Power Play by Patrick Robinson Read Free Book Online Page A

Russians were nowadays much more solvent. The days were past when dockyards shut down because the government could not pay the electric bills, never mind the workers’ wages.
    Today the Russian Navy was going to sea and refitting their old boats, which had lain idle for so long. They were conducting sea trials, recruiting to the navy again. Once more slipping into that tiresome old Soviet mind-set, that half-paranoid compulsion to spy on those they perceived as enemies.
    “Crazy but dangerous” was Ramshawe’s considered opinion of Russians, as he worked his way through the secrets of the world’s great military powers. He gave little thought to the stupendous effort made by the United States of America to keep private every single electron in its arsenal and to spend literally billions and billions of dollars annually finding out precisely what everyone else was up to.
    It was odd, but the United States even spied on itself. The signal, which had gone to the US Navy’s chief of naval operations on the fourth floor of the Pentagon, had already been intercepted by the NSA. Jimmy’s staff had read it before the Navy Department even saw it.

    Jimmy himself had immediately logged its importance, the clue being that it came from the first sea lord, the former submarine commander who was slated to become Great Britain’s next ambassador to Washington. Captain Ramshawe knew that too, before they even told the queen of England. Which slotted in perfectly with the US military chief’s desire for “full-spectrum dominance”—land, sea, air, space, information, and presumably the celestial world above.
    No wonder his workplace was known in the trade as Crypto City, or, less reverently, “No Such Agency,” staffed by thirty-two thousand people who denied its very existence.
    Britain’s hands-on national security partner made its headquarters on 350 acres of Maryland, fifteen miles southwest of Baltimore, its location being very deliberately clear of Washington, in case the nation’s capital was ever hit by a nuclear bomb. The political hub of the United States was judged dispensable in an emergency. The National Security Agency was not.
    Which is why Crypto City, with its thirty-two miles of roads and twenty thousand parking spaces, represents one of the largest municipalities in the state of Maryland but does not appear on any map.
    The specially constructed exit ramp off the southbound lane of the Baltimore-Washington Parkway is hidden from view by cunningly constructed earth hills and thick trees. Once off the ramp, the employees hit a labyrinth of barbed-wire fences, razor wire, huge rocks placed close together, and heavy concrete barriers.
    No one can see the motion detectors and the hydraulically raised an-titruck devices. Closed-circuit television cameras sweep the entire area, and there are warnings everywhere forbidding anyone from taking photographs or notes.
    Commandos in black paramilitary uniforms armed with submachine guns are seconds away from any area. America’s National Security Agency is probably the only place in the entire United States where an illegal intruder could, more or less, be shot on sight. The NSA’s supremely trained SWAT teams are an all-seeing force, with information fed into their own HQ from one hundred fixed watch posts manned by the agency’s own police officers.
    Behind this ironclad, merciless security lies a strange and surreal place, like nowhere else on earth, where the greatest body of international military
secrets ever assembled by any organization in history is contained. Since the dawn of the twenty-first century, Crypto City has also become the world’s preeminent and most advanced spying operation.
    There are almost seventy buildings, offices, laboratories, warehouses, factories, and living quarters. The people who work here do so in absolute secrecy. Most of them will live and die without ever mentioning even to relatives, wives, and children precisely what they do on