Mahanth S. Joishy is Editor of usindiamonitor

As some of you know, I entered the following draft first chapter (since lightly edited) of a much longer work into the Katha Fiction Contest 2017 run by India Currents with the Wellstone Center and got second place.   The novel manuscript has now been completed.  I am going to work like heck in 2024 to have the completed novel manuscript published one way or the other…

***

Chapter 1: Subterfuge in the Septagon (BAY AREA)

The message appeared suddenly on my smartwatch in the coldly efficient time and space saving digital shorthand format developed by the Septagon’s in-house AI, which auto-generates certain internal comms and instantly pings them to the appropriate agency devices and weapons anywhere in the world.  This particular little string of characters customized just for me stated:

[0837 Hours] 3/17/2029; “BART JOSHI: Stop ALL actvty + rprt 2{7FL.conf/rm}; NOW_NOW!”  

The weird language structure seems unnecessary or even silly at first, but people quickly get used to it because the internal comms generated by the AI are short, sweet, and crystal clear without fail.  I easily understood the urgent command to drop whatever I was doing and head straight up to the top floor of the Septagon for dear life.  Everyone knew that receiving an unscheduled summons to the 7th floor only meant one thing: a major crisis was popping off somewhere on this earth or in outer space that required swift action to be personally directed by none other than United States Cyber Force (USCF) General Nirupama Sushila Patel, better known as General Nero, herself.  In other words: big trouble. 

The directive shocked me momentarily and a chill crawled down my spine.. 

 Never before had I received a call to join an emergency meeting, or any communication involving the big, big boss at all for that matter.  In fact nobody in my unit had seen the secretive 7th floor during my two years with USCF.  And I had no idea why my particular name was up this time; I hadn’t even really met our leader USCF General Nirupama “Nero” Patel yet, only seeing her speak a few times from a distance during addresses she made to large groups of staff in the USCF auditorium.  I was just a low-level USCF grunt with layers of military bureaucracy between me and her.  The 7th floor housed the legendary General Nero’s office suites, and was almost exclusively reserved for senior officers of the corps and visiting VIPs from the White House or other military branches.

But today I was being told to join that exclusive club unexpectedly.  Some adrenaline kicked in to displace my initial disbelief while the message sunk in.  There they were, the letters, numbers, punctuation and symbols of the abrupt message continuing to flash in bright red on my USCF-issue smartwatch programmed to vibrate and beep annoyingly at the same time for this emergency.  Until my device geolocated to the 7th floor conference room it would not be satiated.  All its applications completely frozen, my smartwatch was now just a pricey alarm that would do nothing else but flash, beep, and vibrate.  It was time to move.  I jumped up off my chair and swiveled my head around to conduct a quick scan beyond my cubicle walls of the larger room I worked in, looking around at the other members of my unit.  I was part of a motley crew of three dozen cyber warriors scattered loosely around a cutting-edge lab full of large cubicles where we worked our magic, focusing our energies on Asia.  There was plenty of world-class talent of many stripes present.  Would stand to reason that the crisis in question was unfolding on that continent.  Apparently nobody else in my unit except me got the call though, which felt odd.  The lab had gone quiet except for my watch, which continued shrieking and sucked the oxygen out of the room.  My teammates silently peered back at me with a mix of curiosity and concern as they double-checked their own wrists and got nothing back.

So why me?  For a split second I wondered whether the message was sent to my inbox in error when it appeared, but the AI algorithms never made mistakes at this level and my career prospects depended on my obeying the order dutifully instead of pausing to question it.  Still I felt fear and anxiety lingering as I ran down the hall to the elevator bank that would get me to the top floor of the building from my perch on the second floor.  Buckle up, big boy, I told myself while peering at my reflection in the mirror inside the elevator and smoothing out my medium-length silky black hair with my fingers during the quick ride up.  Whatever hellscape awaited upstairs, I lied to myself that I could handle it.

“Top floor” sounds oddly misleading when you work in a bunker somewhere deep underground beneath Silicon Valley. Even those of us who work down there have no idea exactly where the subterranean bunker is.  America’s youngest military branch quietly toils away beneath the feet of Northern Californians and visitors, largely unbeknownst to them and unobtrusive to the physical surroundings. Not only are the Septagon’s coordinates classified, it takes a high-speed, 30 second hyperloop ride through a twisting tunnel that goes down, but not straight down in a line, to reach the gargantuan structure- the largest underground construct ever built by man in the world.  Very much by design every one of us select few authorized riders are utterly disoriented every time we journey up and down that winding tunnel.  Someone unofficially dubbed this bizarre tunnel “The Wormhole” and this insider nickname stuck.  My best guess is that the roof of the Septagon is around one entire mile below ground level.  To this day it’s proven futile for humans or AI algorithms, ranging from innocently curious USCF online fanboys to various enemies of the state both domestic and foreign, to even attempt to guess where one could happen upon the Septagon without authorized access into The Wormhole.  The thick steel-reinforced concrete outer walls are practically impregnable to bad actors and earthquakes alike, and outside those walls the bunker is protected by a network of highly sensitive digital seismic signal scramblers rammed deep into the surrounding dirt that persistently ensure nobody can use any form of geologic survey tools or surveillance technology known to mankind from ground level, underground, on or under the Pacific Ocean, in airspace or outer space to precisely locate my building.  And in the unlikely event the coordinates were ever found, no weapons in existence could damage the Septagon unless someone managed to haul munitions through the layers of security into The Wormhole, and that ain’t happening.

 The only way into USCF global headquarters, aka, The Septagon is through one of seven heavily guarded ground level hyperloop entrances that are the only portals to The Wormhole., Each entrance is embedded within heavily guarded secret USCF satellite bases widely scattered around the Bay Area, outwardly masked as workaday corporate office parks and equipped with the most cutting-edge facial recognition scanners.  The entire $79 billion subterranean system encompassing the bunker and the tunnels constantly feeding America’s lead cyber warriors in and out of it was designed and built by a team of free-thinking autonomous construction robots and 3D printers that were meticulously wiped of all data, every ounce of hardware decommissioned for scrap recycling before the Septagon’s small ribbon cutting ceremony in early 2027.  I monitor several credible Russian spy-hunter social media feeds and blogs that somehow conjecture that the base lies directly beneath the Shoreline Golf Links in San Francisco.  I don’t know, Comrades, your guess is as good as mine; just you try digging around those putting greens and if you find someone or something blows your head off, there’s a good chance you’re right. 

It bordered on the obsessive how Uncle Sam seemed to be into the number seven those days.  The USCF was inaugurated in 2027.  Christened the Septagon was the massive bunker so named for its seven walls and a clever play on the motherboard in Northern Virginia, the Pentagon.  So far only seven living people ringed by substantial security, including the US president, Secretary of Defense, and USCF General know exactly where the United States Cyber Force Headquarters is; the executive suites are on the seventh floor as I mentioned. An obvious theory is that the number 7 was used purposely and repeatedly because Uncle Sam’s luck especially in the online space had been running real, real low in the years leading up to the Septagon being opened for business, and a bit of superstition or maybe humor was in order according to the powers that be in Washington, DC. 

*** 

When the summons appeared on my smartwatch I had been knee deep in diligently probing North Korean air force base and missile defense system servers in close coordination with the Mossad’s cyber command for several months.  This type of work was not only important, but also fun, and I was damn good at what I did.  I was having a great time plugging away at the work as me and my Israeli counterparts in Tel Aviv, who I only ever met online, were making serious hay. The prospect of that project remaining on my plate was now unclear depending on what waited upstairs.

The elevator door opened, and I collected myself for the most important meeting of my career as I walked out.  For the first time I walked past the dozen heavily armed black carbon fiber humanoid robot sentries lined up along a wall of the 7th floor lobby, the killer droids standing guard on behalf of the most valuable floor space, the main servers, and most critical personnel in the Septagon.  The imposing killer machines dutifully scanned and validated my face and body, and calculated that I was authorized to enter, so I could walk by without having to stop, or get pulverized into a small red stain on the floor by their laser rifles.  I must admit that was a relief, however irrational.  These things made no mistakes.  My safe passage was the final signal that I really belonged where I was going, symbolically in my mind..  

I entered the fancy oak-paneled executive conference room with massive floor to ceiling digital screens on one side and large hanging hologram projectors pointing down from overhead, with genuinely no inkling what was in store.  Until that moment I had strictly worked behind the scenes: deep underground in my 2nd floor laboratory, hacking my way into spying on, stealing, or breaking digital stuff around the world from a safe and anonymous perch.  I really liked my life that way, buried in the Septagon by day quietly racking up wins for America at minimal risk to my physical person inside the safe and comforting confines of a lab inside the USCF headquarters.  But nobody outside USCF was allowed to know what I specifically did at work all day, which was highly classified.  Till that morning I couldn’t be sure if the USCF brass even knew I existed, as literally hundreds of important cyberwarfare operations were underway from within the Septagon at any given moment, conducted by over 3,000 souls who reported to this single facility and another 2,000 USCF personnel on active duty across the country and abroad, deployed on assignments that involved physical access. 

Again this was my first “NOW_NOW!” and we were about to find out why it made its way to me.

Here I was, an Indian-American, a fresh-faced USCF geek, twenty-seven years old, just two years removed from USCF basic training, attending my first seventh floor meeting with the entire USCF senior staff assembled. I didn’t even know what the 7th floor looked like until I was up in it IRL.  Access to that floor was extremely exclusive.  My commanding officer had never been up here. 

I noticed a stranger that seemed out of place as I sat down at the space where my name was printed in caps on a placard toward the middle of the executive conference room table.  The sight of her threw me off my game another notch, if that were possible.  Two seats away from me sat a strikingly beautiful and unusually tall Indian woman with sharp features, long jet black hair tied into a tight ponytail, a form-fitting light gray business suit, and that caramel tone I tend to like on both my candy and on my women. A bright and shiny tricolor Indian flag lapel pin on her jacket identified her as a foreign government agent hailing from the land of my ancestors.  The seat between us sat empty so I got a look.  At first glance she looked to be over six feet tall and physically fit.  That’s a height almost unheard of in the ranks of full-blooded Indian-origin females as you might also know from your own experience. And a bit above my 5’5.”  I was already nervous, but this stranger I instantly calculated to be way out of my league when it came to the realm of mating games, unsettled me further.  I chose to mind my own business, stare at the ceiling, try and slow my breathing, keep my heart rate down, and pretend not to notice her as the group settled in around the table and we all waited for the emergency meeting to start. 

She broke the ice first, and there went my meticulous plan to sit silently till the meeting commenced.  “Hi, I’m Manisha,” she said with a sultry Indian accent.  Her voice was outlandishly sexy.  I looked over out of polite necessity and made sure who she wanted to speak to.  She was looking right at me with her hand extended in my direction.  There was nobody else within several feet around us.  No choice but to engage.

Stay calm, dude. COMPUTE?

“How you doing, I’m Bart,” I replied with a dopey grin, gripping her right hand that was noticeably larger than mine. And stronger.  Instantly that hand enveloped mine with an unexpected show of force.  Man, that was a strong grip. In fact her handshake almost hurt, as if her hand easily just swallowed mine in a vice.  I did my best to convey firm pressure back in return, but her hand dominated mine.  I was still trying to process her presence in this exclusive place when she thankfully let go.  What was this gorgeous tall foreign national thing with that huge robust hand doing with us deep underground in the Septagon today?  That too in the most VIP conference room in the entire tightly secured enterprise during an unfolding global crisis?  There was no doubt from the next few moments onward all information we were about to learn would be top secret, and I had been under the impression foreigners were never even allowed in the USCF headquarters.  It was certainly the first time I ran into one down there in my time.

“You’re… Indian, no?” Manisha asked after a pause, doing that Indian head shake thing where you can’t tell if it’s a yes or a no, approving or disapproving. A no head shake or at the end of a sentence with Indians can be a yes, as in, she was probably saying and gesturing at me, “You’re Indian, right?” 

“Well, yes, I’m actually Indian-American, born in C-California. Real name my p-parents gave me is Bh-Bharat,” I stammered involuntarily and to my chagrin, guessing correctly that the name Bart from a Hindu-looking guy threw her off.  Either that or she was wondering if I was named after Bay Area Rapid Transit, and would stammer that out next because talking to attractive women reduced me to pathetic mush?   

“Oh, I get it!  Bharat is a nice name.  Why don’t you use it, man? You’re named after the great nation of India itself where I’m guessing your family is originally from.”

I lowered my voice so only Manisha could hear, my confidence rising back after noting her seeming interest in engaging with me as we waited for business to start. 

“Yeah, I know.  My family and relatives always call me Bharat, but Bart is easier for all these gringos to pronounce and remember.” I bobbed my head around at my mostly corn fed USCF superiors assembled patiently, engaged in their own light banter.

“Very nice to meet you too. I’m here representing India on the new inter-agency task force,” she informed me.

Wait, what?  There’s a new task force between the United States and India?  And this Indian chick knows about it before I do? 

This was a very big deal and obviously tied into whatever crisis brought us to the room.  Before I could ask her for details the conversation had to be cut short.

Right then General Nero hurriedly walked in through the door from her office, and everybody shut up and stood at attention as she approached her place at the head of the table, her normally stoic looking face betraying deep concern.  She waved us to sit back down.  There were now twenty people in the room, including the general, her two lieutenant generals, and all the rest of the top brass, along with Manisha and I.  There were absolutely no other low-level drones like me I could discern from a quick scan around the table. I had no idea about Mainsha’s rank or government branch back in India and didn’t get a chance to ask.  No doubt this was an important figure I had just glad handed.  But I figured General Nero was about to clarify things, including what the heck I was doing up there myself.

The general began to speak immediately in her infamous no-nonsense tone. 

“Ladies and gentlemen, I know you’re dying to know why we’re here.  We’ve got absolutely zero time to waste this morning so I’ll get right to it.  The world just changed, quite possibly with no turning back.  But before diving into that, first please join me in welcoming Agent Manisha Gayatri from India here today, an ally in our time of need,” she began, now looking toward Manisha, whose presence in our midst some of the others must have been wondering about like me.  “Agent Gayatri is on urgent special assignment with us from the India Cyber Army for a new detail we are going to form.  She is in town on extremely short notice because she is one of India’s top agents, and was sent to us personally by my counterpart and old friend, India Cyber Army Director Senthil Ramakrishnan himself.  Agent Gayatri graduated first in her class at the Indian Institute of Technology in Chennai, and was ranked #1 in the inaugural India Cyber Army training class as well.” 

Whoa. Highly impressive resume. IIT and the ICA are both considered top-notch by reputation globally these days. I was ranked nowhere near the top of my own USCF class (insert sheepish face emoticon here) or my Georgetown University undergraduate class either. I’ll admit I was too busy socializing with other students or recruits, while playing and designing video games with most of my spare time instead of studying hard enough to earn top honors. Please don’t judge.  Yes, video games are a major hobby of mine. I managed to get by despite low effort with my brute intelligence and comprehension of new concepts in lessons about high technology.  At least that’s what I like to think.  Somehow though, here I was at this eventful juncture, about to get into the thick of it just the same as Manisha.

General Nero quickly got to the point of the sudden meeting for the eager audience dying with curiosity and anxiety. “Now listen to me very closely.  The news is extremely bad, I’m afraid. At approximately 0200 hours this morning Indian Standard Time, the Chinese People’s Liberation Army mysteriously and successfully hacked into and powered down every damn system of the entire US Navy Indo-Pacific Fleet carrier group on routine patrol in the Indian Ocean…the USS Barack Obama carrier group.”  I gasped, and I wasn’t alone.  

“Categorically, every last vessel’s power, comms, GPS satellite feeds, computing, weapons systems, surveillance, radar, sonar, ability to deploy jets and drones, navigation, HVAC, everything went down, including all of the backup and backups to the backup.  Every single offensive and defensive system went completely dark. The vessels could not even move for a while.”   

Jaws dropped, including mine.  Wait, WTF did she just say? 

The General continued after dramatically pounding the table with a fist, no doubt to keep our attention and focus in the face of this devastating new information and a bunch of people suddenly murmuring in alarm.  “We’re highly grateful to the Indian Navy for rapidly deploying to the sector at that odd hour with nearby assets and helping secure our US Navy colleagues during this episode while American sailors worked hard to get back up and running- which regrettably took almost two whole hours.  Thankfully there were no casualties, damage, or further incidents reported.  Except for wounded pride, everyone is OK.  The Pentagon assessment is that the Chinese seemed to conduct this as a probe of Navy defenses rather than an attempt to consummate a kill chain against any part of our flotilla.  They were gone from the vicinity before the ship commanders even knew what hit them.  The maneuver was like a passing ghost.  And it was unbelievably ballsy.” 

Some excited muttering and a few muffled snickers emerged around the room with that latest nugget of information.  This was really not good, definitely not cool, and it was a deadly serious incident that represented a recklessly dangerous international escalation in an already tense neighborhood.  But we also found it a bit amusing after she informed us nobody got physically hurt, no hulls were damaged- and importantly, it was the Navy’s stuff that got penetrated, not any of ours. 

However, regardless of which military branch was breached, the event marked an unprecedented show of strength and escalation at a scale nobody had been able to manage against the US military before- and none of us, even the pros who track China’s hacking capabilities for a living, saw this coming.  What China had just pulled off was a very big deal.  It had their fingerprints all over it, and I knew no other country or entity was remotely capable of such an elaborate hack except them.

There were no shots fired.  This was a different sort of attack, more like a probe, but highly dangerous nonetheless.  Not sinking US Navy warships in a live-fire real world game of Battleship but instead hacking into them to render them useless for precious minutes and hours.  Executing this brazen operation and getting away safely must have taken years of planning and preparation.  Wow.  Even USCF had never tried to do that to a rival country’s carrier group and I for one wasn’t sure we even could.  And if we could, that we’d want to.   It was a dangerous game to play, if counting the odds of exiting the scene without the outbreak of hostilities and loss of life.  General Nero confirmed that in the entire annals of cyberwarfare this had never been done to any known American naval asset by any adversary before.  I began musing on the historic nature of this day.  It wasn’t too soon for me to imagine the amused chatter that would inevitably ensue around the USCF water coolers throughout the day as the news coursed like wildfire around the building about our friendly rival military branch’s foibles. “Ah, the fucking Navy! Those seamen let an entire carrier group from its most prized fleet in the world go dark over basic sixth-grade malicious code. That’s some serious technical incompetence.  Damn seamen should have had a few of us Cyber Force boys and girls on board over there, and the Chinese would have had their asses handed to them!” 

It got worse.  As per General Nero various parts of the U.S. national security establishment were right then, as we sat there, scrambling for dear life to come up with a coherent, credible narrative for journalists and the public.  She typed several commands into her smartwatch as she spoke, and the giant floor to ceiling flatscreens on the wall of the conference room flickered to life.  

Unfortunately, in a truly bizarre comedy of errors, several US sailors discovered that some excitable Sri Lankan civilian fishermen happened to sail into that very specific area of the massive Indian Ocean right during the random two-hour window when the US Navy systems were shut down.  The Sri Lankans quickly recognized the unusual nature of what they had stumbled across and started a giant global Tweetstorm replete with videos and commentary in Tamil…depicting six powerful US warships and a giant Ohio-class nuclear submarine floating listlessly on the water like sitting ducks without even their lights working approaching dawn local time. So the cheapest boats in the world had managed to train an unwanted cell phone spotlight on the most expensive boats in the world purely by catastrophic luck and timing.  We all knew there was no way for the United States to stanch the gusher of information suddenly racing around the globe in real time.  All that was left to do was spin, deny, repeat, and pray for another news cycle.  We watched the screens in despair as the horrifying scene suddenly exploded before our eyes on social media channels and global 24/7 network news stations in various languages, in real time.  The footage had gone viral at blazing speeds.  Upon seeing these visuals it instantly dawned on me that momentarily I would be sucked directly into the spiraling vortex of this disaster that unfolded on an ocean halfway across the world, somehow, someway.

General Nero continued after a long pause to let us soak in the extremely bad news playing on our screens.  “This trash has only been up for a few minutes now, but we knew it was only going to be a matter of time.  The Sri Lankan fishermen being poor and sailing on ramshackle vessels must not have had good connectivity while out at sea to post on social media immediately after they filmed.  They probably hooked back up again after docking on land some hours after recording the USS Barack Obama carrier group.  What you are seeing is unfolding in real time, right now.”   

In the next moment General Nero noticeably switched tones from stressed, to defiant.  “It’s no doubt party time for our rivals in Beijing.  Well, dammit, not for long!  I repeat, not for long, people!  I just got off an emergency video conference with President Hubbard in the White House situation room, Indian Prime Minister Raj who has convened his security council, and my boss, the Secretary of Defense, who is about to land in New Delhi for talks with counterparts as we speak. As of five minutes ago President Hubble signed a clandestine national security declaration calling this an act of official cyberwar by a foreign nation-state against the United States of America under Article 79, and has ordered us to retaliate ASAP.  Which the declaration allows us to do.

“As per strict Article protocols in place exactly for this sort of scenario, there will be zero public hint of retaliation.  The US government shall not even acknowledge on the record who was behind the hack, nor confirm that it even happened.  The incident is officially being dubbed a pre-planned US Navy training drill, the nature of which will remain classified.  The Indian government will publicly remain silent, but their leadership indicated in no uncertain terms on the videocon they are far beyond enraged that China just took a giant piss in their own backyard swimming pool, against a treaty ally, and for the first time ever, invoked Article 108 to provide substantial mutual defense resources to the United States effective immediately.  We informed Taiwan but will need to keep them quiet too because- get this-  we have fresh raw intel pouring in that the probe of our forces by China was actually the final prelude to a Taiwan invasion!”

Gulp!  The long-anticipated and feared Taiwan invasion by China? The big one the world has anticipated and feared could happen for over a decade now?  The collective stress level in the room just skyrocketed.  This was not funny in the least anymore.

“Now you all know why Agent Gayatri dropped everything and was rushed here from New Delhi this morning.  We thank you for that.  This is not a drill!  Our number is up today, boys and girls.  This is what we are here for, and what we all train so hard for.  The United States Cyber Force is unambiguously set up by law as the lead military branch to retaliate against foreign hackers, big or small, with overwhelming and disproportionate force.  So that’s what we are going to do.  Now it’s time for a counteroffensive operation they will never, ever forget.  The mother of all hacks on those motherfuckers is what I am asking for right now!  And stopping their invasion in its tracks!  Who’s with me?!”

Everyone in the room stood up and cheered enthusiastically- although we barely understood what it was we were cheering for exactly.