Blue Warrior

A search of UDC employees uncovered the medical records of a senior programmer at the facility. The fifty-eight-year-old woman had recently had one of the new wirelessly programmed heart pacemakers implanted. The wireless pacemaker was monitored and updated via a cell phone call. All Bath did was hack into the poorly secured mainframe of the medical device manufacturer and install a Stuxnet-like worm on the woman’s pacemaker via the cell phone. Once the infected programmer was at her computer station, the self-propogating worm used the pacemaker’s wireless capabilities to infect the SCADA system Wi-Fi routers. Those SCADA computers, in turn, controlled the air handler units that cooled the 1.2 million square feet of the vast server farm. Once the air handler units failed — along with the warning alarms and software monitoring the failure, disabled by the same worm — acres of servers overheated and eventually caught fire, destroying 400 terabytes of collected foreign intelligence. While this represented only a small fraction of the total amount of data stored at the UDC, it was an amount of data equal to all of the books ever written in the history of the world.

Internal security inspections investigating the multimillion-dollar catastrophe located the worm, and it was traced back to the home computer of the Q Group investigator who had nearly uncovered CIOS and its operations. His hard drive also contained encrypted links to offshore bank accounts affiliated with the anarchist hacker group ALGO.RYTHM.

The innocent Q Group investigator was swiftly arrested, tried, and convicted. A life ruined, a family bankrupted, all thanks to falsified evidence created and planted by Jasmine Bath.

35

Adrar des Ifoghas

Kidal Region, Northeastern Mali

7 May

The convoy of five Toyota pickups sped through the desert toward the mountains in a long, steady line, spread out enough that the sand kicked up by the truck in front didn’t spatter the windshield of the one behind. Overladen with extra ammo, weapons, gear, and people, they couldn’t do top speed for fear of hitting the soft patches of sand and either busting shocks or, worse, spilling the trucks over and tossing their human cargo onto the ground. The ride was hardly smooth, though. The extra weight caused the trucks to rise and fall like a ship on a heavy ocean swell, especially in back where Pearce and Early rode in Mossa’s truck. They’d suffered far worse in years gone by, but hours of sweltering heat and stinging sand in an open truck bed wasn’t exactly a Disneyland ride, either.

“I’m getting too old for this shit,” Early complained through his shemagh and aviator glasses. “Bring any Dramamine with you?” Early was on the verge of puking from motion sickness.

“Beats working for a living, doesn’t it?” Pearce shouted back.

As they neared the mountains, the sand began to give way to small rocks, then hundreds of larger rounded stones as large as soccer balls as they approached the mountain range. They slowed. The steep hills in front of them were covered with piles of eroded granite blocks, some over five meters tall, like broken teeth thrusting out of a sandy jaw. Impassable by vehicles.

At the first steep incline Mossa signaled a stop and the convoy halted. Early and Pearce jumped out. It felt good to stretch their limbs after hours of riding folded up in the back, crowded in with two other fighters and Pearce’s gear. Pearce was the only man without a tagelmust. He pulled off his boonie hat and glasses and shook the sand out of his long hair and shaggy beard.

“Didn’t exactly come prepared, did you?” Early asked.

“It was supposed to be an extraction, not an insertion,” Pearce said.

“There’s a dirty joke in there somewhere, but my brain is too rattled to find it.”

Mossa had stepped out of the cab and was calling on a handheld walkie-talkie. The boy stood close by him. Pearce didn’t understand the lingo. It certainly wasn’t Arabic or Pashto.

“What’s he saying?” Pearce asked Early.

Early shrugged. “Beats me. I never picked up on the patois.”

“He’s calling ahead to his men, though they surely have watched us all the way here. He wants to be sure they don’t fire on us on the way up,” Cella said. She took a drink out of her canteen and held it out to Early.

“Thanks.” Early took a swallow as Pearce glanced up the rising chain of ragged mountains. The tallest peaks in the far distance rose some eight hundred meters.

“On the maps they call this the Adrar des Ifoghas — the mountains of the Ifogha clan,” Cella said. “The Imohar have fought many battles here. Algerians, Chadians, the French, and, lately, al-Qaeda Sahara. And yet they still remain.”

“How do they survive?” Pearce asked. “There’s nothing but rock and sand here.”

“The massif has many shallow valleys and wadis, and villages are scattered here and there.” She rolled away one of the larger stones with the toe of her boot. A yellow scorpion flared its stinging tail, then fled for the cover of another. “And a few surprises.”