Straits of Power (4 page)

“Black Sea,” Parker said. “And they are funny. . . . The following capability is highly classified, Captain. You’re seeing it on a need-to-know basis.”

“I understand.” Submariners had to be very good at keeping secrets.

“The actual image resolution is much finer than this display screen can reproduce. I do not exaggerate to say that on the original, with proper equipment, you can watch one of the copilots picking his nose. I could tell you exactly how long his fingernails are, but I won’t.” Parker tapped a few keys. The frozen still image, in shades of gray, suddenly changed to full-color movement in video—without losing any sharpness at all. The satellite camera followed the planes. The angle of the picture slowly shifted as the satellite orbited.

A pretty high orbit, maybe a thousand miles, to have such good dwell time. . . . I had no idea you could watch things, live, in color, from outer space so perfectly like this.

Now Jeffrey could see that the aircraft were flying right over the water: Backwash from multiple jet engines mounted on each fuselage—not on those stubby wings—created rooster tails on the sea. As the planes moved, and the amazingly powerful camera tracked them, a coastline entered the picture.

An inlet or bay.

The aircraft slowed and formed in single file. Jeffrey noticed ships, then buildings and vehicles on land. These established a sense of scale.

Jeffrey finally realized what he was seeing.

Holy crap, that’s the Bosporus Strait! That’s Istanbul! Those planes must be gigantic.

“Wing-in-ground-effect aircraft,” Jeffrey said aloud.

Parker cleared his throat. “We know the Soviets experimented with these things as far back as the 1960s. One project was called the ekranoplan. It actually flew. Flew very well, thank you. The Sovs canceled the program, even before the Berlin Wall came down. At least, we thought they did. We don’t know when they restarted, or how they hid it till now.”

Wiggies, as the U.S. Air Force called the basic concept, relied on a cushion of air trapped between the bottom of the wings and any smooth surface, such as water or a flat beach. This gave them vastly greater aerodynamic lift than airplanes flying higher up. In theory there was no limit to their dimensions—the bigger, the better. For short spurts, they could gain enough altitude to clear bridges—something Khrushchev had mysteriously boasted about, but the claim had been dismissed at first as Communist disinformation. Then an early American spy satellite caught a blurry, grainy picture of one at a pier—wiggies were basically seaplanes. Using pier-side objects of known size for comparison, that ekranoplan was, to this day, one of the largest flying machines ever built.

Jeffrey was rattled. He knew some U.S. companies sold much smaller wiggies for civilian use—including as water taxies—but nothing in the Allied inventory, including the biggest military-transport aircraft America had, came even close to what he was seeing now.

The Russian wiggies were intended as the ultimate amphibious invasion platforms. Coming at you from way out at sea. Low and under your radar. Moving at hundreds of knots. Each of them carrying troops and tanks and the whole rest of an army—with cargo capacity per plane so big it was scary.

“Where did they go?” Jeffrey asked.

“Watch,” Parker told him.

Turkey was neutral, so the modern Russian ekranoplans were exercising their right of military passage after prior notice. They quickly left Istanbul behind, transited the Sea of Marmara, and then went through Turkey’s other tight spot between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean: the Dardanelles Strait. As the satellite began to lose a good angle, the mass of aircraft aimed southwest, to cross the Aegean Sea between Turkey and Greece.

The picture went blank, then resumed, a different satellite pass.

Now the planes were in the Ionian Sea, well within the Med, between Greece and the boot of Italy. Both countries were occupied by the Germans. With the Axis also controlling Spain and North Africa and the Strait of Gibraltar between them, large parts of the Med amounted to an Axis lake.

The Russian wiggies moored at a port between the heel and toe of Italy. Jeffrey guessed this was the major harbor, Taranto, outside the range of Allied cruise-missile strikes from the Atlantic, or from Israeli waters too.

The video stopped.

“What was their cargo?” Commodore Wilson asked.

“That’s the whole point,” Parker said. “They carried no cargo. The wiggies themselves were the delivery.”

Jeffrey was shocked. “Russia sold them to Germany? In plain view, just like that?”

Parker nodded expressionless. “We estimate each has a lift capacity of over five hundred tons.”

Jeffrey grimaced—that was even more than he’d thought, five times what the air force’s huge C5-Bs could carry. “But if they’re German flagged now, or whatever you call it, can’t we take them out with B-Fifty-twos or B-Ones and B-Twos or something?” B-1s were supersonic strategic bombers. B-2s were subsonic stealth bombers. Like the others, B-52s had global reach from U.S. bases, with tanker planes refueling them in flight.

Hodgkiss shook his head impatiently. “They’d never make it there, let alone come back, going that far inside Axis-controlled and defended airspace. The air force already went through this with me. The anti-stealth radar the Russians invented works too well. And the Germans have surveillance assets concealed in satellites they built for Third World countries before the war, launched by the ArianeSpace consortium. They can watch us multispectrally and there’s nothing we can do about it. So forget about a surprise air attack.”

Jeffrey nodded reluctantly. “These ekranoplans give Germany substantial new options in the Med.”

“Got it in one,” Admiral Hodgkiss said. “But it gets a lot worse. Mr. Parker?”

“We need to shift gears. New topic. With everyone eavesdropping on everyone else’s transmissions, and cryptography now amounting to an entire classified body of work in math and computer science, it’s difficult to be positive that any message has not been compromised.”

“Granted,” Jeffrey said. This was nothing new. With the outbreak of the war, the World Wide Web had collapsed into disjointed fragments as countries made impenetrable firewalls against external intrusion—by disconnecting their pieces of the Internet from the outside world altogether. In the U.S. and UK, and over the protest of many, cell phones had been banned except for persons with special licenses: Their signals were too easy to intercept and amplify billions of times from orbit. Massive parallel processing would give the enemy valuable knowledge from hearing loads of civilian chitchat and analyzing voice content in bulk. As a consequence of this real threat, everything that could be done was done by fiber-optic cable or wire; home-front propaganda stressed “Is this e-mail or phone call necessary?,” and people paid attention; in the U.S., sending spam was a federal offense with stiff prison penalties; government bailouts kept the most-affected telecom companies going.

“The result,” Parker went on, “besides the downer effect on civilian morale, and rampant paranoia, is to force us back to using early Cold War–era espionage trade craft sometimes. Human couriers, dead drops, that sort of thing. Well-proven things, from before the Internet or minicomputers were even invented. Which of course degrades the amount of information our surviving agents can convey, and badly slows how quickly they convey it.”

Jeffrey digested all this. “You’re implying that it’s all become polarized. Either a cyberspace and electronic warfare arms race at the very high-tech end, or Mata Hari cloak-and-dagger stuff at the very low-tech end.”

“That’s exactly right,” Parker answered. “Except, you should say
and,
not
or.
It’s both at once, Captain. . . . One technique for maintaining covert broadband is to embed the message, encoded, in a seemingly harmless broadcast, but disguise it as underlying noise. It’s an old idea. I can’t say too much, except that all the major powers these days watch for such enemy messages, and use the same technique sometimes to send messages of their own. Again, there are top-secret math theorems about how to study noise and tell if it’s too patterned to be harmless random static. People with Ph.D.s at Fort Meade do this for a living.”

“Okay.” Fort Meade was the NSA’s headquarters. “With all due respect, what has this got to do with me?”

Jeffrey caught Hodgkiss and Wilson give each other meaningful looks, then they both turned to Parker.

“You’re attending this meeting now, Captain Fuller, because several ominous things are converging fast.”

“I’m listening.”

“Again, without the details, the NSA can read pieces of some German military signals traffic.”

“I’m sure they do the same thing to us.”

“You don’t know the least of it. . . . The NSA began, a few weeks ago, to pick up references to something their linguists translate as ‘Plan Pandora.’ ”

“Like in Pandora’s box?”

“It’s a long-standing part of German war-fighting culture that they like to choose operational plan names that carry some meaning or aspect of the plan. We do that too, in peacetime, for public relations, but never in a major shooting war like this.”

“Plan Pandora,” Jeffrey repeated. “Open her box, unleash unspeakable horrors on the world.”

“That’s why I said it was ominous. There have also been repeated reference to ‘Zeno,’ which appears to be related to this Pandora plan. From the context, the NSA thinks Zeno is actually a code name for a person. And again, the specific code name chosen probably tells us something.”

“Zeno as in Zeno’s paradox? The ancient Greek guy?”

Parker nodded.

Jeffrey recited the paradox to himself, to try to see what was going on:
You can’t walk across a room, ’cause first you have to go halfway there, then a quarter, then an eighth, blah blah, so you never get the whole way there. . . . Except Zeno wasn’t an idiot. He knew people walked across rooms. That’s what made for the paradox.

Yeah, but this brain teaser is simple to solve nowadays. The ancient Greeks didn’t understand how to sum a converging infinite series. A half plus a quarter plus an eighth and so on adds up to one, not infinity.

“It hasn’t been a paradox for centuries.”

“Precisely,” Parker said, as if he’d let Jeffrey talk so he could pounce as soon as Jeffrey finished. “Paradoxes are solved by major breakthroughs in the conceptual framework through which the problem can be viewed. That’s the part that’s ominous.”

“Zeno. This suggests the Germans have made some sort of new major breakthrough?”

“And I’m not finished.”

“Keep going,” Jeffrey said. “Please. You definitely have my attention.”

“The NSA also intercepted a German message hidden in a Turkish TV station’s signals.”

“Did they break any of it?”

“They broke
all
of it. The message was sent encrypted, but using two different American codes, one within the other.”

“What?”

“The outer code, once the NSA cryptanalysts recognized what it was, was easy to undo by using certain approaches and pieces of data. The outer code was something teams of hackers—‘crackers’ is the proper nomenclature when they’re malicious—have failed to penetrate for years.”

“What is it?”

“The computer algorithm used by New York’s subway system to prevent counterfeiting their magnetic-strip fare cards.”

“Huh? But mass transit’s all been free since the war started.”

“The latest algorithm from before the war, and the proper key prime numbers.”

“Is this some sort of
joke
?
”

“At first our NSA compatriots did think it was a hoax. But then they recognized the second code, the underlying one that carried the message.”

“And . . . ? ”

“It was another one of our codes.”

“Don’t tell me,” Jeffrey said sarcastically. “The secret formula to a top brand of soda pop?”

“This isn’t funny.”

“Sorry.”

“The second code was one of our highest-level navy command-and-control encryption routines. With number keys that were two or three weeks stale. . . . That’s to be expected, if for whatever reason the sender had to work with a time delay at his end. . . . But our encryption routines were so well mastered that whoever did send the message was able to properly encode entire lengthy documents. I’m not saying fragments, I’m saying entire documents. And not
our
documents. . . . If they were our documents, it could just mean they intercepted what to them was gibberish and beamed it back at us to confuse us. . . . The documents are German documents. Needless to say, the broken navy code was discontinued immediately.”

Jeffrey sat there stunned. “Wait a minute.” He glanced at Wilson.

“Take your time,” Wilson said.

“ ‘Someone’—you’re sure they’re German?”

“We think so,” Parker replied. “We need you to help us verify that.”

“How?”

“Step by step,” Parker said dryly.

Jeffrey pondered this. “A German sent a message encrypted in two American codes, one inside the other. He sent us German documents using our own supposedly unbreakable codes. . . . These documents would be classified, to the Axis? Not just last month’s newspaper from Leipzig or something?”

“Absolutely these would be classified documents.”

“He’s acting like a friend. He’s done us two huge favors, right? He sent us secret German materials, and he warned us that they compromised one of our most important crypto protocols.”

Parker nodded.

“But why
two
codes? And the New York City
subway
? . . . Wait, I think I see why. He had to keep the Germans from knowing what he was doing, right? Otherwise, they’d pick up exactly what we picked up from Turkey, and know they had a traitor, and they’d track him down and string him up. So, the outer code is one he broke on his own, moonlighting, so to speak, knowing that no other German could read it, but we could, once we recognized it.”

“Got it in one again,” Hodgkiss said. “But our concern is that the guy is not for real, not what he seems, a red herring or a double agent. He appears to have some access to extremely close-held German naval information. Access that might be authorized to him, or unauthorized, we don’t know. Since there seems no limit to what this guy can do, it’s possible he isn’t Imperial German Navy at all. It’s possible he cracked his own country’s security, and sent these particular documents to really,
really
hold our interest.”