"c331" - читать интересную книгу автора (Burt Andrew - Noontide Night)

10:48 A.M., Tuesday, March 14, 2000
Washington, D.C.

Zach took a 2-liter bottle of Mountain Dew from the small fridge under the team's desktop and guzzled a swig. "Woo!" He shook his head like a dog drying off. "Jade, you in yet?" Jade hammered away at her keyboard. "Just 'bout." The team was breaking into a telephone switch in Baghdad. The switch allegedly lived in a hardened bunker, and was impervious to conventional weaponry. The Iraqi hackers on the other side had not, apparently, had time to close all the software holes in their own systems and like many places, had local dialin lines for diagnostics and emergency access. This one had a fancy VPN—Virtual Private Network, designed to ensure security. Or as Zach called them, referring to what happened when they were hacked, Virtually Public Networks. The net lag for typing was terrible, but Jade had poked her keyboard into a crack in this switch. "Okay, we're in." Morgan had been relegated to "over the shoulder" duty, namely, watching the system to see if anyone in Baghdad noticed their intrusion. He mainly ran the same status checking commands over and over. "Their admin's on, but half an hour idle time. We're clear." Nobody was watching at the moment. He ran the same commands again and again as rapidly as his mouse could paste them into the window. Chaos being far easier to create than order, it shouldn't have taken the crew long to disable the system. They wanted to do a thorough job, however, to maximize the length of time before the Iraqis discovered it had been tampered with; and longer to repair the damage. Simply crashing the box wasn't enough. Their best bet was to silently trash the data and software so the problems didn't appear to come from this switch. That took time. Sasha uploaded one of the scrambling programs that Morgan wrote, and Zach ran it. It bombed. "God fucking damnit! Morgan, you're worthless!" Zach typed onto the screen, "Morgan Hyland is a worthless sack of shit." Sasha commented, "Harsh." Morgan looked over and frowned. Every keystroke and mouse click the group typed was monitored by auditors. The auditors were usually Elite who'd been demoted from mission status, and thus hungry to prove their competence. Checks and balances. From secret locations they watched every mission real-time and in replay, looking to find someone messing up. Zach's comment, which was otherwise unprocessable as commands to the Iraqi computer system, was typed specifically for the eyes of the auditors. Zach went ahead and hit return anyway; some auditor might miss it if he backspaced over it. The Iraqi switch replied with "Morgan: not found." Zach snorted. Morgan scrambled to fix the typo in his program, did so, and fed it over to Sasha for uploading again. What did they expect, perfection? It was awfully damned hard to test programs when you didn't have a sample of the machine in the lab to test on. Under other circumstances, he'd relish this kind of environment. Trading barbs and being fiercely competitive was ordinarily his manna. But worrying about Jeremy stripped any fun there might have been here. The damnable office moms hadn't been able to find any more information out. At lunch he met up with Rizzuto. Rizzuto chewed on a ham on rye. "The Lieutenant is not a happy man. The CyberCorps Elite is a cutthroat organization, am I right? I know nothing about computers, so pardon me if I say that getting demoted to something like the motor pool is not so bad. Some of us can never aspire to rise above it." "This isn't about demotions," Morgan said. "It's more of a family thing." "No woman is worth dying for," Rizzuto said around his sandwich. "It isn't about a woman." "No guy is worth dying for, then. Hey, suit yourself. All I gotta say is, if you want an accident, Rizzuto can arrange it. You know, it ain't easy to arrange an accidental death. Lots of risk. But ol' Rizzuto would take this on himself. You name the place and time, and Rizzuto can squash your head between a HUMVEE and a brick wall, make your head pop like a watermelon. Sqplssh! I wouldn't trust anyone else to get it right. Name the spot." Morgan said he'd get back to him, and went back to his post, slightly queasy.

back | next home


Chapter 33.1

10:48 A.M., Tuesday, March 14, 2000
Washington, D.C.

Zach took a 2-liter bottle of Mountain Dew from the small fridge under the team's desktop and guzzled a swig. "Woo!" He shook his head like a dog drying off. "Jade, you in yet?" Jade hammered away at her keyboard. "Just 'bout." The team was breaking into a telephone switch in Baghdad. The switch allegedly lived in a hardened bunker, and was impervious to conventional weaponry. The Iraqi hackers on the other side had not, apparently, had time to close all the software holes in their own systems and like many places, had local dialin lines for diagnostics and emergency access. This one had a fancy VPN—Virtual Private Network, designed to ensure security. Or as Zach called them, referring to what happened when they were hacked, Virtually Public Networks. The net lag for typing was terrible, but Jade had poked her keyboard into a crack in this switch. "Okay, we're in." Morgan had been relegated to "over the shoulder" duty, namely, watching the system to see if anyone in Baghdad noticed their intrusion. He mainly ran the same status checking commands over and over. "Their admin's on, but half an hour idle time. We're clear." Nobody was watching at the moment. He ran the same commands again and again as rapidly as his mouse could paste them into the window. Chaos being far easier to create than order, it shouldn't have taken the crew long to disable the system. They wanted to do a thorough job, however, to maximize the length of time before the Iraqis discovered it had been tampered with; and longer to repair the damage. Simply crashing the box wasn't enough. Their best bet was to silently trash the data and software so the problems didn't appear to come from this switch. That took time. Sasha uploaded one of the scrambling programs that Morgan wrote, and Zach ran it. It bombed. "God fucking damnit! Morgan, you're worthless!" Zach typed onto the screen, "Morgan Hyland is a worthless sack of shit." Sasha commented, "Harsh." Morgan looked over and frowned. Every keystroke and mouse click the group typed was monitored by auditors. The auditors were usually Elite who'd been demoted from mission status, and thus hungry to prove their competence. Checks and balances. From secret locations they watched every mission real-time and in replay, looking to find someone messing up. Zach's comment, which was otherwise unprocessable as commands to the Iraqi computer system, was typed specifically for the eyes of the auditors. Zach went ahead and hit return anyway; some auditor might miss it if he backspaced over it. The Iraqi switch replied with "Morgan: not found." Zach snorted. Morgan scrambled to fix the typo in his program, did so, and fed it over to Sasha for uploading again. What did they expect, perfection? It was awfully damned hard to test programs when you didn't have a sample of the machine in the lab to test on. Under other circumstances, he'd relish this kind of environment. Trading barbs and being fiercely competitive was ordinarily his manna. But worrying about Jeremy stripped any fun there might have been here. The damnable office moms hadn't been able to find any more information out. At lunch he met up with Rizzuto. Rizzuto chewed on a ham on rye. "The Lieutenant is not a happy man. The CyberCorps Elite is a cutthroat organization, am I right? I know nothing about computers, so pardon me if I say that getting demoted to something like the motor pool is not so bad. Some of us can never aspire to rise above it." "This isn't about demotions," Morgan said. "It's more of a family thing." "No woman is worth dying for," Rizzuto said around his sandwich. "It isn't about a woman." "No guy is worth dying for, then. Hey, suit yourself. All I gotta say is, if you want an accident, Rizzuto can arrange it. You know, it ain't easy to arrange an accidental death. Lots of risk. But ol' Rizzuto would take this on himself. You name the place and time, and Rizzuto can squash your head between a HUMVEE and a brick wall, make your head pop like a watermelon. Sqplssh! I wouldn't trust anyone else to get it right. Name the spot." Morgan said he'd get back to him, and went back to his post, slightly queasy.


back | next home