An overt reference, Lana was certain, to a cyberincursion revealed by Snowden. As early as three years ago hackers had infiltrated a navy computer system. Iranians were suspected in that attack. A security upgrade — more layers, network segmentation, and enhanced monitoring — had been implemented, which made Lana doubtful that the Iranians had a part in the Delphin’s takeover, largely because they always seemed too inept to avoid leaving their fingerprints on whatever havoc they caused.
The U.S., of course, had proved equally clumsy — the Iranians would say even more so — with its infamous Stuxnet attack on Iran’s nuclear centrifuges. While renowned among experts for its almost flawless code, the U.S. was implicated when the worm escaped Iran’s Natanz plant and made its way all around the world. But when a cyberattack was executed well, anonymity made responding quickly and forcefully almost impossible. There were plenty of potential culprits, but getting confirmation of a single one was much tougher. And now Lana and her colleagues were up against an enemy unlikely to ever claim credit for an environmental disaster that would devastate every continent on earth.
Clarence Besserman arrived late, looking as if he’d stepped from a World War II Defense Department photo, even though the climate-change expert was in his early thirties. He sported the wet-look haircut of a military attaché and a bow tie that could have been filched from the collar of Winston Churchill himself. Like the late British prime minister and war hero, Besserman was chubby. In Lana’s view, he fit the very definition of that word: cheeks, arms, chest, legs, everywhere she looked he carried a few extra pounds of padding. But not obese, not by any means.
Despite the starched bow tie and carefully oiled hair, he was disheveled with his shirttail hanging out of his pants. It wasn’t simply that he’d been rousted late at night for a meeting, though, because Besserman always looked like he slept in his clothes. Only his computer looked crisply intact as he pulled it from its case, likely because his screen wasn’t yet visible. Lana would have guessed his desktop might also need some ordering. But there was no disputing Besserman’s brilliance.
Holmes, she noticed, looked on the verge of saying, “Glad you could make it, Clarence,” but the younger man looked so flustered that the deputy director might have spared him out of charity alone.
“You have something for us, I gather,” Holmes actually asked him.
Did Besserman ever. He launched right into the geopolitical implications of a rapid rise in sea levels: “We just ran our first climate-change war games last week. To prepare for the Task Force presentation next month, we looked at who the actors might be in a similar attack on the ice sheet. We weren’t gaming with a nuclear-armed submarine in mind because we didn’t think the hacking and takeover of one was possible. A lack of imagination on our part, clearly. But we did decide after extensive analysis that hackers targeting the WAIS in any manner would have to be other than a state actor. No country with the ability to bomb the ice sheet into the ocean would ever have enough to gain to make it worth their while. But here was the quandary: No individual hacker would have the means to launch an ICBM in such a precise fashion. So before the Delphin was taken over, that was our conundrum and why we concluded such an attack was highly unlikely.”
McGivern put up her index finger. Talk about looking war weary and ruffled. “I’m surprised to hear—”
“Except for Russia.” Besserman had the presence of mind to let that bulletin settle in.
“But you just said,” Tenon broke the silence, “that ‘No state actor would have—’”
Besserman rode right over the analyst: “Until the Delphin. Taking over a submarine of that caliber by hackers working without the support of a state security apparatus is so unlikely that our latest calibrations rank it as a 1 in 1.9 billion possibility. It’s not just the sub, it’s all the onboard systems. And to launch the missiles, there are codes, required verifications, keys, and a number of manual procedures. We’re looking at such extreme expertise needed in so many areas. U.S. submarine technology alone would demand teams of highly trained specialists, all of which would require unprecedented incursion skills, not to mention bringing all that to bear on the earth’s Achilles’ heel. It’s so demonically inspired, it’s mind-boggling.”
“So nobody saw it coming,” Wourzy said, “yet it was hiding in plain sight?”
“Yes,” Besserman said. “It’s the single most vulnerable climate-change catastrophe that could be set off immediately. We can watch Greenland melt, Arctic ice disappear, the Amazon burn — along with the American West — and the Sahara spread north into Mediterranean countries, but there’s not much we could do to speed up any of that, other than what we’re already doing inadvertently by continuing to accelerate the release of greenhouse gases. But as we all know now, the WAIS is the world’s first big tipping point.”
“So what changes if the ice sheet gets hit?” Holmes asked, urgency fueling his tone.
“What doesn’t change is the question, if I may reframe what you’ve just asked, sir.”
Holmes nodded.
“With an eleven-foot rise in sea level, every map of the world will have to be redrawn. It would shut down our country for months, at the very least, quite possibly years. Every port would flood, and many, if not most, would disappear. They would be underwater. Storm surges could be more than twice that eleven-foot rise. We’re still assessing how many major military installations would be wiped out but I can tell you that we’d be looking at more than one hundred. Even if we were sure of how to respond to the attack on Antarctica, we’d still be severely handicapped by the absolute necessity of responding to what would be our overwhelming domestic crises. One hundred fifty million Americans, about half our population, would either be racing from the coastlines, with calamitous results, or those not immediately affected would be overrun by climate refugees. All imports and exports would cease right away, and not just on the Atlantic and Pacific coasts. The Great Lakes would rise, too. From the shores of Lake Superior to the St. Lawrence Seaway, cities would eventually flood. Chicago, Detroit, Buffalo, Milwaukee, Duluth, Syracuse, Rochester. Our most critical cities are on our shores. For all intents and purposes, they would come to a standstill at best, or float away at worst.”
Besserman looked startled by his own words. His stunned gaze took in everyone at the conference table. Then he drew another breath and went on: “I’ve talked to every one of my colleagues at Defense, CIA, you name it. They all agree. This has got to be Russian in origin. The Russians are denying any role, but they’ve always done that and we know that’s true because we’ve caught them red-handed at it, though nothing of this magnitude. And then they always blame it on ‘patriotic citizens’ hacking at their leisure. We’ve even discussed that in here. But this was not a casual incursion. This was planned for a long time and executed with precision.”
“What’s your sense of the likelihood of a launch?” Holmes asked him.
“Strong likelihood for one deceptively simple reason: The Russians will gain the international upper hand almost right away. They would not be spared entirely from the rise of the oceans, but given what their chief competitors would endure — meaning us, China, the NATO nations — the Russians would be mostly insulated from the worst impacts of the rise. The brutal truth is that in a matter of weeks they would become the dominant world power for decades to come.”