by Jeff Edwards
She tugged the shirt down a little lower, trying to make sure her panties were safely out of view. “What time is it?”
Sheldon checked his watch. “Almost three-thirty.”
“In the morning? Three-thirty AM?”
“I’m pretty sure it’s AM,” Sheldon said. “It’s still dark outside. But this is Japan, and the rules may be different here. Maybe the sun doesn’t come up on any particular schedule.”
Ann yawned. “Why …” Her question was interrupted by a second yawn. “… are you waking me up at three-thirty in the freaking morning, Sheldon?”
“You need to get packed,” Sheldon said. “The Navy wants us back.”
Ann yawned a third time. “The Navy wants us back where?”
“Back on the ship,” Sheldon said. “USS Towers. I got a call from corporate about twenty minutes ago. The Navy wants us to do some more work with Mouse. Apparently, Captain Bowie asked for us by name. They’re sending a van to drive us to the Air Force Base at Yakota. We catch a helo flight from there.”
Ann forced her eyes wide enough to stare at Sheldon. He was still standing near the door, illuminated by the bathroom vanity lights. “I’m the tech, she said. Why did corporate call you?”
Sheldon grinned. “They called us both. But you turn your cell phone off at night. I leave mine on. I imagine you’ve got a voicemail on your phone right now.”
Ann rubbed her eyes, and rotated her head to loosen her neck muscles. “What kind of work does the Navy expect us to do?”
“I don’t know,” Sheldon said. “I talked to Rick Kramer from Norton corporate liaison. He couldn’t give details over the phone. Evidently it’s all pretty hush-hush. But Rick did say that it’s going to be dangerous. We have to sign liability waivers and security agreements.”
Ann shook her head. “I’m not at the Navy’s beck and call. They can’t order me to go anywhere. And they certainly can’t order me to intentionally put myself in danger.”
“Nobody’s ordering us,” Sheldon said. “The Navy’s asking for us. They need our help with something.”
He shrugged. “I’m going. There aren’t any flights to the States anyway. Might as well go do some work and earn some hazard pay. It beats sitting around a hotel room the size of a shoebox, watching Japanese game shows.”
“I’m not going,” Ann said. “The Navy can kiss off.”
“Okay,” Sheldon said. “I’ll tell Rick, and they’ll send somebody else.”
“They can’t do that,” Ann snapped. “Mouse is my baby. I did half the fabrication, and I wrote most of the code. Nobody knows that robot like I do.”
“I understand that,” Sheldon said. “But Mouse doesn’t belong to you, Ann. It’s a very expensive prototype that happens to be the property of Norton Deep Water Systems. And Norton has an extremely lucrative contract to build a few hundred Mouse units for the United States Navy. Ann, you know that corporate isn’t going to piss off their numero-uno customer. If the Navy wants a Mouse technician, Norton’s going to send them one. If it’s not you, it’ll be somebody else. But it’s going to happen. You know that.”
He turned back toward the door. “I’ll call Rick, and tell him to get another tech out here.”
Ann sighed. “Alright! I’ll go, damn it! Just get out of here so I can pack and get dressed.”
Sheldon checked his watch again. “The van will be here in about forty minutes. Why don’t we meet in the downstairs coffee shop in half an hour?”
“Okay,” Ann said. “Have some caffeine ready when I get down there. Otherwise, I may have to kill you.”
“Will do.” He reached for the doorknob.
“Sheldon?”
He paused. “Yeah?”
“Did you look at my butt when my back was turned?”
“Ah … no. I thought about it, but it didn’t seem polite.”
Ann threw a pillow at him. “You’re too freaking nice for your own good. Now, get the hell out of my room and let me get dressed.”
Sheldon laughed. “Meet you downstairs.”
* * *
Thirty minutes later, Ann walked through the front door of the coffee shop. The lighted plastic sign by the entrance identified the shop as Hero Coffee Star. The accompanying logo included a bright red Art Deco coffee pot, rendered in the style of a 1950s Flash Gordon rocket ship.
The interior décor of the coffee shop followed the retro-science fiction theme. The walls were airbrushed with cartoon murals of alien lunarscapes, dotted with improbable-looking domed cities in which the buildings all resembled old-school jukeboxes.
Sheldon was seated at a small round table that had been silk-screened to look like the planet Saturn. As promised, he had a cup of coffee waiting on the table in front of Ann’s chair.
He was looking the other way as she approached, and humming a strange little tune—bouncy, but with an odd rhythm.
Ann sat down and started doctoring the coffee with sugar and powdered creamer. “Do you really have to make that much noise this early in the morning?”
“It’s stuck in my head,” Sheldon said. “From a Japanese commercial.”
He hummed the tune again, and used his spoon to gently tap out the notes against the rim of his coffee cup. The musical clink of the metal on porcelain seemed to goad him into song. “Kitty paws,” he sang. “Like Santa Claus, but kitty paws…”
Ann snorted, and had to grab a napkin to keep from spewing coffee. “Kitty paws? What were they advertising?”
Sheldon took his own swallow of coffee. “Have you ever watched Japanese commercials?”
“No.”
“You can never tell what they’re advertising,” Sheldon said. “At least I can’t. They don’t make any sense to me, but a lot of them are pretty funny.”
“I don’t care what language it’s in,” Ann said. “How can you watch a commercial and not know what they’re advertising?”
“The language isn’t the problem,” Sheldon said. “It’s the cultural subtext. The Japanese contextual cues are totally alien to me. They go right over my head.”
Ann snorted again. “That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard.” She set down her coffee cup. “I don’t claim to understand people, but I always know when somebody’s trying to sell me something. Describe this commercial to me, and I’ll tell you what they’re selling.”
Sheldon leaned back in his seat. “Okay … Let’s see … It starts out with a view of the earth, seen from outer space. The camera zooms in closer, until you see the Japanese islands, from great altitude and through cloud cover. Then the camera drops through the clouds, and you’re looking down on a major city—Tokyo, maybe. It zooms in even closer, past the tops of the buildings, and then down to a beautiful little Japanese tea garden, sandwiched between two enormous glass skyscrapers. In the middle of the tea garden is a black European sports sedan. Something really sharp looking. Maybe a Saab. I don’t remember. And draped across the hood of the sports sedan is a tall dark haired woman, European or American, with legs that go on forever. She’s wearing a strapless black evening gown, slit way up the thigh to show plenty of leg, a pair of black stiletto heals, and a little headband with black Cat Woman ears attached. The narrator is talking a mile-a-minute in Japanese, while an off-camera choir of little Japanese girls sing the jingle in English. “Kitty paws … Like Santa Claus, but kitty paws …”
Sheldon sat up, and took another sip of coffee. “Then the camera pulls in tight on the tall woman’s face. She does sort of a sexy-pouty thing with her lips, raises an eyebrow, and says, “the excitement has arrived …”
Sheldon looked at Ann. “So, what do you think they’re selling? Japanese tea gardens? European sports cars? Evening wear and sexy shoes? For all I know, they were selling those little Cat Woman ears.”
Ann glared at him. “You just made that whole thing up. Nobody would shoot a commercial like that.”
“I didn’t make it up,” Sheldon said. “That’s what I’m trying to tell you. Japanese comme
rcials are all like that. They don’t make sense to anybody who wasn’t born into the culture.”
He set down his coffee cup. “When we get back to the States, I’ll find that commercial on the Internet, and download it for you. I’m really not joking.” He laughed, and started singing again. “Kitty paws … Like Santa Claus …”
He chopped off in mid-note. His cell phone was ringing. He flipped it open and held it to his ear. “Sheldon Miggs.”
He listened for a second. “Thanks. We’ll be right out.”
Sheldon closed his phone, and took a final gulp of coffee. “Grab your bags. The excitement has arrived. In this particular case, the excitement takes the form of a U.S. Air Force van, with a government-issue driver.”
He pushed back his chair and stood up. “How about it, Cat Woman? Ready to go rescue mankind from certain destruction?”
CHAPTER 34
ICE PACK - EASTERN SEA OF OKHOTSK
LATITUDE 55.18N / LONGITUDE 154.17E
MONDAY; 04 MARCH
0614 hours (6:14 AM)
TIME ZONE +11 ‘LIMA’
The titanium cylinder hung suspended in the water 100 meters below the ice, at the end of a Kevlar-jacketed cable. The cylinder was anodized in a flat gray color, the precise shade of which had been calculated by marine biologists to resemble neither food, nor predator. The protective Kevlar cable jacket had been molded in the exact same color, for the same reason.
The sea creatures inhabiting the strange twilight world beneath the ice pack were ravenously hungry, and the more predatory species guarded their territories with jealousy. Although the Kevlar and titanium were tough enough to resist easy damage, it was important that they not invite attacks by any fish or mammal that might mistake them for an enemy, or for an easy meal.
This last was particularly critical, because the titanium cylinder was an acoustic transducer. It transmitted and received audio signals underwater, and those signals were modulated to closely simulate the noises produced by the shrimp-like krill that lived under the ice pack in teaming schools.
When it was broadcasting, the transducer made the same frying bacon hiss produced by swarms of krill as they fed on ice-algae and phytoplankton. Because the krill themselves were a major source of nutrition for many of the fish and sea creatures living in the water beneath the ice pack, that meant that the transducer’s signals sounded like food. And—the durability of titanium and Kevlar aside—a piece of equipment that sounds like food, should not look like food as well. The carefully non-food coloring of the cable and transducer had been selected with this in mind.
Apart from the obvious drawbacks inherent in making sounds like an easy meal, the feeding noise of the krill was nearly perfect for masking a digital audio signal. The crackling hiss was rich with white noise, a jumble of high and low frequencies into which binary information could be encoded with ease.
The advantages of this were twofold. It would be nearly impossible for an outside listener to decode the digital messages without the proper encryption/decryption algorithm. But more importantly, the sound of feeding krill occurred naturally in the waters under the ice pack. If an acoustic surveillance sensor happened to intercept a transmission, the sound would be classified as typical ambient noise made by local sea life. No sensor operator or acoustic analyst in the world would recognize it as a manmade communications signal. For all practical purposes, that made the system invisible to anyone who did not already know of its existence.
The encryption/decryption algorithm at the heart of this covert transponder system had been programmed by a pair of graduate students from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Perhaps one or both of the students had eventually grown to suspect that their enigmatic employer did not really represent an eco-friendly alternative energy firm, as he had claimed. Perhaps the young programmers had also guessed that the true purpose of the software had nothing to do with bio-density surveys. But any misgivings the two students might have felt were now moot. Both men had been killed within hours of delivering the final version of their software.
Detectives from the Cambridge Police Department were investigating both deaths, but had failed to turn up evidence of a connection between the cases. One of the students had slipped in a hotel shower and cracked his skull. The other had been killed by a hit-and-run driver. The circumstances of the cases were quite different, and both deaths appeared to be accidental. Even so, the police found it exceedingly suspicious that two students from the same department at MIT had died on the same afternoon.
At various points in the investigation, the homicide detectives considered and discarded a long list of possible suspects, including friends of the victims, fellow students, known enemies, relatives, girlfriends, possible romantic rivals, and several smalltime drug dealers known to ply their wares near the MIT campus.
The drug angle was a stretch. Neither of the victims were known users, and the toxicology screens from their autopsies showed no traces of any controlled substances. The dealers had been added to the list when the detectives realized that they’d run out of suspects. With two college-age men dead under suspicious circumstances, it was possible that drugs were somehow involved, and no one seemed to have any alternative leads.
But the suspicions of the police—whatever they might have been—did not involve trained assassins from the Chinese military, nor covert under-ice communications systems, nor hijacked Russian nuclear submarines. Which meant that the Cambridge police had no chance of actually figuring out who had murdered their two students, or why.
* * *
A little over 4,600 nautical miles northwest of Cambridge, Massachusetts, the motive for the MIT murders was gliding quietly through the frigid waters beneath the Siberian ice pack. Submarine K-506 had been built as part of the Soviet Union’s Project 667BDR construction program: the Kal’mar class—what the NATO countries called the Delta III class.
Although the submarine was more than three decades old, and much noisier than current generations of missile subs, it was still quiet enough to escape detection at low speeds. So it moved slowly and deliberately, creeping through the dark waters under the ice at less than four kilometers per hour—just enough speed to keep water moving across the rudders and stern planes, for steering and depth control.
At a range of one kilometer from the designated coordinates, the submarine’s Burya underwater communications system began transmitting an acoustic signal into the water. The signal sounded nothing like an ordinary Burya transmission. The equipment had been modified to broadcast and receive only the crackling and hissing signal that so closely mimicked the feeding noises of the under ice krill.
The signal was received by the cylindrical titanium transducer. Thin wafers of piezoelectric crystal within the transducer resonated in time with the vibrations of the sound waves. The tiny stresses created by these vibrations caused the crystal wafers to alternately contract and expand. The fluctuations were nearly microscopic in scale, but each deformation of the piezoelectric crystals generated a minute pulse of electricity.
The technology had been invented for quartz movement wristwatches, but it worked equally well in this application. Each electrical pulse was channeled into a transistor, where it was amplified for better examination. The amplified pulses were then routed to a binary discriminator circuit, where they were converted to digital ones, or digital zeroes, depending upon their strength and polarity.
The stream of digital pulses from the discriminator circuit passed through a splitter bus, and then a short length of ribbon cable, to reach a microprocessor configured as a binary parser.
The parser stripped out ambient ocean sounds and the masking junk information that had been woven into the acoustic signal to disguise it as random biological noise. The output of the parser was a complete and coherent digital message, rendered in perfectly-legible binary code.
The digital message shot up the fiber-optic wires at the core of the Kevlar cable, and followed the cable through the thick i
ce layer, to another microprocessor, sheltered in an insulated protective housing under a few centimeters of concealing ice and snow.
The second microprocessor examined the contents of the digital signal, to determine whether or not it contained a destruct command. If a destruct command had been present, the microprocessor was programmed to detonate an array of shaped explosive charges drilled into the ice in a circular perimeter.
No destruct signal was present, and the explosives were not triggered.
The microprocessor reverted to its secondary program, encrypting the digital signal to protect its contents. When the encryption process was complete, the computer immediate re-encrypted the signal, using an entirely different code scheme. The double-encrypted block of digital code was uploaded to the outgoing message queue of a satellite phone within the same insulated enclosure.
On command, the phone dialed a pre-programmed telephone number, accessing a commercial communications satellite network. When the connection protocols were synchronized, the hidden telephone unit transmitted its waiting message to a ComStar IV series satellite in standard commercial orbit.
The satellite phone account was legitimate, one of many commercial accounts opened for this specific purpose. The registered account owner was a dummy corporation in Spain, again one of many established solely for this operation. But the bills were paid on time, and the account had never been flagged for suspected misconduct.
Other than an automated notation to charge the call against the user’s account, no human or machine in the telecommunications industry paid any attention whatsoever to the call. It was a routine commercial transaction. The message from K-506 joined the flow of ordinary daily phone traffic, and no one was any the wiser.
When the call was completed, the satellite phone kept the connection open, and transmitted the access code for its voicemail box. There was one waiting message, which the satellite phone downloaded, before terminating the call.
