The Seventh Angel

“We looked up the Mexican importer,” White said. “And he never heard of this shipment. So we tried calling the Chinese exporter. Their company reps won’t return our phone calls.”

She straightened the stack of photos, and slid them back into the yellow and black folder. “There weren’t any cars, Greg. That was a smokescreen. Those 4,00 °Chinese economy cars never existed. Those ships were carrying something else.”

Brenthoven nodded. “Our intel sources have been saying from the get-go that Kamchatka is crawling with Asian shock troops. I’ve been pulling my hair out trying to figure out how Zhukov managed to smuggle them in.”

He tossed the pencil on the desk. “I think you just solved that little mystery.”

CHAPTER 41

SEATTLE, WASHINGTON

MONDAY; 04 MARCH

3:52 PM PST

On those rare occasions when he ventured out into the streets of Lynnwood, Jason Hulette looked like exactly what he was: a gangly and plain-featured seventeen year-old boy from a middle class family. Jason was an ordinary kid — or in his own eyes — perhaps something less than ordinary. The real world seemed to regard him as somewhat unsatisfactory, and the feeling was decidedly mutual.

As unremarkable as he might have been in real life, when immersed in his realm of-choice, Jason was an entirely different creature. Within the boundless datascape of the Internet, he was a virtual demigod — known, respected, and even feared under the hacker alias ‘Apocalypse-for-you,’ which he spelled as Ap0kA1yp$e4U, in his own personal brand of the geek proto-language known as Leet.

Jason sometimes shortened his alias to Ap0k, in open homage to his favorite Keanu Reeves movie. The web was not a second life for him. It was the world: the only one that mattered. The physical universe outside of his parent’s front door was a shabby and disappointing substitute.

Jason/Ap0k was the leader and founding member of a loosely organized coven of Seattle hackers who called themselves the d34d kR0w k0n$p1r4$y (Dead Crow Conspiracy). Although he fervently denied it, Ap0k had cribbed the name idea from the famous Texas-based hacker gang, the Cult of the Dead Cow. Original creation was not one of his personal strengths. His best ideas were always adaptations of concepts invented by other people.

The plan he put into action on the fourth of March was no exception. Ap0k didn’t create any of the ideas or technologies involved. He just strung the elements together in a new and interesting way.

With the near-miss nuclear attack now slightly more than forty-eight hours in the past, some of the frenzy was dying down in the western states. The east-west roadways were still flooded with cars as the unscheduled migration surged eastward, but most of the remaining people in the threatened states were starting to quiet down. The world had not ended. The attack had not been repeated, and the U.S. military had managed to knock out most of the missiles, or bombs, or whatever. Perhaps flaming death was not going to fall out of the sky after all.

As life in the Western United States began to settle into a shaky equilibrium, two thoughts occurred to Ap0k. First: Seattle, which was an armpit of a city in his opinion, had not received its fair share of blind panic. And second: the attack itself had not harmed a single person, or damaged a single house, or flattened a single convenience store.

There was plenty of destruction; that was for sure. Car crashes, burning buildings, injuries, and even deaths. But those effects hadn’t come from the nuclear bombs. They’d been caused by the spur-of-the-moment craziness that comes with uncontrolled hysteria.

It slowly dawned on Ap0k that the damage had been a strictly social phenomenon, caused by the rapid spread of information. Or more correctly, the rapid spread of misinformation, as the bombs had all been aimed toward the ocean. The mobs of people who had freaked out and started trashing things had never been in any immediate danger. The threat had not been real. But it had looked real, and it had sounded real. And that had been enough.

To Ap0k, this revelation suggested all sorts of possibilities. Because the rapid spread of misinformation happened to be one of the things that he and his fellow dead crows did best.

On the afternoon of March the 4th, Ap0k and the Dead Crow Conspiracy hacked into the Emergency Alert System computer network for the Greater Seattle area. The plan was to trigger the Emergency Alert System, and seize control of every radio and television station within Area Codes 360, 206, 253, and 425. Then, when they had a million or so viewers and listeners glued to their televisions and radios, the dead crows would inject their own fake broadcast into the network.

They’d recorded the audio track in a walk-in closet, draped with blankets to muffle outside noises. They’d copied the timing and format of an actual emergency announcement, and modulated Ap0k’s voice to sound like the baritone of the real EAS announcer. They’d even screen-grabbed a copy of the Emergency Alert System television banner.

With the recording playing over the background of EAS banner, the announcement looked and sounded just like the real thing. Ap0k was sure that the radio and television audiences wouldn’t be able to tell that the broadcast was fake. He was right.

The dead crows were extremely proud of their handiwork. They were already congratulating themselves for having dreamed up the hoax of the century. Their little scam would go down in history, like the War of the Worlds radio broadcast panic of 1938. People would run screaming, and piss their pants, and overload the 911 switchboards, and drive their cars into telephone poles. The Dead Crow Conspiracy would become the stuff of hacker legend.

At 3:55 PM, Ap0k transmitted the go signal to his hacker buddies. The assault on the EAS server farm began simultaneously, from nineteen manned sites around Seattle, and over a thousand zombie machines, recruited for the task by a Trojan horse software application that hijacked control of infected PCs without the knowledge or consent of the computer owners.

Under the combined onslaught, the firewall and anti-virus engines protecting the servers crumbled in less than a minute.

At 3:56 PM, the bogus emergency announcement created by the dead crows went out over the Emergency Alert System throughout the Greater Seattle area. The message was seen and heard through every operating radio and television in the network footprint. Nearly a million and a half Seattle area residents were informed that ten nuclear warheads were screaming toward their fair city, and that all military attempts to intercept the missiles had failed.

There were no such warheads, of course. They existed only in the fevered imaginations of Ap0k and his dead crow buddies. But the residents of Seattle had no way of knowing that. They had no reason to suspect that the warning was anything but genuine.

The recorded voice of the fake EAS announcer went on to inform the million-plus victims of his hoax that the bombs would arrive in twenty minutes. Seattle would be completely obliterated. Everyone who wanted to live should evacuate the city immediately, or perish in radioactive fire.

The seventeen year-old boy who styled himself as Ap0kA1yp$e4U had promised his buddies that the d34d kR0w k0n$p1r4$y would be remembered by history. And so they were.

Jason Wesley Hulette and ten of his accomplices and co-conspirators were arrested and tried for domestic terrorism and treason. They were collectively charged with over forty-thousand counts of manslaughter, more than a million cases of assault with intent to wound, and three-quarters of a trillion dollars in property damage.

The remaining eight members of the dead crows were identified, but none were brought to trial. They had been killed in the panic that burned the city of Seattle to the ground.