[ISN] Tale of the encrypted

http://www.theage.com.au/entertainment/books/tale-of-the-encrypted-20121012-27hsy.html

By Peter Pierce
The Age
October 13, 2012

MIDNIGHT EMPIRE
By Andrew Croome
Allen & Unwin, $27.99

YET another Vogel award winner for the best unpublished first novel has 
kicked on: after Document Z (2009), his fictionalised account of the 
Petrov affair of 1951, Andrew Croome has followed up with a taut, 
exciting and complex thriller, Midnight Empire.

Young Australian Daniel Carter works for a Canberra telecommunications 
company that specialises in cryptographic technology. He is sent to an 
American air force base outside Las Vegas to install the LinkLock 
encryption device in its fleet of drones. This is (and Croome both 
puzzles and persuades us with the technical detail) ''a method of 
transmission through insecure networks, it used the principles of 
quantum mechanics and was based on imperfections in fabricated 
diamonds''.

After CIA vetting, Daniel goes to work on the Creech Air Force Base in 
the desert. He enters an unreal, or hyper-real, world in which his moral 
compass and very sense of self will be upturned. Each day he has to step 
across a painted red line, thus symbolically crossing the 7000 miles 
(11,200 kilometres) that separate the Nevada desert from Afghanistan. 
Doing so, it is necessary to ''imagine, in fact believe, that one had 
entered a war zone''. He learns ''the inevitable secrets'', for 
instance, ''that the CIA controlled an irregular army in Afghanistan, a 
paramilitary force of 3000 men''. He reads the ''kill-or-capture 
inventory of al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders''. The key target is Abu 
Yamin. Advertisement

The American asset on the inside is the agent called Protonic, ''a 
walk-up'', allegedly a defector from the Taliban to al-Qaeda. Now, as 
these men's movements are tracked in the Pakistani city of Peshawar, it 
is as if the Americans ''had spent two weeks above the city''. What 
follows is a nerve-racking narrative of betrayal and vengeance, enacted 
from afar.

[...]


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