Free ' The Longest Night ' & ' Crossing the Rubicon ': The Original Map Illustrated and Uncut Final Volume (Armageddon's Song) by Andy Farman

silenced him and he handed the instrument back to his deputy as he had been instructed.
    Limanova put the proffered instrument to his ear.
    “Yes sir…yes sir…I believe I can sir…with pleasure sir.”
    Major Limanova lowered the handset, drew his sidearm and fired twice.
    Twisting the frequency dial back to the unit command channel he holstered his pistol before speaking.
    “All stations this is Lieutenant Colonel Limanova, you will all of you turn and follow your ears.” He turned and waved to Petrov who activated the vehicles traffic control siren and kept it on.

     
    CHAPTER 3
     
     
    West of Brunswick, Lower Saxony, Germany.
    A great deal of time, energy and thought has gone into the formulation of codes and cyphers over the centuries, almost as much effort as that which is expended by code and cypher breakers. Of course in order to set about breaking a code it is first necessary to recognise that one is in use.
    In 1951 British Intelligence commissioned a study into a completely unique set of codes and cyphers for use by agents and Special Forces acting behind Warsaw Pact lines in some future confrontation. This would of course have to involve seemingly random frequency changes in order to avoid the opposition’s signals intelligence recognising that an enemy was active on their side of the lines by their sending and receiving coded transmissions. Mathematicians, academic deep thinkers and members of the intelligence community, past and present, put forward their responses for consideration. One of the latter was a former officer in the Black Watch who had spent not a small amount of the previous war behind enemy lines in Greece, before returning to Hollywood to renew his acting career. He believed, from hard won experience, that the more complex a communication setup was, the more likely it was to fail. His input was to dispense with complicated codes and channel hopping and simply use the enemies own known military codes and frequencies as nobody would notice a needle in a stack of needles. Accordingly, good language skills with a mix of provincial accents were more important than memorised ‘keys’.
    Thirty two proposals were eventually considered but the ‘Stack of Needles’ was dismissed as too simplistic and a multi layered mathematics based encryption code was adopted instead. The only people to believe that the simpler method had any worth were the Glavnoye Razvedyvatel'noye Upravleniye, the GRU, who are responsible for special forces acting behind NATOs lines in some future confrontation, and they received full details of all thirty two proposals via the Cambridge spy ring before the final selection process had even begun.
    The Stack of Needles theory was tucked away safely for the future and updated whenever new working versions of a NATO army’s battlefield code came into their possession.  For operations in Northern Germany, Batex, Codex, Son of Codex and Slidex code books were all in their turn faithfully reproduced in sufficient quantities to equip saboteurs, assassins, fifth columnists and road watchers . Even the high magnesium content of the Slidex strips was duplicated, those burnable keys which were the closest an infantryman carrying a radio set on his back ever got to that famous line on TV “This tape will self-destruct in five seconds!”

“…Whiskey Echo, Golf Juliet, Charlie X-ray, Zulu Mike, Sierra Delta, Lima Victor Bravo, roger so far, over?” the voice with a slight Liverpool accent queried in the operators headphones.
    “Tango Four Four roger, over.” replied the operator with a lilting Welsh accent of his own.
The hash of electronic noise marked a pronounced pause as per British Army signals doctrine for long messages, during which another station could transmit an urgent message of its own on that frequency.
None did of course.
    “Tango Four Nine, Two November…Quebec India Foxtrot, Yankee Golf, Echo Tango, Victor November…”
The operator filtered out the