Jonathan Fox is an engineering graduate student returning to a summer internship in the telecommunications industry. He has been given a copy of a Confidential letter written by an Air Force colonel on Guam that suggests a wiretap scam of significant proportion has been set up on a fiber-optic undersea cable network. One of the wiretap locations is on Andersen Air Force Base, on Guam, with other locations in California, Japan, and Hawaii. National security may be at risk, aside from theft -of-service. Jonathan’s task is to determine how the wiretap scam was established, by whom, and for what purpose. He is assigned to work inside the company’s cable station on Guam, ostensibly to fine-tune cable equipment, but quietly snoops on the technicians, a task he finds necessary but distasteful. On his second day on Guam he is invited out to Andersen, where he finds the colonel who authored the Confidential letter to his company has been murdered. As Jonathan pursues his investigation he finds the wiretap arrangement has been established for a very intriguing purpose. The action in Pacific Wiretap creates a scene of adventure, crime, and daring that spans the Pacific Ocean itself.

PACIFIC WIRETAP

By PATRICK DOWNEY

IUNIVERSE, INC.

Copyright © 2010 Patrick Downey
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4502-6762-5

Chapter One

Jonathan had yet to attend a funeral in his life, but the descent of the elevator into the ground conjured up images of a casket gliding into its grave. Alone in the steel chamber, the silent, indiscernible motion raised the hair on his back, and after thirty seconds he was relieved when a wall rolled away as a door.

He stepped quickly into the subterranean half acre of telecommunications equipment forty feet below the earth's surface, a place where electronic technicians worked in shifts around the clock, a place fourteen thousand air miles from his native New Jersey, a place where, for the summer, he would feign engineering work while snooping on the employees.

Inside the cavernous structure he sucked in the conditioned air supplied by a 100 ton air-purification system housed in its own room and prayed none of it would fail over the next two months. Standing, waiting, he perused the forty million dollars of electronics equipment as though viewing a display of iPhones in a mall kiosk. He had seen it all before, at sites in New York and New Jersey, had designed some of it, knew the function of every part, which manufacturer had produced it, and what it cost.

As an engineering intern commencing his third summer with American Tel, he was no longer impressed with sophisticated electronic hardware mounted on row after row of steel bays stretching to the ceiling. The equipment was bland and robotic, requiring no human operator. It sat in silence, consuming digital signals by the gigabit, processing millions of telephone calls daily between Asia and North America, indiscriminately multiplexing and de-multiplexing data and voice messages for businesses, governments, lovers, thieves, assassins, whores, students, parents, children, and the barking dogs and meowing cats of children. Fed by a laser lightguide source, the equipment routinely routed multiple streams of binary signals over fiber-optic undersea cables laid across the floor of the Pacific Ocean.

In the hi-tech era of the twenty-first century, Jonathan knew this location was similar to other cable stations around the world that terminated transoceanic telephone cables on the shores of more than fifty countries, but the equipment here was on an island, in a man-made underground hole near a military base, and was somehow different, eerie, and secretive.

From an equipment-aisle a man approached.

"Hi, and welcome to Guam," came the ethereal voice that had interrogated him over the video intercom at ground level. "I'm Len Borja, the senior tech."

Jonathan reached for Len's outstretched hand and introduced himself, noting Len's carefree speech and easy-going mannerisms and politeness. Jonathan was recognizing these traits as standards of Pacific island grace and culture, traits subdued by the Japanese occupation of Guam during World War II, but which every contemporary Japanese businessman was trained to respect today.

Len Borja's business attire comprised leather sandals, white shorts silk-screened with hibiscus flowers, and a short-sleeved shirt with pens and a yellow highlighter protruding from the pocket. His skin was rich ochre, passed down by his forefathers and weathered by the Pacific sun and northeast trade winds. Standing next to him, Jonathan felt a congenital absence of skin pigment, despite weekend exposures to the Miami sunshine.

Jonathan judged Len to be six feet tall, like himself, and except for the hoop earring and a tattooed arm, could be an anchorman on broadcast television's evening news. Observing Len, Jonathan found he had unconsciously loosened his tie under the collar of his oxford button-down.

Len explained he was one of seven American Tel technicians who manned the Ague cable station on Guam on the day shift, along with one supervisor and one station manager. Jonathan already knew this, but nodded assent. Their chat was brief, Len advising that the station manager wanted to meet with him before leaving on a three-day vacation.

Len led Jonathan past the monotone hum of the power room and the DC battery room and down a hallway where open doors gave way to a locker room, kitchen, and a pleasantly furnished break-room. Turning a corner, they walked past the equipment repair shop where two technicians were performing routine maintenance on a piece of electronic hardware. Jonathan immediately recognized the equipment. It had been pulled from the Terminal Transmission Equipment of the Pan Pac 1 fiber-optic undersea cable. It was used to multiplex electrical signals up to the cable system's line speed and convert them to optical pulses for transmitting out on the undersea cable itself. On its receive side, it reconverted the pulses of light to electrical signals. It also provided protection switching in case of component failure. Jonathan could write the book on it, remembering well the required study of the TTE equipment during his first year of graduate school. If the techs would just stroll off to take a leak he could complete the scheduled maintenance using an algorithm shortcut before they zippered their flowered shorts.

Pan Pac 1 had been the first fiber-optic cable to span the Pacific, but in just three years its technology had been rendered obsolete. Its circuits were underutilized due to high operating costs and the entire system was soon to be retired, despite its twenty-five year design life. Larger capacity cables were already deployed across the Pacific and new terabit systems were in the water and being activated on a regular basis. High-tech eats its own.

Jonathan returned the nods and smiles from the turning heads of the techs as he followed Len past the repair shop, down another hall, past more rows of equipment bays complete with their multi-colored supervisory lights, plug-in cards, modulation and demodulation jacks, monitoring jacks, dials, meters, alarms, and switches, past two empty conference rooms to a corner office. The hand-painted sign on the office door read Cable Station Manager. In larger letters below the title was the name Roger Mahoney.

Jonathan had seen Mahoney's file. Everyone in the company had heard of him. He was a thick New York Irishman who had started his telephone career in the mailroom and made sure everyone knew it. Through time in grade and attending the right company schools he had worked his way into American Tel's domestic operations department in New York City and later to their International Facility Maintenance Center on Avenue of the Americas. He was promoted to supervisor and later to manager, responsible for a staff of eight supervisors and fifty technicians who collectively oversaw the operation and maintenance of every company telephone circuit to Europe and to ships at sea in the Atlantic Ocean. This was in the halcyon days of international telecommunications, before competition, when American Tel was the only game in town and Roger was king of the overseas telephone call.

Jonathan's file on Mahoney was private, for his eyes only. The file included personal information on Mahoney's staff at the cable station on Guam, but Jonathan had so far familiarized himself only with their boss, whose business tactics he found deplorable. During his tenure in New York, Mahoney had fired eight new members of his staff over a three year period, almost always for insubordination, meaning they disagreed with him, and always during their one year probationary period when they had no recourse. "He's not telephone people," had been his stance each time, stifling queries from the Human Resources Department.

But Roger landed himself in hot water with the New York State Division of Human Rights. Two black technicians hit him with discrimination charges after he gave them their walking papers for "jive talkin" him. The hearing lasted less than an hour during which the commissioner charged Roger with discrimination and ordered both men reinstated with back pay. Roger, his company lawyer, and the two technicians walked back from the DHR office to the Avenue of the Americas building as a group, the two blacks laughing all the way, behind Roger's red neck. That same evening the Post carried the story, and the next morning Roger was given thirty days to find a lateral position in another city, preferably in another state or on a different planet. A month later he was on Guam, replacing the retired cable station manager. Jonathan had the background skinny on Mr. Mahoney, but would be delving deeply into Mahoney's activities at the cable station.

Jonathan observed Mahoney through the window in his closed office door, watched him pick up the telephone and punch in a number the moment Len reached for the doorknob. From behind his mahogany desk Mahoney held up two fingers in a request for time. Jonathan knew it was a pretentious move designed to keep them waiting and convey to Jonathan that his arrival was of little significance. There were more important matters to attend to than waiting around to greet a summer intern engineer. So what that he had been awake in his hotel room since 4:00 a.m., struggling with a time difference of fourteen hours. So what that he had been on three planes and traveled twenty-six hours. Mahoney was pragmatic, Jonathan had learned, sorting his work by priorities, some exaggerated, and doing business with a junior engineer was no reason to adjust his priorities, exaggerated or not. After the wave-in, Jonathan followed Len into the office.

"How's the Hilton?" Mahoney asked, coming slowly around his desk as though he didn't normally do this for a visitor. He dismissed Len and waved Jonathan into a chair.

They talked about the jungle smell in Jonathan's hotel room, and Mahoney assured him there was no way of getting rid of it.

"You're on the southernmost island in the Marianas, for Christ's sake, only thirteen degrees north of the equator. This is the way it is here."

They talked, or mostly Mahoney did, of the advantages and disadvantages of traveling from the US mainland to Guam via Honolulu versus coming through Narita airport in Japan. Mahoney preferred Honolulu, he said, where he would visit his co-manager at the Kepuhi cable station, join him in a round of golf on the company, all legit, of course, and hit a few friendly bars at night, solo. Traveling through Japan was OK once in a while, Mahoney said, but in contrast to its bustling airport, Narita was a dead old town for a transit stop; and besides, he didn't like it when the girls spoke only in Japanese. Japan was just too goddamn expensive, he quipped, even for someone on an expense account.

Mahoney filled the preliminaries with more small talk, looked at his watch and advised Jonathan they had fifteen minutes to discuss business before he left on vacation.

Jonathan watched Mahoney skim through a report on his desk. He had seen his own name on the cover before Mahoney opened it, and could tell from Mahoney's face that Mahoney had familiarized himself with the contents and hadn't found anything there that would endear him to Jonathan. Mahoney's unspoken thoughts said it all, and Jonathan had no problem interpreting the silence as the pages flipped: the education of this snot, for Christ's sake. A BS from Columbia in Electrical Engineering and on the Dean's list every semester. A freakin' grade point average of 3.9. Number three in his graduating class. And next year he would graduate from the University of Miami with a Master of Science degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering. And just twenty-four years old.

Jonathan knew his academic credentials slammed in the face of Mahoney's scholastic attributes: a GED, sixteen weeks of microwave school at Fort Monmouth, two years in the Signal Corps, and an expired 2nd class FCC radio telephone operator license. But Mahoney was the boss here, and Jonathan would need to respect that, though he had no intention of placing himself in a subordinate role to Mahoney. A dotted line to Mahoney was how the brass in New York had described Jonathan's reporting responsibility, the solid line plugged into Frank Riordan, the Director of the Undersea Cable Planning & Management Division, back on Avenue of the Americas.

While Mahoney droned into a sophomoric explanation of his own responsibilities and the strategic value of the Guam cable station to US industry and the Department of Defense, Jonathan studied his face and mannerisms. He knew Mahoney had never married, but if he hadn't, Mahoney's cherubic face told him so. Mahoney had rosy cheeks and a nose that had been reset a long time ago. His upper right incisor was chipped and darker in color than his other teeth. He was growing a mustache, its development scraggly, and where the hair on his head was gray, his mustache was dotted with wiry reds.

If he hadn't been transferred here to Guam, Jonathan figured Mahoney would still be living with his parents up on the Grand Concourse, where he would be a regular at the corner bar and a star member of his league's bowling team. Jonathan suspected he was a good Catholic who visited the confessional regularly but never told the priest when he got laid.

Mahoney was standing now and reaching for his jacket, a need to impress about him. "That wall map over there depicts the Pan Pac 1 undersea cable system," he said, pointing a stubby finger from a stubby freckled hand, "the first digital fiber-optic cable in the Pacific. It's 13,000 kilometers in length and connects between California, Hawaii, Guam, and Japan. And this one here on this wall, one of our latest, is the JAGUAR system. That's the Japan-Guam-Australia cable, in case you don't know. I'm not sure how long that one is."

Jonathan rose from his chair and gave Mahoney a quick look, mostly into his chipped tooth, which was frequently filled with the tip of Mahoney's tongue when he wasn't talking.

"It's 12,000 kilometers long," Jonathan said. "It has four undersea branching units and each of its fiber pairs is designed to operate at 320 Gigs." Up yours, Mahoney. I've got the stats on the newer terabit cables too, if you want to hear them.

Mahoney said nothing as he closed his laptop and slid it into a canvas briefcase. Jonathan could feel the heat, could see the skin reddening around Mahoney's neck, rising like blood drawing into a nurse's vial. He wondered if he had stepped over the line on his first day.

Mahoney looked down at two framed watercolor prints leaning against the wall behind his desk and cast a glance at Jonathan that said retribution was on its way, upstart. He leaned across his desk and punched a digit on his telephone. "George, come in here for a minute," he said into the phone. "Your summer helper is here. Drive him back to the Hilton. Give him a day to rest up, then assign him to the night shift. I'll give you a list of items I want him to handle. And get these new cable ship pictures hung up here in my office. Today."

Mahoney dropped the receiver into its cradle, gave a curtly nod at Jonathan and strode out of his office, leaving the door open.

George Sablan was the newly appointed supervisor at the Guam cable station. His personal file was next on Jonathan's reading list. George's predecessor had been demoted to technician by Roger Mahoney and transferred to the Guam cable depot where he processed the loading and unloading of fiber-optic undersea cable aboard American Tel's cable repair ship, but mostly was relegated to the warehousing of spare cable and equipment. An outsourced part-time janitor was the only other worker at the depot. Mahoney said the transfer of the insubordinate subordinate had raised the IQ's of both the cable station and the depot, and had laughed for days over his little joke. Six months earlier, Mahoney had transferred a night-shift tech to the Kepuhi cable station in Hawaii for having a less than acceptable performance rating, with the recommendation that he be fired if his performance did not improve by two categories during the next rating period. Mahoney had no tolerance for laziness or underachievers, and unlike the technician in question, saw the transfer to Hawaii as punitive. He would have fired the tech, except the union contract stipulated a twelve-month documentation of unacceptable work performance, signed off by two managers.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from PACIFIC WIRETAPby PATRICK DOWNEY Copyright © 2010 by Patrick Downey. Excerpted by permission of IUNIVERSE, INC.. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.