Cybernation nf-6 Read online

  Cybernation

  ( Net Force - 6 )

  Tom Clancy

  Steve Pieczenik

  Steve Perry

  In the year 2010, computers are the new superpowers. Those who control them control the world. To enforce the Net Laws, Congress creates the ultimate computer security agency within the FBP the Net Force.

  When web service is disrupted across the world, a new nation makes its presence known. Terrorists from a virtual country called CyberNation have taken the web hostage. Their demands: worldwide recognition and rights for their "citizens." Though there are millions of CyberNation sympathizers, Net Force rallies its troops for an all-out war on three fronts — politically, physically, and electronically — because dealing with terrorists is never an option…

  Tom Clancy, Steve Pieczenik, Steve Perry

  Breaking Point

  “The issue before us is one of no ordinary character. We are not engaged in a conflict for conquest, or for aggrandizement, or for the settlement of a point of international law. The question for you to decide is, Will you be slaves or will you be independent?”

  — President Jefferson Davis. Confederate States of America. Jackson, Mississippi. December 26, 1862

  PART ONE

  The Lines Are Down

  PROLOGUE

  Friday, December 23, 2012—7:03 A.M.

  Scranton, Pennsylvania

  Cameron Barnes jabbed one finger at the phone’s keyboard, hitting the “O” button over and over.

  “Dammit, what the hell’s wrong! C’mon, C’mon—!”

  From the kitchen, Victoria said, “What?”

  “I’m not talking to you, I’m talking to the stupid phone!”

  Victoria stuck her head through the doorway. “Excuse me?”

  “The phone, the phone is out of order. No dial tone, nothing.”

  “Use your digital.”

  “I already tried that. Same thing.”

  “Maybe your battery is—”

  “No, the battery is not dead, I checked it!”

  “Well, don’t take my head off! It’s not my fault!”

  “I’m sorry. But, look, I have to make this call — if the customer doesn’t hear from us by seven-thirty, we’re screwed. I’m gonna lose my commission!”

  “Use my cell.”

  He started to ask, but she beat him to it. “In my purse.”

  Cam found her purse, pulled the little folding phone out, opened it. He tried voxax first, telling it the name to call, but that didn’t work. Neither did the buttons.

  He was going to lose his commission. Eight hundred bucks. Shit!

  Austin, Texas

  Rocko Jackson stared at his computer screen and cursed. “Son of a bitch! Don’t you do this to me now!”

  In the cubicle next to his, Tim Bonifazio stood and peeped over the short divider.

  “ ’S’up, white boy?”

  “The damned system must be locked up again. I can’t get it to access the net.”

  “Hold on a second, lemme check. It’s probably just your station, you know how the mainframe hates you.”

  Tim disappeared from sight. After a second, Rocko heard, “Uh-oh!”

  “Aha, so the mainframe hates you, too, don’t it?”

  “No, man, it hates everybody. My laptop and wireless modem ain’t working, neither.”

  “So what are you saying, the net is down?” He laughed.

  “That’s what it looks like from here.”

  “I don’t even want to hear that.”

  Silicon Valley, California

  Rachel Todd arrived at the conference room at the same time as Dal Ellner and Narin Brown.

  Rachel said, “What is going on, guys?”

  Both Dal and Narin shook their heads. “Got me,” Narin said. “All I know is nobody can get on the web. Not with hardwired, laptops, digital phones, nothing. Even old man Johns’s virgil isn’t working. It’s like the net just… died, or something.”

  “Can’t be,” Dal said.

  “Maybe not, but I know of at least fifteen major ISPs — from local to New York to London to Hong Kong — that are flat out inaccessible.”

  “This is bad,” Rachel said.

  “Bad? It’s catastrophic! Every hour we’re off-line costs us half a million bucks! In a couple of days, we’ll be in the toilet!”

  “Us and everybody for as far as the eye can see,” Narin said.

  “That doesn’t make me feel any better.”

  Cheyenne Mountain, Wyoming

  “Lieutenant, you want to tell me what the hell is going on?”

  “Unknown, General Harmon, sir. All network operations are snafued.”

  “You mean we are deaf and blind here?”

  “No, sir, we have landlines that still work, we can call in launch codes manually if we have to.”

  “And how do we open the silo doors?”

  “Hand cranks, sir.”

  “Not acceptable, Lieutenant. I want the situation rectified.”

  “Sir, according to landline reports, the problem is nationwide — we can’t fix it from here.”

  “God dammit!”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Dry Wells, North Dakota

  Chief of Police Steve Cotten stared through his window at the icy morning outside. The new power grid had just up and shut down. With the temperature at minus fourteen and the windchill factor pushing minus fifty, the lights, electric heat, and all phone and net service simply stopped.

  The citizens of North Dakota knew how to deal with cold, and usually had enough wood stockpiled for such emergencies. The chief himself had six split cords under a tarp next to his garage, but there were people old enough so that splitting and then hauling in firewood would be a hard chore. Four men had already had fatal heart attacks; two others injured themselves badly enough to require hospitalization. Chief Cotten knew there would be another group unable to heat their homes who were likely to die from hypothermia.

  The chief sighed. It was turning out to be an all around, in the toilet, crappy morning here, oh, yeah.

  On the Gambling Ship Bon Chance Somewhere in the Caribbean

  Alone in his cabin, Jackson Keller slipped the headset up, pulled the earplugs loose, shucked his haptic gloves, and grinned at the holoproj’s test pattern. “Way to go, team,” he said. “Let’s see how they like that!”

  They weren’t gonna like it at all. Jay Gridley especially wasn’t gonna like it.

  He laughed. Ah, this was going to be so much fun!

  1

  Net Force HQ

  Quantico, Virginia

  Alex Michaels, Commander of Net Force, swore softly at the empty computer screen on his desk. He picked up his phone and said, “Jay Gridley.”

  The voxax circuit made the connection, but internal coms were pictureless. The voice on the other end said, “What? I’m kind of busy here!”

  “Jay. What the hell is going on?”

  “Oops. I didn’t check the ID sig, sorry, boss. We got problems.”

  “Really? You think so?”

  “I guess you wouldn’t be calling if you didn’t already know that.”

  “What’s up?”

  “I don’t know. Our main server is off-line, and all wireless external phone lines are bollixed. My virgil’s emergency circuit says there are outages like this everywhere, all over the country.”

  “Great.”

  “I’m trying to run it down, boss.”

  “Don’t let me keep you. Call me back when you get something.”

  Michaels put down the phone. Well, wasn’t this just peachy? A few minutes ago, he’d been patting himself on the back, telling himself how great things were going. B
usiness had been slow, Net Force had been on top of computer crime like never before, even the director had called to congratulate him on how good a job they’d been doing. He should have known better than to feel good about this. It was as if while God was having his morning coffee, Michaels had strolled by, full of hubris and proud of himself, and bumped God’s elbow, sloshing hot coffee into His divine lap.

  Oops.

  Here, son, let me show you what goeth before a fall…

  He should have known.

  He was paying for it now. Because he knew that whatever the problem was with the net and phones, it was going to be Net Force’s responsibility. No question about it.

  “Sir?” His secretary.

  “Yes?”

  “The director is on the intercom. Line one.”

  Michaels nodded. Of course she was. He sighed and reached for the phone.

  Helsinki, Finland

  Jasmine Chance walked down the hall toward the office Roberto had cleared of furniture and made into a workout space. Music drifted out of Roberto’s makeshift gym, drums and the singsong twang of berimbau, an instrument that looked vaguely like an archery bow strung with a metal wire, and with a gourd attached to one end. Roberto had explained the workings of this device in much greater detail than Chance had ever wanted to know. The instrument was played by hitting the wire with a little stick while rattling a gourd filled with pebbles in the same hand, and the musician could alternate between two notes by touching the wire with a coin or not. Santos liked to have his players use a Krugerrand, gold giving the best tone, so he said. The simple rhythms produced were part and parcel of the acrobatic African/South American martial art of Capoeira that Roberto Santos — a black, Brazilian master of the dance who bore the title of Capoeirista Mestre—practiced for hours every day.

  Chance stepped into the doorway just as Roberto leaped into the air and turned a back somersault, landed neatly on the balls of his feet, then dropped into a spraddle-legged posture, sweeping one foot along the floor in a broad half-circle. Only the palm sides of the hands and soles of the feet were ever supposed to touch the ground, he had told her, that was part of O Jôgo, The Game. Capoeira was a fighting system developed by slaves, and while one school of history had it that it had been disguised as a dance so as to fool the white masters, Roberto had been quick to point out that such thinking was simplistic.

  Most of what she knew of Capoeira she had learned from Roberto in bed, between bouts of an art at which she was an adept. Roberto was barely thirty years old. He was a decade younger than she was. He was handsome, had great stamina, and his body seemed chiseled from hard cocobolo wood. There was no fat on him at all. He had been a diamond in the rough when they had met. She had polished him and taught him how to be a skilled lover over the year of their association. He was coming along nicely.

  Now, wearing only a pair of thin, calf-length red-and-white striped cotton pants, Roberto glowed with passion and sweat as he practiced his exercises. Though he preferred to be musically accompanied by three or four of his fellow game players — you had to learn to play the instruments as part of the dance — the music now was recorded. When he saw her arrive, he finished his sequence, then padded across the bare floor to the sound box and shut it off.

  When he spoke, he had an accent, the soft liquid flow of Portuguese translating to his English, a rounding of hard consonants and lengthening of vowels.

  “Ah, Missy. How goes the battle?”

  She smiled, flashing perfect teeth — all marvels of expensive orthodontia, a thousand dollars a cap. “Keller says the first sortie went perfectly.”

  Roberto picked a towel up from the floor and wiped the sweat from his face and shaved head. “Jackson, he’s a fine boy, can make them computers dance like nobody else.”

  Chance smiled. That was true. Jackson Keller was a wizard with hardware and software, as good with those technical things as Roberto here was at bashing heads. CyberNation did not hire second-class talent for its key positions. There was much to be gained — or lost — in this game, and cutting corners on personnel would be short-sighted and stupid. When you were trying to create a virtual nation from nothing, to give it weight and substance, you had to do some very intricate things if you were going to pull it off. Having good help alone wasn’t sufficient. You needed the best. All of Chance’s people were just that — the best. And she wasn’t so bad herself, though her talents were somewhat harder to quantify. The higher-ups in CyberNation called her The Dragon Lady when they thought she couldn’t hear, and she took that as a compliment.

  To Roberto, she said, “Yes, but this is the easy part. Scrambling software gets their attention, but they’ll fix that, and all it will cost will be some tired programmers and a few hours’ downtime. The next stage will be more difficult. If it gets to that.”

  And of course, it would get to that soon enough — the nations of the world weren’t going to just roll over and give away anything, certainly not the kind of power CyberNation wanted for itself.

  “You worry too much, Missy.” He grinned. “That part won’t be no harder than Jackson’s jôgo, only different.”

  “Good to see you haven’t lost your confidence, Roberto.”

  “Ah, me, I ain’t lost nothin’.”

  She closed the door and locked it. “Talk is cheap.”

  He hooked his thumbs into the waistline of his pants and skinned them down, peeled them off, one foot, then the other, and tossed them to one side.

  She laughed, and reached for her shirt buttons. “We’ll have to hurry,” she said. “We have to leave for the ship in an hour.”

  “Only an hour?”

  “We have to pack.”

  “Let me show you how to pack,” he said.

  She laughed again. Life was good.

  Washington, D.C.

  Somebody screamed bloody murder, jerking Toni from her half-doze into full alertness. She came off the couch and onto her feet and into a defensive stance, expecting to be attacked, before her brain got back on track.

  It’s only the baby. Just Little Alex.

  Toni relaxed. Aloud, she said, “Yeah, little Alex, the demon child from the lowest pit of Hell.” But she was already on her way into the bedroom, and at the baby’s crib before he could get through the second outraged scream.

  “Hey, hey, hey, baby boy, what’s the matter? Mama’s here, it’s okay.”

  He stood balanced precariously on his little fat feet, holding onto the rail.

  She picked the baby up, put him over her left shoulder, and patted him gently on the back.

  He gave out one more half-hearted yell, just to let her know he wasn’t happy it had taken her all of thirty seconds to get from the living room to pick him up, then trailed off into a quiet burble before shutting up completely.

  “Oh, you’re happy now, are you? Brat. Monster.” She leaned him away and cradled him, smiling with a fierce possessive joy at him. She hadn’t slept for more than four hours at a stretch for what seemed like forever, but he was such an angel when he smiled his new-toothed grin at her, as he was doing now. He was a beautiful child. Yeah, yeah, she knew that every mother thought that about her babies, but objectively speaking, he really was. Objectively speaking. Anybody with eyes could see that.

  She smiled at that thought and at Alex Junior — a name his father had fought against but lost. Yes, she had agreed, a junior had a lot to live up to, and no, it wasn’t necessarily the best thing to tag a baby with that. The choice they’d agreed upon was “Scott,” giving him his paternal grandfather’s middle name. But when the nurse had come in with the little flatscreen to log in the newborn baby’s stats, Alex hadn’t been there.

  “What’s the baby’s name?” the nurse had asked, ready to log it into the system.

  And Toni had smiled and given it to her. Alex hadn’t really been that upset. Secretly, she was sure he was actually very pleased.

  Little Alex made sucking noises, but it was not time for his feeding yet. He
had gotten off the breast and was taking milk and some solid food full-time now. And she no longer leaked milk when he cried, thank God. That had gotten a little embarrassing while sitting in a restaurant or even just out pushing the stroller.

  She walked into the living room, cooing at little Alex, looking for his binky. They had half a dozen kinds of different pacifiers, but somehow, the baby could tell the difference among them, and would spit out all but his favorite. This had caused some not-so-funny moments while they turned the house upside down looking for it against the background of unhappy baby squawls. Unfortunately, the favorite binky had come as a baby shower gift from somebody, and neither Toni nor Alex had been able to find a match for it anywhere. There was no brand name on it, and nobody remembered who had given it to them. A web search came up empty, and friends with babies were no help, either. Normally, they had the thing strapped to a clip attached to the baby’s shirt so they wouldn’t lose it, but somehow, they managed to lose it anyhow.

  Jay Gridley had come up with a tiny responder that could be hooked to the clip strap. All you had to do was say “Binky!” in a loud voice, and the electronic device, about the size of a penny, would say “Here I am!” over and over until you could find it and squeeze it off. Jay had put the thing inside a little sleeve of waterproof silicone, just in case little Alex managed to somehow get that part into his mouth.

  Life since the baby was just full of these kinds of problems, and they only sounded little to people who didn’t have children of their own.

  And being a full-time mama was a far cry from being a Net Force operative second in command to her now-husband, or working for the mainline FBI as a special liaison to Net Force.

  Just then, the baby distinctly said, “Da da.”

  Toni stared at him, astounded. “What? What did you say?”

  Little Alex smiled and said it again, repeating it a third time for good measure: “Da da da.”