Page 76 of Dark Chains: First Link
"His recorded devotions are still playing five times a day. I would love to shut them down since they are not doing any good when they are not actually broadcast with his live voice, but their absence would raise questions, so I keep them going."
"Smart," Kian said. "The more normal things appear on the island, the better."
"On that we agree. Is there anything else you need from me tonight?"
Toven looked at Kian, who shook his head.
"That concludes our call," Toven said. "We will contact you tomorrow at the usual time."
The line went dead without a goodbye.
Not a surprise since Losham did that each time.
Kian let out a breath. "We all know that Losham's two weeks do not really mean fourteen days. Fortunately, we will now have better progress reports from the enhanced soldiers."
That was the single biggest advantage of having an inside channel. Losham's estimates were too general and lacked any concrete basis. The Eight, on the other hand, could thrall the excavation crews and obtain precise information on the remaining debris quantity and the rate of progress.
Onegus nodded. "I'll coordinate with Number One to establish a reporting protocol. The daily updates on excavation progress are great, but an immediate notification when they're within forty-eight hours of the breach is even better."
"Right." Kian drummed his fingers on the table. "Now let's move to the operation itself." He shifted his gaze to Turner. "Where do we stand?"
"The plan has three phases. Phase one is preparation. Phase two is infiltration and extraction of the chests. Phase three is withdrawal. Let me walk you all through each one."
He drew a rough diagram as he spoke. "As we've discussed, the entry point is Navuh's secret submarine cove. It's connected to both the harem and the mansion basement by a tunnel. The submarine itself is a four-person vessel, but I doubt we can load the five chests inside even if we remove the seats, which means that we will have to bring waterproof casings for the chests and drag them underwater to our own submarine."
"Is it the same one you used for Tula's rescue?" Lokan asked.
Turner shook his head. "I'm in the process of getting us something much better that has full EMP shielding, in case we end up using it. It won't be much of a contingency if our people are affected by the blast. We need everything to remain operational. The submarine, the diving gear, and the communication equipment all need to be EMP hardened so our people can complete the mission and get out of there."
That was exactly the kind of foresight that made Turner invaluable. He was thorough and planned for failure, and for the failure of the plan that was supposed to fix the first failure.
"I'm glad you're not cutting corners," Kian said.
Turner's expression didn't change. "I never do. Corners are where people die."
"The cove entrance is underwater," Onegus said. "We estimate that it's about eight meters below the surface at mean tide. The cove itself is an underwater cavern with an air pocket large enough for Navuh's submarine and some docking infrastructure. It was designed as a last-resort escape route, so the entrance is concealed and doesn't appear on any charts or surveys."
"What about the tunnel?" Kian asked.
"According to Eluheed, the tunnel runs from the harem to the mansion, and there's a branch that goes to the cove. Navuh kept it a secret and used it exclusively, so supposedly no one else on the island knows about it. Eluheed and Tony also provided intel on the security systems." Onegus opened his laptop and looked at those notes. "The tunnel has surveillance cameras and a proximity alarm. They believe that the tunnel surveillance runs on a closed circuit that feeds only to Navuh's private computer because no one on the island was supposed to know that the tunnel or the cove existed. Not that it was hard to guess, since Navuh was journeying between the harem and his mansion twice a day, and I doubt people believed he used an invisible magic carpet to do so. Still, it's safe to assume that the feed is not connected to the island's central monitoring station."
Toven leaned back in his chair. "Who has access to those feeds now?"
"Probably just Losham," Onegus said. "But I wouldn't stake the lives of Guardians on it."
"Neither would I," Kian said. "We proceed on the assumption that the tunnel feeds are isolated, but we plan as if they're not. I want the cameras dealt with regardless."
Turner nodded. "It's a straightforward operation. The tunnel cameras monitor a static environment. Nothing moves in there. No personnel, no activity, and no traffic. That makes it easy to loop the feeds. We capture a static image from each camera and feed it back into the system, replacing the live feed. To anyone watching, and almost certainly no one is, the tunnel looks exactly as it always has. Empty and undisturbed. The loop takes less than two minutes per camera to install once we have physical access to the hardware."
"Two minutes is nothing, but there are many cameras," Onegus said. "We need to account for that in our projected timeline."
"Did Eluheed and Tony specify what kind of alarm is used in the tunnel?" Turner asked.
"From their descriptions, it's probably a proximity sensor system," Onegus said. "It was designed to alert Navuh if anyone entered the tunnel. Disabling it requires physical access to the control panel, which is near each entry point. One at the entrance to the harem and one at the cove, but they require a code. We assume that there is another one on the mansion side. A standard bypass procedure of cutting the power and bridge in the circuit should do the trick to disable it."
Kian shook his head. "The alarm might be more sophisticated than that. I'll ask William to provide us with contingency solutions for the alarm. We also can't rule out the possibility that Losham's brothers have a back door to the surveillance. It's not likely since the system was designed by Navuh to exclude everyone else. But Navuh's been gone for a very long time, andthe brothers had people poking around the mansion despite Losham taking up residence there. They might have stumbled onto something."
"It's a low probability," Turner said.
