A nuclear attack on the WAIS, on the other hand, would be so far removed by comparison that most citizens of the U.S. and the rest of the world would feel little impact initially — but then the waters would begin to rise and all too quickly the horrifying ramifications would sink in.
It took Lana almost a half hour of grindingly slow city traffic to escape to the Beltway, which wasn’t exactly the Indy 500, either. But at least the Prius was plodding along now.
Her thoughts quickly focused on the agents of the threatened apocalypse. She knew that word was far overused, but a sudden and radical rise in sea levels, with its consequent smothering of coastlines that had been stable for the last twelve thousand years, certainly did not make the term seem like a stretch. And all of it would happen in the geological equivalent of a blink.
Taking the HOV lane, she powered past miles of lone drivers on her right, feeling no compunction at all because she thought her car carried plenty — the weight of the world. Without the congestion, she felt free to think, but she still could not wrap her head around the idea that any country powerful enough to put this catastrophe into play would actually commit such a self-destructive act. Yet only a highly trained and immensely sophisticated cyberunit could have hacked the navy’s communications and, with accomplices onboard, hijacked the Delphin. Those hackers now threatened to launch an attack that would change the very contours of the continents for millions of years to come.
Millions?
She could scarcely make sense of her own well-reasoned conclusions. Communicating this to the public would be unfathomably difficult. The attack last year had set off savage displays of panic; she could hardly grasp what would happen this time around — and didn’t want to.
Lana had yet to hear back from Emma, so she tried again, adding “ASAP!” before hitting “send.”
Respond, Em, come on.
The next instant she was back in professional mode, wondering when the cyberattackers—Murderers, that’s what they are—were going to launch their lethal assault. The communiqué, which had been boldly sent to the White House and cc’d to Holmes, didn’t reveal a countdown. Shrewd — from the unknown enemy’s point of view. Whoever had decided on that strategy might have borrowed a page from last year’s attackers who toyed with turning the grid on and off to keep everyone in a near panic. And then they turned it on with the vow to shut it down for good at any second, which had unleashed mass hysteria.
But what would Americans — and everyone else in the world — make of seas rising past shorelines and engulfing entire island nations and other vulnerable low-lying countries? Even in the developed world, whole cities and smaller communities would disappear under floods of Biblical proportions. Trillions of dollars’ worth of water treatment plants and sewage facilities, hospitals — emergency services of all kinds — along with nuclear power plants, naval bases, and scores of defense installations, would disappear. So, of course, would hundreds of millions of people. Hiroshima and Nagasaki countless times over, but instead of fires raining from the sky, there would be relentless flooding by the seas.
She texted McGivern: “Is Besserman there?”
“Running late, but coming,” she replied.
Excellent. Clarence Besserman was one of the government’s top experts on climate change’s impact on national security. He was also an ex officio member of the Joint Task Force.
Lana rolled up to Fort Meade’s front gate, eyed closely by security personnel who waved her through. That had never happened before. But she was stopped seconds later by a band of marines from the service’s Fort Meade detachment, one of whom tapped the passenger window and jumped into the seat a moment later.
“Ma’am, drive up to the door and deploy. I’m going to park your car. Your keys will catch up to you, along with the car’s location.”
Lana did as directed, pulling up to the biggest of the NSA buildings, the one with what appeared to be a white tray cake plopped on top. She popped the trunk and hopped out.
“Thank you, sir,” she said to the young marine.
“Thank you, ma’am. Godspeed,” he added.
She grabbed her computer case out of the trunk and rushed inside.
An NSA security guard was waiting to escort her swiftly to the SCIF, the secure conference room that was starting to feel more familiar than her own office at Meade.
She checked her watch: 10:30 p.m. Just before entering the electronically secured enclosure, she tried Emma again, apologizing to a pair of NSA guards waiting to clear her for entry to the room.
Lana tried texting Tanesa this time. No sooner sent than replied to: “Got Em at my house.”
“Thx!” Lana answered before surrendering her devices and enduring the critical security protocol, which included signing off on the procedure. At least her daughter and Tanesa and children everywhere were peacefully ignorant of the threatened assault. But for how long?
That was the first question Holmes raised: “What’s our countdown look like? Any ideas?” The deputy director looked every day of his seventy-eight years.
Admiral Wourzy, the chip counterfeiter, said he thought the enemy would strike in a matter of hours. “Or, more to the point, any time now.”
“Why?” Holmes asked with unusual impatience.
“Now that they’ve announced their target,” Wourzy replied, “they’ll move quickly rather than risk shutdown. And once the attack has taken place, it gives them breathing room while chaos breaks out.”
“Or it gives us a means of tracking the hackers to their lair,” said the lean, bearded Tenon, once more speaking up early in a meeting, as if always fearful of being overlooked.
“In classic terrorism, that often holds true,” Wourzy replied, “because the terrorist leaves behind physical evidence. But this has been engineered by hackers who are much harder to locate. To put it simply, this isn’t like tracking an ISIL missile fired from the Iraqi desert. Plus, they’ve got to know we’ll do everything we can to find and sink that sub, so I’d say the good money’s on a fast launch.”
“Find the sub?” Holmes asked. “What are you—”
“We’ve lost the Delphin,” Admiral Deming answered. “They moved it into a deep trough and rigged for ultra quiet. The sub has the latest in sound-suppression technology. They’ve shut off all nonessential equipment, slowed down the fans, and reduced speed to less than ten knots. We’ve got two destroyers racing to the southern ocean now but they’re going to have a helluva time finding the Delphin.”
“How did we lose them?” Holmes sounded incredulous. “We had them literally in our sights before.”
“That was when they used the buoy, and we saw them from the air,” Deming replied.
“Believe me, I know how we saw them,” Holmes fired back. “How long have you known this?”
“Minutes,” Deming reported. “The admiral and I found out walking in the door here.”
“What about the destroyers?” Holmes persisted.
“They were also too far away when the Delphin went to depth, and the hackers and their accomplices certainly appear to know their topography.”
“And the sub’s Operations Compartment,” Wourzy added. “I’ll give you odds-on that navigating the underwater canyons is the least of the challenges they’ve overcome. They’ve had plenty of practice of playing around with the navy’s computers,” he said with raised eyebrows.