Walter Jon Williams
Deep State
In the days when Sussman was a novice, Minsky once came to him as he sat hacking at the PDP-6.
“What are you doing?” asked Minsky.
“I am training a randomly wired neural net to play Tic-Tac-Toe,” Sussman replied.
“Why is the net wired randomly?” asked Minsky.
“I do not want it to have any preconceptions of how to play,” Sussman said.
Minsky then shut his eyes.
“Why do you close your eyes?” Sussman asked his teacher.
“So that the room will be empty.”
At that moment, Sussman was enlightened.
PROLOGUE
Jerry left the warmth of the station building and walked out into the parking lot. Packed snow crunched beneath his Nikes as frigid air burned its way down his throat. He blew warm breath onto his hands and looked west, where the light of the setting sun illuminated the curves of the Tigris far below on its rolling plain. Hills and scarps obscured much of the river, leaving scattered loops of gilded water that were laced across the brown and white terrain countryside like fragments of some ancient Syriac alphabet graven on the land.
Rearing up above the Tigris were the spectacular crags of the Hakkari Dalary, all dark stone, white snow, and formidable black shadows. And above Jerry were the domes and antennae of the CIA listening station, perched here at eight thousand feet, with convenient electronic access to Syria, Iraq, and Iran, the Middle East’s perpetual stormy petrels.
Jerry had been delighted to learn that the Hakkari Dalary were also known as the High Zap Mountains, because the High Zap was what he and his partner had done four days earlier-reached electronic fingers down into the plain below and performed long-distance surgery on crucial electronics controlled by a clutch of malign foreigners.
The operation had been a brilliant success, at least until the news had come that had left Jerry stranded on the mountain.
Sunlight dazzled Jerry as a frigid wind numbed his cheeks. Tears leaked from his eyes. He wished he had been allowed to bring a camera to take a picture of the scene, but things were so secret here that cameras and cell phones were forbidden, even to station personnel.
This was simply the most beautiful and spectacular place he’d ever seen in his life. He’d been born in the flat Iowa cornfields and now lived outside Annapolis. Giant rearing untamed glacier-capped mountains were a completely new experience to him. He just wished he could leave the station and visit some of the towns he could see on the plain of the Tigris, far below.
On his one and only drive, coming to the station, he had looked out the window as they passed through the square of a small village and he’d seen old Arab women with tribal henna tattoos on their faces. It was like a visitation from another universe.
Being stranded up here at the station sucked. Totally.
Jerry flapped his arms and shuffled his feet for warmth. When he and Denny had flown out to Turkey, they’d had no clear idea where they were headed, and they hadn’t brought clothing suitable for living on a mountaintop in the middle of February.
The deep mountain shadows expanded as the sun neared the horizon. Jerry scanned the horizon one last time, then turned and shuffled his way back toward the main building.
The listening station lacked any trace of glamor. Four acres of windswept limestone had been scraped flat by bulldozers and surrounded by chain fence draped with rusting signs reading “Danger” in English, Turkish, and Arabic. The main building was a prefabricated steel structure that sat on a concrete pad. Two more structures served as garage and generator room. Above the main building were the huge golf ball-shaped domes that concealed the station’s dishes and antennae, their bulging geodetic surfaces an echo of the domes of the mosques on the plain below.
The air was glacial and snowfalls were frequent. The only reason the station wasn’t absolutely buried in frozen H2O was that the wind blew most of it away-though still there were drifts here and there, and occasionally the station personnel had to get on a ladder and sweep snow off the roof before it collapsed.
The gate was padlocked shut, and an old Mercedes truck, with icicles dripping from its bumpers, was parked behind the gate as a security measure-another obstacle that a jihadist car bomber would have to push aside in order to blow up the installation. But the gesture seemed halfhearted-the regular station crew didn’t seem very interested in the possibility of attack, and in fact Jerry couldn’t see the station as a high-profile target. You wouldn’t get many headlines blowing up an anonymous, prefab site on a remote mountain in some place called High Zap. Much better to blast a cafe in Istanbul or an embassy somewhere else.
Jerry walked into the main building, stomped snow off his boots in the anteroom, and headed straight into the ops room with its coffee machine. He took his cup-a souvenir mug from Perge, where he’d never been-and filled it with hot coffee. The coffee was unbearably strong.
“You know,” said his partner, Denny. “You can watch the sunset perfectly well from the window.”
“Not the same,” Jerry said. He had a hard time keeping his teeth from chattering.
Around him data flashed across flat-screen displays, intercepted transmissions from Syria, Iraq, or Iran. The material wasn’t analyzed here; it was encrypted, sent to a relay satellite twenty-two thousand miles above the planet’s surface, then beamed down to a facility in northern Virginia where it was either inspected or, most likely, ignored and filed away-in any case, the data itself wasn’t any of Jerry’s business.
Neither Jerry nor his partner, Denny, were members of the station crew, nor were they CIA employees. They were special contractors who had flown to Turkey on a special assignment eight days ago.
What had surprised Jerry was the discovery that, despite working at a CIA facility, none of the station personnel were CIA employees. They were all contractors working for one corporation or another. But then he’d realized that, in fact, they all were CIA-the corporate identities were just ways of sanitizing the identities of Agency employees.
He’d realized that when absolutely none of them expressed curiosity concerning the task that Jerry and Denny had been sent to perform. The lack of interest in the Zap had been professional all right, but it wasn’t in any way corporate.
But now Jerry and his partner were stuck here on the mountaintop. While they were engaged in their special assignment, transmitting the High Zap to sites below, the Turkish government had changed suddenly and violently. The prime minister, on a state visit to Spain, found himself deprived of his office by the military. The president was under arrest in an undisclosed location. The entire country was under martial law-particularly the Kurdish areas, such as those on all sides of the listening station.
The attitude of the military government to the U.S. installations on Turkish soil seemed ambiguous. On the one hand, Turkey was a NATO ally of the U.S. and its military had enjoyed a long collaboration with the Americans on security matters. On the other hand, the Turkish generals were ultranationalists who might view with suspicion any foreigners using Turkish soil for their own purposes-a suspicion enhanced, no doubt, by the possibility that the listening stations might now be listening to them.
The orders that came down to Chas, the soft-spoken engineer who was in charge of the station, seemed to Jerry to be contradictory. Chas had sent half his people away-it wasn’t clear where, exactly-and was now running the station with a skeleton crew of eleven. Jerry and Denny, by contrast, were forbidden to leave the station at all.
Jerry had asked Chas why.
“Because,” Chas said, “the regular personnel won’t be able to tell the Turks anything they don’t already know.”