CHAPTER 6

Twelve hours earlier…

The Special Forces GhostWalker team gathered together in the California home of Lily Whitney-Miller, daughter of Dr. Peter Whitney. They grouped together in the war room, where they met regularly, knowing the room was impossible to bug.

“Do we know if he’s still alive?” Kadan Montegue asked as he spread the aerial maps of the Republic of the Congo across the table.

“If there’s one person who has a chance of escaping the rebel camp and making it out of the jungle alive, it’s Jack Norton,” Nicolas Trevane replied.

“General Ekabela is the most bloodthirsty of all the rebels in the region,” Captain Ryland Miller added with a small sigh. “The general’s troops are mostly veterans in combat. Most of his men were in the military before everything went to hell there.”

“It seems to me, as long as I can remember, it’s always been hell in the Congo,” Nicolas said. “Ekabela had done more damage to that region, destroying entire villages and towns, committing genocide, but he’s as elusive as hell and well funded.”

“He controls the marijuana traffic and has major backing by someone here in the U.S. None of his prisoners have ever lasted more than a couple of days. He’s particularly ruthless when it comes to torture. Ken Norton was in bad shape and they’d only had him about ten hours. Ken’s still in the hospital,” Ryland pointed out. “They nearly skinned him alive, not to mention sliced his body into tiny pieces. If Ekabela has Jack, he has only a few hours to escape before they do worse to him.”

Kadan tapped his finger on the map. “Ekabela is on the move. He isn’t going to take any chances with Jack. What the hell was that senator thinking, flying over the Congo in the no-fly zone? And what was some hotshot military scientist doing in a region as hot as the Congo?”

“That’s just the thing,” Dr. Lily Whitney-Miller said. She stepped out of the corner where she’d been observing the GhostWalker team as they met together for the briefing. “The small jet that was shot down in the Congo is the same plane that landed at the airport outside of New Orleans when Dahlia’s home was attacked.”

“What’s even more interesting,” Ryland said, “is that Ekabela didn’t kill the pilot or the scientific team. And when Ken Norton’s squad went into the Congo to rescue the senator, Ekabela was waiting for him.”

Kadan held up his hand. “You think Ekabela was tipped off that the GhostWalker team was conducting a rescue? How would that be possible?”

Ryland nodded. “I’m sure of it. Ken was able to get the senator, the research team, and the pilot out. Why would Ekabela keep the pilot alive? He wasn’t worth anything at all.”

“Of more significance,” Lily added, “the plane went down with supposed engine trouble, yet no one was injured, and Ekabela didn’t have the pilot and research team tortured and killed as he normally does with anyone not of monetary or political use to him. The rebels were waiting to ambush the rescue team. Even with that, the GhostWalkers were able to pull out the senator, and everyone else, although in the process, Ken Norton was captured. Ekabela didn’t waste any time torturing Ken.”

“Even of more significance is the fact that the rebels went for Ken-singled him out. That’s how he was cut off,” Logan Maxwell added. He was the only member of the SEAL GhostWalker squad present. Ken and Jack Norton were both members of his team. “They were waiting for him. I was there. They could have fought to keep their prisoners, but they were more interested in acquiring Ken.”

“Specifically Ken? Not just any GhostWalker?” Lily asked.

“Specifically Ken,” Logan reiterated. There was sudden silence in the briefing room. Members of the GhostWalker team sank into chairs around the table. “Who could have tipped Ekabela off?”

“I don’t know how much you know about Dr. Whitney’s original experiment, when he first began to use human subjects for physical and psychic enhancement,” Lily said to Logan.

“Jesse informed us, ma’am,” Logan Maxwell admitted. “We know he took orphans from overseas, all girls, and enhanced them first. After perfecting his technique, he enhanced the first team.” He gestured around the room to encompass the men and women. “And then ours.”

“Everyone, including me, believed my father, Dr. Whitney, was murdered. We no longer are certain that’s true. We suspect not only that he is alive, but that he has enhanced his own personal army and is conducting experiments with the sanction of someone in the military and someone very high up in the government. We believe there is a conspiracy to engineer the perfect human weapons and that conspiracy involves my father, perhaps the senator you rescued, and definitely members of the military and/or other covert government agencies.”

Logan looked around him. “This place is a fortress. How could Whitney, or anyone else, get ahold of your plans? Or our plans, for that matter. It was my team that came up with the plan to rescue first the senator and, then again, Ken Norton. They were waiting for us when we went in after Ken. Jack provided covering fire, took a hit, and went down. He signaled us to get out of there, and frankly, if we hadn’t, we’d all be dead. Ekabela wasn’t playing games; he wanted us dead. And they wanted Jack. We’ve tried twice to rescue him or recover his body, but they’re moving camps so fast our information is always hours late. General Ekabela definitely tried to kill all of us, and he’s had traps in every camp we’ve hit. Fortunately we’ve managed to avoid them.”

“Which just reinforces the idea that Ekabela should have killed everyone but the senator. So why didn’t he?” Ryland asked.

“We’ve known all along that all of the computers we use here at the house and at the Donovans Corporation belonged to my father. Most of the software programs were either written or modified by him. The datastores use a proprietary, encrypted format. There’s no way to even access data except by using the program he wrote-although the raw data could be manually transferred from his programs to another by pulling it up on the terminal and transcribing it into another terminal… but that wouldn’t get you whatever evaluation formulas were written into his software codes. Obviously if he were alive, and had planned to disappear but wanted to see what we were doing, he would have left himself a back door to monitor the computers. There are fifteen computers here in this house, counting mine, the ones in the lab, and the ones in his office, as well as his personal one in his room. There are over a hundred at the Donovans Corporation, where both of us worked. Dad was the majority shareholder and now Whitney Trust is.”

“And you need his data so you can’t very well wipe everything clean, can you?” Logan asked.

“Exactly.” Lily tapped the end of her pencil on the tabletop. “If someone could access our computers, they would know every move we make. And they could certainly make educated guesses based on data collected on any given move we make.” She glanced at the woman sitting quietly in the back of the room. “Flame brought it to our attention and we all owe her a lot. We’ve been working on the natural assumption that my father planted back doors in the software programs. We assumed he used the main Internet connection.”

Ian McGillicuddy, a tall Irishman, raised his hand. “I’m not very good on a computer, Lily.”

She smiled at him. “Actually, Ian, don’t feel alone. I use them on a daily basis, and it was Arly, our security expert, and eventually Flame who tracked this down. Flame? You want to explain to everyone what’s going on? You’re the one who finally figured it all out.”

Flame made a face and touched the cap on her head to make certain it was in place. Raoul Fontenot leaned over to bite her ear and whisper something that made her blush. She smacked him hard. “You’re such a perv, Raoul.”

“Don’t call me Raoul, Mrs. Fontenot,” he whispered overly loud. “I told you, Gator. They have to call me Gator.”

“Don’t you call me Mrs. Fontenot,” she hissed between her teeth, the color creeping up her neck.

“You married him,” Ian pointed out with a wide grin.

“I was tricked.” Flame shoved at Gator to move him away from her, but he didn’t appear to notice, not budging an inch.

“The computers,” Ryland reminded them.

“Sorry,” Flame muttered. “There’s a single Internet line coming into the house, a high-speed cable modem. The cable line hooks up to the cable modem. The modem, in turn, hooks to a router, which then distributes the cable signal to all computers. In this case, Dr. Whitney used a high-end snazzy, heavy-duty router because he has so many computers. We presumed Whitney,” she glanced at Lily, “or someone who knew about his work, tried to get access to his computers via the Internet connection, through the router. The router has a built-in firewall, as do each of the individual computers. We used the firewall software to monitor any attempted intrusions. There were random attempts here and there that you can expect to find on any computer these days. The attempts were easily rejected by the firewall and didn’t have the kind of systematic pattern I would have expected to see if someone was trying to get in.”

“Arly and Flame monitored the computers for several days with no luck at all of spotting evidence of my father attempting to break in,” Lily explained.

Flame nodded. “We kept daily logs on each computer.” She took the notebook Lily slid to her and opened it to a random page. “Here’s the event log for the last week. There were several random attacks from different IPs on UDP port 25601, like this one on Thursday at 10:39:17 A.M. from IP address 152.105.92.65. Or this one on Friday at 5:23:58 A.M. from IP address 59.68.234.64. They were all caught and stopped by the firewall and were all probably SeriousSam gamers looking for playmates-you can tell the game by the port they were trying to enter through.”

Ian scratched his head. “Sheesh, Flame, and I thought Lily couldn’t speak English.”

She smirked at him. “And you thought I was just a pretty face.”

“I thought you were a pain in the ass,” he said. “Now I know you are. You’re going to be holding this over my head, aren’t you?”

“Darn straight.” Flame tossed the log on the table. “At a certain point we realized someone was reading the key files on Lily’s computers. We found that out by noticing that the last accessed date on several files was very recent.”

“Wait.” Ian held up his hand. “I’m really trying to follow this. How can you know when someone accessed a file?”

“Every Windows file has three associated time stamps. Creation date, last modified date, and last accessed date. You can access or read a file without modifying it, hence the distinction between last accessed and last modified.”

“Okay, that makes sense,” Ian said. “Did you catch him?”

“I wish. We ramped up our monitoring of the firewalls, but we couldn’t link any of the random attempts to the reading of the files. We looked in all the usual places someone could insert a back door into the Windows operating system, but couldn’t find any evidence of any such back door. We were completely stumped.”

Lily laughed softly. “Arly and I were stumped. Flame suddenly jumped up and yelled, ‘Hardware back door.’ I had no idea what that meant, Ian, if that’s any consolation.”

Flame shrugged. “It was so obvious. We forgot the most obvious advantage Dr. Whitney had over other hackers. These are his computers. He could do anything he wanted with them. Unlike the usual hacker, he doesn’t have to sneak a virus, worm, or Trojan through the firewalls. Unlike software manufacturers, he doesn’t have to sell someone software with a back door in it. No, he has complete control over his own computers. He could literally drill a hole in the side of his computer and run a cable into it creating a private tap. All that time we wasted looking for a software back door when it had to be a hardware back door.”