He now knew why Keren had gotten demoted; the officer suspected that if he had tried to take the ANCD, the private would have simply shot him where he stood and not even noticed.
“Charlie-Five-Papa-Five-Four,” Keren called, using the callsign and frequency of the artillery battery tasked to support his company. If Central was the problem, then simply take it out of the loop. “This is Golf-Four-Juliet-One-Five, check fire! Check fire! Blue on blue, say again, blue on blue! Check fire! Check fire!”
“Calling station, say again callsign, check fire confirmed! Say again callsign!”
Thank God. “This is Golf-Four-Juliet-One-Five. Check fire!”
“Confirmed.” The rumble of artillery died away overhead as the unit called back. “Juliet One Five, authenticate Whiskey Romeo.”
“Roger, stand by… authentication Del-Ta.”
“Juliet, this is Papa, that fire was confirmed by Central, over.”
“Roger, well, we don’t have a fuckin’ company anymore, Papa. I don’t know what’s wrong with Central, but you just wiped out Alpha Company First Batt.”
“Jesus. It’s a damn authenticated order! And…” There was a pause, “Yeah, and the target point is forward of the company on our IVIS! What the fuck, over?”
“What do you have for the company coordinates?”
“Juliet, this is Whiskey, over!” came another call from the Second platoon.
“Hang on Arty!” Keren swung to the other radio as the platoon sergeant picked up the microphone and continued the questioning of the artillery unit.
“Go ahead, Third.”
“We still need fire! The Posleen are massing for another attack!”
“Roger. Stand by.” Keren picked up the intervehicle transmitter and almost called for the pre-laid Final Protective Fire, then looked at the fire control computer. Obeying an instinct he did not want to define, he dove across the compartment and rummaged behind a seat in the Humvee until he found an overlooked piece of equipment.
“What are you doing with that?” asked Lieutenant Leper, trying to keep up with three nearly incomprehensible situations at once.
Keren continued sketching in positions and locations on the mortar plotting board. It was nearly two years since he had last picked up the obsolete piece of equipment and this was turning out to be a lousy time to try to remember how to use it. But with the problems with Central, and the fact that the new Mortar Ballistic Computers interacted with it, he was damned if he was going to depend on anything else at that moment.
“Just checking something, sir.”
“Well, check fast.”
“Mortars, this is Third platoon! We need some damn fire, over!”
Keren picked up the mike without taking his eyes from his calculations, “You want it on the Posleen or on your heads?”
“Keren!” said the lieutenant.
“Sorry, sir,” said the specialist. He pulled out a calculator, looked up a trajectory in a book and made a final calculation. His shoulders slumped. “Shit.”
“What?” asked the platoon leader. The platoon sergeant looked over as well, telling the artillery to hold on.
“This FPF is fucked, sir,” said Keren, scribbling furiously again. “Our computer-calculated Final Protective Fire would have landed right on the company command post. And the mistake is somewhere in the computer.”
CHAPTER 47
The Pentagon, VA, United States of America, Sol III
1342 EDT October 10th, 2004 ad
Major George Nix suspected that he was at the pinnacle of his career. As Tactical Systems Manager for the Continental Army Command he got to control every aspect of information going to and coming from the Continental Army commander. For him, it was equivalent to being a colonel with a brigade or a Navy captain with a ship. From here on out, even if he was called a commander or a manager, he would not be involved in day-to-day hands-on managing of systems, and that was his love. To gather and redistribute data efficiently and effectively was, to him, the epitome of the military intelligence field. After all, accurate military intelligence was half the battle and good orders were the other half. All the actual fighting was just the cherry on the cake, so to speak.
So when the first reports came in of garbled orders, like everyone he took it to be the confusion of the moment, “the fog of war.” But as more and more reports came in, an alarming pattern of data invalidation began developing.
For him, the final straw was an overheard argument between the CONARC and the Tenth Corps commander. CONARC had been informed, out of channels, that Tenth Corps had given conflicting orders, some of them vocal orders from General Simosin himself. General Simosin’s response was so angry, so absolutely sure, that Major Nix, who had dealt with the general several times over the years, could not decide which data to trust.
Given a conflicting set of statements, only additional, preferably objective, data could decide the answer. Major Nix set out to find that data. He was no cyberpunk, but he could get the job done.
He started with order logs. All electronic commands issued over Battlenet were stored on the Cheyenne Mountain Secure Server. He first called up the initial deployment orders for every unit in Tenth Corps. After that he called up the logged unit responses. A short query indicated that twenty-five percent of the units gave an invalid response. Logically, the higher commands receiving an invalid response should have replied, but there were only three replies to invalid responses. In addition, a plot of the logged responses had the units scattered all over northern Virginia. If the encryption codes had been invalid, the units would have either gotten no communications or map references scattered all over the world. Puzzled, he queried the unit local servers.
It was a little-known fact that communications within the local commands were also stored locally. Unlike external communications, which were stored in Cheyenne, these communications were purged after each exercise. Mostly it was interdepartmental e-mail that would not be stored under any normal conditions, or comments between the staff and their subordinates. Like “back channel cables,” the information was in no particular style and often had nothing to do with the exercise or even the military. In addition to local communications, however, the precise information presented on the command screens was stored. Since, logically, this would be the same as the commands stored at Cheyenne, the information was considered of low priority and only existed as a debugging tool. However, until purged it was available and purging only occurred during a stand-down maintenance cycle. To Major Nix’s surprise, most of the Corps’s databases had been purged, but Thirty-Third and Fiftieth still had some intact files at battalion level and the data conflicted with Cheyenne. Not in every case, but in several cases what the operators at battalion level saw was not what had been transmitted from their division.
Tenth Corps had been hacked.
Jack Horner stared at the electronic map of northern Virginia and shuddered. Across the map were red penetrations and friendly-fire markers. Now he knew how an officer as experienced and capable as Arkady Simosin could have let the battle fall apart like this.
He turned to Colonel Tremont. “Begin the evacuation.”
“But… sir!”
“It’ll take hours to do it in an orderly fashion, and if Major Nix is right…”
“I am…”
“We don’t know how this is going to go. I don’t know if Ninth Corps is where that map says it is without sending you out on a goddamned horse to tell me! If we are penetrated, we have to assume the worst-case scenario for this battle.”