by MF Bishop
Chapter Eighty Seven
Bobby pushed aside the terrible realization that Mary disliked him in particular, not men in general - or at least not men who were Generals. He threw himself into the work of turning the spy link into a double agent.
The game was played for one week. The teams then took a week to plan. There were now five days left in the planning week; five days to construct a parallel Game and the means to feed it to the spy link. The United States Game team swelled to hundreds of people as false moves were devised to be translated by the Dragon and then transmitted via Enterprise Magnetics to Japan. Bobby supervised the construction of a sealed enclosure around the spy pickups. Transmitters inside the enclosure beamed Omniac's signals to the enemy as a group of military strategists and programmers tested the false moves for the next round of play.
Mary worked at the Navy Yard, converting the Dragon - 'perverting' the Dragon, she called it. The job took almost sixty hours, but at the end of that time, the Dragon was tamed. It would now change any set of signals in the Japanese standard computer language to Omniac's unique tones.
Security was maintained by following the 'once in, never out' principle. Almost three hundred people dropped out of sight for the week, locked up at Omniac, the Navy Yard and the Pentagon. Alexa took over security at Omniac, had cots set up in the halls, and turned the officers' mess into a gigantic soup kitchen.
Six hours before the start of the next round of the Game, a haggard, dirty, smelly group of managers and technicians switched the signals being fed to the spy from Omniac to the Dragon. A computer terminal displayed Omniac's signals and the Dragon's signals on the same screen. The group examined them anxiously.
"Looks good to me," Bobby muttered. "Christ on a crutch, I think this might work."
"You mean you doubted it?" Tony Walsh asked in surprise.
"Hell, yes, I doubted it," Bobby said. "It sounded completely crazy to me."
"But it was your idea."
"I rest my case," Bobby said triumphantly.