Verikoff shook his head. “No.”
“How about conventional intruder alarms around the grounds?” Pacey inquired. “Is the place equipped with anything like that? Would it be possible to get in over the walls and fences without being detected?”
“It’s extensively wired,” Verikoff replied. His expression became alarmed as he realized the implication of the questions. “Detection would be certain.”
“Is the place watched from orbit by Jevienese surveillance?” Hunt asked. “Could it be assaulted without it being reported?”
“As far as I know it is checked periodically, but not continuously.”
“How frequently?”
“I don’t know.”
“How about Sverenssen’s domestic staff?” Lyn asked. “Are
they Jevienese too, or just help that he hires locally? How much do they know?”
“Specially picked Jevienese guards-all of them.”
“How many?” Sobroskin demanded. “Are they armed? What armaments do they have?”
“Ten of them. There are always at least six in the house. They are armed at all times. Conventional Terran firearms.”
Packard looked over at the others. One by one they returned slow nods. “It looks as if we could be in with a chance,” he said. “It’s time to bring in the professionals and see what they think.”
Verikoff suddenly seemed apprehensive. “What is this talk of an assault?” he asked. “You are going in there?”
“We are going in there,” Sobroskin told him.
Verikoff started to protest but stopped when he saw the menace in Sobroskin’s eyes. He licked his lips and nodded. “What do you want me to do?” he asked.
An hour later a VTOL personnel carrier flew the whole party across the Potomac to the army base at Fort Myer. They were met by a Colonel Shearer, who commanded a Special Forces antiterrorist unit that had already been called to alert and was standing by. The planning and briefing session that followed went on until the early hours of the morning. The first gray light of dawn was showing in the east as an Air Force transport took off from Fort Myer and followed the coast toward New England. It landed with a whisper less than thirty minutes later at an out-of-the-way miiitary supply depot situated among wooded hills twenty miles or so outside Stamford, Connecticut.
chapter thirty-two
The Jevienese were still tapping into Earth’s communications net. Earth knew they were, and the Jevienese knew that Earth knew. Therefore, Caldwell reasoned, the Jevlenese would expect any high-level communications between Earth’s governments, especially anything to do with an impending attack on Jevien, to be encoded by methods that were generally thought to be unbreakable; anything else would not look authentic. But if the codes were indeed unbreakable, little purpose would be served by planting authentically encoded information in JEVEX since JEVEX wouldn’t be able to unravel what it said.
At Caidwell’s request the scientists at McClusky beamed details of the coding algorithms currently used for high-security terrestrial communications through to the perceptron. VISAR studied them and announced that JEVEX would have no problem. The scientists were skeptical. As a test VISAR invited them to compose an encoded message and send it over the beam, which they did. VISAR returned the plaintext translation less than a minute later. The stunned scientists decided that they still had a lot to learn about algorithms. But the implication was satisfactory: JEVEX could be led plausibly to believe that it was eavesdropping on Earth’s highest-level secure communications.
Since then VISAR had been busy manufacturing a revised history of the last few decades on Earth in which the superpowers had not disarmed but gone on to escalate their strategic forces to insane levels of overkill capability, concluding with an account of Earth’s leaders meeting secretly and agreeing to a hasty alliance to hurl their combined strength at Jevien with the Thuriens transporting the force to within striking distance. Its latest creation, being previewed in the Government Center in Thurios, showed a conference hookup in which some of the senior officers engaged in the joint planning of the operation were delivering a preliminary briefing to their staffs. A General Gearvey, whom vis~ had al
ready appointed as the American Supreme Commander, began speaking.
“We are about to engage an enemy who possesses a technology incalculably ahead of our own, and of unknown strength and retaliatory capability. But against that we have two factors in our favor that could redress the balance-ti,ne and preparedness. We are in a position to move now, while all our intelligence from the Thuriens leads us to believe that the enemy is not. Our strategy is therefore based on exploiting these factors to the fullest. We will forego detailed planning and rely heavily on the initiative of local commanders in order to move fast and aim at total devastation of the enemy in a single, surprise, all-out, lightning strike with no compromises. This is not a time to ponder about morality. We might not have a second chance.”