negotiations are at now. It can destroy you and Op-Center.'
'I've already lost what counts. They can have the rest.'
'They'll take that and more, believe me. Making unauthorized contact with the enemy— Washington and Seoul will chow down on you, me, Paul Hood, Mike Rodgers. It'll be a turkey shoot.'
'I know this will hurt you, Howard, and I don't take that lightly. But I wouldn't ask if I didn't think I had a chance to make a difference. Think of the lives that can be saved.'
The color seemed gone from the Base Commander's weathered face. 'Dammit, I'd do anything for you— but I've put my professional life into this base. If I'm going to chuck that, and write my memoirs in a nine-by-twelve cell, I want you to at least sleep on this. You're hurt, and you may not be thinking as clearly as you ought to be.'
Donald lit his pipe. 'I'm going to do better than sleep on it, Howard. We'll have our dinner and then I'm going to pay Soonji a visit. I'm going to stay with her awhile, and if I feel differently after that I'll tell you.'
The General slowly picked up his knife and fork and began cutting his steak slowly and in silence. Donald set his pipe aside and joined him, the quiet meal broken by a knock at the door and the arrival of a man with a fixed scowl set beneath a shiny black eyepatch.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
'This can't happen, this can't happen, this can't happen!'
The normally passive, cherubic face of Operations Support Officer Matt Stoll was pale as an unripe peach, with Kewpie doll smears of red on the cheeks. He was whining under his breath as he worked feverishly to plug his computer into a backup battery pack he kept in his desk. He couldn't find out why the entire system had gone down until he got it back on-line and crawled into the wreckage— what hackers humorlessly referred to as the black box system of making your flight safe.
Perspiration dripped to his eyebrows and spilled into his eyes. He blinked it away, spotting his glasses with sweat. Though it had only been a few seconds since the crash, Stoll felt like he'd aged a year— a year more when he heard Hood's voice.
'Matty—!'
'I'm working on it!' he snapped, fighting down the urge to add, 'But this just can't happen.' And it shouldn't have. It made absolutely no sense. The main power from Andrews hadn't gone down, just the computers. That was impossible to do from the outside: it had to be a software command. The computer setup in Op-Center was self- contained, so the shutdown had to come from a software command issued here. All incoming software was searched for viruses, but most of the ones they found were nonmalicious— like the one that flashed 'Sunday' on the screen to tell workaholics to get away from the keyboard, or 'Tappy' that created a clicking sound with every keystroke, or 'Talos' that froze computers on June 29 until the phrase 'Happy Birthday Talos' was typed in. A few, like 'Michelangelo,' which erased all data on March 6, the artist's birthday, were more malevolent. But this one was something incredibly new, sophisticated? and dangerous.
Stoll was as intrigued and amazed as he was distressed by all of this— the more so as the screen blinked back on a moment before he plugged in his battery pack.
The computer hummed to life, the hard drive whirred, and the DOS screen flashed by as his customized Control Central program booted. It locked on the title screen as the synthesized voice of Mighty Mouse sang operatically from a speaker in the side of the machine.
'Are any other programs currently running, Matty?'
'No,' Stoll said glumly as Hood swung into his office. 'How long were you off fighting Mr. Trouble?'
'Nineteen point eight-eight seconds.'
The computer finished accessing the program and the familiar blue screen appeared, ready to go. Stoll hit F5/ Enter to check the directory.
Hood leaned on the back of Stall's chair and looked down at the screen. 'It's back—'
'Seems to be. Did you lose anything?'
'I don't think so. Bugs was saving everything. Nice work getting it running again—'
'I didn't do anything, boss. Not unless you count sitting here, shvitzing.'
'You mean the system came back by itself?'
'No. It was instructed to do that—'
'But not by you.'
'No.' Stoll shook his head. 'This can't happen.'
Lowell Coffey said from the doorway, 'And Amelia Mary Earhart had a map.'
Stoll ignored the attorney as he finished checking his directory: all the files were there. He entered one; when he didn't get an Error prompt, he felt confident the files themselves hadn't been burned.
'Everything looks okay. At least the data seems to be intact.' His thick, piston-fast index fingers flew across the keys. Stoll had written a WCS program as a lark, never expecting to have to use it. Now he hurriedly dumped the worst-case-scenario diagnostics file into the system to give it a top-to bottom physical. A more detailed diagnostics examination would have to be made later, using classified software he kept under lock and key, but this should spot any big problems.
Hood chewed on his lower lip. 'What time did you get here, Matty?'
'Logged in at five forty-one. I was down here two minutes later.'
'Ken Ogan report anything unusual?'
'Nada. The night shift was smooth as glass.'
'As the sea when the Titanic sunk,' Coffey noted.
Hood seemed not to have heard. 'But that doesn't mean something didn't happen in the building. A person at any station could have gotten into the system.'
'Yes. And not just today. This could have been a time bomb, entered at any time and set to go off now.'
'A bomb,' Hood reflected. 'Just like the one in Seoul.'
'Could it have been an accident?' Coffey asked.
'Mightn't someone simply have pressed a wrong key somewhere?'
'Nearly impossible,' Stoll said as he watched the diagnostics checklist begin working its magic. Numbers and characters scrolled up at lightning speed as it looked for aberrations in any of the files, commands that didn't gel with existing programs or weren't entered 'on the clock.'
Hood drummed the back of the chair. 'What you're saying then is that we may have a mole.'
'Conceivably.'
'How long would it have taken for someone to write a program to bring down the whole system?'
'Anywhere from hours to days, depending on how good they were. But that doesn't mean the program was written on-premises. It could have been created any-where and piggybacked in on the software.'
'But we check for that—'
'We check for sore thumbs. That's basically what I'm doing now.'
'Sore thumbs? You mean something that sticks out?'
Stoll nodded. 'We tag our data with a code, stored at specific intervals— like a taxicab, either every twenty seconds or every thirty words. If the code doesn't show up, we take a closer look at the data to make sure it's ours.'
Hood clapped a hand on his shoulder. 'Keep at it, Matty.'
Sweat trickled into his left ear. 'Oh, I will. I don't like being coldcocked.'
'Meantime, Lowell, have the Duty Officer start running through the videos they took last night, all stations inside and out. I want to know who might have come and gone. Have them blow up the badges and check them against file photos— make sure they're authentic. Put Alikas on that. He's got a good eye. If they don't find anything unusual, have them go to the day before and then the day before that.'
Coffey toyed with his class ring. 'That'll take time.'
'I know. But we've been blindsided, and we better find out by whom.'
