Colonel Wesley Denvers was a generally relaxed man. He never overstressed nor obsessed. That helped in his work, and more specifically, the monitoring of the Pentagon’s main Situation Room.
In peacetime, The Room was lightly staffed. A handful of duty officers sat at triple-screen posts, which displayed the results of multiple intelligence feeds, both real-time and filtered by layers of analysts. And Col. Denvers got the main summary displayed on his own post, with red flags to direct his attention to any specific event that those duty officers found important enough. He could then bring up the summary, or usually, go and chat with the appropriate duty person.
Like right now. Without a world crisis underway, “attacks” targeted infrastructure through the Internet, not air bases and missile silos via ballistic attacks.
“Got that on cyber-threat board about 10 minutes ago. The cyber defense command says we have a large-scale outage of the Internet in western Washington State. Looks like a number of data centers and tier-one Internet links went down.”
“Yummy,” his non-regulation comment almost made the officer smile.
“Anything else?” Denvers added.
“No,” she replied, before the duty officer on the next post interrupted.
“Got a notice of part of the electricity grid down. Around Seattle.”
“Could it be the cause?” Denvers asked, turning back to the first duty officer.
“Unlikely,” the cyber officer replied. “All those high-tier facilities have batteries and generators. In a few hours, maybe. Not after…”
The utilities monitoring officer checked again and specified.
“… just 12 minutes. Or about so.”
“So? What threat model?” the colonel asked.
A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.
“Looks like the gaming mecca of the world is in trouble. The West Coast will probably have lots of frustrated gamers tonight. And… yes, that e-commerce-slash-infrastructure provider has some outages too. Its northwest and main datacenter is among those down. Okay, this is a major world-ending crisis.”
Denvers allowed himself a chuckle. That lasted until a third voice from one row behind added a new element.
“Space command status board just notified of a GPS satellite down. They lost comms and the signal is… ah, no. It’s back.”
“Back?”
“Ground command channel indicates the satellite is restarting. Looks like it went on safe mode due to… power bus shutdown?”
“Does that happen often?”
“I don’t think so. I don’t think anyone mentioned that type of problem during my training, let alone a procedure to even do a restart from scratch… ah, looks like it’s going to take several hours to recalibrate the ephemeris. Consider it offline until then.”
The first duty officer said, “You know the adage. Once is happenstance, twice coincidence, thrice enemy action.”
Denvers shook his head.
“Well, that’s only two out of three. The last is in space, not in Seattle…”
The fast-clicking of keys was his answer. Denvers looked at the space monitoring officer, seeing his face scrunch. The duty officer waved to him and the colonel moved to see.
“It was… crossing just over the Seattle area when it went down.”
Denvers swore internally. The joke suddenly wasn’t funny anymore.
He raised his voice.
“Listen everyone? Anyone got anomalies in Washington State?”
The rest of the duty officers made negative signs, save for one.
“PacWest says they got an interruption of phone/IP service in the northwest. They don’t have monitoring updates on a number of cell towers and are trying to get… new status updates. They lost links to another set of cell towers.”
“Link types?” he asked.
“That’s the direct line-of-sight antenna relays,” the telco monitoring desk replied.
“Don’t they have fiber links as backup?” Denvers asked.
“The line-of-sight are backups. The fiber went down earlier… the main nodes are all at the edge of Seattle.”
“Okay, everyone, looks like we have all sorts of cascade failures in the Seattle area. Start doing active checks on whatever you can.”
He debated quickly. Most of the upper echelon was probably gone home, or maybe on the road for those working late. The situation didn’t make sense. Coordinated Cyber-attacks on the infrastructure could explain a lot, but not a GPS satellite falling briefly. Besides, attacking just Seattle sounded stupid, despite the handful of high-profile civilian infrastructure there…
“Can’t raise Jitsap base,” a voice said. “I’m trying satellite, but nobody’s answering.”
“Get me any local base. Or facility.”
He almost-ran back to his desk. General Markus would be annoyed, but he would be the one to decide to call the Joint Chiefs, not him. Once military bases went down, it was a serious attack on the USA.