Salsa Book 3: Salsa In Siberia
“Irene, wake up! We’re going to be late. No more excuses! Don’t forget your picnic stuff.” Salsa was getting impatient. She had been pestering her sister to wake up for the past half an hour.
“I’m sleepy! You go back to sleep!” Irene yawned.
“We’re leaving,” Salsa called, noisily closing the room door.
“Fine!” Irene skipped out of bed and changed quickly, as Salsa went down the stairs. “Wait for me, I’m coming,” Irene shouted. The room door flew open, and out she popped.
Salsa was waiting on the stairs. “Irene, do you intend to freeze to death on the trek? Go wear your warm clothes! You can’t just wear a blanket.” Salsa rolled her eyes.
Irene rushed back in. She scrambled around her room emitting several ouches before racing back down the stairs. The door burst open presenting Irene bundled up in a thick fleece lined canvas jacket, flannel leggings, a woolen scarf, hat, gloves and socks.
“Boots,” Salsa reminded Irene, ignoring the riot of mismatched colors she often deliberately chose for her outfits.
Irene nodded as she slipped on her warm fur-lined beige boots before joining the rest of the family on the front yard. “Hiya Violet,” Irene waved.
“Here,” said Violet handing a gift-wrapped object to Irene. “A little something for you. Open it.”
Irene tore apart the shiny paper of the neatly wrapped package. “Oh, it’s awesome. This is exactly like the Fialka I saw on your desk that day.” Irene jumped about in glee. “So many buttons to press. I love buttons.”
“Yeah, I know,” Violet laughed, “so I figured I’d get you one. Now, we can chat in code. The code is much simpler, but it looks exactly like the real one.” Violet pressed a button to turn it on.
“Okay girls, time to go. We’re late.” Dad called. Irene unzipped her bag, and put the miniature Fialka in.
Salsa’s family was vacationing at a cottage in rural Siberia and Irene’s best friend Violet had joined them. They were all set to explore a hiking path that seemed promising.
Salsa’s family enjoyed hiking. Her father had been a professional before he had broken his ankle. Now they enjoyed tackling broad but steep paths.
They headed up a snowy path, in spite of Mom’s protests that the path was not charted. Mom did not like wandering off the marked trails.
As Mom made gloomy predictions about the outcome of her being outvoted, Irene raced ahead of everyone else.
Upon turning onto the trail, Violet turned to Mom and said, “Did you know that there were some ancient prison camps on nearby paths? Legend has it, that a some thieves in one of these camps used codes to communicate with their accomplices in a near by town and they hatched a daring and successful escape plan. These codes were later used in the Fialka and other Russian cryptography devices. I’m so glad you let me come. I researched all of Russia’s cryptography history, and it’s awesome. Their codes are so convoluted. In spite of all the developments in AI and data analysis, they remain relevant even today.”
“No, no Violet. We’re glad to have you. I hope you enjoy the trails.” Mom smiled, as Violet ran ahead looking for Irene. Mom liked the polite, well-behaved and geeky Violet. She was a good antidote to excitable and fidgety Irene, Mom thought. The girls were firm friends and balanced each other out.
About an hour later, Irene sat down, panting. Her cheeks were flushed. She needed the break.
Remembering her picnic mat, she spread it on the ground. She glanced around and noticed the turrets of a castle shrouded by trees at some distance, but chose to ignore it.
The region was known for its mysterious castles. Salsa and Violet had told her that the castles were haunted by ghosts of nasty Russian Tzars. Irene wasn’t feeling brave enough to face the ghost of a Russian king at the moment, not before breakfast, at least, she firmly decided.
Violet caught up with Irene ten minutes later, and plonked down on the mat beside her. “Looks like it’s going to snow,” she commented, panting.
Once she had caught her breath, she looked around and her eyes danced with mischief. Irene was busy looking through the contents of her picnic bag searching for something to eat. Violet rolled some snow into a ball and threw it at Irene.
“Hey!” Irene shouted and threw one back at her.
The two bombarded each other with increasingly large snowballs, until cold and exhausted, they collapsed on the mat, laughing.
When their laughter subsided, they sat up on the mat. “Oh look, here comes everyone else,” Violet pointed, squinting to make out their shapes in the distance. “Do you have water?” she asked.
Irene nodded and handed her a bottle.
From the distance, Salsa called, “There’s a storm approaching. Mom says we’ll all sit for a while and then go.”
“Oh, please can’t we stay for the whole day as we planned?” Irene and Violet asked.
“Mom says no, as it will be much colder and more dangerous to walk in the snow,” Salsa explained, sitting down next to them, as Mom and Dad approached the mat.
Irene was opening her bag to take out her a pack of mints when FLASH! She turned around to see the castle she had noted before, flashing bright colorful lights the instant Dad stepped on the mat.
“What just happened?” Salsa blinked.
“Well, the castle started flashing.” Irene pointed at it. She stood up and looked at the castle, her eyes shining with curiosity.
“Way to state the obvious!” Salsa shook her head in annoyance.
“You asked,” Irene reminded her.
Irene turned around to face Dad. “Look at that faint red line made of light that is near Dad’s head. It looks like a proximity sensor. I read about them somewhere. It probably set an alarm off,” Irene declared with pride in her voice.
“Hey, focus on the flashing lights.” Violet’s eyes danced as she bounced around.
“It’s a pattern,” Salsa said.
“It’s probably code,” Irene said.
“Time to head back,” Mom said, eager to get away from the strange happenings.
But Irene had already waltzed into the castle, with Salsa in pursuit, and Violet was mulling over the code. Mom was trying to convince Dad to leave.
Violet couldn’t believe her luck, a real life situation where she had to solve a code was a lifelong fantasy come true. She was obsessed with codes and secret messages and even had an ASCII table as her computer wallpaper. Her parents used to get her miniature code making and breaking machines, like a model of the German Enigma and the Russian Fialka.
“It’s morse code for do not enter!” Violet called.
“See? We should not be meddling here! Let’s go!” Mom nodded enthusiastically, to no effect.
Irene, who was busily playing with little square buttons on a console in the enormous entrance chamber of the castle shouted, “Come on in, and check out this stuff!”
Mom sighed.
Salsa peeked inside. “Violet said not to enter,” Salsa informed.
Irene was too excited to care. Salsa stepped in to grab Irene’s arm and drag her out, when an entire wall turned red.
“Oops! Oops! What did I do? Oh no! It’s red alert, like on Star Trek. Is that good? Maybe it’s good. I have no idea. All this stuff is so weird.” Irene continued to meddle only slightly disturbed by the fact that there was a flashing red wall.
“Irene,…” Salsa began.
“Oh look green writing on the flashing red wall! Nah, it’s useless. What language is that? Salsa you study so many languages, come and read this.” Irene continued with her rant.
Salsa sighed and walked towards where Irene was pointing.
“Apparently, not enough. It lookes like Morse code or something. Ask Violet.” Salsa was squinting at the dots and dashes with a raised eyebrow. She exited the palace to check up on Violet.
“The code has changed. It says you have been w-warned.” Violet stammered. “Salsa l-let’s g-get out of here.”
“See? Let’s go!” Mom said, wishing her own daughters were sensible like Violet.
“But come and look at this,” Salsa pulled Violet by her arm.
“Okay,” Violet agreed, feeling flustered.
Salsa guided Violet to the writing Irene had seen.
“It says: Outpost 54 for operation ‘No Dead Men’. Functional since 1997. Insert entry code to turn off alarm. Current status: Calling Aero Modern Military. ” Salsa watched in awe as Violet read fluently, like the text was written in English
Violet frowned. “Salsa look up Operation ‘No Dead Men’ on codebreakers.com. I think I’ve heard of it. We got data on it three days ago. The password is apegkrez, all small.”
After Salsa tapped away at her phone screen. Violet added, “Select c-r-database and click intercept frequency. The password is kemprix.”
“Got it. Operation ‘No Dead Men’ is a Russian military operation set up during the cold war. It was founded in 1997 to attack the USA. It was also known as operation building blocks, because it consisted of robots that could assemble themselves into several different structures. These robots would fight wars instead of Russian soldiers, thereby minimizing casualties. However, the operation was canceled for unknown reasons. The Russians would send a random group of civilians to send messages. The civilians were given an identifier corresponding to the outpost number, but the robots only accepted alphabetical messages in Morse code- Damn! I lost internet. But why do you know of this website anyway?” Salsa jabbed the retry button on her phone in vain.
“Every person interested in code and spies knows this website! It’s called codebreakers.com!” Violet explained.
Salsa shrugged. It all seemed totally bizarre to her, but hey, Violet seemed to know what she was doing.
Irene had been staring out of the castle window imagining herself to be a beautiful Russian princess dressed in a pink satin gown embroidered with lavender flowers, when suddenly she noticed something that made her jump with fright. “Look! Look! Look at that funny flying thing emerging from the cloud! Why is it a cube?”
“I guess it’s one of the shapes the robots can make,” Salsa said, putting the pieces together.
“Yeah, but why a cube?” Violet asked.
“It looks like a lander, like the ones that we land on the moon. They are squarish.” Irene pointed out as the cube gently touched the ground.
“Anyways, I downloaded the morse code chart before I lost the network.” Salsa was busy checking her files.
“Aha! I know what we can do. We can pretend that we are civilians the government sent to give a message.” Violet looked around the castle nervously.
Salsa nodded, “But, what does that have to do with anything?”
“You’ll see.”
Salsa ran outside to tell her parents the plan. A few minutes later she peeked her head in. “I told Mom and Dad. They don’t know if it’s going to work or not, but they agreed to nod along.”
Irene said, “Look at the lander disassembling into robots. They’re so big.”
Violet, Irene and Salsa ran outside.
Violet turned around to the robot-like things. She tapped her knee a few times to say hello, I am Violet.” “Friends” she added pointing to Irene and Salsa.. Are you the RAMM?
“We are the RAMM. We have been monitoring your activity form the castle through CCTV footage. You activated us by setting off the alarm. Is there an adult with you?” was the robot’s morse code reply.
Violet tapped her knee to say “Yes we have a message.”
“Kindly state your message.”
Knowing what the robots wanted, Violet tapped “The government wants reinstate you. We were sent here to inform you three days left before the first test run.”
“Is that the truth? Whats the password?” The robots demanded.
Violet took a deep breath. “LIV,” she tapped without hesitating. “We were to tell you, so you could prepare,” she added.
“Very well. Kindly leave. Do not interfere with the RAMM again.”
Violet tapped, “We will leave in five minutes once we have collected our belongings.”
“That is acceptable,” the giant robots nodded.
Violet, Salsa and Irene gathered the stuff on Irene’s picnic mat, folded it up and left quickly with Mom and Dad. They walked back to the cottage without a word.
“Whew, what a day,” said Violet once they returned to the cottage. She collapsed on her bed.
“How did you know the password?” Salsa asked.
Violet explained, “It was in the article that the robots could only interpret alphabets in Morse code and the only way that I knew to convert numbers to alphabetical sequences was through roman numerals. So I gave it a shot.” Violet looked sheepish.
“And you bet our lives on this guess?” Salsa raised her eyebrows.
Violet nodded, her eyes wide with fear. “Please don’t tell the rest of your family.”
“Sure. But you’re pretty badass, you know. Thanks for saving us all Geek Girl.” Salsa winked.
“Anytime.” Violet smiled. What an amazing adventure it had been!
