“Sergeant Walker! Check it out. You’re not going to believe this shit.”
“What now?” Walker happily took a break from updating her unit’s status reports in the Blue Force Tracker computer and ambled over to the daily supply truck. One of her guys dropped the tailgate. Walker was so pissed off she could only laugh.
“God protect us from our own side!”
Walker climbed into the truck and riffled through the boxes, but no, it was all the same crap. A pallet of bottled water and MRE’s, a few small wooden crates of rifle rounds… and two pallets of chemical protective suits, spare gas mask filters and various decontamination equipment. What the hell?
“Maybe supply knows something we don’t?”
Walker hopped down and snickered. “That’ll be the day. No, someone fucked up. Again. Let me talk to the first sergeant and find out where our stuff wound up.”
This wasn’t the first time she’d seen this nonsense. Just yesterday the boys got a laugh when those nameless rear-echelon folk dropped off a year’s supply of tampons. Everyone chalked it up as a joke, some crap about a platoon led by a woman must be a bunch of pussies, but that seemed childish even by the petty prank standards of the Army.
Before she made it back to her radio, the company’s first sergeant trotted up to her.
“Sergeant Walker! What bullshit did you all get? A pallet of batteries?” The old man sounded even more stressed than usual.
“Worse than that, First Sergeant. Say, we aren’t using nerve gas and no one told us?” The first sergeant took one peek in the truck and attacked his clipboard with a pen.
“This bullshit is getting out of hand. The rear area has been screwing up royally these last two weeks, but they’ve gone totally off the reservation today. Not one load in the whole battalion matches the order request. I swear to God, I’m gonna strangle someone over this!”
He ran off cursing and scribbling on his pad while Walker just shrugged. She turned back to her squad leaders assembling for the mission brief. “Well, might as well dig in here some more. I think it’s safe to say we won’t be making our push into Colorado Springs tonight. A shame, really. A few more miles and Peterson Air Force Base will be within artillery range. Oh well. What difference does a day or two make?”
Walker didn’t waste another moment’s thought on the paperwork mess. She had no way to know they were neither accidents nor pranks.
The most crucial components of the military’s internal intranet, such as command and control, communications and intelligence sharing, were painstakingly isolated from any outside network. The logistics net, however, needed to connect to the World Wide Web to coordinate with civilian vendors and all sorts of third parties. Once a high-profile target is connected to the internet though, it’s only a matter of time until they’re compromised. No matter how good their encryption.
Despite the military’s later accusations, the URA wasn’t involved in the security breach. In fact, the original hacker was a young idealist who just thought it would be a fun anti-war protest to shuffle around the US Army’s requisition orders. Replace 100 grenades with 100 Humvee headlights here, swap 1,000 artillery rounds for 1,000 gallons of engine oil there. What a blast!
Hundreds of miles away, in a college dorm on the East Coast, the 20-year-old hacker verified his new $100,000 PayPal balance. He never asked, nor cared really, why some random lawyer would pay him so much for access to the Trojan horse program he installed on the Army’s supply chain management servers. He briefly fantasied that maybe his efforts stopped the war, but dropped that line of thought. Politics was boring. He started texting his friends. It was time to party!
A few hours before dawn, hundreds of radar blots burst to life over northeast New Mexico. Federal air traffic controllers onboard an AWACS orbiting just inside the Texas border identified them immediately. Even so, it took nearly 10 minutes before they could convince their overworked headquarters that this huge flotilla materializing out of nowhere was real. That this was no strange electronic jamming, but hundreds of low-level bogeys penetrating the weakest point in their air defense screen.
Sgt. Li leaned out the empty gun port of a Blackhawk helicopter and scanned the night. To make room for a few more soldiers and extra ammo, the usual two crew chiefs and their machine guns were left behind. In their seat, he should have had a helluva view of their armada. With all their lights off though, he couldn’t see much of the largest helicopter-borne air assault in history.
He fantasized about how scary they’d appear to the enemy in a few hours, popping over the horizon in full Apocalypse Now style. The dream didn’t last long. In reality, how terrifying could their flying gypsy caravan be? What a hodgepodge collection of nearly 500 helicopters his band of raiders had assembled. Blackhawks, Vietnam-era Huey’s, hundreds of civilian helicopters and a few futuristic looking, twin-bladed Ospreys rounded out the flying circus.
Sgt. Li propped his foot up on a crate of landmines wedged between the seats and laid his head against a fire extinguisher. Might as well catch a little shut-eye while he waited. The comedic value of the taxi service aside, there was nothing funny about Sgt. Li’s fatalistic calmness.
Nor with the 4,000 other grim-faced infantrymen the helicopter flotilla transported deep behind federal lines.
Just inside the Kansas border, the five hundred choppers peeled off into dozens of staggered flights and fanned out across the state. The handful of fighters the federal defenders could dispatch to intercept had no great big mass of locusts to engage. They’d spend the next couple of hours wasting fuel skittering from one quick radar blip to the next. All while the helicopters churned slowly, but steadily towards their unknown targets.
Despite all this frantic action, the goals of the assault appeared modest. The mysterious raiders bypassed one vulnerable headquarters and artillery park after another. If anything, they seemed uninterested in the rear areas of the Fed military. When the helicopters finally swooped down on their landing zones, the federal command breathed a collective sigh of relief. They were only hitting tiny, out-of-the way towns in occupied Kansas.
General Lyon scratched his head. “All right everyone. Just relax. This is all very strange, to be sure, but a minor inconvenience in the long run. Detail a brigade or two from our reserves to clean them out.” He pushed the whole affair to the back of his priority list and focused on putting out the much larger fires in Colorado.
At least until his G-6, the head logistics officer for the entire field army, came running out from his corner desk. The quiet fellow, an accountant by trade, screamed and babbled incoherently. Lyon put a hand on his shoulder. “Take a breath. What’s the big deal?”
For an answer, he simply called up an overlay on their giant digital map. This one covered with lines and tonnage figures. Like a bow tie, hundreds of paths converged from bridges and rail lines in east Kansas to a narrow point in middle Kansas and then fanned out to reach all the scattered units in Colorado. The quartermaster reduced the overlay’s opacity.