James Barrington - Overkill

‘By whom?’ Yuri Baratov asked.

‘That is not known,’ the President replied, ‘but the weapon was linked to a satellite communication system on board the ship.’

‘Trushenko,’ Ryzhkov said.

The President nodded. ‘Exactly,’ he said. ‘General Sokolov told us that the Gibraltar weapon was to be detonated as a demonstration only after the London weapon had been positioned and twenty-four hours after the Podstava ultimatum had been delivered.’ He paused. ‘So that means that somebody must have told Trushenko that things were going wrong. We have to find this person.’ He turned to Baratov. ‘Nothing from St Petersburg?’

The SVR chief shook his head. ‘No,’ he replied. ‘The address Trushenko claimed he was staying at does not exist. We have widened our search, but so far without success.’

‘I wonder,’ Konstantin Abramov said, tentatively. ‘Someone must know where he is, and that someone must have been contacted either by the London convoy escort, or by the crew of the Anton Kirov when the vessel was attacked. Nobody else knew.’

‘That is obvious,’ Baratov said. ‘So?’

Abramov leaned forward. ‘Finding this man could be almost impossible, because if he is simply sitting in a building with a short-wave radio, he could be anywhere in the country. But he must have a means of communicating with Trushenko, and that could be the link we are looking for. Trushenko has a mobile telephone. I know, because all requests for ownership of such equipment have to be approved by the SVR – even requests from ministers. And all—’

‘Yes, of course!’ Baratov almost shouted. ‘I should have thought of that myself. All calls to and from mobile phones are logged automatically. We can find out exactly who Trushenko has been talking to, and we can place him anywhere in the world to within about ten miles, because of the cells.’

‘What cells?’ Ryzhkov asked.

‘The mobile telephone system operates using cells. All the time a mobile phone is on, it’s in communication with the local cell and, through the cell, with the central computer system. And the numbers of all calls to and from every mobile phone are recorded.’

‘I do not fully understand what you are saying,’ the President said, ‘but do you mean that you can find Trushenko?’

Baratov nodded. ‘We can quickly find out more or less where Trushenko is. We can also identify everyone he has called or who has called him, and we can pull them in for questioning. And,’ he added, ‘once we know Trushenko’s approximate location, we can instruct the local cell to disable his mobile telephone. That will force him to use a landline phone, and once he does that, we can take him.’

The internal telephone rang and the President answered it. ‘I will come down,’ he said, and replaced the receiver. Baratov looked enquiringly at him. ‘The Americans want to talk to me on the hot-line,’ the President said. ‘This time, I think I will have to tell them about Podstava . And,’ he added, with a wolfish grin, ‘I can explain that the traitor Trushenko will shortly be apprehended.’

Hammersmith, London

Richter sat up straighter. ‘Proof?’ he asked.

‘None yet,’ said Baker, ‘but I might have something soon.’

‘Clue me in on this,’ Richter said. ‘How exactly can a computer stuck in a building in a hick town like Krutaya control these weapons?’

Baker switched to lecture mode. ‘First, as it looks like this was what you might call an unofficial plan and not one officially sanctioned by the Kremlin, the computer has to be somewhere like Krutaya. If it was in the Lubyanka or down at Yazenevo, somebody who wasn’t privy to the plan would be certain to notice it and start asking awkward questions. Second, with the data transfer facilities available today, the controlling computer could actually have been placed anywhere – not even necessarily in Russia.’

He paused and checked to see if Richter was listening. He was. ‘Now, there are two major components of this system, plus the weapons themselves. The most important component is the Krutaya computer itself. That contains a big and complicated program that controls every aspect of the system, from the functioning of the weapons to the positioning of the satellite in geostationary orbit over the middle of the Atlantic.

‘The second crucial component is the satellite, because that actually controls the operation of the weapons, acting on instructions from the computer. The satellite and the computer are inextricably linked. The computer will be constantly monitoring the weapons via some kind of feedback system, and also watching the station-keeping parameters of the satellite to ensure that it stays in its designated position.’

Richter had a question. ‘How do they communicate with each other? Where’s the link?’

Baker shrugged. ‘The how is easy, the where I’m not certain about. They communicate through a facility called an uplink station. That’s basically a big satellite dish pointed permanently at the Atlantic satellite. It sends signals to the satellite, and receives messages back from the bird. I don’t know where it is, but my guess is Pechora.’

‘And if they decided to fire the weapons?’

‘Each bomb will have a unique identifier, just like the Sky card in your satellite TV receiver at home. If they want to fire the Los Angeles weapon, the operator selects the code for the Los Angeles bomb, chooses “Detonate” or whatever, and a couple of minutes later a substantial part of Los Angeles turns into a cloud of dust. If they want to fire them all at once, they just select all the weapon codes simultaneously and go through the same routine.’

There was a long silence. ‘The operator?’ Richter asked. ‘Where is he? At Krutaya?’

‘He can be anywhere,’ Baker said. ‘That’s the point of the armoured telephone cables. They carry the signals to and from the uplink station, but they also allow authorized access to the computer from anywhere else in Russia, or in fact from anywhere in the world. The guys actually sitting in the building at Krutaya looking at the computer screens will probably be mainly low-grade maintenance staff. Their job is simply to monitor the physical health of the computer, if you like. They’ll be the ones doing tape back-ups of the program and data files, running diagnostic utilities, checking that the air-conditioning is working and that the lavatories aren’t leaking over the power supply, that kind of thing.

‘The real operators,’ he continued, ‘are in Moscow, probably at Yazenevo. They log on to the Krutaya computer via the telephone lines, and give instructions to the program from there. They never need go to Krutaya – in fact, there’s no need for them even to know where the computer actually is. All they need is a telephone number, a username and a password. That’s the beauty of the system. That’s its flexibility. It’s also,’ he added, ‘our way in.’

‘Oh yes?’ Richter said.

‘Modin told you that the satellite could disarm the weapons, temporarily or permanently. All we have to do is hack our way into the Krutaya computer, convince it that we’re an authorized user, and then instruct it to permanently disable all the weapons.’

They all looked at him. ‘And how easy is that going to be?’ Simpson asked.

‘If the Russian programmers were any good,’ Baker replied, ‘it’ll be sodding difficult. Finding the computer’s telephone number is the easy bit – one of my computers is doing that now, which is why I’ve got the time to sit here and explain it all to you. The problem is the username and password.’

‘And how do you get them?’ Richter asked.

‘Well, the system itself may help us. A lot of very powerful computer networks actually provide help screens so that a new user can work out how to use the system. I think it’s unlikely, at best, that the Krutaya computer will have a facility like that. Assuming that it hasn’t, we’re back to trial and error – we just try every username and password that we can think of. That’s standard practice for computer hackers. There are a few tricks of the trade that we can try, but unlike most hackers we do have one big advantage – we know a lot of the names associated with this project. Modin, Bykov, Trushenko and so on. One of the almost infallible rules of computer science is that if you tell anyone to think of a password, they invariably use a name or a date or a place known to them. All we have to do is find which name, date or place they selected. And that,’ he added, looking across at Richter, ‘is where you come in.’