Rogue Element

NSA HQ, Fort Meade, Maryland, 2330 Zulu, Wednesday, 29 April

Bob Gioco stared at the computer screen as he ate dinner.

A musical chord sounded on his computer announcing the arrival of another slip in his etray. He opened it and read the accompanying note. ‘Hello, Bob. Add this to your Sulawesi jigsaw and see if the picture starts ringing your alarm bells too. Ruth S.’

It was not unheard of for an IAE to make a personal approach to an analyst, but it was not entirely regular either. Ruth Styles. That’s right, Gioco remembered her now. Formidable old duck, but she seemed to like him and that made it easier for him to like her. He apologised to the ether for thinking of her as a battleaxe. He scanned the information troubling the woman sitting in a bunker on the other side of the world. A company called Tropical Pulp and Paper had lost one of its forward survey teams in the jungles of Sulawesi. Apparently, the campsite had made its routine report that morning and everything was fine. An hour later, they were off the air. Totally. Nothing from the camp’s VHF or UH frequencies, the sat phones were dead as were all computer comms. Alright, so something was definitely rotten in Denmark. Or rather, Sulawesi.

Bob stared at the slip. He pinned it on his virtual noticeboard and read through some of the others. There were around thirty or so that he’d highlighted with a red electronic exclamation mark, the ones he thought he should keep an eye on to see what, if anything, developed.

There was something about a group of mercenaries training on the border between Vietnam and Cambodia. An unusual virus had again jumped from the pig population to humans in a remote part of Malaysia. Unionists had sabotaged some stevedoring gear in a port in Western Australia (but there was a counterclaim by them that the damage was actually caused by company thugs). A number of schools had been torched in a systematic attack in Sydney. There was plenty of military traffic, some interesting, some routine, some plain odd. There were the reports from A-6, the Australian agent in Sulawesi. Sulawesi… He reread her first one about a squad of Kopassus troops heading north. He then read the second report, as it seemed an addendum to the first. He decided on a whim to dig a little deeper into this one.

He checked the radio interceptions from the helos that transported the troops. They were buried amongst millions of small data files, which could nevertheless easily be found by the NSA’s Cray X1 supercomputers. He read through the slips. Two helos out of Hasanuddin AFB asked for taxi and airways clearance, so as to deconflict with private and commercial traffic. There was no further radio work from the aircraft at all except for an airways clearance when they re-entered controlled airspace approximately 180 minutes later. It must have been a special ops sortie or there would have been at least some en-route radio work. Gioco thought about it while he fished some egg from his dinner. Indonesian noodles, by coincidence: Mee Hoon. Okay, so a couple of helos landed somewhere, disgorged their troops and returned empty. He absently picked out a ring of calamari, and remembered his earlier assumption that perhaps the soldiers were off to search for that downed Qantas plane.

Something clicked in Bob’s brain. The report on the Qantas plane. Jumbo jets did not just vanish. He checked the time of the aircraft’s disappearance: 2036 Zulu. The time rang a bell. He called up all relevant radio work from that time of the day and in that area of the world. The Crays crunched the numbers. It took less than a minute before the required information was on his desktop. He had an F-16 Falcon out of Hasanuddin at around 2015 Zulu on a sortie. It was airborne for around forty minutes before landing back at base. From takeoff to landing only minimal radio exchanges, all of them just radio clicks, which could have meant anything, including a faulty radio.

2036Z — 4.36 am local time: the precise time the 747 went off the screen. The event was right in the middle of some of those unusual ‘clicks’. Was it possible? Things were starting to race in Gioco’s head. A picture was coming together and it was a particularly nasty one. Is this what Ruth’s driving at? Would Indonesia blow a civilian aircraft out of the sky? No. They wouldn’t, would they? He put the lid back on his dinner and pushed it to one side.

He was sure the clue lay on his desktop somewhere. He reviewed all the slips for the last thirty-six hours, looking for anything to do with Indonesia, whether he’d flagged them with an exclamation mark or not. It took him a good two hours. There was the death of the air traffic controller, which, the way things were going, was looking a bit too coincidental to pass as an accident.

Then a reminder for his early morning meeting popped up on his desktop. He’d forgotten to dismiss it as ‘done’. COMPSTOMP. He traced the unease that had started to gnaw away at him to the morning’s meeting. He reviewed his notes: Watchdog found intruder in CS982/Ind. server. Watchdog traced hacker, Cee Squared, and system notified server owners.

He cross-referenced CS982/Ind. against the registry of Fido Security clients, COMPSTOMP’s venture into the free market, and discovered, just as he had feared, that computer system CS982/Ind. belonged to the Indonesian army. Then he noticed the time of the intrusion. Around 1830 Zulu or — he added the eight hours for the time zone in his head — 3.45 am local time. Could it be…?

Gioco got on the phone to Research. ‘Hello, Gioco, SEA Section. Can you get me the passenger manifest for a commercial aeroplane flight?… You can? Qantas QF-1 departed Sydney, April 28… Yes, the plane that’s gone missing…’ There was a pause while Gioco caught the response. ‘Yeah, I know. Tragedy. Okay, great.’ The list of passengers would be posted to him on the internal mail system. It would take around ten minutes. In the meantime, he contacted COMPSTOMP. He wanted Cee Squared’s name; he wanted to know the name of the hacker responsible for setting off the Watchdog in the Indonesian army’s server. He was known to them, they had his ‘fingerprint’. That also meant they’d have his real name, address and probably even his favourite breakfast cereal on record.

Bob jotted the sequence of events down on a piece of paper. He hoped that something would be so totally out of place that his growing fear about the fate of QF-1 would dissolve. He wrote:

Gioco had to admit that the events listed could be circumstantial, especially the logging camp’s radio silence. He appeared to have quite a few incidents happening within a suspiciously short period of time. The glue was missing, an element (or elements) that would tie all these loose incidents together into something cohesive and incontrovertible. Still, there was enough there, on paper at least, to raise his interest.

Gioco checked himself for an instant. Was it really possible that the Indonesians would splash a 747? He whistled quietly.

The phone rang. ‘Thanks a lot,’ was all he said as the identity of Cee Squared came down the line. The icon for internal mail appeared on his screen at the same instant. It was the passenger manifest of QF-1. He scanned the 394 passenger names on it.

Jesus H. Christ! He couldn’t believe it. There it was! The implications of what he’d just discovered hit him like a pile-driver. The flimsy string of events he’d lined up instantly hardened into something more concrete. He had his glue. Gioco sat in his chair for a good five minutes blinking at his computer screen, in a mild state of shock, again hoping that a glaring inconsistency in his logic would put the facts in a less ominous light. None presented itself. Was this the work of religious fanatics? Was Indonesia in the grip of some kind of fundamentalist boil-over? Perhaps this was just the beginning. Shit!

What had Cee Squared found in the TNI server that the Indonesians were so desperate to keep quiet? He added the clincher, the hacker’s real-world name and allocated seat number, to his notes:

Was it possible that Joseph Light and Joe Light were different people? Yes, possible, but improbable. Gioco considered letting Ruth Styles in on his deductions. He never would have been able to piece it together without her. No, he realised, he couldn’t. She would have to remain in the twilight — aware that something was going on but uncertain of exactly what it was. Instead, Gioco picked up his handset, heart in his mouth, and dialled the Director of SIGINT.