Chapter 3 / Page 9

“We believe the HP’s shipment arrived in Amman, Jordan. It is a simple matter of trucking the equipment across the border and into the desert. If all software licenses were left in place, the Iraqi’s have gotten their hands on about twenty gigabytes of hard disk, five hundred megabytes of memory, and two Oracle 7.1 databases. The software is more than adequate to assist the Iraqi government in managing any secret weapons’ research.

“One of the things we learned during the Gulf War was the existence of an extensive fiber optic network. With this equipment, they can connect from a variety of locations to central servers. Such a network enables the Iraqis to continue moving weapon prototypes about in an elaborate shell game. Even with satellite and reconnaissance over flights, we are not completely certain where everything is located. These databases have the precise information we need.

“We know these machines exist. We know approximately where they are located, and we have an electronic backdoor into these systems.” He looked around the table. “Jim Harper’s last mission, before retiring, compromised this network. We have some hidden user accounts at both the operating system and database level. Unfortunately, the Iraqis do not allow any dialup access at all to their networks. They have hardened their systems to outside attack. We need to get to a terminal and execute an attack from inside the Iraqi network.

“Jim Harper is the logical choice. He knows how the network was put together. It is our assessment that you, Mister Stillwell, working with Mister Harper have the best chance of figuring out where and what weapons systems still exist in Iraq. We believe the data would be in real time. Therefore, we could effectively take out all weapon sites in one stroke.”

It sounded so tidy on paper. Brian shook his head, smiling in spite of himself. If they had so many clever facts about Saddam’s computers, why not use a couple of stray smart bombs and blast them to bits? Why allow the equipment into Iraq in the first place? Brian had so many questions, and quite a few bad answers. The other nagging fact: it was doubtful that even a massive Tomahawk cruise missile and air campaign could completely eliminate the threat.

“You have a comment?” inquired the NSA.