Jerome Preisler: Net Force--Attack Protocol

“Yes, K?”

“Outlier,” she corrected. Using the dark web handle she had long ago created for herself.

“Yes, K.”

“Bring up the Satu Mare power grid.”

“Yes, K.”

She clicked her tongue. Fernandez had infused the AI with one too many of his stubbornly aggravating personality traits. But the upside was that, like Julio, it was also smart, nuanced, and intuitive. She could live with it.

In front of her now, the panel on-screen was replaced by a sector-by-sector map of the region, its cities and towns numbered according to the substations that supplied their electricity. The five already off-line were black, the rest red.

She watched as a sixth went dark.

“Over half the stations are down,” she said. “Total blackout in about five minutes.”

“Bitter cold out, a quarter million people without light or heat,” Dixon said. “Women, children, seniors. All for the sake of bagging one guy.”

She glanced over at him. “The hackers—the technologie vampiri —are the local economy. The government protects them. The polizei , the citizens, everyone.”

He shrugged with his hands on the wheel. She was right. Suspicions definitely would have been raised at the syndicate’s current headquarters—the Wolf’s Lair—if they only cut power to its surrounding village.

“I get it,” he said. “Still tough.”

“Tougher than it was on New York?”

Dixon didn’t answer. Four months ago the vampiri had launched a cyberattack that left the East Coast a shambles, killed hundreds, and almost took out the President. Now his team’s pursuit of the Wolf had led them out here to the Romanian boonies, making them key players in the first fully integrated operation conducted by the various elements of America’s new Department of Internet Security and Law Enforcement. Net Force, in bureaucratic government shorthand.

He really did get it.

The BearCat rolled between the gigantic evergreens standing sentinel on either side of the road. In the rear compartment, Gregg Long, Fox Team, sat with a small detachment on loan from Task Force Quickdraw—six men in tactical gear with Mark 18 CQBR carbines strapped over their shoulders and short-barreled Mossberg 590 combat shotguns racked to the sides of the passenger compartment.

“Distance to the target?” Dixon asked after a few minutes.

This time Kali skipped the AI, tapping her computer keyboard for the GPS sat map. “Thirty-two miles.”

Dixon nodded and checked the speedometer. He was doing about fifty. So a little over half an hour.

Taking his hand off the wheel, he adjusted his earpiece and hailed Carmody on the ground-to-air.

Raven winged over the Romanian countryside at her top cruising speed of 280 knots, her tilt-rotors angled down for forward flight. She had maintained an altitude of 6,000 feet, slightly below the low, heavy ceiling of clouds. Faye Luna and Ron Cobb, Net Force Cy-Eye Surveillance and Aviation, occupied the pilot and copilot seats. Mike Carmody, Fox Team, stood behind them in the cockpit’s dimness, facing its wide wraparound window, peering down through the gauzy veil of snow.

One after another, the rows of homes on the streets and lanes below went dark. He thought suddenly of Christmas lights. Strings of unplugged Christmas lights.

“Preacher, you copy?” It was Dixon over the Radio over Internet Protocol, or RoIP. He was using Carmody’s call name for the mission.

“Yes,” he said. His hands were meshed together behind his back. “What’s up?”

“The precip’s heavier than expected,” Dixon said. “Want to confirm you’re still tracking us.”

Carmody moved up to the touch-screen interface spanning the width of the avionics board. It was, as his training instructor put it, a giant smart tablet. Pinch, zoom, swipe . External sensors on the outside of the aircraft—its PDAS, or Pilotage Distributed Aperture Sensor suite—gave the multifunction display a fully integrated 360-degree view of earth and sky.

Set for night flying, the screen’s background was a fused infrared/low-light magnification terrain map of Satu Mare. Its radiance washed the cockpit in green and gray.

Raven was a bespoke version of the Bell V-280, and Carmody saw her as tricked out like something straight from a sci-fi flick. At a cost of fifty million dollars, she was expensive but worth it. He’d proposed that Net Force order twenty. Its Director of Operations, Carol Morse, requisitioned a fleet of ten. Congress had approved funding for two.

He selected a tracking window for the two BearCats and widened it with his thumb and forefinger. The SUVs appeared inside it, along with the GPS latitude, longitude, altitude, and speed coordinates.

“Rover One, I see you fine,” he said.

“Nice being the only things with lights.”

Carmody wished he could have lit a cigarette. “Okay. Keep it rolling.”

He signed off and glanced over at Luna. Dark-haired, round-faced, she looked about fifteen. But he knew her quals and reputation as an ace among flying aces. US Air Cavalry, Task Force Viper, Afghanistan. Then college on the GI Bill and a stint with the FBI Critical Incident Response Group. She and Cobb had crewed the only chopper allowed in the air over New York in the hours after the attack, their actions earning the express gratitude of POTUS herself.

“Better run my checks,” he said.

“Yes, sir.” She kept her right hand on the joystick, pointed to the screen with her left. “The bird’s picked up quite a tailwind. We could beat our own ETA.”

The aircraft rocked and trembled on an air pocket. Carmody turned toward the cockpit door, grasped the handle. He thought about Drajan Petrovik, the Wolf, and their first encounter in a dark Bucharest hallway. About squeezing his wounded arm and feeling his blood well up between his knuckles. Carmody had smelled the hacker’s blood in a corridor splashed with the blood of dead men, and thought he could smell it now, taste it at the back of his tongue like copper.

But that was his imagination. He paused and breathed through his nostrils as if to prove it to himself. Nothing. Just the sterile, filtered scentlessness of the recycling cockpit air.

After a moment, he pushed through the door and joined his men in the troop cabin.

2

Baneasa, Romania

(FOB Janus)

Four hundred fifty miles southeast of Satu Mare, the Midnight Runners were gathering for their nightly meetup. Organized by physician Lavonne Hughes at Forward Operating Base Janus, the group had grown from Lavonne and her two staff nurses to about a dozen regulars. Tonight they were short a few members, several of them on assignment with the Satu Mare hunting expedition.

As she did her warm-ups near the south perimeter fence, Lavonne saw three late arrivals hurrying over from their barracks. She straightened from a calf stretch and waved, steam puffing from her mouth into the cold, snow-flecked air. With almost a third of its personnel up-country, and only a thin detail left behind, the general mood around the installation was anxious. Scalpel was FOB Janus’s first official operation since its transfer from US Army command to Net Force Quickdraw. It was dangerous and politically sensitive.

Lavonne wasn’t sure how much the Romanians knew about it, but she’d heard through the grapevine that it wasn’t half what they were supposed to know. Meaning that if the task force ran into trouble, they could face major consequences from their host government in addition to whatever the hackers threw at them—and the technologie vampiri weren’t your stereotypical keystrokers. They were violent criminals, armed to the teeth and ready for a fight.