“Tell me, Walker, what does cyber warfare mean to you?”
“It’s another language,” Walker said. “Or, rather, it’s a new weapons system. Something I’m not current on. I see it for the awesome power it can wield, but I can’t deploy it myself.”
“You’re part right, it is awesome.” General Brokaw was silent as he got up and moved around to the other side of the desk, hobbling without his crutches but always with a hand on the desk top. He sat in a worn leather chair. “But don’t think of it as a weapons system. Think of it as a whole new branch of warfare. It’s asymmetric to the square root of we’re screwed, if you get my meaning. My final couple of years were at the Pentagon. Cyber’s the next big thing, and it has a lot of brass scared.”
“State and non-state actors can cut us down to size,” Walker said. “And we have to think about the reality that we are fighting opponents who are as well armed and informed as we are—and this is the only battle space where that’s the case.”
“Why?”
“Our hands are practically tied up with all kinds of laws.”
“And that’s the rub, see? There’s no rulebook here, no global set of standards or defined combat space. There’s no Hague or Geneva conventions putting restraints on cyber warfare, or treaties governing the number of nukes we can have or even some kind of informal understanding of mutually assured destruction to keep these young punks from pressing their damned keys. It’s a mess. I mean, hell, we don’t even know what an act of cyber war is, do we? It ain’t defined any place I can think of.”
“Do you think this is the first shot in a cyber war?”
“I think those shots were fired a long time ago, by all kinds of parties. We’re fighting this on all fronts.”
“How do we respond to a serious act of cyber war?”
“Exactly. What is our response going to be?”
“Depends on the attacks.”
“Sure. What if someone wipes off a trillion dollars from our economy? What if they melt down a nuclear plant or two near a populated area? What’s that worth? What do we do about it? Send in the tanks and carriers and B52s? Where does that response start—and where does it end?”
“We would have to think about our first line of defense, and what’s beyond that. Guys like your son,” Walker said. He sat forward with his elbows on his knees and his hands together. He remembered a few conversations like this with the General. It was a test. To see if the person was worthy of greater respect, and a reward—usually in the form of being chosen for a special assignment on or off base. Conversations like this had changed after he’d spent that time with Monica. Not that he let the General know, but it changed things, within Walker, that knowledge. And the General sure did know now. And the way in which Walker participated in this conversation would dictate whether he would earn the reward. “There are laws in place to react, but what do they mean, in practice? What does it mean to take over civilian infrastructure, when over ninety percent of the US military communications travel over public networks?”
“You think they’ll force Jasper to attack civilian targets?”
Walker shrugged.
“The writing has been on the wall about this for a long time,” General Brokaw said. “And we’ve done far too little about it in terms of gettin’ prepared.”
“We’ve got a Cyber Command.”
“Sure, but we need better than that. Something with teeth. Bigger. See, Walker, in the Gulf War, a new military revolution emerged. A transformation, from the mechanized warfare of the industrial age to the info warfare of the information age. Information warfare’s a war of decisions and control, a war of knowledge and intellect. Is that how you see it?”
“Yes,” Walker said. “And it’s changed since then.”
“How?”
“Information warfare has gone from preserving oneself and wiping out the enemy, to preserving oneself and controlling the opponent. At least, that’s what other state actors like China and Russia and Iran have in their mindset. Electronic warfare, tactical deception, strategic deterrence, propaganda warfare, psychological warfare, network warfare, structural sabotage. They want to vanquish, conquer and destroy—as deviously and pervasively as possible.”
“We don’t do that?”
“Not on the scale that they do.”
“Why?”
“All those laws I was referring to before. And because we’re more about building up our defense and preparing for retaliation, being on the back-foot. Plus there’s the talent pool—we should have the best experts in the world available to us on this, but the military will never compete with Silicon Valley salaries in attracting and retaining talent.”
“But it can appeal to recruits through its national-service ethos and its proximity to the action, like it did with Jasper.”
“Sure. And all that said, we’ve been good at scooping up electronic and signals intelligence. The best.”
“What makes us the best?” General Brokaw prompted.
“We have the best gear to do it. The NSA practically hoovers up every written and spoken word on the planet, and they can decrypt past any protections. We can hear every conversation we want to. We have the biggest eyes and biggest ears.”
“Yes,” General Brokaw said. “But we’re the ones spending the most in R and D on weapons systems across the spectrum, so these other actors think ‘Why bother doing that—why not just steal the plans for fifth-generation fighter jets?’”
“Which they’re doing.”
“Which they’re doing.” Brokaw leaned back in his chair. “What will it take for us to change our playbook—to be able to act like them? To start attacking their servers on a daily basis and stealing all the data that we can get our hands on.”
“A Pearl Harbor,” Walker said, matter of factly. “A cyber Pearl Harbor, and we’d be there. The country would rally. The landscape would change. It’d be like when Roosevelt said we’ll build fifty thousand aircraft for World War Two.”
“And how many did we build?”
“Three hundred thousand.”
“Three hundred thousand,” the General repeated, although Walker knew he already knew the answer. The old man looked as though he had come to a conclusion. “Walker, do you care for my daughter?”
Walker paused, just a moment, thrown a little by the question. “Yes.”
“Yet you hesitated just now.”
“Sir—I—a lot of time has passed. But of course I care for her. And I’ll do all I can to get your son to safety.”
“You won’t put my girl in unnecessary danger to achieve that?”
“No.”
General Brokaw neither spoke nor moved for a minute. He was weighing up options. In the end, perhaps he figured: what’s the harm in someone capable wanting to help? At least, that’s how Walker read the response when General Brokaw said: “You really think you can find something out from talking with her? Something that will help find Jasper?”
“You said yourself that she knew about his Army work,” Walker said. “What was that?”
He said, “You can ask her about that yourself.”
“You’ll give me her address?”
“You dim or hard of hearing or both?”
Walker smiled. The General did too, the first Walker had seen. He opened a drawer in the desk and looked at its contents, hesitated, then retrieved a small book, flicked pages and read out an address.
“Got that?”
“Got it,” Walker said. He pointed to last year’s edition of a Rand McNally California road atlas on the General’s desk. “You mind?”
“Go for it.”
Walker checked the address, memorized the route, closed the book.
“You going for a long drive north?” Walker said, seeing that the General had marked the section along the Oregon coast.
The General nodded. He showed an older version of the map book, again with marked pages. “I had long planned on the drive with my wife, but we never got to do it. So, I’m seeing what’s still there, and I’m, well, I hoped I’d do that drive later this year. We’ll see.”
“You’ll do it. This will work out. I’ll find Jasper.”
General Brokaw appeared pensive, then said, “So, are you working on this alone?”
“Yes,” Walker said.
The General gave him a measured stare.
“Because of the nature of this investigation,” Walker said, “because the FBI and NSA will be watching and listening to and reading every communication related to your son and the attacks, I’m working on my own.”
General Brokaw didn’t react. After a moment he said, “You last served in the 24th Tactical, right?”
“Yes.”
General Brokaw nodded. Then he reached into the desk drawer and pulled out a black plastic box, which Walker recognized, because he’d been issued something similar once but had not been allowed to keep his.
“See this?” General Brokaw said, opening the clasp and pulling out the service automatic. It was an M1911, a Colt .45, the official side-arm of the US military for seventy-five years until the mid-eighties. “You have use for this?”
Walker met the General’s eye. “Yes, sir.”