Chapter Two

Rick took a drink and grimaced at the bitter brew that the break room called coffee. He was on his fifth cup of the day and the likelihood of him sleeping tonight diminished with every sip. However, the hundreds of milligrams of caffeine flooding his system made the thousands of lines of code flying up the screen of his laptop seem to come into greater focus. He was a man on a mission and nothing was going to stop him from solving this Oracle fiasco tonight. The tools for a successful nocturnal mission were the caffeine and the music slamming its way through the Bluetooth speaker he kept hidden in his desk for after hours. Rick had no desire to be subjected to another meeting with the brass such as earlier.

Suddenly the lights flashed on and off several times. Rick jumped up from his seat training his gaze on the door to his office while instinctively reaching for his weapon.

“Good thing you keep your Sig locked in your desk otherwise my ass would be grass.”

“What the fuck, Masterson?” he yelled.

“Hey, I had to get your attention somehow! You were about to be sucked into whatever’s on your screen like Flynn! By the way, can we turn down the music?”

“Jarvis, stop music.” Rick commanded.

The instant silence sucked the energy of his office out like a deep space void.

“Jarvis? Seriously? You are such a nerd. How the fuck did you get it to do that? I thought those things only had four wake words, and that wasn’t one of them.”

“I just used an API to code a new skill and made ‘Jarvis’ the awake utterance.”

“Of course you did. Because that’s totally normal for someone to do after shopping on the jungle website.”

Rick let his expression speak for him.

“Got it. Anyway, now we can talk without inducing laryngitis. I felt the bass rattle the doors down the hall, then came in to find you sitting in the dark manically typing away on that machine. You rarely dive that far into the deep unless there’s something really wrong.”

“And you thought that the best thing to do would be to distract me? Makes perfect sense.”

Rick stood with his arms crossed staring at his best friend across the room. He and Masterson had been tight since they were both baby greens at boot camp. Over the years their assignments had occasionally placed them on the same base, but regardless of where in the world they served, they’d kept in touch. When Rick had come out of the closet after his switch to cyber command and walked the same sidewalks as his longtime friend, some had even thought that the two of them were a thing, but Masterson’s magnet only attracted the opposite sex.

“Well, yeah. It’s my sworn duty as your best friend to make sure you don’t get taken out by the programs.”

“Okay, enough with the Tron references. You know I think we’re officially the old guys on base. I made a comment about Goonies the other day and Kela looked at me like I’d lost my mind.”

“Hmm, what was the reference?”

Rick walked around his desk and propped his ass on the top while Masterson plopped his in the chair a couple of feet away.

“I was in here working and might have been talking to myself—”

“Which you often do.”

“Kiss my ass. It helps me think. Anyway, he said something about my head being in the clouds, and I simply said, no it’s stuck in the basement.”

“Vague, but any true connoisseur of epic cinema should get it.”

“I know! Then he asked me what a floppy disk was. You do not know how hard it was not to roll my eyes and tell him to get the fuck out of my office.”

“Shit, it really is official then. I was hoping it was just me.”

Rick inspected Masterson. A closer look than usual. The years had been kind. Sure his blond hair was lighter than it used to be and there were some new creases near his buddy’s blue eyes, but Tony still had the whipcord frame he’d always had.

“So are you going to keep stalling or tell me the real reason for the late-night visit?”

“I’m not re-upping, Rick.”

His mouth was drier than the Registan Desert. His ears buzzed with more than his normal tinnitus, and his hands shook as if his blood sugar dropped sixty points.

“What?” he whispered.

“I… I’m just… tired, man. The bureaucratic bullshit seems to get worse every year, and I don’t have the patience like you do. The Army has been the best decision I ever made, but I want something else now. There’s this company in San Diego that’s been headhunting me for a while now. I’ve been putting them off since I still had time until I reached my twenty. But they’ve been persistent and sweetening the pot ever since. I said nothing, but I was moments away from submitting my DD2648 a couple of years ago. But then I found out that I was being transferred here and I… shit man, I wanted my last post to be where you were.”

“I don’t know whether I should hug you or slap you upside the head. Obviously, I support you, I always would have.”

“I know that, and hey this way you can come visit me in sunny San Diego. I actually found a nice little place close to your folks.”

“So, what you’re really saying is that when I go visit the rents I have a standing reservation on your couch, and won’t be subjected to sleeping on a flower-covered duvet with ruffled pillows?”

“When was the last time you slept on a couch?”

“Last weekend when I passed out while working on personnel reviews.”

Tony chuckled, “And how did your back feel the next morning?”

“My cricks had cricks, and I walked like Quasimodo.”

“Exactly, which is why I, in my infinite wisdom, got a two-bedroom condo.”

Rick pulled Tony up out of the chair and hugged him hard. “I love you.”

“I know you do, now put me down you fucking ginger-headed behemoth. Jesus Christ, thirty-eight years old and you’re still built like a brick shithouse.”

Rick preened for a moment. He was proud of the fact that he’d stayed in as good of shape as he was. “It definitely takes twice as much effort to stay this way than it did ten years ago. You know I can’t remember the last time I had Mamma Roma’s lasagna.”

“Save the date for December eighteenth. That’s when my terminal leave is up and I’m officially retired. We’re going out to celebrate and we’ll both stuff ourselves with ooey-gooey carbs and drink red wine till they have to roll us out the door to our Lyft.”

“You’re on. Now get the fuck out of my office and let me get back to work.”

“Still having issues with Oracle? I can’t believe installing the scrambling chips on the tablets didn’t work. That’s like next-level futuristic cyber defense shit.”

“Right? You know it sounds crazy but…” Rick covered his Bluetooth speaker’s mic with his palm. “It’s like we really are dealing with some kind of AI infiltration and not a traditional hacker.”

Tony leaned in and whispered, “Why are you covering up your speaker?”

“Because he’s always listening.”

“Okay buddy. It’s time for you to lay off on the caffeine before I come in here next time and you’re wearing a tinfoil hat.”

“Hey asshole, I’m Army proud, not some Space Force nut job.”

“Keep telling yourself that if it helps you sleep at night.”

Tony may not be that far off but given the phone call Rick had earlier and the evidence he’d thought he’d seen in the coding lines before Masterson had interrupted, he didn’t think he was being as ridiculous as a Hollywood movie. He felt like he’d been moments away from figuring something out. It was right there, but he just didn’t quite see it. Almost like ghosting images on old, rerecorded film.

“You take away my caffeine and my Sig will be the least of your worries. Now shoo!”

Masterson held up his hands and backed out of the room slowly. “Try to actually leave the office at some point tonight, okay?”

Rick waved him away as he turned on his music again and sat down in his chair before snapping open an energy drink. The disgusting flavors slithered over his tongue but he knew it would keep him going for at least another couple of hours. The lights flicked off and Rick smiled. Tony had remembered his preferred method of working late at night.

“Now, come to me, said the spider to the fly.”

“Oh my fucking God, I found it.”

Rick’s fingers flew over the keyboard as he copied the lines of embedded code for the source of the breach in Oracle. It really was terrifyingly brilliant. He almost didn’t find it at all, which clearly was the intent, but the asshole responsible had messed up one tiny line of code. An inconsequential non-command line that was used as a part of the framework for the actual integration between the offsite operations and system server. If Rick hadn’t had every bit of this system burned into the back of his retinas, he wouldn’t have caught it.

“Kela!” he yelled through his closed door.

He heard his office door jerk open, but he refused to look up from the screen in fear that he would lose sight of his target. “Get Lt. Carpenter’s office on the line. I need to see him right away.”

“Yes, sir!”

“I got you, you bastard.”

Rick had barely left the office for three days. His team had been working their asses off trying to write interception code to stop the hemorrhaging of data, but Rick had placed himself in charge of finding the source. And now he’d finally done it. He got a whiff of himself and grimaced.

“On second thought Kela, see if I can get a meeting in a couple hours. I need to shower and change into fresh ACUs before presenting myself to the almighty.”

Rick transferred everything he had to a jump drive and sent his files up to the secure cloud before logging out of the system. He could clean up on base since he always kept a change of clothes in his office for days just like this. It was a good thing he was single because if he’d had a partner waiting for him at home… well, he probably wouldn’t still be there given Rick’s propensity for working late and often. He didn’t have time to go home, but he could make it over to the Gaffney Fitness Center to clean up. It was still early enough that it was only open to active-duty service members.

“The lieutenant’s aide said he could see you at eleven hundred hours, sir.”

“Perfect.” He ejected the jump drive and shut down his computer. Snagging the spare set of clothes from his lateral filing and storage cabinet, he ran from his office. “Wish me luck!” he yelled, running from the office.

As soon as Rick pushed his way through the exterior doors to his building, he came face-to-face with a pair of MPs.

“Sorry, excuse me.”

“Sergeant Major Davis?”

“Yes?”

“Please come with us.”

Rick rocked back on his heels and gripped his jump drive harder. “I’m sorry?”

“We have orders to bring you before Colonel Riggs immediately.”

“What for?”

“I’m sorry, sir. We can’t say anything further. Please come with us.”

Oh fuck, this is not good.

“I need to contact my CO. I have a meeting with Lieutenant Carpenter at eleven hundred.”

“Sir, I’m going to tell you one more time and then we’ll need to detain you.”

“Okay, okay. I don’t know what this is all about, but I’ll come so we can get everything straightened out.”

He thought he was about to feel the sharp clap of cuffs, but the MPs turned and started walking away. It appeared he wasn’t under arrest, yet. For the life of him he couldn’t figure out why the colonel would have a hard-on for him. He’d had no reason to interact with the commander of the 780th Military Intelligence Brigade. He was Carpenter’s boss’s boss. Why would he even be aware of Rick’s existence within the ranks?

The MPs headed for a base vehicle. One of them held a back door open and his expression clearly showed that Rick shouldn’t think of trying anything funny. He didn’t have any intention of planning some kind of master escape, hell maybe this was a good thing. Maybe getting face-to-face with Col. Riggs was jumping up a few levels of red tape. Now that Rick knew how to solve the problem, they needed to develop a process for remediation as soon as possible.

Rick’s offices were in the USCYBERCOM building but the colonel’s offices were in the headquarters for the National Security Agency. It only took about ten minutes to get there but felt almost a world away. At least with his escort, he didn’t have to worry about finding parking. As they entered the massive building, Rick felt the eyes of every military and civilian employee trained on him. It was as if he was under a microscope, which was not a good feeling given that people who worked in this building were suspicious by nature and expected all strangers who entered their kingdom to be guilty of the next major act of treason.

Of course, he knew this was all a head game by Col. Riggs. A show of superiority and power. Well fine. Rick had nothing to fear. He was damn good at his job, and he knew it. He’d served his country well and his file read as any exemplary service member’s should. That didn’t stop his hands from sweating just a little. Rick tried to straighten his blouse and cap as much as possible. He hadn’t had the chance to get cleaned up. The MPs came to a stop outside a pair of double doors. A sharp knock later they opened, and Rick came face-to-face with Col. Riggs’s aide, Lieutenant Osgood. Rick and both the MPs snapped to attention and saluted.

“At ease, gentlemen.” He looked at the MPs on either side of Rick “You are dismissed.” Then those dark flat eyes trained on Rick. “Sergeant Major Davis, please follow me. Colonel Riggs would like a word with you.”

Rick followed the lieutenant through the doors. When they reached the inner sanctum he saw not only Col. Riggs, but his CO Lt. Carpenter as well as another man. Civilian obviously, but he definitely wore an air of command. All of Rick’s warning bells were clanging.

Intimidation level has reached DEFCON two. Danger Will Robinson. Danger!

“Thank you for joining us, Sergeant Major.”

Like I had much of a choice. “Of course, sirs.”

“Lt. Carpenter and Special Agent King, the NSA liaison to the Army Criminal Investigation Division, asked for this meeting. As I understand it, youve been in charge of determining the source of the breach that is affecting Oracle, correct?”

“Yes, sir. In fact, I asked my assistant to request a meeting with Lieutenant Carpenter just this morning after achieving a breakthrough.” He looked at his CO. “I was under the impression that we were to meet at eleven hundred, sir?” He turned back to Col. Riggs. “I was not aware you were involved with the investigation, sir.”

“Hmmm, yes. Well, I would be very interested to learn what you were planning to present. It may be pertinent to our questions. As it so happens, Special Agent King and his team have been investigating a separate issue and came across some very concerning evidence that features you.”

Rick was sure that his heart left a bruise by slamming rapidly against his chest.

“I don’t understand, sir.”

Carpenter took several steps forward, and Rick had to force himself not to go on the defensive. The door-kicking infantry may think cyber geeks were pushovers, but Rick loved to disabuse them of that misconception. Just ask anybody who’d been up against him on the training grounds.

“Cut the crap, Davis! I’ve seen the evidence; you’ve been stalling on finding a solution to the Oracle problem just to give your own terror campaign more time to do its dirty work.”

“Sir, I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’ve been working night and day to find the source of the problem. You can ask anyone on my team. I’ve barely left the office for the last three days. This morning I finally identified—”

“Are you calling me a liar?”

“No, sir! But if I could show you—”

“I don’t want to see your falsified data. Special Agent King has shown me everything I needed to prove you’re just as big a son of a bitch as I’ve always suspected.”

What in the fuck was going on? Rick knew that he and his CO had never been best friends, but he did not know the guy held such hatred for him.

“Jared, you may not want to see what Davis found, but I am curious,” Colonel Riggs said.

His CO looked as if he was chewing on glass as he acquiesced to his superior officer. Rick looked over at Special Agent King and saw a slight nod.

“Is there a terminal I can use? I have everything I discovered here on my jump drive.” He held up the small device.

Special Agent King waved him over to a table not far away. It held a smart terminal. Rick wasn’t taking anything for granted so he confirmed someone had connected it to the NSA secure network before plugging in the jump drive. The large monitor on the wall switched over to the VPN application that allowed him to connect to the Army domain. All officers in cyber operations had reciprocity access to both Army and NSA domains. It made briefs between the two government organizations easier, but Rick specifically needed access to the Army domain as the NSA didn’t have access to the Oracle server. Compartmentalization and need to know was still very much a daily path they all walked. He then logged in under his username. Three pairs of eyes watched his every keystroke. He suspected that Riggs had eaten sauerkraut for lunch and King was a coffee enthusiast. Carpenter had on his usual amount of nauseating cologne. Rick opened the file directory he was looking for and brought up the mapping of the Oracle platform.

“Okay, this is the basic operation of the system. I don’t want to assume your operational knowledge of Oracle. Do I need to give a high-level briefing?”

“Just show us what you think you found, Davis.” Col. Riggs said.

“Yes, sir.” He opened the file on his jump drive where he’d copied the script earlier. He didn’t want to change the active program until he’d brought this to his superiors. But as soon as his screen filled with lines of code, he knew something was wrong. “What the hell?” he whispered.

“What’s wrong?” King asked.

Rick pointed to the screen. “This control flow is all wrong. This is not what I copied out of the host server earlier. I don’t understand it. It was a simple copy and paste so I could present this to Lt. Carpenter. Let me log into the server and show you what I’m talking about in the live program. Now that I know what I’m looking for—”

Lt. Carpenter maneuvered himself so that he was in front of the screen, effectively blocking everyone else’s view.

“Sergeant Major, that gobbledygook on the screen means nothing to me anyway. Just give it to me in simple English. What do you think you found?”

He looked at Col. Riggs. “There is a loop that appears in the code whenever a very specific sequence of commands is started. It completely alters the function so that say… a supply officer submits a request for a resupply of 5.56 rounds for the M4A1. The loop alters the request so that what’s delivered is actually completely different from what’s requested. It could change the request to look like 9mm, hell it could change it so that the supply clerks thought the unit needed toilet paper. The problem has been that the alterations are never the same. And when we try to go back and review historical data on the server it’s gone like it never happened.”

“Yes, we know and now that we’ve tracked your little side job we know why.”

“Lt. Carpenter, I don’t know what you’re talking about! Sir.”

“Jared, I will not tell you again. Let him finish. Okay, so the requests are being altered. How?”

“In our departmental briefing earlier this week we thought the program was almost acting like AI, altering itself with an almost cognitive ability. Well, what I found was similar. But instead of the program suddenly becoming autonomous, the loop I discovered inserts a function that alters the original command, but the kicker is that almost as quickly as the alteration appears it reverts to the original in the history logs. The only reason I found it at all is because I was monitoring the live program, searching for inconsistencies instead of looking at the logs.”

Col. Riggs looked at King. “How does this information affect what you found, or does it?”

King nodded to the terminal. “May I?”

Lt. Carpenter stepped aside. “Do you know what you’re looking at there? I didn’t know Army cops were trained in how to read computer code.”

“Hmm, ones who also have a master’s in computer forensics from MIT do.” King typed in a series of commands to log Rick out of both the Army domain and the VPN. He then repeated the same measures using his credentials. After navigating several file directories King stepped back from the smart terminal and walked forward to the monitor. “Sergeant Major Davis and I happen to speak the same language. My team and I have been working to track code changes in several Army cyber-based systems, outside logistics.” He looked over at Rick. “Specifically, Battlehawk.”

“The new medical drone they’ve been testing?”

“Yes, during one of its flights in Virginia the autonomous flight system changed course on its own. The pilot’s systems still appeared as if the drone was on the correct flight path. We have this on recordings, but in reality the physical drone had altered course and was returning to base.”

“When did this happen?”

“Like you don’t know! It was your credentials that King found in the log.” Carpenter said.

“With all due respect Lieutenant, that makes no sense. I have no training in piloting drones. The closest I’ve ever come to piloting anything is a paper airplane in the fourth grade.”

“And that is why my team felt it prudent to speak with you, Sergeant Major.”

Col. Riggs pinched the bridge of his nose. “Okay, clearly we have more questions than answers at this point.”

“I agree. Davis, do you think using a source code tracing would allow you to identify the execution to track the variable values as they change and determine the output of the code?” King asked.

“In theory, but when I watched the live code it moved so fast I don’t think using paper and pencil is a workable method. If I had the time, I could work with some other C17s to write a trace program—”

Lt. Carpenter’s face turned an ugly shade of red as he yelled, “You, Sergeant Major, aren’t getting anywhere near another U.S. Army owned piece of technology ever again! Special Agent King, I order you to arrest him.”

“What!”

“Jared.”

Agent King held up his hand. “Everyone quiet.” The sudden silence of the room reverberated off the walls louder than the yelling of a moment ago. “Thank you. Now, first... Lt. Carpenter, I don’t take orders from you. I am a civilian investigator. Second, even in the Army there is such a thing as due process. Even if I wanted to, I don’t have enough evidence to arrest Sergeant Major Davis.”

“What the fuck for?” Rick looked over at Col. Riggs. “Pardon my language, sir.”

Col. Riggs gave a slight nod but didn’t speak.

“The two of you just proved that he has the ability to manipulate everything from what ammunition our troops in the field receive to hijacking lifesaving drones. I warned you Martin. All this cyber bullshit was going to bring this Army to its knees. You put me in this position to keep it all in check, well here we are now.”

Rick felt a rage unlike anything he’d ever experienced overcome him. It was only because of years of ingrained training that he didn’t let out a roar of Godzilla proportions. King looked over at Rick, his face saying words his mouth couldn’t.

“On the contrary, sir. I believe we just proved that Sergeant Major Davis may be one of the few people who can help my team and his solve our mutual problems. I came to you as a courtesy because you are Sergeant Major Davis’s commanding officer. What I specifically said was I need to speak to him as the ranking cyber operations officer. It is you who is escalating this scenario. Now,” he looked over at Rick, “I’m sorry but I need to ask you to come with me. There are questions and I do need answers, which I’m expecting you to provide.”

Rick stared at Special Agent King. The man seemed intelligent and had a level head, unlike his asshole of a commanding officer. Rick didn’t know what the fuck was going on, but he had a feeling that going with King was the only way he had any hope of figuring it out. All of this had taken place in the office of one of the highest-ranking officers at Cyber Command. Col. Riggs had the reputation of being fair, but he did not bend the rules for anyone. Allegations of this caliber were career killers. It didn’t matter if they eventually found the accused innocent; the stain followed them for the rest of their career. Apparently, Carpenter would not be happy until Rick found his way to a cell at Leavenworth. Well fuck him, Rick would not let them see his anguish of watching twenty-one years of service get flushed down the toilet. He was going to march out of this office with his head held high.

Rick snapped a salute to Col. Riggs. It galled him to do so but he repeated the salute to Lt. Carpenter. The man held a higher-ranking office, even if Rick refused to consider him superior. He turned and presented his arms for shackles.

“That won’t be necessary Sergeant Major.” King placed Rick’s jump drive in an evidence bag. “You are not under arrest, yet. For now, we are just going to have a friendly conversation.”