"Serious as a heart attack. The headsets have got a special neuro-firewall, specifically to prevent it. They even have a term for it: brain intrusion. But since when has a firewall bothered people like you and me? There's no way that the Oversight Committee is going to-"

Dodge's cell phone emitted an urgent bleeping noise. A half second later, Sam's started woofing.

"Bleedin' h.e.l.l," Dodge said. "It's begun."

19

THE RAID

"Here they come," Dodge said. "And they're coming in heavy."

"Listen up," Jaggard said from the center of the room. "This is no stealthy, crawling, under-the-wire incursion. It's a full-on cyberattack, and the targets are nuclear reactor sites."

"We're covering Peach Bottom," Dodge said. "Since we know it best. We're going in battle-group formation; Vienna and Kiwi are covering our six, with Zombie and Gummi in reserve. Stay on my tail and keep those bugs off my a.r.s.e."

Sam glued his eyes to his screens and wished for his neuro-headset, despite what Dodge had said. The keyboard and mouse were just too slow and c.u.mbersome.

"What are they after?" Vienna's voice sounded in his ear. "They can't bridge the air gap; we already checked that."

"Maybe they know something we don't," Socks' raspy voice said.

Dodge said, "They're after something, or they wouldn't be coming in this hot and hard. Let's kick them in the b.o.l.l.o.c.ks first of all, then try and figure out their game plan."

"Where are they coming from?" Vienna asked.

"Working on it," Kiwi replied.

"I'm going to try and take back the main router," Dodge said. "As soon as I hit them, their bugs are going to be all over me. Sam, I'm depending on you."

"I'm there," Sam said in a quiet voice.

"Vienna, you lead with a diversionary attack on the Internet gateway," Dodge said. "Make them think we're coming in through the roof. Stay sharp."

Sam kept one eye on his left monitor, following what Dodge was doing, and kept the other on his scanners on the right. They had drilled and drilled exactly this scenario, running simulations and game plays against their simulator computer and against each other.

But this was no game. This was real.

Dodge was going in to root out the malicious code on the main router, but in doing so, he was exposing himself to attack. Sam's job was to cut that attack off at the knees.

"There you are, you slimy prat," Dodge said. "Big mother of a candiru fish, hiding in the swap file. I'm going to hit it with a depth charge. Vienna, Zombie, get on the nodes around me and watch for wrigglers."

Sam watched as the swap file dissolved, crumbling in on itself as the depth charge imploded in its midst.

Flashing red lights appeared immediately on his TCP scopes.

"I got predators!" he shouted.

"Keep them off me!" Dodge yelled back. "I've got corruptions everywhere; I gotta stay on this."

The hackers were homing in on the source of the depth charge: Dodge. Predator programs, designed to trace Dodge's signal back to its source and attack it there. Sam keyed his weapons systems, readying a freeze-bot. Whatever server the predator was on, the bot would freeze the central processor, running the CPU around in circles until it was barely alive. Once the server was frozen, he could scan the drive and find and a.n.a.lyze the predator, which would be icebound, unable to shape-shift and easy to detect. Once he had its genetic structure-its central code-he would feed that into the proximity detectors of his sidewinders.

The lights on his scope flashed brilliant red as one of the predators streaked across the screen, homing in on Dodge's code trail.

"Ouch!" Dodge cried. "Something just bit me. Switching nodes now."

"Sorry, Dodge," Sam said. "Had to let him bite to see where he was coming from."

He hurled the freeze-bot at the predator, a nasty, writhing malicious bit of code that had burrowed into an e-mail server in Kentucky. He isolated the code quickly and scanned it in, a.n.a.lyzing it line by line himself, not just relying on the automated code scanners built into his system.

"Hurry it up, Sam," Dodge said. "I'm getting more nibbles here."

"Almost got it," Sam said, feeding the digital DNA of the creature into his master weapons control. "Okay, code's in the wire, fellas. Lock and load-let's blast these guys out of the sky."

"Got it," Gummi and Kiwi both said as they loaded their warheads with the information.

"I got crawlers all over the place," Vienna said. "I'm going to need a big cold can of whoop-a.s.s down here."

Sam focused on the red predator alerts on his scope, tracing the trail through the complex nodes of the Internet, narrowing down the location of the intruders.

The one he was chasing disappeared, flitting out through an open port before he could hit it.

"Hold still, you mongrel," he said to himself as he fired a sidewinder through the same port. There was a flash on his scope as he did so. "Got you!"

"Good work, Sam," said Dodge. "But there's plenty more where that came from."

The sidewinder was one of the most basic of weapons but was highly effective.

Its proximity fuse meant that if it even got close to a predator, it would explode, simply wiping all the data off the RAM sector where the predator code was. It could cause havoc for the owner of that computer, but that's what backups were for, right?

Sam fired off a few more sidewinders in the general direction of the other predators, hoping he might get lucky. The missiles were coded for the DNA of the predator and would just circle around in an ever-increasing spiral, trying to home in on the signature. If they didn't find it, they would eventually self-destruct.

"Bull's-eye!" Gummi Bear's voice came into his ear, and one of the red dots disappeared from his scope. Sam hammered a stream of sidewinders into the offices of a small ISP in New York and was rewarded with a series of flashes as the missiles took out their targets.

"I got the source!" Kiwi shouted. "It's right here in the States. Chicago. Server cl.u.s.ter in a warehouse registered to a shipping company. Looks like it was purpose-built for the attack."

"Main router is clear," Dodge said. "And inoculated. How's the rest of the network?"

"Getting there," Vienna said.

Zombie added, "Is the air gap holding?"

"Don't know," Dodge said. "Somebody get on a landline to the site. Check with their techs to see if there's anything suspicious in the wagon circle."

"You should see this place," Kiwi said. "It's swarming like a wasps' nest."

Sam saw it too. He unleashed a string of sidewinders into the heart of the cl.u.s.ter, but even as he did so, his scope exploded into a fireworks display of colored sparks.

"Oh, c.r.a.p!" he said.

"What's going on, Sam?" Dodge asked.

"It's like a zoo down here," Sam said. "And I think we just fell into the snake pit. There's got to be a million of them."

"Stay calm," Vienna said. "Scan them, read them, shut them down. They'll come in waves, but there can't be that many different kinds."

"There are too many," Gummi Bear yelled. "We can't hold them!"

"You got the address of the warehouse?" Dodge asked.

"I got it," Kiwi shouted.

"Take out their power, now. Get into the nearest substation and kill their power lines. Take out the whole block if you have to. Vienna, notify Chicago PD and get the location to Tactical."

Sam slashed his way into the storm of predators. There were all types: vipers, rabid dogs, shooters, blockers, vampires, and other kinds he had never seen before.

One by one, he said to himself. Take them one by one.

"Power's out," Kiwi yelled. "But they're still streaming! They must be on a UPS."

"Let me have a go at it," Sam called.

"Okay, Sam, it's yours."

He scanned the warehouse with a heat sensor, ignoring the haze of marauders buzzing through the networks around him. The UPS showed up clearly, and he ran its signature through a pattern-matching program, comparing it to an equipment database.

"It's an HVC9001," Sam said. "It's got Power Line Networking. I can take this baby out. Kiwi, I need the power back on for a moment. Can you do it?"

"Just say when."

"Hang on...hang on...Okay, now! Count to three, then shut it off."

The 9001 had built-in Power Line Networking, enabling it to communicate directly through the power cables. Sam grabbed the latest firmware updates from the HVC download site and modified the code just slightly before updating the firmware on the motherboard.

"Give it ten seconds, then pump it with all the juice you can. I took out the voltage limiter."

Dodge breathed, "It'll go sky-high!"

"Gonna give them a mother of a power spike," Kiwi called out. "In three, two, one-take that, you code suckers!"

The red-hot core at the center of the storm on Sam's scope blinked once and disappeared. He could just imagine what the overloaded spike of electricity had done to the UPS system without a voltage limiter in place to protect it. At the very least, it would have melted down. With luck there might have been an explosion.

The swarms of predators still circled, but aimlessly, without intelligence behind them to direct them.

"Good work, team," Dodge said. "Let's clean this up. I want those predators cla.s.sified, neutralized, and stuck on a bulletin board in the lunchroom before those filthy geezers can pick themselves up off the floor and try again."

Sam grinned. He had done well. He knew that. New kid on the block and he had- A movement caught his eye, and he half turned, just in time to see a black command window appear and disappear on his left-side screen.

"Dodge," he said in a voice that was not as steady as it should have been.

"What is it, Sam?"

"I think I just got infiltrated."

"Not possible. Not in here."

"But-"

Sam was cut off by a shout from the other side of the room.

"I got a blue screen of death over here. What's going on?"

"c.r.a.p! Me too," Vienna said. "I just got wiped."

Sam looked around and saw Jaggard sprinting across the room toward them.

"Shut them down!" he shouted. "Shut them down now!"

20

VICTORIA

Victoria Dean looked again at her radar screen and swore under her breath. There were too many planes and too little time. The computers normally took care of most of the work, but today all their computers were off-line and her head hurt.

"Get them down," Taylor, her shift supervisor, said again from behind her shoulder. "Every one of them. I want those birds sitting on the ground until we regain control of our own system."

Taylor, a small gray man in a dark gray suit, wasn't talking to her directly. He was addressing the room. But he was right by her shoulder, which made her feel as though she was the only one not doing her best to achieve the impossible.

They had 117 planes either on approach or inbound when the computers went haywire. She was responsible for eight of those planes. Over eleven hundred souls.

There had been several moments of panic as some of the planes had obeyed nonsensical messages on their onboard computer systems, fed from the ground, but most pilots had the sense to check with their flight controller first and did not deviate.

The challenge now was to get those planes on the ground using old-fashioned voice instruction. They trained for that, sure, but to actually use it was a whole new ball game.

She pressed the foot switch to activate her radio.

"Singapore SQ12 Airbus inbound, I have you cleared for final approach on runway two-five right; please confirm visual. Over," she said.