Doomsday Warrior 15 - American Ultimatum Read Online Free PDF

budge a millimeter.
    “Moscow, or very close to it, as far as we can tell. Do you have any idea what—”
    “Yeah, I think I do,” Rock replied. “Have one of your men run to the library and pick up a copy of War and Peace. I pray we have a copy.”
    “War and Peace ? What the hell are you talking about?” Rath exclaimed, flustered, wondering if Rockson had finally cracked up.
    “The speaker on that tape is Rahallah, Premier Vassily’s right-hand man,” Rock said softly, starting to realize that something really was up if the African was putting so much effort and using all their comm lines to get to him. “When I was in Moscow we worked out an arrangment that if either of us had to contact the other and didn’t want anyone else to know about it, we would use War and Peace as our code framework. The first number of each sequence is the page; the following numbers are the words on that page. It’s a childishly simple code system. But if you don’t know what book it refers to, you could spend the rest of your days trying to figure the damned thing out.”
    Rath looked stunned for some reason, perhaps because he had had his entire operations unit spend hours trying to figure the thing out. “But I’m afraid that if it’s Rahallah calling,” Rock said almost in a whisper, “the message can only concern war. Men don’t get that desperate when their words are of peace.”

Four
    B ut it wasn’t going to be as easy as that. Rockson had learned long ago that nothing is. One of Rath’s intel ops ran down to the Century City library, and after scrounging around for nearly half an hour was able to find a dog-eared copy of the novel—somewhat motheaten, to say the least, pages yellowed as corn. But the words, which were what mattered, were all still there. However, when it was brought back and they began trying to decipher the code that Rahallah and Rock had worked out, the cipher boys ran into problems. The very first part of the message appeared to read, when translated, “Tree love no samovar quick Czar appetite dirt dog.” So much for the first sentence, which Rock thought might have been some form of beatnik poetry circa the mid-twentieth century, but hardly a decoded emergency message from the Kremlin!
    “The problem is—we’ve got different editions of the book in English,” Rath suddenly exclaimed, slapping his forehead with such force that it looked like it hurt. “Even slight differences in the number of words per page makes it all not match up.” He thought for a few more seconds, his brain whirring feverishly, his eyes half closed as he was wont to do when deep in concentration. Even Rockson had to admit, though there were plenty of things he didn’t like about the man, he did his job well, almost fanatically.
    “But we will be able to figure it out anyway,” the intel chief suddenly blurted out as his mouth twisted up into the first hints of a smile Rockson had seen since he came in. “Once we analyze the sequences of words in our book, we can send it through the computer to re-do the edition Rahallah’s using. That’s the right track!” He immediately set the five cipher techs to figuring out just how to program the C.C. mainframe with the actual book before them. It took nearly three hours before they understood the right sequencing between words. But at last, success. Rock could see that Rath took a certain pride that his men were able to come through. And he congratulated him.
    Once the message was completely unraveled, the linguistic experts turned over the sheet of paper with their scrawlings on it to the intel chief, who read it out, as Rockson listened intently:
“To rock son from your friend, the premier’s aide, R. in Moscow: I think you and I trust one another. We’ve already been through battles together and you know my word is good. We face great danger. The madman kill love who we both believed to be dead is alive. I received a thought vision from my relative, a witch man