Ron Schwartz - The Griffins Heart.txt

by The Griffin's Heart(Lit)

  Rob nodded. “So how should we proceed?”

  “Well, I guess I would probably send a patrol at full speed up to one of those doors. If they’re able to enter, then the rest of us can storm the compound, also.”

  “Just like that?”

  “Just like that.”

  “Well, pick your men, Captain, and get going.”

  “Me? Why do you want me to go?”

  “It’s your plan. A plan as simple as that would be hard to screw up, wouldn’t it?”

  Taylor nodded. “Yes, I guess it would at that.” He left to gather his men.

  The passengers unloaded and hid in a group of trees while the soldiers and tribesmen prepared for battle.

  Logan found himself in a difficult situation. They had come upon a missile base that none of his intelligence agencies knew about. This one was just as serious since it was a missile launching facility, and it was a sure bet that Israel would be the target of the first missile fired. He felt compelled to try to break away from the group and find a way to report it.

  “So, are you plotting to kidnap me again?”

  Marie’s voice behind him startled him. “What?” He turned to face her. “Look, Marie, I’m sorry about all that, and I don’t expect you to understand my reasons.”

  “I understand more than you give me credit for. When I found out what was going on, I thought I’d better come over here and ask you to give Rob a chance this time, okay? I’m not trying to convince you that he’s got all the answers or that he’s going to do everything right. He just makes good decisions, and I think it’s about time you started backing him. Why don’t you try coming out of your little world and helping us out? God knows we could all use some help.”

  Logan remained silent, considering what she had said. Even as she turned to leave, something was telling him that she was right. He wanted to tell her he would try, but he couldn’t find it in himself to make the commitment. So, instead, he watched Rob organize another attack.

  It took less than ten minutes for everyone to prepare. The group was beginning to function together as a team. Taylor and his men left, flying down the road in the dwindling evening light. Within minutes, they had reached the bunker and entered one of the doors. They appeared to be similar to overhead garage doors with a simple, easily broken lock. The rest of the attacking force left soon after, heading for the bunker. They had almost reached the doorway when the first shots rang out. Taylor had apparently met with little resistance and was deep within the bunker attacking the few defenders that were there.

  By the time Rob and the others entered the bunker, Taylor and his squad had already secured it. The bunker was circular, just like Taylor had guessed, with doors leading out every forty-five degrees. Behind every door, they found three or four motorized rail cars with missiles loaded and ready for launching. At the center of the bunker was another circular command area. There, Taylor captured some prisoners.

  Rob entered the command room and looked around. Large screens and computers covered all the walls, and command consoles were spread across the center. Obviously, this was where the missiles were programmed and launched.

  About a dozen technicians and guards lay dead throughout the room. Rob looked at the five technicians kneeling before him with their hands behind their heads. “What are we going to do with them?”

  “We scored big on this one,” Taylor grinned.

  “Now what?”

  Wright walked up behind him. “Why don’t you do some of that computer magic and send these missiles to every military installation in Iraq?”

  Rob ignored him. “Did they call for help?”

  “No. They didn’t even have time to blink.”

  Rob turned to grin at Wright and answer his question. “Why not? We have time! Maybe we can do something really interesting with these missiles.”

  “Well, if nothing else, it’s a great place to spend the night.”

  “Send for the others. I need Katz and Grant.”

  Rob examined the consoles while the Marines set up defensive positions in and around the bunker. They brought the passengers into the bunker and distributed what food was available. Grant and Katz joined Rob in the control center, and the three began an extensive evaluation of the command systems. After the initial evaluation, Rob walked over to a small console near a corner of the room. “This seems to be the security control for the center.”

  Katz followed him with his eyes. “I think you’re right. The main bus leads right through it.”

  Rob circled the room. “Let’s put it all together.” He pointed to a flat table near the center of the room with a large map of the Middle East on it. The center of the map seemed to be the bunker. A large circle, which took in all of Israel and Jordan, as well as a large portion of Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia, and Iran, ran around the outer borders of the map. Two large sliding arms ran in opposite directions over the top of the map, forming crosshairs over any position on the map. “This table is where the missiles are targeted. I don’t think there is any disputing that. The outer circle is the range of the missiles and the two large arms extend over the chart to identify a target.”

  He stopped to look around the room. Everyone was nodding in agreement. “These consoles are targeting and ballistic computers for the chart table.” He pointed to a set of consoles near the table. “Most of the rest of this equipment seems to be a variety of communication and radar tracking equipment.”

  Katz followed Rob around. “I think you’re right. Now what?”

  “Well, first we need to eliminate the security measures.”

  “You can’t remove the security console. It’s a sort of fire-wall. We’re talking true hardware secure control. It contains the encrypted key the rest of this equipment needs to function.”

  “Agreed. But that may not be as big an issue as you think.”

  Katz looked confused. “How’s that? We can’t do anything in this room without first authenticating with the security system. Remember, this is a ballistic missile battery, so the security for this system will be unprecedented.”

  Rob paused for a minute to look around the room. His algorithm could eliminate the security measures of any system on earth. But to use it would mean exposing the algorithm’s existence. That algorithm was something he had carefully hidden for over a year now. “Let’s just say we can bypass security. Setting aside the security issue, we next need to concentrate on understanding these systems and how they work with each other. Agreed?”

  Katz nodded.

  Rob pointed to the first line of consoles. “We’ll start at the beginning there and try to flowchart the means of control.”

  No one moved. Clearly, none of them believed they could break the security control. Finally, Grant stepped forward. “Well, let’s get started. It’s going to be a long night.”

  Rob pointed to the primary communications hub. “We’ll start there. We need to access the comm network first.”

  “Why?” Katz asked inquisitively.

  “To speak to this system. Don’t concern yourself with answering all the questions now. It’ll all become clear as we proceed.”

  “You’re the boss! Now, what do you have in mind?”

  “The problem I see is that we don’t know the protocol, the voltage of the line, the system, or the security that we have here. So we’ll need to go one step at a time.”

  “I get the picture,” Katz nodded approvingly. “Who knows, maybe we can get some information about the stock market!”

  Grant was more serious as he removed the front panel. “Looks like we could connect here and here.” He pointed to a couple of posts. “Give me the multimeter meter so I can check the voltage.”

  Within a few seconds, the voltage was no longer a question, and within a few minutes, they had rigged a makeshift step-down transformer to match the line to the voltage level of the laptop. It was crude, but they brought the attached line into the laptop through the PCMCIA attached network card. Katz had only man
aged to synchronize the voltage but not convert the network protocol.

  “We need a programmer now.” Katz crimped the final wire into place. Rob stepped up beside Katz. “Let me see what I can do.” He knelt down beside Katz. “What do we have here?”

  “Well, I have the network current synchronized with the laptop through this transformer. A good programmer should be able to use the laptop’s built-in drivers to interface its network card with the network we’ve connected to.”

  “Yes.” Rob hesitated. “Since the laptop already is network compliant, all we need to do is build a sort of translator between the laptop and the network. But even the best programmer must know the characteristics of the network he’s tied into.”

  “Probably.”

  “What tools do you have for me to work with?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Do you have a protocol analyzer on here?”

  Katz shook his head.

  “Any digital performance tools?”

  Again, he shook his head.

  “How about a compiler?”

  His answer remained a definite no.

  “Great, I don’t even have the tools to make the tools to do what I need done.”

  Grant joined them. “Isn’t there anything you can use on it?”

  Rob took a deep breath. “Well, I suppose I could use the DOS debug program as a mini assembler. Then, I should be able to use a rough macro language to create a crude protocol analyzer. That will get us started, anyway.”

  “How long do you think that will take?”

  “Well, under favorable conditions, I would say two or three days.”

  “That’s what I thought.”

  Rob sat down to begin his work on constructing the protocol analyzer. He knew it would be far from efficient and lack the niceties included in the analyzers one could purchase at the local software store, but his only concern now was to get something to work. Something to help them determine what kind of network they had discovered and how to build interface drivers.

  It took Rob more than four hours to create his macro language of only ten words. He worked hard into the night. There were actually two programs he needed to create: a protocol converter to interface the laptop’s network card to the Iraqi network and a little protocol analyzer to analyze the data he received from the network.

  “I’m getting packets of a two fifty-six byte frame.”

  Grant and Katz, like the others, had drifted off to sleep but were now awakened by Rob’s voice. “What’s that again?” Grant asked.

  “I’m receiving packets of a two hundred fifty-six byte frame. It appears that the first one hundred twenty-eight bytes is the header and the remaining one hundred twenty-eight bytes are the data and checksum value. From the initial data, it appears that the traffic is ASCII and not EBCDIC!”

  Katz smiled. “That’s good! If that’s true, we won’t have to worry about data conversion!”

  “That’s right, but what do you make of this?” Rob pointed to a sequence of characters on the screen.

  Grant studied the screen. “Interesting. It looks like encryption information. It’s a possibility that each packet is keyed.”

  “Which means?”

  “Which means that this transmission would be encrypted at the packet level to keep unauthorized users of their system from doing exactly what you’re trying. You see, simply requiring a login and password does not prevent someone from hacking into a communications line and intercepting the data directly from the system.”

  “Understood. What I need to do is to write a program that reads the data directly from this field of the packet and translates it into the numerical or alpha values they originally were.”

  Grant shook his head. “Be careful. If I designed this system for security, I’d make the packets touch-sensitive. That is, each time the packets were read, I’d change the checksum value. That would cause an exception and alert the data receiver that someone had looked at the data before he received it.”

  “Clever.”

  “What you need to do is intercept each packet of a given address, examine its information, and then resend a duplicate of it before it was read.”

  “That will take some work.”

  It wasn’t easy, but Rob worked on into the night. His efforts resulted in a makeshift Transparent Protocol Analyzer. It intercepted the incoming network packets pretending to be an intermediate node and then resent them. This would work only if the security systems were not matching point-of-origin at the packet level.

  “This is what the unencrypted data looks like,” Rob told the small crowd that had gathered to watch.

  Grant raised his eyebrows. “That was some fancy coding.”

  “You ought to see me bake a cake.”

  “Does it come encrypted, too?”

  “Oh, yeah, complete with a chocolate keyboard and a vanilla mouse pad.”

  “Yum yum.”

  Rob studied the screen carefully. Meaningless characters and symbols scrolled across it. “Well, where do we go from here?”

  Katz shrugged and glanced at Grant. “This sequence here is the lock.” He pointed to a small group of characters and symbols that remained constant on the screen.

  “What we need now is the key.”

  “That may be a problem, then.”

  “What’s the matter, run out of rabbits to pull from your hat?”

  “Sorry, gentleman, the bus stops here. I can’t take it any further than this. ”

  Logan spoke up from the back. “Rob, we really need to get into the system! Not only could we see were the Iraqi forces are located, but these soldiers could take a wealth of information back to their commanders. It could be what is needed to change the direction of the war!”

  “You don’t have to preach to me the significance of this information. But I can only take this so far. I may...” Rob quickly checked himself.

  “What’s that?”

  “Oh, nothing.”

  “He’s right,” Katz agreed. “There are probably only a hundred people in the world who could have taken it this far.”

  Logan sat down, and silence settled on the small group. He was right, Logan knew. Israeli information specialists had tried things like this before and never gotten this far. Deep down inside he knew that, if necessary, he would kill to keep or protect what Rob had done. But now he was faced with very few alternatives. They were at an impasse, and it was his turn to stick his neck out. “Well, I think there is someone here who could help you.”

  Rob was stunned. “There are over two trillion possible keys for this lock, and you think that you have the correct key?”

  “No, but your wife does.”

  “Marie?”

  “Ask her.”

  “You’re crazy! How could she possibly know?” Rob tried to look into Logan’s thoughts, but he just stared back intently. Logan wore the kind of look that said, “Why don’t you just try?” He could tell this was no joke. Logan was serious about her help. Finally, after a brief staredown with Logan, he got up and left.

  Several minutes later, he returned with Marie. She was still wiping the sleep from her eyes. “I don’t see why this couldn’t wait until morning.”

  Logan watched her with anticipation, wondering how much she’d let Rob know. But even in this intense situation, he couldn’t help but notice now attractive she was even after she just woke up. Most women don’t look this good after an hour in the bathroom, he thought.

  “Do these characters mean anything to you?” Rob pointed to the screen. “No... Yes!” Marie froze and studied the screen. Then she slowly turned around to look back at Logan. He was gone. Actually, he was standing just outside the door where he could listen without being seen.

  Rob had been studying her reactions carefully, and noted her response to this situation with interest. She had turned around and looked toward where Logan had been standing when she first saw the characters on the computer screen. Why? What was going on between those
two? More importantly, why had she chosen not to confide in him?

  She turned to face her husband. “What is this?”

  “It’s an encryption lock. Does it mean anything to you?”

  “Yes.” She looked back again toward Logan’s last position. “But why are you asking me?”

  “I was told you might be able to help us decipher it.”

  “By whom?”

  “Mr. Logan.”

  Marie was quiet for a moment as she contemplated her husband’s eyes. He was not altogether certain what her stare was saying, but instinctively he knew he should trust her.