Page 48 of Power's Fall
Montana’s lips twitched, and both Dahlia and Vadisk seemed to relax when he smiled.
“You’re right, a submarine doesn’t need a full-time Cyber Ops chief there to defend its systems.”
“I guess we’re back to the original question. What did you do on the submarine?” Dahlia asked.
“I attacked. It wasn’t until I was on the submarine with no way off that it was clear no matter what was said during my training about defense, I was an offensive weapon.” Montana hadn’t talked about this aspect of his military career with anyone, shame keeping him silent.
“Why were you on a sub instead of locked in some top-secret computer room?”
Vadisk stroked his beard, considering his own question. “Was it because you had to get close to the places?”
“No. We didn’t have to be close to the physical locations of our targets, only to subsea cables.”
Dahlia frowned. “To what?”
“The world’s internet is connected by physical cables, most of which run along the floor of the ocean.”
“Just a big cable? What if a ship drops an anchor on it?” Vadisk asked.
Montana shrugged. “Then half a continent loses internet, and not just public internet, but SCADA systems that control facilities like airports, infrastructure like water treatment facilities, and industrial processes.”
“They need to put the cables in a box or something,” Vadisk muttered, eyes wide.
“There are countless undersea cables providing internet connection to Europe, Africa, and Asia. The longest one goes all the way from Hong Kong to France,” Montana explained.
“Wait, wait, wait.” Dahlia was doing that thing she did where she looked at nothing as she put pieces together. “You’re saying that this submarine got close to the cables and used them to access online systems to launch cyberattacks.”
“Incredible,” Vadisk mused. “You really are fucking brilliant.”
Montana was uncomfortable with that praise. He didn’t deserve it.
“When I got my orders, I remember being so proud. I was on a top-secret submarine, the first of its kind, which, of course, fed into my arrogance. All of that faded away, however, when the reality of what I was doing sank in.” Montana gripped his knees tightly, hoping the actions would hide the slight tremor in his hands.
“Tell us the rest of it,” Vadisk urged.
“I wasn’t happy when I realized what I was going to be doing, but it was willfully stupid of me not to figure it out. And there wasn’t anything I could do. When you’re on a sub, you’re stuck and you’re isolated. We were at sea for months at a time. Voice transmission is impossible because of the narrow bandwidths, and because of the top-secret nature of our missions, we worked exclusively at radio silence. You have no idea how isolated we were down there, cut off from everything and everyone. I…” Montana bowed his head. “I put my head down and didn’t think about the larger picture of what I was doing. It was just more CDX, and it was easy to get lost in the code, in putting all the pieces together to create what, in my mind, were masterpieces or works of art.”
Dahlia rose from the couch, kneeling before him and taking one of his hands in hers. “What happened?”
“A couple of years into my deployment, I was home on leave. As I said, I’d had no contact with my family, no access to the news. I’m not proud to admit that the first few times I was on leave, I purposefully didn’t search for information that might be related to some of the ops I’d done while submerged.”
“You checked to see if it worked,” Vadisk said rather than asked.
Montana nodded. “I wanted to see if I could find any trace of my work. I needed to know if my chaos had succeeded, if our missions had been successful.”
“What did you find?” Dahlia whispered.
“Some good things.” He was a coward for doing this, trying to soften the blow of his crimes by starting with the things he’d done that were arguably good. “Have either of you ever heard of Stuxnet?”
They both shook their heads.
“It’s a computer worm that attacks the SCADA system.”
“The one you said controls things like airports.”
“And industrial processes. Cyberattacks rarely make the news—I mean the big ones, not things like credit card numbers for private citizens—but there’s a Stuxnet attack that’s famous. Hearing about it was one of the things that got me really interested in computer software and coding.
“Stuxnet was used to attack the Iranian nuclear program. The worm got in, gathered information, and then took control of the system’s programmable logic controllers and made the centrifuges they were using to refine uranium tear themselves apart.”