Straits of Power

Jeffrey was shocked. “Russia sold them to Germany? In plain view, just like that?”

Parker nodded expressionless. “We estimate each has a lift capacity of over five hundred tons.”

Jeffrey grimaced — that was even more than he’d thought, five times what the air force’s huge C5-Bs could carry. “But if they’re German flagged now, or whatever you call it, can’t we take them out with B-Fifty-twos or B- Ones and B-Twos or something?” B-1s were supersonic strategic bombers. B-2s were subsonic stealth bombers. Like the others, B-52s had global reach from U.S. bases, with tanker planes refueling them in flight.

Hodgkiss shook his head impatiently. “They’d never make it there, let alone come back, going that far inside Axis-controlled and defended airspace. The air force already went through this with me. The anti-stealth radar the Russians invented works too well. And the Germans have surveillance assets concealed in satellites they built for Third World countries before the war, launched by the ArianeSpace consortium. They can watch us multispectrally and there’s nothing we can do about it. So forget about a surprise air attack.”

Jeffrey nodded reluctantly. “These ekranoplans give Germany substantial new options in the Med.”

“Got it in one,” Admiral Hodgkiss said. “But it gets a lot worse. Mr. Parker?”

“We need to shift gears. New topic. With everyone eavesdropping on everyone else’s transmissions, and cryptography now amounting to an entire classified body of work in math and computer science, it’s difficult to be positive that any message has not been compromised.”

“Granted,” Jeffrey said. This was nothing new. With the outbreak of the war, the World Wide Web had collapsed into disjointed fragments as countries made impenetrable firewalls against external intrusion — by disconnecting their pieces of the Internet from the outside world altogether. In the U.S. and UK, and over the protest of many, cell phones had been banned except for persons with special licenses: Their signals were too easy to intercept and amplify billions of times from orbit. Massive parallel processing would give the enemy valuable knowledge from hearing loads of civilian chitchat and analyzing voice content in bulk. As a consequence of this real threat, everything that could be done was done by fiber-optic cable or wire; home-front propaganda stressed “Is this e-mail or phone call necessary?” and people paid attention; in the U.S., sending spam was a federal offense with stiff prison penalties; government bailouts kept the most-affected telecom companies going.

“The result,” Parker went on, “besides the downer effect on civilian morale, and rampant paranoia, is to force us back to using early Cold War — era espionage trade craft sometimes. Human couriers, dead drops, that sort of thing. Well-proven things, from before the Internet or minicomputers were even invented. Which of course degrades the amount of information our surviving agents can convey, and badly slows how quickly they convey it.”

Jeffrey digested all this. “You’re implying that it’s all become polarized. Either a cyberspace and electronic warfare arms race at the very high-tech end, or Mata Hari cloak-and-dagger stuff at the very low-tech end.”

“That’s exactly right,” Parker answered. “Except, you should say and, not or. It’s both at once, Captain…. One technique for maintaining covert broadband is to embed the message, encoded, in a seemingly harmless broadcast, but disguise it as underlying noise. It’s an old idea. I can’t say too much, except that all the major powers these days watch for such enemy messages, and use the same technique sometimes to send messages of their own. Again, there are top-secret math theorems about how to study noise and tell if it’s too patterned to be harmless random static. People with Ph.D.s at Fort Meade do this for a living.”

“Okay.” Fort Meade was the NSA’s headquarters. “With all due respect, what has this got to do with me?”

Jeffrey caught Hodgkiss and Wilson give each other meaningful looks, then they both turned to Parker.

“You’re attending this meeting now, Captain Fuller, because several ominous things are converging fast.”

“I’m listening.”

“Again, without the details, the NSA can read pieces of some German military signals traffic.”

“I’m sure they do the same thing to us.”

“You don’t know the least of it…. The NSA began, a few weeks ago, to pick up references to something their linguists translate as ‘Plan Pandora.’ ”

“Like in Pandora’s box?”

“It’s a long-standing part of German war-fighting culture that they like to choose operational plan names that carry some meaning or aspect of the plan. We do that too, in peacetime, for public relations, but never in a major shooting war like this.”

“Plan Pandora,” Jeffrey repeated. “Open her box, unleash unspeakable horrors on the world.”

“That’s why I said it was ominous. There have also been repeated reference to ‘Zeno,’ which appears to be related to this Pandora plan. From the context, the NSA thinks Zeno is actually a code name for a person. And again, the specific code name chosen probably tells us something.”

“Zeno as in Zeno’s paradox? The ancient Greek guy?”

Parker nodded.

Jeffrey recited the paradox to himself, to try to see what was going on: You can’t walk across a room, ’cause first you have to go halfway there, then a quarter, then an eighth, blah blah, so you never get the whole way there…. Except Zeno wasn’t an idiot. He knew people walked across rooms. That’s what made for the paradox.

Yeah, but this brain teaser is simple to solve nowadays. The ancient Greeks didn’t understand how to sum a converging infinite series. A half plus a quarter plus an eighth and so on adds up to one, not infinity.

“It hasn’t been a paradox for centuries.”

“Precisely,” Parker said, as if he’d let Jeffrey talk so he could pounce as soon as Jeffrey finished. “Paradoxes are solved by major breakthroughs in the conceptual framework through which the problem can be viewed. That’s the part that’s ominous.”

“Zeno. This suggests the Germans have made some sort of new major breakthrough?”

“And I’m not finished.”

“Keep going,” Jeffrey said. “Please. You definitely have my attention.”

“The NSA also intercepted a German message hidden in a Turkish TV station’s signals.”

“Did they break any of it?”

“They broke all of it. The message was sent encrypted, but using two different American codes, one within the other.”

“What?”

“The outer code, once the NSA cryptanalysts recognized what it was, was easy to undo by using certain approaches and pieces of data. The outer code was something teams of hackers—‘crackers’ is the proper nomenclature when they’re malicious — have failed to penetrate for years.”

“What is it?”

“The computer algorithm used by New York’s subway system to prevent counterfeiting their magnetic-strip fare cards.”

“Huh? But mass transit’s all been free since the war started.”

“The latest algorithm from before the war, and the proper key prime numbers.”

“Is this some sort of joke?”

“At first our NSA compatriots did think it was a hoax. But then they recognized the second code, the underlying one that carried the message.”

“And…? ”

“It was another one of our codes.”

“Don’t tell me,” Jeffrey said sarcastically. “The secret formula to a top brand of soda pop?”

“This isn’t funny.”

“Sorry.”

“The second code was one of our highest-level navy command-and-control encryption routines. With number keys that were two or three weeks stale…. That’s to be expected, if for whatever reason the sender had to work with a time delay at his end…. But our encryption routines were so well mastered that whoever did send the message was able to properly encode entire lengthy documents. I’m not saying fragments, I’m saying entire documents. And not our documents…. If they were our documents, it could just mean they intercepted what to them was gibberish and beamed it back at us to confuse us…. The documents are German