Amid the Shadows (27 page)

“TELL ME!” Zahn
suddenly shouted.
 
“Tell me
how
!”

When she didn’t answer,
he sighed.
 
“Maybe it’s me, but I get the
impression you’re not going to tell me.”

Christine glared back
at him resolute, her tears beginning to fall.

Zahn shook his
head.
 
This was certainly not the woman
he was expecting.
 

Christine inhaled
deeply and tried to push back the tears.
 
“You know what I think?” she said in an icy tone.
 
“I think you’re
afraid
of her.
 
I think you’re actually frightened by that
little girl!”

50

The “Dead Hand” system
was a Cold War era nuclear control system used by the Soviet Union.
 
Its design was to automatically launch the
Soviet intercontinental ballistic missiles if a nuclear strike were detected by
seismic, radioactivity, light, or overpressure sensors.
 
Called a “Second Strike” capability, it
ensured the Soviets could retaliate against a nuclear attack even if the Soviet
Union had already been destroyed.

In other words, it
allowed an automated nuclear attack without any human intervention
whatsoever.
 
It was also considered
highly dangerous by every other country, and even by some inside Russia.

In the 1990’s, several
Russian military officers confirmed the existence of the Dead Hand system but
would not confirm as to whether it was still in use.
 
Many suspected it was.

Ron Tran sat on the
famed Yalong Bay Beach, just outside of China’s southernmost province
Hainan.
 
He dug his feet into the warm,
white sand and looked past his laptop screen, out across the emerald blue
water.
 
He turned and peered down to the
southern end of the crescent shaped beach with its dozens of giant hotels,
frowning at the construction cranes in the background.
 

He wanted to spend his
last days in China at one of its most beautiful locations.
 
He had always remembered Yalong fondly from
his childhood, when his parents would bring him during their summer holiday.
 
It seemed so long ago, before they both died,
and it looked a lot different now.
 
Tran
shook himself out of his daydream and reminded himself that Argentina had
beaches too.

He turned back to his
computer screen and watched one of the American news channels over the
internet.
 
The coverage on the Pope’s
death was everywhere, covered in every country around the world.
 
The Pope was dead, and
that
was his
signal.

The Pope’s death was
the trigger for initiating Phase Two of their attack.
 
Nicknamed Stux2 after its more simplified
predecessor, Tran’s new version was truly impressive on a technical level.
 
On an emotional level, it was terrifying.

Tran opened several
windows on his laptop and prepared to send the final command.
 
There was no one on the planet who knew what
was coming, except Zahn.

Stux2 improved not just
on the speed and ability to traverse and infect networks, but it benefited from
a second, simultaneous attack that Tran liked to think of as the “mother of all
head fakes”.

With well over ten
million drones or “bots” standing by, Tran would use them to launch a massive
viral attack against the country least expecting it, China itself.
 
The virus would attack all of China’s public
facing systems and servers from the outside.
 
All public and government systems would be targets, and knowing how
poorly government computer networks were maintained, many, if not all, would be
brought to a veritable standstill within hours.
 
After spending too much time attempting to stop the attack, they would
eventually have to concede that cutting off access was their only option.
 
But they would soon realize that was not
easy, especially using computer systems that simply would not respond.
 
In a short time, panic would spread as they
became more desperate to stop an attack that would appear to be originating
from everywhere in the world at once.

It was that panic that
Stux2 would take advantage of.
 
Most
worms used one or two vulnerabilities to gain access to servers and networks
which had not been properly patched.
 
However,
as Stux2 traveled, it would periodically create copies of lists and databases
with
all
current known vulnerabilities.
 
And since few computer systems were ever fully patched, it would allow
Stux2 to move quickly through virtually any network, identifying its computer
environment and looking for China’s Command and Control System for the
country’s nuclear arsenal.
 
It was here
that Stux2 would go to work.
 

China was arguably more
careful than Russia and never considered implementing a Dead Hand system, but
China’s computer systems were far more shoddy.
 
At its very core, what Stux2 was designed to do was to “reprogram”
China’s control system
into
a Dead Hand system.

Tran expected the
reprogramming to take only hours, which meant also reprogramming the system’s manual
safeguards.
 
But when it was done, it
would do the unthinkable…it would then simulate a nuclear launch against China
from both Russia and the United States, and the Chinese Command and Control
system would no longer be able to tell the difference.

In the end, China’s
systems would believe it
was
under attack, and automatically launch its
entire nuclear arsenal against its attackers.

The United States’
original Stuxnet worm was the first to leap the barrier from the virtual world
to the real world.
 
Stux2 would use that
leap to launch a full-scale, global, nuclear war.

Tran stared at his
screen for a long time.
 
The world had
become so terribly dirty and corrupted.
 
He regretted having to do it, but he had realized long ago this was the
only way to cleanse the system, all of the systems.
 
Mankind had to start over.
 

He looked at his screen
again and pressed the Enter key, which sent the command for the attack to begin
in six

hours.
 
By then he would be on a plane and far over
the Pacific Ocean.

51

Robert Correia wanted
revenge.
 
He wasn’t supposed to, but he
did.
 

Born and raised in the
Bronx, he’d spent almost as many hours in church as he had in school.
 
It was because of his mother, a devout
Catholic.
 
She was a believer through and
through and would often tell her children when their actions went against God’s
will, so it was no surprise her four children grew up as close to the church as
she had.
 
They were true to their faith,
and none of them had married outside the church.
 
As far as his mother was concerned, their
hearts and souls were pureblood.

But Correia stared
through the bars with a pain like he had never felt.
 
His Pope was gone, murdered in broad
daylight.
 
And worse, his mother was also
dead.
 
So distraught by the news, his
elderly mother had fainted and collapsed.
 
Two hours later, she was dead.

Correia was
seething.
 
His mother, his life, and his
faith were all shattered because of the man lying on the floor on the other
side of those bars.
 
Correia was a deputy
sheriff at Rikers Island, and at 2 a.m., he was standing silently before the
cell of the man who destroyed it all.

He watched the dark
shape on the floor and could hear a faint gurgling sound as the man tried
desperately to breathe.
 
The world was
simply not meant for men this evil.
 
He
didn’t deserve to be here.
 
Correia
gripped the metal baseball bat in his hand, looking left and right down the
dark corridor.
 
Everyone was asleep, and
the two other deputies had conveniently decided to go downstairs in search of
something.

Correia had already
unlocked the door from a distance and now reached out and grabbed one of the
thick bars, pulling the door outward.
 
He
looked up and down the corridor again and quietly stepped forward into the dark
cell.
 
The man at his feet had been
beaten as close to death as anyone he had ever seen.
 
In fact, no one could believe he was still
alive, so it wouldn’t come as a surprise if he unexpectedly died during the
night.
 

The hate welled up
inside Correia as he raised the bat up over his head.
 
There would be no turning of this cheek.

“Don’t you dare,” came
a voice from behind him.
 
It was followed
by the sound of the safety being released on a semi-automatic hand gun.

Correia froze.

“Put it down.”

The deputy slowly
lowered the bat down over his head, quickly trying to think of an
explanation.
 
“I…uh,” he stammered.
 
“I was just…angry.
 
I wasn’t really going to do anything.”

“Lay it down and back
up out of the cell.”

Correia complied.
 
As he exited the cell, he was thrown
forcefully against the bars without warning and felt his nose break.
 
“AHHH!”
 
He groaned and stepped back but was slammed into the bars a second time,
even harder.

The face of Bazes
appeared from a shadow behind him, followed by the older chaplain.
 
Bazes whispered into the deputy’s ear.
 
“If I see you move one inch, I’ll make sure
you never walk again.”

“I can’t believe he’s
still alive,” the chaplain said as they eased Rand down onto a table in the
infirmary.
 

Bazes simply nodded his
head.
 
He’d never seen anything like it.
 
He reached up and turned down the brightness
of the overhead lamp.

Below them, Rand
managed to open one eye.
 
“Who are you?”
he whispered through swollen lips.

“That’s a long story,”
Bazes smiled.
 
“But we’re here to
help.”
 
The chaplain nodded from over his
shoulder.

Rand slowly rolled his
eye back and forth.
 
“Where am I?”

“You’re at Rikers
Island,” Bazes answered.
 
He looked down
at Rand’s arms and noticed they were still shaking.
 
Bazes put his hands on one arm trying to calm
him but realized the tremors ran throughout his body.
 
“I think you’re having a prolonged seizure.”

“It’s not a seizure,”
Rand said quietly.
 
“What time is it?”

The chaplain looked at
his wristwatch.
 
“It’s two twenty-five
a.m.”

“What day?”

The chaplain looked
curiously at Bazes.
 
“It’s Monday, the 8
^th
.”

Bazes looked into
Rand’s eyes.
 
“Listen, I don’t know who
you are, but I have some idea.
 
And I
think you and I are looking for the same person.”

“What happened in
here?”
 
Rand grimaced in pain when he
tried to move.
 

Bazes looked at the
chaplain.
 
“They think you killed the
Pope.”

Rand let his head fall
back onto the table and stared straight up at the ceiling.
 
“The Pope is dead?”

 
“Yes, and I think the man we’re both after is
the one who did it,” Bazes said.
 
“And I
don’t think he’s finished.”

Rand’s brow
furrowed.
 
“What do you mean?”

“I think he’s planning
something else, something worse.
 
But I
don’t know exactly what.”

Rand closed his
eye.
 
The trembling was getting
stronger.
 
There wasn’t much time.
 
He opened both eyes and looked back at
Bazes.
 
“Where’s Avery?”

Avery was also lying
motionless on his cell floor, but he was in worse shape.
 
Due to his age, they hadn’t beaten him as
badly, but no longer having the ability to heal like Rand, his injuries were
terminal.

Bazes and Wilcox helped
Rand down onto his knee beside him.
 
He
couldn’t hear Avery’s breathing, and when he checked his pulse he could barely
feel it.
 
He was slipping fast.
 
Rand put his shaking hand gently on the back
of Avery’s head.
 
Then he ran it over the
top and down over his eyelids.

“Go home,” Rand said
softly, squeezing his shoulder.
 
“You’ve
earned it.”

As he tried to stand
up, Avery’s hand suddenly moved and reached out for him.
 
Rand quickly grabbed it.
 
His lips were moving and Rand knelt down,
trying to hear.
 

Avery whispered
something, but it was still too faint.
 
His strength was gone, but Bazes and Wilcox helped Rand down even
further, so his ear was just inches from Avery’s mouth.
 

“Tell Sarah,” Avery
whispered, “to be strong.”

With that, Avery let
out his last breath, his body relaxed and rolled back onto the cold floor.

Rand stared at him for
a long time.
 
Avery had given him so
much, trained him, taught him and prepared him.
 
Rand’s jaw tightened as he took a deep breath and pushed himself up.
 
With his teeth clenched tightly, he rose
enough to get a shaking leg under his weight. Both Bazes and the chaplain
reached out, but Rand stopped them.
 

“No!” he growled,
rising up into a kneeling position and then sliding his second leg beneath
him.
 
Finally, with everything he had, he
pushed himself up and onto his feet.

He turned and looked at
the two men.
 
“Can you get me out of
here?”

“Yes.”

“I need a plane, and I
could use some help.”

Bazes looked at the
chaplain, then back at Rand.
 
“I have
resources.”