Mission Compromised (24 page)

“Now, the UN International Sanctions Enforcement Group. I'm sure that my friend, Dr. Simon Harrod, told you that you were specifically selected for this assignment—from among thousands of possible candidates. That should give you some confidence.”

Newman waved his hand and interrupted. “No, that's not the kind of reassurance that I want. I have no lack of confidence, General. In fact, I know that for whatever reasons—fate, luck, bad luck maybe, whatever—I am the best qualified on the basis of my record and where I've been. No … what I'm looking for are specific written orders—
official recognition that what we're being asked to do is legal under international law and that the UN has the authority to issue these orders to me.”

“I see,” Komulakov said thoughtfully. “I'm sorry. I thought Dr. Harrod had covered all of that with you.”

“No, I'm the one who's sorry, General,” Newman said. “Dr. Harrod was very
thorough
, and I don't doubt for an instant that he was telling the truth. But, well, I'm a cynic—I want to make sure that this mission is on the up-and-up—there are no surprises. All I want is written confirmation from the very top. Now I'm smart enough to know that you can't put these things in circulation, but I just want to see it for myself. Is it possible to humor me so that I can go on my mission with no doubts hanging over my head?”

“You have my word, as well as Dr. Harrod's.”

Newman grinned and looked askance at the man behind the desk. Komulakov laughed. “I suppose that does sound rather silly, in light of what we were just talking about—our past occupations and the like,” he said, smiling.

He pushed a button on his desk and said, “Captain Sjogren, please come in.”

The office door opened and an attractive blonde woman, in a well-tailored Swedish Army uniform that fit her lithe body like a glove, gracefully entered the room. Newman could smell her perfume almost instantly. Komulakov motioned for her to come near to him. He whispered instructions to her; then she nodded and left the room.

Komulakov poured himself another cup of coffee and gestured toward Newman with the carafe. Newman shook his head. “No thanks.”

“You find my aide attractive, Major—or is it Lieutenant Colonel—Newman?” asked the general again, his eyebrow raised inquisitively.

“Major … the promotion isn't final yet. And, yes, she certainly is attractive—” began Newman, but the general interrupted.

“If you are staying here in New York tonight, I'm sure she would be pleased to prepare some dinner for you. She has a lovely apartment in Soho. And after that, who knows?”

“Thanks anyway, General, but I'm married. And I'm sure you know the meaning of the Marine motto,
Semper Fidelis.
I take it seriously in everything I do.”

Before he could reply, Komulakov's intercom buzzed. He pushed a button: “Yes?”

It was Captain Sjogren. “Sir, I have the file ready on your computer. You can call it up with file number ‘ZZ 744809.'”

“Thank you, Captain.” He turned to his computer and typed in the file number and opened it. It popped instantly onto the screen. Komulakov hit the “print” command with his cursor, and the document began to print. After a minute or so, he retrieved ten sheets of paper from the laser printer and brought them over to Newman.

Newman began to read. The first two pages were a copy of the National Security Directive that Harrod had shown him. The second document was an almost identical UK
Cabinet Minutes
, bearing the signature of the British prime minister. And the third item was a copy of the secret UN Security Council Resolution that sanctioned it all. Newman read all three documents, just to make certain that nothing was included or left out that conflicted with Harrod's orders. Newman saw that the UN Secretary General had signed it.

“Thank you, Mr. First Deputy,” Newman said, smiling. “I had full assurance that the action that I'm about to take on is right. But
now I have reassurance that we have international law and the authority of the UN behind us. Thank you, sir.” He handed the pages back to Komulakov who put them through a shredder behind his desk.

“Now, let's go look at the equipment and meet the people with whom you will be in contact in our UN command center,” Komulakov said. Then he led Newman to a door in the right-hand corner of the office. It led into the command center itself.

“And all the while I thought this was a door to your private john,” Newman said with a grin.

The huge room was without windows and darkened. Video and computer terminals glowed in rows on top of other rows. High-intensity flood lamps that focused only on the desk area and kept the light away from the terminals and monitors illumined individual workspaces.

“I'm impressed, General,” Newman said with a soft whistle. “Man, this room must have at least three thousand square feet.”

“I suppose you're right,” Komulakov said with a shrug. “I've never thought of it. But we use every square inch of space and could use more. This room primarily houses just the brains of the command center. It's where we gather all of the intelligence.”

Newman looked around the room housing the command center operations—he looked slowly to take it all in. He had a strange feeling of
déjà vu
after seeing what was there. The computers were state of the art, and Newman was sure their servers must have had a “zillion” gigabytes each. Newman could see how fast the various computations were happening on the computer monitors and knew this was highly sophisticated stuff—like the equipment he'd seen at the NMCC at the Pentagon. Then he remembered. No wonder this all seemed familiar—
it was.
This command center could have been a clone of the one he had seen in the Pentagon, and it was a much larger and more sophisticated version of the one in the White House Sit Room.

Komulakov permitted Newman to stroll through the room at will. He took his time, making mental notes of everything he saw. From the banks of video screens he could see by their various labels that they were live video feeds coming from East Timor, the Golan Heights, Bosnia, Kosovo, Haiti, the Congo, Rwanda, Sinai, Angola, Namibia, Zimbabwe, Afghanistan, Bogota, Iraq—everywhere the UN had a peacekeeping mission, an inspection team, or a monitoring post. And then he noticed that there must have been at least a hundred “live” video cameras trained on potential trouble spots around the world, being watched by people on banks of twelve-inch video monitors.

On the opposite side of the room were computer monitors, which contained such things as temporary downloads of after-action reports, status reports, daily action reports, and all kinds of lists—including the dispositions of military and naval forces all over the globe. Remarkably, Newman saw his own name on one of the monitors. Unlike the other monitors, which had printed labels describing the content on-screen, this one, handwritten with a felt-tip pen, bore the same “ZZ 74409” code that Komulakov had used to open the file that Newman had read a few moments earlier. Below his name on the screen were the names, ranks, military branch, and home country for his three deputies at the White House and each of the thirty-eight members of the ISEG. Newman suddenly had conflicting feelings—excitement, recognition, uneasiness; he wondered how many other screens were lit up in
other
parts of the world showing these names—and who was watching them.

There were also larger video screens that showed weather displays around the globe and others with detailed military dispositions on tactical maps. There were monitors for receiving images from space satellites, some even offering infrared pictures of areas that were in total night darkness.

“Let me show you the comm center—the communications part of this outfit,” Komulakov called to him from the raised carpeted walkway surrounding the room. It was some six feet higher than the floor of the command center operations, giving Komulakov and other planners or decision-makers a panoramic view of what was going on. “Come,” he said, with a wave for Newman to follow him.

Newman followed him to an unmarked door at the far end of the room. The two of them went inside, shutting out the buzz of activity in the larger area. As soon as they stepped inside, a British SAS major jumped to his feet at attention.

“Please,” Komulakov said softly, “don't let us disturb you. I'm just taking Lieutenant Colonel Newman here on a little tour of our toy store. Major Ellwood is the watch chief for this section. We have seven other sections, each one covering a designated geographical area. You'll no doubt be communicating with Major Ellwood and his counterparts here when your people are overseas.”

Newman shook the hand of the major. He smiled and nodded to Newman, “Glad to meet you, Lef'tenant Colonel Newman,” he said, using the British pronunciation. “It's nice to be able to put a friendly face together with a voice when the messages come in.” Ellwood then gave Newman a tour of his comm room operation. Newman surmised that the word of his promotion had now spread internationally—yet his own wife didn't even know about it. He drove the thought from his mind and said, “It looks to me like you have nothing but the best in
here, Major. I'm impressed. Is there any piece of the most recent technology that you
don't
have here?”

“I don't think so, sir. All we have to do is ask, and the SG gets it for us.”

Newman was puzzled. “The ‘SG'?”

“Why that's the secretary general, sir. We all work for him, don't we now?” replied Major Ellwood.

As the British major was talking, Newman absently ran his hand over the smooth console. Suddenly an alarm buzzed on one of the machines. Newman drew his arm back quickly.

Ellwood chuckled. “That wasn't you, Colonel. It's the signal that we have an outgoing message that we have to transmit. I'll have to encrypt it first. Excuse me, please.”

He squeezed past Newman and reached beside one of the computers that was linked with video feeds to a small, covered box with an electronic lock on it. He took his plastic key and swiped it into the front of the box. “This just records who serviced this message and who encrypted it before transmission.” A green signal light came on after Ellwood passed his plastic key through the reader. He opened the door to the protective cover, reached inside, pulled out an EncryptionLok-3 device, and made sure it was securely interfaced with the feed coming into the comm unit from somewhere else in the UN's vast command center. Ellwood checked the message on the screen for correct addresses and then put the EncryptionLok-3 back inside its housing and pushed the
Lock
key on the touch-screen computer monitor. Then he pushed the icon on the screen for
Encrypt
, and immediately the screen was filled with letters, symbols, and digits. Without any spaces, punctuation, or even comparative words or sections, code-breakers would find it impossible to make sense of it.

The mathematical algorithms used for the EncryptionLok-3 were so unique that every letter or number could have a totally different replacement even if the letter was a repeat. Most of the codes from World War II used a basic template to decipher words. It was a rather straightforward process; for example, whenever you used the letter
a
in your code it was meant to read as another letter, say
k.
But the EncryptionLok-3 had 56 billion equivalents for a replacement for just the twenty-six letters of the English alphabet if it were transmitted as a message.

Newman, of course, knew that the EL-3 was an absolutely superb device for keeping communications from the enemy. But now, as he had just witnessed its use in the comm room of the UN Security Council Operations and Command Center, directed by a former Russian KGB agent, the significance of the event nearly bowled him over.
What other U.S. top-secret equipment is being shared with these people?
he wondered.

“Major, how long have you been using the EL-3?” he asked as nonchalantly as he could.

“Well, let's see … I started this tour in July of '92. We didn't have 'em then. If I remember right we got 'em just about a year ago. Yeah, that's right—last November. They're really remarkable little assets, aren't they?”

“Yeah,” Newman muttered, not knowing what else to say. “Remarkable.”

 

CHAPTER EIGHT

Corporate Headquarters

________________________________________

Silicon Cyber Technologies International, Inc.

Newport Beach, CA

Monday, 5 December 1994

1500 Hours, Local

 

M
arty Korman, founder and CEO of Silicon Cyber Technologies International, Inc., had to be convinced that hiring high-profile military retirees to shepherd the company's sales efforts through the government bureaucracy was a good idea. It was SCTI's cofounding partner, Stanley Marat, who insisted that they follow existing protocol to get things done in Washington.

Marat and Korman had been classmates at Cal Poly and after graduation when Korman went to Los Alamos, Marat had been stolen by one high-tech firm after another, always with the enticement of greater and
greater compensation. He had been with six different companies over seven years until the two old friends had bumped into each other in 1981 at a high-tech seminar in Vail, Colorado. Over drinks the two twenty-nine-year-olds decided that if they continued to work for other people they would never get rich. Three months later both quit their jobs, mortgaged their homes and marriages, rented a warehouse in Paramount, California, and started Silicon Cyber Technologies Inc., then later adding the word
International.
And the rest, as they say, is history.