The Cloud Collector (40 page)

An hour later the CIA issued its Abu al Hurr statement. It included, in full, a medical certificate signed by two doctors attesting that the man died from an aneurysm rupture of the aorta. The autopsy also established that the aneurysm was a long-standing and obviously undiscovered condition. Concluding the long-running and misleading coincidences, Algeria arraigned a captured terrorist from their leading Al Qaeda faction who'd confessed to involvement in the Madrid atrocity committed by James Miller and Milton Kline. It had, insisted the man, been a single act, unconnected with any other Al Qaeda or jihadist activity.

John Poulter's telephone call, patched through from Fort Meade, halted Irvine and Sally as they were about to leave Langley. Poulter said that after some reconsideration, GCHQ felt the circumstances required the closest and direct co-operation. Irvine told the other cryptologist he felt the same and was glad there'd been a rethink.

On their way to the Owen Place safe house and its secure computer links to Fort Meade, Irvine said, ‘I've got a good feeling about how this is going to turn out.'

Sally wished she had, too.

 

40

Conrad Graham's parting insistence that Irvine remain instantly available—which Graham also demanded of Sally, who didn't intend on going anywhere—meant Irvine's staying in Washington, which Sally welcomed on every level. She hadn't expected to miss Irvine as much as she had during his Fort Meade absences and balanced her conscience twinge with the professional recognition that his secure Owen Place computer bank would give her unrestricted access not just to his own unit's eavesdropping but to all Cyber Shepherd traffic with GCHQ as well. And it wouldn't stop there. Her minimum twice-a-day conversations with David Monkton and morning and afternoon sessions with Conrad Graham would provide an overview of each of the drone-base protections that began at Waddington and Creech within two hours of the attack alert.

Sally was relieved that voices in addition to hers had echoed her concern at an obvious military buildup at either air base. Only a dozen officers—men as well as women, commanded by two undesignated wing commanders—were to be moved onto the Waddington base. All but two would be military communication specialists and technicians with closed-circuit contact with the outside Special Forces and military defence units. The other two were IT experts who would liaise with outside GCHQ colleagues, supplied with their owners' or users' bona fide IP domain codes to pick their way as quickly as possible through every base computer mainframe, desktop, laptop, and connected cell phone for [email protected]. The force waiting outside was to be divided between four neighboring RAF bases—Coningsby, Cranwell, Digby, and Holbeach—all within five minutes' helicopter flying time of Waddington.

Concealment of an outside military reaction force was more limited in Nevada, but from the planned schedule appeared already to have been effectively prepared. Nellis, ten minutes' helicopter time from Creech, was the only nearby holding area of sufficient size, but there had already been a Pentagon announcement of a desert-survival training exercise to cover the encampment, under canvas, of two hundred SEALs and Special Forces only a mile from Creech. The inside command contingent was to be made up of twenty officers, again male and female, who were to enter in twos and threes during that early evening and night. Five were the core segment of a fifteen-strong Meade IT sweep team—independent of Irvine's unit—hunting Smartman.

‘Looks like you were right again about avoiding a too obvious military buildup,' lightly mocked Irvine.

‘It's not about who thought what first. These are obvious precautions,' dismissed Sally.

‘What if we don't find Smartman?'

‘You're more qualified to answer than me. I'd want to look all over again, until we do find him.'

‘So would I.'

Sally nodded towards the screen upon which they were receiving a simultaneous, Pentagon-provided television feed from both bases. ‘It looks good—secure—set out like that. I'm guessing three days, tops, before there's some sort of leak.'

‘I'm not concerned about a few locals seeing a convoy moving around the Mojave Desert: the military do that all the time. What we've got to worry about is Smartman or someone else in the jihad having a lookout position from which they can make the connection. So I'd give it a little longer than three days.'

‘Just a little, not a lot longer.'

*   *   *

Sally kept her reservations to herself at Cyber Shepherd's enthusiastic acceptance of GCHQ's suggested decryption pattern because the evidence appeared unarguable. Her reluctance anyway came down to the same unease that she'd had before but still couldn't translate into words that others might accept.

The British assumption was that the intercepted Iranian messages were predicated, like the darknet chat-room exchanges, on Arabic proverbs and aphorisms. Their recommendation was that decoding should be approached using selections—or combinations—of each as crib grids. Following that principle, two codes had been transliterated in the preceding twelve hours. One, from Kermani, was from the encryption in which Sally had located the Waddington post code that led to Creech.

It read,
A mosquito can make a lion's eye bleed
.

The second was another original GCHQ intercept from Smartman. The transliteration was
One tiny insect may be enough to destroy a country
.

‘The Brits have made the breakthrough,' declared Irvine, one of the few among the assembling groups to remain subdued.

‘Have they?' questioned Sally, matching Irvine's mood, which she guessed to be chagrin at the proverb idea not coming from him after his having supplied the chat-room lead.

Irvine looked at her curiously. ‘The attacks are against drone bases. What do Al Qaeda and the jihadists call drones? Mosquitoes. How else can you read it?'

‘Not even encoded. How do you read insects bringing down countries?'

Irvine's curiosity deepened into a frown. ‘Reinforcing the mosquito analogy, maybe; we know GCHQ have a second Vevak source, although they haven't gone all the way back as we have with Hydarnes. There could be different recipients.'

‘I'm not arguing with the transliterations. It's the interpretations—our interpretations—that I'm not sure about.'

‘Give me another one,' demanded Irvine.

‘I don't have another,' openly admitted Sally, not liking the inadequacy or his head shake of disappointment.

‘Then until you do find one, we've got to go with what we've got.'

That evening, thirty-six hours after the alert, the first security review was held on a conference-link video between the Creech and Waddington commanders, each with their staff officers—the Americans from Nellis, the British similarly hidden at RAF Cranwell—as well as David Monkton, John Poulter, and an unidentified Foreign Office official at GCHQ, and Conrad Graham, Jack Irvine, and Sally Hanning at Langley.

The military overviews were presented by an unidentified U.S. colonel staff officer and an equally anonymous British wing commander, both in undesignated fatigues, against aerial backgrounds of both Creech and Waddington. At Creech, one thousand men, predominantly Special Forces from all three services, made up the immediate defence and were already in place. A further five hundred were on standby at Fallon, Nevada's third air base. At Waddington, five hundred Special Forces were stationed at the four conveniently close bases. High-altitude American E-3 Sentry surveillance aircraft were already permanently airborne over Creech and Waddington; their look-down radar provided horizon cover over 320 kilometres. A minimum of four helicopters—the normal daily average in and out of Nellis—were currently airborne, as were two at Waddington. That cover would be maintained from regular base fleets on twenty-four-hour rotation pending the attack. Throughout the available darkness of the preceding thirty-six hours, a helicopter wing of thirty gunships had been assembled at Creech—fifteen at Waddington—and concealed in hangars. The moment of the attack would trigger the launch of an additional ten troop-carrying helicopters from Fallon. A further two hundred troops would be helicoptered into Waddington from RAF Digby. Psychologically disorienting sound systems had also been brought into both bases under cover of darkness, as well as additional mobile radar equipment, ground lighting, and television relay equipment. Electronically, from its beginning and throughout any engagement, Creech and Waddington would be beneath an electronic shell, inside of which, from both ground and E-3 radar, the attempted incursion would be visible and recorded.

Sally thought what followed was an anti-climax given the military preparations, with their illustrated backgrounds, including photographs of the latest covert-operations Sikorsky MH-53 helicopters and even some older, Vietnam-style, open-side gunships. John Poulter, whose obvious self-confidence was in contrast to the uncertain man she remembered from their Sellafield encounter, said the successful GCHQ reading of seemingly innocuous Facebook transmissions unquestionably confirmed the imminent attacks. Sally positively rejected the half-formed thought that Jack Irvine's contribution lacked the presentational confidence of his British counterpart's.

Conrad Graham waited until the television screens blanked and the technician controller confirmed the sound system was off before saying, ‘I thought that went pretty well. I could have made the presentation myself.'

‘I expected you to be the spokesman,' said Irvine.

And I wish you hadn't been so dogmatic, thought Sally protectively.

Graham said, ‘I want us to crack the attack signal.'

‘That can be your moment,' said Sally.

‘You're right!' said Graham, too absorbed in his biopic fantasy to detect the sarcasm.

Memory-stick-terminated decryptions from both Fort Meade and GCHQ were waiting for Irvine when he and Sally got back to Owen Place. GCHQ had another Kermani post—
Who does not think that his fleas are gazelles
—that Fort Meade had not intercepted. They had, though, transliterated another insect encryption—
When the ant grows wings, it is about to die
—from Swordbearer. Sally spent more time poring over an Anis message—
Death rides a fast camel
—because it wasn't insect referenced.

Irvine didn't break her concentration until Sally finally thrust herself back into her chair, sighing. ‘Well?'

‘The attack's getting close,' suggested Sally. ‘But that's too easy: it's all too easy to make that conclusion.'

‘It's—' started Irvine, closer to the computers, but then he erupted, ‘Found it.'

Sally came forward to read the screen and said quietly, ‘It could be Graham's moment.'

 

41

[email protected] was embedded in the desktop of the executive operations officer of Creech Air Force Base and was loop-connected to the base commander and two other executive officers and was separately backed up in the man's personal laptop.

As he read the initial Nellis-relayed alert, more to himself than to Sally, Irvine said, ‘It would have gotten into the mainframe through the less secure laptop. That's how we got the Stuxnet worm into Iran's nuclear installations at Natanz and Bushehr.'

After a transmission pause of several minutes, a second e-mail came, requesting a Skype conference. Irvine said, ‘The sweepers are frightened to go in.'

Sally said, ‘They should be.'

Before Irvine could reply, another e-mail, this time addressed directly to him, said a helicopter was on standby from Creech to Nellis: they could be talking in ten minutes. Irvine said, ‘Ten minutes wasted!'

‘Frightened people make mistakes,' warned Sally.

Irvine e-mailed that he would be waiting, continuing on with a longer secure post to GCHQ suggesting that despite the time difference in England, John Poulter be awakened to listen to the impending Skype discussion via remote access. Still not pausing, Irvine separately forwarded to England the brief details of the Smartman discovery before copying the complete file to his Fort Meade unit, who were to make direct contact with the sweeper group. In the interim they were to prepare alternative Smartman algorithms. Finally he called Conrad Graham. It took Irvine several minutes to convince the acting CIA director that the Owen Place computer system was more secure than any at Langley, and that everything he'd set up to remain in DC on Graham's orders was concentrated in his security-guaranteed apartment.

‘You expect me to come there!' demanded Graham.

‘I don't expect that at all. I'm keeping you in the loop is all. And which I'll continue doing, with whatever develops.'

After a silence Graham said, ‘You think there's going to be something moving tonight?'

‘At this stage I haven't any idea what's going to happen tonight.'

‘I'll be here. Call me every half hour.'

‘That won't be possible,' refused Irvine. ‘I'll call you immediately if there's a definite reason and in between times otherwise.'

Irvine's telephone sounded as he replaced it. He was expecting it still to be Graham, but John Poulter said, ‘Thanks for the invitation.'

‘Sorry you won't be able to see as well as hear.'

‘You going in right away?'

‘Of course. You briefed your guys at Waddington on what I just sent?'

‘They've worked from the bottom down: done all the officers and middle ranks already, official equipment as well as personally owned stuff. Looks like you've got Smartman all to yourself.'

‘No second chance if something goes wrong, then?'

‘That's another way of putting it,' agreed Poulter.

‘You'd better connect up.'

Nellis linked exactly on time. Irvine initiated the Skype from Owen Place to ensure total privacy apart from the British connection. Momentary interference rippled across the screen, but suddenly it cleared. Irvine didn't recognize the face.