“We’ve had words.”
“So he has developed some information that suggests one area as a likely hiding spot for this White Witch. He means to run a sweep with dogs up that way. If she’s there, she will head for Natasha’s Womb and escape into uncontested country.”
“What is the Russian army going to be doing this time, sir?”
“Almost certainly attacking. Yes, it will be quite busy around here. The First Ukrainian Front has over one-point-two million men, twenty-two hundred tanks, and twenty-eight-hundred planes. Sometime soon they will launch all of them in our direction. We have only Army Group North Ukraine spread through these parts, about half as many men and machines, and the men are, many of them, Hungarian, perhaps not that inclined to give their all. So when Ivan comes, he will come in deadly earnest. And in the middle of that will be poor little Battlegroup Von Drehle, hunting for a single girl. Your job is to catch her, if indeed she makes for the Womb, and hold her for Police Battalion. Please pay no attention to the one-point-two million Red soldiers.”
“Yes sir.”
“I’ve made arrangements for you to draw ammunition and other supplies. You’ll also have a radio transmitter, and you know how hard to get they are. Division intelligence has already put a map package together for you. I want you to check with them for detailed briefing; they’re expecting you. Your transportation will get you through Yaremche tomorrow at 0630, and I want you in place by 1200. I’ll want a daily report, as will Police Battalion. SS must be kept in the communications network or they’ll make trouble, and this Police Battalion officer has Groedl’s ear.”
“Understood, sir. One question, if I may.”
“Go ahead,” said Von Bink.
“If I’m in the shit and I have to hold on against a large attack, I’d dearly love to have a Flammenwerfer in my bunker. Ivan hates the bite of the Flammenwerfer. A few squirts of burning fuel and he loses his taste for the charge.”
The Flammenwerfer-41 was the flamethrower, which spat out bolts of pure fire for twenty-five meters in half-second units. Everybody hated to go against it; that was the primal power of flame.
“Yes, but not right away. It seems Police Battalion has requested them, and with their high Kommissariat authority, they’ve got them all, for some damned reason or other. I’ll put through an order so that when they’re done with the things, they’ll radio you. I’ll give you a Kübel so that you can run back to Yaremche and pick up your Flammenwerfer.”
“Very good, sir.”
“Look, I know you don’t like this, but we are all going to be in the shit in the next few days as we fight our way through another retreat. Be glad you’re not on some lone 8.8 battery facing Ivan’s thousand T-34s.”
“Yes sir.”
“And Bober, watch that mouth. It could get you killed.”
Interlude in Tel Aviv III
It hit him in the middle of the night.
“Gershon, where are you going?”
“To the office.”
“Gershon, it can wait until morning. Come back to bed.”
“I can’t sleep.”
“There is some yogurt in the fridge, but I am not going to get up to make you coffee. You can make your own coffee, you madman.”
He drove through the quiet streets of Herzliya, a suburb not unlike any in the civilized world. Now and then a light was on in a house, but mostly it was dark, people asleep and secure in their beds. No one would come to arrest them and send them off to a bitter destiny of night and fog, he thought, recalling that his grandparents had not made it out of the night and fog of Poland to disappear in the Shoah, as had most of his wife’s family. His children, a photographer and a gym teacher, had no idea about any of this beyond perfunctory acknowledgment, unrooted in emotion, of family history. He himself rarely thought of it, as his mind was mechanical in its genius, based on mathematics, memory, the ability to see patterns or factors where no one else did, as opposed to empathetic, a conjurer of emotions. But for some reason, tonight the Shoah seemed alive to him as he drove through neighborhoods of sleeping Jews. Nobody protected them then. Who protects them now? Well, the best air force, army, and navy in the world. Also Gershon Gold.
He arrived at the Black Cube, where a sign of stability in the world was that no upper floor lights blazed away; he got through a surprised security without issue and went to his cubicle after a stop in the cafeteria for bad machine coffee, black, then got to work.
His insight: Platinum not as wealth, not as finance, not as operational lubrication. But platinum as stuff. As physical property, of weight and size, requiring transportation, security, delivery to—? Well, to where?
Today’s working thesis: The newly purchased $16 mils worth of stuff had to be delivered to a shipping location. They couldn’t just FedEx it. It weighed — he calculated — about 685 pounds, but, because of its density, was about the size of a shoe box, although typically packaged in a container designed to be loaded on a pallet. Where would it have been picked up, where would it have been shipped? It didn’t take long for him to ascertain that the vast majority of AMPLATS platinum was railroaded to Port Elizabeth from its refinement in the Johannesburg complex, then shipped to its destination by freighter, because in most instances the amount was too unwieldy to ship by air. But this platinum was a different issue. Six hundred eighty-five pounds was easily transportable by air, and air traffic being more crowded than sea lane traffic by a factor of about twenty to one, it would be more difficult to track.
However… Gershon knew this game… and he knew that all exporters in South Africa, including AMPLATS, are required to register with the South African Revenue Services, called SARS. They used a single administration document to make the clearance of goods easier and more convenient for importers, exporters, and cross-border traders. One purpose of this document was to ensure that exported goods were properly declared to SARS. The form required the exporter or his agent to indicate the foreign consignee, the place of export, the form of transportation, and the estimated date of departure. The document was submitted to the commissioner of customs, a division of SARS.
So: how to crack SARS firewalls and read the AMPLATS export documents for a $16 million shipment of platinum?
The answer: Cain & Abel, a program obtained from the Darknet, the under or illegal side of the Net known to most professionals but unreachable by outsiders. Cain & Abel was a password discovery tool that allowed easy recovery by first sniffing out the network, and then cracking encrypted and scrambled passwords using dictionaries, brute force, and cryptanalysis methods if needed. Not only that, Gershon had used it to record voice and video transmissions over the Internet and grab cached passwords and trace routing protocols.
Gershon activated his copy of Cain & Abel, pointed it at the authentification server for the South African Revenue Service, and waited. It wasn’t a long wait. In South Africa, a data entry clerk signed on, and Gershon walked into the system in his shadow; all the data that existed became visible to him.
He called up the enormous file on AMPLATS, reduced his frame set to transactions of a few days — on the assumption that Nordyne had bought fast and paid fast and therefore wanted shipment fast — and discovered that among the tonnes dispatched to car makers, the grams to jewelers and the pounds to oncological units, one shipment, AM43367, was dispatched to Nordyne Ceramics, located in Astrakhan, on the Volga River at the northeastern tip of the Caspian Sea, in Russia.
So who in Russia wanted $16 million in platinum, particularly when Russia was the world’s second largest producer of… platinum? It was the classic coals-to-Newcastle scenario, which made sense only if the point of the transaction was the secrecy of the transaction.