“Be like having your own psychotherapist on the cheap, CAG,” Toad said unctuously, “but you could skip the messy details about your sex life unless you wanted our modern Dr. Freud to make you famous.”
Jake Grafton shook his head. “Won’t work that way,” he told Yocke. “You either come along for the ride on the chance that someday you may get to write a story or you stay at home. It’s up to you.”
“Just what do you get out of this arrangement?” Yocke demanded.
“I get an independent observer who has the power to reach the American public. I’m not sure what that will be worth because I don’t know how things will shake out. But…if Toad and I get killed and you somehow manage to live to tell the tale, it might make very interesting reading in some quarters. I don’t know. Too many ifs. I just don’t know.” He eyed Yocke. “At the very least you’re an unknown quantity added to the equation.” He shrugged.
A knock sounded on the door.
“Well?” Jake asked. “Yea or nay?”
“I’m in.”
Yocke went to answer the door. The man who came in was wearing a suit and overcoat and had a hard case that looked as if it contained a videocamera handcuffed to his wrist. The case displayed a diplomatic tag.
“Admiral Grafton?”
“Yes.”
“I’m Master Sergeant Emmett Thornton. I need to see your ID, sir.”
Jake took out his wallet and extracted his green military ID card. Thornton gave it a careful look, then handed it back. “Thank you, sir.” He extracted a piece of paper from his inside coat pocket and held it out. “Now if you will just sign for this equipment, it’s all yours.”
Jake scribbled his name. “How much is this going to cost me if I lose it, Sergeant?”
“About a hundred grand.”
Toad snapped his fingers. “We’ll put it on our Amoco card.”
Thornton glanced at Yocke.
“He’s okay,” Grafton told him.
Thornton laid the case on the bed and used a key to open it. They gathered around for a look as he began unpacking items. “What we have here is a TACSAT — tactical satellite — com unit with built-in encryption device. The signal goes right up to the bird, which re-broadcasts it to the Pentagon com center. Ni-cad batteries and a universal recharger. All you do is set the encryption code and use it like a two-way radio. General Land wanted me to remind you that the codes were generated by the National Security Agency.”
Jake examined the switches and buttons on the device. “We’ll need a brief and the codes.”
“Yessir. I’ll come to that. This other item is simpler. It’s a tape recorder with an encryption device attached. You merely record a message, anything you want up to thirty minutes. Then you punch up a six-digit code in this window here. Find a telephone, call the party you want, and when they are ready, you hit the play button. The garbled sound goes out at high speed. Takes about sixty seconds to play a thirty-minute message. If the other party has a message for you, you then put your machine on record and hold it up to the phone. Later on you can play the message and the machine will decode it into plain English. This thing works with telephones or TACSAT.”
The TACSAT came with a set of codes on water-soluble paper. Since it was possible the codes could fall into the wrong hands, “unauthorized personnel” was Thornton’s phrase, each authentic message should start with a code word that the admiral was to make up. Now. After a moment’s thought Jake wrote a word on a matchbook and showed it to the sergeant, who then burned the matchbook in the wastepaper basket.
“The code for the telephone encrypter is a little more difficult. If you other gentlemen would like to step out of the room for a minute?”
“No, Sergeant,” Jake told him. “Let’s you and I go for a walk.”
Out on the sidewalk in front of the hotel the evening breeze was picking up. The sergeant explained: “General Land suggested this code. Take the date, multiply it by the year in which you were born, then divide by the hour of the day in which you sent the message.” He produced a sheet of paper. “Try it. Today is the second of July here so write that as seven oh two. And use local time in the military format. It’s now twenty-three fifty, so use twenty-three hundred.”
Jake got a pen from his shirt pocket and did the math. “I get five nine three point six four seven — something.”
“You were born in 1945, right?”
“Yes.”
“Okay, Admiral. You would just punch that six-digit number into the encrypter and place the decimal in the proper place. Always start with a positive integer and carry out any fractions so that you have six digits. Add zeros to the right of the decimal as necessary.”
“Who has this code, besides you and me?”
“Just General Land.”
“We’ll always use Moscow time?”
“Moscow date and time.”
“Okay. Come upstairs and give Toad and me a complete brief on the gear and we’ll be all set. Did you just get in from Washington?”
“I came here straight from the airport, sir. They’re waiting to take me back.”
“Long flight.”
“I’m used to it. I sleep on the plane.”
Jake Grafton stared at the communications devices with a sinking feeling. After a moment he screwed up the courage to ask, “Just how secure is this techno-junk?”
The sergeant faced him squarely. “Admiral, this stuff is like a padlock on a garage. It’ll keep honest people honest. But with a good computer a competent cryptographer could break any message in a couple hours.”
All Jake Grafton could manage was a grunt.
“The good news,” the sergeant continued, “is that the ruskies don’t have many good computers. They do most of their crypto work by hand, so it’ll take them a couple weeks. Then one hopes the report will get routed here and there through the bureaucracy and a couple more weeks will pass before it lands on the desk of someone who may or may not decide to believe it.”
“A couple hours. With a good computer.”
“That’s about the size of it, sir.”
And the CIA has the best computers in the world. Jake Grafton took a deep breath and thanked the sergeant for his trouble. Being an army man, the sergeant saluted.
9
The plane was the personal transport of the Minister of defense and still the rest room smelled like an outhouse and no water came out of the sink taps. No paper towels. So much for personal hygiene!
Jake opened the door and stepped out into the aisle that led to the cockpit. There was no cockpit door and he could see the instrument panel between the pilots.
The warning placards were in Cyrillic and the instruments had funny labels. He stood there looking over their shoulders for several seconds before the pilot realized he was there and looked over his shoulder. He said something in Russian and Jake replied in English.
“Good morning,” the pilot managed.
“Good morning,” Jake echoed. “Nice plane you got here.”
When the pilot tapped his watch and made half a circle on the face with his finger, Jake nodded sagely and returned to his seat.
General Yakolev was in a seat across the aisle conferring with his aide. They were going over documents. Toad sat in the next row with Jocko West, who was broadening the American’s horizons. Behind them sat the other foreign military representatives.
Today they were making a trip to a Russian nuclear weapons depot to see how warheads were disassembled. The name of the base they were going to was Petrovsk, on the Volga watershed. Jake glanced at the map again. The place was a hundred miles or so north northeast of Volgograd, formerly Stalingrad, where the Soviet army shattered Adolph Hitler’s ambitions.