Darpa Alpha

computerized fire control. Once they can pick us up visually they—”

“I know that,” said Tibbet. The Russian TOSs were big, ugly boxes of thirty rockets set on a T-72 chassis. He felt anxious and looked at his watch while taking care not to express any more signs of anxiety in front of his HQ group. He estimated that there were now more than 1,200 marines landed, consolidating the line. It was a very thin line, given the huge area of the lake and environs. The 1,200 had sounded like a lot, however, to the marine quartermaster back on board Yorktown, who had to find every item needed, from the “snow whites” he’d sent with the second wave to each of the Marine force’s thirty Land Warrior Micro Air Vehicle Systems. Each LAWMAVS was no bigger than a child’s rubber-band-and-balsa-wood glider, and had a transparent fuselage containing a laser range finder, video camera, and computer. The hair-thin spars of its tiny tail and wings were transmitter antennae. But now, like Chipper Armstrong’s and Manowski’s JSFs, the LAWMAVS, one issued to each forty-one-man platoon in the MEU, were grounded by the atrocious weather.

Jack Tibbet ordered his communications operator, “If we don’t get a ‘Yankee call’ in ten minutes, I want you to send a plain language to Freeman. Get your pad.”

“I’ll punch it in now, sir, and save.”

“No, to hell with it. Send it now.”

“Right, sir,” replied Jimmy.

Tibbet frowned in concentration. “PL message is as follows:

AIRSEYRAENAKDEYE.

Tibbet paused, remembering the emergency keys he and Freeman had agreed on. The first plain-language transmit from Freeman would contain a BIRTE — built-in reverse target (error) with a three-letter key at the end of the message to open it, the three-letter key being any three-letter initials of a U.S. president: HST for Harry Truman, or JFK, LBJ, GWB, et cetera. Tibbet’s reply, also with a built-in reverse target error, was to be signed off with the two-letter initials of a president, such as AL for Abraham Lincoln, JC for Jimmy Carter, et cetera.

“Sign it HT,” said Tibbet. “It’s a hurry-up for Freeman,” he explained to his radio operator. “We can’t broadcast the fact that we’ve had a twenty-four-hour deadline placed on us. The terrorists here at Lake Khanka would love to know that. We might have to go in sooner than we thought.”

“Message sent, sir.”

“Very well,” acknowledged Tibbet.

“Snow is easing,” said Hoyt encouragingly.

“Not fast enough,” said Tibbet. “We can’t even use our MAVs. They were supposed to relay back good pix to us.”

Jimmy, Tibbet’s radio operator, had been monitoring the weather forecasts. “Sir, they say the weather’s changeable around the lake here. And with those mountains nearby, everything can change in a jiffy.”

“They say,” Tibbet said. “Who are they, Jimmy? Farmer’s Almanac?”

“No, CNN, sir. That Marte Price woman. She’s covering the op.”

Tibbet muttered an obscenity. As Tibbet’s radio operator, Jimmy Vanes was one of the few marines authorized to “dial up” CNN pix on a cell, because no commander wanted his troops second-guessing themselves in the midst of a battle because of some talking face five thousand miles away in Atlanta, like those “embedded” correspondents who had reported every hit the U.S. Army took and every terrorist hostage murdered, creating the impression that U.S. and Coalition forces were on the ropes.

“Turn that damn CNN phone off, Jimmy.”

“Yessir. Sorry, I — sir! Reply coming in. Plain language reads: YGAONOKDETEOEGSOTJ. Last two letters ‘TJ.’”

“Thomas Jefferson?” proffered Tibbet.

Jimmy was already breaking the message, minus the two signature letters “TJ,” into two lines. It read:

YANKEEES

GOODTOGO.

“Very well,” said Tibbet. “Pass the word.”

In ABC’s H-block, Sergei Cherkashin rushed in, thumping the snow from his fur hat and gloves. “What a break, huh?” he said, smiling, the frosty air issuing from his breath rising up to mix with Abramov’s cigar smoke.

“What are you talking about?” asked Abramov tersely, still feeling that his armor in its hidden revetment areas could be bombed once the snow stopped and their engines started up, giving off infrared signatures of the kind his two big TOS tracked rocket launchers were looking out for in the American lines along the perimeter.

“They cracked the code of that Freeman to Tibbet message?” Beria asked hopefully.

“No, no, Comrades,” said Cherkashin, stomping his snow-laden boots, “I mean the message from Moscow. My assembly line captain — who, I might add, gentlemen, is keeping the three tunnels working as we speak — heard it not more than five minutes ago.”

Beria and Abramov said nothing. ABC’s assembly line captains were supposed to keep the production lines moving 24/7 no matter what. Did Cherkashin think the U.S. Marine Corps took a day off in battle?

“Well,” Cherkashin began, pouring himself coffee, relishing the moment, despite knowing how much his petty drama annoyed his comrades, “this captain heard it on the ‘banned’ Chechen terrorist radio network. It appears that fourteen hours before the Chechen network heard of it, our glorious Comrade President issued the Americans a twenty-four-hour deadline. Twenty-four hours? And,” Cherkashin glanced up at the old pendulum clock, a museum piece in the sparse, brutal Stalinesque architecture of the H-block, “that means by now these boys the Americans have sent to do a man’s job have only four hours to do us any damage. So, my comrades in arms, this shit Freeman is in a box. Our box. We’ve got more men than he has, plus your twenty T-90s, Mikhail. All we have to do is keep him away from the tunnels for another—”

“He knows about the tunnels.” It was Abramov, hands forming a chin rest, the smoke rising from his head as if he was on fire. “Your stupid computers, Viktor,” he told Beria. “While they’ve been, what did you call it, crunching the numbers, I’ve worked it out with pen and paper.” With that, the tank commander of the Siberian Sixth turned around the notepad he’d been working on and fixed his eyes on Beria who, frowning, stared down through the Havana’s bluish brown haze.

Abramov sat back in his chair. “Well, Viktor, you’ve been crunching numbers, with all your permutations and — what d’you call them — combinations, but they’re all wrong. You haven’t got the message, have you?” Abramov didn’t wait for a reply. “Because you assumed the key, the signature key, in that plain-language message that your experts intercepted is FDR. These three initials were given at the end, so you thought, ‘Ah, it’s a three- line message.’ In fact, it’s a nine-line message, arrived at by the sum of the number of letters in Roosevelt, nine. Obviously the key for their message was the initials of any American president, so the three letters ‘FDR’ are just to tell them which American president’s name to use. It could have been an American actor or something, but the prearranged key between Freeman and Tibbet was presidential initials.”

Viktor Beria gazed down noncommitally at Mikhail Abramov’s jottings. There was no doubt that Abramov had indeed cleverly broken the long line of 129 letters in the plain-language string down to nine lines of fourteen letters each, so that the plain language text revealed Freeman’s message to Tibbet as:

WHENYOURECEIVE

YANKEEGOODTOGO

FROMMEBOTHOFUS

WILLNOTHITEXIT

BUTHITENTRANCE

ANDWIPETHEMOUT

ANDMRPETERROSE

NEVERDIDGAMBLE

GOODLUCKFORUSA

Beria picked up the yellow sheet and sat down in one of the six ugly but functional metal chairs that lined the room’s walls.

Abramov was sitting back now, allowing himself a victorious smile. “So, Viktor, you’re right. We do have a gift.” Abramov drew in a full draft of the dense cigar smoke. “We know that when Freeman radios ‘Yankee good to