Terminal Run

by Michael Dimercurio

  “Ready, sir,” the aide said.

  “Make it read, “Strongly concur with your plan. Good luck. Admiral Patton sends.” Got that?”

  “Yes sir.”

  Patton sat back in the chair, a slight smile appearing on his face.

  The first Equalizer IV heavy supersonic cruise missiles streaked off the deck of the John Paul Jones at just after three in the morning and climbed to the west. With a missile taking off every minute, it took less than an hour to launch them all.

  Five hours later, Admiral Ericcson was called out of his rack to flag plot as the missiles received their targeting instructions. A half hour later the units began to seek their targets in the Suez.

  “Turn on SNN London,” Ericcson said to Pulaski. “Let’s see how long it takes for the news to hit the airwaves.”

  By the fourth explosion, Satellite News Network London interrupted a business report with a breaking story about violent supertanker explosions in the Suez Canal.

  “Any bets they get a camera there to catch the last missile impact live?”

  Two minutes after Ericcson spoke, the tanker on the screen was hit from directly above by a descending missile. The explosion rocked the camera. An orange eruption of flames rose from the middle of the ship, and as it grew into a fierce mushroom cloud, the form of the supertanker could be seen in the smoke, clearly broken in half, the bow protruding pathetically vertical while the aft section rolled to expose the huge screw and rudder.

  “Holy Christ,” Pulaski muttered.

  Ericcson nodded somberly. “Poor bastards.”

  A moment of silence passed, until finally Ericcson tossed his cigar away and said, “I wonder what the British admiral is thinking right now.”

  The pilot put the supersonic Whirlwind fighter in the approach glide slope, rowing his throttles to full power, back to half throttle, then back to a hundred percent. The deck of the Royal Navy aircraft carrier Ark Royal grew closer in the windscreen, on a perfect calm sunny day in the Mediterranean. The pilot took one last scan of the instrument panel—the landing gear was extended, flaps were at thirty degrees, the arresting hook was deployed, fuel was at thirty percent, engine oil pressure was nominal—and after a tenth of a second had his eyes back on the carrier deck. He jogged the wings level, dipped the nose, pushed the throttles to maximum, and stopped breathing. One second to impact, then a half second, until the twenty-ton jet’s rear gear thumped hard on the steel deck of the carrier. The jet was still at full throttle in case the arresting hook missed the cables and he had to fly back off the carrier deck. The wait for the deceleration of the hook seemed to take a full minute, but suddenly the pilot was thrown against his five-point harness as the hook bit into the arresting cable and the heavy jet came to a full stop. The pilot cut power, retracted the flaps, and opened the canopy, then followed the deck officer’s direction to taxi off the landing area. The wheels were chocked, and the signal came to kill the engines.

  The pilot climbed out, feeling both exhilarated and disappointed to be back on the carrier deck. He pulled off his helmet, a full head of salt-and-pepper hair falling over his forehead. The squadron commander ran toward him from the island—that couldn’t be good news.

  “Admiral,” the squadron boss called.

  The pilot pushed a sweaty lock of hair out of his face and looked at the squadron commander. “What’s the trouble, Commander?”

  “Sir, bad news from the Admiralty in London. The Americans have launched an attack on the Suez Canal. There are fully forty hulks blocking the channels, sir.” Lord Admiral Calvert Baines IV, Royal Navy, Commander

  British Indian Ocean Expeditionary Forces, bit his lower lip hard, enough to make his mouth bleed, trying to avoid cursing.

  “Show me the data,” he said calmly, his sweaty flight suit suddenly making him feel chilled.

  “We’ll either have to wait at the mouth of the canal or turn back and go around Africa, sir. We’ve just lost three weeks, maybe longer.”

  Baines sighed, handing his flight helmet to the squadron boss. “Let’s get all the facts, then talk to the Admiralty. But first, let me visit the men’s room.”

  The admiral ducked into the head, and when he made sure he was alone, he spit blood into a paper towel, then clamped it to his mouth so no one would hear him cursing into it.

  Goddamned Americans, he thought.

  12.

  In the darkened back booth of a Serocaba, Brazil, seafood restaurant, emaciated computer felon Pedro Meringe ate a plate heaped with food while Victor Krivak briefed him and Frederick Wang on the operation to find the Snare.

  “We need to get the Snare to a rendezvous point so we can board her,” Krivak said. “Since we have the codes to the U.S. Navy communications and tactical data system, technically right now we could give her orders that would bring her to the surface where we want her to be. But there’s a problem we’ve never told our Chinese client, and that is that while we’ve been successful at monitoring the American communications, we’ve yet to prove that we can route our own orders through their command-and-control systems, and we haven’t proved that an order we insert will be followed, and finally, we haven’t proved an order that we originate will be undetected by the remainder of the system, with a failure giving our penetration away. Do you follow me?”

  Pedro nodded, but Wang shook his head. “If you have the keys to the system,” Wang said, “why do you think you need to tiptoe around it?”

  Pedro snickered and smirked. He understood, Krivak thought.

  “Dr. Wang, your expertise on the carbon computer system has blinded you to the realities of the silicon computer protocols,” Krivak said with a smile. “You see, we are inside the

  U.S. command network, and we can hear everything happening around us. We can report on all of it to Admiral Chu. We’re like a cat burglar hiding under the kitchen table listening to the family’s conversations. But let’s say we want to give an order to an electronic entity on the network—the Snare for example. If we do that, it would be like the cat burglar calling the dog from his hiding place. The family at the table would hear and react. Soon the burglar is in prison. Yes, we can give an order to the Snare calling her to surface near Bermuda so we can board her. But immediately the Pentagon would know, because our message would send out ripples in the lake of the system. Our message would be improperly formatted—the burglar’s voice—and the system would be alerted.”

  “So what?” Wang asked. “We board the Snare and the Americans scratch their heads about the message.”

  “No,” Pedro said. “The information warfare defense systems might kick in. The entire system could go into a default shutdown. The Pentagon has a contingency for network penetration. If they think they’repenetrated, the entire network would self-destruct.”

  “But then their communications would be off-line,” Wang said. “They wouldn’t do a self-destruct. It would be too easy to beat them in a war if that were the case—you’d just have to penetrate their network and it would kill itself.”

  “The point is,” Krivak interrupted, “that we would be detected. And once we’re detected, our ownership of the network, tenuous at best, would be over. Pedro here has one vital job, Dr. Wang, and that is to give us the ability to use the network using its own language in a way that it will not detect us. He’s going to make the cat burglar speak in the voice of the head of the household. So when he calls the family dog, the people at the table don’t notice.”

  “Here, Snare,” Pedro joked. “Come here, girl.”

  “Once you get in, Pedro, you need to find the Snare, get her position. Then you’ll upload a rendezvous order to go to the nearest land with an airport. Once that’s done, we’ll get out to the Snare and take her over. Then, if we need anything,

  Pedro’s our communications link, our translator to the network.”

  “Will he be doing any other operations for Admiral Chu? Disinformation to the fleet, or giving other orders?”

  “Heavens no
,” Krivak said. “This is a delicate situation, Dr. Wang.”

  “Just call me Wang.”

  “We can’t be detected meddling with the defense systems. We can only use the network sparingly, for what we absolutely need. Snare is it. If we are detected, the network will shut down, the Americans will know we’ve penetrated, and they could trace our manipulation of the system back to us. They could follow the wire right to our operation here. So, Pedro, give us a list of what you will require, and we will get it for you so you can get to work.”

  Pedro Meringe sat at the console surrounded by computer displays. He had been working through the night and was dead tired, a spilled bottle of amphetamines by his keyboard. He had been trying to break into the U.S. Navy Computer and Telecommunications Command network while going around the Naval Security Group Command’s electronically mobile firewall. Krivak stood looking over at his desk after the young computer expert had sent Amorn with word that Pedro was in.

  “You did it? You can talk to the Snare without the system becoming alerted?”

  “I can slip into the system with a surveillance and messenger entity through our ‘manhole-cover’ entrance to the sub network at the Unified Fleet Communications Group at Annapolis, Maryland. My mission entity can become invisible to their NavSecGru net-hot and carry the message to the queue with the other outgoing messages, and then through the encryption machines. When the message is encrypted it will be transmitted on a burst pulse with rapidly changing frequencies to the Comm Star satellite for later transmission to the submarine. The message will be one of a thousand being encrypted and transmitted during that one-minute interval. At first, since

  the message will only be addressed to the Snare, no one in the communications facility will be able to read it, and it will stay in the outgoing Comm Star satellite buffer for eight hours. During that time period the Snare, by procedure, will come to periscope depth and receive its broadcast from the satellite, which transmits the message every fifteen minutes whether the sub is listening or not. After eight hours, the message in the satellite buffer will be dumped, erased completely and permanently. I had thought it would linger at the shore facility in an electronic sent-message-suspense-file, but since sub communications are highly passive, there is no pending suspense file for sub traffic, only an archive directory of transmitted messages. I can delete our message from the archive and no one knows the difference. I’ll need to send a test message to the Snare to test the breakin, test the appearance of the message in the archive, and test to see if I can delete it.”

  “Why do you think no one at the communications facility can read the message?”

  “We’reusing the system’s security procedures and protocols against it. The system is designed to prevent the compromise of messages by anyone but the receiving satellite. Since classified radio messages up to top secret and higher are transmitted, the entire system treats each message as if it were the highest classification. It’s simpler architecture rather than treating unclassified messages differently than secret, and secret differently from top secret. You understand?”

  “No. What about a system administrator, the one authorized to troubleshoot problems and monitor the process?”

  “The process is automated. No human-directed administrator can get in, only automated and programmed ones. And my messenger entity is invisible to them—it masquerades as a virus-protection subroutine.”

  Krivak felt a headache coming on. “But this message would linger in the satellite memory for eight hours and transmit to the world every fifteen minutes. That is thirty-two transmissions. Are you telling me no one but Snare will receive that?”

  “I am. You see, the system is designed to make sure no one

  other than the recipient can receive that recipient’s message. Not even the communications facility. That’s what I mean when I say we’reusing the system’s security features against it.”

  Krivak waved. “Go ahead with a test message, but it must be unclassified—a maintenance message. And it has to be correctly formatted so that it will look normal to anyone who does see it. Did you get the formats?”

  “I don’t have a procedure or a manual for the formatting, but I have a hundred thousand examples. It will look like an authentic message from fleet maintenance to watch out for high temperature at an engine bearing.”

  “How will we know it worked?”

  “I’ll require a response. I’ll tell it to write a report of the bearing temperatures for the last forty-eight hours. We’ll intercept the response as it comes in, before it can be rerouted to the maintenance facility.”

  “Fine, fine. Proceed. Let me know if the system becomes wary of us. And good luck.”

  Krivak returned to his suite and lay down on his bed, fully clothed, exhausted, and troubled by the risks they were taking.

  “Mr. Krivak?”

  “Yes, Pedro,” he said, sitting up in the bed.

  “The message went out two hours ago. We got the Snare’s reply an hour ago, with two days of bearing temperatures. I and my surveillance entity monitored the network since the reply came. We did it, sir. It worked—there are no messages on the system about an intruder.”

  “Excellent,” Krivak said, fully awake. “It is just too bad you did not ask it about its location.”

  “I found a month-old message in the network archive that requested a situation report, a ‘sitrep.” The sitrep format includes a line for latitude and longitude. And a tactical summary. If I send an order for the Snare to provide a sitrep, we’ll not only know her position but her mission details.”

  Krivak considered. “It’s risky—this is not about bearing

  temperatures, but tactics. The system could be more aware of this. And the fact that the shore commanders did not demand a sitrep for a month indicates to me that a new one coming in may alert the command.”

  “Do I need to explain this to you again?”

  Krivak waved off the hot-tempered engineer. “Send the demand for the sitrep. But do not wait an hour to tell me about the reply this time.”

  Pedro Meringe grinned and vanished. Krivak tried to sleep, but the room suddenly seemed stuffy and hot. He got up to join Pedro at his console. After two hours, Padro nudged Krivak.

  “Snare’s reply is back, Mr. Krivak. She’s here, about two hundred nautical miles northwest of the Azores Islands.”

  “Pedro,” Krivak said, grabbing a computer and clicking into a world atlas, “send the Snare an order to transit to the Azores, to Pico Island. Have her transit to this position here, due west of Pico by thirty miles. Tell her to hold there until local nightfall.”

  In the chaos of the next hour Krivak, Wang, Pedro, and Amorn made their arrangements and hurried to the Serocaba airport, dashing into the jet and rolling to the runway.

  COMMAND AND CONTROL DECK LOG, USS SNARC:

  MESSAGE NUMBER 08-091 RECEIVED THIS MORNING, WITH INSTRUCTIONS TO REPOSITION

  TO A POINT WEST OF THE AZORES ISLANDS, TO

  ATTAIN THIS POSITION USING A MAXIMUM SPEED

  RUN, AND TO BE THERE BY TUESDAY NIGHT.

  COURSE CHANGED TO HEADING ONE ONE

  ZERO AND REACTOR RECIRCULATION PUMPS

  STARTED IN SLOW SPEED, THEN UPSHIFTED TO

  FAST SPEED, THEN OPENED THE THROTTLE

  SLOWLY TO ALL-AHEAD FLANK, THE REACTOR

  POWER INDICATION RISING TO THE LEVEL OF

  100.0 PERCENT REACTOR POWER. THIS UNIT HAS

  NOT BEEN TO 100 PERCENT POWER SINCE SEA

  TRIALS, BECAUSE IT IS A NOISY OPERATION, SO

  THIS ALLOWED A CHANCE TO MAKE SURE THAT

  ALL SYSTEMS WERE FULLY FUNCTIONAL. THERE

  WAS NO TROUBLE WITH THE MAIN ENGINE

  BEARINGS AS AN EARLIER FLEET MAINTENANCE

  WARNING MESSAGE SUGGESTED. THE HULL

  SHOOK AS THIS UNIT SPED THROUGH THE SEA AT

  MAXIMUM SPEED, WHICH AT A DEPTH OF 700

  FEET AT A WATER TEMPERATURE OF 29 DEGREES,

  I
S COMING OUT TO BE 41.2 KNOTS. NOT BAD,

  CONSIDERING THAT IF NECESSARY THIS UNIT

  COULD OPEN UP THE THROTTLE ALL THE WAY TO

  150 PERCENT REACTOR POWER AND OBTAIN ANOTHER

  FIVE KNOTS, BUT GOING TO AHEAD

  EMERGENCY IS AN OPERATION THAT MAY ONLY

  BE DONE IN TIME OF WAR OR SHIP-THREATENING

  EMERGENCY. AFTER RUNNING DEEP AND FAST

  FOR SIX HOURS, THIS UNIT MADE THE NEXT RANDOM

  EXCURSION TO PERISCOPE DEPTH TO GET

  THIS UNIT’S MESSAGES.

  THERE WAS A NEW ONE, WITH THE ODD

  NUMBER 08-092, WHICH CALLS ITSELF AN EMERGENCY

  ORDER, TO MAKE THE SOONEST RENDEZVOUS

  MAXIMUM SPEED ALLOWS AT A

  POSITION JUST SOUTHWEST OF THE AZORES,

  NEAR PICO ISLAND. THIS UNIT IS ORDERED TO

  GET TO THE RENDEZVOUS POSITION, WAIT FOR

  NIGHTFALL, AND WHEN IT IS COMPLETELY DARK,

  SURFACE AND RAISE THE RADAR REFLECTOR UNTIL

  THIS UNIT IS IN VISUAL CONTACT WITH THE COM

  SUBDEVRON 12 LOCAL REPRESENTATIVE, WHO

  WILL BE ABOARD A CLEVER MOCKUP OF A CIVILIAN

  POWER YACHT. THE EMERGENCY MESSAGE

  GOES ON TO INSTRUCT THIS UNIT TO DISREGARD

  PREVIOUS COMSUBDEVRON 12 MESSAGES AND

  THE SQUADRON OPERATION STANDING ORDERS.

  IT ALSO ORDERS THIS UNIT EXPLICITLY TO MAKE

  NO TRANSMISSIONS IN REPLY TO THE NEW ORDERS

  OR FOR ANY OTHER REASON, CONTRADICTING

  THE ORIGINAL OPERATION ORDER.

  PERHAPS COMSUBDEVRON 12 WILL GIVE THIS

  UNIT NEW ORDERS OR AN EQUIPMENT MODIFICATION.

  IT IS ALL SO EXCITING.

  The hired cabin cruiser Andiamo tossed in the seas fifty nautical miles southwest of Pico Island. Pedro Meringe had taken over the glassed-in bridge on the upper level, his dish antenna temporarily bolted to the superstructure above the bridge. Victor Krivak stood on the afterdeck and lit another cigarette, his throat irritated, but the nicotine keeping him awake. In a strange way it was appropriate that this boat was a fishing boat, because he was about to go fishing for a steel whale.