CHAPTER 55
“The reports are starting to come in, Mister President,” said Secretary of State Allison Lukas. Tall and rather matronly with a helmet of honey blond hair, Lukas turned away from the com panel.
The PEOC immediately erupted into a low murmur as the President and his senior staff took their seats at the table.
It had been two days since their last meeting in these chambers and in that time things had greatly deteriorated. Now, vast swatches of the country were without electricity. When the power was on, media outlets in the northern states kept issuing grisly reports of people found frozen to death in their living rooms, sitting in their easy chairs next to their Christmas trees, in between stories about continuing chemical spills, fires and transportation disasters. With the resulting shortages of food and water, rioting had started to break out in cities and towns nationwide. Everything was falling apart. The stock market had completely collapsed and with it the banking system. ATMs had stopped working. The airlines, railroads, bus lines and all organized transportation systems were indefinitely grounded. Despite pleas for calm from the White House, the President had been forced to call out the National Guard in all fifty states, in truth less to combat the fires and accidents and chemical spills than to simply keep order.
For the first few hours following HAL2’s assault on America’s military and infrastructure, the White House had issued reports to the media that the cyber-attacks were coming from various locations around the world. In other words, although it was difficult to tell, they did not appear to be the work of any one particular nation state.
Despite this official analysis, when the chemical spills began, FOX News very publicly accused Iran’s Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Cyber Fighters of launching the cyber-attacks. And an unofficial source, reputedly tied to Israel’s ultra-secret cyber squad Unit 8200, agreed.
In order to minimize panic, even well after they were convinced about the reality of HAL2, the White House continued to issue statements that the attacks appeared to be the work of terrorist hactivists. The President’s advisers reasoned that people were already familiar with criminal hackers, so-called Black Hats who stole financial data, committed online fraud, or who created phishing Web pages that were so much like the real thing, they fooled people into revealing all kinds of personal and financial information about themselves. And the media, eager to blame someone or something, took up the cry. The New York Post named it The Virus, with a capital V. USA Today, more ominously, called it The Plague.
Anonymous quickly responded, saying that they had had nothing to do with the deadly attacks. The truth, it turned out, was far more insidious. Upon further analysis it was revealed that Piratbyrån, Anonymous, Wikileaks, and several other hactivist organizations, as well as dozens of torrent sites, had been unwitting pawns in the spread of HAL2, just as ibn Barzani had said in his videotaped self-recording, right before HAL2s blond assassin had paid him a visit and hanged him from the rafters of his stuga in Sweden. Somehow, Zimmerman’s cyber-doppelgänger had managed to plant snippets of code into the hactivist systems so that all the botnets they created, each slave computer, instead of reporting to them and doing their bidding, turned control over to HAL2.
By the time they reconvened in the PEOC under the White House, the official position was that the United States and many other industrialized nations around the world, including all NATO allies, were being attacked by a number of global terrorist hacktivist organizations using malware and viruses but that the country’s nuclear deterrent system and codes were secure, and that — while the state of martial law would continue for the foreseeable future — the President and his staff were fully confident the U.S. Military was up to the task of defending the nation from this new twenty-first century threat.
There was no talk of HAL2, or about any newly formed artificial intelligence taking over the Internet and all IP-based systems worldwide. In order to avoid causing more panic, it was felt by most Western leaders that leaving this extra detail out of the news, at least for the moment, was probably best, and any discussion of HAL2 was labeled Top Secret. Why alarm the public further when they were about to launch a campaign designed to eliminate the threat permanently?
A young NSA analyst named Mason, with a crew cut, round face and sleepy gray eyes, sat at the communications terminal next to the Secretary of State. He turned to the President at the head of the table and said, “The porcupines have entered the valley.”
Given that they could not communicate directly with soldiers in the field for fear of being discovered, they had orchestrated an elaborate system of messaging involving code words and mostly human transmission. Whenever intelligence was passed back to the White House electronically, it was always clothed in odd language.
“All the soldiers are now in place within their respective missile silos, Mister President,” translated Secretary of Defense Pancetta. “And all the pilots are ready. We should know within a minute or so.”
Everyone looked up at the digital clock on the wall. They had less than two minutes before they had to initiate the launch codes and feed in the target coordinates.
Decker watched the numbers diminish.
1:54. 1:53. 1:52. 1:51.
For two days, he had been housed at Fort Meade, in an officer’s bungalow, a guest of the U.S. government — but, essentially, a prisoner. He had not been allowed to leave the premises, nor had he been able to contact anyone either on or off the base. The only news about the chaos breaking out around the world had filtered in on the lips of passing soldiers, or had been scrounged through subterfuge from his personal nursemaid, the stone-faced and all too laconic Sergeant Stephen P. Swan.
Decker looked at the people around him.
Secretary of Defense Pancetta, tapping the tabletop, burning off energy, his eyes shiny and black. 1:28. 1:27. 1:26.
Secretary of State, Lukas, leaning over Mason, the NSA analyst, keeping an eye on the console.
White House Chief of Staff Lamb, National Security Advisor Dolan, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Flannery, Homeland Security Director Pignateli, General Alexander Darius. :59.:58.
Glaringly absent were Rory Woodcock and Ted Hellard, Decker noticed. Although Sergeant Swan, Decker’s own personal watcher, was still present.
The President, of course. He sat at the end of the table, deep in thought, his eyes closed, as though praying.
And Lulu.:36.:35.
Decker hadn’t seen her since their last meeting in the PEOC. She looked different now, for some reason. Smaller. Less alluring. Perhaps it had just been one of those things after all.
Until she turned and looked into his eyes. Then, it all went to hell once again.
“Five, four, three, two, one.” The Secretary of State shifted from the communications console and faced the central table. “It’s begun.”
Decker imagined the missile silo doors opening, revealing the very tops of the ICBMs. He could see the keys turn, see the instruction sets course along the electrical filaments, the wires that ran back into all those systems controls. He saw the flames first appear and then brighten, then roar. Heard the engines burst into life. Felt the tunnels shudder and shake as the giant rockets lifted themselves up out of the ground, slowly at first, lumbering, and then more quickly, gathering speed as the flames of the fires beneath them turned golden, then white. They climbed out of the earth, out of reinforced bunkers or false barns and grain silos, out of the tops of faux farmhouses. They lifted and climbed and broke free of the earth, climbing higher and higher in the blaze of their engines. When, without warning, systems started to fail.