On the west side of the airstrip, two more revetments were under construction, one of them housing the Tupolev Tu-124 that had been converted to a tanker. Several dozen trips with the tanker had been required to fill the underground fuel tanks located a half-kilometer out in the jungle. The tanker made at least three trips a week to a shifting schedule of destinations to take on fuel and transport it back here.
At the far north end of the runway, off to the west side, they had excavated large bunkers in which to store the ordnance. There were ground-and air-launched missiles of Soviet, Chinese, French, and American manufacture. Iron bombs and guided “smart” bombs were stacked in one bunker. Another held ammunition of various calibers, ranging from that for 9-millimeter personal weapons to 7.62-millimeter rounds for automatic weapons.
When he reached the command center, Maslov skirted the building to the left and entered through a side door. The value of the four ceiling-mounted air conditioners was immediately apparent. The perspiration on his forehead dried quickly. He felt chilled.
No-air operations were planned for the day — their necessary training flights for the pilots took place at night — and the chairs in front of the radar and communications consoles were vacant. He crossed the control room and entered the narrow corridor leading to the back of the building.
At the rear were offices for the base commander and his assistants, as well as a large space for pilot briefings. Along the corridor were smaller cubicles set aside for storage, hygiene, and dedicated tasks. Maslov turned into the one identified as “Global Communications.”
General Oleg Druzhinin, the base commander, was seated in one of the two chairs available in the small room. He was not an imposing man. With moderate stature, bland facial features, and mousy brown hair, he was the kind who disappeared in the crowds of nearly any city in the world. His mind was sharp, however, and his reflexes, while slowed somewhat as he approached sixty years of age, were still capable of commanding MiG-25s and MiG-29s.
With the general was Sergeant Nikita Kasartskin, a lumbering bear of a man whose massive hands were extremely adroit with computer keyboards. Kasartskin was their top communications and computer specialist. He was seated before the massive global communications console which, with its super secret encryption devices, had accompanied Anatoly Shelepin on his flight from Moscow. The antenna complex required for the machine, along with the antennas for the radars, was located two kilometers to the south, at the top of a hill in the jungle. The antennas were finished in matte camouflage paint and would never be seen by the human eye. Only search radars might detect them at a time when they were radiating energy.
“Good afternoon, Comrade General,” Maslov said. “Sergeant Kasartskin.”
“Come in, Colonel Maslov,” the general said. “We were about to review the morning’s tapes.”
“I wonder if they will be informative?” Maslov asked.
“Who knows? I doubt it. Proceed, Sergeant”
Against one wall was a bank of forty tape recording drives. The technician could assign them to monitoring forty of the thousands of frequencies in the Commonwealth satellite system. That they could still tap into the old Soviet satellite communications was a wonder, but not an awesome wonder. The breakup of the state, with various republics assuming control of bits and pieces of the Soviet military, communications, and intelligence apparatus, had resulted not only in confusion, but also in trust. The new commanders in the Commonwealth assumed that the security of the system was still intact. Kasartskin, too, was circumspect in his use of the system.
Normally, he only drew information from it. Only rarely was it used for transmission of data or voice communications, and then on unused channels. The likelihood of the Commonwealth members discovering the usage was not high, and the system provided them with, as the sign outside the door said, a global communication and listening ability that was worth billions of rubles.
Maslov leaned against the doorjamb as Kasartskin played his nimble fingers over the keyboard. All of the tape drives began to whir, searching forward until finding a transmission, then halting to wait until the transmission was replayed over the speaker mounted in the ceiling. The replays were automatically queued, and once one drive had disgorged its data, it searched forward again while another drive was replayed.
The sergeant watched a readout on his cathode ray tube, commenting on the source of the transmission: “That is Molniya I in polar orbit… here is Salyut 7 over the eastern United States…”
If the message transmitted was graphic, rather than vocal, it appeared on the console CRT as well as on the screen of a monitor placed near General Druzhinin. All of the messages were in the clear, decoded by the encryption devices. If the message appeared innocuous in the beginning, Kasartskin tapped one of his keys, and the machine jumped to the next message. For such reasons, the review went quickly.
The session still required two hours, and by the time it was done, Maslov had settled to an uncomfortable seat on the linoleum floor.
“That is all there is, Comrade General,” Sergeant Kasartskin said.
“Very well. You may reset the machines,” the general said as he rose from his chair.
Maslov pushed himself to his feet and followed the commander back to his office.
It was a tiny office. Prefabricated buildings were not intended to be spacious.
Druzhinin sat down behind his small, gray metal desk. “Well, Aleksander Illiyich?”
“The segments which eavesdropped on American communications were the most interesting, General.”
“Even while undecoded?”
Indirectly, their eavesdropping on Commonwealth satellites provided them with some intelligence about American activities through U.S. communications that were being monitored. They were neither staffed nor equipped to decode the American messages, but frequently, that was not necessary.
“There is no change in tone, urgency, or frequency from earlier messages,” Maslov said. “My interpretation is that the Americans have not increased their level of defensive alertness. I suspect that they are acting as if nothing of import has occurred.”
Druzhinin smiled.
And Maslov smiled back at him.
Because he had faith in Tony Munoz and the WSO’s equipment, McKenna was covering his search area at sixty thousand feet of altitude and twice the speed of sound. They could cover a lot more area at Mach 2.
They were conserving the turbojets, boosting on rocket motors, then shutting them down to coast in parabolic curves. Munoz had set their search pattern on a north and south grid, and they had already covered all of Vietnam and part of Laos, stretching their area between the Chinese border on the north and latitude ten degrees North on the southern end. When they were finished with their portion of the Asian continent, they would cover Malaya and Sumatra.
“I’m changing tapes again, jefe.”
“Amy’s going to have a year’s worth of video,” McKenna told him over the ICS, the Internal Communications System.