Zero day code, p.8
Zero Day Code, page 8
part #1 of End of Days Series
A cryptoworm attack, analysts said, and almost certainly using tools stolen from the NSA. Unlike the Wannacry hijack of 2017, which had been countered by Microsoft releasing emergency patches and the fortuitous discovery of a kill-switch that prevented infected computers from further spreading the virus, this latest exploit seemed designed to turn itself off after exactly twelve hours. Many of the compromised systems were still locked up, but the worm had stopped propagating itself at 10.13PM Eastern.
James had no idea yet what any of it meant, beyond the obvious warning that the global economy was acutely vulnerable to disruption by malign actors with weaponised software. He flicked on the TV in his room as the streets outside his windows resolved themselves in the predawn gloom. A minute of channel surfing added nothing to his brief scan of the online news sites, other than speculation that the North Korean chiefs in Pyongyang actually weren’t to blame. Some analyst on the BBC, a Dr. Cathie Tranent, was adamant that her reading of various ransom demands locking up screens around the world indicated the authors were fluent in Russian and quite proficient in English. The ransomware samples she’d studied in those languages appeared to have been written by one or at the most two individuals, while the notes in the other major languages—Chinese, French, Spanish, German, Japanese and Korean—had very obviously been machine-translated, possibly using Google’s technology.
“You can see from metadata in the language files,” she said, “that the systems used to create the cryptoworm were on a Russian civilian ISP and set to UTC+03:00, which is Moscow’s time zone.”
The BBC host didn’t appear to see that at all, but he plunged on regardless.
“So, this could be the Russian mafia?”
James turned off the television before Dr. Tranent could reply.
The data was useful. Speculation was not. He could do his own speculating.
Two hours later a guard at the NSC buzzed him through the security gates and gave him a temporary swipe card on a lanyard. He also printed out a visitor pass which James had to wear stuck to his shirt.
“There’s an office arranged for you next to Ms. Nguyen, sir,” the guard said, “Just down the hall to your left. The card will give you access.”
“Thanks,” James said, a little impressed that they’d set him up with access and a workspace so quickly. He wondered how they’d vetted him for a security clearance in such a short time. The swipe card looked like a driver ID from the future, with his name, address, and date of birth, printed below a full-face hi-res picture that had obviously been captured on his arrival the previously day. He recognised the suit and tie he’d worn. An embedded chip and a swirling hologram of the NSC logo hinted at much a greater trove of data buried within, including presumably his clearance level and access codes.
James took off his jacket, applied the visitor pass to his shirt pocket and walked the short distance to the office carrying his briefcase.
It was weird.
He’d never intended to work for anyone other than himself—and his clients, of course. He got a small taste of that when his parents almost lost the ranch and he had to take over their debts, paying off the second mortgage, the line of credit and three cards they’d used up feeding the herd during the worst years of the last drought, when the farm’s arable pasture had contracted to a couple of acres around the stream and ponds fed from mountain springs. He’d only just got his own business on a stable footing when his dad had reluctantly told him about the troubles back home. Tom O’Donnell hadn’t wanted a handout from his son. He’d been calling to tell him in a choked and halting voice that they were being sold up and there’d be no point coming home because there would be no home to come back to. James had refused to accept that. The next two years felt as though he was working solely for the bankers who’d pushed more and more debt onto his old man, right up until the day when they decided to take it all back.
It had been hell.
He’d never told his parents, but at one point, for a few weeks, he’d lived out of his car because he got so far behind on his rent while paying down their loans that he’d had to give up the lease on the apartment he was living in. For James, who’d slept plenty rough out on the range, bunking down in his car was no real hardship. But having to tell his landlord he couldn’t make the rent?
That was shameful.
It hurt a hell of a lot more than any stiff neck on the mornings he woke up in the back seat of the Camry.
But here he was, working for the Man again. And not just any Man either. He suppressed a grin at the idea that he was a civil servant.
At least for a little while.
The pay wasn’t great, not by the extortionate measure of the fee he’d charge a private corporation to lay exclusive claim to his time and expertise. But…
But he was surely going to learn things that would be of use to his clients.
And, to be honest, he felt the call of service.
There was no denying it. Just as he could not turn away from his parents when they needed him, James O’Donnell believed he could help his country by turning his mind to the problem Admiral Holloway had asked him to think about. He would put in his best effort here and perhaps he would sleep a little sounder at night knowing he had done something other than chase a dollar for a few days.
He was about to unlock the door to his new digs when he heard typing through the open door to Michelle Nguyen’s office.
“Hey,” he said putting his head through the door. He held up his swipe card. “This is cool.”
“Oh my God, you’re such a nerd,” she said looking up from her laptop. She seemed pleased to see him.
James blushed.
“I meant, it’s just that I didn’t expect…”
She waved his explanation away.
“We started vetting you two weeks ago.”
“Oh,” he said, feeling a little deflated for no reason he could put his finger on.
She smiled.
“I’m glad you’re here. We can grab a cup of coffee before the briefing.”
She must’ve seen the look of mild panic that flashed across his face because she hurried to add, “Don’t worry, you won’t be saying anything. You’ll just be one of the junior minions, or Junior Mints as the admiral calls us, lining the walls while the grown-ups sit at the big table. But it’s relevant to your interests. You had breakfast yet? You want to get a coffee on the way?”
James felt a little unbalanced by her rapid-fire delivery.
“Er, yeah, sure. I mean, yes I’ve had breakfast and yes I could get another coffee.”
Michelle told him to leave his laptop in her room, which she locked behind her. They walked deeper into the building, turning a few corners and going downstairs one level to a café which was doing a brisk trade in breakfast rolls and beverages. James didn’t actually want coffee. He really just wanted to hang out with Michelle for a little while. Besides Holloway, she was the only person he knew here. And he didn’t know her well. They took a booth in the corner of the café, a seat which afforded them a pleasant view over the gardens in front of the Eisenhower building. Sprinklers watered the grass out there, catching the morning sun and throwing off tiny rainbows.
She was frowning.
“What’s up?” he asked.
“They didn’t have my blueberry muffin,” Michelle said. “I had to get a cruller. This is the worst thing that ever happened to anybody.”
“No, no it’s not,” he said. “I once bought a Roomba to clean up after my cat. I was thinking of cat hair and how much I wouldn’t have to vacuum it up by hand anymore. But the cat had other plans and it laid a big wet poop in front of that Roomba and that’s a thousand bucks I’m never getting back again.”
She stared at him, motionless for so long that he wondered if he had said the wrong thing. Perhaps he’d completely misjudged her. And then she burst out laughing and snorted coffee through her nose and dropped her cruller on the floor and laughed even harder, until she started to choke, and James had to lean over and smack her on the back a couple of times.
So that worked out just fine.
When Michelle had recovered and James returned with a fresh cruller to replace the one his Roomba catpoocalypse story had ruined, they chatted for a few minutes about trivialities and about each other, which had been the real purpose of coming down here. James was surprised by how much he liked this woman, by how often she blew up his expectations of what an NSC staffer should be. She was obsessed with roller derby and competed every weekend, sometimes driving a three- or four-hundred-mile round trip to make a tournament. She spoke Japanese and had worked briefly in Tokyo as an Oshiya, a professional “people-onto-train-pusher”. And she had decided two years ago, she told him, to get a new tattoo every month for as long as she had space on her body.
James tried very hard not stare at the sinuous designs enveloping her like iridescent serpents. He’d never met anybody with so much ink etched into their skin and he was unsure of the etiquette. Was he supposed to pretend she didn’t present as a human canvas? He concentrated so hard on not gawking at the colourful, intricate patterns swirling up and down her arms, disappearing inside her loose black silk top to emerge again at the vee-neck of the shirt, that she finally noticed he was staring with increasingly awkward intensity at her face.
“Have I got cheese bits on my mouth or something?” she asked.
James let go of a breath he hadn’t realised he’d been holding. He put up his hands as if to surrender.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s just that I have never seen anybody with so many tattoos. I mean, they look great, I guess, but I just can’t help thinking that gee, that must’ve hurt, and you must have, like, a lot of patience or something…”
He trailed off weakly.
“I wondered if you were going to say anything,” she said. “You’ve been trying desperately not to for at least ten minutes now, haven’t you?”
He stared at her, and then quickly nodded.
“Yes. Sorry.”
She smiled. “You don’t have to apologise. If you want to see some peeps totally freaked out by my bitchin’ skin art, you should come to Thanksgiving with my family. My grandfather was a colonel in the ARVN. He got his family out of Vietnam on the seventh attempt. Came here, worked as a janitor the rest of his life. His son, my dad, qualified as an accountant. House Nguyen is not known for its freethinking radicals and artistic visionaries. Except for this hot chick right here.”
She jabbed at her chest with a thumb. The one with the bright yellow Tweety Bird tattoo.
“The senior threat assessment analyst with the National Security Council, you mean?” James said with the hint of a teasing smile.
“Yeah. Her,” Michelle agreed. “Anyway, come on, the meet cute scene is over. This movie needs some exposition now.”
She took him to a conference room on the third floor. They didn’t stop at her office.
“You won’t need your laptop,” she said. “We’re strictly wallflowers for this meeting. Take notes if you want or if you have to, but remember they’re classified, and don’t speak unless spoken to, which isn’t going to happen. It never happens. A few seconds spent listening to some common sense from a lowly Junior Mint like you or me would be a precious opportunity lost for some deputy assistant secretary to show a room full of captive under-secretaries how fucking brilliant they are.”
“That sounds very cynical,” James said.
“Only about deputy assistant secretaries,” she volleyed back. “And don’t ask. Once I start rolling on that topic, you’ll never get me to stop.”
The conference room was half full when they entered. The chairs around the edge of the meeting space were mostly taken. The Junior Mints did not have the luxury of rolling up late. Michelle indicated that James should take a seat next to her in the corner. Admiral Holloway said good morning to them both when he came in a few seconds later, but he was quickly gathered up by more important people and carried away to his esteemed position up near the head of the table.
The meeting opened with a young black woman in an Air Force uniform recapping the previous day’s cyber-attack. She’d updated her briefing on the fly as Amazon and other sites were listed as being offline, from Tumblr to lululemon. James missed some of what she was talking about because she spoke so rapidly in acronyms and government jargon that were a foreign language to him. But he got the gist of it. The intelligence agencies believed that on the balance of probabilities the attack had originated in China, not North Korea or Russia. It was a state-sponsored operation, not the doing of some freelance criminal organisation or even a front for China’s Ministry of State Security.
“It was almost certainly PLA Unit 61398,” the Air Force woman said.
This occasioned a lot of nodding and mumbling and general disgruntlement around the table.
James leaned over to Michelle and asked quietly, “Who are these guys?”
“Shush,” she scolded him in a low voice, before adding, “Very bad guys.”
There was some back-and-forth between the important people at the grownups table about what PLA Unit 61398 had hoped to achieve with a false flag operation designed to look like either a North Korean Bureau 121 operation, or a freelance Russian ransomware shakedown. It wasn’t like they needed the money.
In the movie, James supposed, this is where he would jump up and stun them with his own amazing theories. But he didn’t really have any theories and he didn’t want to look like a complete idiot, so he kept his mouth shut. At one point Michelle patted him on the arm as if she could tell how much trouble he was having just sitting and saying nothing. Following the lead of the meeting chair, yet another retired admiral, James had taken off his jacket and rolled up his shirtsleeves. The room was hot and stuffy with so many people crammed into it and the air-conditioning was struggling as the temperature climbed outside. The unexpected touch of Michelle Nguyen’s cool fingers on his forearm jolted him like an electrical charge. He had to cough to cover up his surprise, and then dip his face in embarrassment as his loud coughing turned heads all around the room.
Discussion quickly turned to the reason he was there. The trade war.
Now in its third year it was throwing off a Catherine wheel of unintended consequences. The trillion-dollar hit to the Chinese economy had not brought them to the negotiating table as intended. Beijing had doubled down on its most egregious violations of international law. Chinese companies were not just openly stealing and copying the intellectual property of American competitors, they were selling them into third-party markets like Europe at prices designed to ravage the margins of companies like Microsoft. James sat forward in his chair as an official from the State Department took them through a briefing based on complaints from Apple, Dell, Intel and Qualcomm about increasingly aggressive demands from the Chinese government for unsustainable investments, technology transfers and straight up multi-billion-dollar extortion payments.
He made no judgements about the information, which was not out in the market yet, waiting to see whether anybody at this meeting was going to fit it into a wider narrative. A few minutes later, Admiral Holloway did just that.
“We are three years into this shitfight,” he said. “Five years into an unprecedented drought which has affected not just the Western and Midwestern food bowls here, but which has also severely affected major grain producers such as Canada and Australia at the same time as it has denuded North Asia, the Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa of arable land. China is rich but starving,” Holloway went on. “This would not be a problem if they could buy food from reliable suppliers, but increasingly they cannot. Globally, food supply chains are massively stressed by the Great Drought, the collapse of salt and freshwater fisheries, and aggressive competition for nutrient sources by India, China and the major OPEC economies, none of whom have the capacity to feed their own populations.”
Holloway went on for another ten minutes, diving deep into the question of whether or not Thailand and Vietnam would ban exports of rice within a week. It was a story James had been following closely, but for other reasons.
“If either country were to do so it would be an intolerable development for Beijing,” he warned. “Unfortunately, my guys don’t see any alternative.”
James sensed Michelle nodding in agreement next to him.
“Both Hanoi and Bangkok have reached a point where they will feed their own people before they export another grain of rice. For them it’s a matter of self-preservation too. They’re not just hungry. There will be more food riots in both countries no matter which course they take, but in Thailand giving away their last bowl of rice would guarantee a military coup.”
James tuned out for the rest of the session, which mostly consisted of military officers detailing the readiness and disposition of various US forces the president could deploy in the event of a crisis in either the Middle East or Asia. Both seemed equally likely to him. But his mind was already racing ahead of that seeming inevitability.
He was thinking about yesterday’s cyber-attack. And Michelle’s missing blueberry muffin. And his sudden pressing interest in the question of just how long the average American city could feed itself were its food supply to suddenly be cut off.
9
I’d Rather Be Back In Fallujah
Rick Boreham stayed and helped out with the rest of Mel’s judo class. It was only half an hour and none of the lost golf balls he might have otherwise policed up were going anywhere. She was a good teacher, he thought. She had a deep well of patience from which to draw. She was also a master delegator, giving him three of the worst knuckleheads to look after while she busied herself with the rest of the kids. They were a pretty good bunch, even the knuckleheads.
“Were you really an Army Ranger?”
“Yep.”
“Did you ever kill anyone?”
“Part of the job, son”
“Seriously? Would you ever do it again?”
James had no idea yet what any of it meant, beyond the obvious warning that the global economy was acutely vulnerable to disruption by malign actors with weaponised software. He flicked on the TV in his room as the streets outside his windows resolved themselves in the predawn gloom. A minute of channel surfing added nothing to his brief scan of the online news sites, other than speculation that the North Korean chiefs in Pyongyang actually weren’t to blame. Some analyst on the BBC, a Dr. Cathie Tranent, was adamant that her reading of various ransom demands locking up screens around the world indicated the authors were fluent in Russian and quite proficient in English. The ransomware samples she’d studied in those languages appeared to have been written by one or at the most two individuals, while the notes in the other major languages—Chinese, French, Spanish, German, Japanese and Korean—had very obviously been machine-translated, possibly using Google’s technology.
“You can see from metadata in the language files,” she said, “that the systems used to create the cryptoworm were on a Russian civilian ISP and set to UTC+03:00, which is Moscow’s time zone.”
The BBC host didn’t appear to see that at all, but he plunged on regardless.
“So, this could be the Russian mafia?”
James turned off the television before Dr. Tranent could reply.
The data was useful. Speculation was not. He could do his own speculating.
Two hours later a guard at the NSC buzzed him through the security gates and gave him a temporary swipe card on a lanyard. He also printed out a visitor pass which James had to wear stuck to his shirt.
“There’s an office arranged for you next to Ms. Nguyen, sir,” the guard said, “Just down the hall to your left. The card will give you access.”
“Thanks,” James said, a little impressed that they’d set him up with access and a workspace so quickly. He wondered how they’d vetted him for a security clearance in such a short time. The swipe card looked like a driver ID from the future, with his name, address, and date of birth, printed below a full-face hi-res picture that had obviously been captured on his arrival the previously day. He recognised the suit and tie he’d worn. An embedded chip and a swirling hologram of the NSC logo hinted at much a greater trove of data buried within, including presumably his clearance level and access codes.
James took off his jacket, applied the visitor pass to his shirt pocket and walked the short distance to the office carrying his briefcase.
It was weird.
He’d never intended to work for anyone other than himself—and his clients, of course. He got a small taste of that when his parents almost lost the ranch and he had to take over their debts, paying off the second mortgage, the line of credit and three cards they’d used up feeding the herd during the worst years of the last drought, when the farm’s arable pasture had contracted to a couple of acres around the stream and ponds fed from mountain springs. He’d only just got his own business on a stable footing when his dad had reluctantly told him about the troubles back home. Tom O’Donnell hadn’t wanted a handout from his son. He’d been calling to tell him in a choked and halting voice that they were being sold up and there’d be no point coming home because there would be no home to come back to. James had refused to accept that. The next two years felt as though he was working solely for the bankers who’d pushed more and more debt onto his old man, right up until the day when they decided to take it all back.
It had been hell.
He’d never told his parents, but at one point, for a few weeks, he’d lived out of his car because he got so far behind on his rent while paying down their loans that he’d had to give up the lease on the apartment he was living in. For James, who’d slept plenty rough out on the range, bunking down in his car was no real hardship. But having to tell his landlord he couldn’t make the rent?
That was shameful.
It hurt a hell of a lot more than any stiff neck on the mornings he woke up in the back seat of the Camry.
But here he was, working for the Man again. And not just any Man either. He suppressed a grin at the idea that he was a civil servant.
At least for a little while.
The pay wasn’t great, not by the extortionate measure of the fee he’d charge a private corporation to lay exclusive claim to his time and expertise. But…
But he was surely going to learn things that would be of use to his clients.
And, to be honest, he felt the call of service.
There was no denying it. Just as he could not turn away from his parents when they needed him, James O’Donnell believed he could help his country by turning his mind to the problem Admiral Holloway had asked him to think about. He would put in his best effort here and perhaps he would sleep a little sounder at night knowing he had done something other than chase a dollar for a few days.
He was about to unlock the door to his new digs when he heard typing through the open door to Michelle Nguyen’s office.
“Hey,” he said putting his head through the door. He held up his swipe card. “This is cool.”
“Oh my God, you’re such a nerd,” she said looking up from her laptop. She seemed pleased to see him.
James blushed.
“I meant, it’s just that I didn’t expect…”
She waved his explanation away.
“We started vetting you two weeks ago.”
“Oh,” he said, feeling a little deflated for no reason he could put his finger on.
She smiled.
“I’m glad you’re here. We can grab a cup of coffee before the briefing.”
She must’ve seen the look of mild panic that flashed across his face because she hurried to add, “Don’t worry, you won’t be saying anything. You’ll just be one of the junior minions, or Junior Mints as the admiral calls us, lining the walls while the grown-ups sit at the big table. But it’s relevant to your interests. You had breakfast yet? You want to get a coffee on the way?”
James felt a little unbalanced by her rapid-fire delivery.
“Er, yeah, sure. I mean, yes I’ve had breakfast and yes I could get another coffee.”
Michelle told him to leave his laptop in her room, which she locked behind her. They walked deeper into the building, turning a few corners and going downstairs one level to a café which was doing a brisk trade in breakfast rolls and beverages. James didn’t actually want coffee. He really just wanted to hang out with Michelle for a little while. Besides Holloway, she was the only person he knew here. And he didn’t know her well. They took a booth in the corner of the café, a seat which afforded them a pleasant view over the gardens in front of the Eisenhower building. Sprinklers watered the grass out there, catching the morning sun and throwing off tiny rainbows.
She was frowning.
“What’s up?” he asked.
“They didn’t have my blueberry muffin,” Michelle said. “I had to get a cruller. This is the worst thing that ever happened to anybody.”
“No, no it’s not,” he said. “I once bought a Roomba to clean up after my cat. I was thinking of cat hair and how much I wouldn’t have to vacuum it up by hand anymore. But the cat had other plans and it laid a big wet poop in front of that Roomba and that’s a thousand bucks I’m never getting back again.”
She stared at him, motionless for so long that he wondered if he had said the wrong thing. Perhaps he’d completely misjudged her. And then she burst out laughing and snorted coffee through her nose and dropped her cruller on the floor and laughed even harder, until she started to choke, and James had to lean over and smack her on the back a couple of times.
So that worked out just fine.
When Michelle had recovered and James returned with a fresh cruller to replace the one his Roomba catpoocalypse story had ruined, they chatted for a few minutes about trivialities and about each other, which had been the real purpose of coming down here. James was surprised by how much he liked this woman, by how often she blew up his expectations of what an NSC staffer should be. She was obsessed with roller derby and competed every weekend, sometimes driving a three- or four-hundred-mile round trip to make a tournament. She spoke Japanese and had worked briefly in Tokyo as an Oshiya, a professional “people-onto-train-pusher”. And she had decided two years ago, she told him, to get a new tattoo every month for as long as she had space on her body.
James tried very hard not stare at the sinuous designs enveloping her like iridescent serpents. He’d never met anybody with so much ink etched into their skin and he was unsure of the etiquette. Was he supposed to pretend she didn’t present as a human canvas? He concentrated so hard on not gawking at the colourful, intricate patterns swirling up and down her arms, disappearing inside her loose black silk top to emerge again at the vee-neck of the shirt, that she finally noticed he was staring with increasingly awkward intensity at her face.
“Have I got cheese bits on my mouth or something?” she asked.
James let go of a breath he hadn’t realised he’d been holding. He put up his hands as if to surrender.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s just that I have never seen anybody with so many tattoos. I mean, they look great, I guess, but I just can’t help thinking that gee, that must’ve hurt, and you must have, like, a lot of patience or something…”
He trailed off weakly.
“I wondered if you were going to say anything,” she said. “You’ve been trying desperately not to for at least ten minutes now, haven’t you?”
He stared at her, and then quickly nodded.
“Yes. Sorry.”
She smiled. “You don’t have to apologise. If you want to see some peeps totally freaked out by my bitchin’ skin art, you should come to Thanksgiving with my family. My grandfather was a colonel in the ARVN. He got his family out of Vietnam on the seventh attempt. Came here, worked as a janitor the rest of his life. His son, my dad, qualified as an accountant. House Nguyen is not known for its freethinking radicals and artistic visionaries. Except for this hot chick right here.”
She jabbed at her chest with a thumb. The one with the bright yellow Tweety Bird tattoo.
“The senior threat assessment analyst with the National Security Council, you mean?” James said with the hint of a teasing smile.
“Yeah. Her,” Michelle agreed. “Anyway, come on, the meet cute scene is over. This movie needs some exposition now.”
She took him to a conference room on the third floor. They didn’t stop at her office.
“You won’t need your laptop,” she said. “We’re strictly wallflowers for this meeting. Take notes if you want or if you have to, but remember they’re classified, and don’t speak unless spoken to, which isn’t going to happen. It never happens. A few seconds spent listening to some common sense from a lowly Junior Mint like you or me would be a precious opportunity lost for some deputy assistant secretary to show a room full of captive under-secretaries how fucking brilliant they are.”
“That sounds very cynical,” James said.
“Only about deputy assistant secretaries,” she volleyed back. “And don’t ask. Once I start rolling on that topic, you’ll never get me to stop.”
The conference room was half full when they entered. The chairs around the edge of the meeting space were mostly taken. The Junior Mints did not have the luxury of rolling up late. Michelle indicated that James should take a seat next to her in the corner. Admiral Holloway said good morning to them both when he came in a few seconds later, but he was quickly gathered up by more important people and carried away to his esteemed position up near the head of the table.
The meeting opened with a young black woman in an Air Force uniform recapping the previous day’s cyber-attack. She’d updated her briefing on the fly as Amazon and other sites were listed as being offline, from Tumblr to lululemon. James missed some of what she was talking about because she spoke so rapidly in acronyms and government jargon that were a foreign language to him. But he got the gist of it. The intelligence agencies believed that on the balance of probabilities the attack had originated in China, not North Korea or Russia. It was a state-sponsored operation, not the doing of some freelance criminal organisation or even a front for China’s Ministry of State Security.
“It was almost certainly PLA Unit 61398,” the Air Force woman said.
This occasioned a lot of nodding and mumbling and general disgruntlement around the table.
James leaned over to Michelle and asked quietly, “Who are these guys?”
“Shush,” she scolded him in a low voice, before adding, “Very bad guys.”
There was some back-and-forth between the important people at the grownups table about what PLA Unit 61398 had hoped to achieve with a false flag operation designed to look like either a North Korean Bureau 121 operation, or a freelance Russian ransomware shakedown. It wasn’t like they needed the money.
In the movie, James supposed, this is where he would jump up and stun them with his own amazing theories. But he didn’t really have any theories and he didn’t want to look like a complete idiot, so he kept his mouth shut. At one point Michelle patted him on the arm as if she could tell how much trouble he was having just sitting and saying nothing. Following the lead of the meeting chair, yet another retired admiral, James had taken off his jacket and rolled up his shirtsleeves. The room was hot and stuffy with so many people crammed into it and the air-conditioning was struggling as the temperature climbed outside. The unexpected touch of Michelle Nguyen’s cool fingers on his forearm jolted him like an electrical charge. He had to cough to cover up his surprise, and then dip his face in embarrassment as his loud coughing turned heads all around the room.
Discussion quickly turned to the reason he was there. The trade war.
Now in its third year it was throwing off a Catherine wheel of unintended consequences. The trillion-dollar hit to the Chinese economy had not brought them to the negotiating table as intended. Beijing had doubled down on its most egregious violations of international law. Chinese companies were not just openly stealing and copying the intellectual property of American competitors, they were selling them into third-party markets like Europe at prices designed to ravage the margins of companies like Microsoft. James sat forward in his chair as an official from the State Department took them through a briefing based on complaints from Apple, Dell, Intel and Qualcomm about increasingly aggressive demands from the Chinese government for unsustainable investments, technology transfers and straight up multi-billion-dollar extortion payments.
He made no judgements about the information, which was not out in the market yet, waiting to see whether anybody at this meeting was going to fit it into a wider narrative. A few minutes later, Admiral Holloway did just that.
“We are three years into this shitfight,” he said. “Five years into an unprecedented drought which has affected not just the Western and Midwestern food bowls here, but which has also severely affected major grain producers such as Canada and Australia at the same time as it has denuded North Asia, the Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa of arable land. China is rich but starving,” Holloway went on. “This would not be a problem if they could buy food from reliable suppliers, but increasingly they cannot. Globally, food supply chains are massively stressed by the Great Drought, the collapse of salt and freshwater fisheries, and aggressive competition for nutrient sources by India, China and the major OPEC economies, none of whom have the capacity to feed their own populations.”
Holloway went on for another ten minutes, diving deep into the question of whether or not Thailand and Vietnam would ban exports of rice within a week. It was a story James had been following closely, but for other reasons.
“If either country were to do so it would be an intolerable development for Beijing,” he warned. “Unfortunately, my guys don’t see any alternative.”
James sensed Michelle nodding in agreement next to him.
“Both Hanoi and Bangkok have reached a point where they will feed their own people before they export another grain of rice. For them it’s a matter of self-preservation too. They’re not just hungry. There will be more food riots in both countries no matter which course they take, but in Thailand giving away their last bowl of rice would guarantee a military coup.”
James tuned out for the rest of the session, which mostly consisted of military officers detailing the readiness and disposition of various US forces the president could deploy in the event of a crisis in either the Middle East or Asia. Both seemed equally likely to him. But his mind was already racing ahead of that seeming inevitability.
He was thinking about yesterday’s cyber-attack. And Michelle’s missing blueberry muffin. And his sudden pressing interest in the question of just how long the average American city could feed itself were its food supply to suddenly be cut off.
9
I’d Rather Be Back In Fallujah
Rick Boreham stayed and helped out with the rest of Mel’s judo class. It was only half an hour and none of the lost golf balls he might have otherwise policed up were going anywhere. She was a good teacher, he thought. She had a deep well of patience from which to draw. She was also a master delegator, giving him three of the worst knuckleheads to look after while she busied herself with the rest of the kids. They were a pretty good bunch, even the knuckleheads.
“Were you really an Army Ranger?”
“Yep.”
“Did you ever kill anyone?”
“Part of the job, son”
“Seriously? Would you ever do it again?”
