The dead crows were extremely proud of their handiwork. They were already congratulating themselves for having dreamed up the hoax of the century. Their little scam would go down in history, like the War of the Worlds radio broadcast panic of 1938. People would run screaming, and piss their pants, and overload the 911 switchboards, and drive their cars into telephone poles. The Dead Crow Conspiracy would become the stuff of hacker legend.
At 3:55 PM, Ap0k transmitted the go signal to his hacker buddies. The assault on the EAS server farm began simultaneously, from nineteen manned sites around Seattle, and over a thousand zombie machines, recruited for the task by a Trojan horse software application that hijacked control of infected PCs without the knowledge or consent of the computer owners.
Under the combined onslaught, the firewall and anti-virus engines protecting the servers crumbled in less than a minute.
At 3:56 PM, the bogus emergency announcement created by the dead crows went out over the Emergency Alert System throughout the Greater Seattle area. The message was seen and heard through every operating radio and television in the network footprint. Nearly a million and a half Seattle area residents were informed that ten nuclear warheads were screaming toward their fair city, and that all military attempts to intercept the missiles had failed.
There were no such warheads, of course. They existed only in the fevered imaginations of Ap0k and his dead crow buddies. But the residents of Seattle had no way of knowing that. They had no reason to suspect that the warning was anything but genuine.
The recorded voice of the fake EAS announcer went on to inform the million-plus victims of his hoax that the bombs would arrive in twenty minutes. Seattle would be completely obliterated. Everyone who wanted to live should evacuate the city immediately, or perish in radioactive fire.
The seventeen year-old boy who styled himself as Ap0kA1yp$e4U had promised his buddies that the d34d kR0w k0n$p1r4$y would be remembered by history. And so they were.
Jason Wesley Hulette and ten of his accomplices and co-conspirators were arrested and tried for domestic terrorism and treason. They were collectively charged with over forty-thousand counts of manslaughter, more than a million cases of assault with intent to wound, and three-quarters of a trillion dollars in property damage.
The remaining eight members of the dead crows were identified, but none were brought to trial. They had been killed in the panic that burned the city of Seattle to the ground.
CHAPTER 42
Sheldon leaned over Ann’s left shoulder. “How’s it coming?”
Ann stopped typing, her fingers frozen in midair above the keyboard of her laptop. “Sheldon, if you ask me that question one more time, I’m going to duct tape your mouth shut.”
“I just want to help,” Sheldon said.
“Go away,” Ann said. “Stop asking me questions. That will help a lot.”
“You’re absolutely sure that there’s nothing I can do?”
Ann leaned back and crossed her arms. “Am I absolutely sure? Absolutely?”
She pretended to study the matter for several seconds and then shrugged in apparent contrition. “I guess I’m not totally-positively-absolutely sure. I suppose … if you really feel the need to contribute … I should let you get in here and try to do your part.”
She held a fingertip against her lower lip. “Let’s see … This an entirely new mission profile for Mouse. He’s got to perform some specialized functions that aren’t built into his core program, so you should probably start by dumping the mission package I created for the submersible rescue, and purging the robot’s scratch memory and persistent memory. When that’s finished, upload a clean copy of the core program from the master disc packs, and sort through the mission library for the modules that most closely match the functions Mouse is going to need. Then, append those files to his core program, and modify any parameters that need adjustment. Don’t forget to load the program mods for covert search, and under ice operations, and don’t forget to disable his acoustic communications module. You’ll also need to load the bottom contour database for the operating area, the navigation data, and the environmental package, including currents, known navigation hazards, projected salinity profiles, and thermal structures of the water column. And when you’re done, run an end-to-end, and a loop-back test, and debug to check for errors.”
She smiled with exaggerated sweetness. “If you’re going to take care of all that, I’ll go grab a cup of coffee and a Danish.”
“I get the picture,” Sheldon said. “I don’t know how to do any of the stuff you need to accomplish.”
Ann gasped in mock surprise. “You don’t?”
Her fingers starting pecking away at the laptop again. “Then will you please stop interrupting me, so that I can do it?”
“Yeah,” Sheldon said. “I’m sorry.”
Ann stopped typing again. “I’m jerking your chain, Sheldon. I’ve already done all that junk. I just need to run one last program integrity test, to check for disagrees and resource conflicts, and then I’m done here.”
She tapped a key and leaned back. “There. That should take that about ten minutes to cycle. When it’s finished, as long as there aren’t any errors, our buddy Mouse should be ready to go play in the water.”
She checked her watch. “That’s pretty good timing. The Navy boys tell me that the sun will be setting in about fifteen minutes. Since we’re doing all this sneaking stealth business under cover of darkness, that works out just about perfectly.”
Ann stood up and stretched to get the kinks out of her back. “Come on, Cowboy. If you absolutely must help, you can lead me through this metal labyrinth to the wardroom. I really do want some coffee and a Danish.”
An hour later, Sheldon and Ann stood with a bunch of Sailor types on the boat deck, bundled up in heavy foul weather coats, and stomping their feet to keep warm. The sun was down now, and the moon wouldn’t rise for several hours yet. The darkness was broken only by the stars and the dim glow of amber-lensed deck lamps, cranked down to minimal intensity.
Mouse hung beneath the boat davit, a dark silhouette dangling at the end of the lifting cable for the destroyer’s Rigid-Hulled Inflatable Boats.
That particular bit of engineering had been Ann’s idea. At her suggestion, the robot’s lifting hardware had been made compatible with the single-point boat davits used aboard Navy warships. Any ship that carried RHIBs could launch and recover a Mouse unit without installing special equipment. From the Navy’s perspective, that made Mouse cheaper to buy and easier to integrate into the fleet, which — by extension — made it more likely that the Lords of Navy Procurement would decide to purchase lots of Mouse-series underwater robots from Norton Deep Water Systems.
As far as the company was concerned, the Navy procurement contract was the whole point of the Mouse project. Ann’s priorities were quite different, but they still came back to the bottom line. The Navy was Norton’s best customer. If the Navy didn’t buy underwater robots, then Norton would have no reason to build them. And if Norton didn’t build underwater robots, then Ann would have to either abandon her chosen profession, or go to work for Big Oil. And that was not going to happen.