Overkill (65 page)

‘It’s about what I expected,’ Baker said, and pointed at the right-hand column. ‘Eight of these numbers have already been identified by the computer as belonging to the
LPAR site at Pechora. As soon as a modem tone is detected, a sub-routine on the program accesses a database of known numbers and attempts a match. If it finds one, it displays the
identification.’

‘So there are seven unknown computers in the area?’

‘Possibly,’ said Baker. ‘If you look at the numbers, we can probably eliminate one, because it’s only two digits different from one of the known numbers at Pechora. I
think we’ve only got six to try.’ He pressed a key and the list appeared on a sheet of paper in the output tray of the laser printer sitting next to the computer.

‘How will you know when you’ve got the right computer?’ Richter asked.

‘We’ll know,’ Baker said, ‘because it won’t want to let us in.’

Razdolnoye, Krym (Crimea)

Dmitri Trushenko answered the phone immediately. He had been watching the television, expecting news of the explosion at Gibraltar, and he had become increasingly agitated
when he had heard nothing. He had logged on again to the weapon control system through his computer, but that had only confirmed that the firing signal had been sent by the mainframe and
presumably, therefore, received by the weapon, not that detonation had actually occurred. ‘Yes, Genady?’ he said into the mouthpiece.

He heard no voice, just a splintering sound, then heavy footsteps, loud but indistinct voices, the sound of blows and then a single piercing wail of pain, abruptly silenced. He listened
intently, trying to make sense of the noises. Finally, there was nothing but the sound of breathing, and then a click as the telephone handset was replaced on its cradle. Trushenko knew that the
caller had to have been Genady, and that meant that his lover had been taken by the SVR. It also meant that the SVR had discovered his communications link and that, in turn, meant that
Podstava
was blown.

He sat for a few minutes, his eyes filling with tears at the thought of dear, gentle Genady. Then he made a decision. Genady Arkenko had been his lover for nearly forty years – longer than
most marriages – and someone was going pay for what he was suffering. He would not fail him.

Trushenko walked across to the table, sat down and switched on his computer. He connected the telephone lead, loaded the communications software, auto-dialled the number through the modem and
his mobile telephone and logged on to the distant mainframe.

Thursday
Hammersmith, London

Baker took manual control of the Moscow computer, and instructed the communications module to dial the first number. The screen cleared, and the terse message
‘Dialing’ appeared in the top left-hand corner, followed by the number. There was a brief pause, and Richter heard a faint warbling sound as the two computers communicated with each
other, and then a symbolic representation of a computer appeared, and under it the message, in Cyrillic script:

Under that appeared ‘Enter Username’ with a flashing cursor. ‘I take it that isn’t it,’ Richter said, as he translated the Russian text for
Baker.

‘No,’ Baker replied. ‘That definitely isn’t it. That’s just a bulletin board – a kind of electronic conference – run by a bunch of computer enthusiasts
in Syktyvkar.’ He looked down the list. ‘I think we can skip the next number, because it’s almost certainly a second line for the same bulletin board. Let’s try the
third.’

The fifth computer responded entirely differently to all the others. Once the number had dialled, there was no welcoming screen, no text at all, in fact, just a small flashing cursor in the top
left of the screen. Baker looked at Richter. ‘This is probably the one,’ he said.

The Walnut Room, the Kremlin, Krasnaya ploshchad, Moscow

The junior SVR officer knocked respectfully on the door before opening it. He looked at the men seated round the table, approached Yuri Baratov, saluted and handed him a
sheet of paper. The SVR chief scanned the paper, then spoke. ‘Trushenko’s in the Crimea,’ he said, to the table at large. ‘We’ve identified the cell his phone was
using, and we’ve ordered the system to disable his phone card. Konstantin Abramov has instructed local units to pick him up.’

Hammersmith, London

‘This is where I need your help,’ Baker said. ‘I don’t speak Russian, and we’ll need to use Russian to get in. Let’s see if
there’s any help available.’ He pressed the ‘?’ key, followed by ‘Enter’. A line of Cyrillic script flashed up. ‘What’s that?’ he asked.

‘It says “Bad command or filename”,’ Richter said.

‘Typical,’ Baker said, and pressed the ‘F1’ key. ‘That’s the normal “help” key,’ he added. The same message appeared. ‘It looks as if
there’s no help incorporated, on the very sound premise that they don’t want anybody unauthorized gaining access to the system. It’s probably waiting for direct entry of a
username and password.’

‘Try “
Podstava
”,’ Richter suggested. That didn’t work either, and almost immediately afterwards the screen went blank and the message in English
‘Connection terminated by gateway: reverse trace detected’ appeared.

Baker looked at the screen thoughtfully. ‘This is definitely the right machine,’ he said. ‘As soon as an invalid username was entered, the computer started a trace back along
the telephone network to see who was calling it.’

‘Is that going to be a problem?’ Richter asked.

‘Well, it certainly isn’t going to help. I’ve programmed the Moscow computer – that’s our gateway – to sever the connection each time it detects a trace, but
it means we can only try one word per connection, which is going to add minutes to the time it takes us to get in. It also means that I can’t use a password generator.’ Richter nodded
as if he knew what he was talking about, but Baker wasn’t fooled. ‘A password generator,’ he said, ‘is a routine that starts off with, say, AAAAAA and runs through all
possible combinations of characters, including all the numerals and punctuation symbols, until it generates a username or password that the system will accept. The trouble is, you have to stay
on-line to use it, and this set-up won’t let us. So we have to get the username some other way. And the password that matches it.’

‘A username is the real name of a person who is authorized to access the computer?’

Baker nodded. ‘Normally, yes, although there’s nothing to stop somebody who has a long name using an abbreviation to log on, as long as the system manager has approved it. If the
user’s real name was Oblavenkavich or something, he would probably be allowed to shorten it to Oblavo or even use a nickname.’

‘And the password,’ Richter asked. ‘Is it always a name, or can you use anything?’

‘Anything at all,’ Baker replied, ‘the more random and illogical the better. The most difficult password to crack is something like this –’ he scribbled
‘%&reT34£’ on a piece of paper ‘– but the trouble is that the user can never remember it unless he writes it down, which defeats the object of the exercise. So, as
I said before, most people use names or birthdays or something like that. The other common passwords are Secret, Confidential, Keepout and Mine, all of which are moderately obvious, Fred and derf
– Fred backwards.’

‘Why Fred?’ Richter asked.

Baker grinned. ‘Those letters are immediately adjacent to each other on the keyboard, and most computer users are lazy.’

Razdolnoye, Krym (Crimea)

Dmitri Trushenko stared at the screen of his laptop in irritation. The connection to the mainframe had failed, which meant that he had to re-dial and log on all over
again. He pressed the keys angrily, and waited. The screen displayed the message ‘Dialing’ with the mainframe’s telephone number beneath it. After two minutes, the screen message
‘Connection timed out. Redial?’ appeared.

Trushenko snatched up his mobile phone and unplugged the data cable. He input a number at random, pressed the ‘Send’ key and waited. Almost immediately he heard a beeping sound in
the earpiece and the message ‘Emergency calls only’ was displayed on the phone’s small screen. Instantly Trushenko knew what had happened. The SVR had identified his mobile
telephone number, and disabled his phone’s card. That also, he realized, meant that they knew more or less where he was.

He left the phone on the table – it was useless to him now, and would serve to mislead the SVR, as it would continue to show him as being in the Crimea as long as it remained switched on
– quickly shoved the computer and his clothes into a suitcase, and walked outside.

Hammersmith, London

In the next half hour Baker tried every word Richter could think of connected with the Russian operation, including Gibraltar, the names of the French and German towns
where Modin had told him neutron bombs were positioned, Modin, Bykov, Trushenko, Kremlin, Moscow, Lubyanka and Yazenevo spelt forwards and backwards, in upper case and lower case, KGB, GRU, SVR,
GroupNord, and even the names of past Soviet heroes like Sorge, Abel, Philby and Blunt.

With a single exception, the screen blanked each time and the Moscow computer severed the connection. The exception was ‘Modin’, and when Baker entered that name, the system prompted
for a password, but none of the suggestions Richter made were accepted.

‘Let’s take a break,’ Richter said, ‘and think about this.’

Baker made instant coffee in the corner of the office. ‘Is it worth trying the Russian for secret and so on?’ Richter asked, taking a chipped china mug.

Baker shook his head. ‘I doubt it. This system will have an administrator who will have access to all passwords, and who should vet them. If he’s doing his job correctly he
wouldn’t allow anything that simple to be used.’ Baker shook his head. ‘We need a name, or a word—’

Richter almost spilled his coffee. He had suddenly remembered something that hadn’t really made sense before. ‘Christ,’ he said, ‘I am slow.’ He reached for the
phone, dialled the Registry and told them to deliver the file on Graham Newman to the Computer Suite. ‘I think I know what one password is,’ Richter said.

Karkinitskiy Zaliv, Chernoye More (Black Sea)

The closest SVR area headquarters to the Crimea is at Odessa, but there are smaller SVR units at Sevastopol, Simferopol and Kerch. The message from SVR headquarters at
Yazenevo had instructed that the two roads out of the Crimea, through Krasnoperekopsk and Novoalekseyevka, were to be closed to all motor vehicles, the two railway lines closed to all traffic, and
ferry operations from the port of Krym to Kavkaz suspended. Stopping the ferry and closing the railway lines was easy – it took two phone calls – but the roads were different. SVR teams
set out immediately from Simferopol to reinforce the roadblocks erected by the local police forces, but the traffic queues built up rapidly and there were angry confrontations.

Dmitri Trushenko was not a fool. He had chosen the Crimea deliberately because it is effectively an island, with very limited access and egress, and he had anticipated that if anything went
wrong the SVR or one of the other authorities would block the roads. That was why he had bought the powerboat. Fifteen minutes after walking out of the
dacha
, Trushenko was two miles
offshore and heading north-west at twenty-eight knots across the Karkinitskiy Zaliv towards Port-Khorly, where he had left a car. The trip would take him about forty-five minutes, and he
anticipated that he could be back on-line to the mainframe, using an ordinary land-line telephone, in a little over an hour.

10 Downing Street, London

The Prime Minister had used the hot-line and secure telephone circuits to talk to the President of the United States more often in the last three days than he had done
throughout his entire term of office. The two men had enjoyed, almost from their well-publicized first meeting, a relationship that transcended the purely official functions of their respective
offices and had turned into real friendship. And that friendship had helped the two of them face the similar, but in some ways very different, threats posed by Dmitri Trushenko’s Operation
Podstava
.

It would be too much to say that Britain and America were working together to combat the Russian assault, because Trushenko had placed them in completely different positions – there were
no pre-positioned weapons on British soil, but there were over two hundred in place in American cities – and the strategic assets of the two nations were wholly dissimilar. But both men had
decided that the best way to combat the threat was to threaten the Russians just as hard, to take up a totally uncompromising, and non-negotiable, position.

‘What targeting instructions have you given?’ the President asked.

‘Ablanket assault,’ the Prime Minister replied, ‘aimed at Moscow, St Petersburg and Gor’kiy. No military targets at all, just the major civilian population
centres.’

‘And you’ve told the Russian ambassador? Sharov?’

‘Yes. I’m certain he knew all about
Podstava
– you could see it in his face when I told him about the weapon we stopped in France. But what shocked him was that
we’d also found and disarmed the one in Gibraltar. He knew there was going to be a demonstration, as that Russian bastard Trushenko put it, but he didn’t know where. He’s probably
been talking to the Kremlin ever since, trying to find out what he’s supposed to do now.’

‘That was good work by your people,’ the President said.

‘Thank you. I hope that we may have some other good news for you later today,’ he added. ‘We have a team hard at work trying to break into the computer in Russia which we
believe controls this entire operation.’

‘You have?’ the President’s voice rose in hope and surprise. ‘If you require any assistance, anything at all, just ask. We have some of the best computer scientists in
the world working at the National Security Agency. I’m sure they could—’