Full Assault Mode (18 page)

Both men knew there was a secret investigation, apart from the 15-6 initiated on Kolt, into what happened during that mission. Kolt knew as well that Admiral Mason rightly feared being held personally responsible for the loss of an expensive special operations helicopter, particularly in Pakistan. First, a state-of-the-art stealth Black Hawk was left behind in Abbottabad after the SEALs smoked bin Laden. Now it had happened a second time. The one saving grace, well two, really, was that the trailing Dark Horse struck by an RPG on infil had successfully executed a controlled crash landing and that, besides some minor shrapnel wounds to one of the crew chiefs and a few broken bones and bruises suffered by the operators in the back, everyone survived. Everything made it out that night except the scuttled black MH-47G helo.

The second saving grace, of course, was that the assault force accomplished the mission. They had captured Mohammad Ghafour and successfully brought him into Afghanistan to interrogate. And that was the kind of stuff that made POTUS happy. Kolt would never point it out, but he knew that Mason knew Kolt was one of POTUS’s favorites.

Admiral Mason swiveled his neck and tugged at the collar of his uniform. “Your pattern of insubordination, Major, in just the six months or so I have been in command has become intolerable.”

Kolt stood rigid. He gripped his beret tight. He tried to process what was happening here, but it was happening too fast.

“Your episode of direct insubordination last month in the Goshai Valley is the final straw. Your continued inability to follow the rules and policies of this organization confirms to me your services are no longer needed by this command.”

“Are you serious, sir?” Kolt asked, more smart-ass than sincere.

“Dead serious, Major!”

“Does Colonel Webber know about this?” Kolt asked.

Mason tried to set his coffee down delicately but spilled half the cup as he slammed his opposite fist on his desk.

“Damn it, Raynor!” Mason yelled. “I am the commanding general, not Webber, and not you. It is high time Delta realizes that. There will be a full investigation. Now, get the hell out of my office.”

*   *   *

Only a moment after Kolt was dismissed, the phone on the admiral’s desk rang. It was Mary from the outer room.

“Uh, sir, I hate to interrupt you, sir, but you have an important call on the secure line. It’s from Washington … I think POTUS wants to talk to you.”

POTUS
! “Patch them through immediately.”

Before Mary pressed the button on her end, the admiral overheard some small talk in the background. He tilted his head in curiosity and strained to hear what was being said outside his office.

“Great seeing you, Mary. Regards to your old man and tell your daughter to enjoy the prom … within reason,” Kolt said. “Thanks for the
Newsweek
.”

“Thanks, Kolt, I’ll tell her,” Mary whispered with her hand half over the mouthpiece, obviously not wanting to be heard over the phone.

Damn, is there anyone in the community that Delta major doesn’t know?

THIRTEEN

Main access facility, Yellow Creek Nuclear Power Plant

The mail clerk always wondered why in the hell he had to deliver the mail to the main access facility at Yellow Creek station at the same time that the employees rotated shifts. Sure, he knew he didn’t have to undergo such a detailed search as the others, simply because he had been making this same delivery, using this same green wheeled cart, for better than three years now.

But it was still a hassle, since the minimum staffing of security officers kept them busy as employees processed through the search trains, stepping first into the explosives detector as the robotic female voice announced “Enter,” then remaining motionless for several seconds, and finally stepping out the other side upon hearing “Exit.” Then they placed any metallic personal belongings—cell phones, vehicle keys, and so on—into the clear plastic bins on a conveyor belt to be X-rayed. It was similar to processing through a security checkpoint at an airport.

The employees took a few steps forward and walked through the metal detector before retrieving their belongings from the bins. Processing forty to fifty people stacked up in two lines took time, especially since they had to be absolutely sure their security protocols didn’t allow any entry of firearms, long knives, or explosives.

The mail clerk was happy to see the first security officer available head toward the glass handicapped door and unlock it. It was Officer Chad Simmons, a fellow Atlanta Braves fan.

“Morning, Mike,” Simmons said.

“Morning, Chad. Appreciate you getting me in,” Mike said. “Busy Monday morning as usual.”

“You know how it is—never stops around here,” Simmons said as he chalked open the wide glass door and pulled the Garrett SuperScanner metal detector from his hip.

Mike knew the routine all too well. Once the officer had the wand out and gave the head nod to Mike, he would push the mail cart another three and a half feet and stop the lead edge of the front tires on the bold white painted line.

“Go ahead,” Simmons said, standing off to the side to make room for the wide cart. “A lot of mail today it looks like.”

“Like the Pony Express,” Mike said, shaking his head.

Officer Simmons slowly moved the wand over the top of the boxes, removing the first layer to check the bottom boxes.

“Braves are tearing it up this season,” Simmons said. “A pennant year for sure.”

“That would be nice—been several years now,” Mike agreed. “We’re due!”

Finishing the wand sweep, Officer Simmons replaced the metal detector on his hip and reached down to remove two square boxes and a circular tube mailer.

“Gotta run these, Mike,” Simmons said. “Stand by for a second, will ya?”

“Yep, no worries,” Mike said. Officer Simmons walked over to the explosive detectors carrying all three packages. He entered, waited the few seconds, and stepped out on the audible “Exit.” Simmons placed the packages on the conveyor belt and watched as they moved into the X-ray shroud; then he stepped through the metal detector, ignoring the alarm because he was required to be armed.

Simmons stepped over to the X-ray imaging screen to confirm the contents were not contraband with the seated search-train officer.

“What we got?” Simmons asked.

“Looks like some gadget for maintenance and two boxes of cell phones,” the seated officer said.

“Yeah, I heard we were looking at incorporating cell phones into our protective strategy. Must be vendor samples for the bosses to evaluate,” Simmons said as he lifted the three packages from the belt and walked back over to the opened handicap door and the mail cart.

“Packaging looks legit. One from Sprint and one from AT&T,” Simmons said as he placed them back on the mail cart. “Go ahead and process through the search trains, Mike. Your cart will be waiting on the other side.”

Having processed into the plant, Mike pushed the cart into the mail room, which was near the security-officer ready room on the first floor. He logged each package and placed it in one of several large sheet-metal bins identified by the various departments that made up the organizational structure of the power plant. There was one for Operations, the high-paid prima donnas that ensured the profit margins were met; one for Maintenance, who ensured the three General Electric boiling-water reactors operated at one-hundred-percent power, generating the electricity that costs their two million clients a fair $0.077823 kilowatt-hour fee; and another bin for Security, the men and women that ensured no unauthorized access was granted to anyone without first undergoing an FBI background check, psychological evaluation, and fingerprint tests, run against the criminal and terrorism database.

Mike sorted the boxes, checking each addressees’ name against the spreadsheet on the stand-alone screen to his front and placing them in their respective bins to be picked up by each department’s designated representative before lunch.

Mike picked up one of the three boxes Officer Simmons’s metal detector had pinged on and read the address label, recognizing the name as one of the older guys that worked in unit 2. He placed the box in the Maintenance bin, penciled the action on the paper log, and clicked the small box next to the word “delivered” on the screen.

Mike then lifted up a square box wrapped in white paper with heavy, clear packing tape. The address labels were typed neatly and had the yellow and black Sprint logo sticker and
IPHONE5 FORWARD THINKING
stamped prominently on three sides of the box. Mike recognized the professional packaging, but the name didn’t check out on his paper log. This wasn’t uncommon, and the protocol for such matters was simple. Mike turned to the computer, opened the employee database, and typed the name in the search line. The face of an elderly gentleman popped up on the screen, showing his status and previous positions at Yellow Creek.

Hmmm. Guy left the company months ago. Must have retired.

Mike secured the box and walked it over to the smaller bin on roller wheels near the door. The bin was marked
RETURN TO SENDER
.

Mike moved back to the cart and picked up the round circular mailer, roughly the size of a large coffee can, and rotated it to read the addressee and inspect the packaging. Again, the packaging from AT&T was professionally done and everything appeared in order. But, just as before, the addressee name was not on his paper log. Mike repeated the simple steps, but this time the database did not register the name. He tried again. No luck. No indication that the gentleman was ever an employee at the plant. Mike realized this wasn’t as common as a former employee receiving mail after leaving the company, but it wasn’t entirely out of the ordinary. No, the steps were the same, log it and place in the RTS bin. The rejected packages would sit there until the following Monday, at which time they would be removed before lunch.

It wasn’t like the robust security process had been breached or anything.

As Mike finished up logging and delivering the mail, he closed the door behind him and began pushing the cart to the exit portals. Once outside, he would push the mail cart exactly 462 feet to reach the main warehouse and his own office. He’d make the trip again late that evening, twice a day on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, and he might not send another single package to the return-to-sender bin the entire week.

As Mike made the trip down the approved walkway, the freshly poured concrete sidewalk marked by yellow safety lines to identify uneven surfaces and trip hazards, the two packages in the return-to-sender bin chirped to life, having received an initiator code from overseas.

Immediately, the six iPhone 5s began hunting.

Within fifteen minutes, if all went as Nadal knew it would, the phones would remotely grab all seven CPUs inside the adjacent security center. It would kick out the stand-alone work computers and isolate the two connected to the internal local area network, where security-sensitive material is shared across departments and functionalities.

But Nadal wasn’t just interested in security-sensitive information; he wanted the safeguards material, including target-set information, the plant’s NRC-approved security strategy and implementing procedures. To do that, Nadal had to manipulate the phones’ internal data and modify the encryption code so that when the phones received a specific signal, they would aggressively hunt, breaching firewalled systems and advanced security features like “air gaps.” But to bounce undetected across the data diodes and compromise the unidirectional gateways, which provide the most important benefits of truly air-gapped control systems, Nadal figured a way to use the iPhone 5 as a transmitting appliance that would send a wireless sensor to a receiving appliance on the far side of the world. The hunting phones would acquire the light sensors located on the seven CPUs in the company’s internal security network, but that was only half the performance. Nadal’s game-changing breakthrough was figuring out how to hide the capture of secure data from an overseas Internet café from the NSA’s supersecret Social Network Analysis Collaboration Knowledge Services, or SNACKS.

Yes, Nadal had done his technology homework at Balochistan University.

The iPhone 5 was more than an aggressive hunter, it was like a bloodthirsty wild animal that indiscriminately kills by nature. But in this case, it wasn’t killing anything, just waiting on the correct initiating logic, a simple phone call, to prompt the hunt for the light sensors and begin capturing secure data.

Delta Force compound, Fort Bragg

Kolt rubbed his fingers along the side of his whitewall haircut, where the sides of the head were cut skin-close and the top of the head retained maybe an inch or two of hair. He stared into the reflective glass that covered an eight-by-ten black-and-white photo hanging on Colonel Webber’s wall, a little perplexed by how young he looked without his typical long brown hair and salt-and-pepper goatee.

The photo, obviously aged with rippled fold marks from being handled roughly before finding the safety of a framed wall hanging, showed a group of grizzled men dressed in multicolored cold-weather clothing, rifles slung across their chests with the muzzles pointed downward. Behind them, in the gorgeous mountainous area near a village named Bujanovac at the base of the Vlasic Ski Resort of Bosnia and Herzegovina, a mix of snow-covered Scotch and European pines contrasted with the bright red and yellow North Face jackets. Kolt would come to know the place well years later, but this picture, circa 1995, marked the early days of the manhunt for Serbian war criminals indicted by The Hague.

Next to a thirtysomething Webber, then a junior captain, stood a taller man with a full dirty-blond beard and long locks kicking out of the edges of his dark green wool skull-cap. Kolt knew this to be the then major Michael L. Bird. Now, MLB—“major league ballplayer”—was one of the legends whose name is engraved on the triangle-shaped black marble memorial wall, the centerpiece of the Unit garden.