“Chamber high-speed fans are on.”
The SEALs opened small lockers in a bulkhead of the work chamber, removing new tools and supplies. They dried everything using special lint-free absorbent cloths, and donned disposable white garments, including hats and masks, like the outfits worn in a technological clean room. The high-speed fans scrubbed the atmosphere, purging it of lint and dust and even shed skin cells. The men put on long rubber insulation gloves and rubber boots, and stood on thick rubber mats. Once done with their complex task, Nyurba reminded himself, they’d begin a lengthy decompression in a different chamber, ready to rejoin the full commando squadron only as Carter reached Kurzin’s final dropoff point.
The SEALs began to cut away the cable’s outer armored sheath, which gave the cable its structural strength. Then they peeled back the softer waterproofing layer under the armor, revealing the working innards of the cable. The most dangerous part of the process now, from the perspective of the SEALs, was avoiding the power cable that ran beside the eight cladded fiber-optic strands. The power cable carried thousands of volts, needed to power the signal amplifiers that a trunk fiber-optic cable required every few miles. Nyurba knew that fiber optics weren’t superconductors — they did suffer signal loss with distance. Whether the trunk cable was strung underwater or on land, automated amplifiers had to be part of the system. Electricity to run the optical amplifiers needed to come from somewhere. Land lines could use local power suppliers along their routes. Undersea cables brought that power with them.
Slowly and carefully, they separated the eight cladded fiber-optic strands, to be able to work on them individually. Inside every strand, through a thread of glass the thickness of a human hair, a stream of coherent laser light carried information at a rate of about twenty billion bytes per second.
With devices resembling instruments for microsurgery, they painstakingly inserted the ends of even smaller glass threads of their own into each of the Russian ones. These threads, Nyurba had been told, drew off the signal without reducing its strength enough for the Russians to notice. The delicate threads were connected to optical amplifiers, and the output of those amplifiers was fed to Carter’s onboard supercomputer.
“Commodore,” Sessions said, “Carter signals, ‘Ready to send across fiber-optic lead for Challenger supercomputer.’ ”
Jeffrey was expecting this. “Phone Talker, inform Systems Administrator that Carter is preparing to connect fiber-optic feed from cable tap.” The System Administrator’s station was on the deck below the control room.
“Fire Control, signal Carter, ‘Ready to receive fiber-optic lead.’ ”
Bell told COB to put the hull-mounted photonic sensor imagery onto one of the main vertical display screens.
They watched as a pair of divers from Carter emerged out of the murk, swimming with a reel of cable carried between them. They connected the end of the cable to a fitting inside a small hatch in the port side of Challenger’s sail.
“Sir,” the phone talker reported, “Systems Administrator confirms good connection with the cable, handshake between supercomputers successful. Data feed from tap appears to be nominal.”
Jeffrey went below to visit the Systems Administrator. Bell remained in Control in case a threat was identified while the strike group was glued to the undersea cable like flypaper.
“How’s it going?” Jeffrey asked.
The Systems Administrator’s office was the size of a broom closet, just large enough to hold the equipment he needed to control the ship’s local area network performance and manage the status of different computers and software.
“Artificial intelligence routines are mapping out the contents of the cable strands right now, sir. Methods called expert systems and genetic algorithms. Pretty neat stuff.”
“What’s the map showing?”
“Well, the cables transmit a mixture of voice and data and video. Each strand handles several thousand separate message streams at once. But they all follow known formats and protocols, so step one is figuring out what’s where. The next step will be monitoring the information flow and finding which channels have the specific traffic we want to listen in on.”
Jeffrey nodded, and smiled. Supercomputers were very expensive, but they didn’t take up much space. What they did need was a very clean environment, a lot of electricity, and facilities to take away the immense waste heat they created. But with a reactor and turbogenerators — to drive air-conditioning and refrigeration equipment, which fed ventilation ducts and chilled-water pipes that already ran all over the ship to keep the combat-system electronics cool — a nuclear sub was the ideal place to install the most advanced available supercomputer. Rapid warnings to the CIA or the Pentagon could be sent with tight-beam laser or radio buoys, talking to dedicated submarine communication satellites.
And by the link between his ships, Jeffrey was using two supercomputers at once — massive parallel processing. Four NSA experts, who’d come from Carter in the German mini at the end of the first rendezvous, were in Challenger’s electronic support measures room; four more NSA men were in Carter’s. They’d guide the automated interpretive work done via hardware and software.
“OK, sir,” the systems administrator said. “The uh, the channel maps are completed. The sifting through to locate the stuff we care about is starting.”
“How long should that take?”
“I’m guessing about two hours, sir.”
“I’ll be in my office. You can reach me there if you have any problems. Otherwise, call me when we’re ready to stir up the hornet’s nest.”
Chapter 17
Jeffrey was back in Challenger’s control room. The system administrator had called him a few minutes ago. Carter confirmed through the acoustic link that they were ready, too.
As prearranged during the mission briefing days before, Carter positioned two of her Seahorses in polynyas spaced widely apart, with their signals intercept and electronic support measures antennas raised out of the water. These were coated with a white radar-absorbing material, for camouflage and stealth. They would capture radio and radar transmissions across the entire frequency spectrum, and by direction-finding triangulate on each transmitter’s position. The computers would produce a map of any facility that emitted anything at all. This map would be extremely wide-ranging, because surface ducting from side lobes, of even spaceward-focused satellite relay ground stations, could be picked up and amplified billions of times from hundreds of miles away. Side lobes were unavoidable leakage from any radiating antenna, in directions other than where the antenna was aimed. Ducting was an effect where a layer of air at ground or ocean level trapped and held radio and radar waves, minimizing signal-strength loss over vast distances, and bending them along the curve of the earth. Surface ducting was especially effective in mist and fog — and just such weather prevailed in the seas near Challenger this time of year, because differences between air and water temperatures caused heavy moisture condensation.
The computers and analysts on Challenger and Carter were ready to capture transmissions through the air and through the cable tap. To gather intelligence vital for completing the strike group’s mission, it was now necessary to get both the Siberian coastal defense forces, and Russia’s Strategic Rocket Forces, very excited very suddenly.