“Aye aye, Colonel,” she replied with a grin and wink. She checked the airlock and hatch doors, then strapped herself into her seat and began to open the shuttle bay doors. Once fully opened, she carefully raised the boom arm to its maximum height, then opened the claws of the boom to release the satellite. When the claws opened, they gave the satellite a very gentle shove, which sent it a few meters away from the ship and the boom arm. Carefully, she lowered the boom back into the shuttle bay, then closed the bay doors. “Satellite free, boom secure, bay doors closed and locked. Do you want to test it while we are here, Dr. Foster?”
“Absolutely,” she cried. She spun her chair around and sent a simple maneuver signal to the satellite, which caused the rockets to ignite and send the satellite a mile higher. Then she positioned the satellite to focus on earth and initiated its television camera. The image she received on her computer screen was bright and clear. Next, she signaled the infra-red camera to initiate photography. The image was clean and crisp.
“Big Eye is back in business!” she exclaimed, then realized what she had said. No one however, seemed to pay any attention at all.
“How do we know, Di, that it won’t be disrupted again?”
“It will take another nuclear blast with a large EMP pulse to do it. I redid the codes differently than before. It won’t respond to any signal but mine. It disregards all others. That way, nobody can interfere. Regarding another EMP event, it will have to be up here in space, pretty close to the satellite. I lined these circuit boards with a gold over layer to ensure that far off pulses won’t screw it up. Anything below 50,000 feet shouldn’t interfere with it at all.”
“Smart girl,” Berry said. He had been admiring her figure from afar for the last two weeks. She smiled in return.
“Alright, back to business. Coming up on the orbital re-entry point. Everybody in your seats. Get buckled and double check.” He spun around, buckled himself in, tugged on them, and then began throwing switches as Greg went down the checklist. Cathy Slayton began to double check their entry data.
“Re-entry point in ten minutes,” stated the LTC navigator and boom girl Friday. Greg kept going down the checklist, while Slayton checked in with NASA in Houston. They confirmed her readings and gave them a go. At the countdown, Berry ignited the shuttle rocket and positioned the shuttle for a glide path to Houston. Forty-five minutes later they touched down at NASA.
After coming to a stop, Dr. Foster put the damaged hard drives in her carry-on bag. They deplaned, so to speak, to a waiting vehicle who took them immediately to NASA. The first thing Diane Foster did was to hand the hard drives over to the Flight Director. “I need maximum computer power. I don’t know what you have here, but I will need about one million gigabytes computing power to do this in hours. Otherwise, it will take days.”
“And you shall have it. When do you want it? I suggest you shower and eat, and maybe even sleep for a while, before tackling this.”
“No, I’m too excited to sleep. I’ll eat and shower, but then I’ll start on this.”
Once out of their space suits, they all showered and moved to the chow hall. It was evident they already considered themselves a team, the three scientists and the shuttle crew.
At the console, Diane Foster plugged in the hard drive and began to decipher the codes. Three hours later, she fell asleep. Three hours after that an alarm went off which awakened her. The computer identified a worm that was programmed in when the program was written. She copies that information on a thumb drive and then continued. She found a second worm embedded in the program as a back up, in case the first worm failed. She put that on a separate thumb drive. Another hour went by, and the nanoboard had been completely scanned. She plugged in the second hard drive and had her answer six hours later. It was clean. She called the Flight Director. “I need a secure phone, now.”
“I have one on my desk you can use. You can punch in a direct dial to the President, to Fred Gateway or to Ed McCluskey if you like.”
She nodded in agreement, and said, “Let’s go to your office.” Once there, she said, “Excuse me, but I must make this call to Ed McCluskey in absolute privacy.” He picked up the phone, punched some buttons and handed it to her. When she heard the voice on the other end, she said “Siphonoptera” as a code word only the two of them knew. He replied with “Quintus Atillius,” a response that only he knew. They each knew they had the right party.
“What do you have, Doctor?”
She sighed, “I hate to say this, but we have a mole in the organization. Only one hard drive had been reprogrammed, and it was done on the ground floor. Someone in our organization who has the highest of clearance did this. Only a handful of such people had access. I can’t identify who for sure, but I have some ideas.”
“NASA has a Lear jet there. Put Mike back on, and I’ll have the three of you here in a couple of hours.”
She put down the phone and walked over to the door. Flight Director Mike Shannon was leaning against the opposite wall of the corridor. “Ed wants to speak to you.”
He walked in and picked up the phone. “This is Mike.”
“Mike, get those people on your Lear, and get them here as quickly as is safely possible.”
“I think I can get them airborne in about forty-five minutes. About three hours’ flight time, I’ll have them there in time for supper. Anything else?”
“That’s it. Thanks, Mike.”
Mike punched a number into his phone. “Get the Lear ready and warmed up as quickly as possible. Flight plan is for Andrews Air Force Base. Let me know ten minutes before you are ready. Call me on my cell,” and he hung up. “Let’s round up the rest of the crew.” Four hours later, the Lear landed at Andrews, where a three-car escort was waiting for them. All three cars had deeply tinted windows and looked alike. The cars played shuffleboard across the tarmac as a somewhat feeble effort at the old game of pea under the shell.
Fred Gateway, Jim Neville and Ed McCluskey were waiting for them at Langley, CIA headquarters. Drs. Hatcher and Corning were warmly greeted by the three and congratulated, but then escorted elsewhere for debriefing. Dr. Foster accompanied the three to a separate room where two other men whom she did not know were waiting. They were not introduced, so she did not ask.
Ed McCluskey opened with, “What did you find, Doctor?”
“The big news is a worm. The solar panels were also fried by an EMP but easily replaced.” She produced the hard drives and stated, “This drive was programmed with two worms. This second drive is clean. With the exception of me, the same people did not work on both drives. That narrows our field down to about four people, those who worked only on this drive. Whoever did this had to know the type, configuration of both the hardware and software, and access to these drives of the onboard computers. I am sure you will put those people under intense scrutiny.”
“Is there anyone in particular you suspect, Dr.?” asked Fred Gateway. She lowered her head as she thought. She had suspicions but was reluctant to express them as she had no proof, only a gut level feeling. Out of concern of leveling possibly false charges which might do irreparable harm to one’s career and possibly their life, she finally said, “No, there is no one I particularly suspect.”
“Can you tell us why these worms were not picked up before the satellite was sent into orbit, Doctor?”
“There are over 2.5 million lines of code on each of these hard drives. To do so would require a computer review of enormous magnitude. Very few computers in the world have enough power to do that. Even so, it took six hours for NASA’s largest to find these two worms. It is virtually impossible to detect them. The initial worm was actually broken into several parts so that it would appear as an error that the code writer failed to erase or correct. The result was that the individual pieces would cascade together as they received their signals. The individual pieces would appear as nonsense and not be worth the effort to dig out these pieces, possibly damaging other codes. You would most likely do more damage than good. You could almost liken it to a piece of DNA in a gene whose function was not recognized nor appreciated. Maybe a better illustration would be a piece of shrapnel in a critical anatomical location in a wounded soldier that would result in greater damage removing it than if you left it in place.”
The three looked at each other. Then the Secretary of Defense asked, “Is there anything else you can tell us, or would like to say, Dr. Foster?”
“I don’t know what else I can say.”
“Doctor, your efforts have been Herculean. We appreciate that. You have done your country more than Yeoman service. I can assure you that your efforts will be recognized and rewarded. I will have a jet fly you to Lawrence Livermore and a car to take you home. Director Gateway will assign a team of agents as your bodyguard until this is over. You will be under our wing until the mole is caught.”
“Thank you, Mr. Secretary, but I don’t want any bodyguards.”
“Nevertheless, you are going to have them. You are too valuable a resource. We cannot risk anything happening to you. You can take a vacation within the United States if you like or return to work. You will hardly be aware of your escorts. They are very well trained. Whatever you do, you will be in our care. That is final, ma’am.”
Diane Foster smiled weakly, knowing she had no choice. “Well then, it’s home for me and a day of rest perhaps, then back to work. On the other hand, I am not sure I want to go back and look at my colleagues’ faces, knowing that one of them is a traitor.”
“An agent now outside the door will be with until you return home. There, a team of FBI agents, very special ones I would say, will be waiting for you. They will be your guardian angels. Again, we can’t thank you enough.” Diane Foster nodded, as Ed McCluskey stood and escorted her to the door, where the waiting agent nodded and smiled to Dr. Foster. McCluskey closed the door and returned to the desk where he turned to face the two unidentified men in the room. “Well, Doctors, what do you think?”
Dr. Stangness nodded to his colleague as a signal that he should offer his opinion first. “She has suspicions of the traitor but is afraid to voice them for lack of evidence, for fear of harming an innocent if she is wrong. What do you think, Doctor Realms?”
“I agree with you completely, Doctor. Her body language suggested some degree of guilt in not coming forth. I am of the opinion that her gut level instincts will turn out to be correct. They usually are. We need her opinion. Perhaps one of her bodyguards can get close enough to her for her to share her opinions.”
Fred Gateway shook his head affirmatively. “One of them is a handsome, intelligent and single agent in his thirties. The rest are all married men. I’ll order him to very gently court her and see what information he can develop. I thank you two distinguished psychiatrists for your assistance. You know the usual rules apply.”
