Chasm Waxing: A Startup, Cyber-Thriller (32 page)

This was
an amorphous
concept
because the Caliphate could
move its headquarters to any of the
municipalities
that
it
still influenced;
including, Mosul, Fallujah, Tikrit, or smaller towns in Iraq or
Syria.

The Caliphate was
an
extremely
decentralized organization. Caliphate leadership
supplied
its
commanders with specific
goals,
but allowed wide latitude in
which to accomplish those
objectives
.
This made
the Caliphate’s SIGINT
signature extremely narrow. Almost all command and control
communications
were couriered or
forwarded by a network of
disposable cell
phones.

One key to the
effectiveness of the Caliphate was its inclusion of former Iraqi
Baath party members; the party of Saddam Hussein. When American
troops left Iraq in late 2011, Sunni-Shia violence ratcheted up.
With no US troops on the ground, the
Shia-led
Iraqi
government—heavily influenced by Iran—
began to imprison Sunni politicians.

These politicians
congealed with former Baathists and sought protection.
This led
them to
assist ISIS, and later the Caliphate. They shared knowledge of
sophisticated military tactics—like how to use tanks and
properly
position artillery. They also contributed their experience on
governing Iraq. Mosulaydi had no prior military or leadership
know-how.

Over the course of
its
14-year
history,
the Caliphate had
changed its name many times. The group
initially
called themselves
Al Qaeda
in Iraq
(AQI) and then in 2004, the Islamic State of Iraq (ISI). The name
changes reflected the growing territorial and religious aspirations
of the group. Its success in Syria, during the civil war, led
them
to refer progressively to
themselves
as ISIL, ISIS, and then
finally, the Islamic State. Opposition
derogatorily
referred to them as
Daesh.

In 2017, the Islamic State
changed its name to the Caliphate,
formalizing the concept first declared in 2014.
Western media outlets had continued to use the
word, ‘ISIS,’ instead of the Islamic State. Also, Islamic State
leadership wanted to reinvigorate a brand that was suffering
setbacks from air strikes and ground attacks by various nations.
These setbacks included the death of their first Caliph.
Just
naming
themselves
a
Caliphate
would attract
followers. Many Muslims believed it was their religious duty to
protect a Caliphate—once declared.

Mosulaydi first turned his attention
to the Minister of Finance.

“
How are we coming on
acquiring the fleet of self-driving vehicles? I want to load those
cars down with explosives and mustard gas. We can use them to
inflict casualties across Iraq and Syria.”

“
Caliph,” responded the
new Finance Minister, “they’ve been
harder to get than
I first anticipated.
I’m still working on it. My most
promising
deal involves trading 20,000
barrels of oil for 15 autonomous vehicles. But we’re still
negotiating. I’ve also been looking into acquiring a self-driving
kit for our Toyota HiLuxes. The
package
makes them
driver-less
. But it’s still
much cheaper to use suicide bombers, provided that recruits keep
streaming in.”

“
That’s the problem,” said
the Caliph. “Our foreign fighters from the West have slowed, due to
Rahmati’s propaganda.”

Mosulaydi next turned his
attention to his Minister of Social Media & Recruitment, Syed
Abdulkarim
Olyan
al-
Dhafiri
. The Intelligence Community
nicknamed him, ‘Hollywood.’ Hollywood was born in Kuwait. His
family immigrated to Southern California in 1989, settling in
Corona.

“
Syed, we need
a robust
strategy to counter Rahmati. He’s winning our volunteers to
his cause. And the Sunni populations in the cities we maintain are
beginning to turn against us. We’re filtering the Internet, but his
message is still seeping in. We need to highlight the fact that
Rahmati is a Shiite puppet of Iran. He’s an
infidel. He’s not a
Muslim.
I want you to start referring to him the Dajjal.”

“
Yes, Caliph,” replied
Hollywood.

While Sunnis and Shias
lived peaceably for
extended
periods of time, violent
confrontations occurred periodically. For example,
Sunni-Shia conflict was a key to
extending the
US war in Iraq, which began
in 2003 and didn’t end
until
2011.

In Islamic apocalyptic thought, the
Dajjal was the deceiving Messiah, roughly equivalent to the
Christian notion of the Antichrist. The Dajjal was supposed to
arise out of Iran. He was to war against the Mahdi and Jesus Christ
during the End of Days. Strikingly, Christian and Muslim
eschatology were nearly mirror images of one another.

Mosulaydi continued, “If
we brand Rahmati as the Dajjal, we can claim that this is proof
that the Mahdi now walks the earth. The End Times are here. On the
military side, I can tell you that we’re implementing a plan to
execute Rahmati. If we can’t kill him,
maybe
we can maim him and cut out
one of those blue eyes.” One Hadith said that the Dajjal would
possess only one eye.

“
Also, I don’t want to let
up on baiting the Americans and Europeans. We want them to send
their troops. I can’t believe the pathetic American response to the
deaths of the CIA operatives. I’m shocked that Dabiq-gate
didn’t
topple
your President. Keep mentioning those contractors in posts. Remind
the world of the US fabrications. Play the CIA confessions against
a backdrop of the lying comments from the Goodson Administration,
immediately after we seized the operatives.”

Hollywood carefully
listened to his Caliph. “He’s not my President. You’re the only
rightful ruler
of
the world. We’ll continue to threaten the US and
Europe with more
sophisticated
terrorist attacks on
their soil. I’m especially trying to inspire lone-wolf attacks.
They give us so much bang for our buck! We’ll ratchet up the shock
and awe of the images. The bloodier they
are,
the more
viral
they’ll
become.

“
We’ll tell the Crusaders
that they’ll only be safe when they convert to Islam. All of the
earth is for
Muslims;
ours is a new empire. We’re ushering in
the
final
Caliphate, to be ruled by the Mahdi. We’re not going
to even give infidels
the chance to pay the Jizya. Become a Muslim or die.” The
Jizya was a tax introduced in the Koran that gathered revenue from
non-Muslims.

“
Yes, that’s good,” said
Mosulaydi. “Don’t forget to disparage their cowardly drone attacks
and bombings. Highlight the deaths of our women and children. Only
when the Crusaders send troops, can we engage in our strategy of
guerrilla
warfare.
That’s how Mao and the Viet Cong did it. Then we
can obtain victory in Dabiq and initiate the End of
Days.”

Hollywood was slightly
under 30. He earned a degree in computer science from the
University of California at Riverside. After graduation,
Syed
job-hopped
through various IT positions. He ended up as a webmaster for a
Los
Angeles-based
media startup. The company shut its doors and
laid him off in 2016. The experience left Syed disillusioned and
embittered. He moved back to live with his parents in Corona. He
began attending a local mosque and
was radicalized
.

Hollywood sneered.
“Victory, indeed! I’ll work
to
remind our recruits continually that
they’ll play a central role in Islamic history when they join
the Caliphate. Whether they go to Syria, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, or
anywhere else; not only will they be doing God’s will, but they’ll
get
a good
wage, wives, and the power to carry out the Caliphate’s will
on the population. What
adolescent
Muslim from
London,
to
Brussels, to Corona—most of whom have never kissed a girl—won’t be
receptive to that message? I know I was.”

“
You’d never kissed a
girl?” asked Mosulaydi.

9:45 a.m. (EDT),
Monday,
October
26 – Greenwich, CT

Adler Capital’s Offices,
112 Greenwich Plaza

“
Becca, look at
this
. I found
it!” yelled Josh.

Becca rushed over to
Josh’s workstation in the server room of Adler Capital. She looked
over his shoulder. His computer monitor displayed a red geo-marker
on a map.
The map conveyed detail
down to street names and bus stops.
The
geo-marker
resembled an
upside-down tear, with the sharp point of the tear
placed
in a
precise
position. Josh
hovered over the geo-marker with his
mouse.
This produced
a
balloon pop-up
window. It read,
‘Ark of the
Covenant.’

“
This is it!” crowed Josh.
“The AI is using the mapping API to pinpoint this site as the
location of the Ark. The Ark of the Covenant is one-third of a mile
south of the Temple Mount—you know the Dome of the Rock, the
Wailing Wall, and the Al-Aqsa Mosque. It’s just west of the Gihon
Spring, in something the map denotes as
the
‘City of David.’ The AI gives
me no sense
of
the
depth of the Ark. But
we’ve found it!”

Becca hugged Josh through the chair
and continued peering over his shoulder. Then, she kissed him on
the cheek. “What’s there now?”

Josh switched to the
satellite view of A-Maps. “There’s the City of David National
Park—it’s an archeological site—and
a number of
terraced dwellings; they
look like houses and apartments.”

After a little more web
research, he continued, “This area
is hotly contested
. It’s an Arab
neighborhood. That will complicate things. The Israeli’s would like
to turn the entire City of David into an archeological park. Arabs
oppose this. They won’t want to sell their property to Jews.
Luckily, as a Jewish billionaire, my dad has a lot of
high-level
Israeli contacts.”

To
avoid the prying eyes of the NSA, Becca
configured Josh’s workstation to run the latest version of the
Tails Linux operating system from within three layers of virtual
machines—VMs. VMs were
software-based
computers that
mimicked physical machines.

In other words, a
VM was a fake computer that operated within a real computer. Becca
daisy-chained all the network traffic through the VM’s. This
was
one step Becca took to afford herself
a higher degree of confidence that
the NSA or FBI wasn’t hacking Josh’s box, and deploying malware
or keylogger software.
If Becca discovered
a compromise, she could delete the VM and start over with
a pristine
operating system.

Becca worked with Adler
Capital’s CTO, Kishore Reddy, to establish a brand new fiber optic
network connection in the server room. It was
entirely
separate from the
hedge fund’s existing Internet infrastructure.

They leased the
link
from a
boutique network service provider that catered to the financial
services industry. The firm claimed that their Internet connections
were
opaque
to monitoring by the government or hackers.

Despite their assurances,
Becca said that she didn’t trust any American company when faced
with
a
National Security Letter, or NSL. NSLs were subpoenas
issued
by the NSA
to compel telecom and software companies
to
provide access
to their subscriber records. Or, the NSA could
just get a warrant from a FISA
court.
And everything could be
hacked.

For this reason, Becca
made sure that all communications over the line were encrypted.
Becca was
positive
that the NSA would be spying on Adler Capital’s
network. So, Becca and Josh used the Adler corporate
network
for
routine tasks, unrelated to the Ark search.
They wanted to establish a pattern of life that made
it
appear that they were both moving on,
and not pursuing the ancient relic’s discovery.