Red Metal

CHAPTER 25

In the Bear’s Den, the men of APT28 all kept their eyes on the clock above the big screen on the front wall. They were seconds away from the first cyberattack of Operacyia Krasnyi Metal, and the criticality of perfect timing had been pounded into their psyches for months.

Colonel Glowski knew they were ready, because most of the work had already been done. They’d spent the past two months feverishly perpetrating cookie theft attacks, turning on the Trojan horse packets already embedded in their NATO hosts, opening latent back doors, dry hacking, and launching watering hole attacks.

Now it was time to exploit all of their attack paradigms at once.

Glowski looked at the digital clock, his heart racing like a submarine commander’s while cruising just over the Atlantic seabed or a highly decorated combat pilot’s while streaking through the sky in a fifth-generation fighter.

Thinking of himself now, his responsibility in this operation, caused him to harken back to a time just ten weeks earlier when a pair of VIPs entered the Bear’s Den. He’d been informed that the two generals in charge of ground operations in Red Metal would be visiting, and he and his team prepared the space accordingly. Cleaning up, donning ties, forcing chronically slumped shoulders back just as the door opened.

His men were truly intimidated by the arrival of the two visitors, even the young guys who didn’t recognize them.

But Glowski recognized them, and he knew he was in the presence of giants. Sabaneyev, who appeared markedly young to be a colonel general, looked and spoke like a national television newsreader.

And Lazar… the Boris Petrovich Lazar. The Lion of Dagestan. Burly, weathered, and round-faced, but also the most storied general in the Russian military in a generation.

True field commanders, Colonel Glowski had thought at the time.

And intimidating as fuck.

The generals surveyed Glowski and his men as they performed one of the important preparatory attacks on a Polish air defense radar chain. They watched in silence, mostly, but they asked two of his lead hackers some questions.

What a day that was, Glowski thought now.

Papabear pushed the commanders out of his mind and redirected his thoughts to his own battlefield. What a day this will be.

Looking up at the Pageantry, he saw a green light blinking at the top of each of the ten “Christmas trees,” meaning they had pinged previously discovered back channels, and they were open. This left enemy networks exposed; the only thing left to do for APT28 was to flip some switches to fire the activation codes into them. This would be done manually, because it was more covert than placing initiation times on the intrusive codes already embedded in the system. Glowski had deemed that too dangerous.

So the codes were left waiting for their triggers.

Other of the “Christmas tree” hierarchies required his men to actively hack the network and then inject a code. Of course the twenty-four cyberespionage specialists here in the Bear’s Den had seeded hundreds of other government, industry, and military targets with ruse codes for months to prevent these ten hierarchies from being noted as unique.

It was all part of the cyber game.

Team Black Bear was the group of hackers responsible for Germany. As the timer over the Pageantry clicked off to the exact second of their attack, each man began tapping his keys.

The rest of the room remained silent, all staring at their monitors. Black Bear’s work began to show up on the 162-centimeter screen, the German hierarchies filling from bottom to top.

The top changed from green to red as the Russian computer code just shut all German NATO terminals down.

As Colonel Ivan Zolotov flew west over Belarus, he looked down to his A. Lange & Söhne wristwatch. A much-loved heirloom that had belonged to his great-uncle, a tough old bastard who eventually died from cirrhosis, but not before giving young Ivan the wristwatch and the story of how he acquired it.

Leningrad, Zhukov’s 3rd Shock Army. October of 1943. Colonel Z’s great-uncle had described in detail the look on the German officer’s face as he hacked the man’s forearm off using his bayonet while two of his privates held him down.

The watch and the great-uncle had both survived the brutal war, and Colonel Z thought of it as his good-luck charm.

For the next hour, every altitude adjustment, every kilometer he and his wingman traversed, was completely scripted. He would check the timing against the timepiece on his wrist, and his great-uncle’s watch would see battle again.

Looking at it, he saw they were exactly two minutes from crossing into Poland.

The Red Talon fighters had taken off in pairs from six Russian and Belarusian air bases. Each pair would fly dangerously close to each other along preplanned courses, making broad, sweeping turns at predetermined locations. Their flight profiles — for this stage of their mission, anyway — were designed to appear to NATO air defense technicians like those of Russian tankers or routine passenger jets.

Colonel Z checked the A. Lange & Söhne once more, then glanced at the cockpit’s chronometer.

One minute to go.

He pushed the throttle forward a touch and noted that Commander Tatiyev responded, syncing his own speed almost instantly. He flicked a switch and opened a view below the left wing on his HUD camera. Shatskyi National Park passed ten kilometers to the south. He was certain Ukrainian antiair gunners would be monitoring him now, but that was fine, because in less than one minute the Poles to the West would not be. Or at least their daisy chain of radar would not be. He was confident that their computer systems would turn off right on schedule… seconds before he crossed into their territory.

The independent AA stations were another story, but speed and altitude would prevent any danger from the ground; of this he was also confident.

Pora! Time! He said it to himself, looking once more at the time as he pulled a hard right bank.

He saw the lights of the Polish city of Włodawa racing below.

He was over the border.

With the easy but hostile act of crossing into Polish airspace, his airframe and that of the rest of Red Talon Squadron had just opened air hostilities with the West.

On board the Kazan, Captain Etush and his crew had less than three minutes to fire their third and final torpedo mine.

But the mine wasn’t cooperating.

The whole mission in jeopardy over a few shit machine screws, Etush thought. Tough to fault the torpedo’s designers. The SMDM-2C panels were not meant to be hurriedly removed and replaced as the torpedo crew had just done. Program them once, then fire them — that was the manufacturer’s intended design. Not take apart, reprogram, then take apart again.

But things always went wrong in combat.

Etush turned to his veteran weapons officer. “Dmitry?”

“Sir, we will launch on target cable TAT-15 on time.”

Etush looked at his old comrade. The man seemed cool right now. Etush had to admire Dmitry’s confidence in his weapons, though he himself was worried.

“Bridge, Ula-class contact is now five nautical miles bearing one-nine-seven degrees. She’s outside torpedo range, Captain.”

Etush grunted in acknowledgment. Well, that was one thing off his mind, although he recognized that if they were unable to connect their last torpedo mine, he’d have a lot more to worry about than the little Norwegian submarine.

“Thirty seconds to target,” said the helm. Etush looked at the weapons console and saw tube three was still glowing red.

“Twenty seconds.”

Etush fixed his stare on Dmitry, although the man had his back turned… one hand with the weapons phone to his ear, the other hand steadying himself as he looked at the panel.

“Ten seconds.”

Etush looked beyond him at the panel, and torpedo tube three remained red.

“Sir… five seconds to target,” and then: “Captain, we are on target now.”

Dmitry lowered the phone from his ear and turned to Etush. “Sir, weapons reports launch, on time, on target. Third fish is in the water.” A slight smile drew across his face. The third tube showed red still, although the number seven tube showed it had just launched and was now indicating “yellow,” recovery mode.

“Dmitry…,” said Captain Etush. “How the hell did—”

“Sir, the men left the damaged torpedo in tube three and reprogrammed the device loaded in tube seven instead. Faster this way.”

Etush couldn’t help but repress a smile, and the bridge released a collective sigh.

“Sir, Sonar. Ula will pass near the target during detonation. She will likely catch some of the blast.”

The entire bridge looked up at the ship’s clock. The chronometer still ticked, but now, instead of counting down, it was counting up. It showed one minute till detonation.

“Bad luck for her,” said Etush.

More than a minute later an undersea explosion could be heard through the hull of the Kazan, and a wave shuddered the boat. It was soon followed by two softer thumping sounds.

Seconds passed before sonar reported, “Sir, Ula’s been hit: she was caught up near the mine. She has launched. Three torpedoes in the water. Sir, we are being fired upon. They must have assumed we attacked her. They are well outside of range, though. Those fish will drop off well before reaching us.”

“Okay… He must’ve gotten a good blast, a crippled boat, and he’s mad.” Etush smiled.

The sonarman spoke again. “He’s turning to starboard, sir. Hull popping sounds. He’s surfacing! He’s out of the fight!”

Etush nodded. “He’s had enough of us, but be ready for other threats.”

“Aye, sir.”

The captain turned to Dmitry. “Weapons, I presume you have some more tricks up your skirt?”

“Aye, Captain, five other tricks are loaded and will be ready with Nav’s latest solutions.”

“Very well. Gentlemen, the first salvos of war have begun. And may God have mercy upon the men of the sea for what’s about to come.”

Colonel Glowski continued pacing the floor of the Bear’s Den, keeping an eye behind all his teams of cyberespionage specialists.

“Sir?” one of his analysts from Team Grizzly Bear, the U.S. hacking team, called out. “Confirmation on all channels; all U.S. and NATO transatlantic fiber-optic cables just went off-line. Our mimicry systems are established and already taking and faking NATO classified Internet traffic. Transfer mainframes systems are broadcasting and pinging returns. Poisoned watering holes continue to distribute Trojan horses downstream. All systems are up and running in Europe and America.”

“Good work, team,” said Glowski. He looked around and was met with smiles and grins. He couldn’t help grinning a bit himself, but soon his smile disappeared. “Let’s not get cocky — the next ten minutes are vital. Back to work.”

A young Polish radar technician looked at his screen in confusion for nearly ten seconds before activating his intercom link to the watch captain.

“Sir, I think I have an intrusion. Sector Peter-Victor-King, Southwest. Vicinity Lublin.”

“What do you mean, ‘think’?”

“Well, sir, it was there; then it was gone. The border towers sent a signal; then they all blinked out. All systems are reporting green now. Everything seems to be in order.”

“Are the other outstations reporting normally?”

“Yes, sir, all stations are showing green on my board. It all looks good, sir. Must be another glitch like that one that happened last Saturday.”

The captain paused, then asked, “When have we ever had all stations indicating green?”

The radar operator cocked his head, eyes still transfixed on his screen. “Never. There’s always one or more of them malfunctioning or not reporting.”

The captain turned to the communications officer. “Alert NATO immediately.”

The radarman questioned this. “But, sir, the systems are actually pinging back to us really well. All the daisy-chained radars are intact.”

“I don’t care — it doesn’t feel right. Just do it.”

The radioman was already tuning to the NATO frequency. “Copy, sir. I’ll send the alert message now.”