The Passage (45 page)

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Authors: David Poyer

BOOK: The Passage
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“Hey, XO, one question.”
“Shoot, Dwight.”
“CINCLANTFLT pulls us out of training for some crisis action thing before we do the final battle problem. But then whatever it is, it's over. Do we have to go back to Gitmo? Or do they check us off on the requirement, based on our performance up to when we left?”
“Good question. It'd probably depend on how long we were out and how close going back would crowd us up to the deployment date. Final decision would be up to the training people on Admiral Claibourn's staff. Don't throw anything away, though. We could get a message at noon, turn around and go back, do the battle problem tomorrow.”
A knock, and Chief Erb came in with the message board. They fell silent as Vysotsky silently read and initialed it. When the radioman left, he cleared his throat. “Interesting,” he murmured.
“For Chrissake, XO—”
“Okay, it says to drop speed to twenty knots to conserve fuel, but we're still headed northwest. They want us and
Dahlgren
to break out our landing-party stores, ready ships' boats, and prepare to embark or refuel helicopters. Norm, Dwight, we need to file a report on status of food, fresh water, JP-four, diesel, gasoline, batteries, habitability items. Dave, we'll need a medical-stores inventory,
too. We need to come up on International Marine Distress, one fifty-six point eight megahertz, one fifty-six point three, one fifty-seven point one, one-fifty-six point sixty-five, and the emergency CB channel. There's more.” He glanced at his watch. “I'll read it at officers' call. Let's go.”
 
 
DAN filled two pages in his wheel book with things to do, then started delegating them to his chiefs and officers. Whatever was in the wind, it was going to take a lot of supplies and a lot of radio communications.
When he had everything farmed out and working, he stopped in CIC and stood in front of the combat direction system's screen. The system was up, and he studied the NTDS symbology. Gradually, he noted other units being sortied: a unit from Key West that broke as Patrol Hydrofoil Squadron Two; others were Coast Guard, and there were two NATO friendlies. He started to identify them, then didn't. Time was elastic at sea. How slowly the minutes crept by on watch, and how quickly they sped when too much had to be done.
He headed aft, looking into one compartment after another. In the computer room, Shrobo and Dawson and Hofstra were on the screens again. They glanced his way with their usual glazed gazes as he pulled up a stool.
Suddenly, Dan felt guilty. Shrobo was still aboard. No one had remembered him during the hectic hours before getting under way. He could have been left ashore at Gitmo, either to await their return or be flown home. He couldn't blame anyone else; he should have thought of it.
“What's it look like, Doc?”
The civilian shoved himself back from a keyboard and drew his hands from the top of his skull down to his chin. “Like doing a crossword puzzle backward, in Greek.” He leaned back farther, and Dan caught his stool just before it went over. “Thanks … . Like wandering down one of these passageways and opening this door and then that door, and there's a glimpse of something for just a fraction of a second. Then it's gone.” He blinked. “Is it light outside?”
“Yeah, it's light.” Dan stood up. “Let's go out, get you out of here for a couple of minutes.”
When they emerged onto the midships platform, the overcast had clamped down all around the horizon: a darker patch ahead, a slanted haze beneath—a rainsquall. When Dan leaned over the rail, he could see
Dahlgren
rolling heavily ahead, mast tops nodding from side to side.
Barrett
rolled, too, but more slowly, and the sea
slipped past, littered with sargasso weed looking like what was left after you ate a bunch of grapes. Dan ran his eyes around the seals on the Harpoon canisters as Shrobo detached his glasses and lifted his naked face. “Smells clean out here,” he said. Then, when Dan didn't answer, he added, “I mean, without the poison we're always sucking in with every breath on land. I suppose it's still there, but the dilution factor … Do you know anything about the immune system?”
“The what?” For a second, he thought Shrobo was still talking about ACDADS. “Oh. You mean the human immune system?”
“Uh-huh. My wife's allergic to any form of chemical contaminant—like the stuff on mattresses, new carpets, the scents on toilet paper, dyes … . There are more people like that than we suspect.” He went on about chemical emanations from building materials, pesticides, fertilizers. “She can't even read the newspaper—the ink. There's a place called Portsmouth Island, in North Carolina. It was abandoned years ago; there's never been any spraying or other chemical contamination. I'm thinking of starting a colony there.”
Dan said, “Look, Doc, I owe you an apology.”
“An apology?” Shrobo opened his eyes.
“This diversion, mission, whatever it is … I should have arranged to leave you in Gitmo, arranged for the base people to fly you home. I'm sorry. It slipped my mind.”
Shrobo shrugged. “It's a break from being an administrator. But I'd like to call home if I can, let Alma know what's going on.”
“I'll set you up with the comm officer. We should be in range of the Key West marine operator pretty soon.”
“Thanks.” Shrobo blinked in the pale radiance. “You know, you can almost feel it out here, the energy.”
“It is pretty bright.”
“I meant another kind of energy. Every sphere—like our planet—contains within it two opposed tetrahedrons. Their intersections produce access points, or chakras. One of those dimensional gates is in the middle of what we call the Bermuda Triangle.”
Dan looked sideways at him, realizing that the thick glasses, the medical smock, the neurotic preoccupation with his health aside, Shrobo was still one weird bird. You couldn't deny he was brilliant, but after three weeks aboard he still had to have someone take him to the mess hall. And a
Kidd-
class didn't have that complicated a layout.
“So, how's the system fix going? I see we have NTDS back.”
Shrobo blinked. “Do they? I've been concentrating on the virus. The interesting thing about it is that it seems to be self-erasing.”
“
What?
”
“Oh, this is a very interesting guy we have here. If you really want to go into it …”
“Sure,” said Dan. He owed the guy that, to listen.
“The virus operates in the following sequence. One: It establishes itself by writing its basic program—what I call the ‘infector'—to memory, with several backups in various portions of the memory. Two: It 'unzips' the actively hostile portion of the program and writes it to additional areas of operating memory. Three: Running in main memory, not continuously, but in short bursts between lines of the executing program, it actively destroys data by deleting portions of existing code. Four: It masks the damage by replacing the erased code with randomly generated garbage, mimicking the format of the original data.” Shrobo paused. “Clear so far?”
Dan nodded.
“Okay. Then, and unlike any virus I've ever heard of before, step five: It erases itself.”
“You said that before. But I don't understand. Then what's the problem?”
“Because it leaves behind its toxins—the garbage written to the tape. It rezips itself to the spore form and writes the infector to several portions of the tape. Then it erases itself from the operating memory.”
“Whew.”
“The end result—about a minute after you first boot it—is an infected and degraded tape. The damage accrues so gradually that it may take a while even to notice—especially in the case of the sonar system, which uses deep algorithms to process the signal. That's why you noticed it first in the weapons-control module. You actually get a physical output there, which you can visually observe to be faulty.” He fitted his glasses back on again, looked at Lenson. “Any questions?”
“Jesus. Okay, one—this garbage it writes. Can you at least write us something to detect and delete that? Then we could figure where it is by what it leaves behind.”
Shrobo smiled mischievously. “A parity check, you mean? I tried. This virus generates the same total of ones and zeroes that are in the original line of code, only they're totally scrambled.”
“This is a real bastard.”
“It's the most cunningly designed program I've ever seen. It's very difficult to investigate. If the program's running and you attempt to stop it to read its internal code, it erases. So far, all I've managed to do is establish its overall length. Eighty lines. A masterpiece of compression.”
“Where would something like this come from?”
“I have no idea. But whoever wrote it was damned good.”
Dan stared down into the sea as it all reverberated around in his mind. Finally, he said, “How about this built-in booby trap? Can you write a program that activates that? Make it blow itself up?”
“Good insight. That was one of the first things I tried. The self-destruct feature doesn't work in the spored form. Only when it's unzipped. But Matt and I are still working on it.”
“Matt? … Oh, Petty Officer Williams.”
“That's one sharp kid you've got there. He's been a big help. We'll keep you and the captain advised how it goes.”
“Okay. Thanks. Anything else I can do for you?”
“Feel that,” said Shrobo.
Dan hesitated, then gripped the proffered bicep. It felt flabby and soft. “Not bad, huh?” the scientist said. “The workout room—weights, stationary bike.”
“That's good.”
“And I think we're getting close to cracking this thing. It's not St. Paul on the road to Damascus, but I think we're getting close.”
“Anything you need, let me know.”
“Attention, please,” said the 1MC, and they both fell silent, turning to listen.
“This is the captain speaking.
“As you know, we've been under way since early this morning, headed north and then northwest around the tip of Cuba. We have just received a message clarifying where we are going, and why.
“The message directs us to proceed to the north central coast of Cuba, between Cuba and the Florida Keys. Our mission is to be available for on-scene tasking in the vicinity of Boca de Marcos-Anguilla Cay area, in reference to a possible mass boat lift.
“There are no further details on the mission, but there are preparatory taskings that have been passed down via the appropriate department heads. It looks to me like a humanitarian operation. It should not compromise our combat readiness or our ability to return to Guantánamo Bay, which I would anticipate after our activities here are complete.
“I'll keep you informed as more information comes in. Carry on.”
 
 
DAN made his excuses to Shrobo and left him standing at the rail, blinking up at the sky as if at a huge screen filled with interesting new data. He picked up his morning traffic, the Teletype clatter coming through the little grilled door as the duty radioman slid it open, slid his pile through, clicked it closed. As he leafed rapidly through it, the 1MC's hollow voice echoed around him: “Haul over all hatch hoods and gun covers.” They were entering the squall.
He decided to go aft and see how the inventory of helo stores was going. He wondered what exactly they'd have to do in a boat lift. He wondered what they'd find two hundred miles ahead, and which way the storm would decide to go. As he headed down the passageway, absently noting that the red “occupied” light was on again over the door to the crypto vault, he couldn't shake a growing feeling of unease.
 
 
ON the far side of that door, a clock hummed to itself in the isolated quiet of a steel-walled cave. A diffuser hummed a steady drone, breathing cold air on the close-cropped head of the man who sat at a bolted-down desk positioned between two large safes.
He sat scratching his bald spot within a windowless steel-sided cubicle surrounded on all sides by the ship. An arm's length away, a heavy system of levers and dogs were locked into welded sockets. The single massively built access was airtight and watertight. Once locked down, it could not be unsealed by anything short of a cutting torch, and even that would take hours to burn through nearly a foot of hardened armor steel. At the upper and lower edges, springed pins were set to trip if it was opened without the proper combination, setting off alarms throughout the ship.
The other three bulkheads were lined with stacked racks of publications, bulletins, films, and data tapes. They stirred uneasily as the ship rolled, restrained by fiddle boards and shock cords. Some were tactical, outlining the way the Navy would maneuver in war or how it would coordinate operations with the other services and allied navies. Others were intelligence, carefully setting forth everything that was known and speculated about possible enemies around the globe. And still others had to do with communications procedures, security, and how to use, maintain, and repair the classified equipment aboard.

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