To further hamper the American war efforts, the Chinese continued to unleash wave after wave of cyber-attacks across all aspects of American life. Since the Chinese’s successful attack against the American communications grid at the outset of the war, the government had quickly broken the energy grid down into dozens of smaller nodes to ensure that no one node or group of nodes could cause a cascading event that could spread across the entire nation. The Chinese had continued to target the grid on multiple occasions; some nodes had been taken down, temporarily knocking out power to a single state (or a portion of a state), but that was it.
The US was also waging a cyber war against China; however, they were not having even a shred of the amount of success that the Chinese had been having in disrupting the American way of life. So, to play to their strengths, the U.S. was trying another way to combat these attacks; whenever an opportunity presented itself, the US Navy would launch a series of Tomahawk cruise missiles at the locations where the cyber-attacks were originating from. In some cases, they were successful and hit the targeted compound, but at other times the cruise missiles were shot down before they hit their mark.
The Navy’s Swordfish Underwater Drones (SUDs) were also starting to have a greater influence in the Pacific. The Navy still only had a small number of these underwater drones, but they began to seek out and hunt specifically for PLAN transports, fuel tankers and cargo ships. The four SUDs in operation were sinking (on average) nine ships a month, which was starting to have an impact in the volume of supplies and equipment the PLA was receiving in Alaska.
While the Americans had introduced the SUDs in the Pacific, the Russians had introduced a very similar type of underwater anti-ship drone in the Atlantic. Like the SUDs, the Russians only had a limited number of these underwater vessels, but they were becoming extremely effective in finding enemy ships and sinking them. This was starting to cause a shortage in materials and other essential equipment needed for the war in Europe as key transports were starting to be sunk.
The war in Europe had become bogged down in Germany; the Russians had captured large portions of eastern Germany, while the Allies sustained their hold on the rest of Germany, as well as the region down through Austria, Slovenia and Croatia. The Russians continued to train hundreds of thousands of new soldiers, and kept the pressure on the Allies; they had not been able to force a breakout since their initial attack that captured Berlin and nearly captured Hamburg.
Smart and Bored
Neven Jackson was a twenty-three-year-old computer hacker who worked for the National Security Agency (NSA). He was not here by design; he had hacked the FBI database as a prank when he was a freshman at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and he had been caught. He thought he had shielded his activities, but he had missed something, and as a consequence, he was arrested and given a choice-either work for the government as a paid hacker, or go to prison for a very long time.
Neven, preferring a life outside of barred walls, had chosen to go to work for the NSA, and he had spent the last several years playing defense against Russian and Chinese hackers who were becoming more and more sophisticated in their attacks. Since the start of the war, he had been transferred to the “Red Team” and been given full permission to hack in to any sector of the Chinese economy and military systems and cause as much havoc as he could. This opportunity was like a dream come true. During the first several months, he had successfully shut down the power in two provinces for several days, caused the ATMs in one city to empty all of their money, and completed a number of other malicious activities.
Today, however, was a special day. Two weeks ago, he had been assigned the task of infiltrating the Chinese exoskeleton combat suit program, and yesterday he had successfully found a backdoor in to the source code (it was too bad that the Russians used a different operating system, or else they would really have something going). He had spent the better part of the day writing a zero-day code to be placed in the exoskeleton suits’ operating system. Once the update was sent out by the program developers, this code would be dispersed to all of the combat suits that received the update. The code would then lie in wait, ready for it to be activated. Upon sharing his discovery with his superiors, they had worked with him to develop a special surprise. The next time the PLAN infantry attacked the Americans using these suits, they would suddenly find that the entire left or right side of the suit had been essentially disabled. This would confuse the ranks, making them think that the suits were experiencing mechanical problems, and throwing the scent off away from the real issue of a software problem. When the PLAN infantry did attack, their entire attacking force would suddenly find themselves stuck in malfunctioning exoskeleton suits at the worst possible moment. Of course, this attack could only be used once so finding the best opportunity to use it was going to be critical.
Trying to See Eight Moves Ahead
The President was becoming nervous after reading through the various intelligence reports and summaries of the numbers of Chinese troops arriving each week and their grand totals. As of that moment, there were nearly one million enemy soldiers on American soil. Now there were reports that millions more were on the way, and President Stein was unsure if even the mighty Third Army could stop them; they were still close to sixty days away from being fully ready for combat after their R & R and training, and no one knew how many more Chinese soldiers would be on American soil by then. General Black (the Second Army Commander, and overall Commander for all US Forces in North America) was doing his best to keep the Chinese bogged down. Thus far, his efforts had kept the Chinese from being able to break out of Alaska, but that would only last for so long.
The President sat at the head of the table with the rest of his National Security team and his senior military advisors trying to ascertain what their next move should be. “General Scott, what is the DIA’s assessment of what the Chinese may do next?” asked the President, wanting to get a better picture of the Pacific and Asia.
Lieutenant General Rick Scott prepared to speak. He had been the Director for the Defense Intelligence Agency for nearly three years; however, he and the President had a very checkered past. He had nearly been fired in the opening days of the war with China because of his disregard of what his other intelligence departments had been warning him about with regards to the Chinese. LTG Scott had believed (like many others) that the Chinese had too many economic ties with the US and Europe to risk an open war. Like everyone else on that ill-fated date, he was proven wrong when the Chinese launched a massive surprise cyber-attack against the American communications grid, taking AT&T, Sprint and many other internet and cable providers down for nearly two months. Verizon was the only internet and data provider who had survived the Chinese cyber-attack; they had essentially prevented the entire government and country from what would have been a full economic collapse. The CIA and the Joint Counterterrorism Task Force (JCTF) had also missed the warning signs of an imminent attack by China; it was for that reason alone LTG Scott was not relieved on the spot-that and his ability to work with British Telecom and Verizon to quickly get America’s cell phone and data providers back online in two months. He had been redeeming himself ever since.