There was a collective gasp in the room. Decker found himself glancing up at the ceiling, as if he could somehow peer through the concrete and steel, through the various levels and floors, up, up, through the clouds to the heavens above. He imagined the planes flying blind, the pilots unable to see anything electronically, relying exclusively on their all-too-fallible eyes. It was just about dusk on the East Coast. Soon, they’d be flying VFR through the dark.
“We’ve had reports of three mid-air collisions already. One, outside Sacramento. The others over Newark, New Jersey, and Norfolk, Virginia. Thousands of casualties. Area hospitals are already overrun. No, wait. The incident in Norfolk wasn’t an aviation disaster. Sorry, sir. It’s the Federal Railroad Administration. They just announced freight derailments in Norfolk, Long Beach and Chicago. Plus, Kansas City.”
Dixon looked up from the screen. “I have a call coming in from New York. It’s Doctor Woodcock, sir.”
“Patch him in,” Hellard said.
For a while nothing happened. In truth, they waited for only a few seconds, but those seconds seemed like forever to Decker.
He sat in the back of the room, cramped in the corner, his hands cuffed behind him and his manacled feet stuffed under his seat. The blood had already drained from his fingers and he had long ago lost feeling in both of his hands.
The conference room was stuffy and small, like something you might find in an old Holiday Inn. Besides Hellard, McCullough, Lulu and Decker, there was Dixon, a young NSA analyst, a stern-looking Colonel from Homeland Security, a general who was attached to Hellard somehow, currently assigned to Cyber Command, plus a Marine Sergeant whose sole function seemed to be to make Decker uncomfortable. Decker shifted in his seat once again, earning another reproving look from the Sergeant. Sweat ran down his back.
As they sat there waiting for the disembodied voice of Rory Woodcock to waft in over the airwaves, they watched images of news reports flash across the flat screen TVs on the walls all around them. Fires and gas explosions. Pileups on highways. Derailments and railroad crossing disasters. Other screens displayed streams of text sentences. But they weren’t DoD networks. They looked like Twitter feeds and SMS peer-to-peer messages.
“Ted? Ted, is that you?” It was Rory Woodcock.
“Finally. I’m here, Rory,” said Hellard. “What’s happening in New York?”
“What do you think’s happening? It’s fucking anarchy here. We’ve had intermittent blackouts for the last ninety minutes. I just got off the phone with the Chairman of the Fed and he told me all their data centers and backups have been compromised. Not just by the power outages. He insists it was a calibrated assault. DTCC and SIAC are both down.”
“Those are major financial computer centers in lower Manhattan,” Lulu explained to the group.
“Which means,” Woodcock continued, “that nobody knows who owns what.”
“They scrambled the FAT,” Lulu said. “The table that tells you which pieces of code belong to what file.”
“That’s right. And if no one knows who owns what,” Woodcock said, “the entire system will collapse by tomorrow.”
One of the large TV monitors glowed crimson with flames. The volume was turned down but Decker could easily read the white copy stenciled across the front of the image: Washington Metro Tunnel Derailment. Another featured a fire with the words: Little Rock Gas Pipeline Explosion Kills Thousands. And yet another read: Washington State Dams Burst — Floods Destroy Seven Towns. The screen displayed a valley covered in rubble, trees laid out like matchsticks, as if they’d been flattened by a nuclear explosion.
Suddenly, the lights and TV monitors flickered. They flickered once more and went out.
“Not again,” Hellard sighed. “Now what, Captain?”
“It’s the same thing, sir,” Dixon answered. “We’re trying to remove any IP connection to the backup power generators but it’s taking longer than expected. Each time we disconnect the grid from the NET, some dormant piece of code on some PC somewhere on the base reactivates the connection. Whoever they are, they’ve pre-programmed ways to tie us back in, using software backdoors already in place, just waiting to open. It’s a cat and mouse game.”
The lights and the monitors suddenly popped back to life.
“Ah, there you go, sir. I’m afraid we’ve lost Doctor Woodcock, though,” she concluded.
The screens on the walls of the cramped conference room bled with fire. They displayed TV feeds from various local stations from across the country, as well as IP video, both streaming and recently uploaded clips from YouTube and Vimeo.
In the space of just a few seconds, in the amount of time it had taken for the most recent backup power system to kick in and activate, another one hundred and fifty or so metropolitan areas had been thrown into chaos.
Many of the blackouts were occurring during rush hour, causing massive confusion and accidents as millions of stop lights, street lights and illuminated street signs blinked, sputtered and died. Thousands of residents in cities from Wilmington to Houston were just getting off work, traveling to or from school, or at home making dinner when they found the air around them grow suddenly toxic. They clutched at their throats as the hot fleshy membrane of their lungs melted away, they stumbled and dropped to the ground. In the streets. On sidewalks. Or while driving their cars, causing yet further accidents. Old folks in their apartments and houses waiting by their dormant TVs. Babies recently laid down for a nap. None would ever awaken.
Planes flying blind crashed into each other, lighting up the night sky like fireworks. Pipelines in more than thirty major city centers were already on fire, many having inexplicably exploded without any warning, sending blossoms of fire several hundred feet in the air. Terabytes of financial information locked inside data centers were instantaneously transformed into so much digital goo. Weather, navigation and communications satellites, once stable, now spun out of control, muted, unmoored, flung out of their orbits by a few lines of bad code.
It’s like what had happened in Lulu’s apartment in Cambridge, thought Decker, and in Zimmerman’s house in Vermont, except on a national scale. He stared at the images of disaster on the screens all about him. None of it seemed real. But it was. It was happening. And not just here, in this country, but globally. Reports were coming in from all over the world.
“Sir, we have a call from the White House. You and your team. Doctor Woodcock too. You’re to shuttle down to D.C. right away. The Secretary of Defense. He just made an announcement.” Dixon paused, took a breath.
“What? What announcement?” asked Hellard.
“We’re at DEFCON 2. For the first time since the Cuban Missile Crisis, sir. And there’s more.”
“Great. What else?”
“The President’s declared martial law.”
CHAPTER 53
The 5,000-square-foot intelligence management center in the basement of the West Wing of the White House, known collectively as The Situation Room, was managed 24/7 by approximately thirty senior officers from various agencies in the military and Intelligence Community. They were responsible for maintaining command and control of U.S. forces around the world on behalf of the President, they conducted secure communications with overseas VIPs, and they monitored global events on a continuous basis in order to keep the President and senior staff apprised of key incidents.