Breakpoint (21 page)

“We could have made it much worse,” the General observed. “Could have been a Monday-night rush hour in July. Could have been the entire country.”

“Yeah,” Packetman smirked, “but they're not gonna get it back for a while. The nuclear plants especially take a long time to come back up. The blackout will go on for days, into the workweek. And if we want, it could be weeks.”

0859 PST
Electrical Reliability Coordination Center
Riverside, California

“It's so hot for March that they'll be turning on the air-conditioning in L.A., Phoenix, and Vegas before noon. You watch,” Danny Hubbard told his supervisor, Fran Cella, as the two sat below a fifty-foot-long wall of large computer screens. In front of them were smaller screens and a bank of switches and lights. The indicators were all in the green. The voltage level on the transmission lines showed well above the critical minimums. The indicators had been reprogrammed by Packetman never to dip, never to alarm, no matter what the incoming data actually was. The same code change had been made systemwide by one cyberbot inserted into the control network.

“Yeah, but at least it's Saturday, so the load is light,” she said, carefully dipping her Chinese herbal chai in the dragon-covered pot of piping-hot water.

Then, at substations and transformers throughout the California and Baja electric grid, an instruction message was received in the computer code language of the supervisory control and data acquisition system: drop voltage. Each programmable box obeyed. Monitoring systems scattered throughout the state instantly noticed the entire grid's voltage drop below safe minimums. The monitoring systems sent alarm messages to control centers: “High loading, low voltage without electrical faults on unprotected lines.” Slightly over a minute later, three different sensors in the field sent in priority messages: “Potential for cascading failures.” Packetman's handiwork sent the messages into cyber black holes. No needles moved. No lights flashed. No Klaxons sounded.

“How much are we buying today from Pacific Northwest?” Fran asked, blowing on the cup to cool the black tea. As she spoke, the large screens abruptly went dark and the room plunged into blackness. Fran Cella leaped out of her chair, reaching for a telephone. “Son of a bitch!” she screamed as the scalding water spilled down her chest. Slowly, a few dim yellow lights came on from battery pack emergency boxes mounted on the walls. “We lost power?
We
did? We're supposed to be running the grid, for Christ sakes! Danny, how's the grid?”

The big boards had failed to come back on. Danny Hubbard was glaring at a small monitor in front of his position and rebooting his desktop computer. “I thought the center had its own backup emergency generator?” he asked as his system spun up. “We're only on batteries.”

“We do have a generator. Supposed to test it again next month,” Fran said, hanging up the telephone. “Lines are dead. What's your screen say?”

“It says, ‘System was improperly shut down. Data loss may have occurred.' No fucking shit!”

At the nuclear power plants in the desert, generators went into automatic shutdown mode because of the absence of external electrical power to support their emergency systems. Regional air traffic control at Los Angeles Center, running on its emergency generator, queried aircraft whether they had enough fuel to return to Honolulu or make it to Dallas. At LAX, the tower slowed landings and began stacking aircraft in the skies over the Pacific. Under the streets in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Oakland, and Berkeley, subway trains stopped dead in darkened tunnels.

Elevators in high-rise apartment buildings and office towers froze between floors. In casinos in Las Vegas, Reno, Laughlin, and Tahoe, gamblers fought over chips in dimly lit halls. At the ports in Long Beach and Oakland, giant cranes halted with shipping containers hanging in midair. At hospitals in twenty states, staff struggled with emergency generators, as nurses began shutting off patient monitors to shed load on the backup power and started trying to pry open windows for ventilation. Police moved patrol cars with lights flashing into intersections to direct traffic on surface streets, as the traffic control lights sat unresponsive.

At gas stations throughout the region, pumps stopped working. Quarter-mile-long trains with food, cars, and coal halted on tracks throughout the West as the railroad's control system went dark. At the prisons in Soledad, Folsom, and San Quentin, inmates clashed with guards attempting to put the institutions in lockdown. Pharmacies in Phoenix, Denver, and South Central Los Angeles were looted. At windowless high-rises filled with telephone switches and internet routers, batteries failed and switches crashed due to inadequate loads from backup power systems. Burglar alarms went off across the region.

Military bases in California and Colorado went on alert and rolled armored vehicles to the gates. The watch commander at LAPD headquarters ordered all off-duty officers to report in and issued the coded radio message that meant “don riot gear.”

On the beaches of Venice and Malibu, no one noticed. The volleyball continued uninterrupted.

1200 EST
Basement Conference Room 3
The West Wing, the White House

“Rusty MacIntyre will be sitting in for Sol today,” National Security Advisor Wallace Reynolds announced to the Secretaries of Defense and State. “You all know Russell, of course.” Reynolds was in jeans and a Princeton sweatshirt.

“Why does he gets Saturdays off?” Secretary of State Brenda Neyers asked, only half kiddingly. “He's not Orthodox.”

“He's out of town,” Reynolds said testily. “He cleared it with the President. I just wanted to get a briefing today on what we could do in cyberspace, so we understand things better when we get the briefing on all the various options Monday from the Pentagon. I don't know about you, but I don't get how all this stuff works. And I thought if China or someone is messing with our computer things, well, maybe we could do that kind of thing too. Tit for tat. What was it you said, Bill—bytes not bombs, or something?”

Secretary of Defense William Chesterfield nodded at a general, who pointed his finger at a colonel, who turned on the projector. A slide appeared on the wall with two words written in white on a black background: Information Warfare. The General, Major General Chuck Mann, United States Air Force, spoke: “We define Information Warfare to be those actions which we take to affect the information available to the enemy, to include leaflet drops, radio and television programming, e-mail messages, and other media. Whenever possible, our doctrine holds that the information used shall be truthful, although it can obviously be tailored to stress those things which we want the enemy to believe.

“In the 2003 liberation of Iraq, we successfully employed all of those media to send a message to Iraqi Army officers that they should not oppose us, that we were only after Saddam and his sons, they could stay in the Army, and that they should send their troops home for a while and should park their tanks and other vehicles in non-threatening formations. Many did what we asked and American lives were saved.”

Brenda Neyers coughed. “Only to be lost later because we double-crossed the Iraqi Army, fired the Iraqi Army's officer corps, and failed to seize their weapons. We paid for that little lie for years, with the blood of our troops.”

“Brenda, please,” Wallace Reynolds chided. “There's no need to get into all of that again. It was almost a decade ago that all of that started. Not on our watch. But, General, if I may, I thought we were going to talk about computers?”

The General looked at the Secretary of Defense, who nodded for him to answer. “Sir, I was asked to prepare a briefing on Information Warfare. Computers do play a role. We did send the Iraqi officers e-mails.”

Rusty MacIntyre saw the conversation was going nowhere fast. “Wallace, the military use the term ‘Information Warfare' interchangeably with the phrase ‘Psychological Warfare.' What you are interested in, they call Computer Network Attack.”

“Yes, right, Rusty. General, what can we do in this Computer Network Attack business?” Reynolds asked.

The General, still holding a small laser pointing device aimed at the screen, shifted on his feet and looked again at the SecDef, who sat poker faced. “Well, sir, that's all restricted, but I guess I can tell you, huh? We have developed some ability, especially after the Cyber Crash of 2009, to do some offensive work. Although frankly, sir, most of our attention is on information collection, not disruption. But we could, if ordered, do some things to some countries' air defense radar and some of their communication systems. I mean, if we had enough lead time and support from CIA, NSA, and the others.”

Wallace Reynolds sat staring at the general.

There was a brief knock on the door and a member of the Situation Room watch team entered the room and passed a folded note to MacIntyre. He realized, as he read it, that all eyes in the room were on him. He folded the paper back up and turned to Wallace Reynolds. “Other nations apparently have the ability to do more, like turn out the electrical power in half our country,” Rusty said dryly.

“What do you mean?” Secretary Neyers asked.

“All electrical power grids are down west of the Mississippi, except in Texas. That does not happen by accident,” Rusty asserted. “The attack on our cyberspace and technology that started on Sunday, by disconnecting our cyberspace from the rest of the world, and continued with attacks on some of our major labs and commercial communications satellites, probably including the assassination of the heads of our federal science agencies, has now involved the largest power blackout in American history, one hundred million Americans thrown into chaos.”

“If this is supposed to convince us to back off from the China-Taiwan dispute, I think it's having the opposite effect on me,” the Secretary of Defense asserted.

“You don't know that China did this,” Neyers replied.

“It wasn't Botswana, Brenda,” Chesterfield shot back. His answer hung in the air.

Finally, Wallace Reynolds looked at Rusty MacIntyre. “How long will they be out?”

“Don't know.”

Reynolds looked at Neyers and Chesterfield, who said nothing, then back at MacIntyre. “Can you go find out, Rusty? And while you're out there, ask the folks on the Situation Room watch team if we have an emergency generator. Have them check it.”

1230 EST
Finneran's Boatyard
Marsh Harbor, Abaco Island
The Bahamas

“Are you lookin' to go to Hopetown?” the old man said from the boat. His aging face was brown, creased deeply, with white stubble sprouting here and there. “You Miss Connor? I'm Mr. Waters, Charles Waters.”

“Yes—are you here to take me across?” Susan asked, evoking a broad smile in the man. Several of his front teeth were missing. The thirty-two-foot Boston Whaler had twin battery-powered outboard motors, and the old man handled the new-looking boat as if it had been his for decades, a part of his body. He kept the speed down until he had maneuvered around the sailboats and docks in the harbor. Then, clear of Abaco Island, he opened it up for the short run across to Elbow Cay and its harbor at Hopetown. It was still winter in Washington, but in the Bahamas the temperature was in the low seventies, and Susan Connor felt the warmth of the sun as the boat bounced across the perfectly flat sea between the islands.

“Been to our ‘Islands in the Stream' before, miss?” Waters asked.

“No, but I read the book,” she replied, trying not to show her surprise at the boatman's Hemingway reference. “Is this the place?”

He nodded his head. “These cays. But they say the Stream is beginning to shift now because of the ice meltin' up north.”

At the northern end of the Bahamas, Abaco and its smaller barrier islands of Elbow Cay, Guana Cay, and Man-O-War lie to the east of the Gulf Stream, in line with Fort Lauderdale. Although largely unknown in the United States, the island cluster has always been affected by the large neighboring nation. The victory of the American revolutionaries in the 1780s created the first settlers, refugee colonial Loyalists from the Carolinas. The Prohibition era brought a different kind of American, one willing to chance a run across the powerful Gulf Stream to Florida, carrying rum and Scotch. In the second decade of the twenty-first century, state and federal laws and regulations against certain types of stem-cell organ generation and genetic engineering caused some Americans to quietly convert some large villa complexes into high-tech labs and clinics.

“Still pretty shallow here,” Susan noted. She sat in the seat by the windshield to the left of the old man, looking over the side and through the clear water at the rocks and sea grasses below.

“Doesn't get anything but shallow in these islands, not till you go out into Atlantic, other side of Elbow Cay beyond the reef,” Mr. Waters said as he drove with one hand and sipped a Red Stripe with the other. “We don't get many sisters goin' to Elbow or Man-O-War. They still white man's islands.”

“Really. I didn't know there were a lot of whites outside of Nassau,” Susan yelled back.

“They been here since they ran out the Carolinas when Georgie Wash done won the war. Inbred and all. Talk funny.” He cut the engine as they approached the mouth of a waterway leading into the interior of Elbow Cay. “Now they're a few little hotels and cabins on Elbow Cay for tourists, but Man-O-War's still just them original families. They make good boats out on Man-O-War and there's a coupla big villas, but mainly its them same white-folk families that come in the seventeen hundreds.” The boat turned a corner to reveal a little crescent-shaped harbor, dominated on the right by a candy-cane-styled lighthouse and on the left by a series of short docks attached to open air bars. Even though the temperature was in the high sixties, women in tank tops and shirtless men sat at tables in the sun. They were the white tourists who had found a place off the beaten path. Rock music from one bar's speakers bounced across the water toward the lighthouse.