Stephen Hunter - Sniper's Honor

He arrived at the Black Cube, where a sign of stability in the world was that no upper floor lights blazed away; he got through a surprised security without issue and went to his cubicle after a stop in the cafeteria for bad machine coffee, black, then got to work.

His insight: Platinum not as wealth, not as finance, not as operational lubrication. But platinum as stuff. As physical property, of weight and size, requiring transportation, security, delivery to—? Well, to where?

Today’s working thesis: The newly purchased $16 mils worth of stuff had to be delivered to a shipping location. They couldn’t just FedEx it. It weighed—he calculated—about 685 pounds, but, because of its density, was about the size of a shoe box, although typically packaged in a container designed to be loaded on a pallet. Where would it have been picked up, where would it have been shipped? It didn’t take long for him to ascertain that the vast majority of AMPLATS platinum was railroaded to Port Elizabeth from its refinement in the Johannesburg complex, then shipped to its destination by freighter, because in most instances the amount was too unwieldy to ship by air. But this platinum was a different issue. Six hundred eighty-five pounds was easily transportable by air, and air traffic being more crowded than sea lane traffic by a factor of about twenty to one, it would be more difficult to track.

However… Gershon knew this game… and he knew that all exporters in South Africa, including AMPLATS, are required to register with the South African Revenue Services, called SARS. They used a single administration document to make the clearance of goods easier and more convenient for importers, exporters, and cross-border traders. One purpose of this document was to ensure that exported goods were properly declared to SARS. The form required the exporter or his agent to indicate the foreign consignee, the place of export, the form of transportation, and the estimated date of departure. The document was submitted to the commissioner of customs, a division of SARS.

So: how to crack SARS firewalls and read the AMPLATS export documents for a $16 million shipment of platinum?

The answer: Cain & Abel, a program obtained from the Darknet, the under or illegal side of the Net known to most professionals but unreachable by outsiders. Cain & Abel was a password discovery tool that allowed easy recovery by first sniffing out the network, and then cracking encrypted and scrambled passwords using dictionaries, brute force, and cryptanalysis methods if needed. Not only that, Gershon had used it to record voice and video transmissions over the Internet and grab cached passwords and trace routing protocols.

Gershon activated his copy of Cain & Abel, pointed it at the authentification server for the South African Revenue Service, and waited. It wasn’t a long wait. In South Africa, a data entry clerk signed on, and Gershon walked into the system in his shadow; all the data that existed became visible to him.

He called up the enormous file on AMPLATS, reduced his frame set to transactions of a few days—on the assumption that Nordyne had bought fast and paid fast and therefore wanted shipment fast—and discovered that among the tonnes dispatched to car makers, the grams to jewelers and the pounds to oncological units, one shipment, AM43367, was dispatched to Nordyne Ceramics, located in Astrakhan, on the Volga River at the northeastern tip of the Caspian Sea, in Russia.

So who in Russia wanted $16 million in platinum, particularly when Russia was the world’s second largest producer of… platinum? It was the classic coals-to-Newcastle scenario, which made sense only if the point of the transaction was the secrecy of the transaction.

Suddenly there was another indicator pointing exactly to that one place: Astrakhan, which turned out to be a grimy seaport supported by petroleum sucked from under the Caspian, as well as sturgeon—the eggs were called caviar. It was a dreary Russian town of about a half a million luckless souls. But it turned out that he was able to intercept—another Cain & Abel transaction—an e-mailed request from a member of Intrusion Prevention Associates’ team to the home office in Grozny for an upgrade in per diem, because presumably the price of whores in Russia was higher than that in Chechnya.

So he had a security team, $16 million in platinum in a city in Russia. But where in that city?

One option: get beyond the firewall of Narimanovo Airport, see what cargo flights had arrived in Astrakhan from Johannesburg, what imports had been cleared, and where they had been routed to. Yes, but it was too far for the plane of choice—a Boeing 737 chartered to a Panamanian company called Hurricane Cargo—to fly straight from SA to RUS nonstop, so the plane would have had to stop for refueling, likely at the halfway point in Eritrea. Possibly Eritrea was listed as the point of origin on the Narimanovo documents. Sorting that would involve another level of search, which would involve time, time, and more time.

Instead, he decided to run recent industrial real estate transactions in Astrakhan and found them to be on the public record, so no clandestine penetration was involved. He guessed that if you were going to do something, anything, with 685 pounds of platinum, and if you had a security team standing by to protect the investment, you probably needed an old factory, and you needed to upgrade the joint with new fencing, TV surveillance cameras, sirens, location indicators, pressure-sensitive intrusion detectors and so forth. You needed electricity and water, some kind of fire prevention system. Most likely you needed equipment, and the equipment would pretty much reveal what it was that Nordyne was manufacturing.

You naughty boys, trying so hard to keep your games hidden. But Tata Gershon will find you in the end.

He got back to work.

Yaremche

The Carpathians

THE PRESENT

The grazing wound in the side never bled. But the elbow did, presumably cut on the gunman’s breaking teeth. Swagger had washed and bandaged it but was surprised by the stiffness and bruising that seized his whole left arm and made the lengthy ride by Bumpa-Car to the mountain village the next day quite uncomfortable.

He didn’t tell Reilly about it, not wanting to alarm her. Nor did he mention Stronski’s claim about “The Americans.” It was another screwball, which threw everything out of whack, adding a new dimension of conspiracy that could lead anywhere or nowhere. But it weighed on him over the distance of the drive. He turned it over and over in his head, trying to define an American interest or angle in obscure events in a sliver of Ukraine in the middle of another nation’s war seventy years ago, about which most Americans knew nothing.

Now they had met at and checked in to a hotel, rested, and were standing on the walking bridge over the River Prut, just beyond where the water tumbled off the rocks and hit below with a roar and a splash, filling the air with mist. This clearly was not the exact bridge as crudely etched into the plate, since it was buttressed, sunk in concrete, and of strong metal itself, heavily engineered. But a bridge had stood here, and if the drawing was right, it was about here that Groedl was when Mili took her hopeless, doomed shot at him.

“Trying to figure out where the shot came from,” he said, looking around, trying to read the data of the place.

He saw the falls before him, the low bluffs of the river, and to the right, way off, a mountain slope. In the crude drawing on the plate, the officers next to the man were pointing more or less in that direction. But Bob didn’t buy it. Clearly the artist hadn’t seen the event but was re-creating it from an oral tale. The shot couldn’t have come from way out there.