Straits of Power

by Joe Buff

  Jeffrey nodded reluctantly. “These ekranoplans give Germany substantial new options in the Med.”

  “Got it in one,” Admiral Hodgkiss said. “But it gets a lot worse. Mr. Parker?”

  “We need to shift gears. New topic. With everyone eavesdropping on everyone else’s transmissions, and cryptography now amounting to an entire classified body of work in math and computer science, it’s difficult to be positive that any message has not been compromised.”

  “Granted,” Jeffrey said. This was nothing new. With the outbreak of the war, the World Wide Web had collapsed into disjointed fragments as countries made impenetrable firewalls against external intrusion—by disconnecting their pieces of the Internet from the outside world altogether. In the U.S. and UK, and over the protest of many, cell phones had been banned except for persons with special licenses: Their signals were too easy to intercept and amplify billions of times from orbit. Massive parallel processing would give the enemy valuable knowledge from hearing loads of civilian chitchat and analyzing voice content in bulk. As a consequence of this real threat, everything that could be done was done by fiber-optic cable or wire; home-front propaganda stressed “Is this e-mail or phone call necessary?,” and people paid attention; in the U.S., sending spam was a federal offense with stiff prison penalties; government bailouts kept the most-affected telecom companies going.

  “The result,” Parker went on, “besides the downer effect on civilian morale, and rampant paranoia, is to force us back to using early Cold War–era espionage trade craft sometimes. Human couriers, dead drops, that sort of thing. Well-proven things, from before the Internet or minicomputers were even invented. Which of course degrades the amount of information our surviving agents can convey, and badly slows how quickly they convey it.”

  Jeffrey digested all this. “You’re implying that it’s all become polarized. Either a cyberspace and electronic warfare arms race at the very high-tech end, or Mata Hari cloak-and-dagger stuff at the very low-tech end.”

  “That’s exactly right,” Parker answered. “Except, you should say and, not or. It’s both at once, Captain. . . . One technique for maintaining covert broadband is to embed the message, encoded, in a seemingly harmless broadcast, but disguise it as underlying noise. It’s an old idea. I can’t say too much, except that all the major powers these days watch for such enemy messages, and use the same technique sometimes to send messages of their own. Again, there are top-secret math theorems about how to study noise and tell if it’s too patterned to be harmless random static. People with Ph.D.s at Fort Meade do this for a living.”

  “Okay.” Fort Meade was the NSA’s headquarters. “With all due respect, what has this got to do with me?”

  Jeffrey caught Hodgkiss and Wilson give each other meaningful looks, then they both turned to Parker.

  “You’re attending this meeting now, Captain Fuller, because several ominous things are converging fast.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “Again, without the details, the NSA can read pieces of some German military signals traffic.”

  “I’m sure they do the same thing to us.”

  “You don’t know the least of it. . . . The NSA began, a few weeks ago, to pick up references to something their linguists translate as ‘Plan Pandora.’ ”

  “Like in Pandora’s box?”

  “It’s a long-standing part of German war-fighting culture that they like to choose operational plan names that carry some meaning or aspect of the plan. We do that too, in peacetime, for public relations, but never in a major shooting war like this.”

  “Plan Pandora,” Jeffrey repeated. “Open her box, unleash unspeakable horrors on the world.”

  “That’s why I said it was ominous. There have also been repeated reference to ‘Zeno,’ which appears to be related to this Pandora plan. From the context, the NSA thinks Zeno is actually a code name for a person. And again, the specific code name chosen probably tells us something.”

  “Zeno as in Zeno’s paradox? The ancient Greek guy?”

  Parker nodded.

  Jeffrey recited the paradox to himself, to try to see what was going on: You can’t walk across a room, ’cause first you have to go halfway there, then a quarter, then an eighth, blah blah, so you never get the whole way there. . . . Except Zeno wasn’t an idiot. He knew people walked across rooms. That’s what made for the paradox.

  Yeah, but this brain teaser is simple to solve nowadays. The ancient Greeks didn’t understand how to sum a converging infinite series. A half plus a quarter plus an eighth and so on adds up to one, not infinity.

  “It hasn’t been a paradox for centuries.”

  “Precisely,” Parker said, as if he’d let Jeffrey talk so he could pounce as soon as Jeffrey finished. “Paradoxes are solved by major breakthroughs in the conceptual framework through which the problem can be viewed. That’s the part that’s ominous.”

  “Zeno. This suggests the Germans have made some sort of new major breakthrough?”

  “And I’m not finished.”

  “Keep going,” Jeffrey said. “Please. You definitely have my attention.”

  “The NSA also intercepted a German message hidden in a Turkish TV station’s signals.”

  “Did they break any of it?”

  “They broke all of it. The message was sent encrypted, but using two different American codes, one within the other.”

  “What?”

  “The outer code, once the NSA cryptanalysts recognized what it was, was easy to undo by using certain approaches and pieces of data. The outer code was something teams of hackers—‘crackers’ is the proper nomenclature when they’re malicious—have failed to penetrate for years.”

  “What is it?”

  “The computer algorithm used by New York’s subway system to prevent counterfeiting their magnetic-strip fare cards.”

  “Huh? But mass transit’s all been free since the war started.”

  “The latest algorithm from before the war, and the proper key prime numbers.”

  “Is this some sort of joke?”

  “At first our NSA compatriots did think it was a hoax. But then they recognized the second code, the underlying one that carried the message.”

  “And . . . ? ”

  “It was another one of our codes.”

  “Don’t tell me,” Jeffrey said sarcastically. “The secret formula to a top brand of soda pop?”

  “This isn’t funny.”

  “Sorry.”

  “The second code was one of our highest-level navy command-and-control encryption routines. With number keys that were two or three weeks stale. . . . That’s to be expected, if for whatever reason the sender had to work with a time delay at his end. . . . But our encryption routines were so well mastered that whoever did send the message was able to properly encode entire lengthy documents. I’m not saying fragments, I’m saying entire documents. And not our documents. . . . If they were our documents, it could just mean they intercepted what to them was gibberish and beamed it back at us to confuse us. . . . The documents are German documents. Needless to say, the broken navy code was discontinued immediately.”

  Jeffrey sat there stunned. “Wait a minute.” He glanced at Wilson.

  “Take your time,” Wilson said.

  “ ‘Someone’—you’re sure they’re German?”

  “We think so,” Parker replied. “We need you to help us verify that.”

  “How?”

  “Step by step,” Parker said dryly.

  Jeffrey pondered this. “A German sent a message encrypted in two American codes, one inside the other. He sent us German documents using our own supposedly unbreakable codes. . . . These documents would be classified, to the Axis? Not just last month’s newspaper from Leipzig or something?”

  “Absolutely these would be classified documents.”

  “He’s acting like a friend. He’s done us two huge favors, right? He sent us secret German materials, and he warned us that they comprom
ised one of our most important crypto protocols.”

  Parker nodded.

  “But why two codes? And the New York City subway? . . . Wait, I think I see why. He had to keep the Germans from knowing what he was doing, right? Otherwise, they’d pick up exactly what we picked up from Turkey, and know they had a traitor, and they’d track him down and string him up. So, the outer code is one he broke on his own, moonlighting, so to speak, knowing that no other German could read it, but we could, once we recognized it.”

  “Got it in one again,” Hodgkiss said. “But our concern is that the guy is not for real, not what he seems, a red herring or a double agent. He appears to have some access to extremely close-held German naval information. Access that might be authorized to him, or unauthorized, we don’t know. Since there seems no limit to what this guy can do, it’s possible he isn’t Imperial German Navy at all. It’s possible he cracked his own country’s security, and sent these particular documents to really, really hold our interest.”

  “As a point of caution,” Parker warned, “we also need to step back and ask ourselves, hard, if any single human being could do all the different things this unknown person seems to be able to do. . . . That’s one strong cause for suspicion right there. This looks too much like something concocted by a team, not an individual. Another long-term trait of German martial practices is that the deception schemes they hatch get overinvolved, overembellished.”

  “Concur,” Hodgkiss said coldly. “And if indeed done by a team, this gets a lot lower probability rating of being sincere, and a vastly higher likelihood of being some sort of trap. A trap that by the sheer vastness and complexity of the scheme must promise tremendous fruits for the Axis, at a terrible cost to us.” Hodgkiss turned to Jeffrey. “Captain, you’re the only man alive who can take us to the next stage in understanding this.”

  Parker handed Jeffrey a stack of forms. “You’re cleared for TOUCHSTONE Alfa. Sign these.” Jeffrey signed.

  Parker slid a thick manila envelope across the table. It was sealed, and marked TOP SECRET and NOFORN, in big red letters; NOFORN meant no non–U.S. citizens could know anything about it. It was stamped USE EYES ONLY, which meant it mustn’t be read out loud or talked about in specific detail—this to defeat any enemy bugging devices even in areas that were supposed to be swept.

  The envelope was also marked, oddly enough, “Task Group 47.2,” which, if this was navy parlance, had to be a small unit of ships that Jeffrey had never heard of.

  “These are the documents?” Jeffrey said. “In English?”

  “See that door?” Hodgkiss pointed.

  “Yes, Admiral.” It wasn’t the door they’d come through.

  “Take the envelope and open it in there,” Parker said. “Here’s a pencil. Make notes if you want, but only in the margins of the documents themselves. When you’re done, leave everything and come back out. Spend as long as you need, but remember, every minute counts.”

  “What exactly are you looking for from me?”

  Parker deferred to Hodgkiss, who made one of his trademark intimidating eye locks with Jeffrey.

  “Captain, tell us if these documents are real.”

  Chapter 3

  The door into the small workroom was surprisingly thick and heavy, and the furnishings were sparse and drab: a card table and a plastic office chair. Jeffrey was startled to see a burly African-American standing against one wall. The man wore a sports jacket, with a bulge at his left armpit that Jeffrey knew must be a shoulder holster.

  “Have a seat, sir,” he said politely. His voice was strong and resonating, but his eyes were hooded.

  “You’ve been here the whole time?”

  “Yes, sir.” He double-checked that the door was firmly shut, then turned hasps at the top and bottom. Bolts slid closed with a thunk. “This room is now ultrasecure.”

  Jeffrey opened the envelope. He spread the contents before him on the table. There was a cover memo from Commodore Wilson, verifying in writing his basic instructions on what to do. There were also the two documents, each in a white ring binder whose cover and spine said TOP SECRET NOFORN in bright red. The beginning of each translated document included a date: mid-January 2012, and late April 2012. Jeffrey started to read, the earlier first. Footnotes by the NSA’s German-language linguist specialists explained nuances of phrasing that didn’t carry over well from German to English.

  Jeffrey tapped his pencil’s eraser end on the table. He read further. His heart began to pound. Despite the steady air-conditioning, the room felt much too warm. Jeffrey read more, at first in disbelief, then in utter fascination. He forgot the attendant watching him, he forgot his own fatigue. He began to have flashbacks. Sometimes, when he came across especially revealing passages, he nodded to himself while he read.

  The documents were written in a direct and pithy style, as a linguist’s notation had said they would be. The wording was formal, official, but the more of it Jeffrey consumed, the more the person who wrote it came alive. He could feel the writer’s passion for his subject, and his pride, and caught hints of brilliant insights, and lasting regrets.

  Feelings and sensations flooded Jeffrey now. The scream of torpedo-engine sounds, the deafening noise and pummeling of tactical nuclear warheads sending shock waves through the sea. The shouted reports of Jeffrey’s crew in his control room, the orders he snapped out hoarsely in response. The hours of silence, waiting on nail-biting tenterhooks. The seconds of sheer panic and physical pain. The biting stench of smoke, and the rubbery taste of his emergency air-breathing mask.

  With the second report, Jeffrey relived another recent battle. It was as if he watched over someone else’s shoulder, seeing things as that person did, and getting inside his mind.

  It was a formidable mind. It belonged to someone Jeffrey couldn’t help but admire, and whom he feared encountering ever again. Yet such an encounter appeared inevitable, and the information laid before Jeffrey, sent by whoever had sent it, could make the difference the next time between survival and death.

  The documents were postaction patrol reports, filed by an Imperial German Navy nuclear submariner. The documents had to be real. They had to be legitimate. Far too much conformed exactly to Jeffrey’s own memory of the seemingly endless running battles. Too many open questions in Jeffrey’s mind were being answered—with what seemed to be utter credibility. The writer knew things that only someone who’d been there every moment, in command, could possibly know. And Jeffrey was, indeed, the only person alive on the Allied side who could testify for sure that these documents weren’t fake.

  Jeffrey lost all track of time, devouring more and more. At last he finished reading. He looked again at the first pages, with the name of the German captain who’d prepared them. Jeffrey needed to stare at the name in print, to try to assure himself that he wasn’t dreaming. He knew the man’s face already, from an old file photo. He knew the warrior in the man, from mortal combat. Twice he and Jeffrey had clashed at close quarters, in a viciously personal way, in some of the most significant naval engagements of the war. And twice both men had survived when others had not.

  Jeffrey fought to regain his equilibrium. He clawed his way back to the here and now. Yet still he stared at that name.

  Ernst Beck. Prematurely balding, not handsome, known to be Jeffrey’s age but happily married, with twin ten-year-old boys. Son of a dairy farmer outside Munich, in Germany’s Bavarian south, where he’d grown up in good sight on a clear day of the towering snow-capped Alps. A modest man, even shy, judging from his file photo—a photo that Jeffrey kept windowed on his console screen while leading Challenger’s crew to the ends of the earth and the bottom of the sea, to try to kill Ernst Beck.

  What are you planning next, Captain Beck? How does your role fit into Plan Pandora? . . . And who in the name of God sent me your patrol reports?

  Back in the larger conference room, Jeffrey finished a penetrating debrief from Wilson and Hodgkiss while Parker listened.

  S
atisfied, Hodgkiss grabbed a secure house phone and dialed an extension. He said, “Admiral Hodgkiss. It’s affirmative,” and put down the phone.

  Hodgkiss stood. “From here it all gets harder with every step. . . . Now that we know what we know, we’re ready for the next meeting. This time, Captain Fuller, don’t speak unless you’re spoken to.”

  A few minutes later the foursome sat in the enclosed vestibule outside a different conference room. The vestibule itself was highly secure. An aide manning a small desk told Admiral Hodgkiss it would be a while before the meeting was ready for him and his group. Hodgkiss nodded as if he’d already expected this.

  Hodgkiss and Wilson took seats on leather easy chairs in one corner and murmured together out of Jeffrey’s earshot. Jeffrey and Mr. Parker sat at opposite ends of a couch by a glass coffee table. A large and very high-ranking assemblage began to show up and go through the inner door, between two more guards. These marines wore full dress uniforms, crisply starched, not combat fatigues—and held rifles with fixed bayonets. They snapped to attention each time a dignitary passed. So did Jeffrey. Hodgkiss, Wilson, and Parker also stood.

  The chief of naval operations arrived, the four-star admiral who was the most senior active-duty person in the navy. The director of naval intelligence was with him, a vice admiral, a three-star. They were trailed by aides and staffers. The admirals stopped to shake hands with Hodgkiss and Wilson and Jeffrey. It was military etiquette for a senior to always salute a junior who’d won the Medal of Honor, but the navy—unlike the army—didn’t salute indoors. The CNO and his retinue went inside.

  The director of the Central Intelligence Agency got there next; he nodded at Mr. Parker and Parker nodded back—the man was Parker’s ultimate boss, yet Jeffrey sensed there was more to those nods, some sort of question and answer being passed. The DCI was a quiet man, though well-spoken, with a background in high-power Washington think tanks. The DCI’s posture was slightly stooped, yet his gaze was alert and alive; like Parker, he wore a business suit.