Playing A Losing Game

by MF Bishop

  Chapter Eighty Four

  Bobby ran down a street lined with brick buildings, his feet slipping on the cracked pavement. One of the buildings collapsed in front of him, the crumbling bricks spilling soundlessly across the sidewalk. He stopped and looked through the gaping hole in the wall. Inside was Omniac, humming softly in its white and blue computer room. Bobby climbed through the hole and stood on the white tiles. The floor opened under his feet. Power cables coiled up past him. Some of the cables were topped with a dark man's face. Others held guns. The guns fired at Bobby as he began to run again. The bullets hit the computer cabinets, and the cabinets rang softly, then loudly.

  Bobby shouted and sat up. The phone was ringing. Alexa touched his arm.

  "Are you Ok, Bobby? You yelled really loud. Oh, shit, that's the phone." She leaned past him and tapped the receiver switch, but the answering machine had already picked up.

  A brisk female voice spoke after the beep: "Captain Allbright, this is OMCOM. General Gotts is attempting to locate Major Britton and yourself. You are ordered to report to the base immediately. If you encounter Major Britton, inform him he is to report also. Thank you."

  "What time is it?" Bobby mumbled, "Christ on a crutch, Alexa, that was a baaad dream."

  Alexa poked him in the ribs. "Bobby, General Gotts is looking for us. Wake up. Get going."

  "Ow, what? Hey, no rush. Anyway, shouldn't you encounter me first?" Bobby flopped back on the bed. Alexa hit him with a pillow, then howled; she was still sore.

  An hour later, they passed through security at OMCOM. The guard winked at Alexa as they went through. "Major Grinnell will be glad to see you, Captain," he said.

  "What was that all about?" Bobby asked as the elevator made its snappy descent. Alexa had no idea. Uniformed men and women crowded the halls of the underground complex. A sergeant wearing an MP brassard saluted sharply. "Nice to see you again, Captain Allbright," she said. "Please follow me to the computer room. You, too, Major."

  In the computer room, the tiles of the raised floor had been removed in many places. The openings gaped like hungry mouths filled with thick ropes of writhing cable. The dreams came back. Bobby tried to step over the openings without looking at the cables.

  They arrived at the little 'square' Bobby remembered from his first visit. This was where Alexa had carried out her impromptu drug bust. The blood was cleaned up, but the cabinet doors were still bent.

  Beyond the open space a wide, shallow cabinet stood against the cement wall of the underground room. Both front doors of the cabinet stood open and lights on stands illuminated its interior. Several technicians looked down at a metal box sitting on the floor against the back wall of the cabinet. The box was about two feet square and eighteen inches high. It had ventilation grills on the three visible sides. A power cable fed through one of the grills. A large yellow notice on the top of the box warned of high voltage and reminded that there were no user-serviceable parts inside. The warning was repeated in French, Spanish and German.

  "We didn't touch it, Captain." One of the military police cleared away the crowd so Alexa and Bobby could get through. A technician unrolled a fiber probe and plugged one end into a small computer. She handed the other end to Bobby. She obviously expected him to get down on the floor and push the probe through one of the grills. Bobby looked at the boot-scuffed tiles and then at his grey slacks. He handed the probe back.

  "Go ahead, Sergeant, I'll watch the screen." Bobby took the computer and turned up the bright control on the screen. "Turn off most of these lights." Silently cursing him, the sergeant lay full length on the dirty floor and gently slid the probe through the front grill. The infra-red sensor on the tip picked up the interior of the box, and the computer displayed the picture.

  The inside of the metal box was crowded with equipment. Six phone handsets lay in a row with their covers off. Neatly soldered leads ran from each phone to another, slightly larger box; six phones, six boxes. A cable ran from each box to connections on a single large piece of equipment that took up almost half the space inside the enclosure. The power cable fed three outlet strips. All of the equipment plugged into the strips.

  The sergeant stood up and took the computer back. "What the devil is that?" she asked.

  "What do these look like to you?" Bobby asked her, pointing to the phones.

  "Standard OMCOM communication handsets," she answered, "but why? And why the tape recorders?"

  "Tape recorders," Bobby repeated, "what tape recorders?"

  "The units the phones are wired into," she answered, "they look to me like digital tape recorders. We use them for dictating trouble reports, that sort of thing."

  "Christ on a crutch," Bobby said, "of course, why didn't I think of that weeks ago."

  "Think of what?" Alexa asked, "What does this thing do?"

  "Omniac's song," Bobby said, "you showed me the phone handset; tune it to the right frequency and it picks up Omniac. Tune three phones to the different right frequencies and they pick up each of Omniac's three processors. That's why there was no physical connection to the computer. It was broadcasting its information. They didn't need to touch it to listen in."

  "I see the phones," Alexa said, "but all the other gear?"

  "Sir," the Sergeant answered, "the phone picks up the broadcast and sends it over the wire to the tape recorder. It's an analog signal at that point, just a wire from the speaker connection. The tape recorder converts the signal from analog to digital, and, well I'll be damned, excuse me, sir, that large unit is a copper to fiber converter. It takes the electrical signal from the tape recorders and converts it to light, to be carried by a fiber optic cable."

  "The old fiber optic line to the Commerce Department," Bobby said.

  "Look at that," the Sergeant said, "They even have backups, two phones on each frequency."

  There was a stir, a voice said "tenSHUN!", and the generals were on the scene, followed by the usual gaggle of colonels and lieutenant colonels and majors. There was a scramble as the crowd in and around the enclosure reached critical mass. Captain Alexa Allbright looked up from the computer screen. She spotted the MP sergeant who had led them to the computer room.

  "Sergeant," she shouted, "move these people back!" She pointed at the woman working with the probe, "you stay here. Everyone else clear the area. Move it! Move on out!" The crowd parted and Alexa beckoned to the generals. "Right this way, Sirs." As the entourage crowded forward, she said, "Please stand back, ladies and gentlemen, we have a delicate situation here. I'm sure you understand." Two more MPs appeared and enforced her polite request. Only Walsh and Gotts were allowed to approach the cabinet.

  Who was supposed to be in charge here, Bobby wondered? Certainly not Alexa. At that moment, Bobby saw Grinnell. The Major stood behind the MPs, his face grim and pale. No supercilious smirk today.

  Generals Gotts and Walsh peered at the metal box. The Sergeant showed them the picture on the computer screen. Bobby hurried over.

  "Each handset is tuned to the frequency of one of the central processing units," he said. "The signal is sent over the old Bureau of Census lines. Each phone even has a backup."

  Advancing on the box, Gotts snarled, "Tear them out! Knew it! Knew it was the damn computer! Major! Shut this thing off!"

  Bobby appealed quietly to Walsh. "Stop him, General, we have to keep this intact." They both moved quickly and headed Gotts off before he could personally destroy the enemy. Walsh helped, but was clearly puzzled. Pushing through the crowd, they hustled the snorting, ranting Gotts out of the computer room and into Walsh's office. Alexa stood guard at the door.

  "Dammit, Major, I want that piece of treasonous filth destroyed, do you hear me, I order...." Gotts clawed at the desk, then abruptly collapsed into Walsh's chair. Bobby was afraid he had suffered a heart attack, but it appeared to be an attack of good sense instead.
"Ok, Major, " Gotts said calmly, "what's the story?"

  "Pretty simple, sir," Bobby answered, "the J's had an agent on the crew that was brought in to remove the old communications gear. All technical equipment in and out of the computer room was closely monitored, but nobody thought to count telephone handsets or digital recorders."

  "What about the copper to fiber converter?" Walsh asked, "Grinnell must have logged that type of equipment."

  "Communication design always includes redundancy," Bobby answered. "Someone just moved a backup unit to another place." He was pacing now. "Once that line was shut down, no one ever looked at it again. Over in Northeast Washington, they have three microwave transmissions to a satellite, then a tie to a satellite over Japan, then a downlink to the Dragon!"

  "The Dragon?" Gotts asked. Both generals watched Bobby pace and wave his arms.

  "The Dragon Mark Seven. The high priority, high security J computer project. We have one, or part of one. It translates Omniac into something a Japanese computer can understand. They got a look at every instruction. They know where every division, every ship is...." Bobby stopped. "What happens in Geneva?"

  Walsh, like Gotts, was now slumped in a chair. "The signal is encoded here, beamed by satellite to Geneva, decoded and fed to the UN computer. The encoding and decoding causes a delay of about fifteen minutes from when the signal is sent from here to when the Geneva computer actually gets it. So the Japanese have probably a ten minute warning of every move we make. Good God!"