'A' for Argonaut (13 page)

Sergei sat at his computer. He called Maran over.

A single word flashed across the screen: PHALANX.

“Sergei, I’ve heard it mentioned but only in secured rooms. Even the name is classified. How in hell are we going to access the most highly protected electronic surveillance system the U.S. Intel community has ever developed?”

“Hey, if some turkey from Australia can link up with a gang of Chinese hackers and get his hands on a Top Secret DOD counterintelligence analysis report, why shouldn’t we be able to access PHALANX?”

“Julian Assange? Wikileaks? The gang that published thousands of secret files stolen by Pentagon renegades to embarrass the U.S. government?”

“They’ve made Daniel Ellsberg look like a garden club reporter on an Iowa weekly.”

Located in a box-like building on a large campus at Fort George G. Meade outside the small town of Odenton, Maryland, once no more than a railway crossing, and now a thriving suburban town inhabited by well-paid electronic wizards and spooks, a team of computer information technology scientists ran PHALANX, a multi-satellite signals dragnet. The super-powerful surveillance system allowed its operators to sift through and analyze more than one-hundred million messages per second, every electronic pulse in the earth’s atmosphere. It gave them the ability to shunt files to cache basins in segregated fields, isolate word combinations, and track down the senders’ ISPs.

The scientists at NBES had rigged it with a super sniffer they nicknamed Back-End Bugger. The average “sniffer” captures passwords and entry codes to crack through firewalls. BEB was a powerful simile of “Back Orifice” designed by hackers at the notorious “Cult of the Dead Cow” hacking group, except for one thing: it could insert itself into any computer gateway in the world. “Bugger” gave them complete system administrator privileges, freedom to browse the target computer’s files and alter them at will‌—‌without being detected.

When Maran returned to
join Sergei at his work station, he was dumbfounded.

Sergei’s plan involved two parts. The first was an open source search with a customized database for anyone selling diamonds from the Cabinda-Kinshasa region controlled by the Animal. It was the second step, PHALANX, that bothered Maran.

“This is insanity!” he insisted. “You’re talking about hijacking America’s Number One electronic weapon. The world’s most secure encrypted digital fortress.”

“Oh! Right. Look, altar boy, you’re worried about the ‘highest level?’ Did you forget that it was the assholes at the ‘highest level’ who betrayed you. Anyway, we’re not damaging our country. We’re rescuing it.”

Altar boy?

Maran might have found that funny under different circumstances.

“We can do this without breaking into NEBS,” he insisted.

“How’s that, genius?”

“HUMINT. Human source intel. People.”

“OK. I agree. Where would you suggest we begin? We need electronic penetration first. That will lead us to our ‘Human Intel’ sources.”

“No! We abide by the rules‌—‌”

“Horse biscuits!” He knew he had the hard-nosed high ground. “So, you’ve got a bad guy in custody. He has your little girl buried in a hole somewhere. She’s got one hour of air left and he won’t talk. You abandon your daughter or do you break the rules?”

“Serge. That’s a parable.”

“It happens,” Sergei said and pointed to the banner on the wall, Maran’s credo.

Identify your objective

Set your agenda

Go!

The team liked the short version:
“GO!”

Finally Maran agreed.

Sergei launched their network attack.

Against one wall, the
tiger team hunched over the keyboards of the bright, new workstations. Over the windows, tarps blocked any eyes observing from India Pier across the slip. Above the tarps on the brick wall, a series of bolts framed a grid of tempered steel bars. Tiny lights flickered from a bank of computer cluster racks.

Maran walked over from the littered coffee counter, dodging coils of telephone wire and nests of cables. It would have put a Bolshoi ballerina to the test. Gripping his steamy mug of cider-laced Dunkin’ Donuts coffee, he maneuvered around and over one of dozens of cardboard boxes, his foot catching; he tripped on a tangle of wire, cursing as his weak leg gave way. He fell in a heap. The drink slopped out and scalded his hand.

He yelped.

A sudden flash startled him. Kurt Tracha stood laughing and snapping shots with his Nikon digital D3X SLR camera, one of the perks, albeit a prop, of his cover as Maran’s freelance news photographer.

Sergei roared.

“Sadist,” Maran snarled, brushing himself.

“You got that right. Here she is. Meet ‘Elsie,’ the Network-centric main battle center,” said Sergei, using his affectionate stage name for his cherished computer system. He gestured to the bank of computers. The frantic set-up work had been brutal, but he’d done it. He now had the ability to run Elsie through Eurosat’s satellite network system and on to the Z-Apt megacomputer at “NEBS,” the slightly inaccurate nickname they used for ease instead of its actual abbreviation when talking about NBES, the National Bureau of Electronic Surveillance.

“Elsie here will give us whatever we ask for, short of a blowjob; it just takes a little time, a little persuasion and a little love.”

“I accept her limitations,” Maran quipped. “But we don’t have a
little
time.”

“Chill out, Maran. Give yourself a break; take a bow,” Sergei suggested. “Look what you’ve done, after what you’ve been through. You’ve put a world-class tiger team together from scratch, set up a crack consulting firm, overnight, as cover for your mission,” he chuckled. “You’re a goddamn magician; you’re amazing!” The term “tiger team” refers to a methodology used to mount attacks against a target system aggressively: uber-hackers.

“Thanks. Now get me more leads.”

With difficulty on his injured leg Maran turned and climbed the ladder at the east side of the office. The ladder led to the loft, the sleeping quarters in the warehouse’s former locker room, big enough for their bunk beds and a shower, the one spot with a view of Baxter’s Wharf. Upstairs, on his cot, he picked up the sheaf. It contained BANG!’s operational progress report. He followed the step-by-step flow chart until he slipped off to sleep. He bounced around on the cot fitfully until his own snoring woke him.

Sleep apnea.

Another diagnosis that provoked his innate suspiciousness, like the ADHD and acid reflux they’d also pegged on him. He could never remember seeing a doctor without leaving with some kind of diagnosis and a prescription. They always told him the same thing: Eat less; stay away from foods with artificial flavors and alcohol.

“Can you imagine the
reaction of the American public if they knew their most critical cyberware weapon was being supplied by a private consultant from a foreign country working for a foreign company in another foreign country? We’re being protected from electronic Armageddon by idiots!” Sergei said to Maran later.

The code allowed Sergei to retrieve NBES’ daily digest and use his own keywords to individualize searches through any NBES station in the world. The first time he logged onto the system, he entered the general key terms: “diamond or diamantaire,” “bank or account,” “buy or sell”, “retail or wholesale”, “rough or polished,” “rough or cut,” “merchant or viewer,” “mine or pipe,” and “carats.” He added the names of all the world’s major diamond distributors, including KoeffieBloehm Diamond Mining International. He searched the Web for “KoeffieBloehm,” inputting the many names of its affiliates and subsidiaries, a massive job. Sergei put the team on it. Once the protocols were established, PHALANX flagged and opened any e-mail message in the world containing the keyword combinations. He could prioritize and isolate communications with the specified mix of terms. The team developed a list of the most suspect and flagged them, then erected a filter to screen out innocent chatter.

They locked PHALANX on to the suspicious sites for constant scrutiny.

Layered on top of and within the NBES’ PHALANX system they’d penetrated, The Bird had installed his own ingenious digital creation on BANG!’s IBM X5000 computers. The data mining system gave him an army of digital spies that leapfrogged through the ethersphere, screening and isolating sites that employed key terms used in the diamond trade. They delivered answers to questions their human masters had never even thought of. The Bird referred to them fondly as his “gophers.” They gave him freedom to roam computers he was targeting at will, altering files, and delivering false orders without detection. He had written in an Operations Security feature second to none. In the remote possibility that a NBES system administrator tried to find him, it would be impossible.

“I would have developed this for them if they hadn’t been such assholes,” The Bird said. He would never forgive them for firing him, never forget his humiliation, and he had jumped at the chance to compromise NBES.

“This opens the universe!” Maran exclaimed. “Now we go to war.”

“There’s never been nothin’ like it,” Sergei said.

The Bird’s fingers flew like a concert pianist’s over the keyboard.

“Thank God for those incompetent idiots at NEBS.”

“Hold it,” Sergei warned as The Bird manipulated the data.

“That’s it. COMSEC E.O. One-two-three-five-six.” He was referring to Communications Security developed under Presidential Executive Order 12356. The order set defense counter measures to protect U.S. computer secrets from attack.

“Chill,” said The Bird, explaining that he had used PHALANX to download DOD’s Computer Security Technical Vulnerability Reporting Program which automatically cleaned up any technical vulnerabilities that would allow a penetrated computer to identify its source. In spite of Sergei’s concern, they were shielded from discovery.

“Decrypt it. Use the code-breaker.”

The Bird’s fingers danced over the keyboard.

“Wait. That flash is the NEBS signature. We’ve broken through the algorithm in their port!”

The Bird applied a few more strokes. The screen exploded with a burst of figures. Numbers, letters, and symbols unwound in a blur and shot up the computer screen.

“What happened?”

“Bugger sent out an advance team of ARPs, Address Resolution Protocols. They discovered a microscopic hole in NEBS’ parameter check. Our little army just marched right through it. Fuckin’ zipper heads. I tried to warn them. Their INFOSEC info-sucks.”

Sergei left the workstation. He returned ten minutes later with two cups of coffee. He handed one to Bird, another caffeine fiend like Maran.

“Shit! We hit a logic bomb!”

The Bird sounded alarmed. A logic bomb is a code inserted into a software system to sabotage it with a destructive virus under specific conditions. Those conditions often include the detection of a hostile penetration of the host computer’s system.

“Are we in trouble?” Sergei asked.

“Wait! OK. No problaymo. The gophers defused it.”

“We’re home free! Now we can stick it with the Trojan horse. There! They’re all ours, baby. Wide open access to the universe! We can come back whenever we want. Doesn’t breaking through ‘impenetrable’ padlocks give you a hard-on?”

“Only when I know I can’t get caught,” Sergei said.

The Bird chirped. “Don’t worry, we’ve got more rings around us than a Slinky. Anyway, we’ve got their COMSEC protocol. Our tracks automatically delete as soon as we back out. Even if the cyber-spooks at NEBS detect a foreign presence, their system will I.D. it as a zombie.” The Bird was using the term for a dead system floating free through the networks. “We’re invincible! They’ll never even know we’ve been there. This is what I’ve dreamed of since I left NEBS.”

He punched a few more keys.

The screen scrolled through a series of pages. Then it stopped.

TOP SECRET

OFFICE OF PLANS AND OPERATIONS

DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE

WASHINGTON, DC 20006

TS//SPECIAL ACCESS REQUIRED//

BUTTER POPCORN//NOFORN//IMCOM//EYES ONLY

MEMORANDUM FOR: MAJOR AARON SMITH, DIVISION 6

FROM: KENDALL FORSYTHE, DIRECTOR

SUBJECT: (U) NEW TAMPON DISPENSERS: LADIES ROOMS

They were laughing when Maran joined them. The secret classification system had gradually sunk into a national joke since its start in 1947 at the beginning of the Cold War. The National Security Information codes on the screen meant that the document referred to a Top Secret program based on satellite information provided jointly through photo analysis by the NRO, National Reconnaissance Office, and the NSA, National Security Agency. “Eyes Only” meant “burn after reading.”

“Give Director Kendall credit for designating the subject “U,” unclassified,” The Bird observed.

“But still, try to get a copy without filing a Freedom of Information application and waiting two or three years for a response,” Sergei said.

“Great job, guys,” Maran said. “Now let’s stop screwing around. We need a fictitious site to operate from, a bogus ‘diamond newsgroup’ with a chat room. Call it ‘The On-Line Diamond Exchange,’ a ‘Want to Buy,’ and ‘For Sale,’ a bulletin board that purports to match buyers and sellers. We’ll set it up in the best languages for this op. And fast.”

A large brilliant-cut diamond filled the screen. Under it were the words The Bird sought:

ANTWERP DIAMOND COUNCIL

Administrator access ONLY.

Two more clicks. In.

“Confirmed!” The Bird shouted. The security door to the council operating system was wide open. He worked his way through a series of locked corridors that contained the council’s most confidential information.

Sergei stepped into the control center.

“Where’s the file, goddamn it? The map. I need that map‌—‌the war plan‌—‌right now!” Sergei raged.

“It’s in the SAB, the storage area bunker. Right where it should be,” The Bird pointed out.

“Nice going. Think you’re ready to go to work yet?” Maran needled. The team had been working steadily around the clock.