Without looking up from the screen she announced, “I’m through the firewall.”
“Holy shit!”
Hiccock was beaming. “That’s great, Admiral!”
“How did you do that?” Kronos said, amazed.
“It seems that you and everybody else out there today have forgotten the basics. Boolean algebra.”
Kronos snapped his fingers. “Of course.” He turned to Hiccock. “This old …” Kronos caught himself “… genius here went back to the machine code. She essentially passed through the wall as zeros and ones.”
“Yes, and I used what you would call a self-replicating polynomial hierarchy to mask the dimensional string length to zero.”
“Holy fazzool, you’ve cracked my virus. You cracked my greatest hack code.”
“You helped me when I saw you hide the last two Oreo cookies from the MP.” The MP glared at him, marking him for death.
Hiccock chuckled. “She’s got your number, Kronie! Your behavioral traits are infused in your dirty little code writing.”
“Yes, sneaky is sneaky in life or in computer programming. Although, Bill, you aren’t going to like what’s on the other side of that wall.”
As she pointed to the screen to show her discovery, Hiccock actually turned white.
“Mr. President!” a winded Reynolds barked, interrupting a meeting.
The Oval Office was quickly cleared and Reynolds explained what he had learned.
“Are you sure?” the president said from his desk.
“This is Ultra traffic, direct from Hiccock’s team. They have been batting a thousand throughout this whole affair.”
In the silence of the next five seconds, it was obvious to Reynolds that the president had fully digested the impact of the news.
“I want the head of every agency in here in thirty minutes. Start sharpening the axe. I am not going down this way. I will cut off all their fucking heads before I take a fall like this. Thirty minutes— and that’s a direct order from the Commander in Chief. If they don’t comply, I’ll consider that desertion under fire and, God Almighty, I’ll have them shot!”
For the first time since they struggled through those early primaries, Reynolds felt a genuine fear when the president roared. But not because of anything the man said.
Hiccock, Parks, and Kronos were sitting on the porch, celebrating their discovery by dunking Oreos into glasses of milk. Kronos used a fork, wedged into the cream between the two cookie halves. “This way you don’t get the dry finger part, just total immersion. I count to ten for nice and soft, seven for al dente.” He popped one into his mouth from the fork tines.
“You really need to get a life, you know that?” Admiral Parks said.
“I will, now that I … er, we have cracked the biggest terrorism case in American history. Maybe Uncle Sam will give me time off for ‘genius behavior.’”
“Unfortunately this is all top secret, code-word clearance. No one will ever know what we did here,” Hiccock explained soberly.
“Someone will know,” Parks said.
“How’s that?” Hiccock asked as he twisted open a cookie.
“Asynchronous transfer protocol.”
Kronos choked on his milk. “Crap! Of course. You can’t go through a firewall without leaving a tracer back to you.”
“You mean we left a cookie?”
“Something like that …”
Three short whistle bursts rippled across the intersection in downtown Carlsbad, New Mexico, opposite a construction site. A few seconds later, the office shanty of supervising engineer Henry Wilson, along with his iPhone in his hand, was rocked by the deep rumble of an explosion. A moment later, a single, long all-clear whistle sounded.
Outside, a crane pulled away a smoking steel mesh, revealing the blasted, crumpled rock beneath.
Henry was online. The iPhone screen before him displayed a contractor’s materials-and-supply web site. No one in the shanty noticed that his demeanor was much more intense than it should be. The lines in his brow, etched in place by decades of worry, and the white beard he sported combined to make him look older than his fifty years. Without a word to anyone else in the shed, he got up and walked outside, leaving his phone on the desk.
Another three-whistle warning bellowed but Henry just kept walking. A flagman called out to him, “Henry, get down! Are you crazy?”
He continued walking. Boom. Henry didn’t so much as flinch as a whole steel-mesh-blanketed section of earth rose and fell just beyond him in a shuddering explosion. Eyes focused straight ahead, he walked over to a red armored-car-styled explosives truck. Opening the back door, the ex-demolition man turned construction site manager pulled out a cordite module and a blasting cap. With none of the attendant care one might expect when handling high explosives, Henry roughly injected the detonator into one stick of dynamite lying in an open box and spooled the detonator cord out. He closed the door, reeling out the yellow wire around the truck as he got into the driver’s seat and drove off. The actual driver of the truck, a few construction men, and one rent-a-cop screamed after him, but the armored truck, having been jammed into gear, proceeded to barrel down the street.
Deputy Sheriff Jack Rainey was writing up a motorist for speeding when the external speaker on his patrol car squawked. “Car 21, be advised a stolen truck, red, carrying explosives, last seen heading west on Alameda.”
Not trusting what he had heard, he stopped writing the citation and walked back to his car. He grabbed the radio mic through the window. “Dispatch, did you say explosives?”
“That’s a 10-4. Be advised other units are now in pursuit. Subject vehicle has run two roadblocks.”
Rainey jogged back to the motorist and ripped up the incomplete ticket. “This is your lucky day, sir. But slow down. Your luck could run out big-time.”
The officer trotted back to the car, jumped in, and pulled out, leaving a repentant Mexican-American gardener crossing himself and thanking St. Jude.
“Roger that, dispatch. Please advise all other units in pursuit that Car 21 is west of the truck and will try to interdict and slow.” As he released the mic button, a plan of action started forming in his mind. With siren wailing and lights flashing, he zoomed past the light traffic. The police vehicle came to a sliding, fishtailing halt with its rear end pointing at the red truck bearing down on his position.
Calmly he watched the truck approach through his rearview mirror with four cop cars in close pursuit. Slipping his Ford Galaxy in gear, he started rolling, picking up speed as the truck approached his rear bumper. Upon first contact, he let his foot off the gas and applied the brake. The squad car started to dig in, fighting the massive truck’s momentum. The deputy slammed his car into first. The trunk of his car began to collapse under the pressure of the on-charging truck. Henry Wilson, wide-eyed and emotionless behind the wheel, floored the accelerator. The front of Jack’s squad car was cantilevered off the ground as the truck ate more and more into its trunk. Seeing the front wheels of the cop car up off the road, Henry started weaving the truck. Both vehicles swayed across the road, slamming into unsuspecting passing cars creating a domino effect into other cars. As it swerved, the truck resembled an animal shaking its prey in its jaws. Jack was helpless to do anything with the cruiser’s steering up off the pavement. Finally, the squad car pivoted and spun on its blown-out rear wheels as the big red truck pushed it aside. The spinning car came to a stop as the pursuit vehicles whizzed by.