Officer Of The Watch: Blackout Volume 1 (17 page)

Beth Ann herded the men down the stairs with a wave of her hands.  It was a practiced gesture, and one she had obviously perfected through years of dealing with children.  Joe and Chris allowed themselves to be ushered outside where the rest of their group was waiting.

"You all talk it over," Beth Ann said, "and we'll be inside when you're ready to come in."

Without waiting for a reply, Beth Ann turned and walked back into the farm house, leaving Joe and Chris on the porch in the growing shadows and the fading afternoon heat.

Ch. 35

Unknown Administrator

Terry Price watched as the process bar slowly ticked up; ninety one percent, ninety two percent, ninety three...

He sat back and ran a hand over his face.  The past five days had been a whirlwind, and he'd been running short on sleep for a while now.  At 0200, the rest of the staff was sleeping in the dormitory.  A skeleton crew in the war room was in charge of monitoring system status and environmental controls until the regular morning shift began at 0700.  For the moment, Terry had the entire system practically to himself.  Even so, there were some tasks that even the most advanced super-computer couldn't pull off quickly.  Searching through millions of individual lines codes and compiling a requested action list was something that just took time.  Whoever had entered the commands, though, had hidden their tracks extremely well.

Terry downed half of his mug of cold coffee.  He picked idly at the gold foil embossing on the white porcelain with his thumb nail and wondered when he'd find time to go to Annapolis to get another, assuming, of course, that Annapolis and the Academy were still standing. 

Finally, there was a series of beeps, and the status bar disappeared from the screen.  In its place, the display showed a line item action list.  Terry scrolled through the list.  Most of the items were regular system maintenance commands carried out either automatically or entered by the technicians on watch at the time, complete with their unique Identity codes and authorization passwords. 

On the fourth page, Terry found what he was looking for.  A series of commands had been entered and authorized that stood out from the rest.  Terry read through the line items and frowned.  The commands had been entered by an "Unknown Administrator" with no visible authorization passwords, and yet they had been accepted and acted on by the system.  It simply didn't make any sense. 

Terry had designed the security protocol himself, and triple authentication was necessary for all system wide actions.  Either someone had hacked into the system he had designed with a four thousand and ninety six bit encryption framework, a near physical impossibility, or a back door had been built into the coding without his knowledge.  Neither prospect did anything to ease the uncertainty and fear that had been gnawing at him since the system initiated a full data back up and dump of all files from the web and from networked government infrastructure to the secure data vault he was in charge of.

There were four storage facilities like X-Ray Romeo, where Terry served as both Senior Systems Engineer and Operations Director.  All four of them would have been activated by the system flash commands Terry had uncovered.  None of the other engineers or technicians had his level of write-in clearance, though, and they would have been locked out of all but the most basic levels of access as soon as the dump command was given.  Once that switch had been flipped, the system was designed to lock itself down so that only certain people would be able to release it.

Terry stood and drank the rest of his cold coffee in one gulp.  He swiped his ID badge to unlock the door to his office and stepped out into the hallway.  The concrete block walls were painted a soothing sea-foam green that reminded him of a hospital.  To simulate night time conditions two thousand feet beneath the Utah sky, lighting in the hallways was reduced to twenty percent past 2200 hours.  Terry walked through the simulated gloom with his empty coffee cup in his hand and brooding thoughts rolling around in his head.

The Snafu-Bar was deserted and the serving counter was dark.  Breakfast was still four hours away, and even the cooks hadn't made it to the kitchen yet.  Still, along the back wall was a line of vending machines that held everything from individual packs of chewing gum to full microwavable meals.  Terry walked to one of the coffee dispensers, swiped his card, and filled his mug with an approximation of Kona Coffee.  The best that could be said for it was that it was hot.

Terry swiped his ID card at his office door and stepped inside with his steaming cup of coffee.  He sat at his desk still somewhat lost in his own thoughts.  When his eyes finally focused on the screen, he almost dropped the coffee mug.  Terry's confidential personnel file and his sealed service record were scrolling slowly across the screen like a slide show.  The sudden thrill of fear Terry had felt slowly morphed into a burning rage.

Someone had hacked
his
system.

Terry leaned forward and pressed the Esc key on his keyboard, but nothing happened.  He tapped several different key commands, but got no response.  Finally, on the verge of unplugging the PC, the screen suddenly flashed and a network message window popped up.  Terry frowned.  All of the systems at the data storage facility were connected to an internal network that was secure and independent from any outside traffic, in theory at least.  The one main incoming traffic line that fed the data backup and storage systems was isolated, quarantined, filtered, scanned, and every other trick possible used to keep any unwanted signals from breaking through. 

In more than a decade of operation, no facility with Terry's security system in place had
ever
had a breach.  Which meant this was either unique, or someone was hacking him from inside his system.

A message appeared in the window.

What are you trying to find, Mr. Price?

The sender listed was "Unknown Administrator."  Terry thought again about unplugging his machine, but decided against it.  Instead, he began typing, "Who are you?"

Terry hit the enter key and saw the message appear in the window and then fade away.  After a moment, he got his reply.

It's never the question that is indiscrete, Mr. Price, only the answer.  Knowledge can be a very dangerous thing.

The screen flickered once, and then Terry was again looking at the report he'd requested from the computer's command history log.  Terry sat for a moment vacillating between white-hot, foaming rage and cold, clammy fear.  Finally, he brought up the system-wide command prompt and keyed in the line, "Cry 'Havoc,' and let slip the dogs of war; A3S1L273."  For a long time, Terry sat and stared at the line, but he didn't hit the Enter key. 

When he was working on the system years ago, Terry had realized early on what it was intended to be.  In the event of a catastrophic crash or an impending disaster, certain commands would execute a complete backup and dump of all information stored, accessed, or transferred over the internet as well as internal security networks.  The project coordinators at the time had called it a massive fail-safe, but Terry had always seen it as a weapon. 

With a deep breath, Terry pressed the Enter key.

His line of code disappeared.  In its place, a message appeared that read, "Command received and authenticated.  Full system encryption underway."

Now, whoever was pulling the strings would be locked out.  The system encryption would take at least a few days to complete, but once the process was started, it couldn't be halted.  Even if all power was disconnected and the system shut down, the first operation in the stack on restart would be the encryption command.  Terry had built this in as last ditch fail-safe in the last phase of code compilation after reading a book about Oppenheimer. 

Terry unlocked the bottom right drawer of his desk and pulled out a Colt M1911 pistol.  His father had carried the same gun through three years of World War II and later in Korea.  Terry had carried it since the day he graduated from the Naval Academy in the summer of '72.  He laid the pistol on his desk next to his keyboard.

If the "Unknown Administrator" wanted access to the system again, he would have to come to Terry to get it....

And Terry would be ready.

Ch. 36

Lessons Learned

The night air was hot and heavy with rain that hadn't quite started falling yet.  Insects and frogs buzzed, chirped, and croaked in the woods around the small gas station, giving the place a surreal atmosphere almost as if someone had dropped a gas station into some primeval jungle.  Lightning flashed on the horizon, and Eric flinched.  This was natural lightening, though, not the result of an airstrike.  Eric counted the seconds from the flash in his head until the rolling boom of the thunder reached him; the storm was still a good four miles from them.

They had time, but they would have to move quickly.
Eric stood at the door to the brick convenience store and took a deep breath.  Bill stood on the other side, his revolver in his right hand and his left still held up by the makeshift sling.  Imogene had made the call to stop treating the wound with the sugar compresses at their last rest stop, and instead had stitched both sides of the wound tightly closed.  It was bandaged and had a healthy coating of anti-bacterial cream, but according to Imogene the healing process was already well under way. 

Bill shifted his left arm in the sling and frowned.

"Are you sure you're okay with this?" Eric asked.

Bill nodded. "Yeah, I'll be fine, son," he replied "Just a little gun shy is all.  Last time I went into one of these places, it didn't work out too well for me."

Eric nodded.  "Well, this time you just stay behind me and make sure no one sneaks up on me, okay? I'll clear the rooms one by one, and then we can pump some gas once we're sure there aren't any surprises waiting for us."

Bill nodded, and helped Eric pull open the electrical doors enough for the two of them to slip through.  Eric had his small pen light in one hand and his Beretta in the other.  They checked each aisle quickly and then went to the store room.  Bill stood to one side of the doorway, Eric to the other.  On the count of three, Bill turned the handle and threw the door open and then moved aside.  Eric stepped quickly into the doorway, shining his flashlight into each corner of the room.

"Clear," Eric whispered, and Bill nodded.

They repeated the process with the bathrooms, checking each individual stall to make certain it was empty.  Once they were finished, they went back through and checked each room a second time just to be sure.  Satisfied that they were alone, Eric and Bill made their way back outside to the others.  Imogene and Christina had kept the engines running just in case they needed a quick get away, but at a hand signal from Eric, they shut off the engines.  Without the headlights from the vehicles, the darkness of the night closed in around them, isolating the small pool of light cast by their flashlights.

In the darkness, lightning flashed again, and Eric counted to himself out of reflex.  The storm was closing on them and was now a little less than two miles distant.

Bill found a metal cap set in the concrete parking lot off to one side that read '85OCT'.  Eric pried the heavy metal cap off with a crowbar and dropped the long hose from their hand-turned pump down into the pitch black opening.  With a few turns of the crank, the pump primed and began pouring gasoline into the red plastic gas can they'd taken from the Stop-n-Shop. 

They had to fill up the gas can three times to top off both vehicles, and it took nearly a half hour to finish the task.  When they were done with the fuel, Eric and Bill went back into the convenience store and took some of the beef jerky, water, and sports drinks.  They didn't clean the shelves, though, in case someone came after them in need.  When they were done, they loaded the new supplies into the Bronco and paused for a moment to eat a quick snack and drink some water. 

Lightning flashed again, and this time the thunder came quicker on its heels.  Eric counted out the seconds, and it was less than a mile away, closing in from the West. 

"How far out are we?" Bill asked.

"A little less than an hour," Eric replied.  "All of the side roads and backtracks we had to make, we've manage to turn a three hour trip into a seven hour journey."

Bill chuckled.  "Worth it, if you ask me," he said. "After yesterday, I ain't in a rush to run into too many strangers for a while."

Eric nodded and ran a hand over his face with a deep, heavy sigh.  He had been running for days on adrenaline and fear, but the exhaustion was finally beginning to catch up with him.  His head was pounding and a muscle just under his left eye had begun to twitch incessantly. 

"Do we need to stop?" Bill asked.  "We can always go on in the morning, when we've rested a while, and maybe that storm will blow over in the meantime."

Eric shook his head firmly.  "We're so close," he replied.  "I don't want to stop now...  I just want to be home."

Bill nodded.  "Alright, Eric.  You lead the way and we'll be right behind you."

They all climbed back in the trucks and pulled out of the gas station.  As Eric made the left turn onto Highway 24, the skies let loose and rain began to fall in thick, wind-driven sheets.  The lightning and thunder that had been sporadic picked up suddenly and began flashing all around them with deafening cracks and booms of thunder.  Christina slid closer to him and clutched his arm tightly as the storm raged.

Eric said a quick, silent prayer for his father and for Mike, asking God to keep them safe and dry as he drove on through the wind, the rain, and the darkness.

Ch. 37

Rise And Shine

Gilbert lightly nudged Joe's foot with his boot.  Joe's eyes shot open, but other than that he didn't move.  Gilbert jerked his head to the side towards the front door, and Joe nodded.  He carefully unwrapped himself from the quilt he'd slept under and retrieved his pistol from beneath his pillow.  Joe had slept fully clothed with his boots on, so all he had to do was stand, stretch, and holster his side arm.  He followed Gilbert out onto the porch.