Bounty by Michael Byrnes

Author:Michael Byrnes
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2016-07-26T04:00:00+00:00

The Daily Beast @thedailybeast • 12h

@Bounty4Justice helps authorities and assassins track fugitive con man in Mexico.

thebea.st/3rMHGsti4

PETA @peta • 9m

WOW: N. Dakotan pet shop owner caught on video brutally killing puppies shares same fate on @Bounty4Justice.

bit.ly/2eMrt5v.t

# 40.01

@ Moscow

Saturday, 10/28/2017

14:17:55 MSK

Inside Rostelecom headquarters, chief network administrator Yegor Krasneker sat at his desk atop the control room’s command platform, staring in bafflement at the critical error messages flashing up on his screen. At first, his brain denied the whole thing, telling him that what he was seeing could not be right. It was illogical. A mirage…

“Yegor,” his lead technician called to him from a workstation in the pit below. “Are you seeing this?”

“Yes.” Yes. He studied the screen once more. It was there. This was really happening.

Throughout the control room, all the lights and screens flickered for an instant, as if struck by an electromagnetic pulse—an electrical hiccup that quickly stabilized before any equipment went dark.

“The generators…” said the spooked lead technician, coming to his feet and looking around the control room warily, as if it would explode at any moment.

Now dozens of technicians rose from their disabled workstations, looking up to Krasneker for guidance.

On the control room’s main screen, Krasneker brought up a schematic that overlaid a web of color-coded lines across a map of Russia. The grid—stretching from the Far East, to Siberia, to the Urals, and under the Kerch Strait to Crimea—traced out 550,000 kilometers of multi-terabit backbone fiber lines that connected Rostelecom’s close to fifty million residential and corporate customers. Over half of Russia’s digital communications ran through it: voice, Internet, data, media…even the secret networks known only to the Kremlin. It was the Motherland’s central nervous system.

What Krasneker was seeing made his mouth go dry.

Systemwide, green lines were flipping to red and flashing ominously—from the fat lines representing the main data trunks right on down to the thin lines of FTTx last-mile connections—as if the entire data network were experiencing a rolling blackout. Even the labeled sections of the backbone that had recently been upgraded to provide network redundancy were failing to do precisely what they’d been engineered to do. Everything Krasneker was seeing pointed to a catastrophic meltdown. Russia was having a nervous breakdown. His hands began to tremble. Impossible.

Nervous chatter broke out throughout the room.

“Yegor, what’s happening?” asked the lead technician in a quavering voice.

“I don’t know.”

“Was there an explosion somewhere?”

The chatter volume increased.

“Don’t be an idiot,” he replied loudly. “For this to happen, it would have to be…Armageddon.” Yet an all-out nuclear strike just might explain it, he thought.

“You don’t think—”

“Shut up! Everyone SHUT UP!” he screamed.

The chatter subsided to a murmur.

“I need to think.”

For the sake of efficiency, during the backbone’s initial construction, in 2005, much of the Russian Internet—or Runet—fiber lines had been snaked alongside ground-wire cables owned by power companies. It had been a mutually beneficial alliance, with more than one hundred utilities and power plants gaining digital connectivity between their substations and power grids, while ISPs avoided costly outlays for easements and infrastructure associated with a standard network build-out.

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