Overkill pr-1

by James Barrington

  He sat for a few minutes, his eyes filling with tears at the thought of dear, gentle Genady. Then he made a decision. Genady Arkenko had been his lover for nearly forty years – longer than most marriages – and someone was going pay for what he was suffering. He would not fail him.

  Trushenko walked across to the table, sat down and switched on his computer. He connected the telephone lead, loaded the communications software, auto-dialled the number through the modem and his mobile telephone and logged on to the distant mainframe.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Thursday

  Hammersmith, London

  Baker took manual control of the Moscow computer, and instructed the communications module to dial the first number. The screen cleared, and the terse message ‘Dialing’ appeared in the top left-hand corner, followed by the number. There was a brief pause, and Richter heard a faint warbling sound as the two computers communicated with each other, and then a symbolic representation of a computer appeared, and under it the message, in Cyrillic script:

  WELCOME TO THE SYKTYVKAR BULLETIN BOARD

  Type <?> for Help.

  If this is your first log on, use Username and Password

 

  Under that appeared ‘Enter Username’ with a flashing cursor. ‘I take it that isn’t it,’ Richter said, as he translated the Russian text for Baker.

  ‘No,’ Baker replied. ‘That definitely isn’t it. That’s just a bulletin board – a kind of electronic conference – run by a bunch of computer enthusiasts in Syktyvkar.’ He looked down the list. ‘I think we can skip the next number, because it’s almost certainly a second line for the same bulletin board. Let’s try the third.’

  The fifth computer responded entirely differently to all the others. Once the number had dialled, there was no welcoming screen, no text at all, in fact, just a small flashing cursor in the top left of the screen. Baker looked at Richter. ‘This is probably the one,’ he said.

  The Walnut Room, the Kremlin, Krasnaya ploshchad, Moscow

  The junior SVR officer knocked respectfully on the door before opening it. He looked at the men seated round the table, approached Yuri Baratov, saluted and handed him a sheet of paper. The SVR chief scanned the paper, then spoke. ‘Trushenko’s in the Crimea,’ he said, to the table at large. ‘We’ve identified the cell his phone was using, and we’ve ordered the system to disable his phone card. Konstantin Abramov has instructed local units to pick him up.’

  Hammersmith, London

  ‘This is where I need your help,’ Baker said. ‘I don’t speak Russian, and we’ll need to use Russian to get in. Let’s see if there’s any help available.’ He pressed the ‘?’ key, followed by ‘Enter’. A line of Cyrillic script flashed up. ‘What’s that?’ he asked.

  ‘It says “Bad command or filename”,’ Richter said.

  ‘Typical,’ Baker said, and pressed the ‘F1’ key. ‘That’s the normal “help” key,’ he added. The same message appeared. ‘It looks as if there’s no help incorporated, on the very sound premise that they don’t want anybody unauthorized gaining access to the system. It’s probably waiting for direct entry of a username and password.’

  ‘Try “Podstava”,’ Richter suggested. That didn’t work either, and almost immediately afterwards the screen went blank and the message in English ‘Connection terminated by gateway: reverse trace detected’ appeared.

  Baker looked at the screen thoughtfully. ‘This is definitely the right machine,’ he said. ‘As soon as an invalid username was entered, the computer started a trace back along the telephone network to see who was calling it.’

  ‘Is that going to be a problem?’ Richter asked.

  ‘Well, it certainly isn’t going to help. I’ve programmed the Moscow computer – that’s our gateway – to sever the connection each time it detects a trace, but it means we can only try one word per connection, which is going to add minutes to the time it takes us to get in. It also means that I can’t use a password generator.’ Richter nodded as if he knew what he was talking about, but Baker wasn’t fooled. ‘A password generator,’ he said, ‘is a routine that starts off with, say, AAAAAA and runs through all possible combinations of characters, including all the numerals and punctuation symbols, until it generates a username or password that the system will accept. The trouble is, you have to stay on-line to use it, and this set-up won’t let us. So we have to get the username some other way. And the password that matches it.’

  ‘A username is the real name of a person who is authorized to access the computer?’

  Baker nodded. ‘Normally, yes, although there’s nothing to stop somebody who has a long name using an abbreviation to log on, as long as the system manager has approved it. If the user’s real name was Oblavenkavich or something, he would probably be allowed to shorten it to Oblavo or even use a nickname.’

  ‘And the password,’ Richter asked. ‘Is it always a name, or can you use anything?’

  ‘Anything at all,’ Baker replied, ‘the more random and illogical the better. The most difficult password to crack is something like this—’ he scribbled ‘%&reT34£’ on a piece of paper ‘—but the trouble is that the user can never remember it unless he writes it down, which defeats the object of the exercise. So, as I said before, most people use names or birthdays or something like that. The other common passwords are Secret, Confidential, Keepout and Mine, all of which are moderately obvious, Fred and derf – Fred backwards.’

  ‘Why Fred?’ Richter asked.

  Baker grinned. ‘Those letters are immediately adjacent to each other on the keyboard, and most computer users are lazy.’

  Razdolnoye, Krym (Crimea)

  Dmitri Trushenko stared at the screen of his laptop in irritation. The connection to the mainframe had failed, which meant that he had to re-dial and log on all over again. He pressed the keys angrily, and waited. The screen displayed the message ‘Dialing’ with the mainframe’s telephone number beneath it. After two minutes, the screen message ‘Connection timed out. Redial?’ appeared.

  Trushenko snatched up his mobile phone and unplugged the data cable. He input a number at random, pressed the ‘Send’ key and waited. Almost immediately he heard a beeping sound in the earpiece and the message ‘Emergency calls only’ was displayed on the phone’s small screen. Instantly Trushenko knew what had happened. The SVR had identified his mobile telephone number, and disabled his phone’s card. That also, he realized, meant that they knew more or less where he was.

  He left the phone on the table – it was useless to him now, and would serve to mislead the SVR, as it would continue to show him as being in the Crimea as long as it remained switched on – quickly shoved the computer and his clothes into a suitcase, and walked outside.

  Hammersmith, London

  In the next half hour Baker tried every word Richter could think of connected with the Russian operation, including Gibraltar, the names of the French and German towns where Modin had told him neutron bombs were positioned, Modin, Bykov, Trushenko, Kremlin, Moscow, Lubyanka and Yazenevo spelt forwards and backwards, in upper case and lower case, KGB, GRU, SVR, GroupNord, and even the names of past Soviet heroes like Sorge, Abel, Philby and Blunt.

  With a single exception, the screen blanked each time and the Moscow computer severed the connection. The exception was ‘Modin’, and when Baker entered that name, the system prompted for a password, but none of the suggestions Richter made were accepted.

  ‘Let’s take a break,’ Richter said, ‘and think about this.’

  Baker made instant coffee in the corner of the office. ‘Is it worth trying the Russian for secret and so on?’ Richter asked, taking a chipped china mug.

  Baker shook his head. ‘I doubt it. This system will have an administrator who will have access to all passwords, and who should vet them. If he’s doing his job correctly he wouldn’t allow anything that simple to be used.’ Baker shook his head. ‘We need a name, or a word—’

  Richter almost spilled h
is coffee. He had suddenly remembered something that hadn’t really made sense before. ‘Christ,’ he said, ‘I am slow.’ He reached for the phone, dialled the Registry and told them to deliver the file on Graham Newman to the Computer Suite. ‘I think I know what one password is,’ Richter said.

  Karkinitskiy Zaliv, Chernoye More (Black Sea)

  The closest SVR area headquarters to the Crimea is at Odessa, but there are smaller SVR units at Sevastopol, Simferopol and Kerch. The message from SVR headquarters at Yazenevo had instructed that the two roads out of the Crimea, through Krasnoperekopsk and Novoalekseyevka, were to be closed to all motor vehicles, the two railway lines closed to all traffic, and ferry operations from the port of Krym to Kavkaz suspended. Stopping the ferry and closing the railway lines was easy – it took two phone calls – but the roads were different. SVR teams set out immediately from Simferopol to reinforce the roadblocks erected by the local police forces, but the traffic queues built up rapidly and there were angry confrontations.

  Dmitri Trushenko was not a fool. He had chosen the Crimea deliberately because it is effectively an island, with very limited access and egress, and he had anticipated that if anything went wrong the SVR or one of the other authorities would block the roads. That was why he had bought the powerboat. Fifteen minutes after walking out of the dacha, Trushenko was two miles offshore and heading north-west at twenty-eight knots across the Karkinitskiy Zaliv towards Port-Khorly, where he had left a car. The trip would take him about forty-five minutes, and he anticipated that he could be back on-line to the mainframe, using an ordinary land-line telephone, in a little over an hour.

  10 Downing Street, London

  The Prime Minister had used the hot-line and secure telephone circuits to talk to the President of the United States more often in the last three days than he had done throughout his entire term of office. The two men had enjoyed, almost from their well-publicized first meeting, a relationship that transcended the purely official functions of their respective offices and had turned into real friendship. And that friendship had helped the two of them face the similar, but in some ways very different, threats posed by Dmitri Trushenko’s Operation Podstava.

  It would be too much to say that Britain and America were working together to combat the Russian assault, because Trushenko had placed them in completely different positions – there were no pre-positioned weapons on British soil, but there were over two hundred in place in American cities – and the strategic assets of the two nations were wholly dissimilar. But both men had decided that the best way to combat the threat was to threaten the Russians just as hard, to take up a totally uncompromising, and non-negotiable, position.

  ‘What targeting instructions have you given?’ the President asked.

  ‘Ablanket assault,’ the Prime Minister replied, ‘aimed at Moscow, St Petersburg and Gor’kiy. No military targets at all, just the major civilian population centres.’

  ‘And you’ve told the Russian ambassador? Sharov?’

  ‘Yes. I’m certain he knew all about Podstava – you could see it in his face when I told him about the weapon we stopped in France. But what shocked him was that we’d also found and disarmed the one in Gibraltar. He knew there was going to be a demonstration, as that Russian bastard Trushenko put it, but he didn’t know where. He’s probably been talking to the Kremlin ever since, trying to find out what he’s supposed to do now.’

  ‘That was good work by your people,’ the President said.

  ‘Thank you. I hope that we may have some other good news for you later today,’ he added. ‘We have a team hard at work trying to break into the computer in Russia which we believe controls this entire operation.’

  ‘You have?’ the President’s voice rose in hope and surprise. ‘If you require any assistance, anything at all, just ask. We have some of the best computer scientists in the world working at the National Security Agency. I’m sure they could—’

  The Prime Minister’s soft chuckle interrupted him. ‘Believe me, I’ve already offered your resources as well as our own, but the people involved have told me that outside assistance will not be required. I don’t pretend to understand the technicalities of it, but apparently they can only use one line to access the Russian computer, so the two men who are working on it—’

  ‘Two men?’ the President interrupted. ‘Only two men? Good God, I hope they know what they’re doing.’

  ‘I think they do,’ the Prime Minister said smoothly. ‘One of them is the man who stopped the road convoy in France and disarmed the weapon in Gibraltar.’

  Hammersmith, London

  When the courier arrived, Richter took the file and flicked through it until he reached the notes he had made following his meeting with Piers Taylor of SIS. As Richter read them, he realized that the answer had been staring him in the face all along, and that Graham Newman might have had an inkling that something was going on at Krutaya, even if he had no idea what it was. Richter thought he now knew why he had sent Andrew Payne to Sosnogorsk, and what the exchange of messages probably meant.

  ‘The SIS Head of Station in Moscow sent his deputy – a man called Andrew Payne – out to Sosnogorsk in June,’ Richter said. ‘Officially, he was acting as a translator to a party of European businessmen, but the real reason he went was to contact a Russian called Nicolai Karelin and exchange messages. The messages,’ he went on, ‘consisted only of single words. He said Schtchit to Karelin, and the Russian replied with Stukach and Chernozhopy.’

  Richter wrote the words on a piece of paper, together with the name of the Russian contact. ‘Try Schtchit first,’ Richter suggested.

  Baker looked at the paper. ‘What’s that mean?’ he asked.

  ‘The actual meaning is “shield”,’ Richter said, ‘but it has a more specific meaning to GRU personnel. It’s a particular kind of double-exposure film that allows an operative to take two sets of pictures, one entirely innocent – the family playing on the beach, that sort of thing. The other set can be of anything he likes – classified documents, secret military installations or whatever. If the film is developed normally, all that the prints will show are the innocent pictures, but if the correct developing technique is used, the other images will appear.’

  ‘All clever stuff and no rubbish,’ Baker said, and watched the screen as the Moscow computer dialled Krutaya again. When the prompt appeared, he typed the word in, and they watched. Again, the screen went blank and the computer in the Moscow Embassy severed the connection.

  ‘Shit,’ Richter said. ‘I really thought we had it. Try Stukach.’ Baker typed in the word at the prompt, but again the screen blanked out as the connection was terminated. ‘This is our last chance. Type Chernozhopy.’

  ‘Chernozhopy,’ Baker repeated, trying to get his tongue around it. ‘What’s it mean?’

  ‘Literally,’ Richter replied, ‘it means “black-arses”, but it’s a GRU slang term meaning any foreigners.’ Baker typed it, but the result was the same. ‘Oh, shit.’ Richter closed his eyes and leant back in the chair, then sat forward suddenly. ‘Athought,’ he said. ‘Try the name of the Russian contact – Nicolai Karelin.’

  Baker instructed the Moscow computer to dial the number again and tried ‘Nicolai’, without success.

  ‘OK,’ Richter said. ‘Now try Karelin.’ This time Baker typed in ‘Karelin’ at the prompt. The connection didn’t break, and almost immediately another line of text appeared.

  ‘Yes!’ Baker said loudly. ‘That’s more like it. It looks like a password request.’

  ‘That’s what it says,’ Richter agreed, nodding and leaning forwards. ‘Try Stukach.’ Immediately after Baker had typed the word, another line of text appeared. ‘It says “incorrect password”,’ Richter said. ‘Try Chernozhopy, then Schtchit. This really is our last chance.’

  As Baker finished typing Chernozhopy and pressed the ‘Enter’ key, the screen cleared and a series of messages was displayed. Richter didn’t understand what they meant, but they mad
e sense to Baker. ‘Thank God for that,’ he said. ‘We’re in. It looks like it’s UNIX-based – that’s just a type of operating system, don’t worry about it – and we are logged on.’

  Richter pointed at the screen. ‘There’s the username Karelin,’ he said. ‘So Nicolai Karelin must be an authorized user of this system, and the name he passed to Payne was his password into the computer.’

  ‘Excellent,’ said Baker. ‘Now we’re cooking. Let’s see what we can do. It all depends,’ he went on, ‘on Karelin’s access level.’

  ‘What’s an access level?’

  ‘It’s a means of regulating the facilities which each user can access. In a business, for example, the higher management personnel will have access to all the data files, but the accounts staff only to accounts programs and associated data, and typists just to the word processor and the letter files. You can compartmentalize the computer’s files in any way you like, but that would be a typical set-up. The most important user is the system supervisor or manager. He alone has access to everything – data and system files – at all times, and he can delete, copy or move files as he wishes, all as part of his job managing the network. What I’m hoping is that Karelin isn’t just a low-grade user. I’m hoping he’s the system administrator.’

  ‘Is he likely to be?’ Richter asked.

  ‘Probably not,’ said Baker. ‘My gut feeling is that the administrator is probably based at Yazenevo. Anyway, we’ll see in a couple of minutes.’ While he’d been talking, Baker had been studying the screen. ‘It looks like a fairly standard menu-based system,’ he said. ‘Can you just translate what these words mean for me?’

  Richter looked at the screen. ‘There are only two headings,’ he said. ‘The first means Satellite Maintenance, and the second Weapon Maintenance.’