CyberWar: World War C Trilogy Book 3

  Selected Praise & Reviews

  MATTHEW MATHER

  “BRILLIANT...”

  —WIRED Magazine on World War C series

  “Creates characters you've instantly known your whole life.”

  —BOING BOING editor Jason Weisberger

  “Relentless pacing…bombshell plot twists.”

  —Publishers Weekly on Dreaming Tree

  “Terrifying because so plausible.”

  —Washington Post bestseller Steven Konkoly

  “Michael Crichton reincarnated.”

  —New York Times bestseller Nicholas Sansbury Smith

  “Not only a great thriller, but a wake up call.”

  — FBI Special Agent Brent Watkins (retired)

  FROM THE AUTHOR

  A sincere thank you to everyone who helped make the World War C series a reality, to all the fans who did early readings, but in particular I would like to thank:

  Barry Matsumori

  Vice-President, SpaceX (former)

  CEO, BridgeSat

  Brent Watkins

  FBI Cyber Investigations

  Special Agent (retired)

  Richard Marshall

  Global Director of Cybersecurity

  US Department of Homeland Security

  Also by Matthew Mather

  DARKNET Standalone Novel

  Part of the World War C series

  ATOPIA Three-book completed series

  Part of the CyberStorm universe

  NOMAD Four-book completed series

  Science Fiction Book of the Year award winner

  POLAR VORTEX Standalone Novel

  Now in development as a limited TV series

  Published by Pallas Publishing

  Copyright © 2020, 2021 by Matthew Mather ULC

  All rights reserved

  CyberWar is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and event and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictiously.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission by the author (except for short quotations used in book reviews or articles).

  isbn // 978-1-987942-16-3 // e-book

  isbn // 978-1-987942-17-0 // paperback

  isbn // 978-1-987942-22-4 // hardcover

  first edition

  Table of Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Prologue

  WELCOME TO PLEASANT Shade, Population 563,” announced a black-and-white sign as Jolene and Travis swept past in the hissing rain.

  “That’s wrong,” Jolene said. “At least two dozen people moved away this year. When are we going to move out? You said we—”

  “Get your feet down from there.” Travis hated it when she stuck her feet up on the dashboard. He leaned over the steering wheel and squinted into the foggy distance. What the heck was that up there? The edge of the tree line shimmered. “Goddamn, Jolene, what did I say?”

  She pouted but slid upright in her seat, then held up her phone. “When are we going to get service back? It’s gotta be against the law to cut us off like this.”

  “It’s out of their control.”

  “‘Their’? You mean, the government?”

  Travis nodded.

  Two days before, GPS service had gone down after a flurry of anti-satellite launches by India and Pakistan. Travis had been in hourly contact with his old special ops unit swapping theories and stories right until the internet and phones stopped working.

  “And why ain’t the TV working no more?”

  “I told you. The anti-satellite attacks.”

  Taking Fox News and HBO and Netflix away at the same time as cell phones? It was like someone had pulled the cord from everyone’s brains the last few days.

  Jolene switched topics. “Did you see how many birds there were on that electrical wire back there? Like hundreds. You ever seen that before?”

  “Might be the rain. Can’t be easy to fly in.”

  The drizzle let up, but the humidity clouded the windshield. Travis leaned forward over the steering wheel to wipe the condensation away from the glass again. Birds ahead? There was a huge flock in the distance, tiny dots in the air.

  “X says that it’s not the anti-satellite attacks,” Jolene mused. “He says the Indians are right. They didn’t launch those attacks. It’s our own government, they’re—”

  “Don’t listen to that garbage, Jolene.” Even with the internet down, somehow the conspiracy theories still flourished. Where was she getting this stuff? She hadn’t stopped talking about this guy “Xenon” the whole day. “Our government is doing all they can.”

  “Can we pull into Todd’s?” Jolene asked. “I need some Marlboros.”

  The Marathon gas station was as close to a center of town as Pleasant Shade had. Three other cars parked out front. Travis flicked on his indicator, slowed, and pulled his pickup next to a Buick—had to be old lady Mel’s—near the entrance. Jolene got out and sauntered in through the door, swinging her butt in her cut-off jeans the way Travis liked. He smiled and leaned his head back and closed his eyes.

  The staccato stutter of automatic gunfire popped in the distance.

  Travis sat upright and looked left and right. Another weapon discharged, a shotgun, and much closer. Someone yelled. Through the fog in his driver’s-side window, a man sprinted out of a house two doors down, dressed only in a robe and slippers. A gun in his hand.

  “Jolene!” Travis yelled.

  He swung around in his seat and reached for the AR-15 and magazine in the rack at the back. He never went anywhere without it. Couldn’t even sleep—the little he could get—without it nearby. He kicked open his door and dropped to the pavement. The man in the robe had turned to run backward and was firing his handgun indiscriminately at his own house.

  Automatic weapon fire stuttered again from multiple directions in the foggy distance.

  Travis yelled again, “Jolene! Get the hell out here.”

  Or should he go inside? Were they under attack? Here? In Tennessee? By who? He inserted the magazine, gave it a solid whack, then tugged on it to make sure it was seated. Pulled the charging handle back, then let go. The bolt slipped forward and stripped a round from the magazine into the chamber. Flipped the selector to fire.

  Jolene banged out through the gas station’s door. “Travis!” she cried, her voice high and squeaking. “What in
God’s name is going on?”

  Travis half stood from his crouch, using the open driver’s-side door as a shield, and held out a hand to her. “Get over there. Get in the—”

  She was halfway to him, running as best she could in her sandals, when a wet spray spattered across Travis’s face and blinded him. With his left hand, he wiped the muck away in time to see Jolene’s headless body flopping onto the pavement.

  Chapter 1

  A KEENING WAIL cut through the rain as images of Moscow filled the screen.

  “Sorry, Mr. Mitchell,” a Secret Service agent said. “I got her.”

  The man had my daughter, Olivia, wrapped up in his left arm while his right held his submachine gun and its long, curved magazine high and away.

  Olivia’s feet levitated a foot from the ground as he picked her up.

  She wriggled to get free, her arms stretched out to me for help. To her, the heavy military-style encampment of Secret Service around the senator’s house was just another opportunity to make new friends, and she ran between the agents, shrieking as they reached out, smiling, to grab her and try to slow her down.

  They knew it was a game, but their business was still serious.

  Those terrorists were still somewhere out there, maybe some of them still on American soil—even if all indications were that they had gone to sea to escape under cover of the hurricane two days before.

  “Honey,” my wife Lauren said to Olivia. “Come here and sit down. We’re trying to watch something.” She opened her arms and beckoned our daughter to the couch in the sitting area at the end of the dining room, where Luke and I sat too.

  Olivia relented and made a serious face.

  The agent released my daughter, and she walked haltingly to the couch. The Secret Service man—now blank-faced—returned to scanning the tree line beyond the river. It was dark outside, even at midday. Pregnant clouds skimmed the treetops. Rain continued over Virginia and DC as the straggling remains of Hurricane Dolly, which had obliterated Virginia Beach less than forty-eight hours before, finished churning up the Chesapeake.

  “This footage is remarkable,” said a Fox News anchor, a sandy-haired man with glasses and a sharp blue suit. “From a camera crew doing a promotional shoot just an hour ago...”

  Floodlit, the red-and-green and blue-and-white striped onion-shaped domes of St. Basil’s Cathedral painted a striking foreground to the twinkling lights of Moscow and an indigo night sky beyond. The drone rose higher and the brightly lit red-brick walls of the clock tower beside it came into view, the snaking black belt of the Moskva River just visible between the streetlights in the distance. Tourists milled about in Red Square.

  The entire image on the TV screen went blank in an instant, but not because we had lost the signal. A beat later, emergency lighting clicked on to illuminate the base of St. Basil’s, and even through the drone’s mic, we heard the urgent panic as the crowd of tourists was plunged into darkness. The drone continued to rise, and in the clear distance, whole grid-patches of lights across greater metropolitan Moscow snapped off one by one until the entire city was dark to the horizon.

  “I thought Russia had cut off their internet to us,” Chuck said. “How did they get this footage over so quickly?” He perched on the edge of a tan leather recliner that matched the couch Lauren, Luke, and I—and now Olivia—cuddled on.

  “Half of everything in geostationary orbit,” Senator Seymour said, “the communications birds way up there, is still intact, and land-based fiber optic lines aren’t affected. The Russkies opened up comms when we regained control of the situation over our heads.”

  “Is it under control?” I asked.

  “The threat from the GenCorp constellation is over, thanks to our friend.” The senator nodded to his right, where Damon was talking to some FBI agents in the kitchen nook about fifty feet away and a half level up.

  Not exactly talking to them. He was being interrogated.

  Damon was the one who hacked into GenCorp and sent the kill command resulting in the fiery destruction of the ten-thousand satellites in their fleet. The few that were spared were rendered harmless as they burned out their reserves of fuel.

  A Chechen terrorist group identifying itself as the Islamic Brigade had used a cyberattack to gain control of GenCorp’s satellite base stations and TTC—telemetry, tracking, and command—of thousands of communication satellites in orbit. They used them as projectiles traveling at seventeen-thousand miles per hour to batter into hundreds of other satellites, destroying almost everything up there, from military birds to scientific imaging equipment.

  As a result, growing massive debris fields of tens of millions of fragments were continuing to spread and engulf entire regions of space above our heads, wrecking what satellites remained in their path.

  It was a nightmare scenario long dreaded by military planners—the Kessler Syndrome—in which a series of collisions in orbit created a runaway cascade of debris that would eventually destroy anything in orbit. It might be a generation before we could get any satellites back up, although the Russians were already trying.

  The most damaging had been an attack on geopositioning satellites, GPS from America, GLONASS from Russia, the Galileo system from Europe, and more. The loss of positioning data was bad enough, but the loss of timing signals had brought down almost all the global mobile networks and wreaked havoc on any terrestrial systems that needed timing signals or mobile networks.

  The power grid was one of them.

  Without coordinated time-keeping maintaining the patchwork of national grids in phase with each other, the event had triggered overloads and outages—not just in America, but around the world. It was as if the entire planet Earth, already on a hair-trigger, had been short-circuited.

  The whole world was falling apart out there.

  “This year,” the Fox news anchor said, “was already shaping up to be one of the worst on record for billion-dollar natural disasters. Costs for the CyberSpace attack, as pundits are now calling it, might run into the hundreds of billions or even trillions of dollars. And there had already been twenty-four individual billion-dollar-plus natural disasters in the months before that. Hurricane Dolly was the fifth hurricane of the season to make landfall in America. A massive heat wave in the western and central United States through the summer and fall killed hundreds.”

  Chuck returned with another beer and sat down.

  “Add to that the massive wildfires in Appalachia and California that are still burning out of control,” the news anchor continued. “With emergency services hampered by communications and GPS being knocked out, these disasters are going almost unchecked. The full scale of the loss of life is still unknown. For more on this, we go to our correspondent in Kentucky...”

  Which made me think. I asked Chuck, “Have you talked to anyone at Farmer Joe’s place?”

  “Oscar is on his way up to our cottage right now.”

  “Oscar?”

  “He’s delivering our Mini.” My friend grinned. “And he’s supposed to be going with your brother Terry.”

  We’d left Kentucky in what seemed to me like another lifetime, but in reality, was only a week ago. With the fires pinning us down, we had gotten a boat out onto the Ohio River and then, on the other side, borrowed an Escalade truck from Oscar’s cousin. The deal was that Oscar and a friend would drive up the Range Rover and Mini that we’d had to abandon at Farmer Joe’s place.

  However, the government had swept in and taken the Range Rover, because it had belonged to the terrorists. They almost took apart the Mini, too, Chuck said, but the guys had fixed it up.

  I couldn’t imagine my gorilla of a brother Terry jammed into a Mini with Oscar for the drive all the way from Kentucky up to the house in Shenandoah. I bet Oscar was already explaining for the tenth time how it was just bad luck that he had to crack me—Terry’s little brother—in the head with the butt of a rifle. “They’re on their way now? We’ll meet them there?”

  Lauren said,
“You’re feeling well enough?”

  Our plan was to leave for the return trip to the cottage tomorrow morning. “I’m good.”

  She squeezed my leg. “I think we all need a vacation. Some time off.”

  “Yeah, like a year.”

  “We could do that. Maybe we should. A long trip?”

  It was something I had always dreamed of. Taking a year off, traveling around America or maybe even the entire world with the kids. It was just idle daydreaming, but the way Lauren caught and held my eye, she looked like she meant it.

  Chuck’s wife, Susie, and their two kids were still up at their cottage, now with a security detail sent up there by the senator. Chuck talked to Susie every couple of hours over the landline, and it sounded like Susie and his kids were having a great time.

  Smoke from the fires over the other face of the mountain was getting thicker, though. Might be a month before they could be put out, or a heavy rain might do everyone a favor.

  Rural areas of America had been in an almost total communication blackout over the past two weeks, which meant that most of the United States outside of the big cities was in chaos—and would be for the foreseeable future. Not even any TV in many areas, which, with the loss of the internet, landlines, and cell service had to feel like being propelled back into the Stone Age.

  Combined with the blackouts and loss of emergency services, the country was still in the grips of what felt like world-ending spasms. It was no wonder we ran into a Kentucky militia when we passed through. The chaos had forced towns and villages all over the country to take matters into their own hands to protect themselves from an unknown enemy.

  The senator stood behind Chuck’s leather seat, watching the Fox News broadcast. The coverage changed to a story about the terrorist attack and how many satellites had been lost in the past few hours. A long list.