“John, you remember this college was starting on a cybersecurity major before the war started.”
He nodded with memory of that. President Hunt had even asked him, as an historian and ex-military, to think about creating a course on the history of technology. The idea had intrigued him, and he had even done some preliminary research into the fascinating history of World War II, the tales about Enigma, Ultra, the tapping into Japanese and German radio traffic, the work of the legendary Turing and the team at Bletchley Park, England.
Is that where these two were leading?
“Take me to the conclusion,” John said, looking out across the windswept yard in front of the campus library. Lowering clouds were sweeping in from the northwest, a light sprinkling of snow flurries swirling down. If another storm was coming in, he wanted to get home, split some more wood, and huddle in close to the woodstove with Makala before it hit.
“Remember those huge satellite dishes folks used to have in front of their homes twenty years ago?” Ernie asked, pressing in.
John chuckled. It was a bit of a stereotype of ramshackle trailers, with a dish half as big as the trailer planted in the front yard for television.
“They nearly all disappeared once the big mainstream servers came in with an eighteen-inch dish you could tack to your living room window.”
John nodded, remembering installing one himself when he and Mary moved here with two young girls. A hundred-plus channels to choose from, and he had visions of all the educational programs that could be offered, rather than what most stations had degenerated into with the advent of the nauseating reality-show craze.
“If I could get my hands on some of those big old dishes, which hopefully were off-line and disconnected on the Day, and cobble together parts that were not cooked off, I think in a few weeks I could be tapping into communications traffic.”
“Of…?”
“Bluemont, for starters,” Ernie replied enthusiastically. “Raw reportage from BBC uplinking and downlinking out of Canada, even the Chinese. They still must be using comm sat systems. You just point, listen, download, and evaluate.”
“Just? You make it sound easy, Ernie. So you got gigs of data flying around, and chances are the stuff we want to know about is highly encrypted. They’re no fools.”
“No chain is stronger than its weakest link. No data is foolproof. Turing built a system from scratch and was able to break down the German codes, looking for patterns of usage coming from those German Enigma machines that supposedly could be programmed to create billions of variables and thus thought to be uncrackable. Come on, historian, how did we figure out the Japanese were going to hit us at Midway in June 1942?”
John smiled at such an easy underhand pitch. “You know as well as I do if you asked the question. Paul, do you know?”
John looked over at his electrical wizard who had once been a student and was surprised to see the quizzical look and shake of a head.
“I remember you being in my World War II class, Paul.”
“Sorry, sir, I was diverted a lot that year,” he replied, smiling. John remembered how Paul and Becka had shared the same class and spent most of it staring at each other.
“All right, then. We were picking up radio chatter about a ‘Target X,’ indicating the Japanese were preparing for a massive naval strike. One of the cryptanalyst guys at Pearl Harbor came up with the idea of Midway Island sending out a report that their desalinization plant to provide fresh water on the island was off-line and they were desperate, the message to be sent via a code we knew the Japanese had already cracked.
“The message was sent, and only hours later, radio traffic from Japan was monitored that extra desalinization equipment would have to be shipped to Target X once taken. Bingo—we knew where their next offensive would hit; we had our carriers waiting to receive them and wiped out their carriers in a surprise counterstrike. It is a textbook example of code breaking changing the course of a war.”
“How many kids from this school’s old cybersecurity program are still here?” Ernie asked.
“I’m not sure.” John sighed. Too many of his students were now long gone, killed in the fighting or dead from disease and malnourishment. Those left were serving in the community’s defense force, working in the ever-expanding electrical parts factory down in Anderson Hall, or assigned to other equally crucial tasks.
“If I could pull in four or five—even just two or three—and put them to work to help me,” Ernie pressed, with Paul nodding in eager agreement, “John, I just might be able to get something useful out of our tinkering in the basement. Just imagine if you had known Fredericks’s orders before that piece of trash even came to Asheville.” Ernie pressed in with his argument, “Hell, for all we know, five hundred troops with more choppers could be on their way here right now, and we are clueless until they arrive.”
“Or suppose what that poor guy Reynolds said is true,” Paul interjected, “that something is up regarding another EMP. Who is thinking about it? Why? When? Do you want the answers, or do we sit back passively and wait?”
John looked back and forth at the two and then back out the window at what was obviously another storm coming on.
He sighed and finally nodded. “Okay, you got it.”
The two broke into grins, the elderly Ernie and young Hawkins high-fiving each other.
“Quietly, and I mean quietly, run a query today. If any of our old students were in our cybersecurity program pull them off whatever they are working on now. I then want this building secured. Tell Kevin Malady and Grace Freeman I want a guard on here henceforth. Nothing overt—just that we learned with our encounter with Fredericks that he did have spies inside our community. If we’re going for something like this, I don’t want it broadcasted all over town.”
“John, we’d be a lot more secure if we moved this entire operation over to my place,” Ernie replied.
“Why so?”
“Simple. It is out of the way of prying eyes. Easier to maintain security. Plus, my diagnostic tools are there. I can run things 24-7 at my place. Come on; it’s the logical choice.”
John hesitated as he thought it over and then just simply nodded. “Your place then, Ernie. I’m not going to mention this to our council. We keep it under wraps for a while. The kids stay at your place.”
He hesitated and then smiled.
“You house them and you feed them as well; that will justify their being pulled off of regular work details.”
To his surprise Ernie did not object to that additional requirement.
“You two got that?”
There were eager nods.