returned the man’s phone. It was gone, then back again before the other man noticed his cell was ever missing.
That left Tony with another urgent problem. He didn’t have the tools to analyze the information he’d stolen, which meant that he had to transfer the cell phone memory to Jamey Farrell at CTU, Los Angeles, as soon as possible. But every time he tried to get back to his office, some new task arose. Finally, almost ninety minutes after Dr. Reed’s departure, Tony found the chance to excuse himself when Dr. Bascomb went to the cafeteria to grab a late lunch.
“Yo, Steve, I think my laptop’s winking out. I’m going to switch to the backup in my office,” Tony lied.
“Take your time,” Dr. Sable replied, swigging from a bottle of water. He’d found a shady corner and was playing craps for pebbles with a pair of young airmen.
“I’ll be back in five.” “Hey, man, no sweat,” Steve said with a laugh. “The tough stuff’s done and Madame de Sade won’t be back for another half hour. Have yourself a party, Antonio.”
Tony shut the computer down and tucked it under his arm. He left the shade of the tent, crossed the hard- packed sand to the hangar unnoticed. Dani Welles was locked in a heated debate with Dr. Alvin Toth about which television physician was the most competent. Toth opted for someone named “Marcus Welby, M.D.”—then expressed dismay to learn that no one among them had ever heard of the show. Dani was pushing for George Clooney’s character in
“I said the most competent television doctor, Dani. Not the ‘the one with the tightest booty,’ ” the elderly doctor complained.
Only Beverly Chang seemed tense. She avoided conversation with the others while silently staring at her own computer screen. Tony knew she was obsessively running and rerunning various diagnostic programs on the hibernating transmitter atop the steel tower. He knew because he’d been monitoring her computer with his own.
As soon as he reached his cramped cubicle in a dim corner of Hangar Six, Tony kicked up the window air conditioner, then fired up his desktop PC. Then he downloaded a copy of the data from Steve’s cell into his desktop. Now the real task began.
Groom Lake AFB, and especially Area 51, was the most closely watched patch of ground in America. The activities of the staff were monitored closely, both inside and outside the base. Telephones, cell phones, and Internet connections were also screened.
Tony knew that Steve had tinkered with his own cell phone, perhaps placed some sort of scrambler inside of it. Despite this precautions, Tony realized that the watchers of Area 51 still knew
Now Tony was about to test a theory of his own. He had to send a large package of data over the Internet to Jamey back at CTU, without that data being noticed or intercepted by the security screening software. It was much easier to monitor Internet connections than it was cell phone signals, so any misstep by Tony would result in immediate arrest by Air Force security personnel and a rough interrogation by Intelligence officers.
Before he went undercover, Tony, Milo Pressman and Jamey Farrell discussed this problem in CTU’s conference room. They came up with several creative solutions. As usual, Jamey’s first impulse was to try a high tech fix.
“It’s simple,” she’d said with a confident smirk. “We use encrypted bundles broken down and dispatched through the base’s entire computer network. Air Force security protocols might detect the transmission — and I’m not saying they will — but there’s no way their security software could locate which computer was the source of the transmission. Nor could the information be easily decrypted if it was intercepted, because the fragments are too small to provide enough source material to crack the digital coding.”
“But wouldn’t the data arrive here a mess?” Milo asked.
Jamey shrugged. “I could put it together in no time because I know the code.”
“Too risky,” Tony replied, shaking his head. “I might be forced to send a data package every other day, or even every day. And I want a 24/7 CTU remote camera link on any classified activity, too. With all that information streaming out of Area 51 in tiny little bundles, the Air Force would make it a point of sniffing me out.”
Milo shrugged. “How about we go low-tech. Something like carrier pigeons.”
Milo was taking a shot, but it got Tony to thinking. “I think I have a low tech solution,” he announced.
Instead of launching into his plan, Tony talked about how the Internet was born out of research begun in the 1960s by the Advanced Research Projects Agency of the U.S. Defense Department. It was they who created the ARPANET, the first networking system consisting of just four computers, at the end of 1967. Soon after that, software and protocol research began. One development was the Network Control Program, or NCP, which provided a standard method to establish communications links between different hosts. This allowed the ARPANET to expand exponentially.
“He’s right,” Milo said. “According to CIA files, Area 51 had an ARPANET by 1977, if not earlier.”
“Yes,” Tony continued. “But in 1983, the current TCP/IP protocols replaced NCP as the principal protocol of the ARPANET. After that, the ARPANET became a small component of the then fledgling Internet, and things only got bigger from there.”
Milo nodded. “Meanwhile the outmoded NCP protocols were forgotten. Your point?”
“Air Force intelligence used standard TCP/IP protocols to monitor Area 51’s Internet connections, right? So I can avoid detection by sending the data to CTU using the older NCP protocols, the old ARPANET pathways.”
Jamey blinked, understanding his logic. “That will work, provided I can locate some of the older pathways.”
Milo shook his head. “Sounds a little far fetched. You’re still transmitting data. Why won’t you get caught?”
“It’s like the power company trying to meter electricity that is somehow sent through natural gas lines,” Tony explained. “The electric company isn’t paying attention to the gas system, so it slips right past them.”
Milo nodded. “Okay, I’ll dig up some of those old protocols and we’ll give it a try. But Tony, if I were you, I’d use that same analogy when I explained this scheme to Christopher Henderson.”
Tony chuckled at the memory. He’d done just that at the pre-mission briefing and Henderson was hooked. Together, Milo and Jamey developed protocols to translate the data, and stored them in Tony’s laptop so that now it took Tony only minutes to convert the data and drop it into an NCP packet. Then he sent the packet on its way. Back in Los Angeles, Jamey would download this data, along with the camera feed from the test site, by tapping into the old ARPANET routes at UCLA, and then downloading all the collected data into CTU’s mainframe. And it all happened with only a few seconds’ delay.
Tony closed down his computer, then glanced at his watch. In forty-five minutes the demonstration was scheduled to take place. Tony grabbed his backup laptop, and hurried back to the site. He wanted to be present for the final preparations.
“This is certainly an impressive machine,” Senator Palmer declared with genuine awe.
“The Boeing Sikorski LO–88 Blackfoot was commissioned by the Army,” Dr. Megan Reed explained. “The brass were looking to procure a stealthy insertion and recovery aircraft suitable for conducting special operations. Unfortunately the Pentagon wasn’t happy with the helicopter’s payload limitations, and the program was cancelled shortly after this prototype was tested — successfully, I might add.”
The cavernous interior of Hangar Five housed only one aircraft, a sleek, black shape that reminded Senator Palmer of a predatory raptor. A tri-motored, rotor-controlled aircraft, the LO–88 Blackfoot resembled no helicopter Palmer had ever seen. Instead of a main rotor on top of the aircraft, the Blackfoot had two ten-bladed fans housed in engine nacelles affixed to both sides of the aircraft’s fuselage. The vertical tail rotor was conventionally set on the tail fin, but was also housed in a hooded nacelle.
Apart from the propeller housings, there were no rounded edges on the Blackfoot. Viewed from the front, the fuselage was triangular — its bottom was flat, sides sloped like the body of an F–117 stealth fighter. This shape — the so-called “Hopeless Diamond” configuration — was designed to deflect radar waves. It was also clear to the head of the Defense Appropriations Committee that no metal was used in the construction of the craft’s exterior —
