The Sum of All Fears.pdf - Delta Force

y landline or microwave links to Moscow Center, the headquarters of the
Committee for State Security, the KGB, at #2 Dzerzhinskiy Square. The KGB's
Eighth Chief Directorate is tasked to communications intelligence and
communications security. It has a long and distinguished history that has
benefited from another traditional Russian strength, a fascination with
theoretical mathematics. The relationship between ciphers and mathematics is a
logical one, and the most recent manifestation of this was the work of a
bearded, thirtyish gnome of a man who was fascinated with the work of Benoit
Mandelbrot at Harvard University, the man who had effectively invented fractal
geometry. Uniting this work with that of MacKenzie's work on Chaos Theory at
Cambridge University in England, the young Russian genius had invented a
genuinely new theoretical way of looking at mathematical formulae. It was
generally conceded by that handful of people who understood what he was talking
about that his work was easily worth a Planck Medal. It was an historical
accident that his father happened to be a General in the KGB's Chief Border
Guards Directorate, and that as a result the Committee for State Security had
taken immediate note of his work. The mathematician now had everything a
grateful Motherland could offer, and someday he'd probably have that Planck
Medal also.
He'd needed two years to make his theoretical breakthrough into something
practical, but fifteen months earlier he'd made his first 'recovery' from the
U.S. State Department's most secure cipher, called STRIPE. Six months after that
he'd proven conclusively that it was similar in structure to everything the U.S.
military used. Cross-checking with another team of cryptanalysts who had access
to the work of the Walker spy ring, and the even more serious work done by
Pelton, what had resulted only six months earlier was a systematic penetration
of American encryption systems. It was still not perfect. Daily keying
procedures occasionally proved impossible to break. Sometimes they went as much
as a week without recovering one message, but they'd gone as many as three days
recovering over half of what they received, and their results were improving by
the month. Indeed, the main problem seemed to be that they didn't have the
computer hardware to do all the work they should have been able to do, and the
8th Directorate was busily training more linguists to handle the message traffic
they were receiving.
Sergey Nikolayevich Golovko had been awakened from a sound sleep and driven to
his office to add his name to the people all over the world shocked into
frightened sobriety. A First Chief Directorate man all of his life, his job was
to examine the collective American mind and advise his President on what was
going on. The decrypts flooding onto his desk were the most useful tool.
He had no less than thirty such messages which bore one of two messages. All
strategic forces were being ordered to Defense Condition Two, and all
conventional forces were coming to Defense Condition Three. The American
President was panicking, KGB's First Deputy Chairman thought. There was no other
explanation. Was it possible that he thought the Soviet Union had committed this
infamy? That was the most frightening thought of his life.
'Another one, naval one.' The messenger dropped it on his desk.
Golovko needed only one look. 'Flash this to the navy immediately.' He had to