Chapter 9:// Herr Oberstleutnant

Over the Rhine was the only first-person shooter to which Brian Gragg had ever become addicted. He’d played and mastered a score of PC action games. All of them had incredible 3-D graphics, volumetric smoke, realistic physics engines, thirty-two-voice sound, vast levels, and multi-player Internet features. But OTR was different: Its AI was scary smart.

Where enemies in other games poured through doorways, wave after wave, only to be slaughtered, OTR’s AI engine deployed Nazi soldiers realistically. In a house-to-house search, groups of three or four would peel off from the main group, kicking in doors. If you shot one or two or even three, the officer in the street would blow his whistle and shout orders. Then you’d better haul ass because dozens of soldiers would surround your cottage. They wouldn’t storm the place like mindless automatons. Instead, they’d take cover behind fences, walls, and vehicles, and they’d shout in German for you to come out. When you didn’t (and, of course, why would you?) they’d start tossing grenades through the windows or set fire to the house. If you tried to look out a window to see what they were doing, a sniper might cap you.

But what was even more fascinating to Gragg was that they didn’t do it the same way each time. There were smart and dumb soldiers, and varying qualities of Nazi officers. If you holed up in a particularly defensible spot, they might call in a Stug to batter the place into rubble—or worse yet, a Flamenwerfer. And if the siege went on for a while, the Gestapo would arrive to take charge of the situation, and that meant only one thing: SS Oberstleutnant Heinrich Boerner, an adversary so wily and twisted, this fictional character had become a cause célèbre at the E3 gaming convention. There was a thirty-foot color banner of his face hanging over CyberStorm Entertainment’s booth. He was literally the poster boy for evil.

OTR’s AI cemented the impression that you were fighting against a rational opponent—and a challenging one. Gragg appreciated the endless hours of distraction this afforded, particularly since his real-life incident with the Filipinos.

Heider’s body had been found in a rail yard near Hobby Airport, south of Houston. Heider had been bound, gagged, and beaten to death—left as a warning to the carder community. It was at times like these that Gragg was thankful for his limited social circle.

Few, if any, would be able to connect him to Heider, but just in case he decided to lay low for a few weeks.

He had about fifty or sixty thousand in cash on hand at various banks under various identities. Good thing, because he couldn’t trade the identity database he had copied from the Filipino server with any of his Abkhazian contacts. It was just too hot. He felt a wave of humiliation again. Over twenty thousand high-net-worth identities down the drain—a fortune on the open market. How did they know it was him?

Gragg had cracked their database through a Unicode directory traversal that allowed him to install a back door on their Web server. They hadn’t properly patched it, and the sample applications were still on the server, so it was a fairly trivial matter to gain Administrator rights. He was pretty certain that a network admin was lying at the bottom of Manila Harbor over that simple mistake.

But how the hell did they trace the hack to him? Gragg ran the exploit through a zombied machine somewhere in Malaysia and a hijacked 803.11g wireless connection in a Houston subdivision. Even if they tracked the file transfer to the destination IP address, how did that lead them back to him? Even if they beat the hell out of the poor suburban sap whose Wi-Fi access point he’d hijacked, that wouldn’t tell them anything. Nonetheless, Gragg had spent a couple sleepless nights waiting for his front door to be kicked in while pondering the question. He just couldn’t figure it. What had he missed?

Only recently did it occur to Gragg that he might have been the Filipinos’ only partner in Houston. By staging the attack from a Houston domain, Gragg had made a pathetically obvious mistake. The carder, Loki, from Houston, Texas, was an obvious suspect.

But as the days slipped by, it became apparent that either the gang was satisfied that Loki was dead or they had no idea of Gragg’s real identity. Until he was positive, Gragg spent his waking hours hiding in the rough industrial space that served as his apartment, playing endless hours of OTR. And OTR was quite a challenge, after all.

Gragg usually chose the Nazi side, and his preferred weapon was the sniper rifle, which he’d use to pick off newbies from a hiding place in a bell tower or garret window. He combined this with a liberal amount of verbal abuse, using hot keys to launch the taunts built into the game: I’ve seen French schoolgirls shoot straighter!

His cable Internet connection usually gave him a ping in the 20-to 50-millisecond range, which was a major advantage against lamers with pings of 150-plus. Their in-game avatars would hesitate as Gragg dropped them. He never tired of piling up the bodies in front of his hiding place.

Deathmatch OTR was a distributed network game—that is, one of the players hosted the game map off of his machine and made the match available for anyone to join over the Internet. There were deathmatch clients available that listed all available matches by geographical region—each machine sending out a message that it was available. The server listings numbered in the thousands.

Since Gragg had been playing OTR off and on for the last six months—well before the Filipino problem—he was intimately familiar with every game map. He knew that if he tossed a potato masher grenade from the end of the park in the Saint-Lô map, it would land just behind the vegetable cart on the far end, killing anyone hiding there. He knew a place on the Tunisian map where he could jump up onto shattered rooftops and snipe people with impunity. It took an experienced jumper to make the leap without falling to his death off the balcony.

Frankly, deathmatch had begun to lose its luster until CyberStorm released the custom map editor. Since then, a score of popular custom maps had appeared in the deathmatch server listing. Most of these maps were the out-of-control Rambo fantasies of fourteen-year-old boys, with ridiculous numbers of mounted machine guns and no logic in the placement and design of fortifications. Gragg knew he could do much better, but he didn’t have the inclination to learn the scripting language used to create the maps—no money in it.

So it was with low expectations that Gragg downloaded a new custom map named Monte Cassino. The reasonably historic name was unusual, since the fourteen-year-old crowd usually named maps something like “Fuckmeister Shitfest.”

Gragg quickly found a server named Houston Central running the Monte Cassino map. Since it was geographically local, it gave him a killer ping of twenty milliseconds, and he joined the deathmatch already under way.

The moment the map loaded, he noticed differences from other custom maps. First off, he wasn’t even allowed to join the Axis team. The map permitted Internet team play only for the Allied forces. The Germans were bots. It was humans against the AI, which irked Gragg because he loved playing the German side—they were the villains, after all.

Likewise, respawning was different in this map. It wasn’t a straight team match, where you respawned elsewhere after dying. Instead it was described as an “objective” map, where you stayed dead until the last member of your team died or until you defeated all the Germans—at which point the map reset and everyone was alive again.

Also, this map had radically different terrain and textures—as though it was all done from scratch. The map consisted of a steep mountain topped by the ruins of a large Benedictine monastery. The scenario description said U.S. heavy bombers had struck the monastery. The resulting ruins turned out to be a maze of shattered walls, charred wooden beams, and entrances to cellars. It provided excellent cover for the Germans, and the designer placed MG42s with interlocking fields of fire along the approaches to the hilltop. The Germans also had light mortars to kill you if you hid behind boulders. It was as if they’d “registered” the coordinates of all the good cover in advance—which was something the Germans might actually do. As a result, Gragg was determined to beat it.

It was quickly apparent that a pack of lone gunmen could not take the monastery. It required an orchestrated attack. It took an hour of goading other teammates using the chat window, but Gragg finally convinced them to coordinate their attack—instead of running hell-bent for leather up the hill. With some experimentation, they soon discovered that half the squad could draw fire from the Krauts while the other half of the force outflanked them on the left, using the steeper incline for cover. If they ran, they’d be spotted and cut down, but if they crawled on their bellies, they could usually get to within grenade-tossing distance of the outer fortifications. Once the grenades exploded, they’d charge into the ruins and the rest of the battle would be room-to-room fighting.

By this time, the squad distracting the Germans would be mostly dead from mortar rounds and heavy machine guns, so they couldn’t contribute much. It was a tough slog, and Gragg was still at it two days later. He hadn’t slept and had eaten very little, but he would not disconnect from the Houston Monte Cassino server without beating this map. The closest he’d come had been yesterday, when he made it into the wine cellars. There, an SS officer shot him in the back after Gragg raced past a row of wine tuns.

This was what had driven Gragg for the last twenty-four hours straight: After shooting him, the SS officer stood over his body. It was the infamous Oberstleutnant Heinrich Boerner from the single-player mode of OTR. Even freakier, Boerner spoke over Gragg’s body. He said: “Tod ist unvermeidlich, aber meist unbeutend,” with an English subtitle appearing on the bottom of the screen: “Death is inevitable but largely unimportant.”

How the fuck had they done that? It was absolutely the same voice-over artist for Boerner from the original single-player game.

Had this custom map been done by the CyberStorm folks themselves? Gragg was obsessed with reaching the wine cellars again. He had to find out what Boerner was doing there. Only this time he wasn’t going to let that fuck shoot him in the back. Yet he knew only too well that Boerner was a slippery character—not likely to repeat his tactics. Gragg resolved to save grenades for the cellars.

The next round started with much of the usual crew—similarly obsessed folks, cursing this addictive game and striving to take the abbey before dawn broke on another sleepy-eyed workday. This time Gragg made sure to follow in the path of a player whose screen name was Major Pain in the Ass. MPITA was a good player, with quick reflexes and a good grasp of key combinations for jumping, switching weapons, and leaning around corners. Gragg crawled behind him during the flanking maneuver, then stuck close on his tail going into the monastery ruins. He never let him get more than a step or two ahead. MPITA soaked up most of the gunfire from Krauts with Schmeissers and heavy machine guns. By the time MPITA was taken out with a Panzerfaust, Gragg was farther into the ruins than he’d ever gotten without taking serious damage.

He took out the Panzerfaust team with a couple blasts from his pump shotgun—his weapon of choice for this map. A sniper rifle was useless in the close quarters of the ruins.

Gragg then stormed forward, hitting a command key that caused his avatar to shout, “Follow me!” He headed toward the dormitory hall, and that was going to be the next problem.

As he reached the corner, Gragg hit the key combo to lean left. He quickly spotted the MG42 team a hundred feet down the roofless, rubble-strewn corridor. The loader pointed and shouted, and the gunner turned toward him and opened fire just as Gragg ducked back again. Tracers whined past for a moment or two until the Krauts decided to save their ammo.

It was an engrossingly realistic game.

Gragg turned his view to face five other Allied players catching up behind him. This was fantastic. They’d never come this far with so few casualties. That meant only ten of the sixteen had been killed in the assault—a record low. He hit the command keys again, and his avatar shouted, “Charge!”

He raced straight across the hall toward a shallow alcove he knew of, immediately drawing fire again from the MG42 at the end of the hall. He watched his health meter drop quickly to 20 percent by the time he reached the safety of the alcove. The players right behind him tried to follow him into the alcove, but Gragg knew it could fit only one player at a time. Their avatars bumped and jumped against his, striving for cover until the Germans mowed them down. Three other players had hung back under cover, and they exchanged fire with the MG42 until Gragg heard what he was waiting for: silence from the Kraut machine gun. They were reloading.

Gragg switched to grenades and charged forward. As he ran over the corpses of his fallen comrades, he picked up their med kits, increasing his health back to 95 percent. It was an odd genre conceit that fallen players sprouted medical kits like Christmas presents, and that picking up a medical kit would immediately increase the health of injured characters—but right now Gragg was all for it. He wanted Boerner’s head on a stick.

He could see the Krauts wrestling a belt of ammo into the open breech of their gun while he ran toward them. The machine gun barrel steamed ominously.

The detail of this game is fantastic.

Just as the Krauts slammed the breech closed again, Gragg hurled his grenade down the hallway. It was a perfect throw, and the Germans ran shouting from their machine gun nest.

By that time, Gragg had switched to his shotgun, and he pumped two rounds into each of them as they fled the explosion. They dropped with captivating rag-doll physics. When he reached the smoking machine gun nest, only one of the Krauts was still moving, lying on his back with a 3-D texture of blood ostensibly flowing from his mouth—that meant he was 98 percent wounded.

Gragg loved this part. Sometimes severely wounded AI soldiers would surrender.

The injured Kraut held up his hands with melodramatic fear, looking up at Gragg’s avatar. “Nicht schiessen!

BOOM! Gragg wasted him and reloaded.

The other three surviving members of his squad arrived, reloading their Tommy guns. The chat window started rolling fast and furious now:

Sergeant Hairy Balls> Any more grenades?

Your Retarded Brother> Never been this far!

Go Mets!> Loki, we’ll cover u

Gragg smirked. Like hell, motherfucker. He typed:

Loki> Fuk u. I took out the machine gun

A moment, then Sergeant Hairy Balls’s avatar moved toward some cellar steps. The others followed, with Gragg taking up the rear. This was the way he liked it.

Gragg looked down the stairway. That was the entrance to the wine cellar where he’d seen Oberstleutnant Boerner yesterday. He was going to kill that fucker this time.

Should he warn the others? He calculated whether it was better to share the information and increase the chance of success, or risk it all and keep victory for himself. He decided to let them find out the same way he did.

Hairy Balls tossed a grenade into the cellar and chased the resulting explosion, charging inside with his Thompson blazing. Suddenly the doorway filled with an orange glow, and flames leapt out of the cellar with a throaty roar.

Flamethrower. Boerner was holed up in the cellars with a fucking Flammenwerfer. This was suicide. Hairy Balls was already dead.

The other two players started tossing grenades in through the opening. They ducked in and out of the doorway, chased by roaring flames each time. Gragg knew they were taking damage, but they were helping; a flamethrower had only ten blasts.

By the time the flamethrower was exhausted, Your Retarded Brother was dead, and Go Mets! was badly injured. Gragg knew this because a player’s avatar limped when it had less than 20 percent health—and his companion was limping pitifully.

Gragg let Go Mets! grab the med kits from their fallen comrades, since he was of no use to Gragg dead, and they both charged into the wine cellar, guns blazing. Boerner was nowhere in sight.

Gragg hoped it was Boerner they were chasing, since he was running out of ammo. He typed into the chat window:

Loki> Did u see him?

Go Mets!> No

The wine cellar was dimly lit the last time Gragg was here, but now the fires left by the flamethrower illuminated the place pretty well, so they didn’t have to probe the dark corners of the room behind the wine barrels. From experience Gragg knew that wood textures could ”burn” in OTR, so they had to move through here fast, or they might lose any chance of catching Herr OberstLeutnant at all. Gragg glanced up and saw that the beams overhead had caught fire.

Damn! Who designed this level? It’s incredible.

A doorway led through the far wall of the cellar. The exhausted flamethrower pack lay on the stone floor there.

An echoing German voice shouted from that direction: “Amerikaner!” It was Boerner, all right.

Gragg rushed forward with Go Mets!, and they took up positions on either side of the doorway. Gragg started leaning in to take a look, when he saw the infamous Heinrich Boerner character stand up from the cover of some crates behind Go Mets!. Boerner was dressed in his trademark SS officer grays with a floor-length greatcoat and an Iron Cross under his chin.

This bastard son of an AI engine had dropped the flamethrower in the exit to make them think he’d left the room, and they both fell for it, like morons.

Boerner leveled a Schmeisser submachine gun at Go Mets!’s back and opened up. To his credit, Go Mets! leapt up like a house cat and spun around, firing wildly with his Thompson. Gragg tried to pump a few rounds in Boerner’s general direction, but Go Mets! was blocking the line of fire.

By the time Gragg circled around and Go Mets! limped to cover, Boerner was moving behind the huge wine tuns again—his evil laugh echoing.

“Fucker, fucker, fucker!” Gragg actually shouted at his flat-screen monitor.

Just then he heard the telltale clink, clank of a German potato masher landing in his general vicinity.

“Fuck!” Gragg ducked down and scurried away, but he was still caught by the blast and went flying across the room. He was suddenly down to 15 percent health.

“Damnit!” He pounded his workbench.

The grenades kept coming, and both Gragg and Go Mets! fell back, firing at nothing in particular. By the time they stopped, they were damn near back at the cellar entrance. Embers were falling down around their ears. Gragg lost another 1 percent of health in fire damage.

Gragg tilted his view upward to see the ceiling fully engulfed in flames. The place was filling with smoke. A beam in the corner collapsed, sending up sparks.

Incredible effects.

Gragg turned his view to Go Mets!’s avatar. The guy looked like hell, swaying unsteadily and wheezing.

Gragg aimed the shotgun. BOOM!

Go Mets! fell dead. Gragg collected his med kit and was back up to 39 percent health again.

PK-ing’s a bitch, fella.

Then Gragg realized he was out of shotgun shells. He also had no grenades left. He switched to his Colt pistol. This was laughable; he was up against Boerner with a peashooter.

Good as dead now. Might as well go out fighting.

Gragg’s avatar ran like a wild man across the burning cellar, firing his pistol at nothing in particular. He ran to the doorway on the far side and jumped over the discarded flamethrower pack. He ran full-speed into the darkness.

It was with considerable surprise that he found himself still alive and moving toward a faint light ahead. He stopped to reload his pistol and then continued.

Soon he reached a circular chamber with a beam of sunlight shining down from a hole in the ceiling, illuminating a section of the wall. It appeared to be the basement of a shattered tower. Several barred windows ringed the walls in the shadows. It was a dead end.

Gragg looked back the way he’d come. No wonder Boerner let him in here—now he was trapped.

Gragg wondered why Go Mets! wasn’t flaming him in the chat window for player killing. Perhaps if any of the first squad survived the diversion attack, he could convince them to move up and help out. Gragg hit the TAB key to bring up the player list. To his surprise, no one else was playing on the server anymore. There weren’t even any spectators—which is what you turned into after getting killed. All thirty-one human players had disconnected. It was strange. He closed the player list. Maybe they were shunning him for player killing?

Gragg’s avatar moved around the dark room. He noticed the wall where the sunlight struck it. There, in the center of the sunlight, a texture map of chiseled stone spelled out a cryptic message:

m0wFG3PRCoJVTs7JcgBwsOXb3U7yPxBB

Gragg stared at it for a while. What the hell?

Just then he heard a familiar voice off to his left: “Amerikaner.”

Gragg spun left and emptied his Colt in the direction of the voice. It was Boerner all right, standing behind a latticework grate cut into the wall. His shadowy form was partially hidden by the grate. The bullets didn’t seem to have any effect. Apparently the game engine treated the latticework as a solid object—like a bulletproof confessional.

In a few seconds Gragg’s pistol was empty. As he stood there, his gun still aimed at Boerner, the SS officer took out a lighter and lit a cigarette at the end of a long black filter. The orange glow lit up his hawkish, Aryan face for a moment.

The Oberstleutnant’s dark eyes turned to Gragg’s avatar. “You haf played long. Haf you no job?”

Gragg’s jaded eyes widened in amazement.

Who the hell created this map?

Boerner continued to smoke calmly. On a lark, Gragg hit a hotkey for game taunts. His avatar shouted at Boerner: “I think the Germans are out of real men!”

Boerner frowned. “Stop zat nonsense.”

At his computer, Gragg stood up, kicked his chair back and gripped his head in mute amazement. His eyes quickly returned to the screen.

Boerner took another drag on his cigarette. “Are you a brain-dead punk”—he motioned to the text centered in the sunlight on the wall—“or do you haf useful knowledge, yes? If you do, use your key, and ve vill meet again.” He clenched his teeth on the cigarette filter, smiled darkly, then turned and walked away—laughing his (literally) trademark evil laugh. It echoed in the halls.

Gragg watched him go, then turned to face the writing on the wall again. He hit a key combination for the in-game camera to snap a screen capture.

The moment he did so, he was ejected from the game. The Houston Monte Cassino server never appeared in the public listings again.