'A' for Argonaut

by Michael J. Stedman

  The Bird’s fingers danced over the keyboard.

  “Wait. That flash is the NEBS signature. We’ve broken through the algorithm in their port!”

  The Bird applied a few more strokes. The screen exploded with a burst of figures. Numbers, letters, and symbols unwound in a blur and shot up the computer screen.

  “What happened?”

  “Bugger sent out an advance team of ARPs, Address Resolution Protocols. They discovered a microscopic hole in NEBS’ parameter check. Our little army just marched right through it. Fuckin’ zipper heads. I tried to warn them. Their INFOSEC info-sucks.”

  Sergei left the workstation. He returned ten minutes later with two cups of coffee. He handed one to Bird, another caffeine fiend like Maran.

  “Shit! We hit a logic bomb!”

  The Bird sounded alarmed. A logic bomb is a code inserted into a software system to sabotage it with a destructive virus under specific conditions. Those conditions often include the detection of a hostile penetration of the host computer’s system.

  “Are we in trouble?” Sergei asked.

  “Wait! OK. No problaymo. The gophers defused it.”

  “We’re home free! Now we can stick it with the Trojan horse. There! They’re all ours, baby. Wide open access to the universe! We can come back whenever we want. Doesn’t breaking through ‘impenetrable’ padlocks give you a hard-on?”

  “Only when I know I can’t get caught,” Sergei said.

  The Bird chirped. “Don’t worry, we’ve got more rings around us than a Slinky. Anyway, we’ve got their COMSEC protocol. Our tracks automatically delete as soon as we back out. Even if the cyber-spooks at NEBS detect a foreign presence, their system will I.D. it as a zombie.” The Bird was using the term for a dead system floating free through the networks. “We’re invincible! They’ll never even know we’ve been there. This is what I’ve dreamed of since I left NEBS.”

  He punched a few more keys.

  The screen scrolled through a series of pages. Then it stopped.

  TOP SECRET

  OFFICE OF PLANS AND OPERATIONS

  DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE

  WASHINGTON, DC 20006

  TS//SPECIAL ACCESS REQUIRED//

  BUTTER POPCORN//NOFORN//IMCOM//EYES ONLY

  MEMORANDUM FOR: MAJOR AARON SMITH, DIVISION 6

  FROM: KENDALL FORSYTHE, DIRECTOR

  SUBJECT: (U) NEW TAMPON DISPENSERS: LADIES ROOMS

  They were laughing when Maran joined them. The secret classification system had gradually sunk into a national joke since its start in 1947 at the beginning of the Cold War. The National Security Information codes on the screen meant that the document referred to a Top Secret program based on satellite information provided jointly through photo analysis by the NRO, National Reconnaissance Office, and the NSA, National Security Agency. “Eyes Only” meant “burn after reading.”

  “Give Director Kendall credit for designating the subject “U,” unclassified,” The Bird observed.

  “But still, try to get a copy without filing a Freedom of Information application and waiting two or three years for a response,” Sergei said.

  “Great job, guys,” Maran said. “Now let’s stop screwing around. We need a fictitious site to operate from, a bogus ‘diamond newsgroup’ with a chat room. Call it ‘The On-Line Diamond Exchange,’ a ‘Want to Buy,’ and ‘For Sale,’ a bulletin board that purports to match buyers and sellers. We’ll set it up in the best languages for this op. And fast.”

  A large brilliant-cut diamond filled the screen. Under it were the words The Bird sought:

  ANTWERP DIAMOND COUNCIL

  Administrator access ONLY.

  Two more clicks. In.

  “Confirmed!” The Bird shouted. The security door to the council operating system was wide open. He worked his way through a series of locked corridors that contained the council’s most confidential information.

  Sergei stepped into the control center.

  “Where’s the file, goddamn it? The map. I need that map‌—‌the war plan‌—‌right now!” Sergei raged.

  “It’s in the SAB, the storage area bunker. Right where it should be,” The Bird pointed out.

  “Nice going. Think you’re ready to go to work yet?” Maran needled. The team had been working steadily around the clock.

  “This isn’t work. It’s ‘Friday Night at the Fights.’ Break out the chips and beer!” The Bird yelled.

  He logged on to File 31-B-15, the international jewelry exchange service on Dialintell, a private on-line database. He retrieved a dozen company names that matched a search string for the words “illicit,” “smuggling,” and “Cabinda.” When he bounced them against File 5-C-232, the Company Name Finder, he hit a mother lode. The EXPAND function allowed him to capture, merge, and purge the take to isolate any target that fit the parameters.

  “Bingo!” he shouted.

  Sergei came over.

  “I just did a SELECT and REPORT.”

  He handed it to Sergei.

  Strategic Solutions International, Inc.,

  Diamond-mining and Smuggling Shock Troops

  Dr. Stefan Mdaga and Stefan Haan

  International Institute of Security Studies

  Johannesburg, South Africa

  The private military company, Strategic Solutions International, Inc., of Kinshasa, DRC, (SSI) appears to be typical of the modern PMC. In fact, it is a mercenary corporate entity with many criminal tentacles. The mercenary group is led by Grigol Rakhmonov Boyko, a former Georgian intelligence operative from East Germany’s STASI and a fugitive from the International Criminal Court War Crimes Tribunal (ICC). Through SSI, Boyko controls a vast corporate empire, which includes Aero Congo, which operates out of Ostend Airport, Belgium. Aero Congo is a known transporter of illegal arms into N’Djili Airport in Kinshasa. Boyko’s clients include dictators, corrupt government officials, militia warlords, and organized crime gang leaders throughout Angola and the two Congos.

  SSI’s power centers on its control of a band of cult killers, the Christian Revolutionary Army of Cabinda, commonly known as the Ninja Crocodile Militia or Ninjas, led by self-proclaimed general, Slang Vangaler, also a fugitive from the ICC. The Ninjas have spread terror in the region from Cabinda to Kinshasa, aiding Boyko’s operations, which include smuggling illicit diamonds through Angola to Antwerp.

  Maran stood at the counter mixing a combination of orange juice and Dunkin’ Donuts coffee to replace the booze he had been addicted to in his past. Zapping him for his disastrous drinking career, his team called them “Mack Maran Mocktails.” But as usual, he was indiscriminate. If it had enough caffeine, he wouldn’t complain. He drank it by the quart. Never mind that it inspired acid reflux and burned his throat. He was obstinate. He long ago decided that it was bad enough that he could not drink booze; he could still manage a caffeine buzz.

  He carried his drink over to the desk he had jerry-rigged for himself with a seven-foot length of butcher block on two sawhorses. He sat.

  Sergei came over.

  “You won’t believe this, Mack,” Sergei said, handing him the report.

  Maran took one look at it.

  He looked up from the report to Sergei, shocked.

  “Boyko. Grigol Rakhmonov Boyko. The Animal of Angola.”

  His Cabinda mission had landed dead center in the middle of an enormous diamond scam.

  How does diamond smuggling in Angola link to Washington?

  FOURTEEN

  South Boston

  “Get over here, Maran,” The Bird summoned. “We’ve struck a goldmine, or a diamond mine, I should say.”

  Maran read the report on Strategic Solutions International and shook his head.

  “Shut that shit down, patriot,” he snapped at Tracha. The multi-lingual op liked to crank up his boom box with Kanye West, and right now something irritating was booming throughout the converted warehouse space.

  “Hey, man,” Tracha yelled back from his desk at the end of the ban
k that stretched down the middle of the floor. “That ‘shit’ is a sneak peak cut I copped from a YouTube site. Not even released yet. Thought you dug hip hop. You should: the black man’s response to racism.” Tracha carried with him a deep appreciation for Maran and knew he was top shelf when the cards were down, the most reliable and quick-thinking op he had ever had take his back. He loved to joust with him. Needling him on the gap in their politics and musical taste was a sign of that respect. They loved it.

  “Get off the soapbox for a while,” Maran shot back. “You still accept Valentine’s favorite mottos: ‘A penny saved is a penny taxed,’ or, ‘If at first you don’t succeed, change the rules.’ When President Valentine and the tax collectors meet, they wink at each other. It’s my side, the Right side, that values individual freedom and an open field to hard work and the success that goes with it. Anyway, there’s a limit. Put on 50 Cent or Notorious B.I.G. Something civil.”

  Sergei ran a ping sweep on the network maintained by the American Jewelers Guild. Crosstalk on their chat lines led to a series of e-mails. A dispute had arisen between a wealthy customer and a Boston jeweler, Bradford & Bailey on Boylston Street. The complainant had bought a diamond solitaire for his wife. Now he was furious. The stone seemed to be a perfect grade, had beautiful white color with a blue hue, and flawless clarity. But with extra facets adding to its ‘flash,’ the customer thought it was too unusual. He felt cheated. The store had refused to take the stone back; it had been sold at a “severe discount.”

  It was clear: This was one of the stones that were taking down the market.

  A check with the Massachusetts Corporation Division files identified a Harold Mantville as the sole proprietor of the Bradford & Bailey jewelry store. A credit check on Mantville with Dun and Bradstreet showed that his store had been facing bankruptcy until very recently when its fortunes turned upward‌—‌dramatically.

  The Bird punched in several access codes. “Elsie’s” keyboard rattled. Like a Steinway tuned for a concert, she responded magnificently.

  The Bird had weaponized BANG!’s intercommunication network with a scalable coherent interface providing ultra-fast connectivity within the network of target sites and systems he was building. His nerves fired through his fingers and hands and up his arms, shooting a wave of goosebumps up his back and over his shoulders. It was the peak of his career. The search-and-plunder commando program zapped through the ether at a speed of 200,000 gigaflops, slamming around corners, through corridors and crevices, decrypting codes, crashing firewalls, deluding electronic security guards, working with the speed of light. At his fingertips, he controlled a supernatural powerhouse with a node-to-node communication speed of 30,000 megabytes-per-nanosecond.

  He was God!

  “You want to run this monster, Mack?”

  “Are you kidding? I have trouble with the new On-Off light switches.”

  “New? They’ve been around for twenty years.”

  “Oh, well” Maran said.

  With Olli’s code in hand, Maran and his team had the computer equiva-lent of a weapon of mass destruction at their fingertips. First, they scanned the universe for any aberrations in orders for diamonds in New York City and before long, they discovered an enormous sudden increase in shipments to Dolitz, Inc., a major diamond dealer on 47th Street. They penetrated Dolitz’s computer firewalls and discovered invoices for “Special” diamonds Dolitz was buying and peddling. They were all coming from one firm, C. Tolkachevsky & Sons Diamonds N.V. Antwerp, the largest in the Belgian diamond manufacturing industry. They also discovered a purchase order to Dolitz for twelve “special” diamonds from Bradford & Bailey of Boston, a local clue. All twelve were described as GIA D-Perfect with a blue hue. Even more strangely, Dolitz’s wholesale price to B&B was only one-hundred dollars a carat, a tiny fraction of the world’s actual retail dealer market cost, stones so rare they should have been commanding up to twenty-thousand a carat wholesale. Before long it became apparent that Dolitz was filling orders like that for diamonds from jewelry stores all over the world, tens of thousands of carats, many designated “Chrysanthemums” and all priced at ludicrous discounts, many at a store price of a mere thousand dollars a carat.

  A trail of funds led Maran’s team to the usual private banks on the money-laundering circuit. But it wasn’t the accounts in the Bahamas, the Caymans, or the Philippines that surprised him; it was the predominance of transactions and transfers in Cabinda and Kinshasa.

  One message on the diamond exchange line contained the code-name, “Kin-Man.” A quick scan indicated that the e-mail address had been camouflaged. Hoping that they could crack “Kin-Man’s” identity and whereabouts, Sergei spread the word throughout his network. Two days in, a breakthrough: an e-mail message from “Kin-Man” to “Lu-lu Bright:”

  The $2 mill from shipmt # *~12M hs nt ht bank acct yt. Two-00-000 cts. more nu diamonds redy now. Reply ASAP.

  EvanG

  Someone was delivering a lot of diamonds, banking a lot of money. If the next shipment was anywhere near as large as “# *~12M,” some- thing was seriously wrong. Thousands of carats of roughs were now ready‌—‌for $100 a carat. No one in the trade had ever sold such beautiful roughs for as low as $100 a carat.

  There was no telephone number.

  Then The Bird flagged a response from “Lu-lu” to “Kin-Man” with “Lu-lu’s” e-mail address on it. He sent “her” a promotional message about one of the phony diamond exchange bulletin boards the team had created to lure shady traders. A quick reply asked if they ever logged onto an Internet Relay Chat session called GEMS. An IRC is a multi-user, multi-channel dialogue in real-time, an ongoing discussion of a topic of common interest.

  Sergei punched into the network. Logging on to a channel, “#by’n-sell’n,” he got an immediate response:

  If you’re looking for class-act diamonds at the lowest prices in the world, we have them. Contact us now.

  EvanG

  The message contained an e-mail address. A quick search revealed it had originated in Kinshasa. A trace on “EvanG” showed he or she had posted messages on every gemstone bulletin board they could find that was used by jewelers. Several addresses indicated their origin as “DRC.cg”, the DRC. A check of Congo ISP companies revealed these messages, too, were from Kinshasa.

  Once they got EvanG to reply, he was automatically locked onto Sergei’s “Bounce Back” system, which allowed the team to trace the ISP of anyone who logged onto EvanG’s bulletin board. From there, it was a simple step to get the ISP to deliver the logger’s original user I.D., and thus his Internet address no matter how many telephone lines and on-line networks all over the world the logger had skipped through to cloak the origin.

  Next Sergei installed his sniffer programs on “Lu-lu’s” system. Every time he or she logged on to the Internet, BANG!’s computers would deliver an audible riff from Sting’s “Field of Gold” and a red laser light would flash. He hoped to catch “Lu-lu” in a live on-line chat with EvanG.

  It didn’t take long.

  “I have diamonds to sell.”

  “Where are you?

  “Antwerp.”

  As soon as she logged on, they captured her password and used an Internet Scanning Program to access her entire system. They downloaded her e-mail history, but her password was encrypted. That meant one more step. Sergei had his own decryption tools.

  With an Identifier, either a code address or an on-line “moniker,” it was easy enough to trace the first leg of the sender’s route, even if it turned out to circuit around the world. Before long, they had found it: Mindblow.netscan.com was a San Francisco ISP known to have been set up by the Phantoms of Phreak, a/k/a POP, a band of computer hackers. The FBI and the Pentagon suspected the Phantoms of countless computer invasions, but its members had so far escaped identity.

  They had never been tracked by BANG! before.

  Using PHALANX, The Bird found “Lu-Lu” as soon as she moved from a site in Beijing to the POP’
s cloaked home site on a server they located in San Francisco. Her real name was Amber Chu. Access to her e-mails showed that she had a son named Tony and that he had suffered from severe asthma attacks. It was easy to trace the origin of Amber’s transmissions back to her computer. Her location didn’t surprise Sergei.

  It said Antwerp, but she was operating out of Cabinda.

  FIFTEEN

  Presqu’ile de Banana

  Passion flowers and towering bougainvillea overhung the white shell path to Boyko’s holiday retreat in Presqu’ile de Banana. A profusion of crimson blossoms blanketed the walkway as ever-present honey bees droned away. The double front mahogany doors opened wide onto a foyer floored in Spanish tiles. That in turn expanded into an area that included a wood-paneled library lined on one wall with rare books. A zebra-skin sofa in the center of the room was surrounded by alabaster sculptures. Unidentifiable electronic music blared from unseen loudspeakers. The back wall opened on an emerald lawn. It was garlanded with evergreens sculpted in geometrical shapes: pyramids, corkscrews, and mushrooms.

  “‘Chateau de Serein,’ classic gardens in the jungle,” Boyko liked to say.

  The day after Boyko enlisted Amber, he had begun immediately to prepare her for his mission, delivering his coup de grace to the world’s markets with dirt cheap, perfect diamonds.

  Previously, he had used his own sources to distribute his stones. Even though his grand plan was only in the experimental stage, it was proving to be a spectacular success. The world’s financial markets were already in a panic.

  “How many stones?” Amber asked. She had no interest, but she wanted Boyko to believe there was more on her mind than her son.

  “Ten-thousand. One carat each. At ten-thousand per carat, retail,” he lied automatically.

  “Why so much?”

  “The stones are flawless‌—‌completely flawless‌—‌with a blue hue.”

  “That’s a hundred-billion dollars worth of diamonds,” Amber gasped.

  “That’s more than the annual world sales.”

  “You’re quick.”