a different office.

{Chief Admin} 
If you know my rank, then you must have an idea of the oath I took, the oath every single member of my staff took. We swore to support and defend the Constitution against all enemies foreign, and domestic. You definitely fall under the latter category, so you can stop trying to intimidate me. What was your contingency? You must have had one, right?

[Unknown Admin] 
Your backup was ours. The Russians were never a guaranty, but your data vaults were. Everything required to completely take control of the government and commerce of the United States is stored there. We'll have at our fingertips everything from financial accounts to the launch codes for the nuclear arsenal. All we need are the access codes to reach it.

{Chief Admin} 
You have to know that I won't give that to you. If you try to force entry into the system, you'll eventually be able to do it. But the best super computer decryption systems available would take about thirty years to crack my encryption algorithms. Eventually any security system will fail. You should know that coming after me to get the access codes won't get you anything. Like you, like Mr. Jefferson, I am ready and willing to die for my cause.

[Unknown Admin] 
That's why we're not coming after you. Tell me, Commander Price, do you really think you'd be able to watch your daughter die to protect—

Commander Price cut the message when he disconnected the Ethernet line and let it drop. The reformatting program began to wipe the memory from the PCI card, and once those programs were finished, he pulled out the network card and shutdown the PC. He slipped the card back into his pocket and strode back to the door leading to the facility. He had to stay focused; being distracted by any personal issues could be deadly - for him and for his men.
He b
egan the methodical process of unlocking the vault door, but his mind wanted to race toward thoughts that he desperately needed to avoid.

He'd taken a calculated risk making contact with the other side, but he'd needed to know that real people were behind it all. Whoever they were, they were definitely real, and they were definitely trying to overthrow the government, destroy the Constitution, and just take it all for their selfish gain. He'd also needed to know if knowledge about the daughter he'd given up for adoption two decades earlier went farther than the agents in the facility. That last question from the other side had shaken him to his very core and had awakened a kind of cold, paralyzing terror that he'd never felt before, even on the battlefield.

Truth be told, he wasn't really sure how he would have answered it—and that scared him even more.

Ch. 54

Mobile

Mike opened his eyes suddenly and sat up. He was confused and when he blinked, it felt like he had sand in his eyelids. A sharp pain answered when he tried to lift his left hand to wipe his face, and he hissed sharply.

"It's okay, Mike," Alyssa's voice said soothingly off to his right. "We're safe. You're safe, and everything's okay. Just relax."

Mike finally raised his right hand and rubbed the heel of his palm into his eyes, trying to clear the faint fogginess that lingered in his head. The sharp, stabbing pain in his left arm had eased to a dull, aching throb. He pulled himself gingerly into a sitting position and swung his legs around to the right to face Alyssa. As he did so, though, he tottered as a wave of vertigo swept over him and made the room spin like top. He felt thin and weak and cold, which was probably the most startling thing. Mike was always the one person sweating when everyone else in the room shivered.

And now he was cold enough to pull the thin blanket up around his shoulders as far as possible, because he was shivering uncontrollably.

"Are you okay?"  Alyssa asked softly, putting her hand gently on his shoulder.

Mike nodded as best he could, but, still disoriented and confused, all he could manage was a dry croak, "Where are we?"

Alyssa helped him prop himself up and handed him a small glass of water. Mike looked at the water, but he was too tired to care where it came from or whether or not it was clean. The water tasted slightly cool and faintly of a plastic bottle—it was glorious. He drank greedily and almost choked as half the water went down the wrong pipe. Mike coughed and sputtered for a moment, and despite the pain, he drank again.

Alyssa took the cup from Mike and helped him lay back down. She covered his shoulders again with the blanket, and his shivering subsided a little. "We're at the Whitewater Center," she answered. "What's the last thing you remember?"

Mike blinked again as he tried to sort through his jumbled memories. It was such an odd question to be asked, and even odder that he was having so much trouble answering it. Finally, he shrugged his shoulders slightly. "The last thing I remember clearly is cutting the fence at the refugee camp," Mike answered. "I cut my arm pretty bad, and then I think I passed out from blood loss. Everything after that is a little hazy."

Alyssa nodded and rubbed his right arm reassuringly. "Well, the important thing is you're awake."

Mike chuckled. "You sound like that's some kind of surprise."

Alyssa's face paled, and she looked down at her hands. "Mike, you got real sick there for a while. Your arm was all swollen and red, and your fever started climbing. I went out with Alex and searched a few houses that he knew were empty. We found antibiotics in one and gave you some, but they were expired, and I don't know if they helped or hurt things. Tylenol and Ibuprofen barely kept your fever in control."

When she looked back up at him, large tears were rolling down her cheeks. "Even with all of that, you just kept getting worse. The infection was killing you, and we knew the only way to save your life was to cut off your arm, but none of us could do it. When you stopped eating, we all thought you were done."

Alyssa faded into ragged sobs, and Mike shifted over to the cot she was laying on. He put his thin right arm around her shoulders and looked down at the bony left hand in his lap. His forearm was still wrapped in a large gauze bandage, but his wrist and fingers were exposed enough that he could see nearly all the flesh had dissolved off them.