The Mandarin Code (36 page)

Paxton gazed out at the surrounding parklands: Canberra at its orderly best. The heat had deterred the luncheon crowds. Mothers shielded their children from the sun. The lake was tranquil, several yachts trying to catch a few wisps of breeze.

And in the midst of this, just a few hundred metres away, two men had been murdered.

He shivered.

‘Do you think he might hurt you?'

‘Yes Bruce, I know he will.'

Paxton drew her close again as he absorbed the horrifying news.

‘We could call in the police, Mei, or I could make an official complaint through Foreign Affairs.'

‘Your government will not take the risk of offending mine. If there is a controversy the State will drag me back. And if I'm sent home I have no future.'

He looked at her tenderly. ‘Perhaps you should consider defecting.'

‘Where could I ever go, Bruce?'

‘Look, I'm no great friend of the Yanks. But I'll give them this. They don't have any problem standing up to China. I know their defence attaché well. We could get you out of the country. Soon. Mei, you would be a coup for them.'

She started to sob quietly. He held her tight, ignoring a couple walking past the gazebo just a few metres away. He needed to protect his angel.

They would make plans to get away. Yes, the risk would be great, but the risk of doing nothing was far greater.

‘And maybe if you go to America I could join you.'

Weng nestled into his embrace, resting her head on his shoulder. For the first time in days she felt safe.

Melbourne

‘Saffy, what's your favourite colour?'

‘You know the answer Jimmy: green, green, green.'

Saffron Burgess and James Saville sat a few metres apart in front of a bank of computer screens flashing lines of technical data.

They were two of Vodafone's leading security boffins, paid to monitor the beating heart of the telco's vast mobile network. Burgess, a computer science graduate from Sydney's UTS, had punched her way to the top of the notoriously blokey culture. She was now one of the senior members in Vodafone's network operations centre, based in Melbourne.

Saville was her boss, a street-smart IT buff who had joined Vodafone back in the '90s, shortly after the British-based firm had secured Australia's third mobile phone licence. He was closing in on his fifty-eighth birthday and was known affectionately throughout Vodafone as T-Rex.

Each day, they and their team monitored the cellular base stations and network for hiccups, ensuring that customers got their dollars' worth.

The last two years had been the toughest in memory, a series of network crashes earning the ire of customers and management alike. Saville knew the real reason behind the outages – a failure to invest by the Scrooge-like board.

But that didn't stop the executive team giving him a kick up the backside every time they went to red.

‘Have you been to that new laneway bar, Jimmy? The something Institute?'

‘C'mon Saffy, those places are for you young types. Besides, Anna and I try to walk every night around the bay. Clears the head after—'

Saville pulled up quickly. ‘Uh oh, we've got orange in the west.'

He traced his finger along a row of data to a pulsing circle that had suddenly changed colour: green to orange. That meant an overload of data traffic on one of the gateways.

And that meant customer access to the internet on mobile phones would be cut off.

‘We got a position on this yet?' Saville asked his offsider.

‘No. I'm trying to locate it right now. Looks like it's on the coast, just south of the CBD.'

Saville punched a series of buttons, trying to get an accurate picture of the network traffic levels. Something was amiss. A swift response was crucial if they wanted to avoid further outages.

‘Mandurah, Jimmy.' Burgess spat out the name.

‘Jesus, I thought we'd spent decent money upgrading those gateways down to Margaret River. Okay, let's divert some of this traffic to Rockingham.'

Garden Island, WA

The military band stood poised, waiting for the conductor's signal. As the first strains of ‘The Star Spangled Banner' rang out, Aubrey W. Holland raised his right hand to his breast, eyes trained on the unfurled beauty of the American flag.

The four-star admiral had been appointed Commander of the US Pacific Command just under a year ago. This was his first official visit to HMAS
Stirling
, the Australian navy's main base on the west coast.

It was just after 11am and an early sea breeze was softening a blazing summer's day. Holland had arrived in Perth the previous evening, and had several days of meetings lined up, primarily to discuss a series of joint naval exercises. He was also hoping to catch up with several old naval buddies, including an Aussie mate he'd met during his first tour of duty to Vietnam in '72.

It reminded him of San Diego, this naval base; the sparkling waters and friendly personnel. A small flotilla of vessels was moored at the dock, undergoing routine maintenance while their crews enjoyed several days of shore leave.

‘Admiral, this way sir.' He was guided up the gangplank of HMAS
Perth
, the youngest of the navy's fleet of ANZAC frigates, commissioned just seven years ago.

It was impressive, a descendant of the warship that was sunk by the Japanese during the Battle of Sunda Strait at the height of World War II.

‘The commander is waiting for you, Admiral.'

‘Thank you, sailor.'

Holland was ushered into a plush boardroom, lined with photos of the ship and its crew. A waiter poured coffee as the admiral waved away a plate of pastries.

Michele Miller bounded into the room, flanked by an aide. She'd made history when appointed to command the warship in 2007, the first female sailor to do so. Holland considered her an impressive addition to Australia's naval elite, although her absence at his official welcome had been a tad mysterious.

‘Nice to see you, Commander.'

‘And you too, Admiral. You look well, sir. Sorry I missed the anthems. For some reason, Vodafone has decided to shut down our internet coverage. Again.'

Melbourne

Saffron Burgess straightened, pushing her ribcage and lower back forward to untangle the knot of her muscles. The pressure was building.

A small network hiccup had grown into a more serious problem. She and James Saville had tried to isolate the outage but it had spread. Orange lights were flashing across her screen and Saville was increasingly frustrated at the time it was taking to put in place back-up systems.

‘Christ, I thought we had this covered,' he said, his voice rising in volume.

Mobile internet connection was out of action from Fremantle to Augusta, hundreds of kilometres away. Vodafone's customer service lines were being overrun by scores of irate punters unable to access Google or Facebook.

More disturbing was the inexplicable claim that some punters couldn't make phone calls.

The data and voice systems were strictly separated. Voice was carried through radio waves, and data through internet IP.

Vodafone's diagnostic systems showed that the voice lines were fine.

Something didn't add up.

It was a PR nightmare and the operations centre was being harassed by management to get things right, pronto.

‘We can't divert all this traffic to Perth. It will overload the network,' Burgess said.

They'd been joined by Dave Taylor and Ross Hopkins in the operations centre, the four of them tasked with rescuing Vodafone from an expensive and embarrassing meltdown.

Saville studied the network plan, a series of orange lights now flickering their warnings.

‘Have we got a fix on the problem here?'

‘Not yet boss,' Burgess fired back.

A team of technicians had already been scrambled across the south-west of Western Australia, but the remoteness and huge distances meant it would be hours before all the problems were diagnosed.

‘Another one down, boss.' Hopkins delivered the bad news without a glimmer of emotion.

‘Shit, where this time?' Saville asked.

‘Down at Albany, bottom of the state.'

‘Right, so we've got problems from Freo right along the coast, and inland hundreds of kilometres.'

Burgess looked up from her screen. ‘And it's about to get a whole lot worse.'

‘Why?'

‘'Cause we've just gone to red.'

Patrick Fitzgerald's patrician voice boomed out of the speakerphone. Since arriving from Britain two years earlier, the Vodafone CEO had spent endless hours defending the company's reputation.

‘A new era of network investment and improvement,' had been his mantra, against claims the company was the telco equivalent of the Leyland P76.

But this was his greatest challenge. Vodafone's network in the west was collapsing and his technical crew had failed to isolate the problem.

Twitter was in overdrive – #notfunnyvodafone was starting to trend. The company was fielding media calls from local radio stations, while irate customers were flooding its Customer Care hotline.

The CEO was in a black mood. He'd ordered an emergency meeting of the crisis incident response team. They were scattered around Australia, patched in via conference-call technology.

‘James, what's the latest?'

‘It's not good news, Mr Fitzgerald. The IP network in the west is seizing up. We're scrambling to divert traffic but the network is showing signs of system overload.'

‘Have you got a fix on the source of the problem, James?'

‘We're working on that, Mr Fitzgerald. I've got three of my team trying to isolate the source and I hope to have an answer within a few hours. But there seems to be a problem with our control-plane diagnostics. The read-outs don't match the calls we're getting.'

The CEO rubbed his eyes and sighed. Loudly.

‘Not good enough, James. I want a report in half an hour. The problem must be solved. Network outage means bad publicity means loss of customers and revenue. Fix it. Now!'

Pumped-up Pommy prick.

Saville was livid. He'd been flat chat for the last four hours on this crisis and his CEO was treating him like an intern. It was always the same with the Brits. They sent out favoured sons who thought they'd lord it over you, only to find out that running a mobile network in Australia was much tougher than it seemed from a distance of 17,000 kilometres.

‘Saffy, you got the latest read-out for me, please?'

Saville was determined not to lose his cool. His team had managed to stabilise the number of outages but he was worried about a report just handed to him by a network analyst.

‘Vodafone network hit with 1.5Gbps D-Dos. UDP-based attack. Some form of botnet used, originating from India via Russia.'

Christ!

That alone meant Vodafone was in deep, deep trouble. He'd never experienced a botnet attack but, like most tech-heads, had read the literature. He knew how easy it was to buy a swag of infected computers and train them on a target.

The victim, this time, was Australia's third largest mobile phone network.

That kind of attack would explain the loss of data but not of voice connections. Something else was wrong on the system's internal control plane. The adversary had got behind the firewalls.

‘Jimmy, line four for you.'

He picked up the phone. It was Sam Vasoukis, the PR head calling from Sydney.

‘Hi Jim, got a minute? We're in deep do-do. Channel Nine's called. Not good, mate, not good.'

‘Sam, what exactly is the issue?'

‘Sorry, Jim.' Vasoukis sighed loudly. ‘I just got off the phone from the executive producer out of Sydney. They're going to air with a story on us. They reckon we've been hacked into . . . by the Chinese.'

Canberra

Martin Toohey swept into the secure Cabinet Situation Room, a phalanx of advisers in tow. His mood was toxic. He was supposed to be entertaining a group of schoolchildren as a favour for an old Labor mate.

Instead, the National Security Committee had been summoned following Nine's 6pm bombshell. Toohey was furious. The company had made no effort to warn the government and he'd instructed his Minister for Communications to put a bomb up Vodafone.

The other television networks had swung into spoiler overdrive, attempting to play catch-up on a massive story that had serious implications – for Australia, for the Toohey Government, for relations with China.

He had adopted a cautious approach to these cyber-attacks – until now. The court of public opinion was turning swiftly against the Chinese and the PM knew that he would be collateral damage if he didn't take firm and decisive action.

As he took his usual seat he glanced around the room at his National Security Committee team. Every face was bleak.

‘Right . . . what have we got?'

Attorney-General Danny Maiden was on a video link from Melbourne.