May 1
Operations Center, 67th Network Warfare Wing
Air Forces Cyber (AFCYBER)
Twenty-Fourth Air Force HQ
Lackland Air Force Base, Texas
2:37 P.M. CDT / 3:37 P.M. EDT
Once again, Lester Weatherford frowned at the display on his computer monitor; once again, he toggled between the “SYSTEM STATUS/CURRENT” and the “LIVE FEED” of online traffic that had been routed to Lackland AFB’s circuits after Fort Meade had gone dark, early the morning before.
This shit isn’t right, his mind muttered. Freakin’ better not be right…
As a civilian contractor with the Defense Department, he had become privy to much information that had been withheld to him during his earlier employment as an Air Force technical sergeant—despite the fact that in both roles he manned the same station, at the same Texas base, often with the same still-in-service colleagues at their own computers around him. He still held his top-level security clearance and a priority-access ticket to Docent, the ultra-classified super-computer that required its own cooling system, one that could chill every building and hanger at Lackland to sub-Arctic temperatures.
Only Weatherford’s pay grade had changed, decidedly for the better. That, and a civilian’s enhanced freedom to address ranking officers in a manner more suitable to their level of perceived competence than to the insignia on their collars.
Normally, Weatherford and his uniformed peers would have been focusing their collective attention on more specialized military concerns. But with the U.S. Cyber Command’s Maryland operations now inside the radioactive zone, the 67th had been shuttled into a far more comprehensive tasking.
American computer networks—both military and private/commercial—are always under constant, unrelenting attack: tens of thousands of hacking assaults daily, coming from every corner of the globe. Most are detected, and many are shortstopped before they can intrude or infect or overwhelm their targets.
Both private cyber-security firms and government entities like Cyber Command defend against such attacks, an apt analogy being that of a champion player pitted against a motorized tennis ball machine launching a ceaseless high-speed volley of wicked forehands, hard-struck backhands, deceptively timed lobs, and soul-crushing spikes over to the human side of the net.
Serena Williams is a superb athlete. But under such a scenario, even she is guaranteed to miss more than a few saves.
Weatherford keyed his throat-microphone.
“Hey, Captain. C’mere for a minute, will ’ya? Docent’s giving me some weird shit you oughta look at. Step on it, okay?”
Lester Weatherford thoroughly enjoyed his status as a civilian contractor, which often superseded the hierarchical protocols that, back in his “yes, sir!” days, a tech sergeant had to observe.
A few moments later, the officer squatted next to Lester’s chair.
“What do you have, Mr. Weatherford?”
“Take a gander at this, Cap,” the contractor replied. “Outta New York City—looks like some kind of logic loop, right? Keeps kicking their system right in the ass, over and over.”
“What’s the system’s function?”
“Traffic control,” Weatherford said, and grinned wickedly. “Municipal sourced. They must have one major fuck-up on the streets up there.”
“Code bug, you think?”
“Nope. I’m betting virus, maybe some flavor of time-triggered ‘horse.’ The Trojan variety, right?”
“You trap the machine-code embeds?”
“Uh-huh. Docent synthesized an approximation of the original malware’s code via a reverse-analysis of the functional activity. Beautiful coding, if I have to say so. Nothing else like it in the software archives, Docent says. Less than 60,000 kilobytes spread all around the program; one nice-sized chunk of it was hiding in the ‘backup cache’ file. I’m guessing that it plays parasite on the original software.”
Weatherford saw the officer’s blank expression, and rolled his eyes.
“Y’know, selectively hijacks their functions? Lets the intruder-code pick ’n chose the existing code commands it needs, reconfigures the sequence—like it kinda writes its own software program out of the pieces it needs and overrides whatever it doesn’t want. And it initiates the process with just 60,000 KB or so of code. Pretty damn cool, Cap.”
Weatherford leaned back in his chair, clasping hands behind his head and grinning hugely.
“May have isolated a ‘trapdoor-install’ too, still gotta look closer at that, but that coding is pretty plain-vanilla stuff, comparatively. Hell, might even have been in the original code; every other jerkoff programmer tries to slip one into ‘his’ program, just to show how smart he is. Either way, maybe lets a hacker back into the system anytime he wants. Too cute, right?”
“Get any ‘finds’ on a global search?” the captain asked, still studying Weatherford’s screen. “On the virus, I mean.”
“Still looking, but Docent says a few ‘high-probables’ have popped up,” Weatherford replied. “This one I just peeked at, seventy-so percent of the same freakin’ code showed up in another system. Right here in the good ol’ Lone Star State.”
“Yeah? Another city traffic computer?”
“Nope,” Weatherford said. “Some oil refinery, down Port Arthur way…”