[Rogue Warrior 18] Curse of the Infidel

by Richard Marcinko

  You could blame Murphy—the author of the ubiquitous law that states anything that can go wrong will go wrong, but only at the worst possible time. I preferred to blame my wop genius.

  “Can we get through it?” asked Shotgun.

  I pounded my knuckles against it, listening to see if it was hollow.

  “Anyone home?” asked Shotgun.

  Instead of dignifying that with a response, I reached into the pouch at my waist and took out the little Dremel tool I had there. I had to balance myself with one hand and use the drill with the other, which not only made my leverage weak but meant I was drilling on an angle as well. It was slow going.

  I figured that if I could cut a small hole, I’d use the miniature crowbar I had in my ruck to hammer out the rest of the concrete. But the barrier was too thick; the Dremel’s drill bit didn’t go all the way through.

  Worse, it snapped off about halfway around the hole. I put in a backup and completed the circle, but the plug wouldn’t come out. Running the drill across the diameter of the circle, I snapped the new bit; that left me as the only functional item in the tool kit.

  It was time to go to Plan B.

  “This isn’t going to work. We’ll have to back out,” I told Shotgun. “I’ll tell Mongoose. Wait for me on the roof.”

  “Already heard,” radioed Mongoose, aka Thomas Yamya. The team radios were set to always transmit. “Things are quiet out here.”

  Mongoose was in the rental up the block, listening to us on the radio circuit and monitoring the video cameras we’d planted around the building. The cameras—or “cams”—beamed their signals via satellite to a Red Cell Internet site. Mongoose accessed the site via a tablet computer in the car. The devices gave him a full view around the perimeter of the building, in effect doing the work of a small army of lookouts.

  (The computer looks like an iPad, but has a number of improvements, including a faster processor and a proprietary operating system. I got it from a friend and Team Six plank owner, Frank Phillips, who first used it in one of his operations with Golden Seal Enterprises, a Class A training and special operations company. Shunt made a few customizations.)

  Plan B called for us to enter via a bathroom on the floor where the data center was located. Getting into the room was easy—a fire escape ran right by the window. But according to the schematics Shunt had stolen, the hallway between the restroom and the computer center was protected by a motion detector. I’d have to defeat it before we could proceed.

  Motion detectors generally fall into one of two categories: those that work by infrared—heat sensors—and those that work by ultrasound—a little like radar. The techniques for each group are very different, as you can imagine: you can’t freeze a detector that’s sending out sound impulses, and you can’t hum your way close to an IR unit.

  The mechanical plans indicated where the sensors were located. They also stated that the whole building system was wired together. We had been inside the building two days before, and confirmed that the detectors used on the floor downstairs were all thermal. It was therefore reasonable to expect that the one on the computer floor was thermal as well.

  But the appearance of the ceiling where there shouldn’t have been one meant I couldn’t take anything for granted.

  Shotgun was waiting on the roof, eating a bag of potato chips—or “crisps” as they were called in Europe.

  “Hungry?” he asked as I emerged from the shaft. “They’re onion and garlic.”

  “I can smell them. No thanks.”

  “You’re missing a treat,” he said, rising to join me as I made my way to the fire escape.

  “Sure you don’t want me to come down with you?” Shotgun asked.

  “No, I need you out here to create a diversion if we need it,” I told him. “Just like we rehearsed. There’s no place to hide inside.”

  “You got it.” He reached into his tactical vest and took out a candy bar as I started downward.

  The restroom window was locked by a flimsy turn screw. This was easily pried to the side; I was past it in less than a minute. The red emergency exit sign at the window, indicating the fire escape, was all the light I needed to see as I squeezed inside, checked to make sure the stalls were empty, and then went to the hallway door.

  Now the fun began. The door was almost certainly within “sight” of the sensor; if I opened the door there and attempted to reach it from the opening, it would have registered the fact that the temperature of the air in front of it had changed.

  I needed to defeat the sensor without exposing my warm body to it. This would mean I’d have to climb the wall behind the door, open it ever so slightly, and maneuver a small piece of glass over the sensor unit. The glass would be held in place by the metal arm I used to get it there, thanks to a spring-loaded piece at the back. We’d remove it on the way out.

  Yes, I have done this before.1

  While detection units are generally aimed so that they can’t pick up something close by at the ceiling, you can’t necessarily take this for granted. So the first thing I had to do was get the glass and arm at room temperature.

  My laser thermometer found a ten-degree difference. That might not actually be enough to trigger the motion detector.

  Then again, did I really want to take the chance?

  I went to the sink and ran the cold water over the glass and rods for a few minutes, until my laser thermometer declared the apparatus a perfect 18.23° Celsius, or 65° Fahrenheit—the bank kept the data center floor relatively cool.

  Then I took two of the waste cans from next to the sink and taped them together with the help of some duct tape. This gave me a small platform behind the door.

  With everything in place, I climbed up, dug my fingernails into the edge of the wood, and eased the door open. Slipping in a small wedge of toilet paper from one of the stalls to keep it ajar, I examined the sensor with the help of a pair of low-tech but powerful opera glasses.

  I spotted the telltale plastic shield of the IR detector immediately. The arm pointed downward, covering the area where anyone exiting the stairs would walk. The detection angle was definitely aimed at the stairs, but would sweep around in an angle behind, making it harder to approach from where I was.

  Harder, though not impossible.

  But wait. There was something else on the wall to the right.

  An ultrasonic device. This was smaller, and looked a little like an electric razor with a circular head. The red light in the hall—another exit sign—glinted off the metal mesh at the detection dish.

  I thought the Germans believe in documenting everything they do. Why wasn’t the ultrasound system in the plans?

  Sloppy, sloppy.

  In theory, ultrasonic devices don’t have to be completely defeated—by wearing padded clothing and moving very s-l-o-w-l-y, you can fool the device into thinking that its waves are returning normally. (The devices look for a Doppler shift in the waves, but the shift has to be relatively large or they’d always be going off.)

  That’s the theory. The reality is, most people, burglars especially, don’t wear padded clothing. Nor do they have the patience to walk very slowly across a room—so slowly that it might take a half hour to go thirty feet, which is generally the distance the devices are reliable at.

  I had patience, but neither the time nor the clothes. So instead I took out a small radio scanner and turned it on. The scanner “listened” for a few seconds, then declared that it had found the wavelength of the sound waves the device was using.

  Pushing a button at the side of the little device, I set it to the detector’s frequency, then climbed down and slipped it near the crack in the door. By squawking in the same frequency as the detector, the device masked any other returning waves.

  That taken care of, I went back to work on the infrared detector. It was only a few feet away from me; I could practically slap it with my hand. But the closeness worked against me, putting it at an odd angle. I had the damnedest time getting the
glass in place over the curved sensor. This took a good five minutes.

  Fortunately, the suction cups to hold it in place went on smoothly. I got down and packed my gear.

  “How’s it looking, Dick?” asked Mongoose from outside.

  “Just about ready to go down the hall,” I told him. I hadn’t bothered to put a video feed in the building.

  “You have another ten minutes before the security guys are due,” he warned.

  “That’s all?” I checked my watch. He was right.

  “Sorry.”

  We’d cased the building for nearly a week. Security was provided by an external company that made the rounds of several buildings each night. They were also tied into the security system, which besides the detectors up here included an array of video cameras on the first floor and outside the building. (We’d had to bypass one at the rear of the building to get on the roof.)

  The checks generally occurred between five and ten minutes after the hour. The one thing we couldn’t be sure of was what the guards would do when they arrived. Most often, they went into the downstairs floor, took a quick look around, and then left. Occasionally, they simply looked through one of the large plate-glass windows at the front and decided that was enough. But about once a night they conducted a top-to-bottom run-through of the building.

  By my calculations, ten minutes would be plenty of time for me to get down to the end of the hall, past the lock, and into the data center. But doing what I needed to get done in the computer center was another story.

  Shunt had fashioned a small chip containing a Trojan horse program that would allow us into the system. The chip was attached to a small doohickey that I had to place in a specific board in a forest of similar boards in a room full of machines that all basically looked the same to me. I had practiced doing it for two days. My best time—twelve minutes.

  “I better wait,” I told Mongoose. “Give me a heads up when they’re at the building.”

  “Roger that,” he answered.

  “What’s the status?” asked Shotgun.

  “I’m in the restroom. I have the detection devices defeated. If it looks like they’re coming up I’ll have to pull them out.”

  “Need help?” Shotgun’s words were garbled by whatever he was eating.

  “Negative. Hold your position. What the hell are you eating?”

  “Devil Dogs.”

  “They sell those in Germany?”

  “Ship all over the world,” said Shotgun.

  “Don’t get crumbs on any of the equipment.”

  “Roger that.”

  I decided to do a little reconnoitering while I was waiting. I eased out of the doorway tentatively. When nothing sounded, I slipped all the way into the hall and walked down the short corridor to the door where the data center was.

  There was a fingerprint lock, which was about what I expected.

  Impossible to defeat, right?

  Actually, easier than using a bump key. I dug into my magic bag of tricks at my belt and took out a small bottle of forensic dust, the CSI-friendly material technicians use to lift fingerprints. I dusted the reader, but it had been wiped clean after its last use.

  Not a problem. I went back to the restroom and the large plate anyone wishing to enter pushed to get in. I had three different hands to choose from. Choosing the largest, I took a few snaps with my iPhone.

  “Here we go,” warned Mongoose. “Security car is coming up.”

  He gave me a play-by-play as the car parked in front of the building.

  “Guards are getting out of the car,” said Mongoose. “Checking the front door.”

  “I can see the car,” said Shotgun from the roof. “They going in?”

  “No,” said Mongoose a few seconds later. “They’re coming back.”

  Sure the guards were leaving, I went back to the fingerprint reader and held my phone over it.

  Nothing happened. The LED light on the side of the reader blinked red.

  Fail.

  I tried two more times, but without any luck.

  The process had never failed before. I thought maybe there was some sort of heat sensor on the touchplate instead of just a simple scanner, so edged the side of my hand over it and tried again.

  Nada.

  Either the reader wasn’t working, or I had taken the wrong print. Obviously someone other than data center employees used the restroom upstairs.

  Like the janitor.

  I glanced around for another source of prints. The best candidate was the door to the stairs, but I suspected I would have the same problem there.

  There was a closet on the left side of the hall, almost directly opposite the door to the data center. The knob looked like it might be a better bet; the only problem was that the fingerprint, if there was one, would be on the side and difficult to photograph.

  What about in the closet?

  Eureka. It was filled with shelves of stationery. About three-quarters of a bottle of fingerprint dust later, I had three fresh index prints that the app claimed were all different from the others.

  The first one worked. I opened the door gingerly, scanning to make sure there wasn’t another unmapped detector nearby.

  I’d just completed my scan without seeing anything when Mongoose came on the radio circuit.

  “Something’s up, Dick,” he warned. “Two guys just walked down the street and stopped in front of the bank.”

  “What are they doing?”

  “Looking in the front window,” said Mongoose a few seconds later. “They’re dressed in black.”

  “They looking for the ATM?” asked Shotgun.

  “If so, they’re blind.”

  I told Mongoose to keep me informed, and went to work. The red light over the door here was dim and the room large, so I turned on the miner’s lamp. The LEDs revealed a forest of large mainframe computers and peripheral equipment.

  We’d had to guestimate the room’s arrangement, and my little light now revealed that our guesses were more than a little off. Working with layouts from other data centers, we’d assumed that the machines would be pushed back near the walls, with a large open area at the center. But here the large units formed a corridor immediately inside the room, and to get to the operator area, you had to walk between them. This actually made my job easier, though; there would be a lot more area to work in when I removed the access panel from the machine.

  Assuming I could find the right one.

  The bank used an IBM System Z, a rather impressive computer system. The machine cases themselves are high couture—for silicon. The large black boxes with the occasional slash of blue were joined together by bundles of wires that ran along the floor and some of the sides of the units, a bit like ivy without the leaves.

  It took me several minutes to find the right box. I narrowed it down to three based on the outside covers, then used a small plug-in device to see which one had the right addresses in the system.

  I’m parroting what Shunt told me—I have only the vaguest idea of the technical details of what I was doing. From my perspective, I was plugging what looked like a fancy thumb drive into a diagnostic panel on the bottom of the machine. If the LED light lit, I had the right machine. It took all three tries—when I got to the last one, I had to cross my fingers: there was no backup plan if the device didn’t work.

  Unit located, I opened the front of the case and looked for the support processor unit, which looked like a stamped card with two little boxes for plugs. I put a jump wire and card into the left opening. Then I counted off cards until I found the bulk power hub. This contained a long row of connectors, which looked very similar to the network connectors you might use on your own home computer. I slipped Shunt’s doohickey into the third hole, connected it to the jumper, then pushed a little switch at the very end of the doohickey.

  Then I stood back and waited.

  According to Shunt, the device would open a path for him within two computer cycles or some other odd measurement of
time that only he knows. He would call Mongoose once he was in. At that point I could dismantle everything and go grab a beer.

  But instead of Mongoose, I heard Shotgun blaring in my ear.

  “Hey, Dick—those guys are breaking into the bank. Shit!”

  The next second, the bank alarm began to sound.

  We had reached the most marvelous stage of any operation—the condition known to aficionados as SNAFU. As in Situation Normal: All Fucked Up.

  * * *

  Somewhere on the other side of the Atlantic, Shunt and his assistant were hunched over a pair of computers, attempting to connect with the mainframe I was kneeling in front of. According to our plan, he would get into the system—his little doohickeys made the computer think he was a diagnostic routine—and once there, call and tell me I could shut everything down.

  Apparently, his coding wasn’t as perfect as he thought.

  “Shotgun, pack up,” I said over the radio.

  “I’m ready to go.”

  “Dick, I don’t like the looks of this,” warned Mongoose. “You better get out of there.”

  “In a minute. You hear from Shunt?”

  “Negative. I hear police cars.”

  “Stand by.”

  I pulled out my sat phone and quick-dialed Shunt. It probably only took a second or two to connect, but it certainly felt like forever.

  “I’m working on it,” said Shunt, answering.

  “I have two idiot bank robbers downstairs, and cops on the way,” I told him. “Make it work now.”

  He answered with a string of curses, echoing my unvoiced thoughts. Then he was quiet. “Try the backup address switcher,” he said finally. “Then go back and move the dip switch forward.”

  “What the hell are you talking about, Shunt?”

  He walked me through the changes, which involved putting the doohickey into a new slot on the same card, then moving a small switch on the board. One of those changes—or maybe the swearing—did something—lights began flickering madly inside the machine.

  “Dick, the police are out front,” warned Mongoose.