Cybernation nf-6

by Tom Clancy

  Jay glanced at his watch and then at the door just as the newspaper guy from the Kansas City Star arrived. This was a jaunty-looking bearded fellow wearing a gray fedora, a rumpled white shirt and tie, with a black sport coat slung over his shoulder, Frank Sinatra-style, and carrying a manila folder. Here was Mahler, ace reporter for the Star, a metaphor for the information transfer Jay needed.

  “Hey, Joe,” Mahler said. “Coffee and the Number Three. My Oriental friend here is buying.”

  Joe, the swarthy, heavy-set counterman in a once-white apron that would need a gallon of bleach and three turns through a washer with new, blue Cheer just to get back to gray, nodded and turned to the kitchen pass-through. He yelled at the cook, “Four-mixed-shredded-fatback-short-dollars-and-burnt!”

  Jay translated mentally: Four scrambled eggs, hash brown potatoes, bacon, a small stack of small pancakes, and white toast, well-done. Well, just “toast” was enough, since white bread was the only option in this place at this time.

  Joe poured a cup of coffee into a heavy china mug and set it down on a saucer in front of Mahler. Some of the thin brew — it looked more like weak tea — slopped into the saucer. Mahler spooned four teaspoons of sugar into the cup, poured a little glass bottle of cream into it, stirred the concoction a couple of times, then sipped at it.

  Starbucks would have a field day here.

  Amazing they weren’t all diabetics, too.

  “So, here’s your information,” Mahler said. He slid the folder across the counter toward Jay.

  “Thanks.”

  “No problem. Anything I can do to keep those Red bastards at bay, you just call.”

  Jay smiled. The fifties were full of people worrying that the communists would be storming ashore at Palisades Park or Long Beach at any moment. Senator McCarthy had played the country’s fears like a rock drummer on crank hammers his skins, at least for a while. And even after HUAC — the House Committee on UnAmerican Activities — finally faded, the Red Scare lingered until the Soviet Union broke up, almost forty years later. For a time, anybody who considered himself a patriot would do anything for any government agency who hinted it would help stem the Red Tide threatening to engulf the world…

  “Your government thanks you, Mr. Mahler.”

  Jay opened the folder. Julio Fernandez had been right. He had been able to get to the information legally. It was the long way around, but it was all public information, and if you knew what you were looking for, and you knew how to look for it, it was all there to be had. He scanned the list, nodded at the names, and smiled again. The boss was gonna love this.

  Mahler’s breakfast arrived, and it was positively psychedelic-looking. Bright yellow scrambled eggs, reddish-brown strips of crisp bacon, a stack of pancakes the diameter of a saucer, piled eight high, and a second plate with four pieces of toast cut in half diagonally, each buttered, with eight more pats of butter in a tiny bowl. Man. Jay had done the research. They really did eat like this. It was a wonder any of them had lived to be thirty.

  Net Force HQ Quantico, Virginia

  Michaels was in his office trying to make sense of the new budget sheet his comptrollers had put together when Jay walked in. Nobody knocked around here. What did he have a secretary for? She never even tried to slow Jay down, far as he could tell.

  “Check it out, boss.” He waved his flatscreen.

  “I’m listening.”

  Jay handed Michaels the flatscreen and flopped onto the couch. “They got a boatload of computer programmers on that ship. Bet your ass that’s where the attacks on the web came from.”

  “And you know this how?”

  “Well, I was gonna rascal the personnel files for CyberNation, but Julio talked me out of it. Being as how that would be illegal, immoral, and probably fattening and all. But he got me thinking, and I dug it out using public stuff, perfectly legal.”

  “Dug what out, exactly.”

  “Okay, look at the list. What I did was, I borrowed a couple hours on the BFS machine at NSA and ran a bunch of INEST records through them.”

  Michaels nodded. BFS was the Cray computer nicknamed the Big Fucking Sorter, at the National Security Agency’s newly refurbished underground complex outside Fairfax. INEST was the InterNational Education Statistics Terminal mainframe, based in D.C.

  “Okay.”

  “And what I did was, I ran the top two percent of grads from top computer schools in the U.S. and Europe for the last ten years. I found out who they were, then crossed them with public records — drivers’ licenses, property taxes, income tax, like that.”

  “I’m still listening, but I’m getting older here. We getting to a point? I’ll stipulate that you are a brilliant fellow.”

  Jay laughed. “Well, okay. So what it comes down to is a whole bunch of these guys and girls who were the wonder kids of their graduating classes at CIT, MIT, Zurich U, U of Q, and all, seemed to have taken up official residence in Geneva, Switzerland. Doesn’t mean they all went to work for CyberNation, of course, but the brightest of that bunch have been spending time and money in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, for the last six months. They went to Switzerland, then to Florida.”

  “Which means?”

  “Guess which gambling ship has half a dozen flights from its deck to Fort Lauderdale each and every day? And records I can access show these folks tend to show up in the same cycle each week. I make that their days off. They live and work on the ship, hop the copter, and fly to town for Saturday R&R.”

  Michaels nodded. Circumstantial, but a really big coincidence if that’s what it was. Occam’s razor would slice that one to confetti.

  “I can nail it down some more, but I think we’ve got a nest of programmers and weavers on that ship, and they are taking some trouble to keep it quiet, if not absolutely secret. And of course, the big question is: How come? And I think we all know the answer to that. They’ve gone over to the dark side.”

  “Well. I guess we need to find out for sure, don’t we?”

  Jay shook his head. “Harder to do. We might catch one on the deck webcam or something, but the ship’s records aren’t going out to the public. I don’t think we got enough to get a court order for a search. Not that we could get one anyway. They don’t belong to us, and I doubt Libya cares.”

  Toni appeared at the doorway. “What’s up?”

  Michaels nodded at Jay, and gave her a quick rundown.

  “Good work, Jay,” she said. “So what now?”

  “Maybe somebody ought to take a trip to the ship and look around,” Michaels said.

  “All one has to do to get on board is show up at the heliport and flash a little credit to get a ride out to the floating casino,” Jay said. “Most of the patrons come from the U.S. Mainland, a few from Cuba and the other islands.”

  “You going to ask the FBI to check it out?” Toni asked.

  “They don’t have any jurisdiction there,” Michaels said. “And between you, me, and the hidden microphone in my lamp, I don’t trust the CIA as far as I can fly by waving my arms.”

  “What are you saying here, Alex?”

  “It’s the dead of winter. A little trip to the Caribbean to gamble and take in the tropical sun would be a nice break, don’t you think?”

  “Me, me!” Jay said. “I’ll do it!”

  “Nope,” Michaels said. He looked at Toni. “What do you think, Miz Michaels? You up for a little work out of town?”

  The look on her face was priceless.

  * * *

  After Jay was gone, Toni said, “You’re serious.”

  “Yes, ma’am. We need to send somebody there to get the lay of the place.”

  “And you don’t want to do it.”

  “No, my wife would kill me if I went off like that, leaving her at home with a toddler.”

  “Seriously, Alex. Why me?”

  “As I recall, the last time I tried to avoid sending you on an assignment because I was being overly protective, I got my ass handed to me. I learned my le
sson.”

  “Really.” Her voice was as dry as the Sahara.

  “Well, okay, I don’t think it is going to be particularly dangerous, if you must know. You aren’t going to have to do anything risky, just walk around and get a feel for things, get the routine down. I don’t want you skulking into parts of the ship that are off-limits to the public, no trying to swipe computer codes, like that. I’ll have Jay come up with some holographs of the programmers he’s found, you can study them, so if you happen to see one while you are there, fine, but the main thing is to gather information readily available.”

  “For…?”

  “For when and if we might need it. I don’t know exactly where this is going to lead, but let’s take a couple of hypotheticals and run with them. Suppose Jay is right. Say that CyberNation is responsible for the attacks on the net. And they are being mounted from this ship in the Caribbean. What can we do about it without proof? They are on the high seas, and our laws don’t apply. Sure, we could send a Navy destroyer or missile cruiser down to do a search — assuming we could convince the admiral commanding, Secretary of the Navy, the Joint Chiefs, and the president to go for it, not that likely a proposition. If we’re wrong, international outcry would blow whoever was responsible — that would be me — right out of a job. Even if we were right, every Third World country on the planet would scream to high heaven about American imperialism and gun-boat diplomacy. The drawback to being a superpower.”

  “ ‘O! it is excellent to have a giant’s strength, but it is tyrannous to use it like a giant.’ ”

  He looked at her, puzzled.

  She grinned. “I’ve been waiting years for a chance to use that. Measure for Measure,” she said. “One of my political professors at NYU was a big fan of Shakespeare; he used to throw quotes at us like peanuts to overfed monkeys — we pretty much ignored them. The only other one I can ever remember came from Titus Andronicus. Not much chance to toss that one into a conversation.”

  “They made a movie of that one, didn’t they? All about rape and murder and vengeance? Real upbeat, cheerful stuff.”

  “Oh, yeah. The line was Aaron’s: ‘If there be devils, would I were a devil, to live and burn in everlasting fire, so I might have your company in hell, but to torment you with my bitter tongue!’ ”

  “Must have been an interesting character, your teacher.”

  “Oh, yeah. He went to work for State a few years after I graduated. One of the China hands now, I think.”

  “Well, I’m impressed with your knowledge of the Classics. You want to go on this trip or not? I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have any trouble finding volunteers if you don’t.”

  “Yeah, I heard Jay.”

  “Well, I certainly wouldn’t force you. It’s up to you. But you can’t say I didn’t offer.”

  She nodded, and thought about it.

  “If we can get enough stuff to be sure CyberNation is the guilty party,” Alex said, “and that they are doing it from that ship, then we can maybe do something about it ourselves.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “John Howard’s boys and girls are bored, so he tells me.”

  “The director would kill you.”

  “Not if we were right. It’s within our charter, sort of — at least we won’t be sneaking into some foreign country. We have as much right to be out on the ocean as anybody, right?”

  “That’s real iffy, Alex.”

  “Not as bad as some we’ve done and gotten away with. Remember the trips to Grozny? And to Guinea-Bissau?”

  “That’s how you justify it? Making it the least of several evils?”

  “Why not? I remember situational ethics from college, too.”

  She shook her head.

  “Besides, it’s all vaporware right now. We don’t know for sure that Jay is right. Maybe after we gather a lot of little pieces, we can puzzle it together.”

  “And you’d really be okay with me going?”

  “As your husband and the father of your child, not so much. As your commander, I am more sanguine about it. You are a trained operative, you can take care of yourself, and the level of danger is very low.”

  “And leave my husband with a toddler?”

  “I have Guru to help. And you’ve been griping about being cooped up in the house or office, worried that you might turn into a woman who talks about baby poop at social gatherings. Go. Take a couple days, lose a few dollars of the government’s money in the slot machines, get some midwinter sun — properly skinblocked, of course.”

  She smiled. “Okay. I’ll do it. Thanks, Alex.”

  “We live to serve. Guess I better give John Howard a call.”

  “You’re sending him, too?”

  “No, but he might want to start thinking about ways to sneak onto a ship in the middle of the ocean.”

  On the Bon Chance

  In the lowest hold behind locked and guarded doors were the EMP bombs. They wore wooden frames, made from two-by-four fir boards, and sat on big pallets, also made of wood. They smelled faintly of something spicy, and that and a seawater-and-oil odor drifted about in the damp hold. Santos knew vaguely how they worked, these devices, but they were not his thing.

  He had made the mistake of asking. The explosives expert practically peed himself as he talked happily about overlapping radiation pattern lobes and capacitors, coaxial this and coaxial that, of hardened components and planes of radiation.

  Santos listened with half an ear, nodded, and murmured from time to time, so that the bomb man believed, perhaps, that he had some idea of what the man was talking about.

  “We’re talking fifteen, twenty megajoules in ten-hundredths of a microsecond,” the man said, his face ecstatic with pleasure at having an audience.

  The man pointed at the nearest bomb, which looked to Santos like nothing so much as a torpedo in an old submarine movie. A little smaller and thinner, maybe. More pointed.

  “This particular model uses PBX-9501. The armature is surrounded by a coil of heavy-gauge aluminum wire, that’s the FCG stator. The winding splits into halves, to increase induction. It’s cased in a heavy block of tightly wound Kevlar and carbon fiber, so it doesn’t blow apart before it generates the field—”

  A bomb that didn’t blow things up. How odd.

  Well, yes, it did explode and destroy itself, but its primary purpose was to fry sensitive components with a powerful electromagnetic pulse generated by the explosion. Very complicated. It seemed easier to him just to drop a blockbuster on the target and take it all out, but apparently magnetic radiation could go through concrete better than explosives, and besides, they didn’t want to lose the infrastructure altogether, they would need it themselves later.

  Like a biological weapon that killed people, but left the buildings standing, an EMP bomb was designed to kill computers, but allow the people to remain. A bloodless weapon.

  “Not as good as the Vircators,” the bomb man continued, “which are electron beam/anode devices that will vibrate at microwave frequencies. They can get forty gigs out of this design in the lab, but they are heavy and much more complicated—”

  It was all just so much useless technical babble to Santos, who cared only that these giant finned silver turds would blow up when and where they were supposed to blow up, and do the job they were intended to do.

  These looked big and heavy, but the bomb man had assured him they could be easily transported by common aircraft. Even though they had come via supply ship, they could, in fact, be carried on one of the big passenger helicopters, no problem. Each one only weighed as much as, say, four or five big men, and on a craft that could carry thirty or forty people, half a dozen of these devices would ride quite nicely.

  The bomb man started off on some new techno-rant, but Santos waved him quiet. “Yes, I understand,” he said, lying through his smile. “I need merely be certain you understand where and when they must be delivered.”

  “Oh, yes, I know.”

  “Good. Atte
nd to that. I will check back with you as we go.”

  Santos strode away, his footsteps upon the steel grating echoing slightly in the warm, dank hold. You’d think it would be cooler down here, right next to the water and all, but it was not.

  Timing on all this would be critical. His part was easy enough to accomplish, but a failure on the parts of others could be fatal to the mission. They had only a week, and everything must be in place and synchronized exactly by then. It was not much time when you had to deploy men, transfer bombs, and make certain you know exactly where and how to strike each target. But, it was what it was, and he was happier to be going into the field than sitting around waiting.

  Moving was better than waiting, almost always. Once you got moving, to hesitate at the wrong moment, to look away from the goal, that could get you killed. Yes, you had to plan in advance, know your tactics so that you did not make a stupid mistake, but once you started rolling, hesitation was a killer. The man who blinked first lost. And that would not be him.

  26

  Crawfish Point

  Galveston, Texas

  October 1957

  It was raining hard. There was a tropical storm offshore, maybe a hurricane, still far enough away so it wasn’t any real danger to the state yet, but close enough to bring lots of rain and choppy seas in the Gulf. Yet, there Gridley came, in an old-fashioned wooden shrimping boat, arrogant as always, secure in the knowledge that he was invincible.

  Lack of confidence had never been one of Jay’s problems.

  Keller, wearing a black slicker and hiding in a mangrove tangle at the edge of the estuary, with a scoped 30–30 Winchester deer rifle, watched Gridley maneuver the boat through the shallow water as he headed for the Gulf, checking for roots or half-submerged logs he might hit with the boat’s propeller. Or did they call them “screws” on boats this size?