Blood Covenent, page 16
“Thank you, sir.” He turned back to Lynn. “Ma’am, your husband is one of those rare people; he’s a pure warrior. Perhaps one of the finest soldiers produced in the last twenty years. What makes him different is he’s been given a license to kill.”
Lynn closed her eyes. The blood drained from her lips and her stomach tightened. There it was, said simply and plainly. “Like James Bond?”
Hayes shook his head. “No—no. The Major is a soldier; he’s been given a soldier’s license to kill in defense of his country.”
“I don’t understand,” she said weakly.
“These other people are soldiers of a different kind. They hide behind children and shoot from under women’s skirts. They make war on families.They are cowards. ” He spat the last words out. “And these cowards have come to our country. Now, the problem is that the normal police aren’t soldiers, they’re policemen. Policemen are concerned about rights and laws and due process. They are concerned with burglars and murderers and your everyday riff-raff.
“But these cowards aren’t your normal kind of crook. They’re soldiers making war in our streets, and it takes a soldier to fight a soldier. Even cowardly ones like this.” He took in a deep breath. “The major and I are soldiers. Oh, I’m not half the soldier the Major is, but we’ve got a mission, and the mission is to stop these people.”
“No matter what.” She finished his sentence understanding the words and wishing it were someone else.
“Yes, ma’am—no matter what.”
Jonas pinched the bridge of his nose and closed his eyes. He hoped Edwards never heard about this dinner.
Lynn looked across to her husband. “Is this true?”
Harper smiled at his love. “It’s the truth.”
Her anger spent, she sought out Jonas. The revelation was more than enough to quiet her wake. “Isn’t there somebody else?”
Jonas sighed heavily and said, “Lynn, the short answer is no.”
“In this whole army?” she pleaded.
Jonas shook his head.
“Lynn, what you just heard needs to be kept quiet. I—we—could all get into a lot of trouble.”
For a brief instant the twinkle returned to her eyes. “Like Darby said, I am the Major’s wife.”
He almost saw the wink and knew it would be all right. “Yes, you certainly are.”
CHAPTER 16
White House
Tuesday, July 6, 1999
3:00 P.M. EDT
The cast filling the situation room had mutated considerably since the first meeting. Louis counted fewer soldiers, and more people from the State Department. The FBI contingent was bulging with more overweight gray suits. The Department of Energy folks were there simply because nuclear events came under their purview. No one expected much from them beyond the good sense to keep their collective mouths shut. The Vice President’s top political advisor somehow had wrangled a pass to this meeting.The imminent presidential elections and the stark possibility of nuclear terrorism would do nothing to enhance an already tarnished image. The campaign was already in trouble and some were quietly wondering if the wheels would still be on by the time the primaries rolled around.
He closed his eyes, wondering whether history would bring to the fore a new president capable of cleaning up the mess made by Oval Office’s current occupant, or were they condemned to a series of mediocre office holders? Age taught Louis to keep his peace.
George leaned over and whispered, “You think Foggy Bottom is going take this over like they did Serbia?”
“Let’s hope for something a little more sane than that,” replied Louis. He counted five State Department officials.
The National Security Advisor shuffled into the room trailed by his own aides. He held a sheaf of papers in one hand, quickly scanning the filling room. He paused for a moment and talked with Feldman.
“A paper-pushing idiot,” murmured Carnady.
“I didn’t know you got over to the JEH Building,” replied Louis.
Carnady shrugged as the NSA paused with the Energy Secretary. Before achieving cabinet status, he had been a Congressman. The Secretary raised a folder to mask their conversation. The NSA looked across the room to where an army captain was sitting. He had a staff sergeant next to him and a woman on the other side. Louis thought he recognized her.
The NSA continued rounding the table until he settled his bulk between Louis and George. He leaned over and whispered, “I presume you’ve activated your rather unique resources.”
George pursed his lips and nodded.
“The President would look favorably on reinstating your ad hoc services.”
Louis felt his gut twist. “At what price?” He managed to ask in a neutral tone.
“Stop this thing from getting any bigger.”
“Oh,” croaked Louis.
The NSA slapped him on the shoulder and moved towards his seat at the head of the table.
Carnady followed the man’s movements critically. “I wonder what he’s promising the rest of them?”
“Budgets, bureaucracy, and fancy titles—” Louis paused with disgust. “Look around this room, George. They’re not interested in stopping something; they just want to look good on the nightly cable shows.”
“The we-did-the-right-thing-even-though-it-didn’t-work syndrome?”
“Yeah,” murmured Louis.
The NSA shuffled to the head of the table. The White House Chief of Staff sat to his immediate right. Watching them,Tweedledee andTweedledum came to mind.
“I want to thank all of you for coming today,” explained the NSA. He looked hard at the Vice President’s man, but seemed incapable of crossing some boundary. “I won’t keep you long, and I don’t need to remind you how serious the situation is that we are facing or the need to maintain security.”
The Vice President’s man doodled on his note pad.
Feldman made some obligatory sounds about the Bureau’s massive effort and offered some catchy phrases likeleaving no stone unturned . Mercifully, he ran down and turned the meeting over to Mary Kirsten.
Mary was not officially FBI. She was a civilian contractor who knew more about taking apart operating systems, encryption techniques, and programming languages than half a dozen competent government programmers. She was more than competent—brilliant came to mind. She was a part-timer choosing to work for the Bureau when her husband Josh was out driving subs for the US Navy.
She folded her hands over a yellow legal pad with precise lettering. Incongruously, the message I LOVE MOMMY was scrawled in red crayon along the side.
“I was tasked with examining the program running the weapon.” Her voice was soft and even. Her message would be less soothing. “The code was based on the original machine language set for the 8080 microprocessor. For those of you who remember, the 8080 microprocessor was the brain for the first IBM PCs—the ones before there were hard drives. This was the chip they were based on.”
The average age of the State Department people was twenty-eight. They hardly knew what a computer was without sound and terrific graphics. The idea of a monochrome monitor punching out crisp green letters, or a PC with a five-inch floppy drive was before their time. They measured hard drives using gigabytes, but the original PC offered a noisy floppy drive with a capacity of one-hundred-sixty kilobytes. They stared at her like she was ET riding a bicycle across the sky.
“So we can assume this is an old weapon,” she continued. “In fact, according to the serial and lot numbers we were able to track down, every component we can identify was produced in 1978 and 1979. Twenty years ago, microcomputers were basically a hobby. Everything from the software/hardware perspective points to creation and assembly very early in the 80s.” She never looked at her notes. They were there more as a talisman should she stumble, because Mary knew her subject; it was why she was sitting three floors beneath the White House complex in theVault —a bomb-proof, bug-proof room.
“Whoever did this wrote a very simple bootstrap program and burned it on to a PROM chip.” The National Security Council staffers wondered what a high school dance had to do with anything. The White House was not long on deep thinkers these days. PROM stood for Programmable Read Only Memory, but none of them were brave enough to admit their ignorance before their peers. It is a chip where code for a program can be recorded much like a VCR can tape soap operas. History was their least favorite subject. “So the code would be preserved in the event of a power failure. Looking at the program’s structure, I would suggest it is a gifted amateur’s first stab at writing code. That’s the background on the program, however, there are some disturbing aspects to the routine.”
Louis’s lunch churned some more. Mary was leading them somewhere, and he wondered what kind of monster might be lurking behind the next door she opened. Somehow, he knew it would be familiar.
“The code has three different arming sequences, and one disarming sequence. However, I must caution you, the disarming sequence only works withone of the arming sequences.”
The Chief of Staff leaned forward;Tweedledum opened his mouth for the first time. “Ms. Kirsten, are you saying the bomb can be armed in such a way that it can’t be turned off?”
“Yes.”
A disquieting rumble rose around the table. Louis felt his lunch turn very sour and popped a pink Pepto-Bismol tablet. He stared at his own folder and the photographed bomb, the notes from Arkady’s interrogation, and the original drawing. Written in large letters was “SAMSON?” He doubted it would be a question much longer.
“The first arming sequence occurs during the bomb’s assembly.” The rumble stopped like a fat old June bug smacking into windshield along the Mississippi on a hot summer’s eve.
George Carnady closed his eyes, and Mary’s soft voice continued. “This arming sequence continues until a time specific. The countdown is based on the 8080s internal clock, and activates when the year flips from 99 to 00.” She rubbed her hands together. “It’s like the designer wanted it to go off no matter what, but based on what we have here—assembly simply started a twenty-year countdown. This arming sequence can not be stopped short of dismantling the weapon and getting through all the booby traps.”
Louis saw in her eyes she had only started into the dark woods calledbad news.
“You’ve all worked with PC’s for several years, I’m sure. Ever notice how the clocks are never right?” she asked. There was a collective nod around the table. Even the State Department kids knew this. She nodded nervously back. “The clock on this particular bomb was off by over seven months.” She paused again, hoping it would penetrate their conscious thought and slip past their automatic political calculator. “It had slowed down. But, it would also be possible for a clock to accelerate as well. This would suggest for a similar weapon, detonation is imminent.”
The Vice President’s man groaned, “Oh no, no, no.” The campaign was already ragged in terms of the twin specters of fundraising and the inevitable Republican challengers.
Somebody fumbled with a day calendar and handed it to the NSA. He merely glanced at the planner and leaned forward as if the force of his body language would change the news.
“When the clock flips over, the program generates a random seed, a number if you will, between one and a little more than thirty-two thousand.” Mary had no intention of explaining kilobytes to this crowd. They needed to understand they were dealing with a stupid computer incapable of reason or compassion. A computer designed to detonate a nuclear bomb. A weapon designed to kill. Flash polls would not solve this problem.
“The program uses this number and starts a countdown in terms of seconds. This is the final detonation sequence. For example, if the program comes up with twelve hundred, then twenty minutes later it goes off. There is nothing—short of dismantling the weapon—that can be done. We know disarming the weapon is a two-hour process.” Her tone had shifted from that of an analyst’s to a mother’s. Her eyes admonished them to put aside their petty games and concentrate on a solution.
“Those are the automatic sequences. There is also a discrete arming sequence to detonate the weapon inside a one-hundred-eighty-minute window.” She touched the controls on the table, and every monitor in the room sprang to life. The screen displayed:
083097109115048110
“This is the arming sequence required for field deployment. The next number is the disarming sequence.” She tapped the controls a second time and displayed:
068097103111110
“At first I didn’t see any significance to the numbers. However, one of my assistants was looking at an ASCII chart. The ASCII chart is a translation that converts letters into numbers for the 8080 microprocessor.” Best to stick with the short answers and leave any deeper understanding to those who understood. “We look at these numbers and split them into groups of three.”Click :
083 -- 097 -- 109 -- 115 -- 048 -- 110
068 -- 097 -- 103 -- 111 -- 110
Louis stared at the numbers quite lost, but Mary Kirsten was not someone prone to games. His gut told him to pay attention. He counted six groups of three, then dismissed the idea. Preposterous!
“These numbers correspond to these letters.” She touched the control one last time:
083 -- 097 -- 109 -- 115 -- 048 -- 110
S a m s 0 n
068 -- 097 -- 103 -- 111 -- 110
D a g o n
Louis felt his lunch flip-flop. SAMSON stared back at him from the screen. A product from Arzamas-16! A weapon straight from the bowels of the Cold War!
“Is this your idea of a joke?” snapped the NSA.
Mary held her hands tighter. She started to speak, when Louis answered with deadly seriousness, “No, it’s our past come to haunt us.”
The room’s focus shifted from the civilian contractor to what many considered a Cold War relic. Louis Edwards was tolerated, because no one was quite sure what he knew. Some believed he kept track of too many ghosts and simply retiring Louis did not make the specters evaporate.
“The weapon is of Soviet manufacture.”
“We already guessed that,” snarled the Energy Secretary.
Louis fixed the man with a cold stare. Since the revelations regarding Chinese espionage at the national labs under the control of the Energy Department, no one listened very carefully to his protestations. The administration had been forced to come with hat in hand to the remaining spymasters and ask their help. Counter-intelligence was considered an arcane art. That was before the Cox report, the unmonitored email to Beijing, and people without proper security wandering in and out of the labs.
“Yes, but did you know it was built at Arzamas-16 by a man named David Kudrik?” Silence met his demand. “Or did you know this weapon never appeared on any Soviet order of battle, nuclear inventory or as part of the strategic arsenal?
“There have been rumors—unsubstantiated rumors—about a weapons system calledSAMSON for fifteen years. However, these weapons never appeared on any list. Part of the rumor related to the wild idea that the KGB ordered the weapons.” He wondered if some of the children attending even knew what the KGB was.
Thank goodness he had Jonas do the research. “For those of you who care, Kudrik was Jewish.” Sub-candlepower light bulbs began to flicker in some eyes. The folks from Foggy Bottom continued to have that deer-in-the-headlights look. The senior military people nodded their understanding.Tweedledee andTweedledum glowered from their positions at the head of the table. Feldman looked as gray as the cheap pinstripe suit he was wearing.
“Some of you, perhaps, remember the story of Samson.” In an era when Serbia was bombed on Easter Sunday and Saddam Hussein was given a reprieve for Ramadan, Louis wondered whether there was even a Judeo-Christian perspective to work with. “Samson destroyed the Philistine temple for a god called Dagon. It was his last act, and in death he killed more people than ever in life.”
He jabbed a finger at the screen. “Seeing this, I am convinced we are dealing with Kudrik’s weapon. Something he calledSAMSON .”
“Why didn’t you tell us this before?” askedTweedledee .
“I wasn’t certain. We knew we were dealing with a suitcase weapon, but if it’sSAMSON , then I can tell you we are dealing with the possibility of a hundred or more of these things.” He paused gathering himself. “Ms. Kirsten indicated the code was written by an amateur.”
Mary nodded.
“Kudrik was a plasma physicist amongst other things. When they reviewed the code forSAMSON at Arzamas-16, nobody understood what they were looking at. They were too proud to question it.”
Tweedledumnarrowed his eyes. “You talk like you know these things—how?”
George Carnady spoke up quickly. “Sir, not everyone in this room is cleared for this information.”
In days gone by, Carnady would have been challenged and browbeaten into revealing his sources. The seemingly daily discoveries of national security breeches silenced his critics. Keeping assets like Harper shielded from the twenty-four-hour news cycle was critical. Both Louis and George were mindful of Bill Casey—Reagan’s CIA Director—and that he never wanted to read about their machinations in the newspaper. Harper was theblackest of the black , and Louis intended to keep this secret.
The Vice President’s man asked, “Over a hundred of these things?”
Louis nodded.
The Vice President’s man looked greener than the bad tie he was wearing. How would the political consultants deal with this mess?
Feldman, still a cop somewhere beneath the managerial veneer, warned sharply, “This doesn’t leave this room. If it does, I’ll personally lock you up.”
The remainder of the meeting receded into banter about what to do, but this was the type of problem requiring substance, and no amount of symbolism could cover its ugly stench.
CHAPTER 17
