Kilo-61 (Damned of the 2/19th Book 19)- Ongoing

BS, Lies, and SIGMA

She shook her head.

"Remember, my boy is a product of one of the most paranoid and ruthless times in American history," Heather said softly. "You're an officer, learn to look beyond the surface. Don't make the mistake that everyone else does and look at his face, his accent, and the fact he was born country poor white trash and think that makes him both stupid and ignorant."

"So noted," The LT said.

Donaldson chuckled. "It's an easy mistake to make, and a common one, but one you can't afford working with the Corporal. Always remember: the file is not the man and the man is not the file."

The terminal beeped again. Same address. Someone was getting urgent about it.

"Think they'll crack it?" Donaldson asked.

I nodded, "At midnight this site will upload its checksum values to the network, and all the other will record it."

"Can you stop it?" he asked.

I shook my head, "No. It's hardwired into the system. I don't have time to ID all the chipsets and burn EPROM chips to replace them," I grinned at him, "But I want them to get into the system."

"Because of that," The LT said, pointing.

I rested my hand on the server I'd pulled from the site under Blackbriar. "Right. Because of this."

"Why?" Paige asked.

"Because these systems are slow as hell. The network is slow as hell. It will take them hours to rummage through this drive," I grinned.

"And you booby-trapped it," The LT guessed.

I touched my nose. "Right in one. I encrypted the drive, but made a mid-level mistake of leaving the encryption key on the laptop. I wrote my own hash, but embedded something nasty in it."

"And they'll download the hash off the laptop, put it in their own checksum software, and kick off a virus?" The LT asked.

I laughed, "No. I'm assuming that they're running anti-virus. The hash is actually the instruction set and the core virus programming, only encoded. I did it backwards and chunked it, using a specific alphanumeric code to separate the chunks. When they download and run the compression program I wrote, it'll compile the virus, which will execute it's instructions, then terminate without staying resident."

"Are you sure it will work?" Donaldson asked.

I shook my head, "There's a lot of variables. Hell, I don't even know if what I'm trying to do is going to work. Hell, it used to work, it was a network vulnerability that I ID'd back in like 85 and again in 94, but one that I was told there is no way of protecting against without active antivirus software, which should catch it before it can do anything more than load into memory."

The LT shook her head. "It sounds like technobabble. Nothing I learned in school says that what you're talking about is possible."

"What's it do?" Donaldson asked.

I lit a cigarette before answering. Lighting a second after Heather took the first one. I made the decision, knowing that he'd accept the fact I'd just lied my ass off for the entire thing. "It changes their own checksums, which will grind their entire system to a halt until they do a total system reset on all of their software. A complete OS replacement, all data files recompiled, everything."

He nodded, reaching out and taking the cigarette from me and forcing me to light another. I could tell he didn't believe that part, but he knew me well enough to keep silent.

There was a chance, no, virtually a guarantee, that one or more people on the team were working for the enemy.

The third terminal beeped and I motioned everyone out of the way so I could get at it.