Skinless

A vignette of violence and espionage.

Skinless

April 1, 2002 Central Eurasia, Kashkar

Seven years out of Bosnia, Ahmed Muhammed bin-Uruk-dur settled into a stinking yurt in the Hindu Kush. The tent flapping behind him was struck by his guide less than ten miles from the southwest end of the Tarim basin. It was the farthest that his guide felt Ahmed could go- a weakling khat from Arabia- and far enough into the mountains to hide. Ahmed (which was not his real name) knew the location of every piece of mass in orbit at any given time, what each thing did, and how it did it. He knew the location of the EM-630 (EQSAT5) over Eurasia, and knew that it would, within fifteen minutes, begin its last string of telemetry to the 509th Wing of the USAF flying to Afghanistan. He knew that the telemetry would be converted into binary by a Chinese-manufactured Motorola 4505 microprocessor (silent cooling), and the binary would go through the B-2's mainframe to the fire control computers, where it would enter the tiny brain of a JDAM. Running in secure mode, the JDAM would know where it was going better than the pilot of the B-2 would. Incidentally, in this case, the JDAM would know where it was going better than anyone except for Ahmed.

The Motorola 4505 (silent cooling) telemetry microprocessor, being Chinese, originally had firmware that was loaded with backdoors and built in buffer overflows to allow the PLA to take control of American equipment. The Pentagon, realizing this during the manufacturing process, politely asked the Chinese to take out the vulnerabilities so the Motorola equipment could be installed in the B-2 bomber. The Chinese specialized the firmware so it could take especially good advantage of the B-2, then gave the processors back to the Air Force, which installed them on their two billion dollar bombers. For any given day eighty percent of the USAF's firepower was under the de facto control of the People's Liberation Army. On a side note, B-2 manufacturer Northrop summarily refused to use elite domestic programmers because none of them could pass the mandatory drug test.

Ahmed (which was not his real name) had a deal with the Chinese, and had it for long enough that he was able to craft code that could take advantage of the backdoors in the B-2's Motorola telemetry receiver. He also had LANDSAT-1, a massive overengineered NASA satellite (presumed out of service) that was wide open to Ahmed's laptop and dish. LANDSAT-1 had a beast of an antenna- if Ahmed were so inclined, he could make every satellite phone ringtone in the hemisphere play "Fat Bottomed Girl" at seventy decibels. As the telemetry was beaming from EM-630 (EQSAT5) en route to the B-2s of the 509th, it would be overtaken and mugged by an overcharge signal from the LANDSAT. The pirate LANDSAT transmission would find its way to the B-2 antenna, then to the Chinese buffer overruns in the Motorola 4505 firmware, from whence it would cheerfully begin executing commands to the B-2 fire control mainframe, which would reprogram the JDAM so that it went where Ahmed wanted it to go. It would all happen when Ahmed pressed the "Return" button on his laptop. Which he did.

From that point the JDAM was the assassin, hired muscle from the Chinese stolen from the Americans, and Ahmed was sitting in a transmission center. The Americans would realize something had happened and would wipe out every dish-shaped object in the Hindu Kush. It was time to leave.

Ahmed threw everything into his mesh gear, hung it carefully from the yurt frame, and snuck into the inky night outside. Naturally a night person, his eyes found the ridgeline and the glowing cherry spot of his guide's cigarette, the only point of light in the darkness. Slowly- more slowly than the second hand on a watch- Ahmed aimed his silenced pistol at a spot three and a half inches up and to the right of the glowing spot. The trigger pull was light, about a pound and a quarter, and the suppressor functioned so well that the only noise was the metallic slap of the automatic's slide. A giblet of frontal cortex sprayed into the night, and the guard slumped like a drunk. Quickly, Ahmed jammed everything that made him Ahmed into the pockets of his guide, darkness and slippery blood making things take longer than they should; in five seconds, the guide became Ahmed, and Ahmed lost himself. The skin had come off again, and the skinless man, NV goggles and mesh gear packed, headed out of the narrow valley like all the fires of hell were after him. Which, in a sense, they were.

Ten minutes later Muhammed Shubai- the target of the skinless man- met his end at the hand of a misdirected JDAM dropped from a B-2 in the 509th. The wedding had been going on for some time, but odd how his son hadn't showed up, isn't it? He had always tried to get Shem out of the business, trying to tell him, Shem, stop dealing with the poppies and the Russians or someone will get you. His son sneered. As Muhammed lay perforated, watching his daughter die by fire, he knew that his son was behind this, somehow, and wished for the vengeance of God upon him. Allah forgive me, I have wished my son to Hell. Muhammed died. The Air Force apologized.

Almost immediately Shem Shubai -the client- wired five million dollars into a German-run mutual, from whence it would find its way - through a long and laundered route- to the man who had once called himself Ahmed. That was some assassination, thought Shem. Shem would be dead within two days, after unsuccessfully trying to find the man he thought was Ahmed.

Forty five minutes later three F-18 fighter/bombers streaked over the yurt and the dead guide who had become Ahmed. They dropped a total of three one thousand pound bombs laser-targeted on the yurt, clearing the valley of all life and scaring the local dovekie population to somewhere more peaceful, like Chernobyl. Soon the Marines would come and find the man who had become Ahmed, al-Quaeda lieutenant and mastermind of the signals campaign against Operation Enduring Freedom. His body, cellphone, and mule would be dissected, analyzed, wrung out for every last detail, none of which would show that the man was illiterate, had never handled a single piece of electronics (not even a radio), did not speak Arabic, and - most importantly- was not al-Quaeda lieutenant Ahmed Muhammed bin-Uruk-dur. The guide's wife wondered where her husband was.