Blue Warrior (21 page)

33

Tamanghasset Province
Southern Algeria

7 May

T
he French Foreign Legion patrolled the barren stretch of desert with the permission of a reluctant Algerian national government. Cocaine shipments from Bolivia had been making their way into Europe through the porous sands of the Algerian Sahara, an ironic twist to the Americans’ War on Drugs. The Algerians appeared helpless to stop it, though the French government suspected that certain corrupt officials in Algiers profited by the venture. The French decided to take matters into their own hands.

The French government generally, and the French army in particular, had been stretched beyond the breaking point since the Great Recession began in 2008. But the French Foreign Legion had a long history in this desert and, despite their limited resources, volunteered a section of their best. Working from incomplete Interpol reports and questionable intelligence from Algeria’s security service, the Département du Renseignement et de la Sécurité, today’s patrol was heading for a stretch of remote highway that was reportedly used as a temporary airfield for drug shipments.

First Lieutenant Pyotr Krasnov rode at the head of his small column of five Renault Sherpa 3As, low-profile trucks that looked like aerodynamic Humvees. A Russian national, he previously served with
distinction in the 98th Guard Airborne Division as a sergeant in the South Ossetian War, but he was put under house arrest pending a court-martial after assaulting an officer he considered cowardly. He avoided prosecution only by escaping the camp and fleeing the country.

Now Krasnov proudly wore the
kepi
of the French Foreign Legion. A tattoo of huge block letters ran the length of his muscular right forearm that read LEGIO PATRIA NOSTRA—“the Legion is my Fatherland.” He was willing to fight and die for France because the Legion had given him a home, no questions asked. Bald and thick like a power lifter, the two-meter-tall ex-paratrooper was as tough as they came in one of the world’s toughest fighting units. He was one of the few foreign nationals to fight his way up into the officer corps, making him an even rarer breed of elite warrior.

Lieutenant Krasnov hated the jihadists. He had had a bellyful of them on his tour in southern Afghanistan, and he’d seen the carnage they wrought over the years in suicide bombings in his former country, particularly the fanatical Chechens and their murderous assaults against hospitals, theaters, and even schools. He was happy to be chasing the scum today, but if the intel wasn’t any better than what he’d received over the last several weeks, he expected this to be a another waste of time and fuel. His column raced along the flat paved road at 120 kph just in case any IEDs were deployed and his Sherpas blasted out electronic jamming signals to prevent remote IED detonations. A large IED could tear even armored vehicles like his in half like a soft baguette.

“Lieutenant, do you see that?” His driver, a lanky American kid, pointed at a man in the road far up ahead waving a white cloth vigorously over his head.

Krasnov pulled up a pair of field glasses. The man in the road was obviously an American or European. His long blond hair was matted with sweat and tucked under a salt-stained ball cap. His big, bushy beard made him look like a Viking, even from this distance, and he wore a civilian uniform of some sort, but Krasnov couldn’t quite make out the logo. A Nissan pickup was parked near him on the side of the road in the sand, its hood up.

Krasnov radioed the rest of the convoy to prepare to stop. His driver tapped the brakes and began to slow, downshifting as the tachometer drifted toward zero. The driver eventually stopped, pulling even with the broken-down truck. Krasnov radioed to the other troopers to remain in their Sherpas, but he dismounted along with the two privates riding in his command vehicle, a dour blue-eyed Pole and a hawk-faced Spaniard. The American driver remained seated, engine idling.

“Hey! Thank God! You speak English?” the man said. His white teeth smiled through his wild beard. His name was stitched on the sweat-soaked shirt of the faded British Petroleum uniform: “Magnus Karlsen.” The accent sounded Nordic to Krasnov. The man certainly looked the part.

“Yes, I speak English. What are you doing out here?” Krasnov smiled behind his dark wraparound sunglasses, but his suspicious eyes darted all around the scene.

The Pole and the Spaniard kept their automatic rifles slung low as they casually circled around the truck, checking for weapons and drugs.

“Stupid GPS! It sent me the wrong way. And then this piece of shit”—Karlsen kicked the Nissan’s fender hard—“decided to run out of petrol on me.”

“Swedish?” Krasnov asked.

“Norwegian. I think we are both far away from home.”

“You think so?” Krasnov pulled his glasses off and wiped the sweat off his face with his gloved hand. He glanced up at the Spaniard, who shook his head no, indicating nothing unusual about the truck.

“You need some water, Mr. Karlsen?”

“Yes, please. I ran out.” He pointed at half a dozen small empty bottles littering the sand around him.

Krasnov reached into the Sherpa cab and pulled out an unopened liter bottle of water. He tossed it to the big Norwegian.

“Thank you.” He cracked it open and drained it in one long chug, the water dribbling down the sides of his mouth onto his beard and shirt. He finished and grunted like a sated Viking would, then crushed
the bottle in his thick fist and tossed it. “How about some petrol? Can you spare any?”

Krasnov nodded. “A little. Ten liters should be enough to get you back to town.”

“Perfect. Thank you.”

Krasnov nodded wordlessly to the Pole, who crossed to the Sherpa and reached for the jerry can.

“You want me to call you in?” Krasnov asked. “Your bosses must be worried.”

Karlsen grinned again. He pulled out an old cell phone from his pocket and waved it at Krasnov. “Called in two hours ago, before the battery died. They should have been here by now. You didn’t pass them on the way here?”

Krasnov shook his head and said, “No,” still scanning the horizon. In the far distance, high in the hazing blue sky, a plane. The Russian shielded his eyes with his gloved hand but couldn’t make it out. Too high up. Probably nothing. The windless air stank of diesel fuel now.

The Pole set the jerry can down after filling the Nissan’s tank. “Finished, Lieutenant,” he muttered.

“Secure that can, and the two of you load back in.”

“Yes, sir.”

The Norwegian folded himself into the cramped pickup cab and turned the key. The engine coughed for a couple of revolutions and then sputtered to life. “Excellent!” The bearded man threw a big thumbs-up at Krasnov.

“Better get going,” Krasnov said. He shut the Nissan’s door, leaving his hands on the sill.

Karlsen held out a big, sweaty hand. “You saved my life. I can’t thank you enough.”

Krasnov hesitated, then shook his hand.

Karlsen nodded his thanks again, slammed the truck into first gear, and sped away past the convoy of Sherpas. Krasnov watched him for a few moments, then keyed the radio mic on his shoulder. “Time to get
back to work, gentlemen. And keep the music off. I want everybody on high alert.”

The big Russian tapped on the driver’s window. It rolled down. “I want you to call that guy in. Have someone run a check on those plates, too.”

“Already did, Lieutenant.”

Seven hundred meters away, Karlsen slammed the brakes. The rubber squealed on the asphalt.

Krasnov glanced toward the noise. He raised himself up on the Sherpa’s step to get a better vantage. Saw Karlsen’s truck parked on the road, driver’s door open. Where did he go?

Krasnov glanced down at the road beneath his feet, then the sand by the side of the road. He saw it. There.

Too late.

One hundred feet of C4 erupted. Even half a mile away, Karlsen felt the pressure wave. It rocked his truck and spattered sand in his face like buckshot. The earplugs hardly helped, but he covered his ears with his hands, too, and opened his mouth. The air sucked out of his lungs so hard he thought they’d come up through his mouth. But a second passed and he gasped for air and knew he’d survived. His nose was runny. He pinched it with his fingers. Blood. His ears rang and his head ached. His pagan forefathers would have said that Ragnarök had begun—the end of the world. But,
inshallah
, not yet. At least not for him. Not for Al Rus. Not for the Viking.

The big Norwegian muttered a prayer of thanksgiving to Allah, then stood and brushed himself off. He crawled back into his Nissan and sped back to the scene. Smoke and dust boiled over the explosion site like a fog of doom. On the far side of the road, the Sherpas were gone. A debris field of twisted steel littered the sand. Clearly, no one had survived.

He stopped the truck where the MICLIC had been planted. The mine-clearing line charge was a hundred feet of C4 block assemblies strung together by nylon rope. The deadly charge was given to him by
brothers from Fallujah who had retaken that city in 2014. The city was full of U.S. Marine Corps ordnance left behind for the worthless Iraqi army and police—tons of it. Guns, grenades, radios, claymore mines, and even MCLC.

Al Rus knew that the French would use electronic jammers—that was standard operating procedure against wireless remote IED detonators. But the jammers couldn’t stop an old-fashioned hand-cranked generator connected to copper wire. Primitive, but effective, especially in the hands of a trained engineer like Al Rus. The former BP employee had converted to the true Islamic faith, Salafism, when he was stationed in Saudi Arabia. Before he joined AQS, white German jihadi brothers in a Waziristan village taught him how to handle weapons and explosives and took him on their raids into Afghanistan against NATO forces, where he killed his first European infidels. He had a talent for it.

Al Rus stepped back over to his truck and dug around under the seat. He pulled out a radio and called his second-in-command, informing him it was now safe for the plane on the far horizon to land on the road ahead. In an hour, the cocaine would be loaded onto Algerian trucks and shipped north, making its way to the heart of the land of the Crusaders. If depraved Europeans wanted to pay good money for the poison he sold to them, so much the better. That money was used to wage jihad and help the poor and widows, and so it was blessed.

34

CIOS Corporate Offices
Rockville, Maryland

7 May

J
asmine Bath’s paranoia knew no bounds. She was determined to live long enough to enjoy the wealth she had accumulated over the last few years, and even more determined to enjoy a long and happy retirement, which, according to her schedule, would begin in precisely seven months, given current revenue streams.

It was probably time to get out by then anyway. Computer security was about to make a great leap forward with DARPA’s PROCEED initiative, exploring methods that would allow data computation of encrypted data without first decrypting it, even in the cloud, making it virtually impossible for hackers like her to write malware code to break it. Worse, security operations themselves would become automated, just like future combat. Advanced machine learning algorithms would soon become the security gatekeepers, not only preventing but even anticipating human-designed attacks.

Bath’s first line of defense was to remain hidden from the NSA. The easiest trick was to leak NSA training documents to various media outlets under the names of known whistle-blowers. That kept the NSA in a constant state of paranoia and self-limiting defenses as media and congressional inquiries escalated. The NSA simply didn’t have time to
look for someone like Jasmine, especially not even knowing she was there to begin with.

The most effective tool in Bath’s defense arsenal was the alliances she created with other unwitting players in the field. Posing as an anonymous member of various hacktivist groups, Jasmine would empower them with resources that both distracted the NSA and created new targets of national interest. In the last few years, the anarchist hacker group ALGO.RYTHM had made frequent headlines by breaking into DoD computer bases, stealing embarrassing State Department cables, and disabling the LANs of the big national laboratories, then publishing their exploits. Of course, ALGO.RYTHM hackers managed to complete these missions only by following the guided maps through agency software defenses fed to them by Jasmine Bath. If ALGO.RYTHM hackers got sloppy with their opsec, CIOS would dispatch a specialized field operative to pinch off the potential leak, usually with a small-caliber bullet to the brain.

The closest anyone had ever come to identifying Jasmine occurred just weeks after the Utah Data Center at Bluffdale had gone online. She still wasn’t quite sure how he’d picked up her digital scent, but he did, and his abilities were far superior to those of anyone else she’d ever encountered at the Q Group, the NSA’s security and counterintelligence directorate. She finally evaded him by destroying his career, falsely linking him to the most recent Utah Data Center catastrophe. It was one of her best ops.

Jasmine knew the security protocols at the UDC because she’d designed half of them while in the NSA’s employ. The UDC was NSA’s vast, multibillion-dollar server farm, and the crown jewel in its burgeoning intelligence-gathering empire. It was deemed impossible to infect the computers there with any kind of virus thanks to the external firewalls, which suffered tens of thousands of automated attempted hacks daily.

But the internal security procedures were equally important. Those protocols kept any devices from being smuggled in that might carry infectious malware. The NSA knew that it was a USB thumb drive
infected with the Stuxnet virus smuggled into the Natanz nuclear facility that wiped out over a thousand Iranian centrifuges. The NSA took every precaution to avoid a similar attack on the UDC.

Every precaution but one, Jasmine determined.

A search of UDC employees uncovered the medical records of a senior programmer at the facility. The fifty-eight-year-old woman had recently had one of the new wirelessly programmed heart pacemakers implanted. The wireless pacemaker was monitored and updated via a cell phone call. All Bath did was hack into the poorly secured mainframe of the medical device manufacturer and install a Stuxnet-like worm on the woman’s pacemaker via the cell phone. Once the infected programmer was at her computer station, the self-propogating worm used the pacemaker’s wireless capabilities to infect the SCADA system Wi-Fi routers. Those SCADA computers, in turn, controlled the air handler units that cooled the 1.2 million square feet of the vast server farm. Once the air handler units failed—along with the warning alarms and software monitoring the failure, disabled by the same worm—acres of servers overheated and eventually caught fire, destroying 400 terabytes of collected foreign intelligence. While this represented only a small fraction of the total amount of data stored at the UDC, it was an amount of data equal to all of the books ever written in the history of the world.

Internal security inspections investigating the multimillion-dollar catastrophe located the worm, and it was traced back to the home computer of the Q Group investigator who had nearly uncovered CIOS and its operations. His hard drive also contained encrypted links to offshore bank accounts affiliated with the anarchist hacker group ALGO.RYTHM.

The innocent Q Group investigator was swiftly arrested, tried, and convicted. A life ruined, a family bankrupted, all thanks to falsified evidence created and planted by Jasmine Bath.