The Raytheon guys were looking at her as though she was speaking Hebrew, but it sounded entirely plausible to me. Esther immediately got on the phone to call Tel Aviv, and I got our liaison to take me back up to the Director’s office. After I had explained what we’d discovered, he nodded his head thoughtfully. “From what I know of these people, I think you’re right. They never forget old grudges and they would love nothing better than to pull off a coup on the anniversary of that defeat.”
He started to pick up his phone but stopped to look at me. “Now you and your team have to figure out a way to stop them.”
When I got back to our war room, the Raytheon engineers were huddled around one of the terminals. They had managed to establish a secure link between Fort Meade and Andover, and they were now on line with a test version of the Patriot fire-control guidance system. The next few hours were spent trying to find a way to root out the virus. But the system designers had never contemplated having to do surgery on the Patriot’s operating system, and they had no way to isolate the affected areas. “It’s like an epidemic,” one of the techs moaned. “It’s spread throughout the system and it’s out of control.”
January 1
While we worked feverishly, New Year’s Day in Israel proceeded without incident. Although Esther and I were gratified that her prediction had been right, it just meant we were that much closer to the time we thought the real attack would begin.
Finally, the head of Raytheon’s technical team came to me. “We’ve been over and over this thing. There are only two things we can do. The first is to shut down all the units that have been infected and wipe their entire software systems completely, including all peripherals. Then we’ll load software we know is clean, boot them up and test them. But that’s a time-consuming process, and even then we can’t be sure that the new load won’t get contaminated somewhere along the line.”
I shook my head and turned to Esther in frustration. “We can try that, but I don’t think we can get the job finished in time before midnight rolls around again in Israel. Besides, we don’t want to take the entire Dimona defense system offline that long. What if the attack comes early?”
She looked defeated, and I felt like I had failed. I turned back to the Raytheon people. “Isn’t there anything else we can try, some sort of error-checking routine that would recognize the problem and stop the virus?”
The poor guy shook his head apologetically. “When the system was developed, the possibility of a virus was never considered. Now this damn disease has infected the entire system and we just don’t have any antibiotic to kill it or vaccine to block it.”
I started to speak but the words stuck in my throat as an idea from the past came to mind. “Smallpox!” I cried. When he looked at me in confusion, I went on. “The way you fight smallpox is with cowpox, a weaker form of the same disease. We may not be able to kill the virus,” I said with growing excitement, “but what if we inoculate the system with another virus?”
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