"Bert, we just had two birds go down," Intelsat's duty engineer reported in a slightly shaken voice. "What gives?"

"Shit, we just lost three, and Westar 4 and Teleglobe are down, too. We've had complete system failures here. Running checks now - you?"

"Same here, Bert. Any ideas?"

"None. We're talking like nine birds down, Stacy. Fuck!" The man paused. "Ideas? Wait a minute, getting somewhere okay, it's software. We're interrogating 301 now they got spiked Jesus! 301 got spiked on over a hundred freqs! Somebody just tried to zorch us."

"That's how it looks here, too. But who?"

"Sure as hell wasn't a hacker this would take megawatts to do that on just one channel."

"Bert, that's exactly what I'm getting. Phone links, everything spiked at once. You in any hurry to light them back up?"

"You kidding me? I got a billion worth of hardware up there. Till I find out what the hell clobbered them, they stay down. I've got my senior VP on the way in now. The Pres was out in Denver," Bert added.

"Mine, too, but my chief engineer is snowed in. Damned if I'm going to put my ass on the line. I think we should cooperate on this, Bert."

"No arguments with me, Stace. I'll whistle up Fred Kent at Hughes and see what he thinks. It'll take a while for us to review everything and do full systems checks. I'm staying down until I know - and I mean know - what happened here. We got an industry to protect, man."

"Agreed. I won't light back up without talking to you."

"Keep me posted on anything you find out?"

"You got it, Bert. I'll be back to you in an hour, one way or another."

The Soviet Union is a vast country, by far the largest in the world both in area and in the expanse of its borders. All of those borders are guarded, since both the current country and all its precursors have been invaded many times. Border defenses include the obvious - troop concentrations, airfields, and radar posts - and the subtle, like radio reception antennas. The latter were designed to listen in on radio and other electronic emissions. The information was passed on by landline or microwave links to Moscow Center, the headquarters of the Committee for State Security, the KGB, at #2 Dzerzhinskiy Square. The KGB's Eighth Chief Directorate is tasked to communications intelligence and communications security. It has a long and distinguished history that has benefited from another traditional Russian strength, a fascination with theoretical mathematics. The relationship between ciphers and mathematics is a logical one, and the most recent manifestation of this was the work of a bearded, thirtyish gnome of a man who was fascinated with the work of Benoit Mandelbrot at Harvard University, the man who had effectively invented fractal geometry. Uniting this work with that of MacKenzie's work on Chaos Theory at Cambridge University in England, the young Russian genius had invented a genuinely new theoretical way of looking at mathematical formulae. It was generally conceded by that handful of people who understood what he was talking about that his work was easily worth a Planck Medal. It was an historical accident that his father happened to be a General in the KGB's Chief Border Guards Directorate, and that as a result the Committee for State Security had taken immediate note of his work. The mathematician now had everything a grateful Motherland could offer, and someday he'd probably have that Planck Medal also.