The Final Day (After, #3)(24)
He paused for a moment.
“Did it ultimately matter who did it last time? The result was the same; it took us to the edge of extinction. If it might happen again, and there is a chance we can get a forewarning, I want that chance for all of us.”
“There’s one other reason now,” Ernie said.
John looked over at him, ready to let fly with an angry burst for him to remain silent but then realized the secret would soon be out anyhow, and laying it on the table could help with his argument.
“Okay, this is classified, and I mean strictly classified; it has to stay in this room.” John paused, looking at the telephone receiver on the table in front of him, tempted to hang it up. But those listening in were now part of the government as well. “Do we all understand each other? What I say next can go no further.”
There were nods of approval, all now obviously filled with curiosity.
“We’ve managed to get a few computers back up and running.”
“A few computers?” Billy said. “So what? Play Pac-Man, or some dumb-ass flight simulator on them? The Internet is gone forever, at least here, and unless linked up, they’re useless.”
“Didn’t AB Tech in Asheville once offer a course on aircraft maintenance?” Ernie asked.
“Yes, why?”
“How did they teach it?”
“Computers, of course, and anything hooked into the net and plugged in for power got fried.”
“Maybe the maintenance manuals for the L-3 and the Black Hawk were on CDs. I got another old PC up and running over in the library yesterday while our hero John and company were trying to kill themselves going over the mountain. Give me a computer, give me data stored on a CD, and I’ll get the machine to run it. You want it?”
Billy could only nod.
“And fiber optics, my friends, were not cooked off. They’re dark now, but give me enough machines and the juice to run them, and I’ll get a network—at least local—up and running again.”
“So we can play games and send those damn tweets,” someone snapped.
“No, damn it. Data transfer was the lifeblood of what we were. Medical libraries, technical data beyond the magazines moldering in the school basement … find a way to hook me in, and we can even eavesdrop on Bluemont.”
Though John was growing increasingly frustrated with Ernie taking the topic off the point he was trying to close in on and talking about more than he should, this did catch everyone’s attention.
“After I left IBM back in the late ’80s, that was the business my wife and I set up. We wrote the software and provided some of the hardware for those big array dishes. Not the crap units you all started to get with your televisions; I’m talking about the big stuff used by governments. Chances are the LEOs were most likely taken out in the war, but the geosynch stuff I bet is still definitely online.”
“Translate, please?” the Asheville rep shouted from the back of the room.
“Oh, jeez. LEO, low-earth orbit. Companies like those direct television networks, their satellites were high up, twenty-three thousand miles up, what we called geosynch. The comm sats up there were heavily proofed against any kind of electromagnetic pulse. Had to be in order to survive solar storms, or coronal mass ejections, as we called them. Chances are Bluemont and other surviving governments are still using them for chatter and for encrypted stuff as well. You give me enough juice, some fairly recent computers that some rich kid tossed into his basement when Mommy and Daddy gave him an even faster unit for his damn stupid games, and I know how to start listening in.”
“You mean hacking?” Maury asked.
“Yup. Hell, my wife is a pro at that. Some years back, we installed the tracking software for a Middle Eastern country to link into a geosynch satellite.”
“Which Middle Eastern country?” John asked.
Ernie just smiled and replied, “Classified.”
No one interrupted as Ernie smiled expansively, pleased that he had obviously taken over the meeting for at least a few minutes.
“Well, the bastards welched on the last half of a payment of around a million bucks. Figured they had the system we installed, so why bother to pay some Americans once they had it in place?” Ernie started to laugh.
“They hadn’t counted on my wife, Linda. She sent them the usual notices and finally a warning, and they basically told us to screw off. Anyhow, they didn’t reckon on her. She had a Trojan in the software, hacked into it on day 121 of overdue payment—after all due proper notice and warning, of course—and fried their entire system off. We lost a million bucks but laughed our butts off.” Ernie chuckled at the memory of it.
“We have another resource as well,” John chimed in. “This college was starting up a cybersecurity major just before we got hit. We have some kids here that were getting top-notch training in how to keep systems secured from hackers.”
“Which means that in order to stop a hacker, you have to know how to hack,” Ernie interjected. “Put those kids to work doing something useful rather than having them dig for roots and who knows what we might find out, not just about this rumor regarding an EMP but a lot of other stuff we haven’t even considered. It’s out there; it’s time we started listening in, and if there is another EMP that hits without warning and the machines I’ve got up are running when the hit comes, we’re back in the Stone Age, this time with no hope of return.”