“How close is Omaha?” the chief engineer asked.
“Probably within a hundred miles, and there's P-3s at Kodiak — but we still have that Akula out there to worry about,” Claggett said. “Sir, we can hang tough right here and wait it out.”
“No, we have a hurt boomer. We need some kind of support.”
“That means radiating,” the XO pointed out.
“We'll use a SLOT buoy.”
“At two knots through the water, that doesn't buy us much, sir. Captain, radiating is a mistake.”
Ricks looked at his chief engineer, who said, “I like the idea of having a friend around.”
“So do I,” the Captain said. It didn't take long. The buoy was on the surface in seconds and immediately began broadcasting a short message in UHF. It was programmed to continue broadcasting for hours.
“We're going to have a nationwide panic on our hands,” Fowler said. That was not his most penetrating observation. He had a growing panic in his own command center, and knew it. “Is there anything coming out of Denver?”
“Nothing on any commercial TV or radio channel that I know of,” a voice at NORAD replied.
“Okay, you people stand by.” Fowler searched his panel for another button.
“ FBI Command Center. Inspector O'Day speaking.”
“This is the President,” Fowler said unnecessarily. It was a direct line and the light on the FBI panel was neatly labeled. “Who's in charge down there?”
“I am Deputy Assistant Director Murray, Mr. President. I'm the senior man at the moment.”
“How are your communications?”
“They're okay, sir. We have access to the military commsats.”
“One thing we have to worry about is a nationwide panic. To prevent that, I want you to send people to all the TV network headquarters. I want your people to explain to them that they may not broadcast anything about this. If necessary, you are directed to use force to prevent it.”
Murray didn't like that. “Mr. President, that is against—”
“I know the law, okay? I used to be a prosecutor. This is necessary to preserve life and order, and it will be done, Mr. Murray. That is a Presidential Order. Get to it.”
“Yes, sir.”
38
FIRST CONTACTS
The various communications-satellite operators were fiercely independent companies and very often ruthless competitors, but they were not enemies. Between them were agreements informally called treaties. There was always the possibility that one satellite or another could go down, whether from an internal breakdown or collision with space debris that was becoming a real worry for them. Accordingly, there were mutual-assistance agreements specifying that in the event one operator lost a bird, his associates would take up the slack, just as newspapers in the same city traditionally agreed to share printing facilities in the event of a fire or natural disaster. To back up these agreements, there were open phone lines between the various corporate headquarters. Intel-sat was the first to call Telstar.
“Bert, we just had two birds go down,” Intelsat's duty engineer reported in a slightly shaken voice. “What gives?”
“Shit, we just lost three, and Westar 4 and Teleglobe are down, too. We've had complete system failures here. Running checks now — you?”
“Same here, Bert. Any ideas?”
“None. We're talking like nine birds down, Stacy. Fuck!” The man paused. “Ideas? Wait a minute, getting something… okay, it's software. We're interrogating 301 now… they got spiked… Jesus! 301 got spiked on over a hundred freqs! Somebody just tried to zorch us.”
“That's how it looks here, too. But who?”
“Sure as hell wasn't a hacker… this would take megawatts to do that on just one channel.”
“Bert, that's exactly what I'm getting. Phone links, everything spiked at once. You in any hurry to light them back up?”
“You kidding me? I got a billion worth of hardware up there. Till I find out what the hell clobbered them, they stay down. I've got my senior VP on the way in now. The Pres was out in Denver,” Bert added.
“Mine, too, but my chief engineer is snowed in. Damned if I'm going to put my ass on the line. I think we should cooperate on this, Bert.”
“No arguments with me, Stace. I'll whistle up Fred Kent at Hughes and see what he thinks. It'll take a while for us to review everything and do full systems checks. I'm staying down until I know — and I mean know — what happened here. We got an industry to protect, man.”
“Agreed. I won't light back up without talking to you.”
“Keep me posted on anything you find out?”
“You got it, Bert. I'll be back to you in an hour, one way or another.”
The Soviet Union is a vast country, by far the largest in the world both in area and in the expanse of its borders. All of those borders are guarded, since both the current country and all its precursors have been invaded many times. Border defenses include the obvious — troop concentrations, airfields, and radar posts — and the subtle, like radio reception antennas. The latter were designed to listen in on radio and other electronic emissions. The information was passed on by landline or microwave links to Moscow Center, the headquarters of the Committee for State Security, the KGB, at #2 Dzerzhinskiy Square. The KGB's Eighth Chief Directorate is tasked to communications intelligence and communications security. It has a long and distinguished history that has benefited from another traditional Russian strength, a fascination with theoretical mathematics. The relationship between ciphers and mathematics is a logical one, and the most recent manifestation of this was the work of a bearded, thirtyish gnome of a man who was fascinated with the work of Benoit Mandelbrot at Harvard University, the man who had effectively invented fractal geometry. Uniting this work with that of MacKenzie's work on Chaos Theory at Cambridge University in England, the young Russian genius had invented a genuinely new theoretical way of looking at mathematical formulae. It was generally conceded by that handful of people who understood what he was talking about that his work was easily worth a Planck Medal. It was an historical accident that his father happened to be a General in the KGB's Chief Border Guards Directorate, and that as a result the Committee for State Security had taken immediate note of his work. The mathematician now had everything a grateful Motherland could offer, and someday he'd probably have that Planck Medal also.
He'd needed two years to make his theoretical breakthrough into something practical, but fifteen months earlier he'd made his first “recovery” from the U.S. State Department's most secure cipher, called STRIPE. Six months after that he'd proven conclusively that it was similar in structure to everything the U.S. military used. Cross-checking with another team of cryptanalysts who had access to the work of the Walker spy ring, and the even more serious work done by Pelton, what had resulted only six months earlier was a systematic penetration of American encryption systems. It was still not perfect. Daily keying procedures occasionally proved impossible to break. Sometimes they went as much as a week without recovering one message, but they'd gone as many as three days recovering over half of what they received, and their results were improving by the month. Indeed, the main problem seemed to be that they didn't have the computer hardware to do all the work they should have been able to do, and the 8th Directorate was busily training more linguists to handle the message traffic they were receiving.