Overkill (63 page)

Light dawned. ‘Where Newman’s deputy went as a translator?’ Richter said.

‘Exactly. Krutaya is about fifty miles to the south-east of Sosnogorsk.’

‘Is that it?’ Richter asked.

‘More or less, yes.’

Richter stared at him. ‘I’d hoped for something a bit more interesting than that,’ he said. ‘As far as I can see, we’ve been given the name of a town in Russia. A
town which appears to have no military significance whatsoever. The only possible link, which could be entirely coincidental, is that last month an SIS operative visited a town about fifty miles
away.’

Simpson was still smiling. ‘Baker has a theory,’ he said. Baker was grinning too. Richter was beginning to feel like the only one in the room who hadn’t understood the punch
line of the joke.

‘OK,’ Richter said. ‘Let’s have it.’

‘First,’ Baker said, ‘let me take you back to the French autoroute, when you talked to General Modin. A question. When he gave you the word
Krutaya
, did you think he was
serious? I mean, did he toss the word out to see if you’d catch it, or did he really emphasize it?’

‘He was serious about it, no doubt,’ Richter replied.

‘Did you think he was trying to help you, or was it a ploy to mislead you, to force you to waste time looking in the wrong place?’

Richter thought for a few moments. ‘I think he was trying to help, not hinder.’

‘Right,’ Baker responded. ‘Now let’s take the situation a stage further. If we accept that Modin was genuine, then the word or the place
Krutaya
must be important.
Because of his position in the SVR, Modin probably has a reasonably good idea of the data held on allied intelligence service computers, and he would have been able to assume that the only
Krutaya
we would find would be the village at the foot of the Severnyy Urals.’ Richter nodded. ‘So, a reasonable working hypothesis would be that
Krutaya
the place, rather
than, say,
Krutaya
the code-name, is important, despite what the BID and JARIC say.’

‘I don’t see where you’re heading, but I’ll accept that for the moment.’

‘JARIC reported only building renovation work, and new telephone cables being laid. The telephone cables were laid underground, in a trench. The Russians usually run them using telegraph
poles.’

Richter was beginning to get confused. ‘Maybe it’s an attractive area. Maybe they decided not to cover the landscape with telegraph poles. Maybe they’ve run out of bloody trees
to make the poles – I don’t know.’

‘Maybe,’ said Baker, ‘but there could be another reason. They could be important telephone cables. Cables that they didn’t want to string from telegraph poles in case
some drunken peasant drove his tractor into one and brought the lot down.’

Richter thought this through for a minute or so. ‘The road goes nowhere,’ he said slowly, ‘apart from running to the other settlement. If we assume that these cables are
important for some reason, they must link something in Krutaya with somewhere else. They can’t just be vital telephone links that simply pass through the village.’

‘Precisely,’ said Baker. ‘And so?’ he prompted.

‘So if we accept that Modin was on the level, then there is something in Krutaya that we need to find out about.’ Richter looked at Simpson. ‘I’m not going tramping round
the bloody Urals disguised as a Russian potato farmer, if that’s what you’ve got in mind,’ he said.

‘There won’t be any need for that,’ Simpson said, and nodded to Baker.

‘So what is it?’ Baker asked. ‘What could the Russians put in a nowhere village that’s important enough to link to the outside world with armoured telephone cables?
OK,’ he said, as Richter opened his mouth to challenge his assumption, ‘I don’t know that they’re armoured, but I think that they probably are.’

Richter shook his head. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘just assume I’m a congenital idiot and tell me what you’re leading up to. I’ve been up all night and I want to get
to bed some time today.’

Baker looked disappointed. ‘A computer,’ he said. ‘A big computer.’

Simpson interrupted. ‘Put it all together, Richter. Modin’s insistence on you investigating the clue he gave you; the Russian plan; the underground cables; the fact that Krutaya is
way out in the sticks, well away from any strategic target, and the visit to Sosnogorsk by Newman’s deputy. Add that lot up, and what do you get?’

‘A headache,’ Richter said.

‘You get,’ said Baker slowly, ‘the very real possibility that one of the buildings in Krutaya houses the computer that controls the satellite that controls the weapons that the
Russians have planted.’

The Walnut Room, the Kremlin, Krasnaya ploshchad, Moscow

The Russian President put down the telephone and grimaced. ‘The Americans,’ he said, ‘have the expression “plausible denial”. I think we are
getting very close to the point where nobody is going to believe that we knew nothing about
Podstava
. That,’ he added, ‘was Karasin. The American President has told him that the
British intercepted a nuclear weapon in France, obviously the one General Modin was escorting, which was destined for London. More significantly, British Special Forces boarded the
Anton
Kirov
in Gibraltar Harbour last night and disarmed the weapon it was carrying.’ He looked round the room. ‘That would be bad enough,’ he said, ‘but the British also
reported that an attempt was made to detonate it.’

‘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.’

10 Downing Street, London

‘I understand what you are saying, Mr Prime Minister,’ Mikhail Viktorovich Sharov, the Russian Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary to the Court of St
James, said, somewhat petulantly, ‘but the whole tale sounds to me like a work of fiction. Certainly I have no knowledge of any of the matters you have talked about.’