Unholy Code

Chapter 2

There was blood on the water. You’d swear that was true. Crimson streaks from the northern Idaho sunset. Vinko Horvat stood on the shoreline with his border collie Biko, studying the shifting colors, red as the anger that once defined Hayden Lake, blurred as the region’s memory. Two decades ago it had been home to the Aryan Nations until a lawsuit left the white supremacists broke and homeless. They’d lost their compound after their idiot guards shot up a local’s car — with locals in it. That was not how you conducted yourself if you were keeping your eyes on the prize.

But Hayden Lake had a proud white heritage, even if many in the mountain town wanted to set it aside once and for all. And Vinko Horvat knew the little town’s legacy was more important than ever, now with the country’s borders wide open as a beer cooler at a biker picnic. His own heritage was no less vital to him, extending back many decades and three generations of Horvat men to the Nazi-created Independent State of Croatia.

He lifted his eyes from the lake as the sun settled behind a distant mountain, then headed back toward his barn, snapping his fingers to bring Biko to heel. As he approached the large looming structure he heard his goats bleating inside. Gallas from Africa, of all places. “Super goats.” That’s what the breeders called them. Gallas had tough teeth, produced a ton of milk, and could take African heat. It had been getting plenty hot in Idaho, too.

Horvat threw open a wide barn door. Biko backed up the goats, kids chasing their nannies’ teats. Gallas matured twice as fast as other breeds and reproduced as fast as Muslims.

Muslims.

He forced himself to use the proper noun, not the many epithets that came so easily to the tongue. He’d trained himself never to use such words, never to appear as vigorously stupid as his Aryan Nations predecessors. But he wrote about Muslims, posted about them nearly every day. Long ago he’d said hordes of them would be coming, and now they were. Didn’t take a prophet to see something that obvious, just a good listener.

Muslims — all of them, no matter what they said — never made a secret of their plans. The only time they’d ever confused him was with their easy surrender, down in Louisiana. Probably had the same effect on anyone with more than half a brain, but that’s all those southern cops seemed to have — half a brain and not one cell more. And those cretins are protecting our borders? People should think about that.

To Vinko, the biggest wonder of all was that there wasn’t a turban in the White House by now, other than the man who’d been in disguise the whole time he’d occupied the presidency. Hussein? Are you kidding me? There was no figuring the American people, except to conclude the obvious: half a brain.

But Vinko knew you worked with what you had. And he’d been making significant inroads with his fellow citizens. They were starting to see the truth. It had gotten a lot easier since the bombing of Antarctica and the surging of the seas. Terrible, to be sure, but it might just wake America up, and if it did that, well, a man could argue—privately, of course — that the bombing was a good thing, especially if he’d had the foresight to stay inland where there were fish and fresh water and a blood-red sunset to remind you of why you’d never left your family’s land.

Biko kept the goats at bay while Vinko drove his tractor into the barn, though the Gallas were smarter than most people when it came to surviving. They did not wander at night. This was cougar country. A big cat could devour one of those floppy-eared creations in a single sitting. Plenty of coyotes around, too, running in packs. Cougars could start doing that as well. Animals adapt, man included. Right now “adapting”—surviving — meant guns and ammunition. On his website, For the Homeland — Ready!, he’d been repeating a simple message for years: “Ammo up!”

They’re sure listening now.

Trouble was, they weren’t the only ones. Some hacker had taken him down exactly at 11:00 a.m. this morning. The eleventh hour. Were they sending him a warning? Had they identified him? The hacking had sure shocked the shit out of Vinko. Four years of computer engineering at Boise State, another sixteen studying the Dark Web’s deepest secrets, then setting up alternating proxy servers and running the most sophisticated cyberdefenses — only to have some son-of-a-bitch knock him down like he was no more formidable than a bowling pin.

But that wasn’t the real shocker. Before he could even begin a digital forensics operation, his website had come back to life. He would have liked to take credit for the quick comeback, but he couldn’t. The help had come from elsewhere. A powerful force had put him back in business with a private message that had been haunting his evening walk with Biko:

You have a guardian angel, Steel Fist. I am here to keep your message online. You are doing the Lord’s work. Your enemies are crude. They don’t know who you are or where you’re based. But I do.

Those words still gnawed at him as he closed the barn door and strode back to his big log house and stepped inside.

But I do.

A religious type, a real believer, had identified him, claimed to know where he lived. Not a little ironic because Vinko didn’t share any hope for a heavenly presence. But a guardian angel? If some hacker wanted to call himself that and fight back on his behalf, Vinko wasn’t going to protest. But an urgency was now upon him. The walk had finally crystallized one major concern about the day’s disturbances: if his so-called guardian angel could put him back online, he could also have been the hacker who’d taken him down. Someone who might be toying with him for reasons Vinko could not yet imagine.

He now paused only long enough to drink a cold glass of goat milk before heading back to his office, a room that looked as sleek and pristine as any clean room in Silicon Valley.

He needed the latest and most sophisticated gear. Cyberchaos was taking down America. He’d been spared till eleven o’clock this morning, but for weeks hackers had taken aim at rescue efforts trying to save cities and coastlines from the flooding. Dams, bridges, pumping stations, and large-scale sanitation plants had been caught in the crosshairs of America’s most dedicated enemies. But one development Vinko could not accept — and never would — was that almost two months ago the government had “accidentally” released almost a thousand pages of documents online that demonstrated how simple it would be to cyberattack a long list of power and water industrial control systems. They showed that if a cybersaboteur disconnected a generator from the grid, it would immediately speed up because it no longer had any load. Then, if it were reconnected to the grid, tremendous damaging force would be exerted on the generator as it tried to bring it back into sync. A blueprint for all that had quickly followed.

We’re supposed to believe that bullshit was a mistake? When it made it easier for terrorists to come in and kill us?

You’d have to be a madman to accept that excuse at face value. Vinko had been called a lot, but never a madman. Possessed by the importance of his mission, yes. But not mad.

With his website back online, he planned to conduct a thorough disk and memory analysis to determine who his guardian angel was. Just one critical task had to take precedence: the prime-time posting of files packed with data he’d obtained from penetrating the NSA — unless he were taken offline again before he could deliver his priceless trove. He’d feared the files had been destroyed by the hacker, but the takedown had been the crudest form of cybersabotage and it left those files fully intact. Every page showing the secretive U.S. agency was still mining and amassing private information on millions of Americans.

He started uploading the files in seconds, working his keyboard like a pianist tickling the ivories, the tap-tap-tapping soothing and reassuring — with data that would enrage his followers.

With those files in motion, he began sending out teasers to his faithful: “Are you ready? Tell me you’re ready to see your government’s latest crimes.” Most of his readers had signed up for alerts when he went live.

Vinko sat back and waited, scratching Biko’s ear. The dog leaned into his master’s ranch-hardened fingers. Even the pinky that wouldn’t straighten could exert strong pressure, the sole injury that the six-foot-four-inch Vinko had sustained while quarterbacking the Boise State Broncos for four years.

Thousands, then tens of thousands of encouraging messages started pouring into Hayden Lake. Vinko’s entire operation was powered by solar panels that harvested bright mountain sunshine from every square inch of the roofs of his large home and barn. Each kilowatt counted now with power outages afflicting so many other Americans.

He checked to make sure the files were live, then turned serious: “Go ahead, look for yourself,” he told his subscribers. “You’ll probably find that you’ve been spied on, too. Ed Snowden was a creep, a criminal leftist and a turncoat, but he was right about government surveillance. That’s where the political right and left come together, folks. Not to kiss and make up, but to kick the government’s sneaky ass.”

He let those words sink in, imagining the NSA files cascading down across the country like the braided sparkling streams that ran into the lake. He felt as if he’d just thrown another touchdown pass to “Bones” Jackson, his tight end his senior year. They’d tolerated each other. Bones, a junior college transfer, had shaken his head when he’d learned the white quarterback hailed from Aryan Nations country. But business was business, and big-time college football was nothing if not business. Vinko slid his chair forward and resumed his tap-tap-tapping. “If I can access this info, America’s enemies can, too. Your government can’t protect your borders and they can’t protect your most private information. Enemies could target any one of you, and every one of you is important to them. They have your home address, where you work, the schools your children attend. The NSA has it all. Your bank records, data on your phone calls. They’ve cracked your encryption codes, scooped up your text messages, IP addresses, webcam images, and even your online games. THEY KNOW EVERYTHING ABOUT YOU. And now they’re targeting me. The NSA took me down this morning.” He hadn’t confirmed that yet, but blaming the agency was too easy to pass up. “But they couldn’t keep me down, and they can’t keep you down, either. Not if we stay strong and fight back. They have plenty to answer for.”

He uploaded more video of bombings already familiar to his followers. “Look at Liberty Square. Look at Turner Field in Atlanta, King of Prussia Mall in Pennsylvania. Those surveillance cameras tell the whole sorry story, don’t they?

“It’s time your friends and family and neighbors opened their eyes just like you. They’ll see that the dark-skinned hordes we’ve been trying to cull for years just keep coming.

“Ammo up, America! Ammo up!”

Three minutes later, just as he was about to begin his forensic study of this morning’s cyberattack, his guardian angel hacked into a highly encrypted communications channel that Vinko reserved for a select few and left him a message: “Lana Elkins took you down.”

While Vinko had been uploading, the guardian angel must have been finishing his own investigation. Lana Elkins made immediate sense to him. She was an infamous NSA contractor who hadn’t been able to keep herself out of the headlines because she’d been so deeply involved in the cyberwars—and kinetic battles — of the past two years, though he had to question her effectiveness lately, given the paltry state of the country’s defenses.

Vinko had long suspected that the reason the NSA used private contractors was they would be less constrained by government surveillance guidelines, in practice if not in law. From what he’d seen, the contractors were basically given a license to create as much cybermayhem as they wanted, much as America’s military snipers and unmanned drones were sanctioned to take out anyone deemed an enemy.

He wondered for fleeting seconds whether Elkins had taken him down and put him back up, toggling to torment him.

Or maybe setting him up somehow.

No matter. He’d fire back at her hard and fast by using the most fundamental threat of all, the one that wasn’t written into government guidelines for spying and hacking. The lone threat that always worked.

His grandfather and great-grandfather had known all about it. They had both been members of the Ustase, an organization of violent extremists who formed the backbone of the Nazi puppet state of Croatia. Both the Ustase and their German backers knew what you had to do to Serbs, Jews, Roma, and communists. You had to exterminate them like so much vermin — upwards of one hundred thousand harvested during those war years. Then they buried them in pits or on the banks of the Sava and Una Rivers, where flooding periodically still unearthed their bones to this day.

Vinko’s grandfather had been nostalgic about those years, especially the way he’d played the intelligence game to maximum advantage. Once the Ustase reign had been defeated, he’d provided information on the communists overrunning Yugoslavia to the Americans. In return, the country’s fledgling CIA had given his family safe haven in northern Idaho.

Before his grandfather died from lymphoma, he’d told his young grandson that the Muslims were worse than the Jews. “Back during the war we had to put up with those ragheads, but we hated them. We never would have put up with their shit now, not with what they’re doing.”

An angry man, even while dying, though the seven-year-old Vinko had been more confused than convinced by the old man’s words. But he’d noticed his father listening in, nodding the whole time.

Then, when Vinko was nine, his dad had walked him down to the lake, as he had many times for an afternoon of fishing. But that day was different. After casting his line, he’d gestured to the majesty of the mountains and told his son that he deeply loved their home. “The CIA knew what they were doing when they moved Grandpa to the mountains. It’s ninety-nine percent pure.”

Vinko hadn’t known what his father meant, either.

“Look at the water, boy.”

Vinko peered at its smooth surface and saw his reflection.

“Your face is white as the clouds, isn’t it? Just like everyone else you see around here.”

Vinko understood. He’d never known anybody who wasn’t white.

They’d fished until sundown. After gathering up their gear, his father told him to look at the water again. The blood-red colors had appeared, darkening the boy’s face.

“You’re no longer white. That’s what’s going to happen if we let the sun set on America. The white will disappear, and we’ll pay for it with blood.”

His father had been right. The men in his family had all known that the most important threat of all wasn’t a gun or a knife, or even the mongrel races raging to get everything that belonged to whites. But it was all about blood.

Vinko began dishing it out by posting a full-color photo of Lana Elkins. Her bio as well. Then the address for CyberFortress, along with a photo and the address of her home. Next, he offered maps of her possible routes to and from work.

“Know your enemies,” he wrote. “She attacked me today.”

But he was hardly through. Now for the final stroke. He added a picture of Emma Elkins, Lana’s daughter, and another shot, an especially incendiary one of the young woman with her boyfriend. He added their bios, too, and the name of their high school. Their routes to and from school.

Tap-tap-tapping into a mother’s greatest fear, which was also Vinko’s burning hope: that the photo of the girl and her boyfriend would galvanize his followers, even the ones with half a brain. But in case they had any doubt about his intentions, he posted his two most persuasive words right below the smiling faces of the two high school kids:

“Ammo up!”