Trident Code (A Lana Elkins Thriller)

by Thomas Waite

  It disgusted Galina that Oleg was going to get away. He had his eyes on the navy guy, his hands off her, so she tried again with her uppercut, this time smashing his ballsack so hard Oleg doubled over and fell facedown on the deck.

  She fell back herself, sitting heavily on her rear. The navy lieutenant gave her a thumbs-up. The cop was smiling.

  “Are you a SEAL?” the cop asked Walker.

  “I’ve been called worse,” Walker replied. He grabbed the back of Oleg’s shirt and pulled him into a sitting position. “Sit up so I can watch you.”

  Oleg looked green. Galina edged away, almost tripping over Captain Younes’s body. She hurried to check on Alexandra. Another SEAL appeared near the bow.

  “You two had it covered,” the cop said to Walker.

  “We try. You made it a helluva lot easier than it would have been. Saved her, too. Nice job.”

  “I was going to kill him.”

  “We couldn’t let you do that.”

  “You going to trade him for that NSA guy, something like that?” the cop asked.

  “Something like that,” Walker answered.

  “I’ve got a better idea,” Oleg gasped to Walker. “I’ll stop those missiles. Just give me my computer and you won’t even have to take me back to Moscow. My own people will come get me.”

  “Who the hell do you think you’re dealing with here?” the lieutenant replied. “SpongeBob? You’ll never get your hands on another computer. And I never said we were taking you back there. Veal, get his wrists and ankles.”

  The SEAL slapped plastic cuffs top and bottom on Oleg.

  For a moment, Oleg looked worried. Then he lifted his head and his most imperious expression appeared.

  With Oleg shackled, Galina carried Alexandra into the cabin. She watched Veal and the cop board the trawler’s own Zodiac.

  “He’s going to take him over to the sailboat and get Lana Elkins,” Red told her.

  Right then Galina pointed to the trawler Oleg had hijacked. It had stopped moving. “His computer,” she said. “It’s probably over there.” She spotted the captain through the window she’d shot out, relieved he was still alive.

  “Friend or foe?” Red asked her.

  “He was hijacked.”

  Walker rushed to the stern. “Search the trawler for his electronics, computer, phone, anything he left there,” he called to Veal. “The captain should be okay.” Then the lieutenant used the ship’s radio to talk to Lana. “Tell NSA we’re set for Stage Two. Veal’s coming over to get you. Galina’s waiting.”

  “What’s Stage Two?” Oleg demanded as soon as Walker put down the mouthpiece.

  “Your flight out of here.”

  Ten precious minutes passed, mostly in silence, then Lana Elkins climbed aboard with Veal. She carried a large computer case and Oleg’s laptop.

  “So you’re Lana Elkins,” Oleg said.

  “She’s a big reason you’re sitting on the deck of this boat all ready to be shipped back to Moscow,” Walker said.

  Lana said nothing to Oleg. She walked up to Galina and introduced herself, then glanced into the cabin where Galina’s laptop sat on a table. “I see you have yours ready. I’ve got mine, too, and his, but first he has to be thoroughly searched.”

  “Keep her away from me,” Oleg said, staring at Galina.

  “Stand back,” Red said to her.

  “What did you do to him?” Lana asked Galina.

  The Russian motioned upward with her fist, then pointed to his crotch.

  “What goes around comes around, right?”

  Galina glared at Oleg. “Let’s hope so.”

  Red and Veal found a pair of camera memory cards and three thumb drives in Oleg’s pockets.

  “Awfully casual about your data,” Lana said to him. His pants were down around his bound ankles.

  “Bend over,” Red told him.

  When Oleg refused, the lieutenant grabbed Oleg’s privates. He bent over.

  “It’s nothing,” Oleg said about the memory cards, and grimacing from Red’s rude intrusion. “Tourist shit.”

  If so, it had been a grim detour, Lana saw after inserting one of the cards into her camera. It revealed photos of a dead nun and a terrified expression on the face of a naked young woman backed into a corner. The second card focused less on the murder and more on violent sex. Oleg had taken a ton of pictures.

  “Did you kill her, too?” Lana asked Oleg, pointing to the younger woman.

  “I have diplomatic immunity,” he replied.

  “In your own country?” Lana shook her head, then used a virtual machine to reveal the contents of the first thumb drive; she would never have stuck a stick with unknown data into her own computer. Rows and rows of code appeared. She scrolled down.

  “What is it?” she asked, expecting no answer. She didn’t get one, either, not from him.

  “I might know,” Galina said.

  The other two thumb drives contained the same kind of material. Lana handed them over to Galina, who hurried into the cabin and went to work. Lana turned her attention back to Oleg: “Give me the codes you used on the Delphin, and I’ll make sure you live.” More than anything, she feared a second Trident II launch—or a whole series of launches; the submarine, after all, still had twenty-three missiles in its arsenal.

  “Don’t they tell you anything?” Oleg replied. “I’m going back to Moscow.”

  “Look at me,” Lana said. “I’ve just been authorized to tell you that there are men in Moscow who are going to kill you as soon as you arrive. That’s all I can say, unless you cooperate. If you cooperate, we’ll take you back to the U.S. and tell the Russians and some others to go to hell. We’re willing to break some very critical deals we’ve been making lately if you’re willing to cooperate. But don’t fuck with us. If you come and don’t play ball, we’ll make every remaining second of your life a misery.”

  “Yes, you Americans are good at torture now. I’ll never go with you. You say they’ll kill me in Moscow? No, you are the one who should worry about dying, you stupid bitch. I know who you are. Big hero last time. Not such a hero now.”

  Red squatted in front of him. “Oleg, you’re in handcuffs. Think about that. She’s giving you the best offer you’ll ever get.”

  “Come live in America,” Oleg singsonged. “You think you can always play that trump card: ‘Come live in America.’ I’d rather die on this stinking fishing boat than go live in your country. And I’m not giving you any codes.”

  “I think we’ve got them,” Galina called from the cabin.

  “You realize that right now Galina’s sharing everything she ever learned from you with the NSA via satellite,” Lana said. “Nothing’s going to end the way you wanted.”

  “Yes, it is. There’s one more surprise you have coming, I assure you,” he told her.

  Lana wanted to swear, but kept an impassive expression. “Listen to me, you’re going to die if you go back. We’ve been intercepting communications between your President and his staff, and they’re making one thing abundantly clear: you’re expendable. There’s a chopper coming for you. If you don’t cooperate, you’ll be getting on it and you’ll die.”

  “What, are they going to fly way up into the sky and throw me out like you Americans do?”

  Lana grabbed his face and made him look into her eyes. “It’ll be worse than that.”

  “You can’t scare me. And I don’t believe you because if I were in your shoes, I’d be saying the same thing and it would all be lies.”

  “But I’m not you, you’re not in my shoes, and I’m not lying.”

  Oleg shook his head.

  Disbelief is denial’s first ally, Lana thought.

  A helicopter flew toward them. Oleg smiled at her. “Fuck you. I’ll be eating caviar at the Kremlin before the sun goes down.”
>
  “You stupid son of a bitch,” she said.

  “It’s his call at this point,” Walker said. “We’ll be keeping the deals we made.”

  “I know all about deals,” Oleg said to them. “Russians take care of their own.”

  “Yes, you do have a long history of that,” Walker said, smiling when a man was lowered from the helicopter on a steel cable with a double seat.

  “Who’s that?” Oleg demanded when he saw that his rescuer was Chinese. “See, we take care of people who help us, too,” Red told him. “And since you’ve decided your future is short, I’ll let you in on something. Our Chinese friends call themselves Magic Dragon, and they were instrumental in blocking radio signals on the high seas, when others might have warned you that we were coming to take you. They also provided a terrific amount of cyberexpertise tracking down your tight network. Now they’re going to use you to pay their debt to someone you know very well.”

  Veal and the Chinese man seized Oleg and strapped him into a seat.

  “What is this shit?” Oleg said. He sounded unsettled for the first time. “What’s going on?”

  “Come with us,” Lana said.

  “It’s too late,” Red said softly, barely above the sound of the chopper.

  “But I’m going to Moscow . . .” Oleg’s voice trailed off as he and his escort were lifted up into the helicopter’s cabin.

  The first thing Oleg noticed was that the bird was being flown by a Russian crew. But the cabin itself held four other Chinese men.

  “What are they doing here?” Oleg yelled at the pilot, who ignored him. With his headset on, the man might not have heard Oleg.

  “Do any of you speak English or Russian?” he asked the Chinese men.

  “I do,” replied the man who’d brought him aboard.

  “Who do you work for?” Oleg asked.

  The man smiled. “An oil and gas company.”

  “That asshole. PP’s saving me?”

  “PP? No, we call him Mr. Dernov. He is a partner of our country. Saving you?” The Chinese man shrugged and smiled even more broadly.

  A horrible flood of anxiety swept through Oleg. He remembered the video PP had played for him of Dmitri and Galina down in that goddamned museum with its medieval . . . devices, and how fortunate he’d felt when he raced his Maserati away from his father’s estate.

  This wasn’t a rescue. This was retribution.

  CHAPTER 26

  LANA SAT IN THE trawler’s cabin holding Oleg’s computer on her lap with all the care she would have given to a Fabergé egg. Galina was perched by her side, working on her own device, but she nodded at Oleg’s.

  “It’s all going to be in there,” she said. “And on these.” Galina held up the thumb drives. “He was a control freak. He wouldn’t have surrendered the freedom to launch to anyone else, no matter what he might have told them.”

  Lana’s own laptop lay on a small navigation table feet away. Red was piloting the ship. With the boat pitching from stern to bow in the unsettled sea, Lana was finding it awkward to work her keyboard. She noticed that Galina was facing the same challenge.

  Less than ideal work conditions, but with stubby black antennas protruding from all three computers, they did have vital satellite links to the NSA—and that meant stateside support from Jeff Jensen. Even so, Lana was running into one computer security defense after another: “I can’t even get into Oleg’s trash,” she growled.

  Lana was frustrated, but still grateful the cyberbeast hadn’t tossed his laptop overboard. She figured he was too arrogant to have believed there would ever be any call for such an extreme action. But for all the progress Lana was making hacking the device, it might as well have been jettisoned.

  She had just resorted to dumpster diving, a hacker term that held the same meaning for them as it did for the hungry homeless: plundering someone else’s trash. But again she’d failed to penetrate Oleg’s access controls.

  “I put a keystroke logger on him two weeks ago,” Galina informed her, “when I first started to worry about what he was doing. If it worked, we should have a record of everything he’s done since then. But we need deciphering software to read out the results superfast.”

  “I have that,” Lana said, leaning forward so her fingers could fly over her own keyboard on the navigation table. “But he could have used a virtual keyboard to prevent the capture of his keys, or even changed his character encoding.”

  They hadn’t kept Oleg on board to try to coerce his cooperation because Lana knew he could have led them right into a cyber self-destruct payload, which, as the name suggested, could wipe out the data they wanted.

  Complicating matters more was a message that had just come in from Jensen that he’d found data streams from Donetsk in eastern Ukraine that he thought might prove fruitful. The data had been submitted to the Black Sea—most likely to Oleg—and the southern Atlantic Ocean, most likely Lisko.

  Did the data to Lisko contain an alert about Oleg’s capture? That was what worried Lana most.

  The data streams all but confirmed that Oleg had been working with more than one far-flung conspirator. If one or both of those men didn’t already know he’d been taken into custody, she wondered how soon they’d find out their mastermind had been forcibly removed from their attack plan. What contingency had they planned in that case? Plus, Oleg might even have buried a heartbeat signal deep in his software to launch the missile—or all twenty-three of them—if he went incommunicado for a specified period of time.

  “I’m in!” Galina announced. The deciphering software had worked and she’d penetrated a flash drive. “Here,” she copied lines of code onto Lana’s computer.

  “Why do you think this will work?” Lana asked. It looked like thousands of letters and numbers.

  “The sequencing. Pattern recognition. I have a good eye for it. It’s similar to data he gave me that helped me access Professor Ahearn’s computer before I found out about the murders. Just try it.”

  Lana did, this time landing smack into Oleg’s trash bin—only to find he’d cyber-incinerated everything.

  Wanting to tear out her hair, she realized he—or an accomplice aboard—might have installed a rootkit, an intrusion into the submarine’s computers that would remain almost undetectable. What a frickin’ nightmare. It was malware that allowed a hacker remote entry, but also hid its own tracks even as it provided openings for polymorphic malware—attack software that could not only spread quickly from one system to another, but also change its file hashes, persistence mechanisms, access codes, and locations in memory every time it duplicated itself.

  If she could track down the rootkit, she could start roaming the submarine’s computers, too—or send in her own worms to disable the Delphin’s entire system. Shutting down power and lights would certainly hamper the manual efforts necessary to launch the missiles.

  But any keystroke could also set off a virtual trip wire that would launch them. Lana watched Galina typing away frantically, breaking only to sweep her fingers across the screen to move data. As calmly as she could, she voiced her worry.

  “I’m working strictly with his own code right now, and I’m not altering anything.” Then she stared at Lana. “What choice do we have?”

  She’s right. They had no choice. That was when it also occurred to Lana that a conspirator—in the eastern Ukraine or on the Delphin?—might at that very moment also be trying to penetrate Oleg’s defenses, but with a different goal: to empty the sub’s arsenal so all of the WAIS would shatter into the sea and drive ocean levels up the full eleven feet.

  She felt like they were in a race with a phantom that was already haunting Oleg’s systems. In the next few seconds she learned she was right: Oleg’s screen burst alive with Grisha Lisko smiling at Lana as he stood in the Missile Control Center. He exhibited no surprise at her presence. The dead bodies of sailors lay in
the background. Lana figured he was sending his signal through the submerged submarine’s radio buoy.

  “I know what you’re doing, but you’re too late.” Lisko held up the captain’s key. “We’re ready to fire. You can watch, but that’s all you can do.”

  Galina gripped Lana’s arm, whispering, “That man is crazy.”

  “You know him?” Lana asked.

  “No, but look at him.”

  Lisko was joined by two other sailors on the screen for the first time, though Lana knew the previously unseen collaborators had to have been present when Antarctica was bombed.

  Lisko turned around and slipped the captain’s key into the console. He smiled as he grabbed a microphone. “Ready the Tactical Firing Trigger.” Then he cranked the key he’d just inserted. Lana knew the officer to whom he’d just spoken must be using a second key in another part of the sub so they could unleash the lethal madness once again. Two keys in separate locations—in combination with other security precautions—had once been thought sufficient to stop an unauthorized missile attack. But that had been in the era before cyberwar.

  One more missile on Antarctica and even Noah’s mythical flood would look like a kitchen spill. Twenty-three more would mean death to billions.

  “How much time?” Galina asked.

  “Thirty seconds,” Lana replied. “Maybe.”

  Emma lay in the blackness of the coffin trying to control her growing panic. Unlike Tanesa, Emma’s intense fear didn’t stem directly from a lack of space, but a distinct lack of air. Her worst fears of using up the oxygen in the tight confines were coming true, sending her anxiety levels rocketing upwards. She was terrified of an asthma attack, and knew that her fear alone could trigger one.

  Don’t panic! But she was screaming that warning to herself.

  She attempted every trick she’d ever used to try to calm down but they all involved breathing, so they didn’t work when breathing brought so little relief. A big gulp of air led only to the next big gulp . . . and the next.

  In biology last year they’d studied expiration and learned that as carbon dioxide became more concentrated, it made you drowsy. And if you didn’t get oxygen at that point, it would put you in a coma and kill you.