NET
FORCE: Attack Protocol
Author:
Jerome Preisler
ISBN:
9781335080783
Publication
Date: December 1, 2020
Publisher:
Hanover Square Press
The cutting-edge Net Force thriller series, created by Tom Clancy and Steve
Pieczenik and written by Jerome Preisler reveals the invisible battlefield
where the war for global dominance is fought.
In the
wake of stunning terrorist attacks around the world, Net Force jumps into action.
The president’s new cybersecurity agency homes in on a dangerous figure
operating in the shadows of the Carpathian mountains. And he’s ready to strike
again, using the digital space to advance his destructive goals.
But
before Net Force can get boots on the ground, the master hacker and his cadre
mount a devastating high tech assault against the agency’s military
threat-response unit. Has a Net Force insider turned traitor? The stakes are
suddenly ratcheted higher when a global syndicate of black hat hackers and a
newly belligerent Russia hatch an ambitious scheme to plunge the United States
into a crippling war—one that will leave Moscow and its Dark Web allies
supreme.
Their
attack protocol: to seize control of the Internet, and open the door for a modern,
nuclear Pearl Harbor…unless the men and women of Net Force can stop them.
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Excerpt Teaser:
Satu Mare District, Romania
The first snowfall of the season was dusting
the banks of the Somes River when a catastrophic failure struck the power grid,
plunging the western third of the country into darkness.
Nicu Borgos was just
an hour into his midnight shift when things went wrong. An operator for Satu
Mare District’s Electrica Power Distribution Center, he was tired from caring
for his daughter, who was seven and sick with the flu. His wife, Balia, a sales
clerk at a clothing store, was also miserably under the weather, and he had
been doing his best to help her as well. But money was tight and, like him,
Balia needed to work and bring in a paycheck.
The night before, she
had come home from the shop, put chest rub on Angela, tucked her in, showered,
and climbed into bed with her dinner untouched. Nicu normally slept until 9:00
p.m. or even a little later, but the sounds Angela was making in her room
concerned him. He had lost his dear mother to the pandemic three years ago, and
the outbreaks still could be vicious.
Taking no chances,
he’d resolved to stay up to check on the child, poking his head through the
doorway every fifteen or twenty minutes. It was a while before she settled in.
So Nicu was worn out
and bleary, which might have been why he doubted his eyes when he saw the cursor
suddenly drifting across his screen. The computer was networked into the energy
grid, and the numbered blue buttons on its display controlled the circuit
breakers for ten substations throughout the county—an area of almost seventeen
hundred square miles, with some three hundred thousand residents.
The cursor landed on
the switch for Substation One. Clicked. A dialogue window opened below the
button:
Warning: Opening the breaker will result in
complete shutdown. Do you wish to proceed?
YES NO
Reaching for his
mouse, Nicu tried to drag the cursor out of the window, thinking its driver
might have developed a minor glitch. But it remained there…and slid to Yes.
He quickly swiped the
mouse across its pad, wanting to move the cursor to No.
It stayed on Yes.
Clicked. The dialogue box vanished, and the button for Substation One changed
from blue to red.
Nicu inhaled. He had
been an operator at the distribution center for half a decade and did not need
to bring up a map to see the region each substation covered. The map was
already in his head.
Substation One was
Lazuli, a rural commune of six villages to the extreme north, near the
Ukrainian and Hungarian borders. Its six thousand residents had now gone
off-line. Even as Nicu registered this, the on-screen cursor jumped to the
Substation Two button.
He snatched up the
mouse in desperation, lifting it above the pad. It made no difference. The
cursor clicked. Opened another dialogue window requesting confirmation. Went to
Yes again.
Click.
Blue turned to red,
and Nicu Borgos watched Substation Two go down in an instant.
“Draga meu Domnezeu,” he rasped. “My dear God.”
Substation Two was
the city of Satu Mare itself. With a population of one hundred thousand—a full
third of the county’s inhabitants—it was now completely dark.
Nicu tried to think
clearly. During the day, the operating station would have two people on shift.
There was a second computer to his left, with a separate monitor. Possibly the
problem was only with his machine. If he could log in to the system using the
other computer, he might prevent more breakers from tripping open.
He rolled his chair
in front of it, tapped the keyboard. The computer came out of idle showing the
operator log-in screen. He entered his username and password.
A Wrong
Password notification flashed on-screen.
He slowly retyped the
password, thinking he might have entered a wrong character in his haste.
The notification
appeared again. He was locked out of the system.
Nicu sat up straight,
his spine a stiff rod of tension. His original machine showed that Substation
Three, which provided power to Negresti Oas’s twelve thousand citizens, was
down. He glanced at its screen just in time to see the cursor move to
Substation Four…the distribution station for the commune Mediesu Aurit’s seven
villages. The two stations combined served more than twenty thousand customers.
He remembered that tonight’s
temperature was forecast to drop below freezing in the mountain areas, and felt
suddenly helpless. Whatever was causing the shutdowns, he could not deal with
the growing emergency himself.
His heart pounding,
he reached for the hotline to call his supervisor.
***
The black BearCat G3
bore north on the unmarked strip of macadam that linked Satu Mare City to the
tiny farming village of Rosalvea in the Carpathian foothills. Its windshield
wipers beating off fat, wet flutters of snow, the vehicle moved smoothly and
quietly for a big four-tonner armored with hardened ballistic steel panels.
At the wheel was
Scott Dixon of the CIA’s elite manhunting Fox Team, recently placed under
operational detachment to Net Force. Kali Alcazar sat beside him. In her late
twenties, she had short silver-white hair and wore a black stealthsuit and
lightweight plate vest. They were standard organizational issue. A Victorian
English adventurer’s belt and a vintage film-canister pendant hanging from her
neck were personal additions.
“How we doing
timewise?” Dixon asked.
Kali looked at her
dash screen. On it was the same controller’s interface Nicu Borgos was
struggling with at the power distribution center. A moment ago she had seen the
circuits trip in rapid succession.
“Pickles,” she said.
Using the unfortunate name given to the vehicle’s AI by its architect, Sergeant
Julio Fernandez.
“Yes, K?”
“Outlier,” she corrected. Using the dark web handle she had long ago
created for herself.
“Yes, K.”
“Bring up the Satu
Mare power grid.”
“Yes, K.”
She clicked her
tongue. Fernandez had infused the AI with one too many of his stubbornly
aggravating personality traits. But the upside was that, like Julio, it was
also smart, nuanced, and intuitive. She could live with it.
In front of her now,
the panel on-screen was replaced by a sector-by-sector map of the region, its
cities and towns numbered according to the substations that supplied their
electricity. The five already off-line were black, the rest red.
She watched as a
sixth went dark.
“Over half the
stations are down,” she said. “Total blackout in about five minutes.”
“Bitter cold out, a
quarter million people without light or heat,” Dixon said. “Women, children,
seniors. All for the sake of bagging one guy.”
She glanced over at him. “The hackers—the technologie vampiri—are the local
economy. The government protects them. The polizei,
the citizens, everyone.”
He shrugged with his
hands on the wheel. She was right. Suspicions definitely would have been raised
at the syndicate’s current headquarters— the Wolf’s Lair—if they only cut power
to its surrounding village.
“I get it,” he said.
“Still tough.”
“Tougher than it was
on New York?”
Dixon didn’t answer.
Four months ago the vampiri had
launched a cyberattack that left the East Coast a shambles, killed hundreds,
and almost took out the President. Now his team’s pursuit of the Wolf had led
them out here to the Romanian boonies, making them key players in the first
fully integrated operation conducted by the various elements of America’s new
Department of Internet Security and Law Enforcement. Net Force, in bureaucratic
government shorthand.
He really did get it.
The BearCat rolled
between the gigantic evergreens standing sentinel on either side of the road.
In the rear compartment, Gregg Long, Fox Team, sat with a small detachment on
loan from Task Force Quickdraw—six men in tactical gear with Mark 18 CQBR
carbines strapped over their shoulders and short-barreled Mossberg 590 combat
shotguns racked to the sides of the passenger compartment.
“Distance to the
target?” Dixon asked after a few minutes.
This time Kali
skipped the AI, tapping her computer keyboard for the GPS sat map. “Thirty-two
miles.”
Dixon nodded and
checked the speedometer. He was doing about fifty. So a little over half an
hour.
Taking his hand off the wheel, he adjusted his earpiece and hailed Carmody on the ground-to-air.
Excerpted from Net Force: Attack
Protocol created by Tom Clancy & Steve Piecznik, written by Jerome
Preisler. Copyright © 2020 by Netco Partners Published by
Hanover Square Press
Jerome Preisler is the prolific author of almost
forty books of fiction and narrative nonfiction, including all eight novels in
the New York Times bestselling TOM
CLANCY'S POWER PLAYS series. His latest book is DARK WEB, the first novel in a
relaunch of the New York Times bestselling
NET FORCE series co-created Tom Clancy and Steve Pieczenik. Forthcoming in
November 2020 is his next NET FORCE novel, ATTACK PROTOCOL. Jerome lives in New
York City and coastal Maine.
Social
Links:
Twitter: @JeromeAuthor
Facebook: @JeromePreislerBooks
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