All Systems Down by Sam Boush Book Tour and Giveaway :)
All Systems Down
by
Sam Boush
Genre:
Cyber Thriller
24
hours.
That's all it takes.
A new kind of war has begun.
Pak
Han-Yong's day is here. An elite hacker with Unit 101 of the North
Korean military, he's labored for years to launch Project
Sonnimne:
a series of deadly viruses set to cripple Imperialist
infrastructure.
And
with one tap of his keyboard, the rewards are immediate.
Brendan
Chogan isn't a hero. He's an out-of-work parking enforcement officer
and one-time collegiate boxer trying to support his wife and
children. But now there's a foreign enemy on the shore, a blackout
that extends across America, and an unseen menace targeting
him.
Brendan
will do whatever it takes to keep his family safe.
In
the wake of the cyber attacks, electrical grids fail, satellites
crash to earth, and the destinies of nine strangers
collide.
Strangers
whose survival depends upon each other's skills and courage.
For
fans of Tom Clancy, ALL SYSTEMS DOWN is a riveting cyber war thriller
which presents a threat so credible you'll be questioning reality.
Chapter
1
Sirens
blared across all twenty-five decks of the USS Gerald
R. Ford. Lieutenant
Kelly Seong grabbed her flight suit from the wall and slipped inside,
practiced hands buckling the straps of her Aramid coveralls. “A
goddamned drill at 4 a.m.,” she mumbled as she attached her
flotation vest and checked her oxygen mask and survival gear. Not
that she really needed to. The equipment hadn’t changed since her
last flight five hours earlier. But protocol kept her alive. Red
lights flashed, and the boing,
boing, boing of
the alarm ricocheted along the corridors of the ship. Sailors ran to
stations. A petty officer shouted orders to passing swabbies. Despite
the cacophony, men and women hurried through the upper decks with
purpose. General Quarters drills occurred frequently. Every Jack and
Jill on the Ford supercarrier had an assigned station and knew where
to be. Well, nearly everyone.
Kelly exhaled sharply. Where the fuck was Orion? “You
seen Beetlejuice?” she asked a cadre of her squadron mates. The men
shrugged and raced on, a playing-card spade peeking out from the back
of the flight helmets they carried under their arms. They were Black
Aces. First to fight, first to strike. Orion,
as far as she was concerned, hadn’t yet earned the ace on his
helmet. He was what they called a “nugget,” a first-tour aviator
fresh from naval flight training. Technically, he was her weapons
systems officer. The wizzo. In the cockpit of their Super Hornet, he
engaged air-to-air or ground targets and operated the laser- and
satellite-guided ordnance. In a “turn and burn,” Kelly would make
the turn while he dropped the burn. She would if he were any good.
Unfortunately, he was as green as a grasshopper’s right nut. And
here she was, expected to mentor the bastard. She
checked his bunk then the hangar deck. Alarms blasted too loudly to
call for him, and the rush of hundreds of sailors made it hard to
spot his little cornbread head. The other airmen of the Black Aces
beat feet to the ready room. GQ brought the supercarrier alive, even
in the dead of night. Not
that the ship ever really slept; 24 hours a day, the “Jerry”
hummed with activity. At any given time, two-thirds of the four
thousand souls aboard would be awake, working on the floating
fortress currently cruising two hundred miles east of Honolulu. Kelly
beelined past the flight lockers toward the ready room where the rest
of the squadron would already be waiting. If her wizzo couldn’t get
his ass in the saddle he’d suffer the consequence. Over her career,
she’d seen better pilots than him wash out. She
peered in the ready room. Not there. Then back to the lockers. “Jesus,
what time is it?” Orion Bether shouted above the din, in that whiny
voice that set Kelly’s fist to balling up all on its own. He
slinked over to his locker and was now making a hash of getting into
his flight suit. Just like a fucking nugget. She
punched him in the shoulder. “Beetlejuice!” she shouted. “Where
the fuck you been? You look like shit, by the way.” “Ouch!”
He groaned, massaging his shoulder. Like
Kelly, Orion had been pulling twelve-hour shifts, though that was no
excuse for the bags under his eyes and his generally un-shipshape
appearance. His sandy blonde hair, short and squared, still managed
to stand up like a sailor’s happy sock after a six-month
deployment. He dropped one of his Nomex flight gloves, revealing,
most glaringly, that his flight suit hadn’t been fastened at the
crotch. “It’s
balls thirty. And for fuck’s sake, if you’re going to button
salute a boat goat, at least get her to buckle you up at the end.” Orion
reached down and cursed, fumbling to pull the strap closed while
juggling his helmet and flotation vest. Kelly didn’t wait for him,
leading the way to the ready room. He hopped after her. “She’s
no boat goat, Moonshot. She’s a 2-10-2 if I’ve ever seen one.”
Then he laughed that obnoxious cackle of his. A girl who was just a
two on a scale of ten when on land could easily be a ten out on
deployment, where the ratio of men to women was forty-to-one. When
they got back to land she’d be a two again. Few Navy men were below
fucking an ugly girl at sea. “Listen
up!” The call spun them around in salute. Mike Montez stepped into
the room right behind Kelly and Orion. The squadron commander was a
short guy, black hair, usually calm as a pickle in a salt bath. But
in the light of the hangar deck, his dark cheeks were flushed, eyes
excited. “Black Aces,” he said, “this is not a drill. I’m
going to repeat myself. This is not a drill.” “Sir,”
Kelly said. “The call on-speakers sounds a lot like a training
exercise.” During a true GQ, loudspeakers would call all hands to
man their battle stations. Tonight, there’d been nothing but
sirens. “Chrissakes,
Lieutenant Seong. I know what I know, and we’re buns to our guns.
Maybe they’re having some technical difficulties up on the island.” That
drew some laughter. The Admiral sat up in the island—the control
tower rising above the flight deck—and wherever he went,
clusterfucks seemed to follow. “I
don’t know much, but here’s what I got,” Montez continued,
sweeping his gaze across the eighteen pilots in front of him. He bit
his lip and smiled, like he was about to give them some good news.
“Ten minutes ago, at zero-four-hundred hours, our radar sweeps
caught more blips than your collective wives have boyfriends. And
they’re moving in on our position. It might be nothing. Might be
seagulls or flying peckers. But, sonafabitch, it looks a lot like
bogies. I don’t have more details than that. So get in your birds
and beat wings west. Stand by for orders when you’re airborne.”
He clapped his hands. “To stations!” Halle-fuckin’-lujah.
It wasn’t a drill. Maybe she’d actually get to see some real
action, for the first time in years. “Lieutenant
Seong. Lieutenant Bether.” Commander Montez stopped Kelly as she
advanced on the exit. “Hold up.” While the other pilots, flight
engineers, and wizzos ran out of the ready room, Kelly and Orion
pressed in close to their commander. “Brush and Wildfire are coming
off a training run. Their bird is hitting the trap in two minutes.
She’s got live ordnance and half a tank of fuel, at most. I want
you two to take her up the minute she lands.” “A
hot switch?” Orion asked. “Yes,
Lieutenant. Now get your asses up and aft.” He tore out of the
ready room, leaving them alone. “I’ve
never done a hot switch,” Orion confessed. “Then
this is on-the-job training.” Kelly helped Orion into his flotation
vest, then handed him his helmet. “How fast can you run, sailor?”
The question was rhetorical, and she didn’t wait for him to answer
before dashing up to the hangar deck. Orion fell in, close behind. Kelly
had performed hot switches many times and didn’t feel any nerves.
It meant that she and Orion would have just three minutes to switch
out with the landing flight team. They’d forgo the normal preflight
checks and would have less fuel. The bonus was they’d be lead jet
in this foray—and Kelly loved to lead. Sprinting
through a narrow corridor on the hangar deck, she located the ladder
to the flight deck. A sailor, running the opposite direction, clipped
her with his shoulder. Dozens more men pushed past. The siren wobbled
and shifted. A grinding noise now. Why
had the general quarters alarm changed? It didn’t matter. With both
hands she grabbed the rails and ascended to the surface of the
supercarrier, into the October night. The
flight deck of the Jerry shone through the darkness, illuminated with
a thousand bulbs. A vibrant city. A red-light district at night.
Officers and mates hopped over the lighted pathways. Adrenaline
seeped through her, pulsing in her veins. She hoped, as she slowed to
a safer speed, that the fight would last long enough for her to get
in a few good hits. Starboard,
the six-story island dominated the landscape, the most prominent
structure on an otherwise flat surface. From there, the air boss and
mini boss would direct the dozens of F-35C Lightning II and F/A-18E/F
Super Hornet aircraft that shuttled across the deck, ready to
catapult into the sky. She scooted past the island, around munitions
in large, white bins and over cables, following markings to where
she’d rendezvous with her own multirole fighter jet. Sweat
dripped down her face, though whether from the heat or anticipation
she couldn’t tell. Even two days before Halloween, the North
Pacific sizzled. In a lot of ways, it felt like her hometown, only
hotter. And muggier. What
time is it back in Duluth, anyway? It
had to be early afternoon. Mom would be working the phones to sell
combines and tillage equipment to small-acreage Georgia farmers. Pop
would be out buying sweet plum candy for the trick-or-treaters. Kelly
forced away thoughts of home. She needed to focus. More
sailors swarmed the deck of the supercarrier, like a thousand bees in
a shook-up Coke can, zipping to stations. Every man had a purpose,
his role indicated by his shirt. Maintenance guys, hook runners, and
catapult crews wore a forest green vest over a somewhat lighter green
shirt. Chock and chains wore blue. Purples supplied fuel. Red shirts
loaded bombs. But to Kelly, they were all faceless nobodies that
existed for the sole purpose of getting her bird ready to fly. There
was only one thing Kelly liked about the Navy. Flying. Everything
else about this service branch sucked. Two weeks out of port and the
food started to taste like preservatives and powder. The racks stunk.
The showers were so small the crew called them “rain lockers.”
And then there were the shower bunnies—clusters of hair, grime, and
semen that stopped up the drains. But
flight was life. Nothing
on earth compared to soaring at eleven-thousand feet and watching the
target approach in an instant. Flights were long, and the payoff was
short. But nothing made her feel alive like rolling in over the bad
guys at Mach One, pushing that button, and watching ordnance erupt
below. Of
course, it had been years since her last active duty combat. The
world was quiet. Too quiet. No wars or even military conflicts. Maybe
America had just fucking won. Maybe there would never be another
world war. Her gut yawed at the thought. Up
ahead she saw her carrier-capable Super Hornet on approach to land,
fourteen feet above the deck, tailhook out to snag the arresting
wire—the trap. The
Super Hornet landed flawlessly, catching the trap and accelerating.
The pilot brought it to full power at the end, just in case the wire
broke and he had to pull up to get off the carrier. It had been known
to happen, and this kind of accident killed men on the flight deck as
well as in the plane. Fortunately,
the wire held and the jet jolted to a stop. Kelly
didn’t have time to celebrate the other pilot’s safe night
landing. The flight crew ran to the plane and hauled out the boarding
ladder from a jigsaw-shaped door on the side of the fuselage. As soon
as the pilot and his weapons systems officer climbed down, Orion
scampered up the ladder. Kelly followed. Buckling
into her seat, calmness filled her. Everything was routine. She
punched in her coordinates and performed a quick inspection of her
flight controls. “Beetlejuice, systems check?” His
reply came in through her helmet. “Systems a-go.” “LSO,
this is Bravo-60 on a hot switch. Gimme a CAT. Over.” The
landing signal officer, a white shirt, waved a pair of traffic wands,
incandescent red, signaling her toward the bow. “Bravo-60, you’re
on CAT Two. First in line. Over.” There
were four “CATs”—short for catapult—on the Jerry, like the
starting blocks at a track meet. Once fired, they could launch a
thirty-three-ton aircraft off the deck in seconds. And when the Jerry
really got going, she’d be launching birds off all four CATs at
once, sending a death-dealing warhawk into the sky every twenty
seconds. Kelly
obeyed the white shirt’s signals across the deck until she rolled
to a stop at CAT Two. The magnet clicked below. The white shirt
indicated the go-ahead with his traffic wands. The air boss shouted a
confirmation. Her catapult was cleared for takeoff. “Bravo-60
is ready,” she said through her radio. “Full shhhszzshhsshhshszzzshzz,”
a reply came from the tower. “Tower,
I’m getting a lot of static on your end. Repeat the command.” “They
acknowledged ‘full tension,’” Orion said over her shoulder. It
went against protocol not to have heard the command herself, but she
could see the white shirt flagging her forward. And hadn’t her
squadron commander required haste? Fucking
Navy. Pay
a billion dollars for a plane, can’t maintain a working radio. “Whatever,”
she said. “Full tension is go. Military power is go.” A
yellow shirt, the plane director, touched his helmet, nodding to the
shooter. And with that, the shooter fired the CAT, launching Kelly’s
Super Hornet forward. The
G-forces of the catapult slammed her back in her seat, head and neck
straining to stay upright. The combat fighter broke free down the
stroke, accelerating to more than 160 mph in mere seconds. The CAT
threw her jet off the flight deck and over the open sea, in starlit
darkness, ascending, and the punch of acceleration knocked into Kelly
like a body blow, as it did every time. Violent. Loud. The catapult
could launch her a thousand times over the ocean and she’d never
get used to it. She
pulled the aircraft away from the water and brought the wheels up
into the fuselage. They soared, airborne. “Beetlejuice,
I’m going to take this bird west. Radio the carrier to see if you
can get us specifics on these radar blips.” “10-4.” The
darkness outside stretched into eternity, ocean and horizon melding
together, both black and indistinct. At night, she always tried to
take it slow and let her flight tools do their job. They called it
“flying the instruments.” She called it common sense. Down
in the void of the Pacific, her strike group would be at battle
stations. The guided missile cruiser and two destroyers would be
circling the Jerry, protecting her. A nuclear sub patrolled the
waters a quarter-mile below the surface. Even the combat support ship
provided a defensive flank for the supercarrier, their flagship. Kelly
swiveled back toward the vertical red and horizontal blue lights of
the optical landing system that pilots called “the ball.” Beyond,
white lights dotted the deck, illuminating the runway. Otherwise the
carrier sat in obscurity. Quiet. “Beetlejuice,
do you have a copy from the island?” “Negative,
Moonshot. They’re radio silent over there.” “Try
the emergency channel.” She
could hear him clicking through stations. “Nah-nothing.” His
voice caught like a deer mouse in a snap trap. “Our, uh, our radio
must be out. With the fucking hot switch, we didn’t catch it.” “That’s
crazy. It was working a minute ago. I’m gonna give it a try.” Kelly
moved her dial to the emergency channel. “Bravo-Bravo, this is
Bravo-60. Come in.” On the other end, the shush of static. “Come
in, Bravo-Bravo.” Nothing. “Try
one of the other birds,” Orion suggested. “Who’s
in the air?” Orion
craned his head around. “I don’t have a visual on any others. Do
you see any on radar?” Kelly
tapped her cockpit radar display. “I’m not picking up any birds.
We’re on lead. They should be right behind us.” That
pissed her off. It was just like the fucking Navy to send her out in
the darkness against an unknown threat without anyone on her six for
backup. “I’m circling back. We’re no good to anyone with a
tits-up radio.” A hard turn of the stick brought the plane windward
and back to the east. “Jesus,
Moonshot. We need orders to head back, right?” “You
wanna radio in for new orders?” “Radio’s
busted.” She
rolled her eyes and continued to follow the protocol that prioritized
the safety of the plane and its pilots. They flew back toward the
supercarrier. As
they neared, Kelly fixed her gaze on the flight deck, a half-mile
away but still clearly visible. Bathed in moonlight. Beautiful. One
by one, the lights on the USS Gerald
R. Ford blinked
out. First the red lights of the landing strip. Then the white deck
lights. Then the optical landing system, the ball. All out. Gone in
less than a second. Kelly
gasped. Sweat collected on her palms and between her fingers. This
was impossible. In the eight years she’d flown for the goddamned US
Navy she’d been in some hairy situations, seen some real crazy
things. But no one she’d ever flown with had ever seen the lights
of their carrier turn off. Wasn’t supposed to fucking happen. “Beetlejuice,
are you seeing what I’m seeing?” “Motherfuuhh
… we’re gonna crash.” His voice held an edge of panic. “Anything
from the island?” Blood beat at the back of her eyes. “Anything
from the Jerry at all?” He
didn’t reply at first. Then a prolonged exhale of “Craaaap.” The
only light on deck came from a lone F-35 shooting forward on the
catapult, down the stroke. She could tell even from here it wouldn’t
be fast enough. The CAT hadn’t been correctly calibrated. Or it had
lost power. In
slow motion, the catapult propelled the jet until it flipped
lifelessly off the bow and toward the sea. At the final second, the
pilot ejected—an explosion from the cockpit that sent him
vertically into the sky. Then the last light winked out as the jet
disappeared into the Pacific. With
her world now illuminated only by moonlight, Kelly never saw the
pilot land. Never even saw the splash of the F-35 hitting the water. But
it didn’t matter. A fellow pilot losing a plane into the ocean
didn’t matter. The blackout on the Jerry didn’t matter. At least
not compared to what was happening inside her plane. “Was
that Tater’s bird?” Orion said over her shoulder. Kelly
didn’t reply. Instead, she stared at her cockpit controls. The
systems on the Super Hornet were failing. The Navigation Forward
Looking Infrared—the advanced sensors that let her see—dropped
offline. The Doppler ground mapping radar followed. Then the target
designator that delivered laser-guided bombs.Even
those system failures paled in comparison to the reading from the
fuel gauge. Where
the hell are we going to land? Her
hand shook on the stick. And
the dial moved steadily toward empty.
Sam Boush is a novelist and award-winning journalist.
He
has worked as a wildland firefighter, journalist, and owner of a
mid-sized marketing agency. Though he's lived in France and Spain,
his heart belongs to Portland, Oregon, where he lives with his wife,
Tehra, two wonderful children, and a messy cat that keeps them from
owning anything nice.
He
is a member of the Center for Internet Security, International
Information Systems Security Certification Consortium, and Cloud
Security Alliance.
ALL
SYSTEMS DOWN is his first novel, with more to come.
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