Dominic Conlon - Silent Warpath

Sean glanced at Lomax to see how he was taking the news. As expected Lomax began to pace up and down. Sean went to the window and peered carefully through the net. The street looked clear.

Lomax stopped pacing for a moment. ‘What do you think about DD’s idea about the sabotage motivation?’

Sean released the curtain. ‘It’s very elaborate. They could have chosen a dozen other ways to zap the project that would be less risky.’

Lomax shook his head. ‘DD says if that happened, they could restore all the systems from backup tapes.’

‘OK, then I would torch the building as well. Either way I would make sure that they couldn’t use anything to get back into business. Instead DD says they wrote a sophisticated virus specifically for this project. So I think there’s more to this than trying to stop it dead in its tracks.’

Lomax sat at the table and picked up a pencil. ‘Maybe, but the project has stopped. No one’s working on developing it now. And the sub is lost.’

Sean sat opposite Lomax. ‘That’s the funny part of the equation. If the sub is lost, meaning they don’t know where it is, then maybe it’s not lost at all.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘Maybe the virus was meant to transfer control from SeaTek to them.’

Lomax looked interested. ‘OK. But who would do that?’

Sean shrugged. ‘There are a few big contractors in American undersea defence. Perhaps one of them want to spoil the game on this new technology so they can continue to sell their own older technology. You’re guess is as good as mine.’

Lomax looked keenly at Sean. ‘You might be onto something there. Maybe the virus wasn’t meant to make the sub disappear — maybe it was meant to make the whole project look…’

‘Amateurish?’ suggested Sean.

‘Not just amateurish, but a dangerous liability. Not only does the software foul-up, but the sub turns on its support ships. One whiff of a problem like that would put the American department of Defence off for a decade. Investors would demand their money back. The Government wouldn’t touch it with a barge-pole.’

‘Perhaps’, muttered Sean. ‘But maybe there’s another agenda.’

‘Like what?’ asked Lomax. ‘What we know fits with a competitor knobbling the opposition. They’ve made the whole project look like a Frankenstein’s monster. What more could they possibly want?’

Sean propped his chin in his hand. ‘There’s a lot of money, effort, and leading edge technology gone into this project. When you look at it from America’s point of view, this combination of resources could not be found anywhere else in the world, possibly with the exception of Japan. Suppose the competitor has sold the technology to another country?’

‘I don’t know’ said Lomax doubtfully.

Sean shook his head. ‘I don’t know either, but I’ve a bad feeling about this.’

Lomax raised his eyebrows. Sean wasn’t such a knuckle-head as he appeared. ‘Well we have to start somewhere and I suggest we wait until DD has run his tests on the tapes.’

Sean agreed.

‘In the meantime, I’m going to grab some shut-eye. Wake me as soon as DD has something.’

Natasha awoke to someone drumming on her arm. In the dark she couldn’t see who it was and for a moment she felt disorientated.

‘Nat, wake up!’ It was DD, tapping her insistently.

She brushed his hand away. ‘What’s the problem?’ she asked hoarsely.

‘Come on, get up. I’ve something to show you.’

She could tell from his voice he really had found something and she was eager to discover what that was. ‘OK, give me a few moments to dress and I’ll be through in a minute.’ She glanced at the clock and saw it was just after 5 am in the morning. She groaned and made for the bathroom. Before she went into DD’s room she made two cups of coffee and took them through.

‘OK, what have you got?’ she asked, handing DD one of the mugs of coffee.

DD grinned. ‘Just about everything. Come and look at this.’ DD indicated a document on his screen. In it were notes he made during the night. Even to Natasha’s experienced eye it appeared to be list of technical mumbo jumbo. She turned back to DD.

‘Tell me’ she said simply.

DD indicated the chair next to his. ‘First I compared the original unchanged module to the one you gave me last night. I was able to work out where the original had been changed. This was fairly easy, as most of the changes were towards the end of the file. At that stage, I wasn’t sure what I was looking at — the file was still in binary and I had no way of deciphering what the code meant, let alone the changes that had been made.’

DD ruffled through a desk pad to find a page. ‘Once I discovered where all the changes were, I started to look at other modules, just to get a feel for what instructions related to modules — you know the kind of thing, where there were patterns, or where the same block of code was repeated in the same place in other modules.’ DD went back to the screen and checked his notes. ‘I used some special debuggers that make a best guess at the code that they are given. Nothing seemed to work for the first hour. Then I started to get some commands I recognised as assembler hex codes — you know, low level code that has been compiled so the machine can understand the instructions. I started to put the commands together and after about half an hour it began to resemble a computer program.’

Natasha was beginning to find DD’s narrative interesting. This was a genius at work while she was asleep. ‘Go on’, she encouraged.

‘It took me about three hours to trace the original untouched code from the tapes and match it to the binary. I now know what the original package instructed the sub to do. It was supposed to run a series of test drills for the sub over a period of a fortnight. It was also supposed to surface each week to report back. I even have the protocol for the exchange of data, the list of data it was supposed to radio back, and the order in which it was supposed to report.’ DD looked at Natasha who indicated her agreement.

‘My team helped prepare that checklist and designed the reporting mechanism.’

‘Right. Then I started to look at the additional code — the virus that had been engineered for the sub.’

‘OK’ she said, impatient for DD to get to the crux.

‘Well, this is where it gets really interesting.’ DD scrolled down the page on the document. ‘According to my notes, the first instructions were to enable some kind of weapons system. I don’t know much about that — can you fill me in?’

Natasha’s mouth went dry. So that was how it had happened.

‘It looks like the new package gave the sub a timetable, a target and an area to search for the target.’

‘What’s the target?’ asked Natasha quickly.

DD shook his head. ‘It doesn’t have a name in the code, just a specification.’

‘Well what have you got?’

DD handed her a thin pile of paper. ‘It’s all on there, tonnage, length, beam, acoustic profile, magnetic resonance signature, the lot. All the physical characteristics — everything except the name.’

‘To the computers on board Cetus, the name of the ship wouldn’t help it find the target’ Natasha observed. ‘But with the information we have now we should be able to identify the ship. What about the timetable — when is it supposed to strike?’

‘That’s the problem, Natasha. According to this code it should reach its target less than 48 hours from now.’

Sean could hear the sound of raised voices as he approached the door. It sounded like Lomax and DD were arguing. He could sense the frosty air as he entered the room. ‘What’s up?’