It had started two months earlier.
Pacman Gerow was hacked off. A rear screen for the Buick was going to be three hundred at least, maybe more. Plus the wait, which meant plastic and sticky tape and not being able to park anyplace that wasn’t secure. He should have traded the Buick for that Volvo in Silver Spring. Everyone told him but Lanie wouldn’t listen – just said she liked the Buick. Then she’d given him all kinds of shit when he told the kid how he felt about it. There’s a place for baseball, that was all he’d been trying to say. There’s goddam grass out there. There’s even a sports field. Why did you have to play right by the house, for God’s sake? Lanie shouldn’t have taken Billy’s side like that. Sure the grass was kind of muddy. That wasn’t any kind of excuse. So the kid was bored, was that his fault?
Lanie hated it, said it was just a shitty foreign posting despite all the crap they fed you back in Fort Meade, Maryland. Glamour? Shit.
The bottom line was he was late arriving at his desk in the bunker and there were looks that told him you didn’t do things like that on a posting. Not in the NSA, not if you were trick trash, working the shifts. Maybe the day ladies could get away with it but if you were late for your trick someone else was late getting off because the ears couldn’t be left alone.
Trouble with the NSA, glamour just didn’t come into it. Not like being CIA. OK, so ninety per cent of the CIA were backroom, non-active. The ten per cent who weren’t kept the options going for the rest, left it an open question what sort of guy you were when you dropped the hint. NSA, shit, that ten per cent came right down to one per cent max, dropped the glamour right out of it. Square eyed techno-freaks with underground complexions and beeps in their brains.
Wasn’t always that way. Pacman’s dad Walter E. Gerow died of the glamour, tumbling down to earth in the burning fragments of an EC130 ferret plane to burst apart in the mountains of Soviet Armenia. Seventeen of them, killed by five MiGs scrambled from Yerevan. Pacman, three months short of being born then, knew the bloody history of those years by heart as some kind of substitute for knowing his father. NSA ferret planes, bristling with electronics, prowled the limits of the Iron Curtain hunting for radar, plotting the Soviet defences for the day when US planes might need to know where they could get through.
Its four propellers had pulled this one into the air from Incirlik, Turkey, climbing up to circle over Trabzon to calibrate with the US Air Force Security Service listening post there, then heading for the fence, playing fox and hounds right along the Russian border all the way to Iran. Pacman lost his chance of knowing his father on the way back. The ferret tested the Soviet defences once too often and once too far. It was around Leninakan when the MiGs bounced it, five jet fighters against one unarmed, four engined freight car. The ferret’s tail section fell off first, then turning over and over as it burned, the rest of it plummeting into the mountains.
The US public didn’t get to hear about it all for a long time. The air force put out the agreed story: one of their planes on a peaceful mission, studying radio-wave propagation, had been brutally attacked. The US public didn’t know about the NSA – not then and barely now. Pacman’s mother Molly knew, and as Pacman grew up she made sure he knew too. It was the worst loss of the signals intelligence war and it stayed that way for just over ten years until an EC-121 carrying six tons of listening gear, one marine and thirty navy Siglnt specialists was blown from the skies south of Chongjin by North Korean jets.
They weren’t strictly NSA, so Pacman knew only the numbers on that one. The Liberty was different. He could recite the names of every one of the thirty-four dead. It was the worst punch the secret ear ever took and it came not from the Soviets but from the Israelis.
June 7th, 1967 in the eastern Mediterranean: the Israelis, pushing their borders out into Sinai and the West Bank, didn’t want the superpowers to stop them too soon. The Liberty was in the way, monitoring their signals from international waters, fourteen miles out to sea. Mirage jets and Israeli Navy torpedo boats took care of the Liberty, conveniently mistaking her for an Egyptian coastal steamer a quarter of her size in an act of butchery that the American government promptly swept under the rug and classified secret.
Some NSA history buffs still believed they knew the real reason for the attack – that the Liberty had on board the intercepts that would have showed it was Israeli forces and not the Egyptians who started the war.
Pacman joined the Agency for all the wrong reasons in the mistaken belief he could prove himself his father’s son, ride the boundaries of the sky a hair’s breadth from missile-born obliteration. The Agency, short on Vets and dynasties, took him on for those same wrong reasons.
Times had changed. He looked across to the new consoles at position eight and tried to lift his mood by visualizing the power that lay behind them, hoping that way maybe just a little bit of glamour would start to creep back in. Saddlebush Three. Biggest project yet. Megabucks. Civilians crawling all over it for two years but now it was up and running, in commission, and he was on hand to see it. Signals Collection Officer Gerow was good at what he did, graded GG12 with a rare parallel aptitude for both cryptanalysis and track pattern monitoring.
The NSA spotted and nurtured those skills, saw the intuition in him and gave him a long rein, adding back in the human element that the computers just couldn’t match, the hunch that sometimes got far more out of the processed data than the very best software.
Way, way up there, right out in the cold darkness on the road to the moon hung their latest weapon in the listening war, Saddlebush SV, punched into orbit by a Titan rocket, the biggest ear there had ever been, listening to everything there was to hear. Down here at the bottom of the chain of information pouring back was the bunker and outside the bunker stood the dome farm, lines of giant geodesic-framed golf balls hiding the dishes from casual inspection so no smart-ass with a score to settle could make mileage out of which way they were pointing.
‘Hey, Pacman?’ He looked up from the screen to see his section leader coming up behind with a young guy in tow, maybe Mexican. ‘Pacman, meet Al Menendez. He’s going through indoctrination. Gonna be working Gapfish. I’ve got you a half-hour backup so you can show him some of what the Bush will do.’
‘Fine by me.’
Menendez settled in to the chair beside him. Acoustics muted the electronic hums right through the bunker so that each desk position in the long row seemed to live in its own bubble of silence. The world’s most expensive lighting system made sure no one misread a screen through eye fatigue. Everything was backed up, interlocked, failsafed.
‘OK, Al, you just arrived? I guess you know the basics. Saddlebush is geostationary, northern hemisphere, pulling in everything that’s bouncing off all the other birds it can see. Figure a max of a hundred thousand simultaneous phone calls on every bird, that’s a big heap of international traffic. We downleg everything in this hemisphere, right in here. You’re on Gapfish?’
Menendez was red hot, couldn’t wait to show what he knew. ‘We sort it, right? Goes through the sieve.’
When Pacman joined they’d called it the dictionary. Now the bank of Crays were so much faster than anything they’d had back then the name had got faster too. The sieve lay at the heart of everything, a Band-aid on human frailty. The machines could do so much more than the men. A million calls, ten million calls? There was no effective limit that dollars couldn’t fix. They could hoover it all up. Recording wasn’t the problem, listening was. Time just didn’t stretch far enough and that was where the sieve came in. You fed in the key words, the ears listened for them and out came the goodies, straight into the massive printout known as SOLIS – the SigInt On-Line Intelligence System. That’s if you’d picked the right key words.