Rogue Element

He checked the radio interceptions from the helos that transported the troops. They were buried amongst millions of small data files, which could nevertheless easily be found by the NSA’s Cray X1 supercomputers. He read through the slips. Two helos out of Hasanuddin AFB asked for taxi and airways clearance, so as to deconflict with private and commercial traffic. There was no further radio work from the aircraft at all except for an airways clearance when they re-entered controlled airspace approximately 180 minutes later. It must have been a special ops sortie or there would have been at least some en-route radio work. Gioco thought about it while he fished some egg from his dinner. Indonesian noodles, by coincidence: Mee Hoon. Okay, so a couple of helos landed somewhere, disgorged their troops and returned empty. He absently picked out a ring of calamari, and remembered his earlier assumption that perhaps the soldiers were off to search for that downed Qantas plane.

Something clicked in Bob’s brain. The report on the Qantas plane. Jumbo jets did not just vanish. He checked the time of the aircraft’s disappearance: 2036 Zulu. The time rang a bell. He called up all relevant radio work from that time of the day and in that area of the world. The Crays crunched the numbers. It took less than a minute before the required information was on his desktop. He had an F-16 Falcon out of Hasanuddin at around 2015 Zulu on a sortie. It was airborne for around forty minutes before landing back at base. From takeoff to landing only minimal radio exchanges, all of them just radio clicks, which could have meant anything, including a faulty radio.

2036Z — 4.36 am local time: the precise time the 747 went off the screen. The event was right in the middle of some of those unusual ‘clicks’. Was it possible? Things were starting to race in Gioco’s head. A picture was coming together and it was a particularly nasty one. Is this what Ruth’s driving at? Would Indonesia blow a civilian aircraft out of the sky? No. They wouldn’t, would they? He put the lid back on his dinner and pushed it to one side.

He was sure the clue lay on his desktop somewhere. He reviewed all the slips for the last thirty-six hours, looking for anything to do with Indonesia, whether he’d flagged them with an exclamation mark or not. It took him a good two hours. There was the death of the air traffic controller, which, the way things were going, was looking a bit too coincidental to pass as an accident.

Then a reminder for his early morning meeting popped up on his desktop. He’d forgotten to dismiss it as ‘done’. COMPSTOMP. He traced the unease that had started to gnaw away at him to the morning’s meeting. He reviewed his notes: Watchdog found intruder in CS982/Ind. server. Watchdog traced hacker, Cee Squared, and system notified server owners.

He cross-referenced CS982/Ind. against the registry of Fido Security clients, COMPSTOMP’s venture into the free market, and discovered, just as he had feared, that computer system CS982/Ind. belonged to the Indonesian army. Then he noticed the time of the intrusion. Around 1830 Zulu or — he added the eight hours for the time zone in his head — 3.45 am local time. Could it be…?

Gioco got on the phone to Research. ‘Hello, Gioco, SEA Section. Can you get me the passenger manifest for a commercial aeroplane flight?… You can? Qantas QF-1 departed Sydney, April 28… Yes, the plane that’s gone missing…’ There was a pause while Gioco caught the response. ‘Yeah, I know. Tragedy. Okay, great.’ The list of passengers would be posted to him on the internal mail system. It would take around ten minutes. In the meantime, he contacted COMPSTOMP. He wanted Cee Squared’s name; he wanted to know the name of the hacker responsible for setting off the Watchdog in the Indonesian army’s server. He was known to them, they had his ‘fingerprint’. That also meant they’d have his real name, address and probably even his favourite breakfast cereal on record.

Bob jotted the sequence of events down on a piece of paper. He hoped that something would be so totally out of place that his growing fear about the fate of QF-1 would dissolve. He wrote: