by David Poyer
Still nothing … He stretched, then leaned against the plot table again. Getting under way unexpectedly, there’d been no time to plan exercises, drills, the other things the XO and the ops officer generated to occupy the watch standers’ free time. So once the confusion and hurry were over, they floated in a void of unscheduled time.
Gradually, other thoughts reemerged from the outer darkness, things he’d shoved out of his mind during Reftra—such as Leighty, such as his own position. He had an uneasy feeling he hadn’t heard the last of the Naval Investigative Service.
Barrett didn’t pass reveille at sea. The captain felt people could be trusted to get up on their own. So the first word passed was “titivate ship” at 0700. A little later, Cannon came up again, talked to the boatswain and Van Cleef. Then he saluted Dan and said he was ready to relieve.
THE wardroom was packed. Pulling out a chair, Dan said, “Permission to join the mess, XO.” Vysotsky nodded without speaking. Dan ordered scrambled eggs and French toast. Lauderdale, Quintanilla, Martin Paul were back in short sleeves. After wearing long sleeves for weeks at Gitmo, their bare upper arms looked strange.
The exec said hoarsely, “Excuse me, gentlemen,” got up from an empty plate, and left, carrying his coffee cup like a live grenade. It had a skull and crossbones on it and the letters XO.
“So what’s the latest?” Dan asked the operations officer. Quintanilla shrugged.
“Nothing official.”
“Okay, anything unofficial?”
“I heard something in the spaces about a spill,” said Giordano, lifting his cup as Antonio carried the full pot past.
“An oil spill?”
“Tanker hit an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico. It was on the news on the radio. Maybe we’re riding to the rescue.”
“You know the first thing you hear’s always bullshit.”
“That’s a Coast Guard mission, not ours.”
“You wanted scuttlebutt. Felipe?”
“I’d guess something to do with this maneuvering Castro’s doing in the UN. But I don’t know how that would relate to us, or having us up north rather than down south.”
“We need better rumors than that,” said the XO, coming back in. Dan thought Vysotsky looked very tired. “You guys are falling down on the job, all I can say.”
“Hey, XO, one question.”
“Shoot, Dwight.”
“CINCLANTFLT pulls us out of training for some crisis action thing before we do the final battle problem. But then whatever it is, it’s over. Do we have to go back to Gitmo? Or do they check us off on the requirement, based on our performance up to when we left?”
“Good question. It’d probably depend on how long we were out and how close going back would crowd us up to the deployment date. Final decision would be up to the training people on Admiral Claibourn’s staff. Don’t throw anything away, though. We could get a message at noon, turn around and go back, do the battle problem tomorrow.”
A knock, and Chief Erb came in with the message board. They fell silent as Vysotsky silently read and initialed it. When the radioman left, he cleared his throat. “Interesting,” he murmured.
“For Chrissake, XO—”
“Okay, it says to drop speed to twenty knots to conserve fuel, but we’re still headed northwest. They want us and Dahlgren to break out our landing-party stores, ready ships’ boats, and prepare to embark or refuel helicopters. Norm, Dwight, we need to file a report on status of food, fresh water, JP-four, diesel, gasoline, batteries, habitability items. Dave, we’ll need a medical-stores inventory, too. We need to come up on International Marine Distress, one fifty-six point eight megahertz, one fifty-six point three, one fifty-seven point one, one-fifty-six point sixty-five, and the emergency CB channel. There’s more.” He glanced at his watch. “I’ll read it at officers’ call. Let’s go.”
DAN filled two pages in his wheel book with things to do, then started delegating them to his chiefs and officers. Whatever was in the wind, it was going to take a lot of supplies and a lot of radio communications.
When he had everything farmed out and working, he stopped in CIC and stood in front of the combat direction system’s screen. The system was up, and he studied the NTDS symbology. Gradually, he noted other units being sortied: a unit from Key West that broke as Patrol Hydrofoil Squadron Two; others were Coast Guard, and there were two NATO friendlies. He started to identify them, then didn’t. Time was elastic at sea. How slowly the minutes crept by on watch, and how quickly they sped when too much had to be done.
He headed aft, looking into one compartment after another. In the computer room, Shrobo and Dawson and Hofstra were on the screens again. They glanced his way with their usual glazed gazes as he pulled up a stool.
Suddenly, Dan felt guilty. Shrobo was still aboard. No one had remembered him during the hectic hours before getting under way. He could have been left ashore at Gitmo, either to await their return or be flown home. He couldn’t blame anyone else; he should have thought of it.
“What’s it look like, Doc?”
The civilian shoved himself back from a keyboard and drew his hands from the top of his skull down to his chin. “Like doing a crossword puzzle backward, in Greek.” He leaned back farther, and Dan caught his stool just before it went over. “Thanks … . Like wandering down one of these passageways and opening this door and then that door, and there’s a glimpse of something for just a fraction of a second. Then it’s gone.” He blinked. “Is it light outside?”
“Yeah, it’s light.” Dan stood up. “Let’s go out, get you out of here for a couple of minutes.”
When they emerged onto the midships platform, the overcast had clamped down all around the horizon: a darker patch ahead, a slanted haze beneath—a rainsquall. When Dan leaned over the rail, he could see Dahlgren rolling heavily ahead, mast tops nodding from side to side. Barrett rolled, too, but more slowly, and the sea slipped past, littered with sargasso weed looking like what was left after you ate a bunch of grapes. Dan ran his eyes around the seals on the Harpoon canisters as Shrobo detached his glasses and lifted his naked face. “Smells clean out here,” he said. Then, when Dan didn’t answer, he added, “I mean, without the poison we’re always sucking in with every breath on land. I suppose it’s still there, but the dilution factor … Do you know anything about the immune system?”
“The what?” For a second, he thought Shrobo was still talking about ACDADS. “Oh. You mean the human immune system?”
“Uh-huh. My wife’s allergic to any form of chemical contaminant—like the stuff on mattresses, new carpets, the scents on toilet paper, dyes … . There are more people like that than we suspect.” He went on about chemical emanations from building materials, pesticides, fertilizers. “She can’t even read the newspaper—the ink. There’s a place called Portsmouth Island, in North Carolina. It was abandoned years ago; there’s never been any spraying or other chemical contamination. I’m thinking of starting a colony there.”
Dan said, “Look, Doc, I owe you an apology.”
“An apology?” Shrobo opened his eyes.
“This diversion, mission, whatever it is … I should have arranged to leave you in Gitmo, arranged for the base people to fly you home. I’m sorry. It slipped my mind.”
Shrobo shrugged. “It’s a break from being an administrator. But I’d like to call home if I can, let Alma know what’s going on.”
“I’ll set you up with the comm officer. We should be in range of the Key West marine operator pretty soon.”
“Thanks.” Shrobo blinked in the pale radiance. “You know, you can almost feel it out here, the energy.”
“It is pretty bright.”
“I meant another kind of energy. Every sphere—like our planet—contains within it two opposed tetrahedrons. Their intersections produce access points, or chakras. One of those dimensional gates is in the middle of what we call the Bermuda Triangle.”
Dan looked sideways at him, realizing that the thick glasses, the
medical smock, the neurotic preoccupation with his health aside, Shrobo was still one weird bird. You couldn’t deny he was brilliant, but after three weeks aboard he still had to have someone take him to the mess hall. And a Kidd-class didn’t have that complicated a layout.
“So, how’s the system fix going? I see we have NTDS back.”
Shrobo blinked. “Do they? I’ve been concentrating on the virus. The interesting thing about it is that it seems to be self-erasing.”
“What?”
“Oh, this is a very interesting guy we have here. If you really want to go into it …”
“Sure,” said Dan. He owed the guy that, to listen.
“The virus operates in the following sequence. One: It establishes itself by writing its basic program—what I call the ‘infector’—to memory, with several backups in various portions of the memory. Two: It ’unzips’ the actively hostile portion of the program and writes it to additional areas of operating memory. Three: Running in main memory, not continuously, but in short bursts between lines of the executing program, it actively destroys data by deleting portions of existing code. Four: It masks the damage by replacing the erased code with randomly generated garbage, mimicking the format of the original data.” Shrobo paused. “Clear so far?”
Dan nodded.
“Okay. Then, and unlike any virus I’ve ever heard of before, step five: It erases itself.”
“You said that before. But I don’t understand. Then what’s the problem?”
“Because it leaves behind its toxins—the garbage written to the tape. It rezips itself to the spore form and writes the infector to several portions of the tape. Then it erases itself from the operating memory.”
“Whew.”
“The end result—about a minute after you first boot it—is an infected and degraded tape. The damage accrues so gradually that it may take a while even to notice—especially in the case of the sonar system, which uses deep algorithms to process the signal. That’s why you noticed it first in the weapons-control module. You actually get a physical output there, which you can visually observe to be faulty.” He fitted his glasses back on again, looked at Lenson. “Any questions?”
“Jesus. Okay, one—this garbage it writes. Can you at least write us something to detect and delete that? Then we could figure where it is by what it leaves behind.”
Shrobo smiled mischievously. “A parity check, you mean? I tried. This virus generates the same total of ones and zeroes that are in the original line of code, only they’re totally scrambled.”
“This is a real bastard.”
“It’s the most cunningly designed program I’ve ever seen. It’s very difficult to investigate. If the program’s running and you attempt to stop it to read its internal code, it erases. So far, all I’ve managed to do is establish its overall length. Eighty lines. A masterpiece of compression.”
“Where would something like this come from?”
“I have no idea. But whoever wrote it was damned good.”
Dan stared down into the sea as it all reverberated around in his mind. Finally, he said, “How about this built-in booby trap? Can you write a program that activates that? Make it blow itself up?”
“Good insight. That was one of the first things I tried. The self-destruct feature doesn’t work in the spored form. Only when it’s unzipped. But Matt and I are still working on it.”
“Matt? … Oh, Petty Officer Williams.”
“That’s one sharp kid you’ve got there. He’s been a big help. We’ll keep you and the captain advised how it goes.”
“Okay. Thanks. Anything else I can do for you?”
“Feel that,” said Shrobo.
Dan hesitated, then gripped the proffered bicep. It felt flabby and soft. “Not bad, huh?” the scientist said. “The workout room—weights, stationary bike.”
“That’s good.”
“And I think we’re getting close to cracking this thing. It’s not St. Paul on the road to Damascus, but I think we’re getting close.”
“Anything you need, let me know.”
“Attention, please,” said the 1MC, and they both fell silent, turning to listen.
“This is the captain speaking.
“As you know, we’ve been under way since early this morning, headed north and then northwest around the tip of Cuba. We have just received a message clarifying where we are going, and why.
“The message directs us to proceed to the north central coast of Cuba, between Cuba and the Florida Keys. Our mission is to be available for on-scene tasking in the vicinity of Boca de Marcos-Anguilla Cay area, in reference to a possible mass boat lift.
“There are no further details on the mission, but there are preparatory taskings that have been passed down via the appropriate department heads. It looks to me like a humanitarian operation. It should not compromise our combat readiness or our ability to return to Guantánamo Bay, which I would anticipate after our activities here are complete.
“I’ll keep you informed as more information comes in. Carry on.”
DAN made his excuses to Shrobo and left him standing at the rail, blinking up at the sky as if at a huge screen filled with interesting new data. He picked up his morning traffic, the Teletype clatter coming through the little grilled door as the duty radioman slid it open, slid his pile through, clicked it closed. As he leafed rapidly through it, the 1MC’s hollow voice echoed around him: “Haul over all hatch hoods and gun covers.” They were entering the squall.
He decided to go aft and see how the inventory of helo stores was going. He wondered what exactly they’d have to do in a boat lift. He wondered what they’d find two hundred miles ahead, and which way the storm would decide to go. As he headed down the passageway, absently noting that the red “occupied” light was on again over the door to the crypto vault, he couldn’t shake a growing feeling of unease.
ON the far side of that door, a clock hummed to itself in the isolated quiet of a steel-walled cave. A diffuser hummed a steady drone, breathing cold air on the close-cropped head of the man who sat at a bolted-down desk positioned between two large safes.
He sat scratching his bald spot within a windowless steel-sided cubicle surrounded on all sides by the ship. An arm’s length away, a heavy system of levers and dogs were locked into welded sockets. The single massively built access was airtight and watertight. Once locked down, it could not be unsealed by anything short of a cutting torch, and even that would take hours to burn through nearly a foot of hardened armor steel. At the upper and lower edges, springed pins were set to trip if it was opened without the proper combination, setting off alarms throughout the ship.
The other three bulkheads were lined with stacked racks of publications, bulletins, films, and data tapes. They stirred uneasily as the ship rolled, restrained by fiddle boards and shock cords. Some were tactical, outlining the way the Navy would maneuver in war or how it would coordinate operations with the other services and allied navies. Others were intelligence, carefully setting forth everything that was known and speculated about possible enemies around the globe. And still others had to do with communications procedures, security, and how to use, maintain, and repair the classified equipment aboard.
The whole room was shadowy. There was a fluorescent light in the overhead, but it was dark. The only light came from the bulb of a single lamp, set low to illuminate the surface of the desk.
Rubbing his head slowly, the officer seated at it was looking at his notebook, doing nothing in particular, just thinking.
Finally, he reared back, stretched, looking around the interior of the compartment. Then he reached out—everything was within reach; he didn’t have to get up—and spun a dial.
The safe came open with the muffled clank of heavy pins disengaging.
Inside it were more publications, racks of them. They were technical manuals for the KL-47, the KWR-37, KW-7, KY-36, KW-21 … for all the message, voice, and computer encipherment systems Barrett carried. There were s
pare cards and parts and the specialized tools required to diagnose malfunctions in complex cryptographic equipment, as well as the bulky red-bound books that contained the daily key lists for each system.
He peered in for a few seconds, running his gaze down the spines. Finally, he took one out. Placing it on the desk, he flipped through the pages till he found the one he wanted. It was a complicated schematic diagram, stamped at the top and bottom with threatening red letters. Then he reached back into the safe, feeling around till his hand closed on a delicate sphere of thin glass.
Taking down a rag from behind a cable, he carefully unscrewed the hot bulb from the lamp, plunging the vault for a moment into darkness impenetrable and complete. No tiniest ray of light leaked in. Not the slightest chink or crack had been tolerated when the vault was built. Then the lamp came back on, three times as bright as before.
Centering the diagram under the 150-watt bulb, he reached back again into the safe for a small camera. He was starting to load it with film when he paused.
He thought, Why am I doing this?
Did he need to do any more of this? Ever again?
He sat unmoving for a few seconds, then decided that he really didn’t. Whatever happened, the time for that was past forever now. He closed the camera and put it back into the safe. He slammed the book closed, weighed it in his hand for a second—a lead insert in the spine gave it considerable heft—then slid it back into place.
He slammed the safe shut with a clang, pulled the handle down to lock it, and spun the dial. Last, he carefully took the oversized bulb out of the desk lamp and replaced it with the standard one.
He stood motionless again, holding the still-hot, oversized bulb. Would there be any reason he might need it again? He couldn’t think of any. The long masquerade was drawing to a close.