Brad Taylor - The Polaris Protocol

The journalist nodded, saying nothing.

The sicario said, “Remember, you exist solely to identify the gringo coming from America. I hope for your sake you can.”

41

On the wide-screen TV a past administrator of the FAA bloviated on and on about what he perceived had gone wrong in Denver. Having served when air travel was a novelty and the technology was based on lessons learned from World War II, he was the perfect man to discuss the intricacies of modern-day air travel. Or at least the only man the network could get to fill in some dead air. He pointed at a chart detailing the exponential increase in aircraft juxtaposed over the static manning hours of the air-traffic controller, extrapolating human error based on the government’s refusal to address grievances he had championed years ago. Kurt turned away in disgust.

In his heart, he understood he shouldn’t fault the network. They were only doing what they existed to do: entice someone to watch their channel so advertisers would buy time. Like many times in the past, though, he knew what they did not. He knew the secret, and in this case the secret was bad indeed.

George Wolffe stuck his head in the door. “Principals’ meeting in forty-five.”

Kurt leaned back and rubbed his eyes. In the end, it was only a matter of time before he was called. The National Security team would deal with the mess created by the GPS blackout, but his organization was the only one with a thread that could lead to the prevention of a second catastrophic event. Not that he thought it was very strong. Or even something he’d really call a thread. More like a tendril of smoke.

He said, “Any more information on the probes of our systems?”

George grimaced and said, “Yeah. I was going to wait until after the meeting. You don’t need to hear this now.”

“What?”

“There’s a YouTube video posted. The usual idiot in the Guy Fawkes mask. He says Anonymous is going to expose a secret government spy ring in four days.”

“You think it’s us? Or coincidence?”

“I think there’s no way it’s a coincidence. We’ve had probes on all our systems linked to Grolier Recovery Services, and they’ve been very, very good. Hacking cell can’t track them back. All they know is they’re happening.”

“What could they find? How bad could they expose anything?”

“No gun, but plenty of smoke.”

“That’s just great.” He stood up and stretched. “Let’s go see what the Beltway’s knee-jerk reaction is to the blackout. Deal with this later.”

They exited the building into a parking garage in Arlington, getting into a nondescript Toyota sedan. George said, “You going to brief them on the penetration?”

“Yeah. I suppose I have to, but I’ll wait until after they finish hyperventilating about the GPS constellation. It’ll probably cause three or four heart attacks.”

*

Forty minutes later he entered the conference room in the Old Executive Office Building, feeling like he’d just left it. Ordinarily, Kurt and George briefed on a quarterly basis, getting approval for operations that were drawn out and boring but by their very nature had significant risk of United States exposure. At least that had been the framework. Now it seemed they spent more time briefing because of some crisis than they did controlling the long-term efforts that were the core of what the Taskforce did.

He saw five men in the room, unofficially called the “principals” of the Oversight Council. It was a moniker that had grown out of the power and experience the men brought to the table. While all thirteen appointed members of the council were needed to approve any Taskforce operation, these five men routinely met to discuss the operations’ implications, and 90 percent of the time, the rest of the council fell in line with whatever they wished.

Alexander Palmer, the president’s national security advisor, said, “Thanks for coming.”

Kurt said, “It’s becoming routine. What’s the damage?”

“For actual loss of life, pretty much what you see on the television. A 757 crashed, killing everyone on board. It’s being blamed on a computer malfunction in the tower, but the cause of that malfunction is still unknown. To the public, anyway.”

“And nonlethal damage?”

“We’re still trying to assess, but it’ll be in the billions of dollars. The secondary repercussions to our national air transportation alone were significant. Every major airport in America was affected, and while it was very brief, it caused a lot of panic, but luckily no other catastrophic events. Everywhere else worked fine with the legacy systems. Beyond that, we had an enormous amount of lost bank transfers and credit purchases, power outages, downed cell phone signals, and a ton of other things we haven’t even begun to assess. It’s a mess. Nobody knew how far the GPS signal had extended into our national framework.”

Kurt nodded toward the secretary of defense. “I thought there was no way anyone could affect the constellation. Jam individual signals, but not affect every signal.”

The SECDEF said, “It wasn’t every signal. As far as we can tell, the glitch affected only the satellites orbiting over North America.”

George Wolffe said, “Glitch? Is that what we’re saying? This was an accident?”

The director of the CIA said, “We don’t know. For six seconds, the satellites spit out a bad timing signal. It didn’t impact any of our operations overseas. All UAVs continued normally, but here, in the United States, it caused a lost link with every drone in the air. If it was done on purpose, it was most likely a test.”

Kurt said, “Well, it looks like it was successful. Can’t you guys figure out the difference? I mean, isn’t there some egghead who runs this shit who can tell? Find out what happened?”

The SECDEF said, “We’re working that now through Second SOPS and Boeing, but so far we’ve come up with nothing. There isn’t anything in the software architecture that shouldn’t be there. It’s like the satellites had a Tourette’s moment, then went back to normal.”

“So what’s next?”

“We’ve scrubbed everyone in the squadron and they’re clean. Nobody is on leave anywhere near El Paso or anything else that sends a spike, which is what I expected. Those guys live and breathe space operations and take it very seriously. No way would they be involved in an event like this. It’s something else, and we don’t have a thread. All we’ve got is what you have.”

“You mean Jennifer’s theory about her brother? Seriously? That’s the best we can do?” Kurt looked at the D/CIA. “You guys don’t have anything? What about the Hezbollah team?”

“They’re in Mexico City, but that’s all we know. No linkages to this at all other than the timing. The council’s already given execute authority to explore further. We’re wondering what your next steps are.”

Earlier, Kurt had sent them the situation report from the second hit, so he knew they were fully aware of the dry hole as far as Jack Cahill was concerned. What surprised him was that they were willing to continue in the face of so little evidence that it wouldn’t do any good whatsoever. Running amok in a foreign country conducting lethal operations was not something they should have been doing. Maybe once, when there was a distinct threat and a payoff, but twice with nothing in return was pushing the limit.

He said, “Honestly, I was going to tell Pike to stand down. We’ve conducted two overtly hostile actions in an allied country. On top of that we have no cover for action whatsoever down there. If Mexico investigates any of it we’re in hot water. There is no backstopping.”

Kurt saw Alexander Palmer look around the room, getting a nod from each man present. He said, “We don’t want you to stand down. We want you to continue full bore on the problem.”