“What is it?” Esther demanded.
“This is bad, real bad,” he said. He pointed at his laptop. “This is the operating system for the Patriot’s AN/MPQ-65 radar tracking system.” He pointed at the computer terminal I’d been using. “That virus you have has been written to alter the intercept data the radar uploads to the missile. It’s not a big change, but at the speed and distance needed for an intercept, it will cause the Patriot to completely miss its intended target.”
I turned to Esther. “Get back to the IDF and tell them we have confirmation that the virus targets the Patriots. Then get them to check the operating systems again to see if they’ve been infected.”
I turned back to the Raytheon tech. “Don’t go anywhere – we’re going to need you.” Then I got on the phone and called the Director’s office. They put me straight through. “Sir, we now have confirmation that the virus attacks the Patriot missile system. We don’t know for sure, but we think the target is Israel, possibly the Dimona nuclear site. Yes sir, our next priority is to try to figure out how to stop it.”
Esther had also been on the phone, and when I hung up she was looking at me with an angry expression. “That’ll teach those idiots to pay attention,” she said. “They’ve already found signs of the Al Andalus virus in one of the Patriot installations and they’re checking the others now.”
The Raytheon tech piped up, “Oh, they’ll find it for sure. All the systems are designed to talk to one another. That way they create an ‘umbrella’ of defense. If one of them is infected, you can bet they all are.”
Esther and I stared at each other. “So how do we fix it?” I asked him.
“Well, I’ve never heard of one of our systems having a virus, but theoretically it ought to be pretty simple to fix. All you’d have to do is swap out the AN/MPQ on each of the missile batteries with a new one.”
“Can’t you just install a new operating system?” I asked.
“These systems aren’t like a Mac or a PC,” he said. “The hardware and software are integrated, you’ve got subsystems running all through the unit, and they all work together. The only way to be sure you’ve got a clean system is a swap-out.”
“Okay, how long does that take?” I asked.
“Oh, anywhere from eight to twelve hours.”
“That’s going to cut it very close,” Esther said.
“Of course, that doesn’t count delivery time,” the tech went on.
“Delivery from where?” I asked uneasily.
“From our plant in Andover, Massachusetts,” he said.
I slumped back into my chair and looked despairingly at Esther. “That isn’t going to work,” I said. I turned back to the guy from Raytheon. “You and I are going to have to try to figure out something else,” I said.
We worked on the problem for hours. I tried to educate him on how viruses worked and he tried to teach me about the Patriot system. Nothing came of it.
More software engineers from Raytheon showed up, and I began shuttling among them, trying to come up with a way to extract or nullify the virus. The problem was that their system was proprietary, specific to Patriot unit. None of their programmers had ever encountered a virus aimed at their system and they had no way to attack the problem. The easy, obvious answer for them was to swap out the units. Not only would that take way too long, but the whole system would have to be shut down during the transfer, leaving what they were protecting undefended. In effect, we’d be doing the work of the virus for ISIS.
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