Helojumpers weren’t used to ferry tourists to their islands anymore because there weren’t any more tourists. The MDF used them for air patrols and to airlift the sick and injured from outlying islands to the clinic on Male. The only other exception was transportation for members of the Council of Thirteen. Another perk of the job, as Shannon would say. Some Council members abused this privilege, using the helojumpers as their own personal air limousines. I had never flown in one and I never planned to, but today changed that. I had to get to Male and figure out how Jin planned to crack the encryption.
I turned my head as a wash of mist kicked up from the descending helojumper. It came down about a hundred feet offshore. It hovered a few inches above the water and then skirted onto the beach. Before setting down, it turned itself around so that the beak-like cockpit pointed out to sea. I flinched as a set of transparent doors on the backside suddenly slid open.
Well… this was it. I ignored the primal instinct to run in the opposite direction. Instead, I ran with my head down straight through the doors. They shut behind me. Glancing up, I saw the blades slicing the air and I quickly looked away. The cabin was empty, so I picked a seat close to the cockpit, buckled in, and then gave the pilot a thumbs up.
The blades came back to life. It sounded like the pilot had pushed the puree button. I closed my eyes and felt the vehicle pop up off the ground and then move forward. The whine of the electric engines increased and I felt the queasy sensation of lift. After a few minutes I figured we were safely in the air, so I opened my eyes. I was wrong. We were just taking off. I watched the water falling out from under me through the transparent floor. A wave of panic swept over me. I grabbed the armrests and squeezed, willing the machine to stay in the air. The fuselage pitched forward and we began to fly. I tightened my seatbelt as gravity pushed me back into my seat.
After a few minutes, I released the armrests and glanced down through the floor. We were a lot higher than I had expected. Spread out across the bluish green ocean, I saw hundreds of tiny islands that made up a tiny part of the Maldivian atoll. From up here, each island looked like a fried egg with a green yolk.
I needed something to keep my mind off flying, so I turned my attention to Jin’s data mat. After sliding the elastic band off, I gingerly unfolded it as if it were some kind of sacred artifact. I tapped the upper left corner and the screen came to life. Chinese script filled the screen. I double tapped in the lower left corner and selected English from the language menu. The script changed and a prompt asked for a password. I tried my password, but it didn’t work.
Now what?
I tried a few other words: the name of his wife, his son, his hometown. None of them worked.
Why the hell would Jin give me his data mat without giving me his password? Christ! Why did he bother putting a password on it at all? But I knew the answer. Jin was a stickler for the rules.
It didn’t matter what the rules were or whether they made sense, he followed them. And the rule was that all data mats with IICN administrative access must be password protected. Nobody enforced the rule. Hell, I didn’t have a password on my data mat. But a rule was a rule to Jin, so I shouldn’t have been surprised that his was locked down.
I smiled as I remembered how Rick and I had once taken a shortcut during a test of the IICN message system. We had disabled encryption on the servers so we could run through the test faster. Jin had found out and he wasn’t happy. He shouted at us like we were new recruits in boot camp, “You know better! Security is what?” We both knew the answer, but we had just stood there quietly. “Come on, what is security, gentlemen?” We looked at each other, knowing that he wouldn’t let us off until we completed the phrase that he had drilled into our heads. I grinned as I recalled how we had jumped to attention in a mocking acknowledgment of his military background and yelled, “Security is paramount, sir!”
That’s got to be it! I typed the word, “paramount” into the password field. The screen unlocked.
I quickly scanned the folders and was amazed at how many documents he had stored on his data mat. This was going to take a while. I leaned forward and opened a couple of documents. It was mostly technical reference material. I also found some island maps, schematics for the communications towers, and operations instructions for the main communications center. But I didn’t see anything about the satellite or message decryption.
My ears popped and I looked out of the clear walls. My God! Whoever invented this thing clearly didn’t have a fear of heights.
The helojumper had begun its descent. I looked up towards the cockpit and saw the airport ahead of us. The airport was nothing more than a tiny island with a single blacktop runway that consumed it. There was only room enough for a small terminal next to the runway.
I was about to put the data mat away when I saw a folder labeled Communications Map. Jin had everything organized using a meticulous folder structure and file organization schema. This folder wasn’t in the right place.
I opened it, and found a spreadsheet and a link to an app. I opened the spreadsheet first. It contained five columns of data: Sender ID, Recipient ID, Sender Location, Sender Date and Time, Recipient Location, and Recipient Date and Time.
The Sender and Recipient ID columns contained numbers that I easily recognized. They were User IDs, the ones we had created for IICN users. The location columns looked like they contained latitude and longitude information. I scrolled down the sheet. There were thousands of rows of data. This had to be the SIGINT data that Jin had talked about. As excited as I was to finally find something, it wasn’t enough to overcome the dread at having to figure out how it all fit together.
I closed the spreadsheet and clicked on the application link. It was a satellite image of the atoll. Scattered across the image were thousands of small dots, each color coded. I clicked the filter button and a drop-down list of User IDs appeared. I found my own and selected it. Then I set the date filter for the last two days. Most of the dots disappeared. Only a handful of light blue ones remained on the screen. They were positioned over Lohifushi and Male, but a few were over North Point and Eriyadoo. I zoomed in on Eriyadoo and clicked the dot. A small box appeared with the same data elements that I had seen in the spreadsheet.
| Sender | Location | Date:Time | Recipient | Location |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1537668/ Aron Atheron | 4 37’23.69’N/ 73 24’52.94’E | 10/10/2168:1345 | 1577229/ MALE AIR OPS | 4 10’30.00’N/ 73 30’ 32.00’ E |
It was the call I had made to the Air Operations Center an hour ago to arrange the flight.
He had really done it! The son of a bitch had hacked into a satellite and had developed an application that could track IICN messages in near-real time. A hundred questions popped into my head, but Jin wasn’t around to answer any of them.
The seatbelt saved me from hitting the ceiling when the helojumper landed. However the data mat flew out of my hands and on to the floor out of reach. I looked down and saw blacktop. Glancing up, I saw the twin turbines still slicing and dicing. I unbuckled my belt, picked up Jin’s data mat, and ran like hell out of the open back doors.