'A' for Argonaut

by Michael J. Stedman

  The other team members followed closely behind Sergei.

  Al Ray Goodwin had come in from Kansas City to join the team. He had shared honors with Maran in Operation Acid Gambit when both men were awarded the Silver Star. Goodwin’s last job with the Army had been running Predators over Angola and the Congos. He spoke fluent Lebanese, Levantine Arabic, and passable Swahili.

  Kurt Tracha was born dirt poor on welfare in the economically depressed hollows of south central West Virginia’s coal country. At the age of six, he had been adopted by a heartfelt social worker working to rescue the most needy children from the cycle of poverty. She was the only daughter in a Lebanese-American banking family on Manhattan’s upper West Side which was giving up hope of having grandchildren. He had battled alongside Maran in Operation Guardian Retrieval, a rescue mission of two downed Blackhawk pilots. For a while after that, Tracha ran his own detective agency that was hired by the Pentagon to probe a multi-billion-dollar vending machine scandal of kickbacks to non-commissioned officers at Post Exchanges around the world. Tracha’s probe uncovered a link between the non-coms and a world-wide Japanese video game company. The project was so profitable, even though it never led to any civilian convictions, Tracha had cashed out and sold the business. He had free time now.

  He jumped in.

  They intended to set up a powerful electronic surveillance network to scan the world for communications regarding the import and sale of diamonds.

  “We have until sunset tomorrow to collect, organize all there is about diamonds, legal or otherwise,” Maran stressed.

  “We’ll set it up in French and Lingala. Add Arabic and Persian. Put in a link translator for any others that come across it. If the bad guys are there, they might use any of those languages.

  “We can create bulletin board magnetism for diamond dealers in Cabinda, Kin, Antwerp, Brazzaville. Shake the apple tree. Dangle these diamonds in front of every eyeball on the net. I can handle the French and the Lingala sites. That will cover the DRC, Sierra Leone and Cote’ d’Voire,” Goodwin volunteered.

  MARAN LAY ON THE cabin cot after reading Sergei’s first brief. Through the window on the opposite wall, he could see the waters of the river slipping smoothly to rendezvous with the sea like all the other rivers Maran likened to his concept of a “Higher Power”‌—‌no beginning‌—‌no end: down from the sky, back up to the sky. He could see the claret sun slipping down like a lollipop behind the trees on the river banks overgrown with sweet-nectared trumpet honeysuckle. Tufts of billowing, dark fog were settling in. Soon he was asleep, dreaming. He had been there as a boy, a guest with other Boy Scouts of their Scoutmaster, to learn the arts of fly-fishing, using a 12-foot, two-handed Spey rod and an S-curved cast to reach far out with a big, smolt-patterned streamer fly over the roiling river. Maran relished the memory of the rustic cabin, with its aromas of thick coffee percolating in an old-fashioned spotted granite enameled pot and hand-cut hickory-cured-at-home baby-back bacon. Best of all were the huge goose eggs from Chuck’s Fowl Farm down the dirt road. One goose egg could take up whole plate. Red letter days.

  Now, lying in bed even with the help of those savory memories, his over-tasked brain refused to rest. He tossed from side to side, anxious about the passing time. He was in a hurry.

  THIRTEEN

  South Boston

  A week after they pulled out of the fishing cabin, Maran’s team went to work at BANG!’s new headquarters on Liberty Wharf, a section of unrenovated and largely abandoned warehouses on South Boston’s Northern Avenue waterfront, now occupied mostly by artists, writers, musicians, and graphic designers.

  Outside, the black of the moonless night blanketed Boston Harbor. The tiger team worked through the night. Across the small channel alongside the Boston Fish Pier, the docks and the utility boats were ablaze with sparkling red, blue, and yellow lights. The city wanted to make sure it was festive. Boston Common, a common cow pasture and gallows field from 1634 to the early 1800s and now a public park, was laid out in glittering lights that spread out at night from the center of town like Christmas decorations all the way down to the waterfront.

  Sergei had put his pal, Bird Serkin, to work setting up the computer network communications and encryption systems. Serkin was another cyber-warfare wizard with even greater skills than Sergei’s. Reputed to be the top code-cracker at NBES, the National Bureau of Electronic Surveillance in Fort Meade, Maryland, “The Bird” had been fired when he was caught pulling off an electronic bank fraud scheme. The U.S. government never discovered the $225,000 he had siphoned off in .0009 cent bits. It was only when IBM rejected his employment application and he retaliated by raiding one of their corporate accounts that he got caught. Through a porn site he set up linked through IBM’s internal corporate network, he had duped a young clerk into clicking on a hypertext leading to a video titled “Young BABES in SEXTOYLAND.” The link contained a keylogging virus that gave him the passwords to IBM’s vendor payment bank accounts. Posing as an approved user, he sent millions of dollars to account dumps in dozens of private banks around the world; then he ordered theoretically untraceable cashier checks drawn on them sent to a post office box near his home. The FBI, armed with the new Open-Transparency-in-Banking law, followed the money trail through the private banks to The Bird. They never got a conviction, but it ended his career with the federal government. Soon afterward, Sergei took him into his Huntsville operation.

  Sergei’s tiger team had been working around the clock. He had tasked them to monitor Internet chat rooms and bulletin boards; YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter; searching for clues to what was happening in the diamond market. He had assigned jobs for each of them, including keywords to search and monitor, but they needed stronger hacking tools like vulnerability port scanners, packet sniffers, spoofers, and rootkits.

  With PHALANX, The Bird now had instant access to everything digital, all security, everywhere‌—‌all codes would open to his command.

  Sergei’s first call had been to Olli Lehtinen. Olli had the keys to PHALANX.

  The phone call was brief.

  “You remember?”

  “Of course. I told you. I’d never forget.”

  It had been years since Sergei had seen the Finn, but they had stayed in touch by text messaging. Like most people who got to know Sergei even peripherally, Olli owed him and Sergei believed strongly in IOU’s. Keeping people indebted to him was his M.O. Years earlier, Sergei had helped Olli send his son abroad to university in Zurich. As a ranking intelligence officer, Sergei only had to make a couple of phone calls. One call was to a good friend at the Ministry of Telecommunications and Electronics in Moscow who got Olli a lucrative consulting contract there working on Russian telemetry programs for the Department of Agriculture. The other call was to Moscow University. It was a simple matter for another friend of Sergei’s, this one in charge of the school’s transfer programs, to arrange a scholarship to the University of Zurich for Olli’s son. The deal was struck on a transparent promise that the boy would attend graduate school in Moscow after he graduated. Predictably, the boy stayed in Zurich, beyond reach of Russian authorities.

  Since his early years with the Soviet government, Olli had been working on encryption programs as a freelance consultant. Now one of his primary clients in electronic deception was CryptoCop, a cyber-security firm in Zurich, the world’s largest provider of encryption technology to governments as well as to businesses. CryptoCop had conducted a secret relationship with NBES for years. At Sergei’s request, Ollie used Sergei’s own personal Operations Security protocols, undetectable by NBES’ security systems, while on a client call at NBES’ Fort George G. Meade, Maryland, Headquarters of the U.S. Cyber Command, Olli e-mailed Sergei a masked and encrypted copy of the PHALANX code.

  Sergei sat at his computer. He called Maran over.

  A single word flashed across the screen: PHALANX.

  “Sergei, I’ve heard it mentioned but only in secured rooms. Even the name is classified.
How in hell are we going to access the most highly protected electronic surveillance system the U.S. Intel community has ever developed?”

  “Hey, if some turkey from Australia can link up with a gang of Chinese hackers and get his hands on a Top Secret DOD counterintelligence analysis report, why shouldn’t we be able to access PHALANX?”

  “Julian Assange? Wikileaks? The gang that published thousands of secret files stolen by Pentagon renegades to embarrass the U.S. government?”

  “They’ve made Daniel Ellsberg look like a garden club reporter on an Iowa weekly.”

  Located in a box-like building on a large campus at Fort George G. Meade outside the small town of Odenton, Maryland, once no more than a railway crossing, and now a thriving suburban town inhabited by well-paid electronic wizards and spooks, a team of computer information technology scientists ran PHALANX, a multi-satellite signals dragnet. The super-powerful surveillance system allowed its operators to sift through and analyze more than one-hundred million messages per second, every electronic pulse in the earth’s atmosphere. It gave them the ability to shunt files to cache basins in segregated fields, isolate word combinations, and track down the senders’ ISPs.

  The scientists at NBES had rigged it with a super sniffer they nicknamed Back-End Bugger. The average “sniffer” captures passwords and entry codes to crack through firewalls. BEB was a powerful simile of “Back Orifice” designed by hackers at the notorious “Cult of the Dead Cow” hacking group, except for one thing: it could insert itself into any computer gateway in the world. “Bugger” gave them complete system administrator privileges, freedom to browse the target computer’s files and alter them at will‌—‌without being detected.

  WHEN MARAN RETURNED TO join Sergei at his work station, he was dumbfounded.

  Sergei’s plan involved two parts. The first was an open source search with a customized database for anyone selling diamonds from the Cabinda-Kinshasa region controlled by the Animal. It was the second step, PHALANX, that bothered Maran.

  “This is insanity!” he insisted. “You’re talking about hijacking America’s Number One electronic weapon. The world’s most secure encrypted digital fortress.”

  “Oh! Right. Look, altar boy, you’re worried about the ‘highest level?’ Did you forget that it was the assholes at the ‘highest level’ who betrayed you. Anyway, we’re not damaging our country. We’re rescuing it.”

  Altar boy?

  Maran might have found that funny under different circumstances.

  “We can do this without breaking into NEBS,” he insisted.

  “How’s that, genius?”

  “HUMINT. Human source intel. People.”

  “OK. I agree. Where would you suggest we begin? We need electronic penetration first. That will lead us to our ‘Human Intel’ sources.”

  “No! We abide by the rules‌—‌”

  “Horse biscuits!” He knew he had the hard-nosed high ground. “So, you’ve got a bad guy in custody. He has your little girl buried in a hole somewhere. She’s got one hour of air left and he won’t talk. You abandon your daughter or do you break the rules?”

  “Serge. That’s a parable.”

  “It happens,” Sergei said and pointed to the banner on the wall, Maran’s credo.

  Identify your objective

  Set your agenda

  Go!

  The team liked the short version: “GO!”

  Finally Maran agreed.

  Sergei launched their network attack.

  AGAINST ONE WALL, THE tiger team hunched over the keyboards of the bright, new workstations. Over the windows, tarps blocked any eyes observing from India Pier across the slip. Above the tarps on the brick wall, a series of bolts framed a grid of tempered steel bars. Tiny lights flickered from a bank of computer cluster racks.

  Maran walked over from the littered coffee counter, dodging coils of telephone wire and nests of cables. It would have put a Bolshoi ballerina to the test. Gripping his steamy mug of cider-laced Dunkin’ Donuts coffee, he maneuvered around and over one of dozens of cardboard boxes, his foot catching; he tripped on a tangle of wire, cursing as his weak leg gave way. He fell in a heap. The drink slopped out and scalded his hand.

  He yelped.

  A sudden flash startled him. Kurt Tracha stood laughing and snapping shots with his Nikon digital D3X SLR camera, one of the perks, albeit a prop, of his cover as Maran’s freelance news photographer.

  Sergei roared.

  “Sadist,” Maran snarled, brushing himself.

  “You got that right. Here she is. Meet ‘Elsie,’ the Network-centric main battle center,” said Sergei, using his affectionate stage name for his cherished computer system. He gestured to the bank of computers. The frantic set-up work had been brutal, but he’d done it. He now had the ability to run Elsie through Eurosat’s satellite network system and on to the Z-Apt megacomputer at “NEBS,” the slightly inaccurate nickname they used for ease instead of its actual abbreviation when talking about NBES, the National Bureau of Electronic Surveillance.

  “Elsie here will give us whatever we ask for, short of a blowjob; it just takes a little time, a little persuasion and a little love.”

  “I accept her limitations,” Maran quipped. “But we don’t have a little time.”

  “Chill out, Maran. Give yourself a break; take a bow,” Sergei suggested. “Look what you’ve done, after what you’ve been through. You’ve put a world-class tiger team together from scratch, set up a crack consulting firm, overnight, as cover for your mission,” he chuckled. “You’re a goddamn magician; you’re amazing!” The term “tiger team” refers to a methodology used to mount attacks against a target system aggressively: uber-hackers.

  “Thanks. Now get me more leads.”

  With difficulty on his injured leg Maran turned and climbed the ladder at the east side of the office. The ladder led to the loft, the sleeping quarters in the warehouse’s former locker room, big enough for their bunk beds and a shower, the one spot with a view of Baxter’s Wharf. Upstairs, on his cot, he picked up the sheaf. It contained BANG!’s operational progress report. He followed the step-by-step flow chart until he slipped off to sleep. He bounced around on the cot fitfully until his own snoring woke him.

  Sleep apnea.

  Another diagnosis that provoked his innate suspiciousness, like the ADHD and acid reflux they’d also pegged on him. He could never remember seeing a doctor without leaving with some kind of diagnosis and a prescription. They always told him the same thing: Eat less; stay away from foods with artificial flavors and alcohol.

  “CAN YOU IMAGINE THE reaction of the American public if they knew their most critical cyberware weapon was being supplied by a private consultant from a foreign country working for a foreign company in another foreign country? We’re being protected from electronic Armageddon by idiots!” Sergei said to Maran later.

  The code allowed Sergei to retrieve NBES’ daily digest and use his own keywords to individualize searches through any NBES station in the world. The first time he logged onto the system, he entered the general key terms: “diamond or diamantaire,” “bank or account,” “buy or sell”, “retail or wholesale”, “rough or polished,” “rough or cut,” “merchant or viewer,” “mine or pipe,” and “carats.” He added the names of all the world’s major diamond distributors, including KoeffieBloehm Diamond Mining International. He searched the Web for “KoeffieBloehm,” inputting the many names of its affiliates and subsidiaries, a massive job. Sergei put the team on it. Once the protocols were established, PHALANX flagged and opened any e-mail message in the world containing the keyword combinations. He could prioritize and isolate communications with the specified mix of terms. The team developed a list of the most suspect and flagged them, then erected a filter to screen out innocent chatter.

  They locked PHALANX on to the suspicious sites for constant scrutiny.

  Layered on top of and within the NBES’ PHALANX system they’d penetrated, The Bird had installed his
own ingenious digital creation on BANG!’s IBM X5000 computers. The data mining system gave him an army of digital spies that leapfrogged through the ethersphere, screening and isolating sites that employed key terms used in the diamond trade. They delivered answers to questions their human masters had never even thought of. The Bird referred to them fondly as his “gophers.” They gave him freedom to roam computers he was targeting at will, altering files, and delivering false orders without detection. He had written in an Operations Security feature second to none. In the remote possibility that a NBES system administrator tried to find him, it would be impossible.

  “I would have developed this for them if they hadn’t been such assholes,” The Bird said. He would never forgive them for firing him, never forget his humiliation, and he had jumped at the chance to compromise NBES.

  “This opens the universe!” Maran exclaimed. “Now we go to war.”

  “There’s never been nothin’ like it,” Sergei said.

  The Bird’s fingers flew like a concert pianist’s over the keyboard.

  “Thank God for those incompetent idiots at NEBS.”

  “Hold it,” Sergei warned as The Bird manipulated the data.

  “That’s it. COMSEC E.O. One-two-three-five-six.” He was referring to Communications Security developed under Presidential Executive Order 12356. The order set defense counter measures to protect U.S. computer secrets from attack.

  “Chill,” said The Bird, explaining that he had used PHALANX to download DOD’s Computer Security Technical Vulnerability Reporting Program which automatically cleaned up any technical vulnerabilities that would allow a penetrated computer to identify its source. In spite of Sergei’s concern, they were shielded from discovery.

  “Decrypt it. Use the code-breaker.”