“No arguments with me, Stace. I'll whistle up Fred Kent at Hughes and see what he thinks. It'll take a while for us to review everything and do full systems checks. I'm staying down until I know — and I mean know — what happened here. We got an industry to protect, man.”
“Agreed. I won't light back up without talking to you.”
“Keep me posted on anything you find out?”
“You got it, Bert. I'll be back to you in an hour, one way or another.”
The Soviet Union is a vast country, by far the largest in the world both in area and in the expanse of its borders. All of those borders are guarded, since both the current country and all its precursors have been invaded many times. Border defenses include the obvious — troop concentrations, airfields, and radar posts — and the subtle, like radio reception antennas. The latter were designed to listen in on radio and other electronic emissions. The information was passed on by landline or microwave links to Moscow Center, the headquarters of the Committee for State Security, the KGB, at #2 Dzerzhinskiy Square. The KGB's Eighth Chief Directorate is tasked to communications intelligence and communications security. It has a long and distinguished history that has benefited from another traditional Russian strength, a fascination with theoretical mathematics. The relationship between ciphers and mathematics is a logical one, and the most recent manifestation of this was the work of a bearded, thirtyish gnome of a man who was fascinated with the work of Benoit Mandelbrot at Harvard University, the man who had effectively invented fractal geometry. Uniting this work with that of MacKenzie's work on Chaos Theory at Cambridge University in England, the young Russian genius had invented a genuinely new theoretical way of looking at mathematical formulae. It was generally conceded by that handful of people who understood what he was talking about that his work was easily worth a Planck Medal. It was an historical accident that his father happened to be a General in the KGB's Chief Border Guards Directorate, and that as a result the Committee for State Security had taken immediate note of his work. The mathematician now had everything a grateful Motherland could offer, and someday he'd probably have that Planck Medal also.
He'd needed two years to make his theoretical breakthrough into something practical, but fifteen months earlier he'd made his first “recovery” from the U.S. State Department's most secure cipher, called STRIPE. Six months after that he'd proven conclusively that it was similar in structure to everything the U.S. military used. Cross-checking with another team of cryptanalysts who had access to the work of the Walker spy ring, and the even more serious work done by Pelton, what had resulted only six months earlier was a systematic penetration of American encryption systems. It was still not perfect. Daily keying procedures occasionally proved impossible to break. Sometimes they went as much as a week without recovering one message, but they'd gone as many as three days recovering over half of what they received, and their results were improving by the month. Indeed, the main problem seemed to be that they didn't have the computer hardware to do all the work they should have been able to do, and the 8th Directorate was busily training more linguists to handle the message traffic they were receiving.
Sergey Nikolayevich Golovko had been awakened from a sound sleep and driven to his office to add his name to the people all over the world shocked into frightened sobriety. A First Chief Directorate man all of his life, his job was to examine the collective American mind and advise his President on what was going on. The decrypts flooding onto his desk were the most useful tool.
He had no less than thirty such messages which bore one of two messages. All strategic forces were being ordered to Defense Condition Two, and all conventional forces were coming to Defense Condition Three. The American President was panicking, KGB's First Deputy Chairman thought. There was no other explanation. Was it possible that he thought the Soviet Union had committed this infamy? That was the most frightening thought of his life.
“Another one, naval one.” The messenger dropped it on his desk.
Golovko needed only one look. “Flash this to the navy immediately.” He had to call his President with the rest. Golovko lifted the phone.
For once the Soviet bureaucracy worked quietly. Minutes later, an extremely low-frequency signal went out, and the submarine Admiral Lunin went to the surface to copy the full message. Captain Dubinin read it as the printer generated it.
AMERICAN SUBMARINE USS MAINE REPORTS LOCATION AS 50 D -55 M -09 S N 153 D -01 M -23 S W. PROPELLER DISABLED BY COLLISION OF UNKNOWN CAUSE.
Dubinin left the communications room and made for the chart table.
“Where were we when we copied that transient?”
“Here, Captain, and the bearing was here.” The navigator traced the line with his pencil.
Dubinin just shook his head. He handed the message over. “Look at this.”
“What do you suppose he's doing?”
“He'll be close to the surface. So… we'll go up, just under the layer, and we'll move quickly. Surface noise will play hell with his sonar. Fifteen knots.”
“You suppose he was following us?”
“Took you long enough to realize that, didn't it?” Dubinin measured the distance to the target. “Very proud, this one. We'll see about that. You know how the Americans boast of taking hull photographs? Now, my young lieutenant, now it will be our turn!”
“What does this mean?” Narmonov asked the First Deputy Chairman.
“The Americans have been attacked by forces unknown, and the attack was serious, causing major loss of life. It is to be expected that they will increase their military readiness. A major consideration will be the maintenance of public order,” Golovko replied over the secure phone line.
“And?”
“And, unfortunately, all their strategic weapons happen to be aimed at the Rodina.”
“But we had no part in this!” the Soviet president objected.
“Correct. You see, such responses are automatic. They are planned in advance and become almost reflexive moves. Once attacked, you become highly cautious. Countermoves are planned in advance, so that you may act rapidly while applying your intellectual capacities to an analysis of the problem without additional and unnecessary distractions.”
The Soviet President turned to his Defense Minister. “So, what should we do?”
“I advise an increase in our alert status. Defensive-only, of course. Whoever conducted this attack might, after all, attempt to strike us also.”
“Approved,” Narmonov said bluntly. “Highest peacetime alert.”
Golovko frowned at his telephone receiver. His choice of words had been exquisitely correct: reflexive. “May I make a suggestion?”
“Yes,” the Defense Minister said.
“If it is possible, perhaps it would be well to tell our forces the reason for the alert. It might lessen the shock of the order.”
“It's a needless complication,” Defense thought.
“The Americans have not done this,” Golovko said urgently, “and that was almost certainly a mistake. Please consider the state of mind of people suddenly taken from ordinary peacetime operations to an elevated state of alert. It will only require a few additional words. Those few words could be important.”
“Good idea,” Narmonov thought. “Make it so,” he ordered Defense.
“We will soon hear from the Americans on the Hot Line,” Narmonov said. “What will they say?”
“That is hard to guess, but whatever it is, we should have a reply ready for them, just to settle things down, to make sure they know we had nothing to do with it.”
Narmonov nodded. That made good sense. “Start working on it.”
The Soviet defense-communications agency operators grumbled at the signal they'd been ordered to dispatch. For ease of transmission, the meat of the signal should have been contained in a single five-letter code group that could be transmitted, decrypted, and comprehended instantly by all recipients, but that was not possible
