Tim Washburn - Cyber Attack

“Whom are you working with?”

“Paige Randall. Know her?”

“Of course. All of us programmer chicks like to hang out once in a while. Paige knows her way around. Tell her I said hello.”

“I will, but back to the reason for my call. We’re headed to Manhattan to get a look at some of the stock market software and I was wonderin’ if you’d be willin’ to share a few of your special software tools.”

“Are you going to share that source code with me?”

“Oh, so we’re barterin’, now? Sure, I’ll ask Paige to send you everythin’ we get.”

“Deal,” Natalie says. “What do you need?”

Hank thinks about it a moment. “I guess what we don’t already have.”

“Put Paige on the phone, Hank.”

“She wants to talk to you,” Hank says, passing his phone over to Paige. He scowls when the second thing out of Paige’s mouth is a deep, hearty laugh. Hank has no doubt Natalie’s comment had something to do with him. Paige glances over and smiles. Yep. No doubt. He glances up at the television to see a full-screen graphic: BREAKING NEWS. He digs around in the seat for the remote and cranks up the volume.

The graphic transitions to a dark-haired woman sitting in a studio. “As if this day couldn’t get any worse—we’re receiving word from our affiliate in Seattle that there are multiple fatalities at a local water park after some type of industrial explosion in the area. In addition to those killed, area hospitals are swamped with people who are reportedly having difficulty breathing. Nothing has been confirmed about the nature of the accident, but eyewitnesses reported smelling chlorine shortly after the explosion. We have crews on the way and will have further details when they become available.”

McAlester, Oklahoma

The town of McAlester is famous for one thing: it’s the home of the Oklahoma State Penitentiary—the only supermax prison in the state with a death chamber and a long line of prisoners awaiting its use. But there’s another facility in the area that deals in death yet remains unknown to most residents outside the McAlester area. In addition to making bombs, the McAlester Army Ammunition Plant is also one of the largest ammunition storage depots in the world. From 7.62-mm rifle rounds to five-thousand-pound bombs, the folks working at the plant can ship, when required, four hundred large containers of ordnance every day. And if that’s not enough to get the job done, the manufacturing side builds the GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance Air Blast (MOAB) bomb, or, as it’s known by its other moniker, the Mother of All Bombs. The MOAB bomb is the most powerful nonnuclear weapon in America’s arsenal. Clocking in at over twenty-one thousand pounds, the bomb’s blast yield is equal to eleven tons of TNT, only three tons less than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima at the end of WWII. The weapon can be guided to a precise target using GPS and, due to its size, must be deployed via drag chute from a C-130 Hercules aircraft.

Those who live around McAlester are very aware of the facility’s existence. It’s hard not to be when the personnel that work there detonate bombs on a daily basis, destroying obsolete ordnance. The locals get a kick out of watching a newcomer’s reaction when the first bomb of the day blows. The high school principal even swears he’s had salespeople try to climb under his desk when it happens. For the local residents, the bomb blasts are part of everyday life and most will tell you they don’t even notice them anymore, much like those residents who live near a hospital and claim they no longer hear the sirens.

The employees not blowing up bombs at the McAlester facility are busy building them. The workers on the production line inside the large warehouse can build twenty different types of ordnance, everything from missiles to mortar rounds. Today, they’re constructing their favorite weapon to build, the MOAB bomb. For Darlene Watkins, it’s a strange feeling to be working on a weapon whose only purpose is to kill or maim other human beings. It’s something she tries not to think about too often, but she has added incentive to make sure the job is done correctly—her son is currently deployed in Afghanistan. And she’s not the only one working at the plant with loved ones serving overseas. When her son’s National Guard unit was activated, a good number of people from the McAlester area were pressed into service. Several of the fourteen hundred employees at the facility have sons or daughters, husbands or wives, or brothers or sisters who are now in harm’s way. The feeling among most of them is the more bombs they build, the quicker their loved ones can return home.

Today, Darlene, a rail-thin woman in her late fifties with a two-pack-a-day habit, is working at the end of the line in the final assembly area. Her job is to test the bomb’s inertial guidance components, a critical job to ensure the bomb arrives at the specified target. She attaches two leads to the guidance system’s testing terminals and steps over to her old, yellowed computer. The damn thing is nearly as old as I am , Darlene thinks as she clicks the grimy mouse, initiating a program that will activate the sensors and gyroscopes to diagnose the components for errors or defective parts. As she waits for the computer to finish, she glances at the clock in the upper-right corner of the screen to calculate her next smoke break. Darlene groans. She’ll have to wait another hour and a half. The program finishes and she studies the results. According to the computer the bomb is good to go.

Darlene walks back over to disconnect the leads and hears a clicking noise. It’s a noise she doesn’t remember hearing before, but they build so few of these particular bombs—maybe three or four a year—and she can’t recall if it’s normal activity or an anomaly. She steps away and scans the surrounding area for her supervisor and spots him talking to another employee farther down the line. Darlene cups her hands around her mouth and shouts, “Bobby!”

Bob Davidson looks up and Darlene waves him over. Bob, in his early forties and nearly as wide as he is tall, waddles over. “What’s up, Darlene?”

“Hopefully nothing. I have a piece of ordnance making a strange sound.”

“What the hell are you talking about, Darlene? They’re bombs. They don’t make noises.”

“Come here, then,” Darlene says, walking back over to the finished bomb.

Bob shuffles along behind her, and when he’s close enough to hear the clicking sound, the blood drains from his face. “Oh shi—”

Before Bob can finish his statement, the massive bomb detonates, killing everyone within a mile of the plant.

Chicago

Peyton Lynch is still parked in the lobby of her workplace building, silently cursing Eric’s boss. There has been a steady stream of people leaving, including most of the big wheels from Brown, Wright, Zuker, Tomlinson & Qualls. Even the seventy-six-year-old J. Michael Zuker, the agency’s founder, made it down seventeen flights of stairs without keeling over. Thrice divorced—the latest a young blond bombshell in her early thirties—the lecherous old bastard had offered Peyton a ride, which she kindly declined. The last place she would want to be is in a private, confined space with that handsy old fart and, with traffic gridlocked, he’ll be lucky to get out of the parking garage.

Peyton lights the screen on her cell phone to check if she has service yet and finds she doesn’t. No big surprise there. God, she’d kill for ten minutes of Wi-Fi time, just to send Eric an e-mail to hurry his ass along. She stands and walks to the closest window, the symphony of car horns growing louder. The streets are jammed with cars going nowhere and the sidewalks are jammed with people trying to get home. Peyton turns and paces to the other side of the lobby, still barefoot and still sporting blisters on both heels. The thought of walking home in her new heels makes her nauseous, but the thought of walking home barefoot makes her doubly nauseous.