Northern Virginia
It was official.
The helicopter crash they were calling Black Fish was now designated by the DIA as a terrorist attack on the United States Military; sabotage that had resulted in the crash of a UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter in the Adirondacks near Fort Drum in New York and the death of all on board. Three weeks had passed since the crash and, by now, a dozen flags were sitting on mantels across the country, the stars and stripes expertly folded into a triangle and encased in glass, having transitioned from their honorific roles atop a dozen caskets at a dozen funerals.
Lilith pushed back from her office desk and looked at a blank wall she liked to imagine was a window. But there were no windows in her line of work. She knew there was snow on the ground outside, but she wouldn't see it until after dark when she would finally shuffle in her overcoat back through the parking lot. It would be piled along the road near the gatehouse where armed soldiers checked her ID each morning. She hoped the hills weren't too icy on her way home, and not for the first time, she thought about Frank and Cal enjoying a warm winter in the Mediterranean.
But now wasn't a time for vacations.
How many lives had been torn apart the moment the Black Hawk had flown into the side of the hill? Mathematically, there would be roughly two-dozen grieving parents, but how many children were left standing at funerals in little suits and dresses, hands over hearts, as their fathers—and one mother, the pilot—were paraded past them in caskets draped with those flags?
Those kids deserved answers. And the spouses and parents. Really, the whole damned public deserved to know that their country was under attack.
Classified.
One word with ten letters that put up a roadblock to any public inquiry. Three decades in the Defense Intelligence Agency and Lilith still hated it. Not the secrets—she loved collecting those like kids collected Pokémon—but the inability to tell grieving families what had really happened to their loved ones. It was more complicated than that, of course, but Lilith hated it just the same. And this new attack was an evolution of warfare that she supposed the American public wasn't ready for yet—not that it was her call. She was just a small fish passing reports from her subordinates up to her superiors. Ten years prior she might have been the one in the field, but with maturity came experience, and with experience came a desk job, better paycheck, and bigger and bigger fish biting at her ass for answers.
She didn't have any yet.
It was clear now that the sabotage to the Black Hawk hadn't been achieved physically. There were no foreign agents hidden in the helicopter hangar or the mechanic bays. No traitors in their midst. But the reality was possibly worse. Black Fish was a technology that allowed somebody to commit sabotage from a distance. Exactly how was still unclear. Was there something encoded in the navigational software? Was there a backdoor implanted during manufacturing? It was a real concern when vital components were imported from overseas, but so far, the techs were confident that wasn't the case.
So how did it happen? Lilith leaned into the computer screen and read through the latest report again.
Apparently even the IRGC didn't know, which was a surprise. Originally, the NSA had picked up chatter from an Iranian network after the crash, where the phrase *mahi siyah—*translated from Farsi to black fish—had been used to describe the attack. Was it a twist on Black Hawk, the target helicopter of the attack? All eyes focused on Iran and their proxy forces around the world and continued surveillance indicated that the IRGC knew something about the attack and technology, but not who actually had pulled the trigger.
If there even was a trigger.
GPS spoofing was a technology where an external force overwhelmed a navigational system and tricked it into thinking it was someplace else. The Russians had used it for years, but their technology was bulky and short-ranged, mostly messing with aircraft on the Polish border or enemy drones in Ukraine. Even then, American military hardware was supposed to be immune, and it wasn't like there was a Russian electronic warfare base hidden in the Adirondack Mountains.
She needed a coffee. Hell, she needed a cigarette, but she never allowed herself to go back to an old habit once discarded. But once she thought about cigarettes, she thought about the old days when she was a DIA foot soldier in the field investigating threats to military bases and personnel around the world. An image of Frank came to mind from ten years ago at the FOB in Syria. He was wearing a soldier's field uniform that wasn't his and had a Virginia Slim hanging from the corner of his mouth, his mustache covering it like an umbrella. Not that there was any rain in Syria.
Frank. If the fucker hadn't retired already, he'd be up in New York right now searching for clues.
"I could sure use your eyes on this one," she said aloud in her empty office where Frank would never hear it.