The Passage (31 page)

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Authors: David Poyer

BOOK: The Passage
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“We've got serious problems with the combat direction system. I don't know if we're going to be able to count on having it up.”
“It'll be awful slow.”
“Not if we get them drilled right. Anyway, I want to give it a try. Get them all up on the phones. Use red for hostiles or unknowns, white for friendlies. Plot everything inside two hundred miles. That includes commercial air out of Jamaica and Haiti. Draw big—I have to be able to read it from here. Get on it fast, Herb; they're gonna start the first run in seventeen minutes.”
One by one, the edge-illuminated boards came on and the men took their positions behind them. Dan caught more than one doubtful glance through transparent plastic. Hell, he thought. I don't know if it'll work, either.
If antisubmarine work was chess, antiaircraft defense was jai alai. It took more computer power and electronics than anything else a surface combatant did.
Modern warships weren't designed to fight alone. They fought in formation, defenses interlocking to form a vast shield hundreds of miles from edge to edge. But to take its place in that phalanx, each had to drill and report to a common standard. Radar, radio nets, patrol aircraft, lookouts, electronic sensors, and intelligence estimates all fed the stream of data. The task group commander stationed his ships to make the best use of their weapons and sensors. The force antiair warfare coordinator controlled the combined air defense. The outer edge of the shield was carrier-launched jet interceptors. Then came long-range missiles, point defense missiles, and last, gunfire.
It all moved so fast that Dan wondered if manual plotting was still possible. The plotters worked from behind the boards, so everything had to be written backward. You got used to that, but updating everything every three minutes, a skilled plotter could still only keep six contacts current. Two could work at one board,
ducking and whirling around each other, but still that made twelve the upper limit of human ability.
In three minutes, a Soviet SS-N-7 cruise missile traveled thirty miles. Launched from a submerged submarine, at a maximum range of thirty-five miles, it would be manually plotted once before it crashed into the ship.
As the first event started, a murmured chant began behind the hum of the blowers, the crackle of radio transmissions.
“Mark, bogey track three, green zero-six-zero one-five-zero, altitude thirty-five, course zero-six-four, three-fifty knots.”
“Say again, didn't catch that … no … gimme the next one.”
“Bogey track four designated to Alfa X-ray.”
“Bogey track five in a fade, handing off to Sierra Lima.”
“EW reports racket, Ice Drum radar bearing two-five-three.”
The men leaned into the boards, eyes abstracted as they listened, then intent as they etched in symbols and information. They gradually warmed to the task, but it was still dreadfully deliberate. Midway through the exercise, one of the instructors came in, clipboard under his arm, sat down near Dan, and began writing.
 
 
THE faces in the wardroom that night were haggard. Leighty looked exhausted. Dan, looking at him, realized the captain had been everywhere; the engine room, the hangar for fire-fighting drills, then the bridge again as they came in at dusk. Vysotsky looked just as wrung-out. He blinked, making himself concentrate as Woollie started to speak.
“The exercise with
Corpus Christi
. Active tracking was adequate, but the passive tracking was unsat. Based on your grades to date, I don't think you're going to stand a chance of passing the antisubmarine portion of the battle problem.”
“Mr. Lenson?” The captain pointed at him, and for a second Dan regretted he'd broken him of his habit of calling on Harper. He stood up.
“Sir, what he's calling a degradation in performance is due to the fact that we weren't running any digital processing. It's part of the overall problem in the ACDADS.” As he spoke, he wondered where he should stop. It was never good to give the commanding officer bad news in front of the troops. But then he thought, Hell, he asked me. “It's worse than we originally thought, sir.”
“What's our new ETR?”
“We don't really have an estimated time of repair yet, XO,” he said, turning to face Vysotsky. “If you don't mind, I'd like to let Dr. Shrobo brief on the problem.”
Leighty raised his head from the test results. “Is he here?” he said. Shrobo stood up in back. “Can you enlighten us as to what's going on?”
“I'll try, Captain.”
As the angular figure stalked forward, Dan realized how out of place Shrobo looked. “Dr. DOS” was still wearing scrub greens, which apparently had become a uniform for him. At least he had a clean set on, but he still hadn't shaved, and his hair dangled, snarled around his bald spot. Half-inch-thick glasses transformed his eyes into polished gemstones under a magnifying glass. As he reached the front, he unsnapped a rubber band from a scroll. He handed one end to Vysotsky, who looked surprised and not overly pleased, but he stood up to help display it.
“This is a block diagram of the subordinate modules of the Automated Combat Decision and Direction System, Block One, Version Three-Point-One,” Shrobo muttered. “I drew it out when I was explaining things to Lieutenant Lenson today. The first thing I need to tell you is that I think I know now what we have in our system. There's a short name for what we've got.”
“What's that?” Leighty asked.
“A virus.”
“A
virus
?”
“A computer virus. That's what they're called.”
Leighty said mildly, “I'm drawing a blank on that, Doc. How can a machine get a virus?”
“Not a biological virus. These germs are actually little programs. They ride in on a tape or a disc and burrow into memory. Then they multiply—erase the original programming and write themselves over it, or lock up the keyboard, or display a message—whatever the programmer who wrote them wants them to do.” Shrobo glanced at Leighty. “It's something that's started around the fringes, since they started making personal computers. We've never seen one in the Navy before, but I think that's what we've got.”
Leighty said, “Some kind of rogue program that goes around eating memory … sounds like science fiction, doesn't it?”
“Oh, they're real all right,” said Shrobo.
“I see. Well, how do we know if we've got one? And if we do, how do we get rid of it? And are we talking just the fire-control system, or—”
Dan said, “It'll depend on what we find, sir.”
“What do you mean? What could we find?”
He took a deep breath. It was always better to let your seniors know the worst that could happen up front. And now that Shrobo had explained how the thing worked, it was easy to visualize how
badly it could damage a ship that depended on computers for almost everything it did. “Well, sir, it depends on how long it's been in there replicating itself. From what Hank says, it may have infected everything the computers handle—the message-processing system, pay records, personnel, admin, sonar programs, navigational programs. And of course the fire control and combat direction systems.”
“This may be serious, then,” said Leighty.
Shrobo said, “It's like the lieutenant says, depends on how long it's been in there. Thing is, like for the message processing, you've got tapes with all the back messages on them. The virus could be on those tapes, too. You've either got to eyeball every piece of data you own or else try to put some kind of routine together to search for it and tell you where it is.”
“Can we do that? Eyeball it, I mean?”
“I don't believe it's possible to sanitize everything manually. There are a quarter of a million lines of code in the operating programs, but there are millions more in the memory units and data tapes for radio messages and the other records. All we have to do is miss one iteration and the virus will regenerate and crash the system again.”
Everyone looked grave. Finally, Vysotsky said, “Then how about the search routine? Dan? Is that within our capabilities?”
“I don't know yet, sir,” said Dan. “We really need to get deeper into how it's done. Dr. DOS is going to have to lead us.”
“But how did
we
get this?” Vysotsky asked him. “Where'd it come from?”
“We don't know that, sir,” Dan told him. “But we'll try to find out.”
Shrobo said, “I need to emphasize one thing. I wouldn't waste any time. Every hour you run your system, you lose more data. The thing's growing in there right now. I've been trying to isolate what I've tentatively named the ‘
Barrett
Virus'—”
“I don't like that name,” said Leighty.
“Well, some of the sailors call it the ‘Creeping Crud.'”
“I'm glad you're here, Doc,” said Leighty. “No disrespect to you, Jay, and Chief Dawson and the rest of the DSs, but it sounds like this is beyond them technically. Okay, go on. You were talking about counteracting it. How?”
“I'm not sure yet.” Shrobo took a turn back and forth, hands behind his back, looking more like a stalking heron than ever. “First, I have to isolate it. Break it, read it, and understand how it works. Then maybe I can write a program that operates within the computer to protect it.”
“Have you done that before?” the XO asked him.
“No one's ever done it before. You have to understand, this is a new field. Of course, you can trace it back to Von Neumann and Turing's work on automata and Shannon's work on information theory—”
“That's all very interesting,” said Vysotsky, “but how long will it take you to fix the computers?”
Shrobo said, in the tone used to placate a child, “How long it takes is not important. Understanding what's happening—
that's
important. I don't want to wipe out this virus. I want to capture it alive.” Vysotsky looked incredulous, started to say something else, but Shrobo went on. “To address your immediate problem, I propose a short-term fix. It may be possible to erect an electronic fire wall or placenta between weapons control and the rest of ACDADS. The interface to designation and identification functions will be manual. But it should control the guns and missiles well enough to permit engaging one or perhaps two targets simultaneously.”
Woollie spoke up then. “Sir, I don't think we can go along with that.”
Leighty looked at him. “Why not, Lieutenant?”
“Sir, it's not that we don't want to cooperate. It's more of a point of philosophy. You're the first ACDADS ship to go through refresher training here.”
“That's right, so?”
“So … Sir, we have no objection to your doing the preparatory exercises any way you want to. The question is how you do the battle problem. Our philosophy is, you train the way you'd fight. Normally, you'd fight in full auto mode, right? That's why this juryrig mode the man here is suggesting—I don't think we can go along with that. If things are really that bad, maybe you should be back in the yard, not here getting ready for deployment. I'd be glad to set you up with the commodore, though, let you argue your position.”
Leighty placed two index fingers to his lips. Then his eye caught Dan's. “Mr. Lenson, you're the combat systems officer. What's your recommendation?”
“Sir, I did a practice run-through today in CIC. Plotting by hand.”
“And?”
“Sir, I recommend we start training everyone that way. Full manual, plotting and everything, right now.”
“Tell me why.”
He sat for a second marshaling his thoughts, then leaned forward. “First, if they want us to do the battle problem in a standard mode, manual makes the most sense. We'd have to fight that way if we had battle damage. The battle problem's three weeks away.
That gives us time to train the talkers and evaluators. By then, we should be able to isolate and run the weapons control systems independently. And, best case—Shrobo gets everything up and running again—we switch to auto, but we're still well trained on the backup mode.”
“Then what's the point in having this class of ship?” Vysotsky said. “Without the computers—we've already proved we can't detect a sub even with his nose up the crack of our ass. We'd never be able to operate as part of a carrier battle group.”
“But we can't depend on the computers in automatic,” Quintanilla said. “Last time we shot at a drone, it hit the ship.”
Dan glared at him across the table. Thanks, you son of a bitch, he thought.
They discussed it back and forth for a while. Finally, Leighty held up his hand. “Okay, here's my decision. I believe Commander Vysotsky is right. Your recommendation is noteworthy, Mr. Lenson, but I'm not going to step back in time.”

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