Overkill pr-1

by James Barrington

  ‘Oh yes?’ Richter said.

  ‘Modin told you that the satellite could disarm the weapons, temporarily or permanently. All we have to do is hack our way into the Krutaya computer, convince it that we’re an authorized user, and then instruct it to permanently disable all the weapons.’

  They all looked at him. ‘And how easy is that going to be?’ Simpson asked.

  ‘If the Russian programmers were any good,’ Baker replied, ‘it’ll be sodding difficult. Finding the computer’s telephone number is the easy bit – one of my computers is doing that now, which is why I’ve got the time to sit here and explain it all to you. The problem is the username and password.’

  ‘And how do you get them?’ Richter asked.

  ‘Well, the system itself may help us. A lot of very powerful computer networks actually provide help screens so that a new user can work out how to use the system. I think it’s unlikely, at best, that the Krutaya computer will have a facility like that. Assuming that it hasn’t, we’re back to trial and error – we just try every username and password that we can think of. That’s standard practice for computer hackers. There are a few tricks of the trade that we can try, but unlike most hackers we do have one big advantage – we know a lot of the names associated with this project. Modin, Bykov, Trushenko and so on. One of the almost infallible rules of computer science is that if you tell anyone to think of a password, they invariably use a name or a date or a place known to them. All we have to do is find which name, date or place they selected. And that,’ he added, looking across at Richter, ‘is where you come in.’

  10 Downing Street, London

  ‘I understand what you are saying, Mr Prime Minister,’ Mikhail Viktorovich Sharov, the Russian Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary to the Court of St James, said, somewhat petulantly, ‘but the whole tale sounds to me like a work of fiction. Certainly I have no knowledge of any of the matters you have talked about.’

  Sharov had been summoned, peremptorily, from his official residence at Harrington House in Kensington Palace Gardens, and was not in the best of tempers. His mood was matched by that of the Prime Minister, who had concluded an interview with Sir Michael Geraghty, the Secret Intelligence Service chief, some fifty minutes earlier.

  ‘This is not fiction, Mr Ambassador,’ the Prime Minister said, his voice hard and cold, ‘this is fact. The proof was found in the back of a Russian lorry we had stopped in France. We can show you the device itself, if you wish, together with photographs of the alleged Russian diplomats who were accompanying it.’

  ‘Photographs can be faked,’ Sharov said, with a faint smile.

  ‘Of course they can,’ the Prime Minister snapped, ‘but the nuclear device cannot.’

  Sharov shook his head. ‘A deception operation, Mr Prime Minister,’ he said. ‘It is a crude ploy by the American CIA to discredit us.’

  The Englishman leaned forward. ‘It would have to have been a very clever deception operation by the Americans, Mr Ambassador, to have also planted an identical nuclear weapon in the locked hold of a Russian cargo ship.’

  Sharov looked shocked. ‘What Russian cargo ship?’

  ‘The Anton Kirov, Mr Ambassador, which we seized in Gibraltar Harbour a few hours ago. This weapon was to be detonated at Gibraltar as a demonstration of the power of these new nuclear devices your scientists have developed, and to encourage the rest of Europe to fall into line.’ The Prime Minister lowered his voice. ‘You may also be interested to learn that we disarmed this weapon a matter of seconds before an attempt was made to detonate it.’ He paused, and looked straight into Sharov’s eyes. ‘If the weapon had been successfully detonated,’ he said, ‘we believe that virtually the entire population of Gibraltar, and most of the Spanish living in La Linea and Algeciras, would have been annihilated.

  ‘What you should also know,’ the Prime Minister went on, his voice like steel, ‘is that these deaths – these needless deaths of completely innocent people – would not have been the last. Most of the population of Moscow, St Petersburg and Gor’kiy would have shared their fate within minutes.’

  ‘I am not certain I follow you, Mr Prime Minister,’ Sharov said.

  ‘It’s quite simple, Mr Ambassador,’ the Prime Minister said, a slight, and completely mirthless, smile on his face. ‘I have issued most specific orders to my nuclear commanders. The moment any nuclear weapon is detonated anywhere in Europe, the entire ballistic missile inventory of the two British nuclear submarines – Vanguard and Victorious – will be launched without delay and without warning.’

  ‘You cannot do that, Mr Prime Minister,’ Sharov said, rising to his feet, red-faced and almost shouting.

  ‘I can, and I have. I suggest that you convey this information to your masters in Moscow immediately. You can also tell them that all the Trident missiles in both submarines have been re-targeted. No military installations have been included, only Moscow, St Petersburg and Gor’kiy. We are aiming for the total destruction of these three cities and the maximum possible loss of life.’ There was a short, appalled silence before the Prime Minister continued. ‘Your masters should also be informed that both these submarines have been ordered to patrol areas very close to the coast of the Confederation of Independent States. The missile flight time, I have been told, will only be a few minutes, perhaps five minutes at the most.

  ‘You have my most solemn assurance,’ the Englishman added, ‘that the three principal cities in Russia will cease to exist no later than ten minutes after any of the devices your agents have planted in Europe is detonated. Russia,’ he concluded, ‘is not the only country that can play at nuclear blackmail.’

  Hammersmith, London

  Richter had never been into the Computer Suite before, and Baker gave him a swift guided tour. ‘You noticed the door as you came in?’ he asked.

  ‘Not particularly,’ Richter replied.

  ‘It’s sheathed with copper,’ Baker said, ‘with bonding strips on the hinge side to ensure a good contact. The entire room – walls, floor and ceiling – are also lined with copper. Basically, you’re inside a huge Faraday Cage.’

  ‘I read Classics,’ Richter said. ‘What exactly is a Faraday Cage?’

  Baker looked at him with something approaching despair. ‘In simple terms—’

  ‘They’re the best kind,’ Richter murmured.

  ‘In simple terms, it’s an electronic shield. It stops any of the emanations from the computers being detected outside the building – in fact, outside this suite. We’re going to sheath the entire building later this year, and then every office will be fitted with its own terminal.’ He paused. ‘Have you ever heard of TEMPEST?’

  ‘No,’ Richter replied.

  ‘OK, it’s a programme initiated by the Pentagon in the 1980s which covered electronic products used by government and defence agencies. It specifies things like radio frequency shielding, power-filtering on lines and so on. It’s now been adopted by most other Western nations, and it’s been fully implemented here.’

  They walked through double doors into a very large room. The noise struck Richter first – a quiet, but quite distinct humming and chattering sound – and then Baker moved his arm in an expansive gesture. ‘This,’ he said, ‘is my baby.’

  Richter looked at the machine. Tall, dark blue cabinets, flashing red lights. It was huge, and he’d never seen anything like it before. ‘What is it?’ he asked.

  Baker gave a very poor imitation of Clint Eastwood playing Dirty Harry. ‘This is the most powerful supercomputer in the world,’ he said. ‘This is a Cray–2.’

  ‘OK,’ Richter said. ‘I’m impressed. What’s a Cray–2?’

  His ignorance was beginning to tell on Baker, and he shook his head sadly. ‘In the 1950s,’ he said, ‘an American computer expert called Seymour Cray designed the world’s first super-computer, which he called the Cray–1, and in 1976 he sold the first machine to a production plant in Chippewa Falls, Minnesota. The Cray–1 occupied only seventy
square feet of floor space, but it weighed over five tons and contained two hundred thousand integrated circuits, nearly three and a half thousand printed circuit boards and sixty miles of wire. But what made the Cray–1 different from every other computer available then was its speed. It ran over one hundred times faster than the quickest IBM machine, and performed its calculations at the rate of two hundred and fifty mips.’

  ‘Hold it,’ Richter said. ‘You’re starting to lose me – again. What’s a mip?’

  ‘There’s no singular form – it’s a plural acronym that stands for a Million Instructions Per Second. To put that into everyday terms, that means the Cray–1 could transfer about three hundred and twenty million words – that’s the text of about two and a half thousand average-size novels – every second. And that,’ he added, ‘was back in 1976.’

  ‘I am impressed,’ Richter said, and this time he actually was.

  ‘You should be. But this machine is the next generation. The Cray–2 operates at three thousand mips – that’s twelve times faster than the Cray–1. You need government – American government – approval to order one, and it costs a bloody fortune to buy, but it’s the best there is, and it’s the only machine capable of doing some jobs.’

  ‘What do you do with it?’

  Baker looked somewhat sly. ‘I’m not allowed to tell you the specifics,’ he said, ‘but I can say that we work in conjunction with GCHQ and SIS doing data processing.’

  ‘OK,’ Richter said. He felt they had drifted somewhat from the matter at hand. ‘The Krutaya computer?’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ Baker said. ‘Follow me.’ He led the way through the main room and into a small office. It had a large desk, two upright chairs and a couple of armchairs. On the desk was another computer.

  ‘Is this a terminal attached to the Cray?’ Richter asked.

  Baker looked slightly surprised. ‘No,’ he said. ‘This is a pretty standard PC – personal computer. You can buy one of these in Dixons. We can’t use the Cray for this job. We’re limited by hardware considerations, and I’ll explain that a bit later. We’re also restricted in what outside links we are allowed to make with the Cray, for security reasons. Any hostile intelligence service would just love to tap into the Cray’s data banks, which is why we’ve got it hard-wired to only three other computers.’

  Richter could see why some people thought Baker was a computer nerd. ‘You mentioned outside links and hardware problems. Can you translate that into English for me?’

  ‘Certainly,’ Baker replied. ‘What this computer is doing is looking for another computer in Russia. The outside links are the telephone lines it’s using, and the hardware considerations are principally the speed of data transfer down those lines. The Cray is simply too fast and too powerful for this kind of work. The slowest part of the system is the telephone line. It’s designed to carry analogue signals – the human voice – not data.

  ‘The other problem is external noise,’ he went on, ‘the pops and crackles that you hear on most telephone lines. That can corrupt the data stream, which means that computers talk to each other using packets of data. Instead of sending an entire data file, the calling computer sends a packet of data and at the end of it a thing called a checksum. A checksum is a number that corresponds to the amount of data transmitted; the receiving computer adds up the units of data and calculates its own checksum. If that is the same as that sent by the first computer, it sends a message approving the transfer of the next data packet. If it isn’t, then it asks for the previous packet of data to be sent again. That’s the simplest method – there are a lot of much more sophisticated error-detecting protocols that can be used. All this, of course, is done by the computers – the operator is unaware that it’s going on at all, but you can see how it slows data transfer down, especially on noisy lines.’

  That more or less made sense to Richter. He looked at the computer screen. The background was blue, and there were three headings in red across the top – ‘Code’, ‘Number’ and ‘Description’. White numbers were appearing in a vertical row below the ‘Code’ and ‘Number’ headings, about one every five to ten seconds, and immediately before the next number appeared, a line of text was generated under the ‘Description’ heading on the line above. ‘What’s it doing?’ Richter asked.

  Baker sighed. ‘I’ve already explained that it’s looking for another computer in Russia.’

  ‘I know that. I meant how, exactly, is it doing that?’

  ‘Ah, that’s the clever bit.’

  ‘I was afraid it would be,’ Richter said, and sat down.

  ‘It’s running an auto-dialler program,’ Baker replied. ‘It’s trying every possible telephone number within the Komi district of Russia.’

  ‘That could take days,’ Richter said.

  ‘It’s been running for several hours – since about an hour after you talked to General Modin, in fact,’ Baker said. ‘Actually it’s not taking as long as I had calculated. The Komi district is pretty sparsely populated. A lot of it is swamp and the foothills of the Urals intrude to the east. About the only sizeable towns are Ukhta and Syktyvkar, and don’t forget that telephones in Russia – especially rural Russia, which is most of it – are still pretty rare, so a high proportion of the possible numbers don’t even exist.’

  ‘What does it do when a number answers?’

  ‘It listens,’ Baker said. ‘If it hears a voice, the computer breaks the connection and dials the next number in the sequence. If nobody answers after twenty seconds, or if it hears a fax tone – rarer still in Komi – it breaks the connection, but if it detects a modem, it logs the number for future action, and then breaks the connection.’

  Light was slowly dawning. ‘Isn’t it a risk,’ Richter asked, ‘using a computer based here at FOE?’

  Baker smiled happily. ‘I was hoping you’d ask that, because it means you’ve been listening to what I’ve been saying. The answer is yes, it would be, if we were using this computer.’

  ‘You’ve lost me again.’

  ‘That’s the really clever bit. What I’ve done is establish communications with a computer in our Embassy in Moscow – not in the Holy of Holies, of course. That computer in Moscow,’ Baker went on, ‘is actually making the calls. If anyone runs a back-trace down the line, Moscow is where the trail will stop.’ A bell rang somewhere, and Baker excused himself to answer it. He returned pushing a small trolley covered with the files Richter had ordered from the Registry. He had requested all the files FOE held having any connection with the Komi district, personnel files on known senior officers in the SVR and GRU, including Bykov and Modin, and on previous KGB and GRU operations. According to Baker, popular passwords in the Royal Navy include famous naval victories, like Trafalgar and Taranto, and Russian officers might well feel the same about past triumphs.

  What appalled Richter was the size of the pile, but he sat down and started working his way through it.

  Kutuzovskij prospekt, Moscow

  The two cars parked directly outside the apartment building and seven men got out. They stood for a few moments in a group on the pavement, then entered the building together.

  Genady Arkenko hadn’t seen them arrive, but he heard them outside the apartment, just before they kicked down the door. His last act as a faithful friend and devoted lover of Dmitri Trushenko was to press the speed-dial code for Trushenko’s mobile number and leave the phone off the hook and out of sight. That way, Arkenko hoped, Trushenko would hear what happened.

  Hammersmith, London

  Four minutes later, the computer emitted a single peremptory ‘beep’ and the numbers stopped appearing. Baker put down his mug of coffee and sat in front of the screen. ‘Let’s see what we’ve got.’ He pressed a couple of keys and the screen display changed. The legend ‘Autodial Record’ appeared at the top, and under it the headings ‘Number’ and ‘Identification if known’. There were fifteen numbers listed.

  ‘Only fifteen?’ Richter asked.

  �
�It’s about what I expected,’ Baker said, and pointed at the right-hand column. ‘Eight of these numbers have already been identified by the computer as belonging to the LPAR site at Pechora. As soon as a modem tone is detected, a sub-routine on the program accesses a database of known numbers and attempts a match. If it finds one, it displays the identification.’

  ‘So there are seven unknown computers in the area?’

  ‘Possibly,’ said Baker. ‘If you look at the numbers, we can probably eliminate one, because it’s only two digits different from one of the known numbers at Pechora. I think we’ve only got six to try.’ He pressed a key and the list appeared on a sheet of paper in the output tray of the laser printer sitting next to the computer.

  ‘How will you know when you’ve got the right computer?’ Richter asked.

  ‘We’ll know,’ Baker said, ‘because it won’t want to let us in.’

  Razdolnoye, Krym (Crimea)

  Dmitri Trushenko answered the phone immediately. He had been watching the television, expecting news of the explosion at Gibraltar, and he had become increasingly agitated when he had heard nothing. He had logged on again to the weapon control system through his computer, but that had only confirmed that the firing signal had been sent by the mainframe and presumably, therefore, received by the weapon, not that detonation had actually occurred. ‘Yes, Genady?’ he said into the mouthpiece.

  He heard no voice, just a splintering sound, then heavy footsteps, loud but indistinct voices, the sound of blows and then a single piercing wail of pain, abruptly silenced. He listened intently, trying to make sense of the noises. Finally, there was nothing but the sound of breathing, and then a click as the telephone handset was replaced on its cradle. Trushenko knew that the caller had to have been Genady, and that meant that his lover had been taken by the SVR. It also meant that the SVR had discovered his communications link and that, in turn, meant that Podstava was blown.