The lingering silence lent gravitas to Brody’s thrust.
“Have I made a valid point?” he asked.
“Indeed you have,” Renard said. “And I cannot disagree with you. I can only ask that you trust me. Should I fail, I will have no choice but to join you in a new conversation about the involvement of the American fleet. But if I succeed, we will hold the tactical edge. Let me prove my merit to you before we entertain future scenarios.”
Brody found the Frenchman smooth and confident, and he grasped how the man could have amassed a large and loyal international following.
He let glimpses of scenarios dance in his head that assumed Renard’s success. Flashes of a chart showing boundaries where Taiwan used its stealth patrol craft to hold back Chinese submarines, giving free reign for American forces to steam toward Taiwan, enticed his imagination.
“Very well,” Brody said. “We’ll know the answer soon enough.”
“I appreciate the opportunity, admiral,” Renard said.
“I wish you luck, Renard,” Brody said. “You’ll need it.”
CHAPTER 14
Lieutenant Commander Chan retraced the Romeo’s path with his eye. With the South Korean Navy content that his countrymen had sunk the submarine that destroyed their corvette, he had driven his hijacked submarine eastward, unfettered by suspecting hunters, toward the Korean Peninsula.
He tapped Lieutenant Gao’s forearm, nudging him from his boredom. The executive officer lifted his angular chin from his palms and stretched his arms while yawning. Chan noted the rapid onset of Gao’s fatigue.
“Sorry, sir.”
“You may rest soon, Gao,” Chan said. “Check my judgment. Do you concur that it’s time to turn south?”
Gao glanced at the chart and seemed to hesitate with the easy question. The illuminated cross-hair converged on the penciled line showing the path Chan had prescribed for the Romeo.
“Yes, sir. I concur.”
“Good,” Chan said. “Send one of the other officers here to relieve me of the deck. Then get my next radio reception to Park on a jump drive as soon as it’s downloaded. After that, take three hours of rest.”
Gao acknowledged the order and departed.
Chan ordered his Romeo’s control room shifted to red lighting to let his irises dilate. He then ordered the ship southward and held a railing as the deck tilted. As the movement steadied, he gave the command to come shallow.
Reaching, he shifted a control ring, heard hydraulic servos clink, and watched the silvery periscope slither upward. He gave the order and placed his eye to the optics.
The night sky revealed empty water as he ordered the radio mast raised. Minutes passed as message traffic confirmed his shifted command structure from the North Sea Fleet to the East Sea Fleet.
Upon descending deeper and leveling the Romeo, he relinquished the deck to the officer Gao had sent to relieve him, and he read a printout of the message from his new command authority, the East Sea Fleet, verifying that his anticipated navigational track remained clear of interference from other fleet vessels.
Satisfied, he walked aft toward the engine room where he passed the whirring starboard propulsion motor as it drove sealed reduction gears. Further down the starboard shaft, he came to a pair of sailors seated on folding chairs and crouched over laptop computers.
Beside the sailors, duct tape bound a dozen more laptops to makeshift plywood shelves perched on hydraulic piping. Additional duct tape restrained extension cords and surge suppressors to the deck plates.
Chan crouched beside a strip of tape.
“Any luck, Park?” he asked.
The young sailor looked up, blinked, and rubbed his beady and bloodshot eyes.
“Sir?” Park asked.
Chan had selected Able Seaman Yueng-Ji Park to join his crew for his cryptologic prowess.
While examining a potential volunteer crew for his mission, Chan had sought radio technicians who scored high on entrance exams measuring technical aptitude but low in their exams in their primary rate of radio communications.
A man too smart for the training would be bored and would muddle through his radio training, Chan reasoned. Such a man might have other interests, such as hacking decrypting algorithms in otherwise secure message traffic.
When he discovered in Park’s service dossier that the man’s only disciplinary action had resulted from hacking into a naval personnel database to reduce his service obligation, he had found his man.
He promised Park early freedom from his military service in exchange for breaking into Chinese East Sea Fleet message traffic. Ignorant of his final mission and mistrustful of his final extraction from it, Chan wanted to know the orders his fleet gave to his surrounding assets.
He had dedicated the younger seaman seated beside Park to serve as his cryptologist apprentice. The seaman nodded and pointed at Park’s screen.
“It looks like you found something,” Chan said.
“Oh, that,” Park said. “That was easy.”
“What did you find?”
“Well, sir. First, I discovered that the East Sea Fleet shares nothing with the North Sea Fleet for encrypted orders. It’s completely different.”
“As you expected, correct?”
“Correct, sir. I also learned that all maritime patrol aircraft in the East Sea Fleet share the same encryption scheme. One of the messages we downloaded during our last snorkel operation was from Ningbo to all patrol craft.”
“How do you know already?”
“I broke an earlier message from the East Sea Fleet that we picked up yesterday,” Park said. “The message traffic had no specific orders for us yet, but I was still able to break the key for the patrol aircraft orders.”
Chan hadn’t asked Park to crack patrol aircraft codes, but he reasoned it was a good use of his time.
“Okay,” he said. “So, how do you know there wasn’t any specific message for a specific aircraft within the main message?”
“The message required only one decryption algorithm, and I decrypted most bits. The bits I couldn’t decode were repetitive symbols serving as synchronizing characters, meaningless preamble if you will. Within the message, the text had specific information for each aircraft.”
“That sounds like a vulnerability,” Chan said.
“Not so much, sir. Patrol areas are vast. The orders are dull, such as aircraft one patrols a large box of sky, aircraft two patrols another. It’s the sort of basics telling them not to fly into each other. Nothing risky if an adversary learns of it.”
“And so you broke that scheme already?”
“It was a small key by modern standards and took only a few hours running my decryption algorithms in parallel.”
He waved his palm over the laptops.
“In parallel?”
“Yes, sir,” Park said. “It’s just bitwise mathematics. An encrypted message is the original message multiplied by a key of ones and zeroes. No encryption is perfect, but the more bits you use, the more times you have to attempt the multiplication to stumble upon the proper key.”
“What does that mean in terms of time?”
Park glanced into the submarine’s overhead piping and ran his index finger under his smooth chin while crafting a response.
“Well, you see, sir, it’s a binary matter. If you need to multiply a message by a one-hundred and twenty-eight bit key, there are two to the power of that many permutations to attempt to break the code.”