Eric altered course to the south. It did not look like things were going too well for Tamaera Cole and her student. The first bandit was still in pursut, and both planes had lost about 2000 feet of altitude as they twisted and turned over the landscape.
“We can’t dive in to help them directly without making ourselves a target from those two bastards to our left. I’m going to make a radio call. It should bring help, and might just scare them off.”
“Alpha Romeo to Outpost Base. Have engaged four, correction three bandits 10 miles northeast of Friel Peak. Request backup.”
After a few moments the radio lit up with a return message. “Roger Alpha Romeo. Dispatching units 5 through 14 to your location.”
“Alpha Romeo out.”
“What units 5 through 14?” asked Eric.
“It’s just a bluff. We only have five planes in the sky. Let’s see if it works.”
“Sir. Shouldn’t we dive towards Delta Niner and help them out?”
“We could Eric, but it would just draw the other two right into the dogfight, plus give up our energy advantage. It will take us several minutes to reach Delta Niner, and if we dive down to their level, we will be under these other two planes. Remember rule number one?”
This did not sit well with Eric. Their comrades were in trouble below them and they were not racing to the rescue. It was cowardly, even if it made sense tactically.
“See if you can find us some lift before those two do. Try that slope to the west.” John was craning his neck in all directions, trying to make sure that they did not get surprised.
Just as Eric started his turn John saw a flash of white powder from the wing of Delta Niner. In slow motion the long wing buckled at the point of weakness. The crippled plane started to tumble.
“Damn, Delta Niner was just hit. No chutes yet.”
The bandit that had fired seemed satisfied with the kill and turned south. John saw Delta Niner’s canopy open. Only the front pilot got out. His parachute canopy opened quickly, well above the rough terrain. It was almost certainly the student in the front seat, watching his dead instructor tumbling into the greay-red rocks below them. The impact was silent from this distance.
“One of the pilots got out,” said John, knowing that the dead instructor was Tamara. He looked back over his left shoulder, to judge if they had a chance getting another one of these bastards before they got away.
“We’ve still got an altitude advantage. The least we can do is make them shit in their pants.”
“Yes Sir.” Eric’s voice was weak. He had seen the crash. He turned sharply left and gave chase.
The IR comm. unit lit up. “Alpha Romeo, this is Bravo Echo. Have you in sight. Report location of hostiles.”
John radioed back. “Bravo Echo, Alpha Romeo, bandits are north of our position at two levels. Two upper aircraft at 10,500 and lower aircraft at about 7,500.”
“Roger Alpha Romeo. We are at 9500 feet and three miles south of you. Unlikely that we can intercept from this position.”
“Roger Bravo Echo. Suggest you return to base. Make contact with base and inform ground crew we have one, repeat one, man to be rescued one mile east of my location. Report Deta Niner destroyed.”
“Roger Alpha Romeo, will report one man for rescue and Delta Niner destroyed. Bravo Echo out.”
* * *
John and Eric were in pursuit. They were only about three miles behind the two bandits flying in formation and perhaps 800 feet above them. It was close enough that they could see the planes raise and fall as they flew through different patches of lift and sink. Eric did his best to fly slowly through the lift, and to avoid the sink. He was able to gradually coax another 200 feet of altitude advantage out of the situation, but they were still three miles behind and rapidly leaving home turf. He saw both planes periodically make clearing turns to check behind themselves. They were not going to be surprised again.
“We are not going to catch them Eric. We might as well head for home.”
“Yes Sir.” Eric did a quick 180-degree turn and headed directly towards base. Neither man said anything until they were within two miles of the landing strip.
“The entry point is that white rock outcrop at 12:00 o’clock. Pattern altitude is 1500 feet. Make a left hand pattern and land.”
Eric used dive brakes to get to exactly 1500 feet over the rocks. He lowered the landing gear and made a standard military pattern and landing. He rolled the plane off the runway before fully applying the breaks to bring them to a stop. The ground crew took over handling of the plane as soon as John and Eric got out.
John was incredibly stiff after five hours in a confined space. Emotionally he felt exhausted, defeated, and angry. None of this should have happened. Looking at his son, he realized that not everything had gone wrong. Eric had made a kill on his first flight. Thinking back on it, John realized that he had never touched the controls. Eric was one hell of a pilot.
“Congratulations on your first kill. You flew extremely well. You will need to do another check ride with another instructor before you are signed off for solo, but I will recommend you highly. I’m very proud of you.”
“Thank you Sir.” Eric’s voice sounded almost sarcastic. Something was wrong.
“Something wrong Eric?”
“I don’t feel right that we did not do everything in our power to help the plane below us. I’m sorry to say this, but I feel like a coward.”
John might have taken offense, but he didn’t. His eight years of combat had taught him a lot about bravery. “I understand your feelings Eric, and I probably would have felt the same way eight years ago when I first flew in combat.”
The truth was, John felt exactly the same way Eric did – not defending your fellow partners felt cowardly in the extreme. Yet is was the right thing to do.
“Let me ask you a question Eric. If we had dived towards Alpha Niner at the point I held you back, would we have gotten there in time to stop them from being hit?”
Eric thought about it carefully. Alpha Niner was hit just seconds after they pulled up from his own kill. They would not have been able to cover even a quarter of the distance to Alpha Niner in that time, and they would have drawn the two other planes into pursuit.
“No Sir. There was nothing we could have done that would have made a difference. I still feel lousy about it, but I understand your point.”
“That is probably the most important thing I could ever teach you Eric. Every dead man is a hero in someone’s eyes, but staying alive to fight again is a lot more difficult.”
Eric nodded. The saluted each other and separated. John needed to talk to Barbara immediately.
* * *
He found Barbara sitting with Major Walters in the Major’s office. John had an overwhelming urge to yell his head off at Barbara for the ridiculous forecast, but he managed to contain himself. He just sat in the second chair and dug his fingers into the armrests.
The Major spoke first. “I heard your radio call, and got the advance message about the plane we lost. There is a ground team on the way to pick up Cerces Rodrigez and the body of Tamara Cole. I’m very sorry about Tamara.”
John took it in. “I did not know it was Tamara until just before she was hit. I’ll miss her. She was a fine pilot and an excellent instructor.”
Barbara looked right a John. “I know this is my fault. I feel like I have Tamara’s blood on my hands. I don’t know what went wrong with the forecast, but I will find out.”
John looked at her briefly, and then dropped his eyes. Of course she felt terrible. How could he think of yelling at her?
John looked back at her. “I was ready to tear your head off, but I know damn well you did not do this on purpose. Find out what happened to the forecast. We can’t afford this to happen again.”
“I will John, I swear I will.” Barbara got up, straightened her uniform and left the office.
“I know it is out of place John, but congratulations on the kill today. Tha
t makes nineteen for you.”
“I never touched the controls today. Eric did all the flying. That was his kill.”
“Amazing result on the first training flight.”
John got up and walked out of the Major’s office. He might have forgotten to salute, he could not remember. He went to his room and collapsed. Part of him wanted to go to Barbara’s room for comfort, and the other half was still mad as hell about the botched forecast. He fell asleep in his own cot the second his head touched the pillow.
Sara was deep in thought. She had finished the photo work for the day and was supposed to be working on breaking the Gengon codes. She had made a lot of progress on that problem, but right now she was trying to help her father catch whoever was leaking information from Section 12’s computers. She was scrolling through the list of computers attached to their network, trying to think like a spy. Workstations, servers, backup storage, firewalls, mail servers. How would I steal information from this collection of machines?
There were a lot of ways. The thief could have somehow learned a root password, allowing direct access to everything. That would probably involve bribing someone on the inside, but it was possible. Failing that, they might have installed snooping software inside of the network. Snoops just watched the traffic going up and down the wires, and saved juicy tidbits like passwords for later recovery. Or they might have installed a Trojan – a replacement for a standard program that had hidden code added to collect information or gain access somewhere else. Hell, there were probably hundreds of ways for someone on the inside to gain additional access. Even if Sara had the ability to look everywhere for these weaknesses, it could take her months. Worse, merely looking would tip off the spy or spies, as they were sure to be watching for the telltale signs of electronic reconnaissance.
No, brute force was not going to work. She needed to be clever. What other points of weakness were there? Say the spy had some information. How would they get it outside to their masters? Section 12’s network was almost completely isolated from the outside world. There was only one bridge to send and receive data and e-mails, and that bridge was sure to have every electronic fortification known to womankind. The spy could not risk electronic transmission, so it had to be physical.
Sara concentrated on this one area – getting the data outside. If she were going to carry data out of Section 12, what would she do with it? One way would be to memorize the information. That would work for small amounts, but she would have to display the data on her screen while she memorized it, or print it out. No, that was too likely to be detected and too limited. She could carry out the printouts, but that was certain to be detected by anyone monitoring the print queues, or just by random searches of people entering and leaving the compound. Writing it to a disk would be better, but still almost certain to be found sooner or later in a search.
What about a very small disk, or even better, a memory chip? An incredible amount of information could be written on a chip no bigger than a pencil eraser. Something that small would be easy to hide in the lining of a coat, hat, or even under your tongue. It would also be very easy to pass off to a contact, by just placing it in a hidden but public place. Stuck under a restaurant table with some chewing gum would work fine. The contact would just come in during off-hours, sit at the same table, and scrape off the somewhat disgusting chip. Her imagination was going a bit far now…
But Sara began to feel that she was on the right track. She followed the mental thread further. How would the information be written to the chip? The spy would need a small device that would hold the chip and connect it to one of the ports on the back of the computer. The spy would just redirect the information to that port for storage on the chip, rather than displaying it on the screen or sending it to the printer. The device holding the chip could be very small, or even be disguised as a printer cable or some other normal piece of equipment. It would be difficult to find.
This was it. It made such perfect sense that she knew that this was how the information was getting out. So, how to catch the spy?
Why not just search everyone and every office until you found a chip or a connector to write data to a chip? It might work, but it would be difficult to not altert the spy or spies in advance as a herd of searchers made their way from office to office. The spy would probably be able to hide or destroy the tiny evidence before it was found. Sara did not have the authority to order such a search, and talking that fat boss of hers into doing it would be difficult. In fact, she kept wondering if Heinrich Largos wasn’t the spy.
Brute force was out. She needed a way to identify the culprit without their knowing that they had been fingered. If she could get to their workstation, it would be simple. She would write a small program that would watch the workstation from the inside. Her program would look for a port that was getting data, but not sending anything back. That would be the chip being fed the secret information. Once the program found that the machine was being used in this way, the last step would be to somehow identify the computer in a way that the spy would not notice, but which would be easy to catch. Changing the bottom-right pixel on the spy’s workstation screen to always be red appealed to Sara. The one red dot would be too small of a change for the spy to notice, but Sara could detect the spy by just getting close to their screen. So sweet!
The snooping program was simple to write. She created it immediately. It just took 12 lines of programming code: look for an open port, watch for data only going out, change one screen dot to red. She gave the program the inconspicuous name envirop_hlp, so that anyone who happened upon the file by accident would think it was a help file of some sort. She also hacked the date on the file to make it look like the file had been created three years ago. Sexy. She now had the bullet, all she needed was the gun to fire it.
Perhaps it was a shotgun she needed. How to load the snooping program undetected on 150 workstations in 150 offices in one of the most secure places on earth. Physically going to each office was impossible. Office doors were almost always closed, and locked when not in use. Each user used a different password. Without those passwords she could not load her program even if she were left alone in the office. She had to find a way to load the program on every workstation from a distance.
Sara was excited, but after hours of nonstop concentration her mind was starting to wander. She needed a break. She went down to the mess hall and made a sandwich. She took the sandwich outside and ate it while walking around Section 12’s buildings. The view was obscured on all sides by the double fence, but the sun felt good on her face. A few ravens had discovered a walnut tree and were busy lifting the nuts up to about 50 feet and dropping them on a rock outcrop within the compound. After a few drops the nuts were weakened enough that the birds could break into the shell using their talons and beaks. Pretty intelligent behavior for a bird she thought as she finished her sandwich. She had her own nut to crack.
Back in her office, Sara sat down in front of her own workstation and thought about how to get her little tattletale program on to all 150 workstations. The answer was staring at her on the screen. The data backup computers. Every night the stored data on every workstation and server was encrypted and stored on backup drives. This was done both to provide a secure record, and in case one of the machines failed. This way no more than one day’s work would ever be lost.
To perform its function the backup computer had to access each workstation. Otherwise, it could not back up the workstation’s data. If she could sneak her program into the backup machine, the backup process could be used to write a copy on every workstation’s disk during the night. The next time the user turned on their workstation the snooping program would be lurking in the background, watching for someone to send data to a tiny chip. After that, it was just a matter of spotting the computer with a red pixel hidden in the corner of the screen.
Sara did not have access to the backup computer. Only the server administrator and Heinrich Largos did. She was going to need to talk dear
Mr. Largos into giving her access to the backup machine. Even better, he was going to do it without having a clue what she was up to. Sara was smiling broadly as she planned just how to approach Largos.
* * *
Sara took her file down the hall to her bosses’ office and knocked politely. After a short pause the office door opened. Heinrich Largos’ frame filled the doorway.
“Ah Sara, so good to see you. Please come into my office and make yourself at home.”
“Thank you Sir. I have some results to show you on my project, and I think I need some help to finish it.”
“Excellent. Please bring me up-to-date.” Largos seated himself behind his desk, which suited Sara. She liked having a barrier between Largos and herself, but was doing her best not to show her dislike for the man.
“I’ve been doing a statistical analysis on each new package of data that comes in. The larger blocks of data are difficult to work with, but I believe I’ve found a weakness in some of the shorter messages which appear to be coming from hand-held units.”
“Ah,” said Largos. “Interesting that you looked at them at all. Most people would have skipped them, thinking that the data they contained would be of little value.”
“Probably correct Sir, but if I break the encryption on a small unit, it is likely to apply to larger units as well.”
“Very true. Please continue.”
“The hand-held units are remarkably small. To save weight and cost, they do not bother compressing the messages before they are encrypted. I can’t read the encrypted text yet, but I do see repeated patterns of the exact same eight characters showing up repeatedly in various messages. This is the weakness.”
“How does this help Sara?”
“I’m certain that before encryption that those eight characters are just eight spaces in a row. People typing on those tiny arm-mounted keyboards need to space their output when they are sending tables of number, such as troop dispositions and supply consumption statistics. That is how those reports look when we happen upon a paper copy. I’m sure that they just hold down the space bar to get the spacing they need, and sometimes this amounts to eight spaces in a row."
Heavier Than Air Page 12