Odom nodded and explained, “I passed this to Harry last night. It’s negative information really, but as far as we can tell, while the Russians are increasing the readiness of their first-line units, they have not mobilized any of their reserve units. The Russian army’s pretty big, but if they were planning on taking on NATO, I believe they’d want at least some of their reserve units stood up, at least to provide garrison and rear security.”
“Maybe they can’t afford to,” the CIA accountant suggested.
“That’s possible, but whatever the reason, they don’t have the forces to fight a general conflict with NATO,” Odom replied.
“That ties in with the late summer date I mentioned earlier,” Mathias added. “There’s decent weather in August and early September, but it’s not the ideal time to begin a military campaign. Putting it all together, they don’t have enough troops, enough money, or enough time for a big theater-wide operation.”
He turned to the last page. “Finally, there’s the elephant in the room — Bolshevik Island.” Heads nodded around the room. Everyone present had been briefed into the Tensor compartment, and was aware of the facility’s weapons and completion deadline.
Peakes announced, “I think the Russian armed forces are moving to a timetable that is directly linked to the Dragon torpedo complex. Whenever the facility is completed, they will be ready to act. Does anyone disagree?”
The room went strangely quiet. When nobody spoke, Peakes added, “Please, somebody disagree with me. We need to find alternate scenarios that don’t involve NATO and the Russians shooting at each other, even though the evidence suggests that’s where we’re headed.”
Mathias, still at the podium, raised his hands and shrugged. “Sorry, boss, but the data indicates there is a linkage.”
“Then, how about indications and warnings?” Peakes demanded. “How can we know which way they’re jumping?”
“Fedorin can walk away from this at any time,” argued Odom. “We have to watch for signs that he is not walking away, that he’s committed. It would be nice to know what he’s committing to,” he mused.
“If the Bolshevik Island base is driving their timeline, we need to know when it will be operational,” offered the CIA representative.
“We’d have to get something or someone not just inside the program, but right up to the base and have a look,” Peakes replied.
“A submarine with a robust UUV capability is the best option,” Odom suggested. “But it means entering Russian territorial waters…”
“And looking over their shoulder while they’re working,” Peaks responded sharply. “I don’t think that’s an option. We’ve already lost one submarine up there. If there wasn’t so much activity around the site, we could possibly argue to the president that the threat is worth the risk, but of course, once the activity stops, they’ll be done.”
“And ready to move,” Odom agreed.
Dieter Hoffmann might have been born in the twentieth century, but he was a true child of the twenty-first. He’d been too young to remember the beginning of the millennium, and had grown up surrounded by personal electronics. To him, it was natural and essential that digital devices augmented his life.
His degrees were in mathematics and music, but he’d starved as a musician. He’d applied to the government because his family wanted him earning a steady income. Thankfully, the civil service exam didn’t require the dreaded “prior experience.” The Bundesnachrichtendienst, or BND, Germany’s Federal Intelligence Service, was interested in his test scores, and the interviewer was intrigued by his extensive collection of pirated music. He’d admitted to the fact reluctantly, but the interviewer seemed genuinely interested, and promised that he was not in trouble.
Being broke, he’d found programs and learned techniques to get free music. Hoffmann had become quite skilled in searching out music he wanted while avoiding the many websites that used music as a lure to spread viruses and other malware. Hoffmann saw his interviewer taking notes, and thought that she was also a music enthusiast. Instead of offering him a job with maintenance or their records office, the BND asked him to go to war.
At the National Cyberdefense Center, he became not only one of their best analysts; he was promoted to supervisor with three other specialists working under his direction. He laughed whenever he thought of his grandfather, a solid German office worker, as ordinary as a signpost, and his grandson Dieter, piercings and tattoos, both working for the German civil service.
He loved the work. Nobody liked the criminals who stole credit card files and hacked hospital records, holding them for ransom. Finding them, identifying them, and then taking countermeasures to defeat or expose them gave Dieter great satisfaction. Often they were foreigners, Russian or Chinese, but occasionally they’d be German, or in a European country where the police could actually arrest them. It didn’t happen often, but when it did, that was a very good day.
One of the reasons Dieter had been promoted to a supervisory position was his idea. Instead of simply reacting to news of an intrusion, the center should be actively searching for them. But with the entire Internet to hide in, where would you look?
Hoffmann remembered his collection of free music. Hunters don’t search the forest for game. They set up blinds near places the animals frequent, or they put out lures.
Under Hoffmann’s direction, the center created websites for fictitious companies or newly formed organizations. The websites were fully implemented, listing staff, with links to other pages that described operations and commercial activities. He liked to include touches like photographs of employees being promoted, or a ribbon cutting at a new facility.
His first attempt, flown solo, had been for an imaginary investment company. It boasted a long list of proven brokers and an equally long list of clients who had moved to that firm, bringing fat portfolios. It had taken almost a week to set up, then two more weeks to fix and polish after a real investment broker was asked to review it.
Within minutes of going live, applications monitoring the site registered the first intrusion. While their false front was equipped with the standard commercial-grade safeguards, a few ports had been left invitingly open, and cyber-criminals were quick to exploit them. While the crooks downloaded false data and installed their malware in code that led nowhere, the center’s own programs traced their origins and isolated the viruses for further study.
Another benefit was that the intruders often sold the data they’d collected to brokers for all types of criminal activities, like fraud or identity theft. In this case, though, the data would hurt no one and, since it was known and unique, could be used to trace the hackers’ connections, like marked banknotes.
It had been a heady eleven hours and thirteen minutes, with at least four and possibly six different intrusions recorded. The seventh wasn’t interested in financial data, but simply trashed the website. Hoffmann mourned its loss, but his supervisor, Johann Klemmer, was satisfied. “If the website had withstood the attack, then the attackers might have become suspicious.” Hoffmann could only think of all his work creating the website, now lost.
That had been almost a year ago. They’d become much better and quicker at creating websites. The team’s latest effort was a midsized petroleum distribution firm. Not only was it modeled after a real company’s website, but Dieter’s team had concocted routines that would generate false reports showing equally false petroleum products being moved from ports to refineries to customers.