Tom Clancy's Op-center_ Op-center Part 14

He set the boat-shaped belly of the aircraft down with a gentle thud, water kicking up on both sides as he braked quickly; he wanted to get the men off and the plane turned around before any curious fishermen or constables decided to check him out.

He unlatched the hatch and flipped it open. The entire c.o.c.kpit was exposed. s.n.a.t.c.hing the raft from the copilot's seat, he lowered it over the side while the men in the back seats stood. The pilot extended his hand to help the first man into the raft. The killer grabbed the pilot's wrist and looked at his phosph.o.r.escent aviator's watch.

"We-- we made it!" the pilot said.

"You've done well," the killer replied as his companion edged around him and climbed into the raft. He reached into the pocket of his greatcoat and handed the pilot a bundle of money. "As your agent and I agreed."

"Yes, thank you."

Then he reached into his pocket and withdrew the b.l.o.o.d.y stiletto, held it in front of him. The pilot's heart drummed so hard he was sure it and not the engine was causing the plane to shake. The killer laughed, c.o.c.ked his arm suddenly to the side, and threw the blade out to sea; the pilot deflated so quickly he lost his balance and fell against the seat.

"Good night to you," said the killer as he turned and joined his friend in the raft.

It was several minutes before the pilot felt calm enough to taxi back to sea. By that time his pa.s.sengers had been swallowed by the darkness.

The men were guided to sh.o.r.e by the flas.h.i.+ng light of a soldier on the beach. The tide was low and they arrived in minutes, one of them deflating the raft while the other took the suitcases and walked toward two jeeps parked in the shadows beneath a sea cliff.

"Colonel Oko?" said the new arrival.

"Colonel Sun," the other bowed. "You're early."

"Our pilot was anxious to be rid of us." Sun glanced at the armed soldier standing beside the jeeps. "You have the uniforms, doc.u.ments, and-- package?"

"They're in the jeep. Would you care to check?"

Sun smiled and set the cases in the sand. "Major Lee trusts you." The smile broadened. "And we have a common goal, after all. To remain enemies."

"I need no war for that."

"You are not a politician, Colonel. We do not need to be reminded of what is in our blood. Would you care to check the money?"

Oko shook his head and motioned for his aide to take the case. "To be frank, Colonel, even if we were not recompensed for the bribes we've paid, the cost would have been worth it."

Bowing again to Colonel Sun, Oko climbed into the jeep, and did not look back as they drove up the steep dirt road into the hills.

Colonel Sun's aide, Corporal Kong Sang Chul, approached as he watched them go. "And they say the North and South can never agree on anything."

Ten minutes later, dressed in the uniforms of a North Korean Colonel and his orderly, and having checked the package to make sure everything was there, the South Koreans followed the same road, headed toward a spot marked in red on the map among the folder of doc.u.ments.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR.

Tuesday, 8:40 A.M., Op-Center

"This can't happen, this can't happen, this can't happen!"

"But it did, techboy. It did."

Stoll and Herbert were sitting at the conference table in the Tank with Hood and the rest of Op-Center's prime team, save for Rodgers who would be briefed. Ann Farris sat to Hood's right, Stoll and Herbert beside her, and Lowell Coffey II to his left; on the opposite side of the table were Martha Mackall, Liz Gordon, and Environmental Officer Phil Katzen. Darrell McCaskey sat down between Gordon and Katzen, having just presented Hood with a one-page summary of the activities of the Red Sky League and other terrorist organizations. It appeared that none of them was involved with the blast in Seoul.

Resting on the table in front of Hood were McCaskey's paper and the photo the NRO had sent over showing extensive troop movements around Pyongyang; beside it was the just-wire-photoed snapshot taken by Judy Margolin from the Mirage. They showed no tanks moving out, no artillery ringing the city, and no other preparations indicating that the DPRK was preparing to go to war. "What do you make of the discrepancy, Matty? Other than that it can't happen."

The portly Operations Support Officer sighed bitterly. "The key landmarks in both photographs are the same, so the satellite wasn't just misdirected, taking pictures of someplace else. They're both Pyongyang."

"We had NRO send us an update," Herbert said, "and I confirmed it with a secure call. The photo on the monitor showed a natural progression of the deployment seen in the first photograph."

"A deployment which probably isn't taking place," McCaskey pointed out.

"Correct."

"So, Matty?" Hood said. "I'm due at the White House in just about a half hour. What do I tell the President?"

"That there's a software glitch of some kind. A glitch like we've never seen before."

"A glitch!" Herbert roared. "In twenty million dollars worth of computer widgetry that you designed?"

"That's right! Sometimes bright guys miss something, and sometimes trucks full of bombs get through cement barricades--!" Stoll regretted he'd said it even as the words were coming out. He pressed his lips together and slumped in his chair.

"Nice one, Matt," Coffey said to break the tense silence.

"I'm sorry, Bob," said Stoll. "That was out of line."

Herbert glared at him. "You got that right, techboy." His gaze fell to the leather seat of his wheelchair.

"Look," Liz said, "we're all going to make mistakes. But we can work them out better if we cooperate rather than point fingers. Besides, guys-- if this is how we're going to react in the early stages of a crisis, we'd all better think about new lines of work."

"Point well taken," Hood said. "Let's move on. Matty, give me your best guess as to what it is we're dealing with."

Stoll sighed even deeper. He didn't look at Herbert. "My first thought was that when we went down, it was just a display of some kind. Someone showing us that they'd gotten into the system somehow and could do it again. I half expected we'd get an E-mail ransom note when we came back on-line."

"But we didn't," Coffey said.

"No, we didn't. Still, I figured there was a bug in the original program or one that slipped in with some software, and that it went from us to DOD to the CIA or vice versa. Then the photo came in from Osaka, and now I'm thinking that that was when we were really invaded."

"Explain," said Hood.

"The shutdown was either a smokescreen or a distraction to cover the real goal, which appears to have been the compromising of our satellite surveillance system."

"From s.p.a.ce?" Coffey asked.

"No. From Earth. Someone else is controlling at least the Geostationary 12-A eye perhaps more."

"The President's going to love that," Coffey noted.

Hood glanced at the countdown clock, then down at Bugs's image on the computer screen.

"Have you got that?"

"Yes, sir."

"Tack it to the end of the Options Report-- with this." He looked at Stoll. "Our Operations Support Officer is working on the problem now, and a.s.sures me that the problem will be identified and solved. Time frame to follow. In the interim, Op-Center will function without its computers, since we can't trust any of the data. We'll rely on aerial surveillance, on agents in key areas, and on crisis simulation papers. Signed, etc. Print it all out, Bugs. I'll be there in a minute." Hood rose. "What's that phrase you're fond of, Matty? 'Make it so'? Well, make it so. This setup was supposed to be invasion-proof. That's how the President helped sell Op-Center to Congress nearly one year and a quarter billion dollars ago. I want the invader found and killed, and the hole patched." He turned to the sandy-haired Environmental Officer. "Phil-- I don't think we'll be needing your division at this stage. You've got an M.A. in computer science-- would you work with Matty on this?"

Phil's blue eyes went from Hood to the countdown clock. "My pleasure."

Stoll stiffened but said nothing.

"Bob, call Gregory Donald at the base in Seoul. He lost his wife in the explosion, but see if he feels up to a visit to the DMZ for some firsthand reconnoitering. We can't trust the satellites, I want one of our people there-- and this may be good for him."

"He sounded out of it before," Martha noted, "so tread lightly."

Herbert nodded.

"Then I'd like you to brief Rodgers," Hood said. "Tell him to continue in at his discretion, unmarked. If Rodgers is up to it-- and I suspect he will be-- have his team report back to us on the Nodong missiles in the Diamond Mountain region."

Herbert nodded again, then wheeled himself from the table, still clearly smarting from what Stoll had said.

Hood hit the buzzer and left, followed by Herbert and the other team members.

Stoll thundered down the corridor to his office, Phil Katzen racing to keep up with him.

"Sorry he did that to you, Matty. I know there isn't much I can do to help."

Stoll grumbled something that Phil couldn't quite make out. He wasn't sure he wanted to.

"People don't understand that so much of progress comes from learning by our mistakes."

"This wasn't a mistake," Stoll snapped. "This is something we've never seen before."

"I see. Reminds me of when my older brother hit forty-five, chucked his wife and his job at Nynex, and decided to walk around the world. He told me that was a life-style change and not a midlife crisis."

Stoll stopped short. "Phil, I came to work today and got hit with the equivalent of the Cretaceous asteroid. I'm an apatosaurus fighting for his life, and this just isn't helping me." He started walking again.

Phil continued after him. "Well, maybe this will. When I was writing my dissertation on Soviet whale hunting, I went on a Greenpeace rescue mission to the Sea of Okhotsk. We weren't supposed to be there, but never mind. We found out that the Soviets had a way of creating false sonar images using sound transmitters at sea; we'd pick up an echo and rush off to protect a pod that wasn't even there, while the hunters were killing whales somewhere off our screen."

The two men entered Stoll's office.

"This isn't a sonar blip, Phil."

"No. And that's not the relevant part of the story. We started keeping video records of the images for future reference and found that whenever the transmitters were turned on there was an almost imperceptible burst of energy--"

"A start-up surge. That's common."

"Right. The point is, the signal had a fingerprint, a signature we could check before running off on a wild whale chase. The computers went down here for almost twenty seconds-- you called it a smokescreen, and you may be right. But as I was watching the countdown clock in the Tank, I realized that there's one eye that wouldn't have blinked."

Stoll stood beside his desk. "The computer clock."

"Right."

"How does that help us? We know from when to when the shutdown occurred."

"Think. The satellite continued to store images, even when it couldn't transmit them to Earth. If we could compare an image from the instant before with one taken an instant after, we might be able to figure out what was done to the system."

"Theoretically. You'd have to superimpose two at a time and compare them for subtle changes--"

"The same way astronomers search for asteroids moving against a star field."

"Right," said Stoll, "and it'd take a long time to compare the dozens of images pixel-by-pixel. We can't even trust the computer to compare them for us, since it may have been programmed to overlook certain artifacts."

"That's just it. We don't need the computer. All we have to do is study the one set of before-and-after shots. That's what I meant about the computer clock. It wouldn't have shut down, even if a virus crawled in. But it would have taken a fraction of a second for a false image to supplant a real one--"

"Yes, yes." Stoll said. "s.h.i.+t, yes. And that would show up in the time-encoding on the photographs. Instead of coming in at-- what is it, every.89-odd seconds, there'd be an infinitesimal delay on the first bad egg."

"And that delay would show up right on the bottom of the photograph."

"Phil, you're brilliant." Stoll reached around and s.n.a.t.c.hed his calculator from the desk. "Okay-- the photographs should advance in increments of.8955 seconds. When we find one that's.001 second late, we have the first of our fakes."

"You've got it. All we have to do is ask NRO to run a check backward until they hit the time discrepancy."

Stoll dove for his chair, got Steve Viens on the line, and explained the situation. While he waited for Viens to run his time check, Stoll unlocked his desk drawer, pulled out a tray full of diagnostics diskettes, and began his check of the inner workings of the system.