Waking Wolfe Read online

  Contents

  Waking Wolfe

  Copyright Information

  Books by S.L. Shelton

  Dedication

  Dear Reader,

  Twenty-One Months Until Event

  Twenty-Two Days Until Event

  Eight Days Until Event

  Seven Days Until Event

  Six Days Until Event

  Five Days Until Event

  Four Days Until Event

  Three Days Until Event

  Two Days Until Event

  One Day Until Event

  The Event

  Aftermath

  Map 1 - Georgia

  Map 2 - Amsterdam

  Map 3 - Central Europe

  Glossary

  Acknowledgments

  Unexpected Gaines

  Excerpt from Unexpected Gaines

  Acclaim

  Waking Wolfe

  The 1st novel in the Scott Wolfe Series

  By S.L. Shelton

  Copyright 2013 by S.L. Shelton

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2013 by S.L. Shelton. Published originally under the title A Lamb in Wolfe`s Clothing. Second edition released as Waking Wolfe, May 2014. Third edition released May 2015.

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

  Front cover, maps, and artwork contained in this book are Copyright © S.L. Shelton

  Word Count, 106,670

  Books by S.L. Shelton:

  Hedged

  The Scott Wolfe Series:

  Waking Wolfe

  Unexpected Gaines

  Danger Close

  Wolfe Trap

  Harbinger

  Predator’s Game

  Splinter Self (Coming 2016)

  Back story: Lt. Marsh

  For my wife, Diane.

  Thank you for your constant and loving support.

  Dear Reader,

  Thank you for making the Scott Wolfe series such a huge success, putting it into the Espionage, Political, Conspiracy and Techno Thriller top 100 bestsellers for its main outlet, the Amazon Kindle. I watch with gratitude, overjoyed by the growing attention.

  When I started this series back in May of 2012, I had intended to write it as a multiple-point-of-view third-person novel. I quickly realized that I wanted a much more personal point of view when it came to Scott Wolfe. After rewriting the first few chapters to address that desire, I realized I was much more satisfied as an author and was encouraged to continue in that direction by my early readers.

  While it can sometimes be jarring to jump from Scott’s brain into third-person narration, I’ve taken steps to reduce those moments to “bonus” perspectives: gifts to you, the reader, to help give you a deeper awareness of what’s going on outside Scott’s line of sight.

  I hope as you read the series, you enjoy the unfolding saga as much as I have enjoyed writing it. There is little more that an author can hope for than what you have already provided—being emotionally entangled in the lives of our characters.

  Thank you once again for taking the time to discover Scott Wolfe, and I hope that if you enjoy it, you will mention it to others and post a review of your time with him. Scott and I both thank you.

  Very best regards,

  S.L. Shelton

  Author

  NOTE: Descriptions of facilities in this novel have been fictionalized for reasons of security and to reduce the number of future encounters the author might have with federal officers.

  one

  Twenty-One Months Until Event

  August 10, 2008—TravTech Headquarters, Reston Virginia

  “Scott Wolfe?” called the TravTech receptionist.

  I rose from my seat, smiling thinly, feeling ridiculous and uncomfortable in a suit and tie. “That’s me.”

  “Danny will be right with you,” she said. “They’ve got a bit of a security crisis going on this morning and Mr. Sterling won’t be able to interview you.”

  I nodded my acceptance of her explanation as I sat again. Though disappointed I wouldn’t be interviewing with the head of the division, I tried to keep my smile plastered on.

  I returned my attention to the TV in the reception area. Breaking news on CNN was showing a bombing campaign in Gori Georgia…the Russians were bombing the living shit out of some little former Soviet state and all the talking heads were crying about a re-emergence of the Cold War. I always took anything the network news shows had to say with a grain of salt, realizing ratings, not information, was their primary goal.

  After a few moments of watching buildings explode on an endless loop, I was half tempted to hack the news network’s video feed servers just to see some new images.

  Though I had a spotless record—never having been caught sneaking into various corporate mainframes—all I needed was to get nailed while sitting in the reception area of the company I was trying to get a job with…over their Wi-Fi.

  Instead, I kept my laptop tucked in my briefcase and continued to wait. I took a lingering breath, impatient, as the news footage continued to recycle every two or three minutes.

  “Mr. Wolfe?” The receptionist called after a few moments. “I can take you to see Danny now.”

  I got up and followed her along a winding path through the giant cube farm to a glass-walled office on the other side of the floor. Around us, busy programmers glared at the monitors and jabbed at keyboards, oblivious to the world outside of their individual cubicles.

  The receptionist stopped and knocked on a door on the opposite side of the vast tech floor. The name plate said “D. Habib.”

  He looked up with a tense smile. “Ah!” he exclaimed as if I were carrying the lunch order he had been expecting. “Scott Wolfe?”

  “Yes sir.” I extended my hand as he came around the desk.

  “Storc has said a lot of great things about you,” he said, shaking my hand firmly. “That means a lot coming from him…he’s one of our best.”

  “He’s good,” I agreed. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone who can re-matrix a data filled database as fast as he can.”

  Danny smiled. “That’s funny; because he said the same thing about you…along with something about being able to sniff network vulnerabilities like a virus.”

  I don’t know if I liked that my friend Storc had tried to build my cred with TravTech by describing me as virus-like, but the intent had been complimentary. I nodded awkwardly, not sure how else to respond.

  “I do have a tendency to know where the weak points are,” I replied and then added, oddly, nervously, “I’m good at just about any kind of puzzle too.”

  He shot me a questioning glance. I can’t blame him; that was an odd thing to mention.

  Shut up, Scott.

  He opened his mouth to say something else as he sat, but a man poked his head through the door interrupting his thought.

  “Danny, I need you for a minute,” the man said. “The routers upstairs just failed. Whatever is in the system, it’s working its way to the executive level servers.”

  Danny jogged around the desk and followed the man. “I’ll be right back,” he said as he left his office, leaving me sitting alone. I noted he had left his computer running without securing it.

  That’s not very security minded, I thought but then saw a chance to try and make an impression. I ignored his unsecured terminal and instead, pulled my laptop out of my briefcase.

  Using the company Wi-Fi, I opened a command prompt and began probing what I knew are typically vulnerable ports in the firewal
l.

  “Good security,” I muttered after a moment. It must be a redundant port that was exploited somewhere.

  That’s when my “gift” kicked in—the nearly ever present visual hallucinations I’ve experienced for as long as I can remember.

  They aren’t random hallucinations like talking trees or walls that ripple in psychedelic colors or anything; these are very specific hallucinations…subject specific. They’re like a visual recall of memorized details, sometimes in the form of text or images, or, like today, a virtual map of network security process charts, winding its way along access points to the vulnerabilities. Two ports in my virtual simulation flashed red at me and I probed them from my laptop.

  The first one was locked down tight—not enabled—but the second one was active…and streaming a large amount of data despite being a redundant port for simple IP verification.

  “There you are,” I muttered as I began pushing my way through the port with no challenge. Unsecure, I thought. Who left you open?

  I passed through the firewall and began searching for the port log—no entries.

  Ah! I thought. “Covering your tracks as you go. Smart virus.”

  I opened a new dialog window and began a second log for the port activity. It immediately began to fill with data, recording each activity that took place through the port.

  I left it running in the background as I began to tackle the source of the intrusion. It was a clever little intruder. It moved in only short bursts of activity, erasing any logs, and then going dormant before starting the process over again. As I followed the winding and widening grasp of the electronic worm, watching it burrow deeper and deeper into the network, I began to see the pattern emerge in my virtual wire-frame of the network—in hallucination form.

  “Gotcha,” I said aloud as I pinpointed the location of the intruder.

  I began constructing a false world around the virus and its connections, rerouting all the data calls to a new directory it could harvest from; a directory of spam mail that the TravTech mail filters had isolated and dumped. Many of the messages, I’m certain had virus links of their own.

  “Let’s see if you find any value in those,” I muttered as I began building a sandbox around the process. Once I imported the sandbox, I moved it to a small, unused boot drive and then copied the virus command files. It would no longer be able to harvest data or shutdown systems.

  “I’m sorry about that,” Danny said as he came back into the office. “That was Bob Sterling; the guy who was supposed to be interviewing you today…my boss.”

  I nodded as I hit enter on my laptop, having finished recompiling the port file, shutting it down. As I returned my laptop to its case, I looked up and smiled.

  “That was a nasty little worm you had there,” I said. “I can see why it was causing you so much trouble.”

  Danny looked at me. “Huh?”

  “It was using a dedicated ‘Whois’ port that was redundant to your primary.”

  A confused expression swept across his face. “I’m not sure I understand.”

  “Your security problem,” I said. “It was erasing its log entries as it worked… It was very well camouflaged.”

  “Was?” he asked, still confused.

  “Yes. I moved it into a sandbox on an unused boot drive. It’s not harvesting data anymore,” I explained. “Well, actually it is still, but now it’s harvesting the spam that your mail server quarantined.”

  “What? You went into the system?” He asked, dumbfounded, with a hint of agitation tugging at the corner of his eye.

  “I used the same port the Malware used,” I replied, starting to worry that maybe my bold display had been less witty and more threatening than I had imagined it to be. “I started a second log file, just to record the actions of the Worm and the Trojans that came in behind it. We won’t be able to track the damage backward from that, but you can watch it work now so you can find the source of the intrusion…that’s why I left it running in the sandbox.”

  Habib began punching keys on his keyboard. “What’s the name of the log file you started?” he asked almost as if in passing.

  “WhoisPortCopy02,” I replied. “It’s in the same—”

  “I see it,” he replied, cutting me off.

  Uh oh…he sounds pissed, I thought. So much for working at TravTech.

  “And you built the sandbox on the Boot884?” he asked, obviously having found it himself.

  “Yep,” I replied. “Actually, though, I didn’t build the sandbox. I just copied it out from the Dev Server and aliased the spam mail directory, since that was already outside of the firewall.”

  He looked up at me suspiciously and then got up to leave. At his door, he called down the hall. “Bob. Can you come down here a minute?”

  Habib went back to his computer without looking at me. A moment later, Bob Sterling walked into the office, nodding toward me as he moved over beside Habib. He looked at the display for a moment.

  “Son of a bitch,” Sterling muttered. “Nice job isolating. And it’s still running like it doesn’t even know it’s been shut down.”

  “And look at this,” Habib said, pointing at something on his monitor.

  Sterling nodded. “Damn,” he said. “How’d that port get compiled open?”

  “Not sure,” Habib replied. “We’ll have to look back at the install logs.”

  “Damn good work, Danny,” Sterling said, slapping Habib on the back.

  “It wasn’t me,” Habib said with a grin. “It was him.”

  Habib and Sterling looked up at me.

  “Who are you?” Sterling asked.

  “That’s Scott Wolfe,” Habib answered for me. “He’s the one you were supposed to be interviewing this morning…for Security and Development.”

  “Whose ID did you log into the system with?” Sterling asked me with distrust on his face.

  “I didn’t, sir,” I replied sheepishly. “I used the company Wi-Fi and then went in through the same port the Worm did.”

  He looked at Habib with a blank stare, bringing a broad grin to Habib’s round face. After a beat or two, he looked back at me. “You’re hired. When can you start?”

  “Uh. Wow!” I stuttered. “Whenever you need me to.”

  “I’ll see you tomorrow morning,” Sterling said as he walked around Habib’s desk to shake my hand. “Welcome to TravTech.”

  “Th…Thanks,” I replied as the worry of indictment for hacking gave way to excitement over being hired. “I’m looking forward to it.”

  “Get him set up in a cube,” he said to Habib. “And put him on writing up the exploit on that port so we can report it.”

  “Will do,” Habib replied with a broad smile.

  As Sterling left the office, Habib turned and looked at me with a crooked grin. “Best interview ever,” he said.

  “Thanks,” I replied. “There for a second, I was worried.”

  “Let’s go talk to HR about payroll and insurance stuff,” he said rising from his desk and shaking my hand. “Welcome aboard.”

  Minutes later, seated back in the reception area as I waited for someone from Human Resources to see me, I looked up at the TV screen. The same footage of the Russian bombing in South Ossetia was still playing.

  Once again, the desire to hack the network video feed swept over me.

  Stop it, Scott, I thought to myself.

  With that internal reprimand, I pushed Gori, Russians, and bombs out of my head; after all, why obsess over something that would never affect me personally.

  **

  August 11, 2008—Gori, Georgia (The country, not the state.) Russian invasion of South Ossetia.

  LIEUTENANT STEVE MARSH—call-sign Arrow—of the US Navy, led his small squad of “military advisors” down a side street in Gori. Around them, the windows and ground shook with each new explosion, sporadic vibrations that Marsh felt deep in his chest and bones.

  The Russians’ air bombardment had intensified over the past coup
le of hours. But to the best of Marsh’s ability to judge from their position, the attack seemed to have shifted almost entirely toward the Georgian military base, one street and one row of buildings beyond where they were huddled.

  “Nightshade, this is Arrow,” Marsh called into his radio mic, speaking to the sniper—Petty Officer Monroe—who was perched on a rooftop somewhere above them. The sniper was scanning the scene for…for what, Marsh didn’t know. No one had shared that tidbit of information with him.

  An explosion on the far side of the building shook dust and loose masonry down around the squad as they took a short break from their forward movement.

  “Go ahead, Arrow,” Nightshade replied loudly after a few seconds.

  “How’s it looking across the parade field?” Arrow asked as he pressed himself against a building to avoid falling glass from a broken window.

  “Well, Arrow, there are a lot of explosions…and fire and smoke,” he replied. “I’d have to say it looks like a gigantic, steaming pile of bullshit...the kind that burns when you pinch it off.”

  Arrow clenched his jaw as the men around him chuckled. He had assumed there wouldn’t be any change. It was pointless to have a forward observer during an air bombing, and not one of them was happy about being there. But Nightshade should have known better than to use an open channel to vent his frustration at having been ordered to do something stupid.

  “COM discipline, Nightshade,” Arrow said into his mic, doing everything he could to keep the smile on his face from coming across in the transmission.

  There were two clicks in his ear, confirming receipt of the order.

  The five man squad from SEAL Team 9—AKA “Development Group Two” as they were officially called—had crossed the bridge over the Mtkvari River just before sunrise when the bombardment had been well underway. There were five of them: Majesty, Owl, Deadeye, Nightshade, and Arrow, who was in charge. The Russians seemed to be very interested in getting everyone out of the small city—they were doing a good job; Marsh was ready to leave. Unfortunately, the CIA Op leader wasn’t ready for that to happen.