Janet Smart stepped in, “All of the pertinent FBI offices have been alerted of hostiles in their area, and have begun to dispatch military units to all of the areas with orders to capture or kill these enemy forces.”
While most of them had already gained some knowledge of these events, they all had been missing pieces of the puzzle. Everyone just sat there stunned for a moment before people broke out into conversation, slowly raising their volume until they were trying to speak over each other to be heard. The President held a hand up for Monty, his Chief of Staff, to not interrupt their chatter and whispered, “Let them get it out of their systems for a minute, then we’ll bring everyone back to the task at hand.”
After a few minutes of controlled chaos, the President stood up and smacked his right hand down on the table with a loud crack to get everyone’s attention. “Enough. Everyone please be quiet while we sort through the information and formulize our plans on how we are going to respond. Thank goodness, at least the battle lines in Alaska have stabilized and the Russians have halted their operations in Europe after being pushed out of Germany…but any actions that don’t require boots on the ground would obviously be highly preferred.”
Director Smart from the FBI was the first to speak, “Mr. President, I believe the first thing we need to do is change the parameters of the Trinity program to now include all known Japanese government workers and as much of their defense forces as we have files on.”
Attorney General Roberts barely contemplated before he responded, “Agreed. I would recommend that we implement this strategy immediately.”
The President nodded, then pronounced, “Let’s make it happen.”
General Branson piped up, “We can provide all of the biometric dossiers of the Japanese military members that have trained with the American forces over the last forty years.”
Admiral Juliano quipped, “That decision to covertly collect biometric data whenever we conduct a training exercise with a foreign national partner is looking better and better.”
Admiral John Casey agreed, “The NSA will be very glad to have any additional information to help track these guys. We will add whatever you give us in terms of photographs or other data; it should increase our ability to find them quickly. It shouldn’t be too long before their faces show up on one of the CCTVs or security cameras across the country, and now that we are going to flag them as enemy combatants, they won’t be able to buy any new supplies here, as they won’t have functioning national identity cards. If someone does try to use a card that they previously obtained, we will pick that up right away.”
FBI Director Janet Smart spoke in the manner of a fan meeting a celebrity. “This Trinity program really is amazing. It has done such a great job of identifying foreign terrorists operating in America since the outset of the war. I’m really amazed by its ability to predict those who are going to become Russian or Chinese collaborators before they do any real damage.”
The President was happy with this course of action, but there was so much more ground to cover. He turned to Admiral Casey and Director Rubio and asked, “Two questions — 1) how soon will we have our government communications systems back in operation, and 2) what can the CIA and NSA do inside of Japan and India immediately, now that they have chosen sides?”
Admiral Casey jumped in first, saying, “Mr. President, the Japanese and Chinese hit us with several types of cyber-attacks. The first was a quick denial of service (DDoS) attack, overwhelming the system with a bunch of useless data until the network came crawling to its knees. This attack was quickly followed up with a nasty malware virus that began to propagate quickly from one directory to the next, erasing everything. Then several key nodes were locked out using a new type of crypto-locker we have not seen before. Couple that with several power transformer nodes being taken offline and it caused a lot of chaos for us. That said, we have already managed to resolve most of the major issues on the East Coast and throughout Midwest.”
He took a deep breath, then continued, “Where we are still having some problems is on the West Coast and with our satellites. We have been planning for this type of attack for a while now, so at least we had the UHF radios up and running. We anticipate having the West Coast cell network and our satellites to be operational within the next four or five hours. We need to restart several servers and install a lot of backup information. Nothing that can’t be fixed…at least we won’t be offline for days like we were at the outset of the war,” the Admiral pronounced confidently. He had explained just enough of the technical details to ensure that everyone in the room understood what the NSA was doing and how.
The Director of the CIA spoke up next, “Mr. President, we have several black ops teams operating inside of both countries. In the case of India, I remember we looked for ways to go after their physical infrastructure. They have several key dams and dike systems; if destroyed, these would cause considerable economic and property damage. We can assume they are going to go after our infrastructure, so we should make it clear we can hurt them far worse than they can hurt us.”
The President objected. “While I’m OK with disrupting flow of travel and distribution channels that the country may have, I do not want a humanitarian crisis on our hands because millions of people are killed by a faulty dam or suddenly lack clean drinking water. I want you to hit whatever economic nodes that you can while reducing loss of life, understood?”
“Yes, Mr. President,” replied Director Rubio. “In the case of Japan, I also recommend we carry out some similar attacks; however, in Japan, I believe there are other opportunities. The population is not going to be fully on board with turning their backs on us and joining with the Chinese. I believe we can work with their opposition groups to help form partisan groups that can carry out attacks against the government.”
Admiral Casey smiled. “Those are good starters, but I think the NSA can do better,” he said. “We have a contingency plan for almost every nation as far as points of attack…” He briefly rummaged through the files on his tablet until he found what he wanted. “Some of our mission planners thought there was a chance that either India or Japan could turn on America and join the Chinese, so they inserted some nasty malware into several areas of their economy. When you give us the order, we can bring those countries down to their knees,” the Admiral said with a wicked grin. Casey clearly liked inflicting apocalyptic scenarios on America’s enemies.
“Tell us more about what that would entail” directed the President.
“Sir, India is a softer target, so I will talk about them first. Our first step would be to collapse their banking system. We are going to do that by creating an artificial run at the bank by spreading some stories through social media campaigns about the banks not having enough money to cover everyone’s accounts. The story would also explain that the government needed to collect additional funds in order to pay for the war, so they would create a bank tax of 25 % to fund India’s efforts, and collect the money by seizing people’s assets like Cypress did back in the 2010s. This would obviously cause a run on the banks. Of course, all of this will be fake news, made up to generate chaos.”
Admiral Casey was smiling at this point and clearly thoroughly enjoying the discussion. He continued, “As the run on the banks begins, our first malware attack will start. The ATMs throughout the country will immediately begin to dispense all their money until they are empty. In addition to the mass chaos this would cause at the scene of each of the machines, with the ATMs across the country suddenly empty, it would be much more difficult for anyone to be able to get any other money. Following that attack, the malware would move through the banking network, hitting each of the banks with a massive denial of service (DDoS) attack. Anything that is hooked up to a network, from printers to building thermostats, computers to fax machines, even some of the administrators’ cars, all of the “internet of things” (IoT) items will be DDoS’ed into oblivion, unable to function under the large amounts of data we will use to flood the streams. Finally, within our roster is a worm that will burn through all the personal checking and savings accounts’ electronic balances. The only way they will be able to restore people’s accounts will be through their off-site backup systems. At that point, it won’t really matter if they can restore the accounts or not. The chaos that will ensue will be sheer madness.”