D-Boys Read online

  The world's most elite counter-terrorist operators.

  A cyber-security guru suddenly getting shot at and blown up rather more than usual.

  And nuclear-armed terrorists rolling with impunity through a lawless and brutal virtual world.

  First published 2011 by Complete & Total Asskicking Books

  London, UK

  Copyright © Michael Stephen Fuchs

  The right of Michael Stephen Fuchs to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any other means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the author. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  About the Author

  Michael Stephen Fuchs is the author of the D-BOYS series of high-concept, high-tech special-operations military adventure novels: D-BOYS, COUNTER-ASSAULT, and CLOSE QUARTERS BATTLE (coming in 2013). He's also author of the acclaimed existential cyberthrillers THE MANUSCRIPT and PANDORA’S SISTERS, both published worldwide by Macmillan, in hardback, paperback, and all e-book formats. He is also co-author, with Amazon-bestselling author Glynn James, of the ARISEN series of spec-ops zombie-apocalypse dark action thrillers: FORTRESS BRITAIN, MOGADISHU OF THE DEAD, and THREE PARTS DEAD (coming soon). He is represented by Robert Gottlieb, Chairman of Trident Media Group in New York. He lives in London and at www.michaelstephenfuchs.com, and blogs at www.michaelfuchs.org/razorsedge.

  “I am not a man, I am dynamite.”

  - Friedrich Nietzsche,

  Ecce Homo

  TERRORIST SAFEHOUSE

  DEARBORN, MICHIGAN

  21:12:14 EST 05 APR

  The keyboard has a lot of blood on it but then again so does almost everything, including Mike Brown. He doesn’t really know why he’s sitting at this keyboard. There’s been a gunfight and it ended so few heartbeats ago that reports still ring in his ears, sulfur stench closes his throat, and most of the blood on the floor hasn’t even properly pooled yet.

  Mike figures he should probably go around and see if anybody is still alive, anybody he could help maybe. But he somehow knows there isn’t. The only things left alive in that little white crackerbox house, out in the shitbird suburbs of Dearborn, Michigan, are him – and the computer that sits on the desk before him.

  The machine has got an outsize flat-panel display, which is bleeding a cool glow out onto the still-warm bodies and all the hot smoke. That's the only light. Dusk has fallen outside and shutters cover the windows anyway.

  Glancing down at his fingers, which are poised over the keyboard, Mike notices a smear of blood on his forearm. Christ, he thinks, there’s blood on everything. There really shouldn’t be blood on him. Mike Brown is a techie – a twiddler of bits and manipulator of abstract symbols. True, he works for a federal agency where people sometimes carry guns. And, yeah, the boundaries between the bit-twiddlers and the trigger-pullers have gotten a little porous in the last few years.

  Nonetheless, Mike is nursing this feeling that he should really be 600 miles away in a swivel chair, slinging code and monitoring signals intelligence. Or, at most, directing trigger-pullers on the radio. He shouldn’t be sitting in a house full of dead people. He should never have found himself fifteen feet away from a balls-out gunfight. And he shouldn’t have blood on his arm.

  And on his eyeglasses. Somehow he missed that. He removes them and regards the fine crimson spray – bright arterial-red, probably from way deep inside somebody – then wipes them on his shirt. He puts them back on his face and refocuses on the room. He tries to get his head around what he is seeing.

  Like somebody whose car has been towed, walking around in a circle, seeing perfectly well that there’s no car there, but not believing.

  Scattered on the floor, on a sofa, in a doorway, slumped against a wall, out on the front porch, are a half dozen very nice sheriff’s deputies. Also, an indeterminate number of hajjis, also arrayed in awkward poses. “Hajjis” is how one of the sheriff’s deputies described them, in the approximately four seconds he’d had to radio in. Mike forgave him the crude racial profiling, given circumstances.

  They’re dark-skinned guys, and they’d been shouting in some language not English. Mike guessed they looked Middle Eastern. And they were just armed to the nines and blazing away like goddamn crazy sons of bitches.

  And now they are gone. All of them have decamped, or died trying. No surrenders, no survivors. Just this one computer. And Mike Brown.

  With that many guns going off, that rapidly, in quarters that close, Mike would not have expected every single one to miss him. He is deeply surprised to find himself having dropped completely unscathed through this meat grinder. For a few seconds there, he’d figured that was his last few seconds. He’d been on the front porch, and grabbing floor, and he hadn’t been armed himself. But, still.

  Here’s the thing. This thing is this. Typically when Mike would go out to serve a warrant on a house he’s identified as the physical source of some computer security breaches – some annoying and clever but, you know, basically parryable hacker attacks – when he went to serve a warrant on some hackers, he didn’t expect to get shot at. Yeah, he went out with sheriffs. And, yeah, the sheriffs had guns.

  But one didn’t, in one’s heart of hearts, expect to end up getting blasted into the next jurisdiction by a bunch of ferocious guys with assault rifles. Much more typically, he’d be interrupting an online porn masturbation session by some post-adolescent script kiddie with delusions of hacker grandeur.

  And Mike could tell you something else – there but for the grace of God. Those geeky kids are Mike without the advanced degree and the federal ID.

  So, Mike doesn’t know why he sat down at that bloody keyboard and logged in. But this act would set the pattern for the next year of his life. Soon, Mike will get so jaded about typing on blood-spattered keyboards that he hardly notices it. He’ll carry hankies.

  But on this first day, he’s a little vacant, a bit blank in affect. So much so that when the cavalry arrives a few minutes later – in the form of probably the entire Detroit metro area SWAT establishment – he doesn’t remember to put up his hands and move real slow.

  The SWAT guys could conceivably have shot him, yeah. But probably not.

  Because another thing Mike Brown is very shortly to learn? He’s going to learn that those SWAT guys are big pussies. Just huge, enormous pussies. And so were those poor dead sheriff’s deputies, and so are the FBI (including their fabled Hostage Rescue Team), and so are regular military, and so are most workaday special operations units – and especially so are even the most heavily armed and vicious hajjis you can even dig up.

  You know who aren’t pussies?

  Mike Brown will tell you who aren’t pussies.

  D-BOYS

  MICHAEL STEPHEN FUCHS

  COMPLETE & TOTAL ASSKICKING BOOKS

  U.S. DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY

  ARLINGTON, VIRGINIA

  06:02:55 EST 06 APR

  “No. Definitely not.”

  This isn’t Mike speaking.

  “Sir, let me suggest—”

  “Shut up. You shut up, too. You – speak.”

  These aren’t Mike speaking, either. Mike isn’t speaking. He’s sitting. He’s sittin
g and trying to look blameless, until and if somebody calls on him.

  “It’s like I said. This is what we’ve been looking for, because we’ve known it was on its way in.”

  This is the closest thing to Mike speaking. This is Mike’s boss – James Niewendyke, who is Director of the Information Security Directorate of the United States Department of Homeland Security. That is where Mike works.

  “For, call it five years now, we’ve known this was coming in, and it was more or less undodgeable.” James Niewendyke is addressing two generals, an admiral, two undersecretaries of defense, the Director of the FBI, three unidentified guys, and two guys with their faces actually fuzzed out on the overhead video links. Also around the real physical table are a handful of high-level DHS guys and a colonel.

  “Why now?” This is one of the undersecretaries. “Why not before now?”

  “Because, before now, the guys who had the chops to get into critical systems didn’t have any desire to break anything when they got there. And the guys who really want to hurt us didn’t have the chops.” James Niewendyke takes his glasses off and rubs them with his tie. “But it was always inevitable that some of the geeks would eventually get angry – Kevin Mitnick with a grievance. Or some of the real assholes would get smart – al-Zarqawi with skills.”

  “Which is it?” This is one of the generals.

  “It’s the second thing.”

  “So these are Islamist bad guys?”

  “Our early forensics say yes, they’re Islamist bad guys.”

  “So then this is just AQO.” This is one of the military guys, an Air Force colonel, from the new Cyber Warfare Command, and in the actual room. He is referring to al Qaeda Online, so-called. “We know this crew, we know what they’re doing.” Mike knows this Air Force colonel fancies himself a cyberterror expert – but Mike is pretty sure he couldn’t reliably find his own asshole with road flares and spelunking gear. Mike figures he’ll let his boss point up that issue.

  “No,” his boss says, with an aspect of thin patience. “You know what they’ve been doing. AQ web sites, jihadi-prop videos, bomb soup. These things spring up, you run D-DOS attacks, you shut down the servers. Maybe you send SAD or SOF out to get them, when you can find them.”

  “We also shut down guys running attacks.”

  “You shut down guys planning attacks – planning real physical incidents using online comms. And over here we spend all our time chasing hackers around the block – all-American kids who want a screenshot of the Treasury intranet for their desktop. So that’s you working serious bad guys fucking around online. And us working fuck-ups doing serious stuff online. But what I’m saying is that now we’ve got the real deal – opponents who are heart-attack serious, and who are probing drop-dead serious targets in the information infrastructure. And who are getting in.”

  “How serious?” This is the other undersecretary.

  “DOE. Nuke labs. They only got in for a few minutes. But they got in.”

  “And you’re so sure they’re real bad guys?”

  “Mike.” James looks down and across at the patch of desk beneath the younger man’s chin. “How many probes or successful breaches of tier one through four systems in the NII have you caught in these three years?”

  Mike looks up and tries to make his face, his voice, like his boss’s. “All in? About fourteen hundred.”

  “On how many of those have you gotten a grid reference and sent out a team, or gone yourself?”

  “A hundred and twelve.”

  “How may of those targets have shot us up when we got there?”

  “Domestic or foreign?” This is just Mike stalling.

  “All in.”

  “One. The one tonight.”

  “How many of that team came home?”

  “None. Well, me.”

  James pins the overhead monitors in turn. “Let me tell you what we’ve got. We’ve got a domestic intrusion cell that we caught in some very interior systems – specifically, the Department of Energy’s Nuclear Test Labs in Idaho Falls. They were about six keystrokes from about ten thousand pages of classified docs on reactors, materials – and weapons. We got lucky and—”

  “How classified?”

  “So classified they wouldn’t tell me. The classification level is classified.” No one can tell if he’s joking, so nobody says anything.

  “We got lucky and they tripped an alarm. The intrusion was extremely well-disguised. But our Mr. Brown here traced it. When we go out to get these guys, with local law enforcement, we end up in an eight-second, thousand-round shootout. We kill two of them, two or three escape out the back door – and our whole team goes down. All the forensics so far say they’re AQ.”

  “And Mr. Brown here can trace them?”

  “He’s an A resource. That’s why we took the risk of putting him out on the firing line.”

  “Put him back.”

  Mike thinks even James is looking a little tired now. They’ve all been up for hours. “Mike isn’t officially a field operative,” Jim says. “He’s not trained for CQB.”

  “You’re going to need tech in the field.” This is the other general. “Someone onsite to capture data while it’s still actionable.”

  “That’s why we send him out. Sometimes. But there are limits to wha—”

  “Get him the tactical support he needs, but get him back out there.”

  One of the undersecretaries says, “Why don’t we get him onto a team that’s already out there? TF145? They’ve taken down some heavily wired safehouses in CENTCOM AO.”

  “No. Not the Task Force. We need a bunch of Rangers shooting everything up with SAWs like we need colostomy bags. This is finesse work.”

  After a beat of silence – the staccato energy of the room seems to be ticking down – one of the guys on video link speaks. He hasn’t made a peep before this. And he doesn’t have a face.

  “There’s Dick Havering’s team.”

  The general stares out the monitor, straight through the room. “Okay, then. Get them tasked. Jim, we’re going to put your boy with some boys in the CAG. That alright with you?”

  “Sir.”

  And with that and nothing more, the general disappears and the room lights come up. Mike sees James eyeing him as chairs scrape floor.

  * * *

  Mike walks beside and just behind his boss now, their footfalls echoing down a sterile hallway with no visible end.

  “Okay, I’ll bite. Who’s this Dick guy?”

  “Check your go-bag,” James says. “You’ll want a shock laptop, tricked out with your sharp-edged stuff. And probably a rugged handheld. And clothes for extremes of climate.”

  “Where am I going?” Mike is getting the sense these questions don’t hold a lot of interest for the other man. “Am I going to get shot at again?”

  Jim blinks noncommittally. “I wouldn’t worry too much about that.”

  “Oh, yeah? Why not?” Mike is starting to feel himself sag behind his eyes. He checks his watch and it’s six-thirty in the morning. He hasn’t slept since two nights previous – the night before the shootout, which was now last night. While off in his head, Mike realizes the other has stopped at an intersection of empty corridors.

  “A bag for how long?”

  “Call it indefinitely. Also pick someone to support you from see-woc.” CWOC, the CyberWar Ops Center, had been the tactical heart of ISD, ever since things picked up on that front of the GWOT (Global War on Terror).

  “Someone who?”

  “I’d go with Fred. Or maybe Dharmesh.”

  Mike’s red-rimmed eyes open fractionally. “I can have Dharmesh?”

  “You can have part of Dharmesh. Let’s call it two-fifths of Dharmesh.”

  Mike knows that if he is being offered nearly half of the Big D, this is a serious deal. Dharmesh is more in demand around ISD than coffee.

  “Get some sleep while you can,” James says. “And drive safely.” This makes Mike think his stock has gon
e up. The department obviously wants him getting killed doing something smart, rather than something stupid.

  James pats Mike’s shoulder once, then turns right, leaving him where he stands. Mike tries to remember the way out of the building from there.

  ON INTERSTATE 395

  FAIRFAX, VIRGINIA

  08:06:22 EST 06 APR

  Forty minutes later, Mike rolls it off the beltway, under a sopping blanket of morning sky, and into his complex. This is a generic development in Fairfax, Virginia, the suburbs southwest of D.C. He picked it out on a two-day interview trip – at which time he’d figured both the job and the apartment would be temporary situations. Now, five years later, he still hasn’t adapted to either the traffic or the weather.

  He lets himself in, drops his coat on the couch, and lays himself down beside it. He knows he should go to bed, but can’t find the energy. Instead, he takes his glasses off and peers through them at the muddy morning light leaking in through the picture window. To his dull amazement and horror, there’s still a faint reddish smear in the corner of one of the lenses, and on the black plastic frame.

  He tries to remember how he got here.

  Ten years earlier, in the spring of 2001, he’d graduated from Columbia University in New York, with a BS in computer science. He’d managed to pay for this mostly by means of a partial ROTC scholarship, with the understanding that afterward he would serve a sporadic six years in the Army Reserve – one weekend a month and two weeks a year of playing soldier. He spent the summer after graduation backpacking around Europe – and then going through Army Basic Training at Fort Knox, in Louisville, Kentucky. He then went to work, as one did in those days, for an Internet start-up – in his case, a start-up in Manhattan’s Silicon Alley. His start date was the 3rd of September, 2001.

  Eight days later, two things changed: the tech economy downturn, which had already begun to accelerate, became catastrophic in New York; and the Army started calling up reserve units for active duty. Worried about losing his job, and horrified by the prospect of having to play soldier for real, Mike applied to a PhD program back at Columbia. He also didn’t mind going back uptown again. From his briefly occupied office in the Flatiron District, he had been able to hear, and feel, the twin towers hit the ground.