Deep Black

by Stephen Coonts; Jim Defelice

  The sitrep showed Dashik R7 over a wasteland about two minutes from the stretched elliptical cone where information could be swept into the net. Martin raised his head from the screen, a wave of relief flooding over him. It was downhill from here, just a matter of punching buttons.

  “Shit,” said the copilot over the interphone. “Company.”

  “Bogey at twenty thousand feet, coming right over us,” explained the pilot, his voice considerably calmer than the copilot’s. “MiG-29 radar active. No identifier.”

  Martin ignored them, concentrating on the top video screen. He pointed to a bright red cluster in the left-hand quadrant. This belonged to a rather large disk array a few miles from their target area. It had the sort of profile he’d seen from units used by banks for financial records, but since their briefing hadn’t identified any large computer systems here—and the sitrep showed they were still over a largely unpopulated area—Martin decided it was worth starting the show a little early.

  “Command: Transmit. Command: Configuration Normal One.”

  The computer gave him a low tone to confirm that it had complied.

  The copilot drowned it out. “That son of a bitch is targeting us!”

  “Keep your diaper clean,” said the pilot. “He’s only going to hit us for a bribe. He’s alone. He’s obviously a pirate. Hail him. Tell him we’ll agree to terms. His squadron probably ran out of whore money—or jet fuel.”

  “Nothing on the radio. He thinks we don’t know he’s here.”

  “Hail him.”

  Martin once more tried to ignore the conversation. Air pirates were rarely encountered by Dashik since they freely paid the protection fees in advance, but there were always new groups muscling in. Legitimate PVO units obtained quite a bit of “supplemental funding” through their Air Security fees; occasional freelancers got in the act for a few weeks or as long as they could get away with it. The agreement to make a certain credit card payment to a specific account upon landing generally precluded being diverted; if that didn’t work, naming a specific PVO general as their protector inevitably got the pirate to break off. Russia’s chaos had grown considerably over the past few months; the country’s economy, never strong, was once more teetering. Part of the problem had to do with an increase in military expenditures to develop new weapons and deal with insurgencies in the southern parts of the country, but Martin thought the country would have been far better off putting the money into things such as housing or even subsidizing agriculture.

  Not that anyone would have been interested in his opinion.

  The red clusters on the video screen pulsated as their contents were transmitted. A white dialogue box opened to their right, the computer sniffing a significant sequence. A run of hexadecimals shot across the screen; Martin tapped them to stop the flow of numbers, then pointed below the box.

  “Command: Open Delphic Fox translator. Access: Compare.”

  The computers took the intercepted sequence and examined them for signifiers that were used in the current Russian military telemetry and data storage. As smart as they were, Dashik’s onboard computers did not have the capacity—or time—to translate the information, let alone hunt for cipher keys or do anything to “break” an encryption. But that wasn’t the point. By identifying the way the information was organized, the system helped operators decide what to capture. Its significance was determined elsewhere.

  FOX BLUE, VARIATION 13, declared the computer.

  Martin had no idea what Fox Blue, Variation 13, was, only that it was on his list to capture. He directed the system to concentrate all of its energy on tapping the source rather than continuing to scan for others. He debated asking the satellite image library for a close-up of the target building, which looked like a small shed on the bottom screen. But the library wasn’t kept onboard, and requesting the information from SpyNet and having it beamed back down would narrow the transmit flow.

  An overflow error appeared—clearly this was a very large storage system; the plane’s equipment couldn’t keep up with the data it was stealing.

  “Slow to minimum speed,” Martin told the pilot. “We may have to circle back on this one. This is something interesting.”

  “Impossible. Hold on—”

  In the next second, Martin felt his stomach leave his body. The aircraft plummeted, twisting in the air on its left wing. As it slammed back in the opposite direction, the seat belt nearly severed his body. The computer sounded a high tone that meant it was losing its ability to reap magnetic signatures; the signal grew sharp and then was replaced by a hum—they were no longer collecting.

  The copilot shouted so loudly Martin could hear him through the bulkhead.

  “Missiles! Missiles! Jesus!”

  The next thing Martin heard was a deep, low rattle that traveled through the floor and up into his seat. He felt cold grip his shoulders but had enough presence of mind to issue a command to the computer.

  “Command: Contingency D. Authorization Alpha Moyshik Moyshik. Destruct. Cleo—”

  Cleo was not part of command sequence; it was the name of his six-year-old daughter, whom he’d lost to his wife after their divorce five years ago. It was also the last word he spoke before a second missile struck Dashik R7—aka NSA Wave Three Magnetic Data Gatherer Asset 1—and ignited the fuel tank in the right wing. In the next second, the aircraft flared into a bright meteor in the dark Siberian night.

  2

  William Rubens pushed his hands slowly out from his sides as the two men in black ninja uniforms approached. Palms upward, he looked a little like an angel supplicating heaven; he waited patiently while one of them took a small device from his belt and waved it over Rubens’ body. About the size and shape of a flashlight, the device scanned Rubens’ clothes for circuits that might be used to defeat the next array of sensors, which were positioned in a narrow archway a few feet away. Satisfied that he carried nothing electronic, not even a watch, the ninjas nodded, and Rubens stepped forward through the detector.

  The fact that Rubens had led the team that developed both the archway and the circuitry detectors did not exempt him from a thorough check, nor did the fact that, as the head of National Security Agency’s Combined Service Direct Operations Division—called simply Desk Three—Rubens was the number two man at the agency. If anything, it made the men work harder. The ninjas, as part of the NSA’s Security Division, ultimately worked for him. Anyone leaving Black Chamber—the massive multilevel subbasement facility bureaucratically known as Headquarters/Operations Building National Security Operational Control Center Secure Ultra Command, or OPS 2/B Level Black—was subject to a mandatory search. Had Rubens not been searched, these ninjas would have been summarily fired—after serving a one-year sentence in the NSA detention center for dereliction of duty.

  Cleared, Rubens continued from the basement levels of OPS 2 upstairs into the main operations building (known as OPS 2/A or just OPS 2), ran another gauntlet of security checks, and finally emerged outside where a Chevrolet Malibu waited to take him to his appointment in Washington. He slid into the front seat, nodded at the aide behind the wheel—an Army MP in civilian dress—and then leaned the seat back to rest as the driver pulled away from the curb.

  Two other similarly nondescript vehicles, a panel van and a pickup truck, followed as they headed through Crypto City—known to the outside world as Fort Meade, if known at all—to get on the Baltimore–Washington Parkway. Both carried ninjas, whose dungarees and work shirts covered lightweight body armor; their vehicles were equipped with a variety of weapons that ranged from handguns to a pair of shoulder-launched Stingers, though the only things they would be tempted to use this afternoon were the M47 Dragon antitank weapons to cut through some of the traffic.

  The trip from the Maryland suburbs where the NSA’s Puzzle Palace was located to the West Wing of the White House took roughly fifty-five minutes. Rubens spent it eyes closed, head back on the rest. His mind focused on a one-syllable nonsense word a yoga ma
ster had given him years before to conjure energy from the kundalini, a point somewhere near the lower spine that the master believed was the center of Rubens’ personal (and potentially transcendent) soul.

  By the time he arrived at the suite where the National Security Director was waiting with the president of the United States, the thirty-two-year-old mathematical genius and art connoisseur felt rested and refreshed. He also felt he had centered his often rambunctious energy and clamped hold of his ego.

  It was a good thing.

  “The Wave Three mission was not authorized by Finding 302,” said National Security Director George Hadash as Rubens entered the Blue Room, a secure meeting room in sub level two of the building. “Losing that plane was a screwup.”

  Rubens had known George Hadash since MIT, where he had been Hadash’s student in a graduate seminar on the use of science in international relations. He was used to the blunt blasts that substituted for proper greetings. “The target was discussed,” he told his onetime professor. “The protocol for Desk Three is that it is to operate autonomously once broad objectives are outlined. Wave Three was the best asset for the job, and it was under our control.”

  “The laser facilities were not important enough to risk that asset,” said Hadash.

  “I beg to differ. Contrary to the estimate from the Air Force Special Projects Office, the weapon is near an operational state. The CIA analysts believe it’s more advanced than our own Altrus. And there is no question that if it were operational, it could completely eliminate our satellite network over central Asia.”

  Hadash’s cheek twitched slightly, but he said nothing. The tic indicated to Rubens that he had made his point.

  “We haven’t finished analyzing the data yet,” added the NSA official.

  “You’re going to have to explain to the president,” said Hadash.

  “Of course. If he wants to know.”

  Hadash gave him one of his most serious frowns, though Rubens hadn’t intended the comment as impertinent. The issue wasn’t plausible denial; compartmentalization was essential to successful espionage and covert action, which were Desk Three’s raison d’eˆtre.

  “He’s not happy,” added Hadash. “The CIA has been all over this, and DOD is reminding him that the NSA has no operational experience.”

  “Not true,” said Rubens mildly. Silently congratulating himself on the earlier mention of the CIA—which would convey an open-minded neutrality in sharp contrast to the paranoid backbiting of his bitter intelligence service rivals—he took a seat on the couch. Hadash went to see if the president was ready to meet with him.

  Both the CIA and the military had made plays to control Desk Three when it was created at the very start of President Jeffrey Marcke’s administration. Both were disappointed that the NSA was given primacy over the operation. CIA and military assets assigned to Desk Three, either on permanent “loan” or for temporary missions, were under Rubens’ direct command until released. This inevitably led to jealousy. While Rubens had foreseen this, it did present an ongoing problem that a man of lesser intellect and ability—in his humble opinion—would have had great trouble controlling.

  The idea behind Desk Three was relatively simple in outline: New technologies such as satellite communications, miniaturized sensors, and remote-controlled vehicles could revolutionize covert action and direct warfare if used properly. The CIA, the NSA, the Air Force, the Navy, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Army—all had expertise in specific areas but often could not work smoothly enough to leverage that expertise. It was no secret that the different groups charged with national security tended not to cooperate; any number of fiascoes, from the infamous Pueblo incident in the 1970s to the attack on the World Trade Center in 2001, could be at least partly blamed on this lack of coordination. And at a time when advances in technology were making all sorts of things possible, coordination was essential.

  Desk Three’s evolution could be traced directly to the CIA’s former Division D, which had worked with the NSA in the 1950s and early ’60s planting sensors, stealing code-books, “turning” crypto experts—and assassinating foreigners, though this was not necessarily an NSA function. It was succeeded by the Special Collection Service, or SCS, which had essentially the same job, sans assassinations, which were outlawed by Congress following scandals in the 1970s. In both cases, the arrangement had the CIA working essentially as a contractor to the NSA; the SCS headquarters was not in Crypto City, and the field agents were never, or almost never, under direct NSA control.

  Desk Three was different in that respect. It was intended to represent a new, cutting-edge force to be used for not only collecting data but also, when the situation demanded, taking action “ad hoc” to meet objectives outlined by the president. It could tap into the full array of sensors maintained by the NSA, as well as the processed intercepts from those sensors and data analysis provided by all of the major intelligence agencies. It could call on its own air and space assets, including twelve Space Platforms, or ultralarge satellites that could launch customized eavesdropping probes, and eight remote-controlled F-47C robot planes that were arguably as capable as F-22s, with twice their range and about one-third of their size. Underwater assets gave Desk Three similar capabilities in the ocean. And a small team of agents, drawn from a variety of sources, gave it muscle.

  Several agencies could have “run” Desk Three. Besides the CIA, the military’s USSOCOM, or U.S. Special Operations Command, had been a lead contender. But the NSA was chosen primarily because it was used to working with the high-tech gear that formed the backbone of the force concept. It also lacked some of the political entanglements that plagued the others.

  And, of course, it contained William Rubens.

  Rubens was critical for several reasons beyond his outsize abilities. One was his friendship with Hadash. Another was his demonstrated skill at melding the disparate talents required for such an enterprise. Last but not least, he had conceived the concept. He personally wrote the report outlining it, well before Marcke’s election. Titled “Deep Black,” the report formed the blueprint for the operation and was still among the most highly classified documents in the government archives. The report title had become an unofficial name for Desk Three and its operations.

  Rubens had long ago learned the difficult and distasteful lesson that sheer intelligence, culture, and genetics often mattered little in Washington, let alone in international affairs. The trick was to use these assets to maintain one’s position and thereby accomplish one’s goals. It took eternal vigilance and, perhaps, a touch of paranoia.

  Rubens cleared his mind of external distractions, preparing himself to speak to the president. The room’s spartan furnishings made it look as if it belonged in a suburban tract house. A large video display sat behind a set of drapes where the picture window would be; otherwise the Blue Room was refreshingly devoid of high-tech gadgetry.

  The door opened so abruptly Rubens barely had time to get to his feet as the president burst into the room, his hand thrust forward.

  “Billy, how are you?” said Marcke, playing the hail-fellow- well-met politico. Marcke was an inch taller than Rubens, who at six-four was not short; though in his early sixties, Marcke had an incredibly strong handshake and was said by the media to work with serious weights every afternoon.

  “Fine, sir.”

  The president released him and sat on the couch. Hadash and the secretary of defense, Art Blanders, entered belatedly. Both remained standing as the president leaned toward Rubens.

  “How’s your boss?” asked Marcke.

  “Admiral Brown is still traveling, sir.”

  Vice Admiral Devlin Brown was a recent appointee to head the agency; he’d only been on the job for a few weeks. Rubens didn’t know Brown very well yet and, frankly, didn’t feel he’d be much of a force. It would take considerable ability to outperform the previous head of the NSA, in Rubens’ opinion—though if the opportunity presented itself, he certainly would be
willing to try.

  “All right, Billy,” said the president with the air of a favored uncle. “Tell us what happened to your airplane.”

  “The Ilyushin carrying the Wave Three magnetic data reader was targeted and shot down for reasons that remain unclear,” said Rubens. “We haven’t been able to identify where the MiG came from, which has complicated matters.”

  “How is that possible?” asked Blanders.

  “We’re not omniscient,” said Rubens, managing a smile to keep his tone mild. The secretary had come to the administration after serving as CEO of a bank; it was difficult to take him seriously. “More than likely, it was a renegade PVO unit working out some sort of dispute over ‘fees.’ But the possibility that both the program and Wave Three itself have been compromised cannot be ruled out.”

  “The lasers,” prompted Hadash.

  Rubens launched into a quick but detailed summary of the Wave Three target, a data center related to the Russian-directed energy program.