Power Play (14 page)

They’ve called in nuclear scientists from two notorious rogue states, and even Nikolai doesn’t know where they are or what they’re doing.
He gazed at his screen, and the answers stood before him.
You don’t fly in nuclear scientists for nothing,
he decided.
And we know they’re planning to hit the United States. Unless I am fearfully wrong, they’re in that fucking monastery. And they’re working in probably the remotest, most unapproachable place in all of western Russia.

So far as Rani could work out, this team of modern weapons maestros must be working on a new, sleeker, and faster missile with which to strike, somewhere in the United States.

He idly scanned through a US military website that pinpointed the main US nuclear response points in the face of an incoming attack. It hadn’t changed much since he last visited. But there were some new notes about the president’s power and likely speed of reaction. And here there was a very detailed note about presidential involvement—a situation exacerbated by the recent arrest of a Chinese computer technician in Washington. Rani had not read any of it before.

It dealt with the “nuclear football”—the president’s emergency satchel, otherwise known as the black box, the nuclear lunch box, the button, or just “the football.” It’s in a metallic Zero Halliburton briefcase, in an outer leather “jacket.” It weighs about forty-five pounds, with a small antenna protruding from the case, close to the carrying handle.

The satchel is kept in the White House but travels with the president wherever he goes. It is always carried by his official aide, one of the five permanent officers representing all branches of the armed services, not one of them ranking less than major or equivalent. The aide on duty is always close to the president and is personally responsible for the security of the satchel.

Every one of the five aides must undergo the most rigorous security clearance and must be familiar with the contents of the satchel in order to brief the president should it become necessary. The supreme presidential command to launch is called the Gold Codes, prepared by the National Security Agency, and carried by the president at all times. It is printed on
a plastic card, same size as a credit card, and normally referred to as “the biscuit.”

Its principal use is to enable the president to positively identify himself as the commander in chief, with full authority to issue the orders to the National Military Command Center. The United States has a two-man rule, which requires a second person to confirm the president’s order—it’s normally the secretary of defense. All of the above takes a matter of seconds rather than minutes.

And the Russians want to beat it
, muttered Rani.
Good luck, Markova . . . crazy prick.

Rani read on, experiencing an uncanny feeling he was not supposed to be privy to all this. He had used a classified Mossad password to come on the website and now, somehow, seemed like a spy, which of course he was, but for America, whenever necessary—
never against them.

If I can help to chop that idiot Markova’s balls off, they’ll probably make me president, never mind read about his security,
he decided, and pressed on, discovering that before he issues his final order, the president must give a “command signal” to the Joint Chiefs of Staff before reviewing the attack options with his aide.

This is the Single Integrated Operation Plan (SIOP). It’s contained in a thick binder, inside the satchel. The main headings read: “Major Attack Options,” “Selected Attack Options,” and “Limited Attack Options.” The aide assists the president in transmitting them over the secure satellite phone included in the satchel. Before transmission, the president will sign prepared orders delegating authority to the vice president, should that appear necessary.

There are three nuclear footballs, one with the president, a spare held permanently in the White House, and one with the vice president. As a system, it’s as near fireproof as it is mechanically possible to be. The only time it momentarily failed, it took a would-be assassin’s bullet to do it—in 1981 when President Reagan’s clothing needed to be cut from him by the emergency room’s trauma team. The biscuit was later found in one of the president’s shoes, on the floor in a corner.

Rani switched off the computer. It was strange, but he had heard that phrase
nuclear football
somewhere in the past few months. But he couldn’t remember for the life of him where. He kept almost recalling it, but it always slipped his mind.

But then, ten minutes later, as he prepared to leave the room, it came to him in a rush. Nikolai had mentioned it way back in the winter in Petrozavodsk—after he’d listened in to a cell-phone conversation between someone in his ship and the Kremlin. According to Nikki, he had distinctly heard someone say something about teaching the Americans a lesson and that the Russians would “kick their nuclear football straight out of the stadium.”

Someone had laughed, because Rani had remembered saying what a rare matter it was to hear a Slavic joke. And now he understood. It was not a joke after all. When someone had said
nuclear football,
they meant exactly that . . .
the
nuclear football, the American one.

Rani had never heard the phrase before in its correct context. But now he knew, and now he could fit several pieces together, something forming in his mind: a weapons laboratory in the monastery of Solovetsky . . . foreign scientists coming to help . . . the obvious threats against Washington by the Russian president. And now their obvious next step:
If we are to strike against the States, how do we stop their instant-reaction system from destroying us?

Rani could not answer that. But if the Russians could disable the US president’s nuclear football, they would be well on their way—maybe to hold up the entire reaction time by several hours, which might be sufficiently long to deflect American anger from Mother Russia.

He still had very few hard facts, not enough to sound a Klaxon fire alarm in the CIA or the Pentagon, and there did not seem to be a threat against his own country, which had, after all, staged such a sledgehammer power play against Iran.

But he had a straight line of circumstances that interlocked. And he had more speculation to make, which was equally critical, all of it to do with the nuclear football and how to cripple it. Because that is what he himself would have been working on, if he had planned to harm the United States on its own soil.

Plainly, the device, snug in its metallic case, could not be hit by any kind of explosive, because that would almost certainly kill the officer carrying it, not to mention the nearby president himself. Rani understood that very thoroughly. He also knew enough about the murder of presidents to understand that, generally speaking, that should be avoided at all costs.

If that nuclear football were to be put out of action, it would have to be treated as a computer, which it was, with satellite phones attached. It was a communications system, and on command it would send information through cyberspace to the Pentagon and beyond, simultaneously demonstrating that the source of those commands was the president of the United States.

It was also programmed to remove all ambiguity. If its signal ordered “Selected Attack Options” on the SIOP to the US Military Command Center, that would be directly from the commander in chief, backed up by the secretary of defense, with the Joint Chiefs standing sternly by . . .
LAUNCH NOW.

Rani Ben Adan, sitting all alone in the Israeli Embassy’s situation room, sensed he was being drawn into the thoroughly creepy world of cyber warfare, a battleground not entirely unknown to the high-tech section of the Mossad itself. Had they not been blamed for disabling the Iranian weapons plants by that very means only eight years ago?

What Russia, too, must need was a method of “jamming” the nuclear football—by some kind of cyber-related attack from a satellite, controlled from the Russian mainland. “Jamming” was the most tried and tested method. It had been used for many years, both on the battlefield and at tactical level, to disrupt the enemy’s communications and to deny opponents the opportunity to listen or watch programs or propaganda.

The problem was the impossibility of “jamming” a radio/telephone without identifying the frequencies being used to transmit. Even then the size and power of the transmitter always determined the range at which it would operate. At ground level, over long distances, it required something close to its own private power station.

The lead country in this ultramodern form of the black arts was China—and the state-of-the-art operation there, both in manufacturing and in marketing the best equipment, was China Shenzhen GSH Technology Corporation, based in the city of the same name directly north and adjoining Hong Kong.

Shenzhen is the world’s manufacturing powerhouse. It was the first of China’s special economic zones and easily the most successful. Shenzhen SEZ is the fastest-growing city on earth, the pride of the paddy fields, ex–Pearl River Delta village turned industrial metropolis, with twenty-three buildings more than six hundred feet high and a population of more than
10 million. Shenzhen also has the third-busiest container port in China, after Shanghai and Hong Kong.

And there they have perfected the small equipment required to penetrate cell phones, industrial computers, even small communities, and opponents. But they are working on much larger and more powerful technology, for far grander targets.

Every “jamming” device requires an antenna to send the signal, and for a major operation, an external one would be necessary, tuned for individual frequencies. If Russia wanted to hit “the football,” it would have to work through Shenzhen. No other cyber warrior, outside of the United States, was so advanced.

Rani knew how difficult this all was. But he knew it in secret. No Israeli, especially a Mossad official, would ever admit to understanding the subject, since any such talk would immediately throw suspicion on the recent activities by the Israelis in this sinister field.

But he did understand it. He knew precisely what Israel had done eight years before, sometime between 2009 and 2010, when a mind-blowing cyber attack had been launched against the Iranian nuclear plant at Natanz, one of the most secure industrial sites in the world.

This was the “mission critical” of the entire Iranian weapons program. In the vast fortified underground bunkers, the Iranians were well into their program of enriching uranium all the way to weapons grade. They had already protected themselves from cyber attack, cutting themselves off from the Internet behind an air gap.

At that point, 2008–2009, the Israelis had not yet considered smashing the place asunder, but rather preferred a high intellectual attack through the computers, which would cripple the Iranian system completely.

The target was the system, which controlled the critical speed of the uranium-spinning centrifuges, the high-tech industrial musclemen that hurl the heavy isotopes to the edge of the uranium hunk during years of fast rotating. The Iranians had around five thousand of them working, with another four thousand being prepared for action.

The problem facing the Israelis, and possibly their American allies, was how to get in there and infect the computers with an effective virus to screw the whole system up. Answer: not possible.

So the Mossad went for the back door. They infiltrated five separate computer companies in Iran, the only organizations that could possibly
undertake the endless servicing and repairs at Natanz. These secret cyber technicians introduced a virus onto a USB flash drive and spread it directly to Natanz via the computers of unwitting contractors working at the plant.

It was programmed to hit the Siemens S7-315 PLCs, which controlled the speed at which Iran’s gas centrifuges rotated. Once in control, this virus caused utter chaos, alternatively increasing and decreasing the speed of the centrifuge rotor. The attacks were short lived, maybe fifty minutes in duration, recurring every month, until they poleaxed any semblance of scientific order. The uranium was useless, the centrifuges were beyond repair, and the computers were ready for the scrap heap.

The virus was so brilliantly designed that it completely hid the attack from the Iranian plant operators until it was way too late. According to surveillance made by the International Atomic Energy Agency, workers were seen working “desperately”—frantically removing possibly one thousand of the plant’s nine thousand centrifuges. The IAEA estimated the number of working “spinners” went down from forty-seven to thirty-nine hundred. Right after that, Gholam Reza Aghazadeh, the head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization, was forced to resign, “following a serious nuclear accident.”

The Iranian president himself was forced to admit in November 2010, “They succeeded in creating problems for a limited number of our centrifuges with the software they had installed in electronic parts.” But even he was not about to nail the Israelis, whomever he believed the culprit to be.

But in early 2011, the outgoing head of the Mossad told the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, that by disabling as many as a thousand of Iran’s centrifuges, the virus might have set back Iran’s ability to produce a nuclear weapon until 2015.

This, however, did not happen. The Iranians launched a titanic effort to repair the damage with a massive program to replace the Russian-built centrifuges.

The Mossad was blamed for a devastating attack in 2011 on an Iranian missile base that killed Hassan Moghaddam, the architect of Iran’s missile program. More bomb attacks killed two more missile scientists. But all to no avail. Tehran was determined to proceed with its quest for an atom bomb.

That ended on October 6, 2016, when Israel’s air wings demolished
the plants at Qom and Natanz . . . bombs and missiles, this time, bearing controlled Israeli nuclear warheads. Result: a total wipeout of the Iranian threat, minimum peripheral damage. Mission accomplished.