Rogue Element Read online

  ‘Why is that?’ asked Joe.

  ‘I met a lot of different troops in East Timor, on both sides. The best – and worst – of the Indonesians were their Special Forces troops, the Kopassus. They’re better trained and equipped than the average Indonesian foot-slogger. Meaner too. They do a lot of the real dirty work. If it is Kopassus out here, they might be carrying night vision goggles to help them see in the dark. When the moon comes out, it’ll be like daylight for them but still pretty difficult for us to see. That’ll give them a big advantage.’

  Suryei threaded her way carefully across the clearing, staying low.

  ‘Where did you pick up all this stuff?’ asked Joe, genuinely impressed by the woman’s general knowledge, particularly about military things.

  ‘When I was in Dili, I had a friend. I met a soldier, a New Zealander.’

  ‘Oh, what did he do?’ Joe enquired, picking up on the subtle inflection on the word ‘friend’ that implied something more.

  ‘Who said it was a he?’ replied Suryei, distracted by the task of deciding which path through the jungle would provide the easiest passage. She quietly parted some fronds of a fleshy plant and slithered through the opening, staying low. Halfway through she stopped and quietly whispered behind her, ‘Shh. Enough talk. Keep your eyes and ears open.’

  The tunnel appeared to begin again on the other side of the clearing. Suryei’s ghostly outline ignored it. She had decided to play the Nam way, disappearing into the wall of jungle.

  It had taken Sergeant Marturak and his men at least fifteen minutes to advance in stealth to the creek. He had rarely seen such thick jungle. The current had carried the two soldiers gently downstream, scraping them occasionally along the bottom of the creek bed. They were not pretty corpses. His men quickly buried them under cairns of smooth black river stones.

  The fact that two of his soldiers had perished in this way made Marturak angry. He wondered how the creek had been set alight. Was it an accident brought about by their own stupidity, or was there some kind of booby trap? Whoever it was had been close to his men when the explosion had killed them – the discarded empty water bottle proved that. Sergeant Marturak had not the slightest doubt that he would catch and kill the perpetrator, but who and what was he up against here? He found the entrance to a tunnel in the bush and sent two men into it.

  The jungle was not an ideal environment for the NVGs. They worked best when there was some open space with large areas of contrast against which the distinctive shape of a human could be painted. In the thick bush, there were just too many confusing planes and shapes of green, and these often began inches from the lens of the goggles. Also, the NVGs cut peripheral vision down to a paltry twenty percent. It was like peering through a long black tunnel.

  Sergeant Marturak swung his head slowly left and right. He couldn’t see any of his men despite the fact that they were close, only five to seven metres on either side of him. He saw numerous pairs of astonishingly large, round eyes flashing bright green in the fork of a tree – tarsiers, small primates. He removed the goggles and fed them into a pouch off his webbing. The things were more trouble than they were worth. He concluded that he would be unlikely to catch his quarry at night unless he was lucky and they (yes, maybe it was a they) were stupid.

  It was difficult to find anything in the complete darkness. Joe wondered what his hands must look like. They felt greasy, slick from the blood oozing from countless cuts. The pain almost didn’t bother him any more. He was tired, a fog insulating his brain. They felt through the darkness with their hands, stopping every couple of metres to listen.

  Unfortunately, noise was all around them. There were monkeys – he assumed they were monkeys – chattering high in the trees, coughs and snarls from the kind of animals that sounded as if they might like eating meat, and once there was the sound of something very large and heavy brushing aside the undergrowth. Suryei froze.

  ‘Snake,’ she said. That was a good reason to freeze in Joe’s mind too. He wasn’t phobic about them but they weren’t exactly his best friends either.

  Suryei whispered behind him, ‘This place is crawling with them.’

  ‘Don’t you mean slithering?’ Joe said quietly to himself, suddenly very careful about where he put his feet and hands.

  After about half an hour of inching through the dense growth they stopped in a small clearing. ‘I think this will do us,’ said Suryei. ‘Bed.’

  Joe manoeuvred himself beside her and he reached out in front of him, into the darkness. The pain of the barb that immediately stabbed into his open palm made him cry out. ‘Shit!’

  ‘Careful,’ said Suryei softly, and too late. It was impossible to see it in the darkness, but the bush Suryei was suggesting they sleep under seemed to be nature’s answer to razor wire. It was tough and vine-like, with plenty of thick foliage, and lethal two-centimetre spikes protruding in every direction. The vine also bore some kind of bulb or fruit, and the spikes were obviously employed to protect it.

  ‘I am not a bloody swami, Suryei. This is a bloody pincushion.’ Joe stretched his hand into the dark again, more carefully this time. He isolated one of the barbs. It was a weapon, the kind of flora you gave a wide berth, not snuggled into. He’d been hoping for a pile of soft leaves at best, or maybe a fork in a tree at worst.

  ‘We need protection and this bush will provide it. Have you seen those little fish that swim between sea urchin spines?’ she asked condescendingly. ‘Well, think like a little fish.’

  He wondered how the hell they were going to get on the other side of those barbs without being skewered.

  ‘Give me your shirt,’ said Suryei. Joe was too tired to say anything smart about her request. He just did as he was asked. He could dimly see her wrap it around her hands, grab a section of the vine and lift it up. ‘Come on,’ she said impatiently. Joe wriggled under the mass of vine Suryei was hoisting. Once inside, he had to agree it made sense. No light whatsoever made it into the centre of the bush, and as there was no fruit on the inside, there wasn’t a requirement to protect anything, which meant fewer thorns.

  Once inside, Joe put his shirt back on and curled up on the leaf litter. It was dry and soft and there weren’t too many mosquitoes. All in all, a good idea. He vaguely heard Suryei say, ‘You’ve got an hour, then it’s my turn,’ through the plunge into merciful sleep.

  NSA HQ, Fort Meade, Maryland, 1210 Zulu, Wednesday, 29 April

  Jesus, ten past eight. It was too early for serious brain-work, especially given the late finish the previous evening. Indeed, it felt like he’d never even left the joint at all. Bob Gioco’s mind didn’t function until he’d had at least two double espressos. The real stuff, full strength and black as sump oil. He had them both poured into the one Styrofoam cup. He sipped the hot, bitter liquid and felt it going to work on his synapses. This group was something special, and worth missing a couple of hours of sleep for.

  The expertise gathered in the lecture theatre represented a whole new ball game for the NSA. It was part of ELINT, the division once concerned only with the interception and analysis of radar signals and missile telemetry, largely from the Soviet Union. After the dissolution of the Eastern Bloc, there was a proliferation of nuclear materials and other weapons of mass destruction, and of their delivery systems. And now there was an insidious new threat to world peace: computer terrorism. It was now entirely possible to bring a country to its knees, and cause widespread death and mayhem, simply by tampering with the appropriate computer network. ELINT’s new role was to provide early warning and counter-intelligence to prevent these dangerous new threats from ever coming to pass.

  Gioco stifled a yawn while he settled into his chair and smoothed a hand across hair still wet from the shower, but an aberrant lock refused to obey the pressure and sprang up annoyingly.

  Like all organisations, especially US government ones, the NSA had a passion for acronyms. The one for this gathering was COMPSTOMP: Computer Security, Tasking, Observation and Man
ipulation Protection. It was a fancy title for the NSA’s new anti-cyberterrorist node. The group had its problems – too much intelligence dedicated to information anarchy in the one place, Bob often thought.

  A young mathematician, indeed the one giving this morning’s briefing, was the creator of COMPSTOMP, and a vindication of the NSA’s policy of poaching the finest math brains in the country. She had followed a hunch that hackers left individual and distinctive signatures – fingerprints – when they entered systems. She thought it doubtful that hackers would crack computer systems with a one-day pad mentality, never using the same logic process twice. It was more likely they would find a key that worked for them, then use it over and over because, she assumed, even people with above-average intelligence were lazy. If her theory checked out, then those fingerprints could be identified, catalogued and tracked. As it happened, she was right. Hackers used consistent processes, rarely changing them, and no two processes were the same.

  The NSA supported the theory with a budget, and COMPSTOMP winked into existence. Within six months it had quite a comprehensive database containing over 4000 fingerprints. Each rap sheet detailed a hacker’s misdeeds, call sign, off-line name, address, employment records, all of which were continuously being updated and checked. It was a massive job, but it was paying dividends.

  The overwhelming success of COMPSTOMP made the theory’s author, the twenty-one year old woman sitting on the floor amongst her comrades, a hero within the NSA. But COMPSTOMP was super secret, so her fame was limited. Hackers weren’t stupid. If they knew Big Brother was watching their every move, they would start employing their own counter-measures, such as altering their signatures, and the group’s effectiveness would be drastically impaired.

  As was normal practice with the NSA, COMPSTOMP had new detection software developed in-house to employ in the fight to keep information secure. The most successful of these was called Watchdog. Watchdog alerted COMPSTOMP of a computer break-in in progress. COMPSTOMP would then check the hacker’s signature and determine his or her identity against the register. If the system was part of the nation’s defence, or essential to its national security, the hacker would be tracked and arrested. If he or she was extremely good and managed to break through the internal firewalls that protected the core of these systems from outside interference, an ultimatum would be given – join the US government willingly or become a reluctant guest of it in a small, dark cell.

  So far, no one had taken the latter option and COMPSTOMP was largely made up of people who had been caught with their hands in the cookie jar. Oddly, there seemed to be little resentment about being spirited out of their old life and given a new one. The pay was extremely good and the work immensely satisfying, not least because of the enormous resources at the NSA’s disposal. COMPSTOMP was even encouraged to set up a dummy company, Fido Security, and lease the Watchdog database technology to other countries and large corporations. The income stream from this activity was now very healthy, which pleased the oversight committees on Capitol Hill no end. And, more importantly, it allowed the NSA to spread its information-gathering capabilities into unwitting rich new areas previously denied it.

  Watchdogs were now patrolling the systems of companies as diverse as General Motors, IBM, Starbucks and Virgin. Quite a few countries had signed up – the Netherlands, Argentina, Indonesia and others. Not all these clients took the same level of protection. Watchdog could operate merely as an alarm system or a complete ‘back-to-base’ tracking system, although this latter option was extremely expensive because it made the NSA a de facto full-time employee. Of course, none of these customers had the slightest notion that, through Fido, the NSA was patrolling their hard-drives. Fido Security presented itself as a stand-alone high-end service company staffed by the best and brightest, one of the few Internet start-ups to survive the burst e-bubble because it had something unique and worthy to offer: total security.

  Mostly the COMPSTOMP/Fido group discussed interesting ways to attack and defend systems, and the effects of any new technology coming on line. Gioco found these discussions exhilarating. Much of the talk was pure speculation but the air seemed to crackle when they were onto something new. Often, the consequences of their brainstorming brought real benefits to the NSA and its ability to meet its charter. They also discussed the fingerprints of the newcomers to cyberterrorism, most of whom had aggressive or obscure call signs like Howitzer and Pukeboy.

  Today’s COMPSTOMP gathering, though, was low key. The world’s computers were enjoying a period of relative safety and security. There’d been a bit of a discussion about whether information should be contained by fire-walls or set free to benefit mankind. Bob had heard it all before. There were good reasons to keep information free but, in his view, better reasons against it.

  ‘In conclusion, then, over the last week all we’ve had is a bit of activity from one “Cee Squared”,’ said the brilliant young mathematician sitting in the lotus position on the carpeted floor. ‘The system notified the client of the penetration – they have the full package – and action, if any, was theirs to take or not. It was a low-grade intrusion, a small server off the main system and hardly worth worrying about. Cee Squared hasn’t been active for a long time. Thought he’d given the game away.

  ‘Anyway, the details have gone to the South-East Asia section head – that’s you, isn’t it, Bob?’ Bob held his finger up and gave a casual salute from the darkness at the back of the theatre. ‘And that’s it, really,’ she said, snapping the folder closed.

  The group broke up and the room cleared quickly, leaving Gioco alone with his thoughts. There was something troubling him, but he couldn’t nail it.

  Jakarta, 1210 Zulu, Wednesday, 29 April

  General Suluang found himself exercising considerably more care. He was just being prudent. Listening devices guaranteed there were not many places, if any, that one’s conversation could be kept confidential. The places he listed as unsecured now included his home, his office, his car. Indeed, thinking about it, the general wondered whether he could speak with anyone anywhere and be assured of keeping the exchange private.

  Suluang speculated whether his caution was an indication that he was losing control of the situation, but he dismissed the thought instantly. The feeling of disquiet, however, once imbedded, was difficult to shake.

  Lanti Rajasa, the head of the security police, was in the driver’s seat of the battered old teal-coloured Toyota Kijang, one of many that rattled slowly up into the hills behind Jakarta. Motorcycles overtook them in a steady stream, blowing oily smoke that swirled in their headlights. The Kijang passed a poor village quietly announcing its existence to the world with a small soft-drinks stand and a pathetic stall that sold carved junk to tourists.

  The location of the meeting place was Rajasa’s choice but the general agreed to it. They drove in silence. The vehicle was unsafe. Rajasa had ordered it ‘cleansed’ beforehand and no bug had been found, but neither man was confident that Indonesia possessed technology equal to identifying the latest in listening devices.

  Rajasa glanced regularly at the mirrors for following lights but this was Java, the most densely populated island on earth, and there would always be lights bobbing in the rear-vision mirrors.

  The Toyota slowed and pulled off the crudely sealed road into a clearing past the small village. Both men got out and walked to the road, where they joined a steady stream of locals going about their business in the early hours of the evening. It was dark but for the constant glare from the lights of passing traffic and, with their heads lowered, it would be impossible for the casual passer-by to identify them, even though the general had one of the most recognised faces in Jakarta. ‘A seat number on the aircraft was identified as the location of the thief. It was in our power to kill the occupant and neutralise the threat. I don’t believe I had a choice,’ Suluang said, shaking his head slowly.

  ‘General, you did what was needed to protect Indonesia. We’re just lucky the means to
maintain secrecy was in your power,’ said Rajasa.

  Yes, but for how long? both men thought.

  ‘You’ve located the wreckage?’ Rajasa asked.

  ‘Yes, and the mopping up has begun. Any leaks from your end?’

  ‘No. Security has been tight. But for this one –’ he cleared his throat for dramatic effect ‘ – incident.’ Rajasa couldn’t help himself. ‘Incident’ was a hell of a euphemism for the shooting down of a jumbo jet. ‘How are you handling it with the government?’

  ‘The parliament knows only what we tell them, and that’s not very much. In fact, they’re unwitting accomplices, spreading disinformation. They’re telling the Australians that the 747 may or may not have come down in Indonesian airspace. Of course, the reasons for the crash are unknown. And we, Indonesia, are very sensitive about having foreigners telling us what to do. Etcetera, etcetera. You know, the usual line.

  ‘It has been easy to manipulate the search procedure to exclude all but hand-picked military personnel – our people. I think, actually, that the parliament is enjoying the game. Causing Australia anxiety and frustration is giving them a secret pleasure, but they’d never admit it.’

  A trike pulled off the road in front of them and three people jumped off to help right another trike that had broken an axle under a heavy load of chopped wood. The general waited until they’d walked past the noisy melee before continuing. ‘All games aside, Rajasa, as I see it, we have two alternatives. But only one real choice.’

  Rajasa nodded.

  ‘One: we can clean up the site as best we can, then announce the aircraft has been located. The government can then graciously allow in an international investigation team. We hold our breath and maintain our original timetable.