William Forstchen - The Final Day

“Yeah, right.”

Ernie smiled. “Well, some are whispering I just simply saved you from the dilemma of what to do with that son of a bitch by just shooting him and getting it over with. Either way, I did you a favor.”

John finally relented and nodded.

“This basement is freezing,” Linda announced. “Let’s go up to the Skunk Works.”

“The what?” John asked.

“That’s what we’re calling it now. The kids like the name, especially after I told them about a little side contract work we once did at the real Skunk Works Lockheed had.”

John smiled at that. Lockheed had been a prime contractor for highly specialized spy planes back during the Cold War, their secret R&D lab dubbed the “Skunk Works.” It fit for what they were doing now.

Linda led the way up to the main floor of their home, again cheerily warm thanks to the fireplace and the wood-fueled kitchen stove. She led them up to the second floor, moving a bit slowly, bracing her knee as she climbed the stairs, muttering that she wished she’d had the replacement knee surgery done before everything had hit the fan.

As they reached the top of the stairs, John looked up and grinned at the hand-drawn sign hanging in front of them: “Linda and Ernie’s Skunk Works.” Whoever had drawn it was indeed creative. Linda and Ernie caricatured as cartoon skunks, arguing with each other, with an array of $#*#%& erupting from the skunk image of Ernie’s mouth, even as they were holding hands.

The entire room was now cluttered with electronic equipment, most of it retro from the ’80s and ’90s but some of it looking fairly recent. The work crew had grown from the five he had seen last time to nine, hunched over screens, empty plates and cups strewn on the tables and floor. That alone made John wonder how many precious rations Linda had been lavishing on them. The mere sight of a half-eaten sandwich, packed with what look liked hamburger meat, by Samantha’s work area triggered hunger in John. A half-eaten sandwich remaining unconsumed was something he had not seen in a very long time in this starving world.

All were at work, two arguing in the far corner, each pointing to their respective screens, one of them a fairly new nineteen-inch flat screen.

“How and where did you get all of this?” John whispered to Ernie, those at work not yet noticing his presence.

“Here and there,” Ernie whispered.

“I need to know. If word gets out we are salvaging equipment from people’s basements and attics, it might leak out.”

Bob’s comment about a spy in their midst had been troubling him ever since he’d woken up.

“Let’s just call it Dumpster diving from abandoned buildings in Old Fort. I figured on hunting down there; it’s only five miles away if you take the abandoned road for which I have a key to the gate. I took my sons along, and we prowled around a bit. Hell, the old police station and town hall are down there. Anything that looked to be online down there I assumed was fried, but in a back-room closet, there was a whole stack of tossed-off equipment. Someone told me they had just had a major refit of their entire computer system just a few weeks before everything happened, had stashed the older stuff, most likely to be quietly taken home after being formally written off as junked. It was still there, so I took it, and no one the wiser. Who the hell wants computers anyhow in Old Fort? Smarter than prowling around Montreat where curious eyes might see us and gossip about it.”

It was important to keep this man happy, John realized, and he made the effort to pat him on the back.

Samantha at last turned in her chair, saw John and Maury standing watching them, and smiled.

Whatever Linda was feeding them, the girl looked the healthiest John could ever recall. She must have put on five pounds or more since he had last seen her. She nudged those working to either side of her, and for a moment, all work ceased.

“Don’t let me interrupt,” John said with a smile. “I just dropped by to see how things were going.”

“Is it true that we’ve been occupied by military from Bluemont?” Samantha asked. “We heard the choppers coming over and shut down while they were overhead. We also monitored a BBC report, claiming they had reports of heavy fighting in Asheville and that you were under arrest and standing trial for the murder of ANR prisoners after they surrendered.”

Those bastards, John thought. Of course they would spin it that way.

“None of it true, Samantha, at least my being arrested. I’m still here, aren’t I? Yes, the military has occupied the area. Yes, several of our people and a couple of theirs were killed in Asheville and a dozen others on both sides wounded. But no one over here. There is no more fighting on either side. The general in command is an old friend of mine. We have a peaceful understanding for now. So don’t worry about it, and just stick to what you’re doing.”

He could see their doubtful gazes.

“Please trust me. There is no fighting at the moment. What I am asking of all of you is to keep at what you are doing. I’m counting on you for that.”

Several started to talk at once, but Linda held up her hands like a schoolteacher bringing her class back to order. “Stay on those screens. We’ll have a team meeting over dinner to evaluate the day’s data. Now get to it.” Her voice was gentle but firm, and all followed her orders.

Linda beckoned to the back office. As they left the work area, John leaned over to Linda. “Do they know what happened this morning?”

“Ernie and I decided not to tell them, though one said they thought they heard a helicopter passing overhead. Until we know who the casualties are at the college, we figured it best not to get them upset and not focused on their work.”

John nodded his thanks as they followed Ernie, with Maury by his side, into the back office.

There was no comment from Linda as Ernie fetched out the bottle of brandy, a jug-handle quart and a half, broke the seal, and without comment poured three glasses, keeping one and handing the other two over, with Linda abstaining.

“Here’s to a blessing to the health of your family and you,” Ernie offered.

“And to those who gave the last full measure this morning,” John whispered before taking a sip.

Ernie put his glass down and smiled. “John, I think we are onto something.”

“What?”

“We’re not having much luck at all with breaking the encrypting. Bits and pieces at best, which is mostly guesswork. We’ve figured out a header to messages that indicate place of origin is Bluemont. A couple of names and titles. Their encrypting is sophisticated, as to be expected. What shows as the letter A might mean the letter M the first time it pops up. If that were the case, any fool can just sit down with a chart and a frequency table of how many times a particular letter is used. For example, A is used a hell of a lot more than X or Z in anything we write. Kind of like playing that old television game show but without lovely Vanna pointing out the letters as the players guess.

“But of course it’s not that simple. A might mean M the first time we see it, but the next time it might mean L or W, and so on and so on. It is the same problem Turing faced when building a machine to mimic the German encrypting machines back during World War II. The trick was to try to see patterns. One of the Germans’ big mistakes was daily submarine check-in reports with longitude and latitude, three groupings of two numbers each for degrees, minutes, and seconds. At the same time, naval intelligence reports in they’re tracking a sub at, say, twenty degrees west and fifty-five degrees north, and they think it is U-Boat 111. Add in that French intelligence had reported U-Boat 111 putting to sea and a drunk sailor had told his girlfriend who is with the resistance where they were bound for patrol. Put those three different data points together, look at what we are getting via the Enigma machine—most likely from that sub—and it puts another piece into that puzzle to breaking the code.”