The War Cloud Read online

  She shut the door and watched him put the minivan into reverse, back up, and then screech down the road, disappearing into the darkening afternoon. She then turned and trudged through the knee-high snow down the hillside, one long stride after another, toward Aunt Dina’s house.

  She burst through the front door, key in hand. “Carla? Carla?” she called for the housekeeper.

  The living room, filled with expensive built-ins and antiques and period rugs, was empty. “Carla?” she called out, then ran up the stairs to the bedrooms.

  But the bedrooms were empty too, including her own. She looked at the shelves next to her bed lined with trophies from soccer, basketball and softball. Even the trophies, however, were dwarfed by the ribbons and cups from her horse riding conquests. But it was the solid crystal cube— a commemorative urn — on the middle shelf that caught her eye. Etched in the crystal was an outline of an old-fashioned biplane and the words:

  Richard Sachs

  July 7, 1955-September 11, 2001

  Jennifer looked at it for a long moment, then turned and walked into the hallway again, calling Carla’s name.

  Maybe Carla left, she thought as she hurried down the stairs and ran into the kitchen, tripping over a pile of laundry. She landed hard and sprawled across the floor.

  “Owww,” she cried out.

  She pushed up with her hands to get on all fours when she saw the blood on the travertine tiles and froze. Slowly she willed her eyes to follow the blood trail until it ended at Carla’s skull.

  “Oh, my God!” she screamed and jumped back.

  Carla was on her back, staring at the ceiling, a small, dark hole in her forehead. Jennifer glanced up at the window over the sink. There was a hole in the center of a spider-web crack.

  niper got Carla, she realized, feeling her heart pounding out of her chest as she gasped for air. Somebody’s out there.

  She didn’t dare stand up again. Instead she crawled along the cabinetry and poked her head around to look outside the sliding glass door. A black Suburban suddenly hit its high-beams, blinding her. She recoiled and crouched back behind the counter.

  “No, no, no,” she moaned.

  She poked her head out again and saw the silhouettes of two shadowy figures with guns — M-16s from the profiles — walking toward the house.

  She ducked back out of sight, staring at Carla on the floor in front of her. Warm tears rolled down her frozen cheeks as she bit down hard on her lower lip.

  Her mom was right.

  27

  1431 Hours

  Air Force One

  Inside the presidential bathroom of the Nightwatch plane, now officially Air Force One, Sachs wiped off the makeup Captain Li had applied for the swearing-in photo and looked at herself in the mirror. Other than the bruises on her forehead, she didn’t look too banged up. But she also didn’t look like an American president, she thought, and she certainly didn’t feel like one. As if to underscore her testosterone deficit, she caught a glimpse of the prominent urinal behind her in the mirror.

  She zipped up the flightsuit Captain Li had given her — presidential seal and all — and walked out into the presidential suite. It was a smaller compartment than she had imagined, dominated by a desk, an American flag, and a long gold couch from which a grim Colonel Kozlowski and Captain Li rose as she entered.

  Sachs said, “What’s FEMA doing for the victims and their families in Washington, D.C.?”

  “Everything humanly possible, Madame President,” said Captain Li. “First-response medical units from around the country are treating the wounded and tagging the dead. Communications command posts are being set up to handle family inquiries. And financial credits are being applied to all affected.”

  Sachs then looked at Koz and said simply, “Jennifer.”

  “Soon as we’ve located her, we’ll put you on with her, Madame President,” Kozlowski assured her. “Meanwhile, Captain Li has General Zhang on behalf of the People’s Republic of China on hold.”

  Sachs said, “What happened to Premier Peng Hu?”

  Kozlowski shook his head. “China has made it clear that Zhang is their point man with us.”

  Not a good sign at all, Sachs thought.

  She looked at the phone on the desk in front of her, light blinking. She sat down behind the desk. There was a presidential seal on the bulkhead above her left shoulder.

  She swallowed hard and then nodded to Kozlowski, who pressed the speaker button.

  “General Zhang,” she said. “This is Deborah Sachs.”

  She heard a quick translation from Captain Li, then General Zhang’s voice and another translation.

  people of China wish to express our profound sorrow for your loss today, Madame President, and desire to offer any assistance the United States may require.”

  Sachs replied, “The only thing I require, General Zhang, is confirmation from your own lips that neither you nor any agent of the Chinese military was responsible for today’s attack on Washington, D.C.”

  “We are not responsible,” General Zhang said firmly. “But we will consider

  any retaliation directed at us an act of war. If so, I guarantee you that many other American cities shall suffer the same fate as Washington.”

  Before she could reply Zhang hung up, his transmission over. She looked at Kozlowski. “Now what?”

  Kozlowski said, “You’ll review your options. The National Command Authority is waiting on screen in the conference room for your first attack conference. That’s General Norman Block at Northern Command, General Duane Carver at Strategic Command, and General Brad Marshall aboard our Looking Glass plane.”

  “Looking Glass?” she asked. “What’s that?”

  “An airborne command post like this plane, with a few additional military modifications thrown in,” Kozlowski told her.

  Brad Marshall, thought Sachs with mixed emotions. She would be conferring with the Brad Marshall. Wouldn’t Jennifer be impressed?

  General Brad Marshall did indeed impress from the moment she stepped into the conference center and saw him on the big screen. He was flanked by General Carver on the left and General Block on the right, who started things off with his own commentary on the D.C. strike.

  “Charlie looks guilty as hell, Madame President,” Block said, full of bluster.

  Sachs said, “So I hear, General Block. And we know this because?”

  General Carver, the ranking general of the three, said, “Marshall, you better tell her.”

  Marshall said, “Have you ever heard of an online video game called the War Cloud, Madame President?” His voice was very smooth and inspired immediate credibility and confidence.

  “I know what the War Cloud is.” Sachs instinctively touched Jennifer’s “Fembot Fiona” USB drive hanging from her neck. “But what does it have to do with the real world?”

  “A lot, actually,” Marshall said. “The DOD has been closely monitoring this game for almost two years now, because it is the only program or application of any kind running on the Chinese military’s Tianhe-1A supercomputer in Tianjin. The Tianhe-1A performs at 2.67 petaflops per second. The most powerful computer the U.S. has, the Cray XT5 Jaguar, tops out 1.27 petaflops. So you’ve got the world’s most powerful supercomputer running nothing but a video game.”

  Sachs was hooked. “Why would the Chinese give their most powerful computer system over to a video game?”

  “Same reason the Chinese have been running other Cloud-based games like Farmville and virtual worlds like Second Life on their next dozen most powerful supercomputers,” Marshall said. “The War Cloud is basically the world’s eBay for arms dealers and terrorists.”

  “What?” Sachs blinked. “You lost me, General.

  Marshall said, “Gamers around the world can buy or sell virtual goods or weapons with real money to help them advance to the next level in these games. Players end up spending more money on their virtual upgrades than they do buying the game itself, making the game compan
ies — and the supercomputer’s owners — billions.”

  Sachs nodded. She remembered the first time her credit cards showed charges from PayPal and Google Checkout for Jennifer’s purchases of “accessories” like exploding diamond earrings and biotoxin-tipped fingernails for her Fembot Fiona avatar. The accessories were pure fantasy, but the money was real.

  “I think I follow you now, General Marshall. What looks like a grenade launcher online for a player’s avatar like Fembot Fiona or Duke Droid might actually represent a real grenade launcher — or a stolen Soviet SS-20 warhead. Is that it?”

  Marshall seemed surprised at how quickly she put it together, but pleasantly so. “Exactly, Madame President.”

  Sachs didn’t know if it was his surprise that bothered her or that his opinion mattered to her more than it should. “Monitoring an arms deal isn’t the same as brokering the deals, much less being party to it,” she said, pressing on. “How do we know for sure it was the Chinese who bought the SS-20 that exploded in Washington today?”

  “Two things,” Marshall said. “First, the former deputy FSB intelligence chief and arms dealer who was trying to sell the SS-20 in South Africa confessed under joint CIA-FSB interrogation. He said he sold it to an agent of the Chinese military. You can call up the video on your workstation aboard Air Force One. The three warheads were placed on a Chinese freighter bound from Cape Town to Baltimore. The assembly of the housing and detonation devices took place in transit across the Atlantic.”

  She glanced down at the conference table and realized there was a computer screen beneath the surface playing the footage. When she placed her finger on the table a touchscreen keyboard terminal appeared.

  So cool, she thought, Jennifer would love this. But she quickly pushed the thought away, along with her natural questions about what form of “interrogation” the CIA and FSB used on this arms dealer.

  She asked Marshall, “So you’re telling me there might be two more warheads out there?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  She exhaled. “What’s the second thing that fingers China as the state sponsor of this morning’s nuke attack and this imminent War Cloud threat?”

  “A cyberweapon that we eventually tracked back to China attacked Pentagon computers nine months ago,” Marshall said. “At first, U.S. Cyber Command assumed it came from the Middle East, in retaliation for the Stuxnet worm the Israelis used to sabotage the Iranian nuclear power station at Bushehr.”

  “I remember,” said Sachs, looking down at a report on her screen detailing the work of Unit 8200, the signal intelligence arm of the Israeli Defense Forces. “Something about a biblical reference to the Book of Esther that was embedded in the computer code. It pointed to Israel as the originator of the cyber attack. So there’s something like that in the code of this cyberweapon that points to China?”

  “Yes,” Marshall said. “The Chinese characters for ‘War Cloud.’ This War Cloud cyberworm infiltratedour most critical systems. We haven’t been able to get rid of it, and we don’t know what its true purpose is, other than it’s malicious.”

  Sachs asked, “What could it possibly do?”

  “Well, the Iranians wondered the same thing after the Israeli Stuxnet infected their systems. Then it suddenly came alive and disrupted their uranium enrichment centrifuges by causing rapid fluctuations in motor rotation rates, causing some of them to explode. Set their nuclear program back months.”

  “So you think this War Cloud worm could actually take down our physical infrastructure like our power grids and defense systems?” she asked, daunted by the prospect.

  Marshall nodded. “We’ve been waiting for the other shoe to drop. It did today with the attack on D.C. Or, more accurately, the nuke this morning was the first shoe. Now we’re waiting for the second shoe to drop when the War Cloud reveals its true nature.”

  Sachs pressed. “What is that nature, General Marshall? What exactly do you believe is the purpose of this War Cloud cyberweapon?”

  “To degrade our ability to respond under attack, Madame President,” Marshall said. “Meaning if you don’t act this minute, you might not be able to at all.”

  28

  1435 Hours

  Looking Glass

  Marshall’s first read on Sachs was that she had a much quicker grasp of an evolving situation than her predecessor Rhinehart. But he was worried about her trigger finger. He doubted she was born with one.

  He sat back in his chair inside the battle staff compartment of his Looking Glass plane and studied President Sachs on the split screen as she took in everything he said. General Carver’s expression from Omaha seemed to be giving her the benefit of the doubt. But then Carver was a consensus builder who only weighed in at the end after all viewpoints were shared.

  General Block, buried under Cheyenne Mountain, looked like he was about to burst. Marshall saw it coming a full minute before Block opened his mouth. “Say the word, Madame President, and we’re ready to point and shoot.”

  Marshall groaned inside and watched Sachs start.

  “Point and shoot?” she repeated incredulously. “That’s the option you’re giving me?”

  Marshall cleared his throat and addressed the screen. “You’ve basically got three decent options, Madame President,” he told her. “Tall, Grande and Venti.”

  She said, “Venti, I suppose, means an all-out nuclear attack like General Block is suggesting?”

  Marshall said, “Basically.”

  Sachs said, “I don’t want to bring an end to China, gentlemen. I want to end this war before it gets out of control. So we can eliminate the Venti option right now. What’s the so-called Grande option?”

  “Limited strike,” Marshall said. “But we spare their most valued targets and leave them at risk. That way the enemy has a strong incentive to seek an end to the conflict. As you just said, that’s what we want: an end to the escalation.“What if they don’t ‘get’ that we’re only inflicting limited harm? They’re liable to launch everything they’ve got at us. What’s the Tall option?”

  Marshall didn’t like the direction this conversation was going. “Something you can reliably recall, like a B-2 stealth bomber armed with a nuclear-tipped Maverick surface-penetrating cruise missile.”

  “A Maverick?”

  “I’m sending the data over right now,” Marshall said, and immediately a 3-D model appeared on the screen. “It’s a next-generation bunker-buster than can burrow through hundreds of feet of earth and concrete and knock out Zhang’s underground headquarters.”

  Sachs said, “Like they took out Washington.”

  “Tit for tat,” Marshall said. “An underground detonation. No fallout or windshift worries or civilian casualties. Might even liberate the Chinese people.”

  “Or their DF-5 missiles,” said a voice off screen, and then Marshall saw Nightwatch’s chief communications officer, Captain Linda Li, lean toward Sachs and mumble something.

  Marshall knew Li had a point, but it was obvious that Colonel Kozlowski, standing behind Sachs, didn’t like it. Neither did Block or Carver onscreen. Neither did he. It was all he could do to not tempt the fates by reminding Sachs that if she and her kind hadn’t scrapped his proposed Defender anti-ballistic system that this would be an entirely different conversation and her options would look a hell of a lot better than the box she was in now.

  Sachs nodded on screen and then said, “Once battlefield nukes are used, it’s too easy for both sides to justify using more destructive weapons. I’m not going to let it get that far.”

  “But it won’t get that far, Madame President,” Marshall injected, aware that his voice revealed the first sign of impatience with her. “Because our Mavericks will decapitate the entire Chinese C3I command-and-control structure. Just like they tried with us.”

  “Yes, and leave no Chinese government to negotiate a cease-fire or surrender.”

  “Not true,” Marshall said. “The government of our ally Taiwan would replace the old regime, and
Taipei would become the new capital of China.”

  “Assuming they don’t invade or destroy it first.” She paused. “Something is wrong with this picture. I mean, why haven’t our forward-deployed forces in the Far East been attacked?”

  Block, who looked like he was going to burst a blood vessel this whole time, finally blurted out, “Who the hell cares? They hit D.C.! For the love of God, lady, make up your mind!”

  She ignored the entire “woman-who-can’t-make-up-her-mind” slur. “I need to think this over before I make an irrevocable decision to kill possibly millions of people.”

  Block could barely contain himself. “Think it over?” he cried. “Think it over? You’re not supposed to think.”

  General Carver, clearly sensing this so-called “attack conference” was coming to an unfavorable conclusion, seconded Block. “Not to decide is a decision in itself, Madame President.”

  “Let me be clear,” she concluded. “For now, I refuse to escalate this conflict.”

  St out, leaving Marshall alone facing a blank screen with Quinn standing awkwardly next to him, embarrassed that anyone should speak to the Great American Defender this way.

  Marshall simply shook his head and answered the screen, “And if the enemy escalates it?”

  29

  1436 Hours

  Air Force One

  Kozlowski stepped outside Sachs’ compartment to give her “time to think,” shut the door behind him, and glared at Captain Li. “What the hell were you doing there, Li, spooking the president with visions of DF-5 nukes raining down on us? You and I have no opinions with regards to attack options.”

  “I was providing my commander-in-chief with potential consequences of her actions, like she asked.” Li offered no apologies. “You think President Rhinehart would have given us the time of day if he were on board with his VP, SecDef and members of the NSC? History has appointed you and me as the new president’s primary protectors and filters of information. Otherwise, Marshall and the NCA might as well be running the country.”