Yuri had stroked the boy's ego and plied him with ideas of being useful to the GAU's cause and living up to his father's legacy. When the boy's élan faded, Yuri struck hard. He had already known the boy's father had trouble connecting with him. He guessed that their only common ground was the father's cryptography work.
Yuri painted a picture for the boy. A way to use his computer skills in the military. To be a communications officer for the GAU and ensure their messages never got read by the enemy. The boy laughed before launching into a lengthy lecture on everything he had ever heard his father say about his duties.
Late last evening, Yuri Yanuk had been told the principles which governed the way the GAU Navy chaffed its transmissions while at sea. He had also been told the actual communications protocols and callsigns for a carrier's air group. He had quickly ushered the boy out of the chatroom and logged off to get to work. He had put all the School's supercomputers to the task and begun winnowing the chaff from the recent GAU transmissions the Intelligence Service had picked up. Using the callsigns as cribs and knowing where in the messages they should be, he was able to guess the encryption methods the GAU was using.
Just like that, the number of possible permutations the supercomputers had to run through to decrypt the messages went from infinite to a mere few dozen quadrillion.
Yuri had worked hard through the night, making educated guesses and cutting off futile avenues of calculations, until he had managed to extract a plaintext translation from a transmission. He wanted to jump for joy, but the thought of Ali's smirk had kept him focused. He still hadn't known if he had been right. He had triple-checked his assumptions and let the supercomputers work at the progression of encryption for another hour. He got his confirmation when more messages were decrypted. The code was cracked. He had cracked it.
As the supercomputers solved more and more permutations, the process of decryption gained speed at an almost exponential rate. Pretty soon, he had enough decrypted material to be able to predict the correct encryption method, based on nothing more than the exact time the message had been sent. No cribs were required any longer. All the GAU Navy's secrets were laid bare before his eyes.
By the time dawn came along, the supercomputers were decrypting the messages all but instantaneously as they were being fed into them. When the rest of the staff started coming in, they were stunned by his accomplishment. General Houdani, the commanding officer of the Intelligence Service Cipher School, laughed at seeing the plaintexts and hugged Yuri, calling him "the brightest boy under the heavens".
Everyone, even Ali, got to work at Yuri's direction and they resolved the backlog of stored GAU intercepts before lunch.
Some of them wished they hadn't. The rest barely contained their panic.
Put together, the recent transmissions plainly told of a huge invasion fleet anchored off Sardinia as it was being loaded with men, munitions and machines it would use to invade the Caliphate. It was going to happen any day now.
Despite the grim news, Yuri couldn't help but feel proud. This was the greatest code-breaking accomplishment of the entire war. If either the GAU, or the Bloc, had ever managed to break the other's codes like this, they had kept it to themselves.
He knew he wasn't going to get a medal anytime soon. As soon as the General had realized what was being said in the messages, he had put the Cipher School on a strict lockdown, disabling all telecommunications. He had summoned couriers and dispatched them to deliver handwritten notes from him to all the senior military officials in the capital. Now that the Caliphate knew the GAU's plans, they needed to keep the GAU from knowing that they knew, at least until they decided that they wanted the GAU to know that they knew.
A steady stream of senior officers started pouring into the School shortly thereafter. The NCOs and civilian secretaries scrambled to accommodate them all and find each one a seat and table where they could read a secure copy of the decrypted transmissions. Their disbelieving murmurs made a continuous droning sound which threatened to lull Yuri into sleep, once again.
The memory of Ali's smirk roused him back into action. He had to figure out the reason behind it. He knew that his analysis was immaculate, the sheer volume of decrypted messages was testament enough to the quality of his work.
Yuri resolved to re-examine the man's words, looking for a clue as to what the ace up his sleeve was.
What was it that he said? A bare-faced boy?
He knew that wasn't it. In Arab culture, smarts were only possessed by those who also possessed moustaches, the thicker a man's facial hair, the wiser he was. Yuri couldn't grow a moustache, as everyone could plainly see.
No, it was something else...
The first naval invasion in thirteen years
.
As ridiculous as that sounded, it was true. World War Three had been raging for fourteen years and it had been more than thirteen years since either side had tried a true naval invasion. He thought back to how the war had even started and the naval invasions he had learned about, both in school and in basic training.
He snorted softly. The things that were written in his high school history book were quite different from the things the drill sergeants had told him. The history books always painted war in terms of just causes and grand strategies. The sergeants told the stories in different terms; logistics and supply lines. The history books spoke of morale and convictions winning battles. The sergeants spoke of how ammo trumped courage every time and how air superiority was never optional.
After watching the war unfold for years, Yuri had to concede that the sergeants were right and the history books and academia were largely wrong. The people who burned for a just cause always lost to the people who shelled them from beyond the horizon with pinpoint precision by using a tiny robot disguised as a bee for a forward artillery observer. Yuri could predict how every military campaign would end, even before it began, based on nothing more than a good look at the supply lines it relied on. Even the most advanced technology was rendered useless if it ran out of critical supplies.
He focused his tired mind anew and thought back to fourteen years ago, when the war had started. He had been just a boy kicking a ball. If someone had tried to explain the war to him back then, they would have told him about the American city of Phoenix being nuked by terrorists. Now, he knew it was the result of economic collapse in both the global powerhouses and their antiquated leaderships' fear-driven efforts to force their markets to recovery.
The Greater Atlantic Union on one side, and the Sino-Russian Bloc on the other, decided to fight a small skirmish by proxy over natural resources in eastern Africa. Things slowly escalated from there into World War Three. While the GAU and the Bloc only added about a dozen nations to their official ranks during the war, the entire world was brought into the conflict. Whether they had to bow to economic pressures, or a direct threat of invasion, every nation had to declare for one side, or the other.
The few countries that managed to remain officially neutral only did so with tacit permission from both the warring sides. They were used as third party go-betweens that allowed the rich and powerful to circumvent the strict embargo laws and do business with their enemy counterparts.
As the crisis spread from Africa to the Middle East, the GAU intervened into the Israel-Iran conflict and wound up occupying most of Iran. High on the success, they got the bright idea of invading Russia via the Caucasus countries. The plan would bypass the bulk of Russia's armed forces.
When the war began, the GAU and Bloc massed their forces at their shared borders. The threat of Mutually Assured Destruction had kept their armies idling in place, even while their comrades in arms had been slaughtering each other in faraway deserts.
Since armies hate sitting idle, they busied themselves with making defensive preparations. This suited the politicians well. Despite threatening to do it, neither side actually wanted to be the one to let loose with the nukes and spark the end of the world. Both sides had been increasing their nuclear arsenals to ludicrous proportions. All thoughts of a crippling first strike were rendered futile. The sheer number of nukes either side had, as well as the various methods they developed for deploying them, meant that any nuclear strike was going to result in the certain destruction of the Earth.
Despite this sobering fact, the world leaders still pressed on with their war, using propaganda to foment pro-war sentiments amongst their citizens. More accurately, they used propaganda to turn their citizens against anyone who dared question, in any way, what the government was doing. Such critical thinkers were painted as traitors and backstabbers. If they got lynched by the angry relatives of dead soldiers, law enforcement routinely looked away and buried the evidence afterwards.
In such an atmosphere, the governments couldn't afford to appear weak while facing the enemy, so they got on board with the fortification program. The GAU-Bloc borders in Scandinavia and Eastern Europe were quickly stitched up tight with multiple layers of defenses.
An Exclusion Zone was established. It ran for thousands of miles, from the Arctic to the Black Sea, and was tens of miles wide. It was riddled with land mines and automated turrets and tank obstacles. Every square inch of it was pre-sighted by the countless artillery pieces that were installed there.
