“Morning, people. And happy New Year!” Batista’s Utah drawl cut through the ambient hum. “I hope everyone enjoyed their break, ’cause the enemy didn’t take one and it’s time we get back to earning our keep.” He turned to his FBI liaison seated to his right. “Darnell, you’re up. What’s our domestic picture looking like?”
Special Agent Darnell Cross straightened in his chair. The former Philly beat cop turned cyber specialist was a technical wizard when it came to hunting digital adversaries. He tapped his tablet, sending his screen to the main display.
“Happy New Year to you too, boss. I wish I had better news to start the year, sir.” Cross’s Philadelphia accent thickened under stress. “We’ve been tracking increased PLA cyber activity against critical infrastructure since Boxing Day, December twenty-sixth.”
The screen filled with network diagrams. Red intrusion attempts spider-webbed across port facility schematics.
“Primary targets are industrial control systems at our major automated ports.” Cross highlighted nodes. “LA, Newark, Miami, Houston. They’re probing the AI management systems that run container operations.”
Batista leaned forward. “Probing or penetrating?”
“So far… just probing. But it’s sophisticated stuff.” Cross pulled up attack vectors. “They’re targeting the junction points where human operators interface with autonomous systems. The handoff protocols.”
“Smart,” muttered Colonel Rooke from across the table. The CYBERCOM liaison studied the patterns with professional interest. “Hit the seams, not the armor.”
Cross nodded. “Exactly. They know our port automation runs on predictive algorithms. Crane movements, truck routing, container stacking, it’s all AI-optimized. Corrupt those decision trees…”
“And you turn efficiency into chaos,” Batista finished. “Got it. Casualties? Any companies fall victim?”
“None yet. Our defensive measures held.” Cross’s jaw tightened. “But here’s what keeps me up at night.”
New graphics cascaded across the displays. Port throughput statistics. Dependency charts. Supply chain vulnerabilities mapped in painful detail.
“Houston handles forty percent of our military petroleum imports. LA processes sixty percent of transpacific container traffic. Miami’s our primary pharmaceutical gateway.” Cross let the numbers sink in. “We’re talking strategic choke points. And the PLA knows it. That’s why these ports were targeted and not others.”
“Huh, that’s interesting. How close did they get?” This from Alicia Morane, the CIA’s Deputy Director for Foreign Operations. Her voice carried the weight of someone who’d seen networks burned, and burned a few herself.
“Too close, if you ask me.” Cross pulled up forensic data. “They penetrated the demilitarized zones at three facilities. Got within two network hops of the operational technology layer before our AI-enabled intrusion detection caught them.”
“Attribution confidence?” Batista asked, curious if it was the same known actors or someone new.
“We’re high confidence on this one. The digital fingerprints are pretty well known by the NSA at this point. We traced the attacks back to PLA Unit 61456, their critical infrastructure warfare group. It stumped us at first, but looking back on similar attacks, we found the codes matched against what we saw in the Colonial Pipeline sequel from last year and the year before. Sloppy if you ask me, but we’ll take it.”
Mara Whitford, the State Department liaison, removed her reading glasses. “That’s good work, Darnell. It sucks that Beijing will deny involvement. They always do.”
Cross shrugged. “Eh, so what? Let ’em deny it. We know it was them and we stopped them.” Cross’s street edge began to show in his tone. “So, if you can believe this, we actually got lucky on this one. We’ve got packet captures, malware signatures, even sloppy OPSEC on their command infrastructure. It would appear one of their operators forgot to sanitize his time zone data. Using that and some other tools, we back-traced the attack to, I kid you not, the Shangri-La Hotel.”
Batista nearly spat his coffee out. “Whoa, wait a second. You guys managed to trace this hacker back to a hotel in Guangzhou?”
Cross nodded. “We did. But without a visual verification to know if it’s legit, we can’t say for certain that it truly originated there and wasn’t a proxy.”
Batista sat back in his chair, absorbing the information. Around the table, his team processed the implications. The PLA hackers had been targeting American port automation processes for years. The automation of America’s transportation and logistics networks had been a game-changing revolution in productivity. Fewer workers, faster throughput, predictive maintenance. Unfortunately, that efficiency now looked like a new vulnerability.
“OK, recommendations. I mean, is it possible we could get eyes on that hotel, maybe see if there’s something to it?” Batista asked, keeping his tone neutral.
