Sword of Shiva - Страница 20

Lu Shi returned the red book to the desk top, laying it next to Xiao Qishan’s hand.

“According to our law,” Lu said, “if a man gives shelter and assistance to a criminal, that man is also a criminal. So, what must we call a man who gives shelter and assistance to our enemies?”

This time, Xiao’s hesitation was much longer. When he finally spoke, his voice was not much more than a whisper. “Such a man must also be our enemy…”

Lu stared into the old man’s eyes. “And, do we hold nations to a lower standard than we hold men?”

Xiao shook his head, slowly.

“Then, we must ask ourselves a very simple question,” Lu Shi said. “What did Chairman Mao tell us we must do to the enemies of China?”

CHAPTER 21

CIA HEADQUARTERS

LANGLEY, VIRGINIA

THURSDAY; 27 NOVEMBER

8:26 AM EST

Kurt Gray yawned heavily as he worked through the multi-step process for bringing his computer on line. He slid his electronic key card into the card reader next to his monitor, and waited for the red LED on the fingerprint scanner to light up.

Between digital tokens, biometrics, and seventeen-digit complex pass phrases, his system was encrypted about nine different ways. In recent years, the Agency had taken information security to levels of obsession approaching pathological mania. Kurt and his fellow analysts agreed that the access protocols would eventually be expanded to include DNA samples and rectal examinations.

That was only half-funny, as there was every sign that the CIA’s cyber paranoia was continuing to escalate. Kurt yawned again as he typed in the first of his pass phrases. It probably wasn’t fair to think of it as paranoia, because there really were people trying to get their grubby little cybernetic fingers on the Agency’s databases. A lot of people. Hostile governments, foreign militaries, criminals, conspiracy theorists, nut cases, garden variety hackers, and even a few friendly governments. For that matter, there were plenty of people in the U.S. government who’d pay good money for an inside look at the CIA’s information stash.

When the red light came on, Kurt gave the fingerprint reader the obligatory peek at his right index finger, and then punched in his second-level password. The machine responded with a satisfied bleat, and Kurt sat back in his chair while his computer shuffled its way through whatever technical voodoo it used to decrypt his local hard drive.

He reached for his ever-handy cup of Starbucks, and took a healthy swig of hot rich coffee. Pumpkin spice latte, one of the specialty flavors that only show up around the holidays.

Kurt lowered the warm cardboard cup from his lips, and tilted it toward the flat screen monitor in a mock toast. “Happy Thanksgiving, Mr. Computer. Hope you don’t mind working on Turkey Day, ‘cause I’m not real fucking happy about it myself.”

He took another swallow of coffee as the report queue opened on his monitor and began populating itself with a column of filenames. The process took more than a minute. The list wasn’t short. Kurt scrolled down the line of document titles and groaned.

The operating model of the Directorate of Intelligence had been developed in the 1960s and 1970s, before the internet — when email and search engines were unheard of, and rotating-drum fax machines were the cutting-edge of electronic information transfer. There had been no cell phone frequencies to intercept in those days, no web-servers to hack, and no flash drives for stockpiling and transporting gigabytes (or terabytes) of stolen documents. Back then, intelligence analysts had labored to piece together tiny snippets of useful intelligence, in a climate of extreme information scarcity.

Now the Directorate of Intelligence struggled with the opposite problem: information overload. The so-called ‘information superhighway’ had become a tsunami of ever-growing and ever-mutating data. Add in video feeds from unmanned surveillance drones, signal intercepts, and actual reports from field agents, and the average intelligence analyst was inundated with more incoming files than any human could possibly assimilate. Unfortunately, about 98 % of the flood was worthless, from a national security and foreign policy perspective. The trick was to reach into that ocean of crap, and pull out the 2 % that actually meant something.

That was Kurt’s job, and while it was frequently tedious and frustrating, he was good at it. He paged back to the top of his incoming file list, and began to sort.

He had been hoping for a light load today, but he wasn’t going to get it. Still, it might not be all that bad. He could tell from the filenames that many of the documents were regional intelligence summaries. Some of those would be recaps of the previous day’s summaries. He could skip those, and he could get by with skimming most of the remaining summaries.

“Okay,” he said softly to himself. “Let’s see what’s shaking in the far off and exotic land of India…”

Kurt had been attached to the CIA’s South Asia Desk for three years, the last two of which he had been assigned specifically to Bhārat Gaṇarājya, the Republic of India. He could read Hindi like a native, and speak it somewhat less fluently, but his facility with the language was less useful than it might have been in other regions, as more than half of the documents coming out of India were written in English.

Since the days of the British Raj, English had been the default language of politics and major business in India. There had been several moves to shift officially to Hindi after the country had gained its independence in 1947, but the cultural inertia of a century of British rule had left an indelible mark on the Indian government.

As was his custom, Kurt dragged a quarter out of his pocket and flipped it briskly into the air. Heads, he would plow into the Hindi files first. Tails, he would start with the English files.

The quarter landed on his desk top, bounced, wobbled, and came to rest with George Washington’s shining profile facing up. “Hindi it is,” he said, and he opened the first document.

* * *

Two hours later, and getting a bit bleary-eyed, Kurt called up one of the last files in the Hindi list. A few more, and he’d be ready to wade through the English pile.

The document was slow in opening. When it finally appeared on the monitor, Kurt could see why. It contained at least a dozen imbedded graphics.

Kurt glanced at the first of these, and then double-clicked it to enlarge the image. The result was a black and white architectural diagram of a large rectilinear structure, like a bridge, or maybe a train trestle. Judging from the associated scale legends, the structure had to be enormous — kilometers long, and about 200 meters high.

Kurt increased the magnification of the image, and began trying to read the associated text boxes. The printed text was rendered in some form of Asian-looking characters that Kurt couldn’t decipher. Chinese, or maybe Japanese, or Korean. Something like that. But there were handwritten notations at various spots around the diagram, and these Kurt could read, because they were in Hindi. Several of the Hindi notes were accompanied by hand-drawn arrows and arcing lines that converged, diverged, and crossed at what appeared to be strategic points on the architectural structure.

It took Kurt about thirty seconds to realize that the huge rectangular construction was not a bridge or a trestle; it was a dam. A gigantic hydroelectric dam, dotted by more sluice gates than he had ever seen.

Kurt minimized the diagram, and worked quickly through the remaining images in the document with a growing sense of both excitement and dread. An idea was beginning to take shape in his mind, and it was not a pleasant thought at all.

He stared at the monitor for several minutes, hoping for the first time in his professional career that he had not found something interesting.

“Not good,” he said to himself as he reached for the phone. “This is definitely not good.”

CHAPTER 22

FINAL TRAJECTORY:

A DEVELOPMENTAL HISTORY OF THE CRUISE MISSILE

(Excerpted from working notes presented to the National Institute for Strategic Analysis. Reprinted by permission of the author, David M. Hardy, PhD.)

The outbreak of World War II brought renewed interest to the search for unmanned aerial weapons.

In 1940, British engineer Frederick George Miles proposed the development of a remotely piloted lightweight aircraft, capable of carrying a 1,000 pound bomb. Designated the Miles Hoop-la, this design was not intended as a single use weapon. Instead, it would drop a bomb payload on a designated target, and then return to its home field to be refueled and rearmed for future attacks. The airspeed of the Hoop-la was estimated at over 300 MPH, but this was never verified, as the project was cancelled shortly after it reached the mock-up stage.

In 1941, the German ReichluftMinisterium (Air Ministry) began to investigate designs for ‘composite’ aircraft, i.e. multiple aircraft which are physically connected together and flown as a single unit. Nazi interest in this concept may have derived from Soviet studies in the 1930s, in which fighter planes were attached to the fuselages or wings of large bombers, ready to launch whenever the host-bombers were threatened.

One German scheme involved using an attached fighter plane to guide an explosive-packed unmanned Junkers Ju-88 bomber to a target. Upon reaching the designated site, the fighter pilot would aim the drone bomber toward its final objective, detach his own plane, and depart the area as the Junkers dove into the target and detonated.