Hostile Contact

by Gordon Kent

  “Like nine hundred?”

  Nine hundred bank accounts? Could anybody have nine hundred bank accounts?

  “How much money was there?”

  “I never seen what was in there, only the transactions.”

  “For how long?”

  “About a day, day and a half.”

  “And how much money was there in the transactions?”

  “If I had it right, about twenty million. That one bank, I mean.” Nickie glanced sideways at the lawyer, who looked distressed. The CIA man didn’t react, and Dukas guessed that he already knew about the money. Of course—they’d had Nickie for a month.

  “Nickie,” Dukas said, “you’re doing great.” His brain was processing what twenty million dollars in a day meant if it was multiplied by all the days that Shreed might have been on a computer. It had to be the money Shreed had talked about to his Chinese control, Chen. It had to be Chinese money. “Nickie,” Dukas said, “now, this money. Was Shreed just watching this money, or—?” Or what? Dukas didn’t know.

  “He had a worm, I tole you. Part of what was sitting there on this mainframe, I couldn’t access it, so I figured it was big. You know—important. So then Shreed took off, and he was working from, I think, a laptop someplace, because I didn’t get nothing showing on any of the stuff I got from his files, except sometimes he was sending an E-mail. Then, just before the cops came in, this message came in; it was just a password, and all sorts of shit happened. Everything lit up. It was awesome, man.”

  “What happened?”

  “A nuke, man. He nuked it.” Nickie snickered. “Suter about shit his pants. I go, ‘The money’s going, man—the money’s going—’ And he’s going, ‘Where, where?’ and pissing his pants, because he had an account that he was going to send the money to.”

  “Suter knew about the money?”

  “He knew something he wouldn’t tell me. All he said was, Shreed was going to get a lot of money and we were going to take it.” Dukas glanced at the CIA man and saw that this wasn’t news to him, either.

  “So what happened?”

  “Suter goes, ‘Where’s it going, where’s it going—? We gotta get it, we gotta get it—’ and I was watching what was happening, and he was right, Shreed’s worm was sending all the money from the accounts away.” Nickie snickered again.

  Dukas waited and then said, “Away where?”

  “Away. See, it wasn’t real money, right? It was just numbers—just code. And he sent the code into cyberspace. So all the money in all those banks, it just didn’t exist no more.” Nickie for the first time gave a real grin. “That was some cool hacker, man.” Nickie was delighted by the prospect of all that money turned into random charges of electricity.

  Dukas looked at the CIA man. He looked oddly embarrassed. The Ops Directorate had had its hands on Nickie’s computer and had milked it for data, and they’d had Nickie for a month and undoubtedly got this story, so why was this guy embarrassed? Because they didn’t know what to do next, Dukas guessed. They think they should have had an intelligence coup and they blew it! Five microseconds after the money turned to electrons, it would have been too late to try to get it back; a day later, it would have been too late to jump on the Chinese about it. They didn’t know whether to shit or go blind.

  If twenty million dollars’ worth of transactions had gone by in a day, how much could there have been? Dukas’s math was not good, but he knew that you could get to a thousand million—a billion—pretty fast at twenty million a day. Billions? Billions? Was that what Rathunter was after?

  “Okay, Nickie. You done good. We got a deal.”

  Seattle.

  It was the next day. “Four hours’ work for that?” Alan asked. He was sitting in the backseat of Triffler’s new Buick rental, swallowing an Italian ice that Triffler had provided. He had just finished driving a surveillance route through what seemed like every street in Seattle, with a stop at the Kusluski house to check out the fake newspaper story.

  “You ran the route perfectly. On time for every waypoint. The guys had you through the whole thing.”

  “And?” Alan thought the creamy lemon of the ice was the greatest, coolest thing he’d ever had. “This is great.”

  “I hoped you’d like it. Seattle has some cultural advantages. You were clean the whole way.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means that they’re waiting for the trap, which is one of the other two action items.”

  “That’s something to look forward to.”

  “And Mrs. Kusluski?”

  “I think she was glad of the company, but she knew nothing about it either way. She didn’t remember the case, but she didn’t really know that much about the routine of her husband’s job beyond that he had a citation for valor. It wasn’t exactly an upbeat conversation.”

  “Welcome to the exciting world of police work, Al.”

  “Four hours of driving around for a ten-minute conversation?”

  “Ah, police work embedded in espionage, I should have said.”

  “Can I go back to flying now?”

  “Tomorrow, we do the call to the newspaper and start part two.”

  Alan finished the last of his ice.

  “I’m meeting with some SubPac guys tomorrow to try to get a schedule on submarine sailings. I hope to get a couple of planes up and see if the uplink shows on our ESM and corresponds to the sailing. That burst transmission is right at the edge of our capability, but we ought to see it.”

  Triffler leaned over the seat, scooped the finished ice container out of Alan’s hand before he could drop it in the back, and popped it neatly in a little plastic trash bag hanging from the driver’s-side door. “You really think that will work?”

  “I really think so. I’m not so sure that SubPac will buy the sailing schedule part. They hold that stuff very close. And there might not be one for weeks. But all that said, I think it’ll work.”

  “Can you triangulate the position of the signal?”

  “From a burst? Maybe, but only to a few miles.”

  “I sense a deeper plan here.” Triffler smiled the way he did when he was leading a witness.

  “Yeah. I guess I think that the burst is short-range, so it’s meant for a sub off the coast. And if it is, then that sub has to retransmit, so there will be an answering transmission going from the sub back to China. I have no idea what it will look like, but it ought to be VLF, so we’ll never see it—but a sub might.”

  “VLF?”

  “Very Low Frequency. A transmission meant to travel through the water. Takes a long time, but it can be done.”

  “So if you get SubPac to play, and it all works, and you catch the burst transmission? . . .” Triffler left the end hanging, and Alan looked out the window as a new set of clouds rolled in over the sound. They were silent for a moment. “I don’t know.”

  “Catching whoever’s sending the transmissions will take years.”

  “Yeah. I have a better idea, though. Short-term, but effective.”

  “And?”

  “Catch the sub.”

  They were both silent for a moment, watching the clouds roll in.

  “Do you have paperwork on all of this?” said Triffler.

  “Not yet. I have to prove the hypothesis.”

  “Alan, if you’re going to work with law enforcement, you have to have a paper trail every time. I’m going to have to get you downtown to see Special Agent Nagel.”

  “Yeah. Well, if I blow the meeting with SubPac, there won’t be a case.”

  21

  SubPac, Bremerton, Washington.

  A day later, Alan was smIling at the two senior captains and an intelligence officer as he accepted a cup of coffee. He was the most junior officer in the room by two pay grades, and he felt it. Admiral Smerts greeted him with a firm handshake and indicated a chair. It had more the air of a board of inquiry than a meeting.

  Submarine officers were a breed apart. Specially chosen, traine
d in their own schools, they almost belonged to a different service, and they had their own language and their own traditions. Alan knew they were far more rank-conscious than aviators. He felt his lack of knowledge of their ways from the first but set some interior jaw and determined to win them over. His wings were of no value here, and neither was his intelligence experience. They cared only about their own vast element beneath the waves.

  “Well, Commander?” The admiral didn’t unbend even to the extent of a smile. Perhaps he already resented the interruption of his job. Alan had to hope he had the intelligence officer, Captain Manley, on his side. She had arranged the meeting based on his reports.

  “Sir. I’m here today to brief you on NCIS efforts to date on the case we call Sleeping Dog. The case has developed some immediacy because we believe now that it represents the efforts of a foreign power to track the movements of naval units within the Seattle/Puget Sound area, and those units include submarines.” That is, thought Alan, I believe the case has developed some immediacy and Mike may have my head.

  The admiral nodded, as if permitting him to continue.

  “Sleeping Dog has existed as a case since the early nineties. NSA had occasional hits on a transmitter operating in a footprint so broad that it might have included most of the Northwest of the North American continent. This transmitter was, and is, of an old type that delivers a burst transmission at a high frequency. The signal, while it propagates a long way, would only actually be receivable for information at a fairly short range. So the assumption has always been that the man behind the transmitter was sending his signal to another receiver fairly close. In the last few years, the rate of those transmissions has increased.”

  Alan opened his laptop and brought up a graphic that displayed the transmissions they had detected since 1993.

  “This lists what we’ve seen.” Alan then hit Enter. “This is the correspondence to known sailings of major Pacific Fleet units from Puget Sound.”

  A set of green and yellow lines enveloped most of the transmission dates. It was an impressive graphic. It had occupied two evenings while Rose was down at Edwards.

  “Due to the close-hold nature of the sailings of some units like ballistic missile submarines, this graphic is incomplete, but Captain Manley has been kind enough to confirm that there is further correspondence.”

  The admiral looked over at Captain Manley, who brushed back her straight gray hair with one hand and frowned. “The correspondence isn’t perfect, Admiral, but it’s pretty high, especially recently.”

  “Why recently?” The admiral looked interested.

  “Sir, this is more in line of a guess, but I’d say the agent changed his focus from another target to submarines.” Alan shrugged.

  The admiral nodded. “So you’re not suggesting this is a submariner.”

  Delicate ground. It was a byword in NCIS that the submarine community thought it screened its candidates too well to have a spy.

  “I don’t know that much, sir. It could be a man with a boat, or a man in the harbor patrol. It could be a man with access to a high-level JOTS terminal that includes submarines, although if that were the case, he’d not have to send his reports so close to the sailing dates and we wouldn’t see any correspondence. But my guess is that at least recently he’s been communicating to a foreign submarine.”

  “Say that again?”

  “Sir, I have some good grams on what appears to be a Chinese or perhaps a Russian attack boat. I have an aerial sighting of a pos sub off Puget Sound. I have a whole body of mythology from the P-3 and S-3 communities going back about four months, suggesting that there is ‘something in the op area.’ And that signal has to go somewhere.”

  Captain Manley leaned forward. “Sir, USS Texas reported—”

  The admiral glared at all of them. “I know. I see the picture.” The admiral looked at the graphics. Then he looked at Captain Manley. “Why is this the first we’ve heard of this? It doesn’t look like it took a rocket scientist to make the connection.”

  Manley looked at Alan.

  Alan looked at his shoes for a moment. “Sir, it’s really not my place to say, but I’ll do my best. We think that a highly placed mole in Washington covered this operation by killing all activity on its investigation.”

  “Why is this the first I’ve heard of that element? If you say the words ‘need to know,’ Commander, I’ll ask you to leave. I need to know anything that affects my submarines.”

  It’s not that simple, Admiral. Not a good tack to take. This operation was giving Alan a glimpse into a very dark world, a world of decision-making where things like “need to know” were in conflict, and where no answer was ever easy. It was easy to say that George Shreed was not an issue for an admiral commanding nuclear submarines, but if he didn’t have the “need to know,” who did?

  “Sir, I think you’d need to talk to someone higher than me at NCIS. Can I recommend you speak to Mike Dukas at Counterintelligence?”

  “Commander, I may just call the CNO, thank you very much. Maybe he can tell me why I don’t know anything about this ‘highly placed mole.’ ”

  Mike is going to kill me, Alan thought. “Sir, we’re here now, and I’d like to prove this theory right if I can.” Manley nodded, encouraging him.

  “How’s that?” The admiral leaned forward. The two captains, silent watchers, leaned forward as well.

  “I’d like to know the date of the next sailing. And I’d like to have some tools in the air and on the ground to be ready to react.”

  “And that will catch the spy?”

  “No, sir. That will prove that there is a spy. I have to shoot straight on this, sir. Catching him may take a long time.”

  Alan spent half an hour going over why, and where, and who. The admiral wanted to believe that they could catch the spy the moment he transmitted. Privately, Alan thought he watched too many movies. In the end, he agreed to support Alan’s project and said that Alan would get twenty-four hours’ notice of the next sailing date. And, as Alan left, the admiral leaned out to his secretary.

  “Get me the CNO,” he said.

  NCIS HQ.

  “Mike, you’re going to kill me.”

  “Probably. Why now?”

  “I just told the admiral at SubPac that a mole in Washington had sat on this investigation.”

  Silence. Long silence. “Mike? You there?”

  “Alan, that wasn’t your call to make.”

  “Jesus, Mike. I know. On the other hand, this is the Navy. They need to know.”

  “You mean, you didn’t want to take the fall or lie, so you told the truth.”

  “Yeah. The admiral is going to the CNO right now.”

  Silence. Tinny STU noises.

  “Okay, Al. Thanks for giving me a heads up. Don’t ever do this to me again, okay?”

  Alan couldn’t decide whether he was right or wrong, and Mike’s anger hurt him. But he fought his own anger. He was the subordinate, here. “I’m sorry, Mike.”

  “Yeah. Don’t sweat it, Alan. Things are moving. Just keep them moving.”

  “Roger that.”

  In Washington, Dukas looked at a message slip: the Jackson Baldwin had just left Jakarta—with passengers.

  In the Indian Ocean.

  Ahmed Fazrahi felt the cigarette boat yaw, and he spun the wheel. He feared the big sea that seemed ready to snatch him, sure that if they turned broadside to the swell, they would broach and go down in seconds. He was trying to find the carrier battle group but had only two-day-old information, and instead of hated American ships, there was only this angry ocean and, on his pathetic little radar screen, some commercial rust bucket five miles ahead.

  The stern rose and the twin propellers came free of the water, and the engines screamed like cats. Fazrahi flinched, willing the stern to come down. He hated his fear. It sat inside him, he thought, like a cancer. To kill it, he pushed the throttle its last few millimeters. The stern settled and the engines returned to their working
roar, and he swung a few degrees north to avoid the merchant ship, invisible still but only three miles away now.

  When he crested the next swell, he looked north and saw one of the other boats, too far away to wave. There should have been three more.

  It was going to be bad out here when the day came, he thought. Bad trying to keep the five boats together, bad trying to locate the carrier, no matter how good the information that was passed to them. Bad when they were discovered—but by then, they would be too close.

  Overhead, he heard an aircraft in the cloud, and he thought, American.

  Seattle.

  Alan was early to a meeting with Triffler because he’d passed through the gate of the Whidbey Island base in record time, but he had learned to build some slop into his routes and he went to the magazine arcade next to the supermarket and bought a copy of Aviation Week and an Economist. Then he was back in the groove. He walked into the mall entrance of the supermarket and picked up the makings of a dinner he wouldn’t ever eat because the BOQ didn’t give him a place to cook it. Spaghetti. A little sausage. It was a good market. He hummed as he walked with his basket on his arm.

  Alan looked at his watch again and noted that the meeting window was one minute old. Good. Perfect. He picked a can of tomatoes off the shelf and walked to the back of the supermarket, turned left, and started up the coffee aisle. Dick Triffler was right on his spot, getting beans from a big brass dispenser.

  “Is that stuff really worth the money?” Alan asked, today’s signal.

  “Depends on how much you like coffee,” Triffler replied.

  Early on, Alan had questioned all these little verbal signals. “I know you when I see you.”

  Triffler had shaken his head. “It won’t always be me.”

  This morning, it was still Triffler. Triffler handed him the beans to smell and Alan got another piece of paper with the bag. A message.

  “Too rich for me,” said Alan, and walked off. In the parking lot, he read the note, which told him to walk over to the Home Depot, where Triffler would pick him up in six minutes. He tossed his groceries in his rental car and walked across the parking lot, zipping his Gore-Tex against the rain.