“Hey, turn on the sound,” said Sammie.
The hackers all pivoted in their chairs to look at the screen with the live feed of war news. Winch pressed the mute button on the remote.
The feed had just cut to a Pentagon spokesman making an announcement. “Fire-fighting and search and rescue efforts have been ongoing for four days on the aircraft carrier USS Stennis. There has been significant damage to the ships supporting that effort. Search and rescue has recovered all wounded personnel on the Stennis. Firefighting efforts are being concluded. Once all personnel have been withdrawn, the Stennis will be scuttled and US Navy forces will withdraw from the East China Sea. I will not be taking questions.”
As reporters shouted questions at the departing spokesman, Winch muted the screen again.
Sammie sat still, his arms crossed over his chest.
George leaned over from his desk to pat Sammie on the shoulder. “Buck up, man. Your brother’s gonna be okay. The Navy’s not going to leave him behind.”
Winch and David shared a look. They didn’t feel optimistic, but weren’t willing to take any hope away from Sammie.
“Don’t feel bad because there’s no messages from him,” said David. “The Navy is holding messages because of security.”
Sammie nodded. “Yeah, Harv might be okay. I’m just scared.”
“The war’s scary for everyone,” said Winch.
“I wish I could do something,” said Sammie. “I went to the recruiting office last week and they kicked me out. Asthma. I hate the damn war and I hate China for starting it.”
Winch looked around the room. It was full of the latest model computer gear, paid for by the hacking that they’d done. Security software, testing of corporate systems, and occasionally lifting money from the accounts of some outfit that didn’t deserve to have it. “So let’s do something. China’s full of servers. Let’s break into some and see how much trouble we can cause.”
George grinned. He was always up for a new adventure.
David’s forehead wrinkled. “The Great Firewall is blocking everything from the US, but we’ve established superuser accounts on Russian and Indian systems. We can access China from there.”
“What can we do to China? It’s huge,” said Sammie.
Winch looked at him. “Turn off the lights. Erase bank records. Spam the shit out of them. All that crap we keep other people from doing to our clients.”
“Right.” Sammie spun his chair to face his keyboard. “Let’s find a weak point.”
The four hackers weren’t the best at their business because they were smarter than everyone else. It was because they’d formed a tight team and were willing to put in as much effort as needed. Focusing on this mission didn’t hurt their nonexistent social lives, but their videogame guild did have to cancel some online events.
In a week they’d established identities on servers in Beijing, Macao, and Shanghai. They could make any action they took look like it came from a local player. Their first move was to disrupt the electrical grid in the capital. Faked error messages made substations shut down to avoid an imaginary overload.
The blackout made the news. A commercial satellite photo showed the bright lights of nighttime Beijing with a trapezoidal hole where power was cut. A few speckles marked buildings with their own generators. George cheered at the picture on the war news channel, but the rest agreed with Sammie’s comment: “It’s a start.”
Software they’d customized searched the networks for vulnerable systems. They were delighted to find a corporation owned by the People’s Liberation Army had left its finance system on a deprecated version of its operating system. A buffer overflow gave them root control. In minutes they owned the company’s accounts. Most of the money was sent to mafia-related entities in Russia, but a small percentage snaked through a dozen intermediate accounts to go into the hackers’ own pockets.
“This is more like it,” said Sammie. “This hurts the generals. The other stuff was just messing with ordinary citizens. They didn’t start the war.”
They kept working.
Money wasn’t much use for them while they were working. Their biggest expense was food deliveries. Sammie answered the door for the latest pizza delivery.
The delivery driver was their regular, the one Sammie thought of as “Barbie.” She was tall, blonde, and fit. She reminded him of cheerleaders he’d mooned after in high school. Sammie took the boxes and stuck his credit card into her gadget. He added a 50% tip. They could afford it.
“Thank you.” Barbie hung in the door, looking over the hacker lair. “Dude. You guys can’t keep living like this.”
“What? We’re fine,” said Sammie defensively.
She pointed at a stack of pizza boxes on the kitchen counter. “I delivered those a week ago. You haven’t thrown them out. The sink has the same dishes as the last time I was here. You’re all going to catch some disease and die if you don’t clean up.”
“We’re working. We don’t have time for that,” answered Sammie.
“Then you need a housekeeper. Or a den mother, or something. I’ll do it. Twenty-five an hour. I’ll clean up the kitchen, get you regular meals, do your laundry. Have you been doing laundry?”
The conversation had pulled in the attention of the other hackers (except David, who wouldn’t notice a explosion in flow state). They all looked away at the laundry question.
“Right. Laundry. And whatever else needs to be done. I’m Heather. I’m your housekeeper. Twenty-five. I’ll start tomorrow.” She put her hands on her hips and looked hard at each of them in turn.
Sammie and George looked to Winch. Their leader scanned over the piles of empty plastic bottles between desks, the stacks of food containers in the kitchen, and the overflow into the living room. “Okay. She’s right. Fine, you’re hired. Don’t show up before noon. We sleep in.”
“See you at noon.” Heather closed the door behind her.
David’s fugue paid off. The Chinese civilian air traffic control system provided its radar data to the military air defense network. The connection could be widened to reveal what the air defense radars saw. There wasn’t any way to make money off that, so Winch dropped all the information on how to access it into a compressed file and sent it to an intel officer at the Pentagon through a string of three anonymizers.
Some good news came from Sammie’s parents. The Navy said his brother was “injured and in recovery” but could not be contacted because of “operational security restrictions.” Sammie still worried. If it was a minor injury, Harv would be back on duty. If he’d been badly burned . . . Hunting for a new hacking target was a way to distract himself from those thoughts.
Heather had the house smelling better by the end of her first shift. After three days the hygiene level was so improved the hackers took showers to fit in.
Sammie started watching the news feed more, looking for signs of their work. Most of what they did was only felt by the victims, who wouldn’t complain to Western reports. But he hoped it would show in the balance of the war.
The interviewer asked, “Colonel Cutprice, will the stalemate on Taiwan hold?”
The grizzled Army veteran said, “It’ll hold. For a while. Then we’ll see a collapse.” He swept a hand over a map of Taiwan. The egg-shaped island was colored red at its base, taking up a fifth of the total land. “The PLA landed three divisions from container ships as a Trojan Horse attack. They haven’t been able to bring in any more troops. The Navy and Air Force have intercepted all the ones they try to send. Once those divisions have taken enough losses that they can’t man their side of the trenches any more, the Taiwanese will crush them.”
“But isn’t the Taiwanese Army destroyed?”
“The pre-war Army was destroyed. Treachery, assassins, and precision missile strikes broke their leadership. But there’s a lot of Taiwanese willing to fight. All of the Army’s gear has been picked up by soldiers or volunteers. They’re not organized enough to wage mobile warfare, but they can hold the trench lines that have developed to hold the Chinese forces. New volunteers are coming in and the US and other nations are managing to send in some troops from time to time. It’s inevitable that they’ll defeat the invasion force by attrition.”
Sammie muted the feed in disgust. ‘Inevitable.’ If it was so inevitable, why did the Chinese attack in the first place? He turned back to his keyboard. Time to find a new target.
The train system had been upgraded in waves. The newest control software hadn’t been updated with the latest security patches. Fiddling with the switches sent an ammunition train into a collision with one carrying coal. That made the news. The fires lasted for days.
The doorbell rang before he could get deep into hacking. Heather was washing dishes, so Sammie answered the door.
It was the new delivery guy Great Wall had hired a couple weeks ago. “Two General Tsos, two orange chicken, ten egg rolls,” he rattled off. It was their standard order, but Sammie didn’t remember anyone calling for it.
He looked toward the computer room. “Anyone make a Great Wall order?” Then he was stumbling away as the delivery guy pushed his way through the door. The guy was pulling something from the thermal food bag.
Sammie recognized it as a QCW-05 submachine gun. He’d been given a digital one in his favorite first person shooter as a reward for completing twenty stealth missions.
The delivery guy almost had the weapon lined up with Sammie’s head when his arms spasmed and he dropped the gun. Sammie’s ears rang, he couldn’t hear anything. A couple more spasms left the delivery guy crumpled in the doorway. Blood spilled from his chest.
Sammie leaned against the wall in shock. He twisted to look at the kitchen.
Heather stood with a pistol in her right hand. Smoke trailed from the barrel. She held a badge in the other hand. “Special Agent Jamilkowski, FBI.” She spoke loudly enough to be heard through the ringing in Sammie’s ears.
The other hackers were clustered in the doorway of the computer room, gaping at the corpse.
The FBI agent made a phone call. “Jamilkowski. Need a clean-up team at the safe house. Because that’s what happens when the perimeter team lets an assassin through. No, that’s over my pay grade. No, they’re all fine. Well, they’re freaked out. No physical harm. Lemme get back to work.”
She dropped the phone back into her pocket.
“What the fuck is an FBI agent doing in our house?” demanded Winch.
Heather smiled. “Protecting you from Chinese assassins. Also botulism, so don’t stiff me on the housekeeper pay.”
Sammie eyed the pistol. He was not going to stiff her.
“How did you know we were here? We’ve been covering our tracks,” insisted Winch.
She rolled her eyes. “If both sides of the war have armed agents at your house, you haven’t covered your tracks.”
“She has a point,” said David. Apparently gunshots a few feet away would break him out of flow state.
“So if you know what we’re doing, why haven’t we been arrested?” said Winch.
“Someone else is on his way over to talk about that.” Which she stuck to despite all four of them trying to get more answers out of her.
The clean-up crew were dressed in county coroner coveralls, but knew Heather by name. She had to go out to the front yard and talk with a cop, or someone dressed as a local cop. They put on a performance for the neighbors. The hackers watched her imitate a shocked and hysterical housewife explaining how she was forced to defend herself. They might have found it convincing if they hadn’t watched her shoot a man with the same facial expression she had when scrubbing stains off the counter. When the clean-up crew left there were no signs that violence had occurred in their house.
When all the fuss died down, a man in a blue suit arrived. Heather introduced him as Bill Pederson, “The Special Agent In Charge of this operation.”
The hackers stood in a row facing Pederson, waiting to hear how the Federal government had found out about their operation and whether they were going to be arrested. There’d been some whispered discussions while Heather was busy, but none of them believed they could escape. Heather could probably jog after them until they all keeled over from heat stroke.
“This is a national security operation,” began Pederson. “What I’m about to tell you is classified. Do you need a complete rundown of the applicable clauses of the Espionage Act, or are you willing to just never speak of this to anyone except me or Special Agent Jamilkowski?”
“We can keep secrets,” said Winch, “or we thought we could.”
That drew a thin smile from Pederson. “You did a very good job of keeping your secrets. But you’ve been so effective that you’ve drawn the attention of the best signals intelligence agencies of both the US and China. You’ll forgive me for not sharing all the details of how you were found out. I’m not cleared for most of them.”
He waited for that to sink in before continuing. “You four have inflicted more damage to our enemy than many four star generals have. That’s why you drew the Ministry for State Security’s attention. And why we’re doing our best to protect you. Leaving you here seemed to be the best way to protect the security measures you already had set up.”
Pederson glanced at the damp spot by the front door. “We should move you to a new safe house now.”
No one argued.
The new place was on the edge of a college town, some place where four twenty-somethings sharing a house wouldn’t raise eyebrows. The network connection from the house needed to be upgraded before they could work. David began creating root accounts on the college’s servers so they could redirect their hacking through it to avoid anything being tracked back to the house.
Jamilkowski stayed on, supervising three guards and two housekeepers. They all lived in the house’s basement, masquerading as an illegal immigrant family.
Mr. Pederson visited when the upgraded cable was installed. “We have a present for you. Your operation will actually be legal now.”
The four hackers gathered around the leather folder he held out. It opened to reveal a fancy document on parchment paper with embossed seals at the bottom. Pederson began to read.
“The Congress of the United States of America. Know all to whom these presents come, that we have granted License and Authority to Winchell Kim and the group under his command known as the Four Avengers . . .”
Sammie flushed. He wouldn’t have suggested that name for the group if he’d known it would be public.
“. . . to seize the property of the government of the People’s Republic of China and the officials thereof, and to destroy such material of military significance as may be accessed. All property seized shall be presented to a United States Admiralty Court to be condemned as prizes if they are adjudged as lawful seizures. The said Winchell Kim and Four Avengers shall give bond and sureties that they shall commit no acts in violation of the Laws of Armed Conflict, as noted in the appendix of this proclamation. The armed forces and other agencies of the government of the United States of America are directed to give succor and assistance to the Four Avengers as needed. This commission shall continue in force until the Congress shall issue orders to the contrary.”
Pederson looked up from the folder. “Signed by the President, of course. And dated back to the beginning of the war, so all your free-lance work is covered.”
It took a little bit for this to sink in. George reacted first. “We get to keep the money?”
That drew a grin from the FBI man. “A court will review if it was taken from the PRC. If so, it’s a legal prize.”
“Cool. We hadn’t figured out how to launder it back into the US yet.”
“We would appreciate it if you did not ‘launder’ any money. That’s a criminal act not covered by the letter of marque.” He watched tolerantly as the hackers exchanged looks. “But with the war on we’re too busy to look into anything you did before hand. Just behave yourselves from now on.”
Becoming legal came with homework. The hackers split the Geneva Conventions and other applicable treaties among themselves to see if any of the provisions would affect their work. As they weren’t taking prisoners or occupying territory most of it didn’t.
“Special Agent Jamilkowski?” asked Sammie.
She looked up from the camera displays of the outside of the house. “Yes?”
“I’m looking at this stuff about hurting wounded enemies. What if we shut down power to a city and there’s a hospital in it? Is that a violation?”
Jamilkowski shook her head. “No. That’s collateral damage. Like if you blew up a tank and there were wounded next to it.”
“Okay. Then I think we’re ready to start working again.”
Being ‘official’ privateers instead of free-lance hackers let them coordinate with the military. Winch followed up on the air traffic control to air defense network link they’d reported to the Pentagon. It turned out that had been handed over to the Intelligence community for use backtracking the hackers and never given to the front-line troops.
The FBI put them in touch with the Pacific Air Force electronic warfare team. The airmen needed help using the hole into the Chinese air defense system, but once George and David held their hands through that part, launching attacks on the Chinese mainland become much safer for pilots.
Knowing the ‘Admiralty Court’ would let them keep all money stolen from the People’s Liberation Army—which owned a large fraction of the Chinese economy—the four of them spent a few days going wild on banks. Not all of them were careless with their security, but enough were that the bank account they’d set up for ‘plunder’ soon held over a billion dollars.
Jamilkowski dampened the celebration over hitting the ten digit mark. “Remember, you have to pay taxes on that.”
George laughed. “We can afford some taxes with this.”
Having more money than they could imagine how to spend destroyed the attraction of banks. A vulnerability in the Chinese cell phone network allowed them to extract a log of all text messages sent in Beijing for the past two weeks. Not something the ‘Four Avengers’ could use. Jamilkowski forwarded the file to the appropriate agencies. A few days later the Four Avengers were informed they’d all been awarded National Security Medals.
They had to look the award up—unlike military valor awards, this wasn’t used in videogames. “It’s pretty,” said George, “but I don’t know where I could wear it.”
“After the war, you can buy some suits and we’ll have an official award ceremony your parents can attend,” said Jamilkowski. They didn’t seem interested. She added, “It impresses girls.”
Which impressed the hackers, but they didn’t want to admit it.
The Pentagon offered a million-dollar bounty on shutting down pieces of the Chinese power grid. The Admiralty Court had already approved over $200,000,000 in ‘prizes’ so the Four Avengers weren’t motivated. After a conversation with Jamilkowski, the reward was changed to an Achievement Medal for each of them.
Wuhan went dark the next day.
“Look, General,” explained Jamilkowski. “I know for you that’s what a corporal gets for four years of doing his job well. But ‘achievement’ is a magic word for these guys.”
The power disruptions made the news. They were having a significant impact on the Chinese war effort. New production of ammunition and equipment was delayed, and shipments had to be routed around the blacked out areas. The Chinese long-range missiles were in short enough supply the Navy could help more reinforcements reach Taiwan.
The hackers kept looking for more vulnerabilities. Tracking links through the power grid brought them to China’s single greatest power generation site: the Three Gorges Dam. The power generators were staffed by China’s best. All the software was up to date. There were no security holes. The Four Avengers’ best automated penetration tools banged on the doors and came away empty.
David explored other systems associated with the dam. Was there some indirect way to ruin the power generation?
The vulnerability was in the dam’s oldest control system, opening and closing the floodgates to adjust the level of the water in the reservoir behind the dam. David checked the weather forecasts. Rain had been above average the past couple of weeks, and was expected to become heavier in the upcoming days. The reservoir was above the optimum level.
The hackers closed the floodgates. This would force the reservoir to overflow the dam, causing damage to the structure and power generation facilities. They searched out the dams upstream from the Three Gorges reservoir and opened their floodgates, forcing as much water as possible into the Three Gorges reservoir. To keep the systems administrators from undoing their hacks, they directed the controlling computers to overwrite their memories with zeroes until the software for managing them was thoroughly erased.
Then all they could do was wait. Or go look for new targets to hack.
All four were focused on the pumping stations of natural gas pipelines when Special Agent Jamilkowski barged in on them.
“Did you guys fuck up the Three Gorges Dam?”
“Yes,” said Winch proudly. “When the dam fails, it’ll black out power to nine provinces.”
“Shit. Shit. Shit.”
“What’s the matter?” asked Sammie. “Will there be collateral damage?”
“Yeah. The CIA estimates a collapse of the dam will kill ten to twenty million people. The president received a hot line message from the Chinese threatening to retaliate with a nuclear strike if the dam fails.”
This made Winch and David drop into troubleshooting mode. Sammie’s face said, ‘I’m in trouble and I’m going to be punished.’ George wore an expression of innocent deniability, as if this world war level crisis couldn’t possibly be his fault.
“They must not have backups, or they would have restored the control software,” said David, starting to brainstorm the problem.
Jamilkowski demanded, “Can you fix this? Or are we having a nuclear war?”
Winch answered calmly, “The dam operators will have to fix it. We can get them the tools to do it. We’ll probably have to talk with them to do it.”
“Okay. It can be fixed, we’ll need to cooperate. I’ll report in.” She left.
Researching the necessary software ran into some obstacles. The control system had been procured from a European company. They were unwilling to violate the sanctions against China without an official waiver from the European Union’s Commission. That would take at least a week.
“These people keep up with their security updates,” muttered David in disgust. None of his penetration techniques had been able to break into the servers of the engineering company.
George said, “They’re not perfect.”
The other three looked up at him. “You’re in?” asked Winch.
“No . . . but I have a friend who says he can get us access.”
“For?”
“He’s Russian. He’ll do it for a favor.”
“Russians demand expensive favors,” said David.
Sammie glared at him. “More expensive than ten million lives?”
“Tell him we’ll owe him,” ordered Winch. “Get the access.”
With the Russian hacker’s help, they had access to the European company’s servers. Within hours they’d downloaded the control software for the motors controlling the spillways and the operating system for their computers. Manuals and other helpful information was also scooped up.
Winch called in Special Agent Jamilkowski. “We’ve put all the data on an open server in China. Get us a phone line and an interpreter and we can talk them through the reinstallation.”
“Thank God.” She made a call, returning less cheerful. “Okay. You guys stay ready to do the tech support. But it’s going to be a little while.”
“What are we waiting for?” asked Sammie. “You said millions could die.”
“It’s not breaking yet. The President wants to make fixing the dam conditional on ending the war.”
“That’s some high stakes bargaining,” said Winch.
“He’s the President. It’s his job.” Jamilkowski didn’t look happier about the situation than any of the others.
Sammie checked for news reports while they waited. The Three Gorges Dam had made the news, though the reporters didn’t know why the reservoir level was so high. There were reports of cities immediately downstream starting to evacuate, but there were over a hundred million people in the river valley from the dam to the ocean.
He traced the Yangtze River on a map. Many of the cities on it were ones where they’d made hacking attacks. He’d always expected harm from their actions to be minor. Maybe a bankrupt general committing suicide, or car accidents in a blacked-out city.
They’d only thought of the dam as a power generator. The thought that breaking it would cause floods of that intensity was terrifying. They’d done this by accident.
Midnight came and went. Winch ordered them to take naps in pairs, so at least a couple would be fresh when it was time to do tech support.
David woke Sammie at dawn before going for his own nap. Sammie promptly checked the news. The peace talks were the top story. The dam problems were second. The reporters didn’t seem to make the connection.
He checked their data server to make sure no Chinese sysadmin had taken it down. It was still in service, pretending to track the inventory of a rice transportation company.
Digging into the manuals written for the original installation of the Three Gorges Dam found more reasons to be afraid. The original engineers warned that if the reservoir level was allowed to get too high, it might cause permanent damage that would cause the dam to fail even if the water level was lowered to the original safe height.
Did the politicians arguing about the war know what the real time limit was?
Sammie checked the weather in China. There was rain in the drainage basin above the dam, but not as much as had been originally forecast. That might buy them some time.
“We have a deal!” Jamilkowski came in carrying a laptop.
The screen lit up with the faces of two Chinese men. The one on the left had the skinny neck of someone resident in China. The right face had the solid flesh of someone who’d grown up eating an American diet. The right face said, “Hi, I’m Wong, I’ll be your interpreter. I understand this is to be a technical support call, yes?”
Winch said, “Yes, it is.”
The other face said something in Chinese. By the tone it meant, “This damn well better be one.”
It went about as smoothly as installing software onto bare metal could. The Three Gorges Dam team already had new computers hooked up to the system to try to gain control of the motors. Those were used to install the operating systems onto the machines the Four Avengers had erased. Once that was done, the control computers could put their software themselves. In less than five hours one of the floodgates was open, letting water spill downstream.
When the third floodgate opened, the Chinese operator declared, “We have this now,” and cut off the call.
Wong asked, “How did you guys wind up working on the dam?”
Before Winch could answer, Jamilkowski stuck her head over his shoulder. “Sorry, you’re not cleared for that.”
“Story of my life. Good working with you, I’m glad I could help.” Wong waved good-bye before cutting the call.
The hackers sagged back in their chairs as the tension released.
“Let’s stay alert,” said Winch. “They might call back if they have problems.”
The chance of problems seemed more remote an hour later. A news report announced that all the floodgates on the dam were open. Sammie stopped worrying about killing millions of innocents.
Special Agent Jamilkowski came in carrying a bottle. “It’s official. China just ordered its troops on Taiwan to surrender and promised to recognize its independence. The war’s over. Congratulations. You won the war.”
She lifted up the whiskey bottle. “I thought I’d offer you all a drink to celebrate.”
The hackers looked at each other. Even George shook his head. Winch said, “Sorry, we’re not really drinkers.”
“Fair enough. I’m going to share with the rest of the crew downstairs. Come on down if you want some.” She left.
Sammie looked at his fellow hackers. They looked as shell-shocked as he felt. All that effort, and suddenly it was over. It didn’t feel like something different when they were doing it, but that one piece of hacking mattered more than everything else they’d done in their lives.
“We won the war.” George said it again, looking as if he was trying to convince himself it was true.
“We were part of winning the war,” said Winch. “It took everybody else doing their part too.”
“Was it right?” asked Sammie. “Putting so many innocent lives at risk to end it?”
“Why are you asking us?” said David. “Attacking China was your idea.”
“Yeah. I wanted to hurt China for Harv. But I wanted to hurt the generals and politicians, not everybody who lived by the wrong river.”
David shrugged. “There’s a whole lot of dead Taiwanese civilians from all the rocket attacks. That’s what war is. China picked that risk when they invaded.”
“I know.” Sammie paused to think. “It’s just . . . if we’re going to put ten million lives at risk, shouldn’t it be on purpose, not by accident?”
Winch nodded. “It should. We’ll be more careful researching our targets if we have to do this again.”
George chuckled. “Let’s hope winning this war means we don’t have to do it again.”
More of Karl K. Gallagher’s fiction is available on Amazon.
Should attacks on enemy networks be part of our war strategy? Should the hackers be uniformed troops or freelancers? Are there any other missions that should be handled by privateers?