Understrike

by James Barrington

  ‘Until they found me.’

  ‘Yes, until they found you, but we sorted that out, no problem.’

  ‘Not for us, maybe, but your two friends are still here on the island.’

  ‘Believe me, they can take care of themselves, whatever happens.’

  The taxi sped along the road that paralleled the southern edge of the inlet on which Longyearbyen was situated, the grey-green white-topped waves clearly visible on the right-hand side. A sudden burst of high-speed Norwegian crackled out of the speaker below the microphone with its dangling cord on the dashboard, and the driver immediately began slowing down.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Richter asked.

  ‘I have been told to return to Longyearbyen,’ the man said. ‘The police have told me—’

  ‘And I reckon that’s the wrong answer,’ Barber said from the back seat.

  He raised the Smith & Wesson 500 revolver and rested the end of the barrel on the driver’s shoulder, and then very deliberately pulled back the hammer to cock the pistol. The Model 500 can be fired single or double action, but the psychological effect of pulling back the hammer for single action use is difficult to over-emphasize. The click as the hammer locked into place sounded almost deafening as the road noise diminished, and when the driver glanced quickly to his right he was staring virtually straight down the barrel. At such close range, it probably looked like the entrance to a tunnel.

  ‘I think you’ll find it would be better if you dropped us off at the harbour before you returned to Longyearbyen,’ Richter said mildly. ‘We are in a tiny bit of a hurry.’

  The driver swallowed nervously, pressed down on the accelerator pedal, and changed up a gear as the car again built up speed. Richter could see his glance flickering between the road ahead and the gaping muzzle of the Smith, but he didn’t say anything else, and less than two minutes later the taxi stopped a few yards away from the gangway that gave access to the after deck of the RV (Research Vessel) Thomas G Thompson.

  ‘Thank you,’ Richter said politely, and passed the driver a €50 note, far more than the normal taxi fare would have been, but more than worth it in the circumstances.

  Now with Barber leading the way, his pistol holstered and his CIA identification displayed in his left hand, the three men strode quickly towards the gangway. Richter, at the rear, walked backwards for a couple of steps as the taxi driver gunned the engine and accelerated hard back down the road the way they had come. He was checking for any sign of hostile activity, but saw nothing and no one.

  The gangway sentry, a young seaman, had clearly been briefed to expect them. In fact, he’d clearly been briefed to expect a party of three males and one female, and the first question he asked was predictable.

  ‘We were expecting a lady as well, sir,’ he said. ‘Has she been delayed?’

  ‘You could say that,’ Barber replied, ‘and she won’t be coming with us. We need to get out of here soonest. Where’s your captain?’

  ‘He’s on the bridge, sir. Go forward and start to climb when you see the staircase.’

  The sentry picked up an intercom unit, and even as Barber, Pavlov and Richter were making their way forward, other seamen appeared on deck and prepared to manhandle the gangway back on board, while two others ran onto the quayside and started to free the mooring ropes that held the vessel in place. Normally, this would be done by harbour-side workers after the gangway had been removed, but the circumstances were not exactly normal, and clearly the captain had issued alternative instructions.

  By the time the three men reached the bridge, the seamen were all back on board and the ship was already moving slowly away from the quayside, which still appeared to be devoid of all life.

  The bridge door was locked and had to be opened from the inside, a security precaution applied on almost every ship, but a moment after Barber pressed the buzzer, the door opened and a uniformed officer with a neatly trimmed white beard looked at them enquiringly. To Richter’s English eyes, he bore more than a passing resemblance to the fictional Captain Birdseye, the well-known advertising mascot for the Birds Eye range of frozen foods.

  ‘I’m Captain Richard Wemyss and you must be our passengers, yes?’ he asked. ‘But I thought there were supposed to be four of you?’

  ‘There were, Captain,’ Barber said, again proffering his identification, ‘but we ran into a bit of trouble a few minutes ago and that changed everything. My name’s Steve Barber; this is Dmitri Pavlov, the guy we came here to collect, and that’s Paul Richter. He’s English, and he shouldn’t really be here at all. He was kind of recruited as an extra member of our team, and right now I don’t know what we’re going to do with him.’

  ‘I’m sure you’ll think of something, Steve,’ Richter said. ‘Thanks for getting underway so quickly, Captain. We really appreciate it.’

  ‘No problem,’ Wemyss said. ‘We’ve had the main engines running ever since we arrived, just in case we needed to slip and proceed in a bit of a hurry. Unless there’s anything else you need to tell me right now, if you go back down the staircase you’ll find a mess there where you can get something to eat and drink, and your accommodation is down there as well. Just ask someone and they’ll show you where. Do that first, and please make sure your weapons are unloaded and stowed securely in your cabins, with the doors locked,’ he added, glancing at the rifle case Barber still had slung over his shoulder.

  ‘There is one thing,’ Barber said. ‘You may receive a signal or a radio message telling you to return to the harbour at Longyearbyen. We’d appreciate it if you took no notice of anything like that.’

  Wemyss bristled slightly.

  ‘This ship may be full of civilian scientists and computer systems, and be operated by the University of Washington, but it’s owned by the US Navy. It takes an American admiral to tell me what to do. I’m not even going to bother listening to what some Norwegian civil servant says to me.’

  ‘And I think that’s probably one reason why Walter Burdiss wanted to use this vessel to get away from Svalbard,’ Barber said, as the three men made their way back down the staircase.

  While Richter and Pavlov found their cabins – a line of three, all with twin bunks in anticipation of three men and a woman occupying them – Barber walked back onto the open deck of the ship with his rifle, just in case the Russians had managed to commandeer a car or taxi and get down to the harbour. He opened the case, pulled out his Savage and chambered a round, then just stood beside the superstructure and waited. As the ship moved steadily away, a car did approach the jetty and come to a stop, but by that time the vessel was well out of pistol range, and whoever was inside the vehicle showed no hostile intent at all. It was entirely possible it was just a resident of the town who decided to drive down to have a look at the American ship, and nothing to do with the Russians. But if it was a member of the Spetsnaz team, he obviously recognized a fait accompli when he saw one.

  When the ship was approaching half a mile from the jetty, Barber unloaded the Savage, replaced it in the case and headed back into the accommodation section.

  ‘No problem?’ Richter asked, as Barber walked past the open door of the cabin he had selected.

  ‘No problem,’ Barber echoed, and took the third cabin in the line.

  Richter had already unloaded the pistols he was carrying, and Barber did the same with his weapons. Then they locked their cabin doors and all three walked back to the mess. There, they grabbed some coffee and snacks and then sat down at a table in one corner of the room. Nobody else was there at that moment.

  ‘You’re quite safe now, Dmitri,’ Richter said in Russian. ‘This is an American Navy vessel, though it’s not a warship, and you’re just as safe here as you would be somewhere in mainland America, perhaps even safer because it’s a closed environment. Now, who are we? This is Steve Barber, who’s from the CIA, and my name is Paul Richter. I’m English, and I work for one of the British intelligence organizations. There’s no point in telling you which one, be
cause I doubt if you’ve ever heard of it. Steve here doesn’t speak Russian, as far as I know, so are you happy to continue our conversation in English?’

  ‘Of course,’ Pavlov replied, switching languages immediately, ‘but first there’s something I want to do.’ He stood up, gave a short bow from the waist towards Barber, and then repeated the gesture towards Richter, before extending his hand to each man in turn. ‘Before we say anything else, and before I tell you what I know and what I suspect, I want to thank you both for saving my life.

  ‘But in fact,’ he added after a moment, ‘my life is completely unimportant. But if you act on the information that I have obtained, you might save millions of innocent lives and your country, Mr Barber, from certain ruin.’

  Chapter 24

  Friday

  Hammersmith, London

  ‘He said what?’ Richard Simpson barked into the telephone. He listened for a few seconds, then interrupted his caller. ‘I’m not interested in your opinion. Take whatever you’ve got down to Baker. Tell him what you’ve been trying to tell me, and then tell Baker to come up here and explain everything to me.’

  He listened again for a few seconds, drumming his fingers on his desk, then shook his head.

  ‘What? Of course I mean Baker in IT. Who the bloody hell did you think I meant – the bloke down at the end of the road who bakes French sticks tough enough to build a shed with? Get a bloody grip, for Christ’s sake.’

  Simpson was still muttering imprecations when he put the phone down, and his mood hadn’t improved that much when James Baker knocked on his door a little over 20 minutes later.

  ‘Right,’ he said when the organization’s resident computer and communications expert was sitting in front of his desk, a sheaf of paper clutched in his hand, ‘I don’t expect you to do your usual trick of trying to baffle me with bullshit until my ears start to bleed. Words of one syllable are best. Two or three syllables I can cope with, but anything more than that you can keep to yourself. In simple terms, I want to know two things. First, have our communications and security systems been compromised? And, second, how has this intruder managed to send that message? And what the hell is he talking about?’

  For a very brief period of time, probably something under a nanosecond, Baker toyed with the idea of pointing out to Simpson that he’d actually just asked three questions, not two, but then his highly developed sense of self-preservation overrode any instructions he was likely to send to his mouth. Instead, he mentally reviewed the information he had been given and came up with the only answer that at that moment seemed to him to make any kind of sense.

  ‘It’s Richter, sir,’ he said.

  ‘I might have bloody guessed,’ Simpson muttered. ‘Right, tell me the tale.’

  ‘We use a lot of different communication systems in this building, sir,’ Baker began. ‘In the old days it was all encrypted radio traffic, but today we rely more on hard-wired data links to exchange information, like those we have with GCHQ, MI5 and SIS, but obviously our people in the field need to be able to contact us, and we need to be able to contact them. And so that we don’t stand out from the crowd, our agents use the same technology as everybody else, namely mobile phones, laptops, tablets, emails and the Internet. But the differences are that the mobile phones we issue include scrambling circuits and other encryption protocols, we have encryption and decryption routines built into the laptops we use, and on the Internet we use the Deep Web or the Dark Web, or whatever you want to call the millions of unindexed sites that are out there.’

  Baker looked at Simpson, but so far he hadn’t fallen asleep, his eyes hadn’t glazed over, and he still seemed to be paying attention, so he continued.

  ‘So the first thing to be aware of, sir, is that this apparent breach of security is in fact nothing of the sort. None of our communications systems have been attacked, never mind breached, and our encryption protocols are completely unaffected.’

  ‘But this person sent us a message,’ Simpson insisted, ‘and what’s Richter got to do with this?’

  ‘I’m just coming to that. As long as our agents and operatives in the field have access to their mobile phones and laptops, there are no communication problems. But when the system was commissioned, we realized that there might be circumstances where those standard communication methods and devices might not be available for one reason or another. They could break, or be lost or destroyed, or be taken from the agent by enemy action, rendering him incommunicado. So we devised a back-up method, intended for emergency communication to us from an operative in the field using the Deep Web.

  ‘Each of our people was given an ECS, an emergency contact site, an individual Deep Web address that they memorized. The page that they would see if they went to that address was simply a blank message form, in which they would write whatever information it was that they were trying to pass to us. One they’d completed the message form, all they had to do was tick a box and the completed message would automatically be scrambled and sent here. It was intended to be a kind of secure email system that didn’t rely on encryption and decryption routines built into laptops or any special hardware. Any computer can access the Deep Web, as long as you know the address that you want, so as long as one of our operatives could sit in front of a computer in a cyber café or a private house or anywhere else, or even use a regular mobile phone or tablet, he had a guaranteed means of getting in touch with us and either passing on information we needed or requesting a particular kind of help. And we would know which operative it was because each Deep Web message site was allocated to a single individual.’

  ‘So what went wrong this time?’ Simpson asked. He was suddenly acutely aware that when he had dispatched Richter to Svalbard, he had specifically instructed him not to take his modified mobile or laptop, but just regular, off-the-shelf units, so that he could play the part of a simple wandering tourist more convincingly. Wandering tourists do not normally carry mobile phones equipped with scrambling circuits.

  ‘Nothing. That’s the point.’

  ‘So who is this—’ Simpson looked at a piece of paper on his desk and then read out the letters written on it one at a time ‘—KBHYOKDOIVNGKRAU person? I assume that’s a codename, because I certainly can’t pronounce it.’

  ‘It is,’ Baker agreed, ‘and a very simple one. It’s almost plaintext, in fact.’

  ‘And you’ll explain that to me, will you, because I don’t see it? When you get around to it, I mean?’

  ‘Yes, sir. Of course.’

  ‘And Richter?’ Simpson asked.

  ‘He has to be involved, because the message came from his Deep Web ECS, although he didn’t send it.’

  ‘You mean he compromised the system?’ Simpson already knew the answer to this question, but with anything to do with operational security he always insisted on making sure that every ‘i’ was dotted and every ‘t’ was crossed.

  ‘No, sir,’ Baker said patiently. ‘That’s the point. The ECS system is strictly one-way. People can send us messages and that’s all. They don’t even know what address their message is being sent to, because that’s all handled by the system software. There is no way of gaining access to any part of our communications system by using the ECS.’

  ‘Not even if they send a virus or worm or something in the message?’

  Simpson’s pretended ignorance about all things electronic was only a veneer. He was actually extremely well informed and knowledgeable about all aspects of the organization he led, including its procedures and especially its security protocols.

  Baker shook his head.

  ‘The ECS will only allow the input of plaintext, and does not even permit the use of special characters or different fonts. No attachments are allowed, and every message is automatically scanned by a suite of virus and malware checkers before it is sent to us. If anything suspicious is detected, it is stripped out immediately. The system is completely safe, and I mean "safe" in a TEMPEST sense.’

  Simpson nodded
. He was very familiar with the TEMPEST specification created by the American NSA – National Security Agency – that covered both methods of espionage relating to electronic emanations and protection against such espionage, commonly known as EMSEC, or emission security. The interior of the building at Hammersmith was classified as a NATO Zone 0 environment, which was probably overkill. That classification implied that a potential attacker or eavesdropper could have almost immediate access and be able to approach within one metre, which would in reality have been extremely difficult or probably impossible. But Simpson had insisted, and accordingly the structure had been designed to meet both the NATO SDIP-27 Level A and American NSTISSAM Level 1 standards.

  The acronym SDIP refers to SECAN Doctrine and Information Publication, and the embedded acronym SECAN refers to the Security and Evaluation Agency. NSTISSAM, or National Security Telecommunications and Information Systems Security Advisory Memoranda, are classified documents produced by the NSA. They’re classified because if you tell your potential enemies what steps you are taking to prevent electronic eavesdropping, it makes it that much easier for those same enemies to work out a way of getting around your precautions.

  TEMPEST itself is thought by some people to stand for Temporary Emanation and Spurious Transmission, but it doesn’t. It’s actually just a now-declassified codeword, hence the use of all capital letters, the normal convention in the military.

  ‘So tell me about the message,’ Simpson instructed.

  ‘The first thing to say is that it’s not very coherent, and I think there’s a good reason for that, which becomes clear when you identify the sender.’

  ‘Just deal with the message first. We’ll look at your interpretation of it later.’

  ‘As you wish. It’s very brief and apparently non-specific. The first thing the sender does is state that the message priority is "FRANTIC". That’s a codeword unique to this organization, as far as I know, and is the highest priority we use. I’ve never seen it in a message before. The equivalent in the military would be "FLASH" and in the old days of operator-connected telephone calls a "Military FLASH" call would require the disconnection of all other calls in progress to put the caller through to the number he requested. The fact that the compiler of this message used the codeword "FRANTIC" means he knows something about this organization.’