CHAPTER 3
Republic of Vanuatu Islands, South Pacific
Tuesday
9:00 p.m. Local Time
Keenan James Ingersol sat in his modest island beach home, paying no attention to the beautiful blue ocean waves gently breaking onto the white sand beach just meters from the full glass wall overlooking it. The view was stunningly breathtaking. The sun was beginning to set just over the horizon, casting reds and oranges in a brilliant display of colors that would generally impress almost any onlooker. Not Keenan.
Keenan wasn’t really excited about the beach life although he had to admit the occasional people-watching opportunities were interesting. The island he lived on was very sparsely populated, but every now and then some visitors to the resort a kilometer down the beach would wander by. Most of the times the wanderers were fully nude. Again, that was mildly interesting to Keenan. But he really didn’t care for the beach. And there was nothing he’d see walking down the beach that he couldn’t find online.
What he did care for was that the Republic of Vanuatu Islands had no extradition treaties with the United States of America. After he’d had to make a fast exit from South Texas between El Paso and Las Cruces, New Mexico, where he used to live, he’d bounced around the globe until he managed to make it to the islands. It had taken him the better part of the past year, with help from some friends, to rebuild his computer system and his hacking infrastructure from the middle of nowhere in the South Pacific Ocean. But his work was important and his friends needed him for things that only he could do and, so, they kept him funded as needed.
Keenan had been staring at the various computer screens for more than thirty-six hours, using every trick he knew to hack into the mainframe system at the 33rd Guards Rocket Army Headquarters in Omsk, Russia. With some help from a Russian insider, he’d managed to find a backdoor through the security firewalls. But finding what he’d been looking for was the hardest part. Mainly because he didn’t speak Russian, though he could read it some. That made his job harder. Almost with every command input he’d had to run a translator program. That slowed his progress tremendously. So, he’d ended up modifying one of his standard artificial intelligence dictionary search programs to interact with the translator program to speed up the process. After all, data was data no matter what language it was in. And nobody but nobody could keep data from Keenan.
And finally, there it was. RT-2PM Topol and RS-24 Yars maintenance records, manuals, and videos. There were others there, including the Sarmat missiles and the R-36M2 silo-based systems. There were records for TEL movements and plans that were all highly classified. He’d hit the mother lode. His friends were going to pay millions for the data he’d just mined.
Working as swiftly as he could, Keenan started downloading the files through multiple dummy IP addresses and nodes to multiple virtual server locations that only he had access to. While the more mundane files, like repair manuals for a nuclear missile, downloaded, he poked around for anything that looked like something a little more fun. He found a personnel roster that might come in handy in some future endeavor. There were some data files with personal information of some of the troops that might also be worth something to somebody someday. But other than day-to-day military information and things that only people interested in geopolitical intrigue would care about, he found nothing exciting. There was one file marked with the Russian equivalent of “UFO” that he made a point to download to read through when he was bored.
The download of the files continued for several minutes and then a window popped up on his screen telling him the program was complete. Keenan added a few extra backdoors on his way out so he could come back when he wasn’t pressed for time and look about more thoroughly. He then carefully covered his tracks as he disconnected from those particular servers. He stretched and reached for the can of energy drink next to his mouse, but it was empty. He turned and looked at the glass door fridge a meter from him but there were no more of them there. He looked across his open floorplan to the kitchen area and saw only stacks of bottled water and empty cases of the drink. Delivery to the island without the pandemics affecting the supply chain was slow enough. It might take a month to get more of the drinks if they didn’t have them down at the resort.
“Damn it. Better order some more of those.” He reached in the minifridge and took out one of the soft drinks there and opened it. “Better than nothing, I guess.”
He sat the can down and looked out the window down the beach, partially distracted by a nude couple walking hand in hand, and shook his head.
“If they only knew,” he said. Then he tapped the blue-blocking big-lensed glasses he wore, opening up the virtual display. Icons filled his field of view. He tapped the messenger icon and opened it. He quickly typed out a message and sent it to one of his “friends.”
S,
Here are the manuals and design diagrams you needed located at the link here. Encrypted the same as always. You know the drill. I think this will give you all the information there is on these things. I could use another seven figures of crypto to purchase that processing system we spoke about last time. I hope this gets us to the finish line. Also, I set all the cameras and sensors along the pipeline as per the plan. Please pass that along to M. Tell V, thanks for the assist.
You’re welcome,
K