Razing Beijing

by Sidney Elston

  Stuart had toed the line on what he thought he could legally reveal about his meeting with ‘certain government agencies’—Emily cast him a subtle glance whenever she read between the lines. Both of Stuart’s guests understood the FBI were investigating the possibility of espionage and, as part of an evolving theory that Thackeray was slow to accept, that a ‘malevolent interest,’ perhaps the Chinese government, in fact may have reduced CLI’s stolen intellectual property to a working device. Emily needed no prodding to make the next leap in the thought process.

  “If such a satellite exists,” she said, “and by your logic it is based on technology stolen from CLI, then its governing software might be similar, or almost identical, to the code written by CLI.”

  Stuart nodded—he wondered if Emily knew how alluring men found her. She possessed an easy intelligence, challenging yet playful, which for him enhanced her femininity. Thin wisps of hair framed bright, intelligent eyes, questioning eyes inviting engagement.

  As if reading his thoughts, Emily parted her lips in a smile.

  Stuart returned her smile and asked, “So how difficult would it be?”

  “To do what?”

  “How difficult for you to write something for communicating with such a satellite?”

  Thackeray opened his eyes. Stuart followed his glance around what was once his ex-wife’s favorite room, their wine tasting cellar. Certain of its features had given Stuart reason enough to venture in here tonight, something he hadn’t attempted since Angela’s death. The polished mahogany table surrounded by leather chairs deep enough to fall asleep in, bathed in recessed light as well as pastel-colored mood lights washing over the exposed stone walls, Bose sound system, a thousand-bottle wine cooler—things Stuart had not a lot of use for, except for tonight, in that it was all below ground level and the most secure place he could find on such short notice.

  “I’ll bet this place set you back a few ten notes,” Thackeray observed.

  “None of your business.”

  “You know, I was thinking I’m about due for a raise.”

  Stuart leaned slowly toward him. “Tell you what. Soon as we wrap up tonight—you’ve got it.”

  Thackeray shifted his glance back and forth between Emily and Stuart. “Right. How much?”

  “Ten feet, all the way back up the stairs you just came down to get here.”

  Emily looked accusingly at Stuart. “That’s very unprofessional.”

  “I know. I can’t help myself.”

  Thackeray shook his head. “I know something about the crew at NORAD. You say they lost track of it?”

  Again without revealing his source, Stuart provided all that McBurney had revealed of his grudging suspicion that, should Stuart’s ‘techie weapon’ actually exist, the so-called ‘phantom satellite’ might be one and the same.

  “This satellite goes into orbit, and now they can’t find it. What makes you think we can?”

  Stuart considered that for a moment. “You have something NORAD doesn’t.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like grotesque personality. But mostly agility, and skin-in-the-game.”

  Thackeray rolled his eyes and muttered, too tired to conceal skepticism bordering on boredom. “There are more than two-thousand satellites orbiting the earth. Not counting all the little pieces of junk sprinkled in that this missing thing probably looks like.”

  “But that number includes everything—geostationary, de-commissioned or otherwise kaput.”

  Thackeray grunted. “I guess you could narrow the search to operational ones in low-earth orbit.”

  “So how many is that?”

  Thackeray lolled his head back and forth.

  “For Christ’s sake, you’ve got six million dollars worth of gadgets on the roof out there at CLI to play with. Are you really going to sit back and let these bastards outgun you with your own handiwork?”

  Thackeray folded his arms. “This isn’t our fight.”

  “It is our fight. The beauty of it is, if I’m wrong then there won’t be any harm done. But if I am right, and we choose to ignore this...you know somebody, someday, is going to step onto the world stage and claim credit for it.”

  Thackeray stared at him. “Even if I could find it, military satellites have security protocols as long as your arm.”

  Stuart realized Emily was looking at him in a curious way. Hadn’t she been doing that a lot lately? “Finding it won’t matter if we don’t have a means to communicate with it. Emily, I need to know if you think getting past these other barriers is going to be worth the effort.”

  Collecting her thoughts, Emily lowered her gaze to the downloaded pages. The Defense Department had apparently tested a limited variety of anti-satellite weapons, including some sort of jet-launched ‘ASAT’ missile, a kinetic energy satellite interceptor and something called the MIRACL laser. But many of the tests were conducted back in the 1990’s, the results not fully published. The hue and cry over such weapons had curtailed development funding. Years later, launch of the final elements of the National Missile Defense system was expected to assist in ‘detecting and cataloging space-borne assets,’ Pentagon euphemism for tracking enemy satellites. According to Stu, and the various Internet sources, even that capability did not yet exist.

  “Well,” Emily said finally, “assuming the code is based on CLI’s, and we somehow deal with the subject of encryption, and if the key command variables are similar...it certainly will be difficult. But I think it’s possible to write a code for communicating with it.” She narrowed her eyes. “Thack has a point. The encryption would be a big problem.”

  “Tell me more about the encryption.”

  Emily moistened her lips. “How familiar are you with encryption?”

  “I know the idea is to render information undecipherable to any party intercepting it for whom the message, or data, is not intended. Other than that, I wouldn’t know a cryptoid if I tripped over the bastard.”

  “Cryptoid?”

  “Never mind.”

  Emily went on to explain that the core of any encryption system is the algorithm software. Both sender and recipient needed to use the same software. “Theoretically, the whole world could employ the same software and not decrypt intercepted messages. You also need to know the encryption key.”

  “That’s just a code, right?”

  “Yes, a digital code. It’s length and character content can vary. The sender selects a secret key to be used by the encryption software. Some systems use multiple layers of protection. As you can imagine, these can be very secure.”

  “So we would need to know the software and the keys?”

  “No,” Thack said, “you need to have the software and the keys. Sometimes having the software is easy. Many systems utilize the Data Encryption Standard algorithm, for example. Triple DES employs a 168-bit authentication key. It’s pretty secure.”

  Stuart scratched the side of his nose. “Can somebody memorize this key, like an ATM pin number?”

  “Sure,” Thackeray said. “You can memorize a phone book. A 64 binary digit key has 8 characters. But don’t be fooled. It’s usually not that simple.”

  “A powerful computer can crack these codes.”

  “In a practical sense, not always. Adding one bit to key length doubles the time to complete a cryptanalytic search. Our supercomputer would need probably three or four hundred years to brute-force a Triple DES key.”

  “You’re kidding!”

  “Maybe twice that long...I’d have to run the numbers.”

  They debated other issues; assuming they were to gain access inside the satellite system, would they encounter intruder detection software? Would they have adequate access to various functions and modules? What levels of authority and degree of mobility would they find between not only the onboard computers, but also any communication satellites?

  Finally there was a long silence.

  “When do you leave?” Thackeray asked, referring to Stuart’s s
tated plans for leaving town on ‘unspecified business.’

  “Not for a couple of days.” Stuart’s reply was as vague as McBurney’s had been.

  Stuart watched Emily’s expression change from dubious frown, to strangely unreadable, and then, reflective. “What is it?” he asked her.

  “I was just thinking,” she responded airily. “If this satellite is what we suspect it to be, and we did take control of it, what would we do with it?”

  “You can’t do much from inside a prison cell,” Thackeray offered.

  “We’d stop whoever it is from using it,” Stuart countered. He didn’t really want to spark a debate over the ethics involved, or the potential response of the satellite’s owner. “Why do you ask?”

  Emily’s far-away look hardened. “Because if we took control of it, we might be able to...well, right a few wrongs.”

  80

  Sunday, July 5

  8:25 P.M. Tokyo, Japan

  BEYOND THE PROW of the cruiser USS Cowpens and the Vincennes moored beside her, points of light punctuated other massive silhouettes against a twilight sky as the latest American warships glided toward Tokyo Bay. The navy destroyer John S McCain and frigate Vandegrift were on their way to the Gulf; they would not be the last. Cowpens herself was putting back to sea in several days and most of the crew were ashore on leave.

  Lieutenant Anthony Scianni stood on the fantail watching the departing warships when crraaccck!—he felt the concussion through the soles of his shoes. Everything around him was bathed in a searing flash of electric blue light. In one brilliant instant the corrugation of waves lapping Vincennes’s hull and every visible object became a frozen image.

  Scianni shouted for the watch petty officer, who ran to join him while beneath their feet the ping-ping-ping of a shock wave traversed the ship. Seconds later somebody sounded the general alarm. Shouting erupted from all over Cowpens and boots hammered the ladders.

  Seeing no obvious damage around them, the younger sailor shouted a sickening question above the alert, “Was that an aerial nuclear blast?”

  Scianni replied, “That would’ve lit the whole sky.” The ship was pitching slightly, fore and aft. “Whatever it was, it struck the ship.”

  Athwartship, a Marine sergeant gripping a rifle hurled himself against the rigging and frantically scanned the water. Finding nothing, he saw the other two men forward and ran to meet them. “What happened?” shouted the sergeant.

  Before they could answer, there came the metallic shout of a bullhorn. “Ahoy, Cowpens!” The navy strictly enforced rules that gunboats patrol any harbor where warships were moored. One of these approached the port bow of Cowpens. “Ahoy, Cowpens!” Two sailors aboard the gunboat were pointing at something, their sidearms drawn.

  “Negative hostile!” A fusillade of words poured between the gunboat’s bullhorn and another aboard the warship. “Repeat, we do not see any hostile in the vicinity. Better inspect that radar array.”

  Outside the bridge, Scianni stepped past the sailor on the deck-mounted machine gun. He leaned out over the railing to look down at the front of the Aegis radar where the gunboat was training its light. The angle prevented seeing much; his nose caught a strong blast of ozone. Two sailors appeared below on deck and turned their heads upward—they froze, their mouths disbelieving ovals.

  Scianni joined the Marine sergeant in a dash from the bridge and down two flights of stairs to the main deck. They reached the five-inch gun turret, where now a half dozen Marines joined the sailors in craning their necks amid speechless confusion. Scianni turned and blinked his eyes clear.

  The gunboat spotlight danced shakily over the forward quadrant of the Aegis array to reveal a gaping hole. Deep inside, where the radar had been, a broken wire sparked intermittently. Scianni realized that someone, or something, had just carved away a ton of the ship.

  81

  EMILY CHANG LOOKED UP from her work and rubbed her arms, the persistent chill being more difficult to tune out than the electrical hum and ozone-rich air. CLI’s supercomputer regularly drew some twelve megawatts of electrical power, enough to power a municipality—more than enough to fry server multiprocessors not kept adequately cool. She zipped her sweater up to her chin. Her work could be accomplished from the warm comfort of home via remote connection, but Thackeray’s satellite terminal was completely off-network and the only other portal through which to access the building’s rooftop communications dishes.

  Seated nearby, indifferent to his environment, Milton Thackeray folded his arms and stared blankly into his monitor. Beside his keyboard were copies of Stuart’s Internet e-mails that had precipitated their dubious plan. Thackeray swiveled his head and gazed at Emily with tired eyes. He jutted his chin toward her desktop. “How’s the map?”

  Emily glanced at the municipal map of Beijing spread open on the table. Thackeray had used a felt-tip pen to designate the longitude and latitude of the more prominent landmarks. Locating the two Beijing University buildings cited by the CIA analyst had been relatively easy; drawing on her memory of government buildings was proving more difficult. “I trust Stu to help fill in some of the blanks,” she said. Right now, she was a lot more concerned about their programming assumptions. If the theft had truly occurred, Emily reminded herself, those responsible for stealing the company’s software probably would have then proceeded to make alterations, perhaps significant ones. If so, hacking her way in was going to be that much more difficult.

  She glanced at the digits in the lower corner of her screen. “You should have said something about the time. You must be starving!”

  Thackeray pressed the heels of his palms against his eyes. “You really seem to be into this.”

  I believe in Stu, she thought, averting her eyes. “I don’t think such people can be entrusted with so threatening a device.”

  One-by-one Thackeray began pulling the fingers of his hand and popping his knuckles. “You seem a little more certain than I am as to who’s behind this.”

  “Thack, we’ve already gone over the e-mails. I thought the logic of the exercise here was fairly self-evident.” Without Thack’s help, the exercise was also thoroughly pointless.

  “What’s evident is that we’re going to get ourselves tossed into jail. Hacking into a satellite isn’t exactly legal, you know.”

  Probably due to nervous tension, Emily found his fear of going to prison inexplicably comical; she conjured an image of Thack in shackles dragging an iron ball around on a chain.

  “You think this is funny?”

  Emily erased her smile. “No. Before becoming a full citizen here, I lived in constant fear of being deported back to my country and locked away in the laogai. That’s sort of like a prison labor camp.”

  “Why would they want to do that?”

  “Because after university I refused to return and work for a state-owned company. I suppose they had reason to be angry. They paid to send me to school here. Nowadays...I guess I no longer fear prison so much.” Simply being deported would be the death of me.

  “Maybe you should.”

  “I don’t mean to belittle your concern, but are you really having serious second thoughts about what we’re doing?”

  Thackeray only stared at his computer screen.

  “Where I come from, people who have done absolutely nothing wrong—nothing to offend their neighbor, to break any law or hurt anyone—are thrown into prison.”

  “Really?”

  “That is to say, they have not broken any laws that Americans might recognize. How can there be law if the law is fickle, the constitution merely some malleable farce? You can rot in jail simply for offending a party official.”

  “I’m not sure I see what that’s got to do with us.”

  Her anger suddenly flaring, Emily turned and looked at him. “Sometimes Americans can just be so ignorant. Even though the one-Party rulers of my country have the blood of sixty million Chinese on their hands, why should they care what their policies yield? Those c
ontrolling the media are puppets, cronies of the ruling elite, spineless cowards who owe their positions to promising only stories favorable to Party and government. Not that it matters, since the gutless bastards refuse to stand for election. They are born knowing what’s best for the masses, they enact their laws, and because there are no weapons with which to protect oneself, their corrupt police are able to barge into homes and hurl innocent people into jail. If there’s even a remote possibility that Stu’s theory is right, we cannot allow these men to control a device of such potential evil. What has it got to do with us, you ask? It’s got everything to do with us.”

  Thackeray had his eyebrows arched and was studying her.

  “Sorry.” Emily let out a deep breath. She smiled sheepishly, feeling embarrassed for having gotten so carried away. “Of course, it’s certainly not your fault that my father is in prison.”

  “Oh. I don’t know that it’s any of my business.”

  “My father is in prison for the heinous offense of trying to take my mother to the United States for medical treatment.”

  “I’m sorry, Emily, I didn’t mean...” Thackeray tugged his beard. “How is your mother?”

  Emily returned Thackeray’s gaze for a moment before looking away.

  “There I go, opening my trap.”

  “It isn’t your fault. My family’s story is not unique.” Emily tried to smile. “Maybe now you can see why I seem so ‘into this.’ I wish people didn’t take their precious freedoms for granted. Why do Americans not appreciate what they have?”

  “I’ve heard that said, but I guess I never really thought about it.”

  They sat silently for several minutes. It became obvious to Emily she could no longer concentrate, and besides, her hands were freezing. It was approaching midnight, anyway. They had another full day’s work tomorrow at their regular jobs before picking up where they left off tonight.

  “I say we pack it in.” Thack began typing commands to save various files and to shut down his terminal.