Tom Clancy - Red Rabbit

The communications people at Fort Meade were all uniformed non-comms, and when one of them, an Air Force E-5, ran it through his decoding machine, he was surprised to see the notation that said the super-encryption was on a one-time pad, NHG-1329.

“Where the hell is that?” he asked his watch supervisor, a Navy senior chief.

“Damn,” the chief commented. “I haven’t seen one of those in a long time.” He had to open a three-ring binder and root through it until he found the storage site inside the big communications vault at the far corner of the room. That was guarded by an armed Marine staff sergeant whose sense of humor, like that of all the Marines who worked here, had been surgically removed at Bethesda Naval Medical Center prior to his assignment to Fort Meade.

“Hey, Sarge, gotta go inside for something,” he told the jarhead.

“You gotta see the Major first,” the sergeant informed him. And so the senior chief walked to the desk of the USAF major who was sitting at his desk, reading the morning paper.

“Morning, Major. I need to get something out of the vault.”

“What’s that, Chief?”

“A one-time pad, NHG-1329.”

“We still have any of them?” the major asked in some surprise.

“Well, sir, if not, you can use this to start a fire on your grill with.” He handed the dispatch over.

The Air Force officer inspected it. “Tell me about it. Okay.” He scribbled an authorization on a pad in the corner of his desk. “Give this to the Marine.”

“Aye aye, sir.” The senior chief walked back to the vault, leaving the Air Force puke to wonder why the squids always talked so funny.

“Here you go, Sam,” the chief said, handing over the form.

The Marine unlocked the swinging door, and the senior chief headed inside. The box the pad was in wasn’t locked, presumably because anyone who could get past the seven layers of security required to get to this point was probably as trustworthy as the President’s wife.

The one-time pad was a small-ring binder. The Navy chief signed for it on the way out, then went back to his desk. The Air Force sergeant joined him, and together they went through the cumbersome procedure of decrypting the dispatch.

“Damn,” the young NCO observed about two-thirds of the way through. “Do we tell anybody about that?”

“That’s above our pay grade, sonny. I expect the DCI will let the right people know. And forget you ever heard that,” he added. But neither really would, and both knew it. With all the wickets they had to pass through to be here, the idea that their signal systems were not secure was rather like hearing that their mother was turning tricks on Sixteenth Street in D.C.

“Yeah, Chief, sure,” the young wing-wiper replied. “How do we deliver this one?”

“I think a courier, sonny. You want to whistle one up?”

“Aye aye, sir.” The USAF sergeant took his leave with a smile.

The courier was an Army staff sergeant, driving a tan Army Plymouth Reliant, who took the sealed envelope, tucked it into the attaché case on his front seat, and drove down the Baltimore-Washington Parkway to the D.C. Beltway, and west on that to the George Washington Parkway, the first right off of which was CIA. At that point, the dispatch-whatever the hell it was, he didn’t know-ceased being his responsibility.

The address on the envelope sent it to the Seventh Floor. Like many government agencies, CIA never really slept. On the top floor was Tom Ridley, a carded National Intelligence Officer, and the very one who handled Judge Moore’s weekend briefings. It took him about three seconds to see that this one had to go to the judge right now. He lifted his STU secure phone and hit speed-dial button 1.

“This is Arthur Moore,” a voice said presently.

“Judge, Tom Ridley here. Something just came in.” “Something” means it was really something.

“Now?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Can you come out here?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Jim Greer, too?”

“Yes, sir, and probably Mr. Bostock also.”

That made it interesting. “Okay, call them and then come on out.” Ridley could almost hear the God damn it, don’t I ever get a day off! at the other end before the line went dead. It took another few minutes to call the two other senior Agency officials, and then Ridley went down to his car for the drive out, pausing only to make three Xerox copies.

IT WAS LUNCHTIME in Great Falls. Mrs. Moore, ever the perfect hostess, had lunch meats and soft drinks set out for her unexpected guests before retiring to her sitting room upstairs.

“What is it, Tommy?” Moore asked. He liked the newly appointed NIO. A graduate of Marquette University, he was a Russian expert and had been one of Greer’s star analysts before fleeting up to his present post. Soon he’d be one of the guys who always accompanied the President on Air Force One.

“This came in late this morning via Fort Meade,” Ridley said, handing out the copies.

Mike Bostock was the fastest reader of the group: “Oh, Lord.”

“This will make Chip Bennett happy,” James Greer predicted.

“Yeah, like a trip to the dentist,” Moore observed last of all. “Okay, people, what does this tell us?”

Bostock took it first. “It means we want this Rabbit in our hutch in one big hurry, gentlemen.”

“Through Budapest?” Moore asked, remembering his morning brief.

“Uh-oh,” Bostock observed.

“Okay.” Moore leaned forward. “Let’s get our thinking organized. First, how important is this information?”

James Greer took it. “He says KGB’s going to kill somebody who doesn’t deserve it. That kinda suggests the Pope, doesn’t it?”

“More importantly, he says our communications systems might be compromised,” Bostock pointed out. “That’s the hottest thing I see in this signal, James.”

“Okay, in either case, we want this guy on our side of the wire, correct?”

“Judge, you can bet your bench on that,” the Deputy DDO shot back. “As quickly as we can make it happen.”

“Can we use our own assets to accomplish it?” Moore asked next.

“It won’t be easy. Budapest has been burned down.”

“Does that change the importance of getting his cute little cottontail out of Redland?” the DCI asked.

“Nope.” Bostock shook his head.

“Okay, if we can’t do it ourselves, do we call in a marker?”

“The Brits, you mean?” Greer asked.

“We’ve used them before. We have good relations with them, and Basil does like to generate debts with us,” Moore reminded them. “Mike, can you live with that?” he asked Bostock.

A decisive nod. “Yes, sir. But it might be nice to have one of our people around to keep an eye on things. Basil can’t object to that.”

“Okay, we need to decide which of our assets we can send. Next,” Moore went on, “how fast?”

“How does tonight grab you, Arthur?” Greer observed to general amusement. “The way I read this, Foley’s willing to run the operation out of his own office, and he’s pretty hot to trot, too. Foley’s a good boy. I think we let him run with it. Budapest is probably a good exit point for our Rabbit.”

“Concur,” Mike Bostock agreed. “It’s a place a KGB officer can get to, like on vacation, and just disappear.”

“They’ll know he’s gone pretty fast,” Moore thought out loud.

“They knew when Arkady Shevchenko skipped, too. So what? He still gave us good information, didn’t he?” Bostock pointed out. He’d helped oversee that operation, which had really been ramrodded by the FBI in New York City.

“Okay. What do we send back to Foley?” Moore asked.

“One word: ‘Approved.’ ” Bostock always backed his field officers.