On the way they passed the robot. It looked as if its limbs, torso, and neck had twisted in different and very unnatural directions all at once, and it smelled of a short-circuited and burned-out power drill. Harden was at first sorry for the guy inside — after all, he was a fellow American and soldier — but he wasn’t going to stick around to check on him in case he was just stunned.
It was completely dark as they approached the inner perimeter fence, a double-layered fifteen-foot-high chain-link fence topped with razor wire. No lights around the fence meant either dogs or infrared sensors, Harden knew. He gave the order for the team to break into squads and begin their approach to…
…and at that moment he heard a whirring sound, like a high-speed fan, and he looked up. Through his night- vision goggles he saw an object about the size of a garbage can about twenty feet in the sky and just thirty or forty yards away, with a wide round shroud on the bottom, long legs, and two metallic arms which held white flags — and incredibly it had a lighted LED scrolling display on the top that read DON’T SHOOT JUST TALK WE’RE LISTENING.
“What the hell is this?” Harden asked. He waited until the flying robot got about ten yards away, then shot it down with a single burst from his MP5 submachine gun. He was sure he hit it, but it managed to fly down in a more or less controlled manner, landing awkwardly a few yards away, the scrolling LED message still visible. He repositioned his whispermike to his lips. “Who is this?”
“This is Brigadier General David Luger,” the voice on the other end replied. “You know who I am. This has got to end, Lieutenant Harden, before anyone else gets hurt or killed.”
“I have orders to take you into custody and secure this base, sir,” Harden said. “I’m not leaving until my mission is accomplished. On authority of the President of the United States, I’m ordering you to deactivate all of your base defenses and surrender yourselves immediately.”
“Lieutenant, there are a dozen more drones flying overhead right now carrying stun grenades,” Luger said. “We can see you and each of your fifteen comrades, and we can hit each one of them with a stun grenade. Watch carefully. In front of you, right near the fence.” A moment later he heard a tiny metallic
“Now that was about a hundred yards away, Lieutenant,” Luger said. The ringing in Harden’s ears was so loud he had trouble hearing him over the radio. “Imagine what that’ll feel like just
“Sir, you’re going to have to take me and all my men out, because we’re not leaving,” Harden said after letting his hearing return somewhat to normal. “Unless you want to be responsible for wounding or killing fellow Americans, I urge you to follow my orders and surrender.”
There was a long pause on the line; then, in a sincere fatherly voice, Luger said: “I really admire you, Lieutenant. We were being honest when we said you made it farther than the other SEAL unit. They surrendered the first time we hit them with the microwave emitter, and they even told us your identity when we captured them — that’s how we knew who you were. You guys did good. I know you didn’t mean to kill Staff Sergeant Henry. He was the NCO piloting the CID.”
“Thank you, sir, and no, I didn’t mean to kill anyone, sir,” Harden said. “We’d been briefed on that microwave weapon your robots carry and we knew we had to knock it out.”
“We developed the microwave disruptor grenade because we were afraid the CID technology had fallen into Russian hands,” Luger said. “I didn’t think it’d be used
“I’m sorry, sir, and I’ll take responsibility of personally informing his next of kin.” He had to keep him talking as long as he could. The main occupying force, a Marine security company from Camp Pendleton, was due to arrive in less than thirty minutes, and if this guy Luger had second thoughts about attacking more Marines, maybe he’d hold off long enough for the others to arrive. “Should I go back and help the staff sergeant?”
“No, Lieutenant. We’ll handle that.”
“Yes, sir. Can you explain how—?”
“There’s no time for explanations, Lieutenant.”
“Yes, sir.” Time was running out. “Listen, sir, no one wants this. Your best bet is to stop fighting, get a lawyer, and do this the right way. There don’t have to be any more attacks. This is not who we are supposed to be battling. Let’s stop all this right now. You’re the unit commander here. You’re in charge. Give the order, have your people lay down their weapons, and let us come in. We won’t hurt anyone. We’re all Americans, sir. We’re on the same side. Please, sir, stop this.”
There was another long pause. Harden truly believed that Luger was going to back down. All this was
Then he heard a whirring sound overhead — the little trash-can robots returning — and then Luger said: “The pain will be more intense this time, but it won’t last very long. Good day, Lieutenant.”
Harden leaped to his feet and yelled, “All squads, fire grenades for effect and make for the fence,
…and it felt as if his entire body had instantly burst into flame. He screamed…and then everything quickly, thankfully went dark.
“I can’t believe this…I fucking can’t believe this!” President Joseph Gardner moaned. He and a handful of Senate and congressional leaders were being briefed by Secretary of Defense Miller Turner on their efforts to detain the members of the Air Battle Force and secure their weapons, and the information was not good. “They knocked out and captured
“The SEAL team sent to Battle Mountain encountered light resistance and managed to capture one of their manned robots, but the robot had apparently either malfunctioned or was damaged and was abandoned,” Turner said. “The aircraft and most of the personnel were gone; the SEALs captured about a hundred personnel without resistance. The FAA couldn’t track any of the aircraft because of heavy jamming or netruding and so we don’t know where they went.”
“‘Netruding’? What in hell is that?”
“Apparently the next-generation aircraft based out of Dreamland and Battle Mountain don’t simply jam enemy radar, but they actually use the radars and their associated digital electronic systems to insert things like viruses, false or contrary commands, false targets, and even programming code changes into the radar’s electronics,” National Security Adviser Conrad Carlyle responded. “They call it ‘netruding’—network intruding.”
“Why wasn’t I briefed about this?”
“It was first put into use on McLanahan’s planes deployed to the Middle East,” Carlyle said. “He disabled a Russian fighter by commanding it to shut itself down. Most digital radar systems in use these days, especially civilian sets, don’t have any way to block these intrusions. He can do it with all sorts of systems such as communications, the Internet, wireless networks, even weather radar. Plus, since a lot of the civilian networks are tied into the military’s systems, they can insert malicious code into the military network without even directly attacking a military system.”
“I thought he shot a missile at the fighter!”
“The Russians claimed he shot a missile, but he used this new ‘netrusion’ system to force the MiG to turn itself off,” Carlyle explained. “McLanahan had his heart thing before he could explain what happened, and we took the Russians’ word on the incident after that.”
“How can he send a virus through radar?”
“Radar is simply reflected radio energy timed, decoded, digitized, and displayed on a screen,” Carlyle said. “Once the frequency of the radio energy is known, any kind of signal can be sent to the receiver, including a signal containing digital code. Nowadays the radio energy is mostly digitally displayed and disseminated, so the digital code enters the system and is treated like any other computer instruction — it can be processed, stored, replicated, sent out over the network, whatever.”
