Silent Key, page 7
“Speaking of sexy, here’s the fairing.” Doctor Dodge started into an orientation of all that he had accomplished and discovered about the fairing. He explained how the fairing appeared white in the Ghost ship's infrared display as it floated on the ocean waves. He showed Cross where he had tapped into the circuitry and how he had figured out how to gain access to the firmware.
“Would you like some help deciphering the code?” He pulled up the text file reader on the screen. “I’m no programmer, but I understood some of it. Not enough, I’m afraid, which is why I called Logan, and why you’re here, of course.”
“I prefer to work alone,” Cross said flatly as he stepped toward the artifact that had drawn him across the planet.
| Chapter 6 |
Coordinates
“You don’t have much time. We could have visitors in a couple of days. If you can find out anything more before the authorities confiscate it, I’d be in your debt.”
Cross nodded, eager to delve into his work without interruption.
“I’ll leave you to it then. The Jeep-Kart is yours for the night. The keys are in it. I’m going to walk on over to the American Eatery. Would you like anything?”
“No, thank you,” Ethan said, eager to get started.
“Very well, suit yourself. Let’s catch up in the morning. I’m interested to hear what you find.”
Cross settled in at the well-used HAM operator station. In front of him lay his quarry. It extended the length of the workbench. The intricate rocket fairing exuded value. It wasn’t the exotic material alone that drove the impression. It was the tight tolerances apparent in its construction. It was a fine piece of craftsmanship. The slight curl of its shape was reminiscent of a modern windmill blade. An aileron flight control surface was formed into what appeared to Cross to be the trailing edge. He inspected it closer. Along what he figured was the bottom, he traced his fingers along a rib that seemed to have the counter contour of the fairings leading edge. Yes. When installed on the nose of a rocket, the flap appeared to tuck behind the edge of the adjacent fairing. Cross could envision the ingenious assembly; each aileron stowed away from view until the whole mechanism was released like a giant Fabergé egg.
Cross turned his attention to the root of the wing. A cover panel had been removed from an electronics box at the base of its twisted shape—the seamlessly integrated mold line showed evidence of Doctor Dodge’s struggle to gain entry. He had gained access using crude tools, but he had been careful with his surgery after that. The exposed electronics had been kept clean. A makeshift cable ran from a test port to the workstation's computer. The terminal was positioned where Cross could navigate the code displayed on the screen while peering into the foreign circuitry.
The Doctor had pioneered a rudimentary yet capable set of diagnostic tools. A pair of old-school dual flat-screen Liquid Crystal Display monitors was at his disposal. Of course, Cross thought, Archie, the man who piloted a 25-year-old Jeep-Kart and a half-century-old relic of defense technology gone by, wouldn’t be set up with a modern workstation with the requisite glass board display panels and laser keyboard to which Cross was accustomed.
Cross sat and dove into reviewing the code on the right-hand monitor being piped to the archaic display panel from the hardware on the operating table in front of him. He read from the top down. Chinese characters that he didn’t understand appeared periodically, but the conditional function structure was familiar. He recognized the matrix math. He scanned over direction cosine matrices and a mixture of Euler operands and quaternion calculations. After a few minutes of scrolling the screen, something caught his eye. He recognized all of it as the guidance portion of the algorithm, but where was the code guiding the unit? There, he saw it; A comparator function.
The hardware’s current location was supplied to the code from an embedded global positioning system receiver with integrated attitude sensors. That was well-established technology. Cross wasn’t interested in that. He wanted to know the final position to which the comparator function matched the current location. He was looking for something that would look like a coordinate. He knew that the navigation code would be designed to calculate how far the device was from some predetermined destination by subtracting where it was from where it needed to be. The code would work to minimize the distance between the two. That simple arithmetic would be the engine behind the complex translation of that knowledge into the control surface inputs needed to steer the unit as it spun to its ultimate destination. Something must have gone awry with the communication to the aileron. Cross correctly figured that the arrival point would be unaffected by whatever malfunction plagued the ill-fated journey. Yes. There it was, Cross spotted a constant that looked like a line of Latitude and Longitude. It read:
20° 8' 29" S, 158° 37' 4"E (-20.14159, 158.61803)
He jotted the coordinates down on a nearby yellow sticky note:
Latitude 20 degrees, 8 minutes, 29 seconds South, Longitude 158 degrees, 37 minutes, 4 seconds East.
He took a moment to reach up to his comm-specs and slid them down over his eyes. He depressed a small button that he knew from the feel of its shape to his fingertips. He snapped a photo of the coordinates along with a fragment of the code displayed on the screen.
Cross hastily entered the coordinates into a map search on the left-hand monitor. The map panned a few thousand miles southwest of his location at Kwajalein to a solid blue position in the middle of the open water North East of Australia. He zoomed out—the Coral Sea. Nothing was there but an expanse of blue ocean. He must have transcribed the coordinates incorrectly. He added the text ‘The Coral Sea’ to the sticky note and stuck it onto Dodge’s old terminal monitor. He’d come back to that.
Cross continued this study of the algorithm. He scrolled down. Another few minutes passed. His eyelids felt heavy, but he forced his eyes to open wider.
A conditional statement passed his field of view from the bottom to the screen's top. He stopped the scroller and moved the screen back to take a closer look. The line of code called a function that Cross recognized to reference the time of day. It was a fork in the road of the computer code that told the electronics to do something different at a specific time. It was logic based on a clock. The behavior of the device would change between two specified times. He read the times bounding a conditional statement, 17:56 UTC+11 Apparent Sunset and 0531 UTC+11 Apparent Sunrise. The first time corresponded to sunset in Oceania, the timezone of the coordinates Cross had noted elsewhere in the code. After the specified time, the algorithm began to look different. No longer was code commanding the electronics to generate power from sunlight. Instead, the code looked more like a radio receiver. Yes. He scrolled on. He recognized digital signal processing algorithms.
He turned his head to look at the hardware on the desk. Another section of the electronics to the test cable's right was still covered. It was a smaller portion of the circuit card assembly than the real estate devoted to the power conditioning electronics. Cross scanned the workbench for a screwdriver. He reached into the assembly and gently pried back the cover of the undisturbed portion. The interior lid yielded readily to the leverage. Cross leaned in to remove the cover. He saw what he knew to be a digital receiver under the protective cover. He knew Doctor Dodge would recognize it too.
It was getting late. Cross could feel the weight of his eyelids pulling at his attention. He shook it off. It had been a long series of fights to reach Kwajalein since Dubai. He was fueled by anticipation. There was so much more code to review. He wondered what else he could glean about the enigmatic rocket hardware. He was eager to share what he had already found with Doctor Dodge. He wanted more answers than questions before reporting back to Logan Kraft. He forced himself to focus. The lines of code were running together. Perhaps he could shut his eyes for a moment, just to clear his mind. Yes, he’d rest his head for a few minutes and go at it again with a fresh start. He put his forehead on his forearm on the desktop in front of the terminal. Cross dozed off into a deep slumber.
| Chapter 7 |
Shadow on the Sun
EV3 Headquarters, Chelmsford. England.
“What we need is a cloak. A shield. A mirage.” Nathan Cain addressed the assembly of stakeholders in the EV3 second-story conference room. His voice boomed through the phone to the employee who had called into the meeting. “For the first time in over three decades, the true nature of the ARCELOR is known to someone outside of our organization. We are at a juncture.” Cain stood from his seat at the head of the long board room table. He referred to Ethan Cross without speaking his name. The CEO walked to face the wall of windows that overlooked the company’s half-length football field. Cain spoke again as he gazed through the glass. “Over three decades ago, the universe presented a problem at the same time it revealed a solution. The ARCELOR; It is our responsibility to the human race to bring the ARCELOR to bear on this problem. We are faced with the unfavorable prospect of enacting our long-term plans far earlier than we anticipated, lest we find a shroud for the ARCELOR, a veil to protect her from prying eyes. Long have I pondered on this dilemma. How do we keep the ARCELOR hidden in plain sight from the world while we continue our work?” Cain turned away from the window to face the room of captive participants.
He focused on the modern saucer-shaped phone sitting on the table. It cast an eerie frozen three-dimensional profile image of a beautiful woman with jet black hair above the table’s surface. The woman was calling into the affair from abroad. She was dialed in from across the globe via a stylish pair of mobile comm-specs. As was common with comm-spec connections from remote locations where only satellite internet connections were available, her video feed was one way. She could view the room of board members on the inside of her glasses, but a video of her likeness could not be streamed to the room due to both the upload bandwidth limitation of the satellite network, which was just as well to Sirena because she sat reclined on the lounge chair on the private top pool deck. No camera was set up to view her flawless face. Instead, her pre-recorded avatar mug shot hovered in the center of the table projected from a holographic prism for all to see. It was a familiar apparition to attendees of the monthly recurring meeting as she had been operating as an Expat for over a year since leaving Portsmouth harbor aboard one EV3’s Panacea cruise ships bound for the South Pacific after a call in Miami. Cain continued to address the attendees.
“The ARCELOR is the heart of a star. Our Star. It’s the centerpiece of our enterprise. It’s the core of EV3’s empire. It’s the key to humanity’s future. For many months now, we’ve convened to discuss ideas to protect her, to keep her under lock and key, to maintain the Crown’s greatest state secret. To date, I’ve heard no viable options from any of you.” He shot a disapproving glance at his Chief Technical Officer, Alan Fortinbras. He carried on, “Again, are there any new ideas to direct attention away from her until we decide her secret can be revealed? I need something- anything that would cast a shadow of doubt on her true nature?” Cain’s frustration was familiar to the participants.
The room was silent. Miss Sirena Raven spoke through the phone.
“I may have something.” Her English accent broadcast clearly to all the EV3 board members. He knew that she would continue without encouragement. Still, Cain prompted her to elaborate. She was one of the few EV3 employees to which Cain afforded some autonomy.
“Please proceed. It’s about time we’ve had a fresh idea on this topic, a viable one.” He glared at Fortinbras as he granted Sirena leeway to take control of the discussion via the phone. After his latest failed concept, Fortinbras dared not offer another half-conceived notion, which he had shared at another session. Fortinbras had voiced a plan for a smear campaign of Ethan Cross to discredit any public claim he may make about the ARCELOR. Cain had promptly pointed out that Fortinbras’ idea assumed Cross would make the first move. The strategy was reactive and did nothing to prevent the very situation they sought to avoid. Cain had shut Fortinbras’ idea down, signaling that he would tolerate only pro-active strategies.
“Have you heard of the Intellagama?” Sirena paused for emphasis while she sipped a green umbrella drink only she could see. No one responded. “It’s an amphibious electric commuter jet. It recently earned worldwide notoriety for nearly circumnavigating the globe here in the southern hemisphere.”
“What’s unique about that?” Cain countered. “Many aircraft boast the ability to fly around the world.”
“It did so in a single day. Or, to be more accurate, it took off at sunrise and landed at sunset back here in Sydney, never crossing into darkness. The Intellagama generates all the electricity its engines need using a unique new solar cell technology from another company here in Australia named NoviX. Their stock has soared ever since but has seen a significant decline in recent days.”
Cain’s mind processed the gravity of her statement. Then he smiled. He pointed his smiling face at his chief technology officer. Alan Fortinbras caught on and smiled back, hoping for his superior’s approval. Cain’s chief of security sat by the conference room entrance. The mountain of a man watched the two men smiling and smiled to mimic them, revealing a missing front tooth. Dante didn’t understand what the business leaders had realized. Cain responded slowly.
“Smells like time for a hostile takeover.”
“I already have a man on the inside on our payroll.” Sirena offered.
“NoviX. I like it.” He paused pensively. “Miss Raven, I think you may have found just the thing to cast a shadow on our sun.”
| Chapter 8 |
Silent Key
Kwajalein. Marshall Islands
Cross awoke with a start. A hand on his shoulder and a deep voice interrupted the fathoms of his Rapid Eye Movement sleep.
“We’ll take it from here, son.” A man in a black suit and tie wearing dark comm-spec sunglasses spoke to him. Cross sat up straight as the man, and a clone of the man standing beside the first came into focus. Behind the two twin-shaded men, Archie Dodge stood, waiting.
“Clarence Jones, Missile Space Intelligence Center.” The serious Alabamian said with finality. “We’ve got this now,” Jones helped Cross out of the chair to his feet.
Cross stepped over to Doctor Dodge. Dodge leaned in and spoke in a whisper as Cross rubbed his eyes.
“They touched down less than an hour ago and insisted I take them straight here to see the fairing. It looks like these good-old MISC boys from ‘Bama beat the Alice Springs folks to the punch. It’s just as well. The USAKA base here on Kwaj is theirs anyway.”
The Doctor and Cross watched the men hastily package up the rocket shell fragment.
“I told them everything I learned. The MISC men didn’t offer much, but they did confirm that it’s from a rocket launched a few weeks ago from Aurhihi Point in New Zealand.”
“Where can we reach Logan Kraft from? Do you have a secure line?”
“I’ve got a STE phone back at the office. I’ve already sent him an unclassified message to arrange a call time.”
Cross followed Archie out of the hanger, glancing back at the desk where the men from MSIC were confiscating the aeroshell. Cross stole a final gaze at Ghost Ship that sat low in the boathouse. The site of the antennas configured for radio frequency direction finding, staggered on its roof like masts of a schooner, reminded Cross of the Doctor's story of the Sea Gull that had been lost at sea. They would have no more opportunity to study the curious rocket solar panel. Like Dodge’s lost Pacific island of Pitcairn, the fairing had gone silent key.
The two men sat together in front of the Secure Terminal Equipment land-line phone. The STE was developed in the early 1990s by the National Security Agency for crypto communications for the United States government, its contractors, and allies. Like everything on Kwajalein, it was a relic. Cross was amazed it was still in commission. Then again, he had learned that the Secure Telephone Unit, or STU phone, the STE’s predecessor remained in commission for nearly 40 years from 1960. It was quickly phased out due to the operational difficulties that hindered coordination between the Federal Aviation Administration and NORAD during the September 11, 2001 attacks on New York and Washington almost 50 years ago. Like Archie himself, this antique STE may be the last of its kind, thought Cross.
Dodge put a worn PC card containing cryptographic algorithms into a slot in the STE at the specified time. The ancient machinery recognized the Fortezza Plus Crypto Card he inserted. Dodge picked up the handset and dialed the telephone number using the STE keypad. It was an archaic process, but Archie commented under his breath, suggesting that he considered the encryption technique to be modern. “Beats using a Tabula Recta….” Cross smiled in silence, uncertain of the reference. Logan was waiting in a Secure Compartmentalized Information Facility, a SCIF, thousands of miles away.
“Hello,” Logan answered.
“Stand by, let me go secure,” Dodge stated and pressed SECDATA on the STE. They waited a few seconds until a secure line had been achieved. The display showed the session's classification level: LINE 1- Classified. “Can you hear us? You old Brass Rat?” David Dodge razzed his fellow MIT grad and former roommate.
“You old HAM, how are you?”
“I’m well. I’ve got your man, Cross, here with me. I’ll let him respond to that. Tell him what you found,” Dodge yielded the floor to Cross.
