“Nothing.”
He looked around at all of the dead enemy soldiers on the floor. All of this death and destruction, he thought. And what did we gain? He looked at Honi. She was staring back at him while she leaned with her back against the desk, her hands clamped around the edge of the desk top. He looked at her small hands, and remembered how fast they moved and the amazing power she controlled. He looked away, and then his mind caught on something. He looked back at Honi’s hands. It wasn’t her hands that had caught his attention; it was a recessed shelf under the desk top. In the bright room light, it was mostly hidden in shadow. The shelf ran the entire length of the desk top, which appeared to be twelve feet long.
Jake looked at his M-16. It had a small high intensity light mounted under the barrel. They hadn’t needed it with the night-vision goggles. He turned on the light and began shining it under the top of the desk. The shelf was only four inches below the desk top and recessed four inches back. As he swept the shelf with his light he saw books, food wrappers, note pads, file folders and crushed coffee cups. Near the left end was a flat object tucked back against the wall, a foot back from the edge of the shelf. He reached in and pulled the object out into the light.
Honi looked down at it in amazement. “It’s a laptop computer.”
Jake examined it in more detail. It had a dent in the left front corner. Other than that, it looked to be in working order. He examined the dent. Copper, he thought. A copper jacketed bullet had grazed the corner of the computer and spun it to the back of the shelf. He looked at the three men on the floor in their white lab coats. One of them was watching him. He looked nervous.
Jake motioned toward the three men with his rifle.
“Put them up in chairs.”
Dave Smith from the President’s Unit came over to him.
“What are you thinking?”
“I’m thinking it’s not over yet. If it really were, they wouldn’t care about a working computer.”
Dave turned and smiled at the three men they had strapped to the chairs.
“Well. This is going to get interesting.”
Dave walked over in front of the three men, took out his K-Bar knife and waved it in front of each man. Not one could take his eyes off the knife blade as it moved close to their faces. Dave studied their facial micro-expressions closely and walked back to Jake.
“Guy on the right,” he whispered to Jake. “He’s the one who knows.”
Jake handed the computer to Honi. She opened it, plugged the power cord into the outlet against the back wall, and powered it up.
“We need a login,” Honi said.
Jake looked at the man on the right, approached him and stuck the barrel of the M-16 against his chest, pointing at his heart.
“Login!”
The man spit at Jake’s face. His name tag was pinned to his lab coat: Schmidt, Jake thought. Could be German, maybe English.
“Anyone here read German?” Jake asked.
“I do,” Andropov said softly.
“Okay. Everybody start going through the files. We’re looking for logins, passwords, and personnel files — anything that is going to help us get into this computer.”
The men of the President’s Unit spread out quickly as did Honi, Stafford and Ken. They started sorting through the file cabinets, pulling and reading anything that even looked hopeful. Ken Bartholomew found the personnel file for Schmidt and brought it over to Honi.
She looked at the file. The guy’s first name was Heinrich. She typed in HSchmidt for a login and hit enter. Invalid username came back on the screen. She checked the file again. Heinrich had a middle initial in his name. She added that. It didn’t work. She checked the year of his birth and added that to the end of the username. Still didn’t work. She tried all lower case letters. Not that, either. She typed the login in all upper case letters.
The screen changed, requesting an encryption key.
All uppercase, she thought. What an ego. “Okay. Now we need an encryption key. It could be any phrase, sequence of numbers, letters or any combination thereof. Find it.”
Every soldier in the building started going through each scrap of paper looking for what might be the encryption key.
“Look at the guy on the right,” Dave whispered.
Jake studied the man’s facial expression. He looked confident.
“Okay,” Jake whispered back. “It’s not on a piece of paper. Where is it?” Short encryption codes were easy to remember, but ineffective. Longer ones worked well, but were hard to remember, unless they were formed from the first letter of each word in a well-known phrase. Jake hoped that wasn’t the case. Discovering the phrase could take days, if they found it at all. He studied the walls for signs, posters or photographs. Nothing. The walls were bare. So were the floor and ceiling. Jake glanced back at the man in the chair. He had a smug, confident look that Jake found irritating. Jake glanced at his countdown watch—25 hours, 3 minutes and 17 seconds to go until the final solar storm hit.
Jake looked again at the man in the chair. He looked away, just not fast enough. The watch, Jake thought. He recognized the countdown watch. Jake walked slowly around the room, checking the walls again. He wandered in back of the three seated men and checked their wrists. Each one wore a countdown watch. Jake slowly checked the dead enemy soldiers. None of them wore a countdown watch.
“Get these three out of here,” Jake said firmly. “Secure them in the Osprey.”
The soldiers cut the three men loose from the chairs and marched them out to the plane. Dave Smith approached.
“You know where the encryption code is?”
Honi, Stafford and Ken gathered around him.
“It’s on this watch,” Jake replied, removing it from his wrist. He studied the watch face in detaiclass="underline" Numbers from 0 to 23, the minute, second and hour hands, and the numbers for the day. That was it on the watch face. That and a fuzzy gray line running around the outer edge.
“Could the encryption code be a sequence of dots and dashes?” Ken asked.
“No,” Honi replied. “It would be numbers, letters or ones and zeros.”
“Ones and zeros?” Ken asked. “Could those be represented by a line and a dot?”
“Yes, they could. Why?”
“The gray circle around the outer edge of the watch face — it’s composed of very small lines that point toward the center of the watch face, mixed with dots.”
“How do you know that?” Honi asked.
“We had just examined some gold bearer bonds in New York. I had my jeweler’s loop with me, so I looked at the watch face through the magnifying lens.”
“You have your loop with you now?”
“No.”
“Search the room,” Jake ordered. “We’re looking for a magnifying glass or a jeweler’s loop.”
After ten minutes of frantic examination, they came up with nothing.
“Search the men on the plane. They have to have one — otherwise they couldn’t read the encryption key.”
Dave Smith and two of the other men from the President’s Unit ran out the door. Five minutes later they returned with a jeweler’s loop. Ken took the watch and the loop and examined the gray circle on the watch face.
“There are a lot of lines and dots on here. I don’t know where to start.”
“Look for three or four dots in a row,” one of the men on the President’s Unit said. “I’m Aaron Smith, electronics and computer specialist. May I?”
Ken examined the watch face. “I’ve got one set of three dots, not four, and many groups of two dots. What does that mean?”