DEAD BEEF (Our Cyber World Book 1) (21 page)

The wind was stronger this time, no longer coming in short gusts, but still changing direction unpredictably. At random,  again, he thought. He hated random. He couldn’t calculate his way to a better outcome. All he could do was repeat the approach he made before, one eyehook at a time.

Since the wind kept coming, now with occasional droplets that pelted him, he didn’t stop. He kept going whether the wind was coming from the east or the west or straight at him from the north.

Beneath him he could feel the rock getting slick, and that only caused him to go faster. He had little time left. He saw that he was getting better at the carabineer exchanges, saving valuable seconds, perhaps even a minute or two by the time he was done.

He arrived at the platform and for a moment, he looked at the tripod more closely. Two of the bolts attaching the tripod to the platform were halfway out. The tripod was vibrating in the wind, which was buffeting and pushing the large camera. If he hadn’t come for the blue cooler, it probably wouldn’t have been there a few hours later or in the morning. He unclipped it and brought it down to the rock, latching it to the guide rope.

Now for the interesting part, he thought. He had to turn himself around without raising his profile so much that the wind would catch him. He needed to trade places with the cooler, and the tripod was no longer a good hand-hold.

Martin slowly came to a crouch, raising himself as much as he dared, leaving enough room to slide the cooler between his legs. The wind stiffened, and he struggled to regain his balance by holding on to the platform’s edge. Then, he slowly crouched back down and turned to his left finally achieving enough room to lay flat on the rock face.

The rain became steadier now, though with the wind, it too changed directions. He pushed the elements out of his mind as much as he could, moving forward, this time with a double tether for him plus the tether for the blue cooler. He made slower progress now, but he knew there was no other way. The rock was just too slick to try shortcuts now.

With two eyehooks to go, he felt himself slipping away from the guide rope, and he gripped it with his left hand to steady himself. But now it was the cooler that started sliding right, and when he reached to arrest its fall, he lost his balance and grip on the rope and he slid right as well.

The fall wasn’t a big one since the tethers were about 6 feet long. Now he hung there with one hand on the cooler’s tether, and one on his two tethers. He heard the straining on the guide rope. He opted to let go of the cooler’s tether, and hung only on his.

Martin tried to walk himself up the rock, but it was smooth and now with the rain, very slick. His best efforts to regain the top, only led to him slipping down again. He stopped to regain his breath and composure.

He could not panic. He had to figure this out.

On his left he heard the helicopter approach. A lone thin figure was coming down the rope. It landed on the platform in a crouch, sat on the edge and stepped onto the rock. It then started running, holding what looked like a rope in its left hand. In a few seconds the figure was upon him, and for a moment, lit by a flash of lightning, he could swear he knew this person.

Martin did not have much time to think about it. With one smooth motion the figure clasped a carabineer onto an eyehook and slid down to him, between him and the cooler.

“It’s me, Martin. Leti.”

Martin didn’t know how to respond.

She flipped herself upside down and anchored her feet on the rock. He saw now she was wearing abrasive sole water shoes. With her right hand she grabbed his belt and with her left her own tether rope.

“On the count of one, two,” she said. “Three.”

Martin tried to climb again, this time aided by her upward pull. She screamed. With a bit of effort he took hold of the guide rope with both hands and then he was where he started.

She flipped herself right up, and with gritted teeth climbed to the top and pulled up the cooler. “To the ladder, quick!” she said leading the way.

He got there a few seconds after her, and she waived him down the ladder. He made it down the ladder quickly, and halfway down he saw Leticia rappelling to his left, the cooler firmly latched behind her on her harness belt. When he got to the bottom, she was waiting for him.

“Let’s go!” she shouted.

Martin followed her quickly

Cynthia was also waiting with the red cooler at her feet, hanging on to ladder 1.

“Let’s go!” Leticia shouted again, and now the three of them were running down the steeper part of the trail, hopping down from step to step while the rain poured down on them and the wind lashed at them with wet flying debris.

The worst was over, Martin told himself. Now the trail was easier to navigate, and they should be fairly safe. They were engulfed by a wall of rain and thunder and flashes of lighting striking the top of the ridge.

Chapter 30

Martin Spencer sat on the floor, fully stripped of his clothes and wrapped in a fleece blanket, shivering.

“Here,” Leticia Ortiz said. “Drink this up to warm you up.” She handed him a cup of steaming tea. On the other side of the single room cabin, Ochoa was adjusting an IV drip and checking in on Sasha. Stan Beloski was at the video screens, replaying the video of Martin Spencer atop the wall. Cynthia stood next to him, dabbing at her hair with a towel after having done the same with her drenched clothes.

“My favorite part is this,” Stan said fast-forwarding then playing the section where Martin caught the second cooler, was pulled up, then came crashing down to the platform. “This is definitely super-viral video material,” Stan added.

Cynthia chuckled. “We’ll turn you into a super star, yet, Martin. With a little strategically executed PR, they’ll be begging you to come back as head of InfoStream. Heck, there may be a congressional seat somewhere in this, maybe even Senate?”

Leticia sat next to him and whispered, “Drink up. It’ll settle your stomach, too.”

“That obvious that I was about to soil myself?” Martin asked in a moment where his shivering had temporarily come to a stop.

“You’re a brave man, Mr. Spencer,” she said. “A brave, generous man. If it hadn’t started raining, or if you had the right shoes, you would've been fine.”

“My yuppie hiking boots let me down, that’s for sure,” he said before he took a quick sip of the tea.

“What you did up there is amazing,” Leticia added. “I respected you a lot before. Now I admire your courage and your heart. Many men would have frozen up there and quit. Most would have never tried.”

“She needed it,” Martin said looking at Sasha. It was then that he remembered, and he felt ashamed that obsessed with his own situation, he hadn’t even stopped to think about Leticia and her little girl. “Wait a minute, you are here... What about Luz?”

“I was planning to go down to see her last night,” Leti said. “That’s when the blackout happened. No flights.” She paused, and tears started to flow down her cheek. “But that’s OK,” she said, now sobbing. “My mom and my aunt were there.” She hid her face in her hands and sobbed softly. “God, I hate it when I cry,” she said.

Cynthia came over. “What’s wrong?” she asked with a frown.

Martin stood up and walked to his bed. Sasha was sleeping comfortably on the other bed while Ochoa prepared for the second blood transfusion.

Martin reached under his bed and pulled out his backpack. From it he extracted his pants, the ones he’d worn until Sasha made him wear the ranger uniform. He searched the left pocket and found it. He shuffled back to where Leticia sat. She had wiped off her tears and now was showing her best blank dead-to-the-world expression.

Martin knelt in front of Leticia. “Here,” he said, handing her the picture of Luz she’d given him two days prior. “She was a good little girl. A great little girl,” he said.

Leticia cried again, and Martin held her. Cynthia knelt down and wrapped one arm around Martin reaching with the other to place a hand on Leticia’s shoulder.

In project Ouroboros headquarters at the ITAA, the D.C. based staff reviewed the Los Angeles power outage incident. The grid was now fully operational. With a couple of to-be-addressed glitches here and there, electrical generation and distribution in Los Angeles had returned to normal. It was as if, someone noted, nothing had happened.

Martin’s code was working flawlessly. In a series of tests, each more aggressive than the last, it appeared to fend even the latest code InfoStream had developed and updated as recently as 3 months prior. That latest version was no match for Martin’s state 1-prime version or 1PV as it became known. Someone commented Martin’s code was bulletroof.

Talk then began about making plans to roll out Martin’s 1-prime version to other parts of the information infrastructure. The team listed prime candidates, among them all major city power grids, financial networks — definitely the New York Stock Exchange, and pronto — and key defense and law enforcement facilities. The list grew long, unsurprisingly and thanks to calls from various interested parties, including congressional and state legislative offices.

Robert Odehl called a meeting to prioritize the list. He started it by saying, “The easiest thing would be to pull out the order in which we rolled out versions 1 and 2, but I think that might lead us to decisions based on the bad assumption that what applied then applies over a decade later. Let’s not do that.”

“Defense first,” someone put in. “Pentagon, CIA, NSA, our ITAA, bases. Anything that will leave us unable to defend our homeland if it were to fail or be taken over.”

“Nukes first,” someone else said. “That’s the scary one.”

“Nukes are off-grid,” yet another person opined. “They are much harder to compromise.”

“Harder but not impossible,” the Nukes first proponent replied. “If I were them, that’s what I’d go after.”

“Do we have any intelligence suggesting what they might be doing next?” Steve Royce asked. “That might help us decide. I mean, it’s been pretty quiet. Maybe they’ve rolled up their tents and gone home to lick their wounds.”

Odehl said, “This is not an intelligence data review meeting. Let’s stay focused on prioritizing critical assets due for version update.”

Royce objected, going on and on about how the situation on the ground was relevant to the prioritization effort, others agreed, and the meeting degenerated from there. Odehl let it roll for another 40 minutes, and then said he had all he needed.

Odehl went to his office where he started to prioritize the list himself. When he was almost done, he got a call from the secretary of Homeland Security. Someone very high up — by which Odehl understood that someone to be the president who apparently wanted to remain nameless — strongly suggested that the stock market and financial institutions be “reinforced” first. The markets had been very volatile since the Los Angeles incident, and would Odehl please do his best to provide everyone with a reassuring argument that the markets were safe.

Odehl hung up the phone and started his prioritization afresh.

Starting at 3 PM Pacific, five teams of two individuals each began arriving at Long Beach Airport. Hailing from Jordan, the West Bank, Lebanon, Egypt, and Morocco, all of them were pursuing degrees in computer science from local Southern California schools: Long Beach State University, University of Southern California, California Polytechnic in Pomona, University of California Los Angeles and California State University in Fullerton. All schools being no more than 1 hour’s drive from Long Beach, they all arrived at their prescribed times or slightly early.

Inside, a representative of the Colorado-based software company that was flying them out for job interviews met them and ushered them to a Lear Jet that awaited on the tarmac. By 4:30 PM all ten recruits had gathered inside the plane. At this time they received apologies along with news that they would have to wait a bit longer. Company executives who would be traveling with them were delayed due to an unanticipated extension of a business meeting in Santa Monica.

They were served refreshments and told to get comfortable. They also received encouragement to anticipate Allah’s favor. The executives would soon come bearing gifts for the students to use in furtherance of Allah’s powerful and unrelenting will.