CHAPTER 7
With the exception of satellite imagery and stealth drone overflights, there wasn’t much known about the goings-on in the countries formerly known as Iraq, Syria, Libya and the Caliphate’s eastern annex, Pakistan. The border controls were tight, to keep the Islamic radicals out of the rest of the world and to keep the perceived decadence of the rest of the world out of the Caliphate. To make matters worse, human intelligence, spies or informants, were hard to come by. Anyone remotely sympathetic to anti-Caliphate thinking was identified and summarily executed. Daily beheadings were commonplace in villages throughout the Caliphate, so much so that many of the residents there had long forgotten that life didn’t used to be that way for their twentieth- and early twenty-first century ancestors.
For a country that prided itself on living in so-called eleventh century peace and harmony, the Caliphate’s leadership was not so naïve as to assume that they owed their continued existence to anything other than the Pakistani nuclear weapons that the Caliphate had inherited when Pakistan allied itself with Allah and the Caliph. In order to maintain that nuclear deterrent, not all of the Caliphate’s citizens could live in an eleventh century world, lest the rest of the world roll across their borders and smite them.
As important as their nuclear weapons were to securing their existence, they were not singular. By the combined technical talents of the Caliphate, supported by as much design information as they could steal, and with the help of the country that used to be called North Korea, they had also developed intercontinental ballistic missiles capable of carrying nuclear bombs to any place on Earth. Amir Attia strode with purpose into the missile base in the Iraqi desert.
Attia was educated in the West. As a student at Georgia Tech, he had earned his Ph.D. in aerospace engineering and even worked for a few years at an American aerospace company before he felt compelled by Allah to forsake his decadent western life and return to his native Iraq so that he could more directly serve God. It didn’t hurt that he was offered an obscene salary to take his American-acquired missile design expertise and transfer that to the Caliphate. And then, of course, there were the concubines . . .
But Attia wasn’t thinking of his status and sexual appetites today. No, today was a day of finishing the alterations of the Scimitar rocket that would carry a small, but very powerful nuclear weapon into space and toward the demonic ship that had invaded the solar system. The Caliph had decreed that the alien ship was from Satan and that it was every good Muslim’s duty to see it destroyed. And the responsibility for seeing the decree carried out fell to Amir Attia, the man who had developed the rockets capable of hitting the east coast of the United States, forcing the Americans into a stalemate that allowed the continued existence of the Caliphate. Attia knew his rocket could be modified to carry out its new mission; he just wasn’t sure there was enough time.
Attia walked through the dimly lit halls of the concrete bunker that was buried under the sands of the Iraqi desert toward the control room where the latest trajectory data was being uploaded to the missile simulator. His engineering team was working at a feverish pace, accomplishing a software development installation on a flight system that normally required weeks to months in a matter of a few days. Tonight they were to have the system ready for a hardware-in-the-loop system test that was the final required step before uploading the software to the missile and launching it. If the schedule held, the Scimitar would be on its way toward the alien demon sometime tomorrow afternoon.
Attia strode toward his assistant, Iyad Shadid, another Georgia Tech graduate who had followed his friend Amir back to Iraq and the Caliphate after receiving his Master’s Degree in Electrical Engineering. Iyad, unlike Attia, was a true believer, and his zealousness sometimes got ahead of his engineering judgement—something of which Attia had to remind himself frequently when he heard news from his long-time friend and companion. Iyad looked up as his friend approached and began to move away from the computer interface he had moments before been engrossed in.
“Amir, we have a problem,” said Iyad in a tone of voice that Amir didn’t hear his friend use very often. He sounded not just concerned, but worried. His brow was furrowed and Attia could see the tell-tale twitch in his eyelid that was a sure sign of his friend’s stress.
“Tell me about it,” said Attia.
“About ten minutes ago, we finished uploading the final version of the flight control software and began the verification process. Moments after we completed the upload, the whole system shut down. Completely.”
“Have you rebooted the system?”
“We are in the middle of that now. What worries me is that the failure is not what is supposed to happen if there is a coding error. As you know, the system is supposed to enter safe mode when there is an error. It is not supposed to shut down completely. I have never seen the system do this before.”
“Get the reboot finished and try again. The clock is ticking and let’s hope this is just a simple upload error. Both our heads will roll, probably literally, if we can’t get this problem fixed before the launch window closes.”
“We’ll get it working. On that you have my word. Allah be praised!”
“Allah be praised!” replied Attia, with feigned optimism. He was seriously worrying about losing his head if this missile launch didn’t go off as planned and work one hundred percent perfectly. The Caliph didn’t like failure and Attia’s status would do little to save him from the legendary wrath of the Caliph if he did.
Six thousand five hundred miles away in a shiny new earthquake-proof, glass and steel office tower in downtown Nanchang, China, a group of three women and eight men, all but one Chinese, sat around a conference table eating guan chang and tang er duo, and drinking various types of tea. They were all busily making small talk, about the things that young, prosperous people all over the world talk about: music, the latest virtual reality immersive, and, of course, dating. What they didn’t talk about was their work. The thirty-five-year-old leader of the group, Lijuan Tseung, was the eldest.
Lijuan was brilliant. She excelled in mathematics and science at a very young age and was quickly identified by her teachers as gifted. Her coal black hair and delicate features could have been used as the genetic template for a host of newly-conceived and genetically-modified babies across China, but no one would ever have the chance to see her attractiveness. Lijuan considered her physical appearance to be an annoyance; she wasn’t the least bit interested in men, or women for that matter, as both were a distraction from her passion: computer programming. She hadn’t been genetically modified for superior intelligence, but rather had acquired it the old-fashioned way—in her mother’s womb. She was completely dedicated to her work and that dedication had quickly led to her being fast-tracked through college, graduating at fifteen. She received her Ph.D. in Mathematical Physics when she was just nineteen. Wasting no time, the Chinese government recruited her to work in their cyberwarfare command, through which she was rapidly advancing in her career.
The young men and women that surrounded Lijuan were her handpicked programming team. They were given the task of developing a cyberattack capability against the Caliphate’s nuclear missile launch systems. When they were tasked to develop the worm that now infected the computers at the Caliphate’s missile development complex in Iraq, they thought they were developing a tool that would be used to prevent the Caliphate’s missiles from attacking China. Lijuan hadn’t envisioned that they would have to activate the worm anytime short of an imminent nuclear war. Nevertheless, she put in motion the sequence of events that would cause the worm to do what it was designed to do: paralyze the Caliphate’s nuclear missile capabilities. That was yesterday. Today she was anxiously awaiting confirmation from the worm itself that all had gone as planned—or not. She could not tell her team. That would have been a serious breach of security. They developed the worm but they had no idea if and when it would be used and would likely never know.
“Lijuan, you look distracted. Is anything wrong?” asked Chunhua, also an excellent programmer and mathematician, but one to whom Lijuan was not particularly close.
“No, I’m just thinking, that’s all.”
“Well, you looked like you were a thousand kilometers away. You aren’t usually so distracted during our breaks.”
“Sorry,” she said, thinking about what was likely happening well over a thousand kilometers away and wondering if their creation would be able to do what it was designed to do—and why . . .
“Khara!” swore Iyad, looking at the screen yet again, hoping against hope that what appeared on it moments ago would disappear and be replaced by what was supposed to be displayed there. It had been nearly ten hours since the screens first went blank and he was now running fully on adrenalin and espresso.
“What is it, my friend?” asked Attia.
“This is a cyberattack. Ebn el Metanaka. Someone has infected our computer systems and corrupted all of the flight software.”
“You are sure?”
“I am one hundred percent sure. We engaged the AI debugger shortly after the anomaly manifested. Somehow a worm infected our systems and corrupted nearly everything. Every computer in the missile complex is compromised.”
“Can the AI fix the problem?”
“No. At least not in time. It estimates it will take days to wipe the system clean, screen all of the backup software for the worm, and reinstall everything,” Iyad replied, now allowing his exhaustion to show.
“You said every computer in the complex is compromised. What about the one on the rocket?” asked Attia.
Iyad’s appearance brightened as he sat up and looked up and to the right, activating his newly-operational corneal implant. Attia waited patiently as his friend rapidly moved his eyes from one location to another, triggering a personal computer access grid that only he could see, until finally he looked straight ahead and again made eye contact with Attia.
“The missile on the pad is currently isolated from the flight system computers in the complex. I just shut down its data link to make sure no one could inadvertently connect to it and spread the infection. I don’t know if it is infected, but the AI can find out. If it is not, then we’ll have to find a way to manually upload the final flight trajectories to the onboard flight computer and then run the launch sequence. It should be possible, but right now I’m not sure how we will do it.”
“So, if the AI finds that it isn’t infected, we can upload the clean flight software and have it ready to go?”
“We should be able to. But if it’s also compromised, then we will be back where we started,” said Iyad.
“Do what you can. I’ll go update the supreme commander and let them know we still might get a missile launched in the time window. Allah be praised!”
“Allah be praised!”