Gauntlet (17 page)

“Are you ready for this, Yousseff?” Vince asked as they watched the other man walk away.

“Yes, I am,” Yousseff responded. He noticed the other crewmembers eyeing him suspiciously, and quickly retreated to his normal silence. It wouldn’t serve the plan to have outside interference, and the crew was already wondering why a greasy, dirty 50-year-old should be standing on the bridge of the
Haramosh Star,
let alone touring the ship with Omar Jhananda, who some of them recognized as the owner of the very successful, rapidly expanding Karachi Star Line.

“He’s a relative,” said Vince, responding to the looks of his men. “He’s a bit, you know,” he added, tapping his forehead demonstratively. “He needs a job, and he’s pretty much unemployable. I thought I could have him along for the trip to clean floors and decks. Give him something to do.”

For his part, Yousseff had already found a mop and bucket, and commenced working. Over the next 32 hours, he hardly said a word to anyone.

T
HE NATIONAL SECURITY AGENCY held the dubious honor of being the largest and most secretive organization in the Intelligence Community. More than 35,000 people worked there, and every one of them was sworn to absolute secrecy. Because the principal occupation of the NSA was to solve intercepted but encrypted electronic signals (“Sigint”), and because cryptologists, computer scientists, and mathematicians were the main inhabitants of its corridors and buildings, the agency’s headquarters and the surrounding community came to be known as Crypto City. It was, in fact, a city unto itself — 5,415 acres, with 65.5 miles of paved roads, 3.3 miles of secondary roads, and about 60 buildings. Within its fences were a modern mall, banks, credit union, post office, chapels, a police station, and many other facilities. There were a number of restaurants and, inside its main building, a 45,000-square-foot cafeteria. Also present were numerous recreational spots, including eight gyms, a number of theaters, and many large childcare facilities. The area even contained its own institute of higher learning — the National Cryptological Center.

The recent terrorist attacks on American soil, and the destruction and tragedy they had brought about, had served as a wake-up call. The sudden need for the ability to access and process communications, especially in the Middle East, became painfully apparent, and the NSA budget was increased dramatically. The organization was once again busy interpreting the billions of snippets of information vacuumed up by its many satellites and listening stations around the world. The need for translators was now great, and American citizens with proficiencies in Arabic, Urdu, Punjabi, and other Middle Eastern languages became acute.

The NSA used many different methods to gather information. Microwave towers were monitored, and the delicate art of splicing into fiber optic cables was now one of the skills taught in NSA classrooms at Fort Meade. Priority was given to monitoring Internet traffic, and many of the NSA programmers learned the stealthy skill of depositing bits of monitoring code onto the hard drives of suspicious servers or websites. Many a terrorist ploy had been foiled in its infancy by the developing stealth and skill of Crypto City’s investigative capabilities. These programmers were so skilled that they could, if so inclined, crash the Internet, possibly permanently.

Information poured into Crypto City in vast torrents; trillions of megabytes of information cascaded through its electronic portals. If human hands were being used to parse and analyze all of it, a workforce of one million people still could not have handled the flood. Hence, the initial stage of processing the information was always handled by computers. And such computers they were.

Only a small percentage of all information intercepted by the NSA was passed up the chain for a higher level of analysis. The first level of filtering was performed exclusively by computer, and specifically by the squadron of Blue Gene/M’s at the Bunker, through a program called ECHELON. These first-level searches hunted for a predefined set of “keywords,” which were either verbal or written. They could be in the form of faxes, images, or even collections of pixels. With the newest modifications, they could even be found in faces or sequences of sounds. The streams of data being searched were microwave, cellular, fax, TV or closed circuit camera, Internet email, and even data on private intranets. The immeasurably vast fields of data, and the complexity of the keywords, created the need for huge amounts of processing power.

The keywords were collated and kept on a series of smaller computers tied into the Blue Genes at Crypto City. These computers were collectively named the “Dictionary,” and hundreds of employees at Crypto City were charged with the task of keeping them current. The smaller computers tied into the Dictionary were each home to a different language or function. For instance, there was an “English Dictionary” cluster of computers, a “French Dictionary” cluster of computers, and so on. The Dictionary computers were continuously updated. If a certain telephone number was fed into the Dictionary, or the name of an individual, or a face, or a grouping of pixels of any sort, the specific Dictionary computer for the particular language affected was immediately updated.

Khasha Jamila’s job at the NSA had been to ensure that the Urdu Dictionary remained updated. She had, in the space of three short years, become the head of the Urdu Dictionary group, which included some 15 or 16 employees. Khasha had been born in Pakistan to an American father and an American-born Pakistani mother. She had moved to America at age 17, when her parents got tired of working abroad and started to long for the comforts of home. Like most of the TTIC employees, she was very bright, and had attended UCLA, majoring in Middle East Studies. She graduated with honors, and had applied to the CIA and been accepted into the Middle East Bureau. There she distinguished herself in analysis of news and events in Pakistan. She had an uncanny ability for picking up languages and was well acquainted with many Pakistani dialects — Urdu, Pashto, and Wahki, among others. She was an omnivorous reader of all things Pakistani and visited many chat rooms and websites daily. Because of her familiarity with Pakistan, she had ended up working with the Intelligence Directorate, and the American Embassy in Islamabad. While she had no formal training in computer science, she intuitively understood how to use the ECHELON program. She was in constant communication with crews at the satellite download stations in Waihopia, New Zealand, Diego Garcia, Morwenstow, and England. She had an always-open line to the Misawaw Cryptologic Operations Center in Misawaw, Japan. She became a key player in uncovering the various terrorist plots that originated in Pakistan and Iran, and played a roll in identifying the location of the terrorists responsible for the attacks on the USA, by picking up significant keywords within Urdu chatter emanating from Jalalabad.

Khasha also had excellent personal communication skills, and it was difficult for anyone to dislike her. When she was seconded to TTIC, she maintained almost constant communication with her work group in Crypto City, and even telephoned or emailed crews at the various download stations she’d worked with from around the globe. Even when she moved to TTIC, she maintained more familiarity with the Urdu Dictionary than most of her former work group.

At the moment, she was watching the three large digital displays in front of her with rapt attention. Eventually, she circled around the various workstations, and pulled up a chair next to Dan.

“Dan,” she said, “we’re getting a high level of Internet traffic in Egypt, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia referring to a nuclear attack.”

“How much weight do you put on it, Khasha?” asked Dan.

“We always get a bit of chatter like that, but in the last few days it’s escalated by quite a bit. It is a little worrisome.” What Khasha did not realize was that the “increased chatter” about nuclear weapons was just one of the many diversionary tactics that Vijay Mahendra had utilized to keep the Great Satan confused and floundering. What she was looking at was a complex ruse, set in place as one of Yousseff’s backups.

“Do you have any idea what the potential target could be?” asked Dan.

“No, not a clue,” replied Khasha. “The NSA has decreased the filtering somewhat, and put extra manpower to work on all Mid-East intercepts. The level of surveillance is increasing, but at this point we have nothing concrete.”

“Let’s get Rhodes in on this,” said Dan. He turned toward Rhodes’ desk, on the other side of the room, and raised his voice to be heard over the noise of the rest of the TTIC group. “Liam!” he shouted. When he got no response, he elevated his voice another notch. “Yo, Liam, are you with us?”

Rhodes abruptly swivelled toward Dan, his face blackening at the tone Dan was using. “Relax, Dan, for God’s sake,” he snapped. “I’m here. What is it?”

Dan smirked at Rhodes’ obvious frustration and gave Khasha a knowing look. It had become all too obvious to the rest of the crew that he reveled in having high-level people like Rahlson and Rhodes answering to him. Khasha narrowed her eyes and bit her tongue, waiting for her question to be addressed. She was looking forward to the day when someone stood up to Dan and told him a thing or two about leadership. But now wasn’t the time.

Finally Dan turned back to the business at hand. “Liam, we’re getting an elevation in chatter about a nuclear strike in the offing. Put that together with what Goldberg said — that it’s likely to be an attack against one of our ports. How many nukes have gone astray since the dissolution of the Soviet Empire?”

“Not as many as the conspiracy wackos talk about on the net,” responded Rhodes. “But there are concerns. General Leben of the Soviet Union stated on the record a couple of years ago that not all of their small nuclear weapons could be accounted for. Caspian Sea countries, like Georgia and Kazakhstan, were the homes of large military bases that we believe contained nukes of some description. The unraveling of the Soviet Union could potentially have put nukes in the hands of at least five or six countries. Some of those countries, like Georgia, are seriously unstable. Places like Pakistan have nukes, and there’s a powerful Islamic extremist contingent there. Iran definitely has a couple. The list really goes on and on.”

“What do you make of the higher level of chatter that we seem to be getting in a few Mid-East countries about nuclear weapons being used against the West?” asked Dan.

“I’d be worried. Definitely, when viewed in the context of Goldberg’s message.”

“Perhaps we should recommend to the President that we go to Threat Level Yellow around all American ports,” suggested Dan. He was fishing for advice, while trying to look as though he didn’t need to ask. It was a pretty common move from the TTIC director, who had never done anything to prepare for this type of position.

“It might be too early for that, but we should definitely be considering it at some point. If we get further clues and talk about this, then I think we should,” said Rhodes. “Definitely.”

T
URBEE ARRIVED at work at eleven. Not eight, thought Dan. Not nine. Not even ten. But eleven. It was outrageous. The PDB had been dissected and discussed. The battle of Yarim-Dhar had been reviewed in detail. Big Jack was on edge. Three American soldiers dead at Zighan. Four American soldiers dead in Yarim-Dhar. Two severely wounded. Thousands of kilos of Semtex gone AWOL, and a growing concern about a possible nuclear strike by terrorists. And this propeller-head sleeps in. Sleeps in. Unbelievable, thought Dan. Fucking sleeps in.

“You missed all the briefings, Turbee,” he snapped. “This is a team. Your skills are needed here. If you don’t want to be a part of us, just let me know.”

“Oh, Dan, leave it alone,” came a slow, soft voice from the other side of the control room. It was Khasha.

An ally? thought Turbee. No way. That never happened. Not to Hamilton Turbee.

“Shush,” came Dan’s retort. “We’re all getting paid good money to be here. We have a developing crisis, and Mr. Turbee drags himself in here at eleven. That’s a little over the top, isn’t it?”

Khasha had never backed down from anyone. With her rapier-sharp intellect, she had never needed to. She didn’t even feel the need to raise her voice. “He works on his own clock, Dan. And he works hard. Maybe he’s actually on Pakistan time right now.”

“Look, sir, I was up most of the night concentrating on the Heckler and Koch thing,” added Turbee. He didn’t think this was a wise time to enlighten Dan about Lord Shatterer of Deathrot, who had been slaying people left and right while Turbee worked.

“Turbee, I know who’s here and who’s not. You left here last night before midnight. Blue Gene tells me when people come and go. You weren’t doing any such thing,” Dan responded, condescension dripping from his voice.

Turbee wanted to tell the man that he had hacked a little back door into the operating system and that he could access Blue Gene from pretty much anywhere on the planet if he wanted to. He could have been working all night from his apartment, and had actually done just that. But it was probably best that Dan not know about that either. So he demurred.

“What about the Heckler and Koch thing?” Dan finally asked, after an uncomfortable pause.

“OK. OK. It’s like this. OK. We start with the PSG-1’s. Definitely a rare gun. Less than 1,000 sold. Germany has several dozen, Israel has more than 100. We have...” He looked up to see Dan’s fingers drumming on his crescent-shaped desk. “OK. Ten were sold in the Sudan in the past year.”

“OK, now I’m interested,” said Dan. Turbee noticed some other heads perking up and starting to pay attention.

Proudly, he started to explain how the guns were initially sold by their German manufacturer to someone named “Mohammed,” which was pretty much like selling them to “John Smith” in the US. He described how he had hacked into the H&K servers to find out where the guns had gone. He related how he had reasoned that Mohammed wasn’t the real name he was looking for, so had started combing through the databases of hotels, property owners, aliases, and known associates — anyone who might have had an interest in obtaining such guns. He had ultimately discovered that the guns were acquired by one Musa Hilal, the leader of a terrorist group in northwest Darfur known as the “Janjawiid,” or “devils on horseback.” He had also discovered that this was a group that was, through Musa Hilal and its other leaders, affiliated with al-Qaeda.

That’ll show them, thought Turbee, drawing a deep breath. Another Madrid. Turbee, the weird little pale kid, solves another international crisis. He saw the entire group, thirty-some people, eyeing him closely. All that was missing was a drum roll and a “tah-daa.”

“That’s it?” asked an incredulous Dan.

“That’s it,” said Hamilton Turbee, tapping his pencil on this desk for greater emphasis. “That is it.” Tap tap tap. He couldn’t understand why Khasha’s head clunked down on her desktop.

“That’s real good, Hamilton, but everybody already knew that,” said Rahlson from across the room. “The Janjawiid are a well-known terrorist group in Darfur. They make the
Washington Post
and the
London Times
on a regular basis. They’re a surrogate for Khartoum, and are at the center of the ethnic cleansing campaign that’s being claimed by the Arabian factions there. Christ, Turbee, just read the newspapers,” he added. “There is no doubt, there never
was
any doubt, that the Janjawiid were involved. We all knew that. It was the Janjawiid that attacked the Americans in Yarim-Dhar two days ago. There was never any question.”