Commander Busby frowned and stared at the technician standing in front of him. “You’re sure about this?”
The technician nodded. “No doubt in my military mind, sir.” The younger man pointed at a series of lines stretching across the printout. “Look at those frequencies. Those aren’t from military communications. Not ours, anyway.”
“What are they from, then?” Busby asked. The three lines on the paper that the technician pointed to were cryptic strings of numbers, indicating frequencies and times of detection. To anyone else, it could just as well have been a report from a Supply logistics computer. He smiled for a second, wondering how many top-secret reports looked just as mundane.
“What’s your best classification?” he asked finally, tapping his pencil on one column of numbers. “These frequencies — this isn’t a long-range system.”
“You’re right about that. I’d call it some sort of short-range tactical system — maybe even hand-held. Look how the signal strengths vary so widely. Could be caused by geography — somebody walks behind a rock and the antenna’s not fully extended, you get that sort of dip.”
“Did you check with our SEALS? Maybe they were playing with some of their toys.”
The technician smirked. “Thought you might ask about that. And no, it’s not our SEALS. The frequencies don’t match up at all.”
Commander Busby sighed and tossed the paper on his desk. The last thing he needed right now was evidence of unknown short-range tactical communications in their vicinity. He closed his eyes for a moment, visualizing a chart of the area. Nowhere those signals could have come from but the islands to the north. He opened his eyes and saw that the technician had come to the same conclusion.
“This is impossible, you know. Just how am I supposed to explain to the Admiral that we’re detecting radio signals from the godforsaken rocks called the Aleutians? Nobody lives there, and we’re certainly not ashore. If we’re wrong about this, we’re going to stir up a hell of a lot of trouble for nothing. Every intelligence group on board and back home is going to get their shorts twisted in a knot over this.”
The technician nodded. “Yeah, but if everybody were where they were supposed to be all the time, they wouldn’t need us, would they?”
Busby motioned to a chair sitting next to his desk. He reached for his coffee cup, curling his fingers gratefully around the warm, rough ceramic mug. The temperatures in CVIC–Carrier Intelligence Center — consistently hovered around the sixty-degree mark. Maintaining a stable, cool temperature inside the most sensitive spaces on board the carrier was one of his continual headaches, and no one had ever been able to come up with a compromise between the needs of the sophisticated equipment jammed into these small spaces and the human beings who operated it. As usual, operational requirements won out over human comfort.
“Okay, we need a game plan,” Busby said finally. “Make me look smart here, Jackson.”
The technician scooted his chair over next to Busby’s and picked up the printout. “You can read it yourself, Commander; I know you can. Maybe some of those fellows believe you don’t know everything that goes on back there, but not me.”
“Pretend I’m dumb for a minute. Chances are, you’ll explain something I would have forgotten to ask about.”
The technician shot him a sardonic look. “Okay. See, here’s the first detection,” he said, pointing his pencil at the fifth line from the top. “Short duration — only two minutes. High frequency — you see, right here in this column?”
“Yeah, I’ve got that. But tell me how we know it’s tactical communications.”
“The signal breaks up. If this were a large transmitter, one drawing a hell of a lot of power, it would blast right around some of the obstructions. Instead, we get these changes in signal strength that indicate somebody’s moving around. Or maybe walking around a rock, or something like that. Not something you see, except on mobile field communications.”
“You ever seen these frequencies before?”
The technician shook his head, paused, and a thoughtful look crossed his face. “Something like it, but not this one exactly. Way back in A School, when we were studying the old Russian Bear. You remember, back when we had an enemy? Hearing about the Bear-J that’s been in the area reminded me of it.”
“So what does it look like?”
“I’m not certain, sir, but I remember one day they played back for us some short-range Spetsnaz communications. Looked a little bit like this.” The technician shrugged. “Course, no telling who’s using all that gear these days. They could’ve farmed half of it out to the border guards. And, like I was saying, there’s nothing really unique about this, except for the frequency. In the range of short-range tactical communications, and not one of ours. That’s about all I can tell you for certain.”
Busby thought for a minute, then hauled himself out of his chair. “Guess I’m about as smart as I’m going to get, then. Thanks for the briefing, Jackson. I’ll let the admiral know what’s happening.”
The technician took the hint, and rose to walk out of the office. He turned right at the doorway, heading back to the even chillier operating spaces within CVIC. At the heavy steel cipher lock that shut his spaces off from the rest of the intelligence center, he paused, then turned back to watch Commander Busby’s figure disappear around the far corner.
Lab Rat. The technician chuckled a moment, wondering who had first hung that moniker on the diminutive Commander Busby. Good call, whoever had done it, although he thought the commander might have wished for a more impressive nickname. But with his pale, almost colorless hair, bright blue eyes magnified behind thick Coke- bottle glasses, and generally frail, nervous appearance, Commander Busby hadn’t had a chance in the world of avoiding that one.
Wish all officers were more like him, the technician mused, punching in the numbers that would open the cipher lock to his outer door. Professionally demanding, tough to work for, but he took good care of his troops. And no pussyfooting around when it came to threat signals. The commander had said he’d take this straight to the admiral, and he would, carefully shielding his technicians from the myriad political considerations that would arise once the report went out.
The heavy door swung open, and a slight puff of air caressed his face, the result of the positive pressure gradient between the sensitive crypto spaces and the rest of CVIC. Jackson stepped over the shin-high knee- knocker and shoved the door closed behind him, waiting to make sure he heard the ominous click announcing the door was secure.
Well, it would be up to the admiral to decide what they did now.
“You think this is really something?” Batman asked Commander Busby.
“Define ‘something,’” Busby said. “if you mean, do I think it’s a valid detection, the answer is yes. But what it means — that I don’t know, Admiral.”
Batman sighed. “And you can’t tell me what was said on the circuit, just that somebody was transmitting?”
“That’s about it. It was all encrypted. With enough time, enough resources, NSA might be able to make something of it, but we can’t here. And I’m not even sure that NSA could break it that fast — there are too many good commercial encrypters on the market these days.” Busby shook his head. “I know the U.S. has tried to keep control of digital encryption technology, but other nations aren’t quite so vigorous.”
“So for all we know, this could be that Greenpeace boat communicating with their people back in the States?”
Busby shook his head. “Not at that frequency. You’d see a high frequency — HF — for that. One thing we’re relatively sure of, this was a short-range signal.”
“Satellite?”
“Not enough power. No, Admiral, I was hoping that would be the case, but this signal has no other reasonable explanation. None that I can come up with, anyway.”
“Damn it. And we can’t ignore it.” Batman handed the commander the printout sheet and stood up. “Well, I’ll
