Chasm Waxing: A Startup, Cyber-Thriller (4 page)

The very same
anti-Syrian-government Sunnis the SEALs had trained,
betrayed them. The rebels seized five SEALs and
handed them over to ISIS. One-by-one, ISIS chopped off the
warriors’ heads and posted the
heinous
videos to A-Tube.

The public outcry for retribution
after the February 2016 executions of US servicemen was reminiscent
of 9/11. Already stoked by ISIS sympathizer’s terror attacks in the
US, Europe, and Turkey; the public demanded retribution. There were
an increasing number of protests against radical Islam and Sharia
law.

However,
the US response in the wake of the decapitations
was tepid. It was a difficult situation. Completely destroying ISIS
would work to the benefit of America’s enemies—Syria and their
benefactor, Iran. It would also help Russia. Russia went so far as
to call ISIS an American creation.

General Shields vacillated
between gut-wrenching heartbreak and white-hot rage, although he
knew he was functioning much better than Lisa.
At least,
I’m doing
something
positive
with my pain and not popping pills,
he thought. General Shields personally wanted to
destroy the radical Islamists, one-by-one. He was upset with the
hamstrung US response to his son’s death.

Americans went to the
polls in November 2016 to elect a new President. Terrorism and ISIS
were important issues in the 2016 election. During the campaign,
Thomas Goodson used extremely
harsh
rhetoric against Islamic
terrorism in general, and ISIS specifically. However, once in
office, he became more cautious. No one—except Shields—wanted to
commit large numbers of ground troops to Iraq or Syria.

Goodson announced stepped up air
strikes against ISIS in Iraq. He continued his predecessor’s
strategy of relocating most special operations units from Syria to
Iraq, to avoid further debacles like Charlie’s death. America was
unable to identify friend from foe in a complicated civil
war.

Because he wanted to avoid
air combat operations in the same airspace as the Russians, and
civilian casualties, the new POTUS
refrained from
air strikes in Syria. He
preferred drones. Goodson bickered with NATO allies about who
should bear the brunt of operations in the ancient country. No-fly
zones were imposed to protect Syrian civilians and stem the tide of
refugees that were drowning Europe and causing upheaval in the EU
and Turkey. In contrast to the
decisive
actions of the Russians, who
began bombing ISIS in Syria in the fall of 2015, the US looked
weak.

While the average American
didn’t distinguish between Iraq and Syria, General Shields was
incensed. The
only response
to Charlie’s killing was airstrikes in a
neighboring country, reduction of the US special operations units
in Syria, and no-fly zones. And drones. Lots of drones.

If the President
wouldn’t
do the
right thing, General Shields would.

In the four years since
the election, by the spring of 2020, the Caliphate was weakened in
Syria due to continued airstrikes from Russia and NATO.
Iran
also had ground
forces in Syria that attacked the Caliphate.
However,
Russia and
Iran
were more concerned
with supporting the current Syrian government, than defeating the
Caliphate. The Syrian government even bought discounted oil from
the Caliphate.

Air strikes in Iraq also
sapped the Caliphate.
But
many
members of the Caliphate
simply
fled to
Libya, the Sinai, Europe, or faded into the civilian populations.
They would return when the
attacks
stopped.

But Iraq wanted the US to do much
more. The Caliphate’s vast propaganda machine continued to draw
recruits from all over the world, especially after they changed
their name.

In 2019, due to the
limited
US
campaign against the Caliphate, the Iraqi government’s frustration
boiled over. Iraq expelled all American forces in the country.
Then, they turned to the Russians and
Iranians
to lead future air strikes
and ground operations against the Caliphate.

The US’
strategy of timidity
towards the Caliphate played havoc with General Shields’
psyche. He inhaled another shot. There was a knock at the door. The
General
grabbed
a piece of gum
and
opened the door.

Lin Liu entered the room.

Lin was in her late twenties. She wore
nude pumps and a tight white dress. Her eyes were jade green. The
second-generation Chinese-American was gorgeous. “I’m sorry I’m
late General. Everybody at the Fort was jockeying for an invite,
even this late on a Friday night. I had to fend them off with a
stick.”

“
Are you sure they were
only interested in the Accelerator?” he chuckled. “Well, good job.
I don’t need them here. The last thing these
entrepreneurs
and startup
kids need is for a bunch of
govies
to get in their way.”

On the job for only two
weeks, Lin had never been to the offices of Defense Innovations
Accelerator. As often happened in the military, the General’s
previous assistant was reassigned. General Shields requested Lin
because she was non-military. He hoped to keep her as his personal
aide for longer than two years. It totally discombobulated him to
switch personal
assistants
. And she wasn’t bad
on
the
eyes.

“
We’re just finishing up.
I came in here to return a call. Let’s go
across
the hallway. Then, you can
see how this place works. By the way, there’s a much better way to
get here from the Fort. I’ll show it to you next time.”

6:20 p.m. (EDT), Friday, July 24, 2020
- Columbia, MD

Suite 602, Conference
Room, Defense Innovations Accelerator

General Shields re-entered
the conference room.
This
time,
he was accompanied by Lin Lu. Ali
completely forgot about the bug he was tracking. Samantha uneasily
shifted in her chair, as the General introduced his new personal
aide.

“
Ok, back to the demo,”
said Shields. “Please explain the monsters and catapults. Why were
there so many of them? Remember, Lin is new to the
Accelerator;
and
I’m still looking for grandma-level explanations.”

“
Catapults?
Actually, they’re
s
upposed to be
trebuchets,
” said Becca. “Did they look
like catapults? Were they too small?”

Samantha gasped. “Becca, we’ll worry
about the artwork later. Tell the General why there were so
many.”

“
Oh,
sorry,
” replied Becca.
“During that part of the demo, I fired up our botnet and simulated
a DDOS—a Distributed Denial of Service Attack—in REALSPACE. The
botnet attack sent a massive amount of IP packets to the servers on
the test network. When the servers receive all those
packets from the
Internet
, they
freak out
. The servers can’t
handle all the packets. In REALSPACE, the result of a DDOS attack
is that no customer can connect to Gecko’s website.”

“
IP, botnets?” said the
General. “Grandma
is having
a tough
time
understanding this.”

Becca smiled and shook her
head.

She had never met a
general, let alone a
five-star
general. Shields was the
first
five-star
general
since
Omar N. Bradley, in 1950. The muscular Shields only looked like a
movie star General. He didn’t fit the stereotypical persona of a
general. He didn’t seem authoritarian,
strict
, or
curt
. However, Becca had a
sense that the General could be all these things—and more—if
needed.

As a hacker, Becca kept
close tabs on the NSA. The NSA was the best hacking organization in
the world. Just before Becca graduated from high school, Edward
Snowden took over two million classified documents, while working
as a contractor for the NSA. Snowden gave
a p
ortion of the
material to
selected members of the press. They, in
turn,
slowly leaked the
information. The
disclosures
allowed Becca
to study NSA capabilities
carefully
.

Becca also knew her technology
history; her dad made sure of that. The General’s massive fiefdom
at the NSA was due to IP and the growth of packet switched
technologies. Packet switching was more efficient and resilient
than dedicating an entire circuit to a communications channel.
Becca recognized the irony in talking to General Shields about
IP.

“
Internet Protocol is how
computers talk to each other over the network—whether it’s a wired
network or a Wi-Fi network. For example, pretend I write an email
to Grandma. When I send her the email, the email destination is
translated
into an
address
, just like your postal
address.

“
Only it’s not Grandma’s
street
address;
it’s the IP address of her email provider. Let’s
say the address is 192.168.1.1. The email
travels
in
pieces
called packets. In
the real world, it’s like I tore a letter to Grandma into numerous
strips.

“
On each
piece
, I put my
IP address as the
sender,
and Grandma’s IP address as the recipient. I’d
also number the strips in such a way, that it wouldn’t matter when
Grandma received the individual pieces. Grandma would be able to
reconstruct the letter without worrying about when she received
each strip. IP is the rules the network agrees to follow. It
adheres to this protocol as it sends the individual pieces—the
packets—over the network.”

“
You’re assuming that the
letter is not encrypted, right?” asked Lin.

“
That’s a great
question.
” Becca
saw Samantha roll her eyes. “It doesn’t matter. IP works the same
for an encrypted letter, as it does for the
un-encrypted
message
. If I sent Grandma an
un-encrypted email, all the packets would be
forwarded
in plaintext.
Anyone that understood English could read it. It’s just
clear text
. Now,
if the email is encrypted, the plaintext would look like gibberish.
That’s called ciphertext. Grandma would only be able to read the
message if she used her encryption key.”

General Shields interjected, “Or
anyone else in possession of Grandma’s encryption key.” He smiled
smugly, “Hypothetically, of course.”

Becca let his words hang
in the air before she proceeded. She wasn’t sure everyone
understood what Shields meant. People’s eyes seemed to glaze over
at the mere mention of encryption. “Our botnet was just a bunch of
servers in the Amazon cloud that we rented. We configured them to
flood the Gecko test network with packets. In the real
world,
botnets
are infected computers that hackers use to perform attacks and mask
their identity. Grandma’s computer could be a part of a
botnet
and she
wouldn’t even know it.

“
Skilled hackers can hide
the origin of the attacks, making it look like Grandma was the
hacker. Companies usually don’t prioritize figuring out the
identity of the
attacker;
they just want the attacks to stop. But, if
you’re a nation fighting a
cyberwar
,
attribution
is a huge issue. You
don’t want to nuke Grandma by mistake.

“
Back to the DDOS attack.
As we flooded the Gecko network with
an enormous number of
packets, the
network couldn’t do anything else. It was stuck in a loop, trying
to figure out how to
route
all the
packets
. That’s why there were so many
arrows flying in the air. The good news is that we mitigated the
threat.
SoCalSheMerlin
cast a spell in GAMESPACE that defeated the DDOS
attack in REALSPACE.

“
In REALSPACE, the G-Agent
recognized the DDOS
attack,
and communicated via the REALSPACE API to
G-Bridge. Then, G-Bridge talked the GAMESPACE API.
This caused
the
Unreal Engine
to appropriately
render the consequences in GAMESPACE
—the
meteors destroyed the giants and zombies.