I'm doing some writing of the sequel to Slow Boil Rising this evening. I'm writing a bit of a flashback/origin plot line, set about four years before the events of SBR1, back in the year 0035.
As I write, one of the main characters is receiving coded instructions via a "Numbers Station." A numbers station being a radio station that does nothing more than broadcast a voice reading numbers in sequence. Believe it or not, it was fairly easy to find them back during the Cold War. But they still exist and a few are broadcasting as you read this.
Have you ever heard a numbers station?
I'll never forget the first time I tuned one in. It was a late October hunting trip back in 2007. I was in between law school and a real job, so I decided to go be a hermit and eat what I could shoot for a little while in the woods of Whetstone Creek Conservation Area in Callaway County, Missouri. I had not seen another human being for three days, and my only social contact had been with a pack of feral dogs who tried to steal my squirrels.
On a very cold and windy evening, I had just finished eating some unfortunate varmints I had encountered earlier that day, and I was settling down by a hickory fire with a metal mug full of 100-proof bourbon. (What can I say? It was cold out!)
I fiddled with my dial, and came across something that sounded very much like this recording of one of the most famous numbers stations of all time: The Lincolnshire Poacher.
My jaw dropped, and I began to worry that I had procured some poisonous whiskey. The numbers just went on and on.
When you hear the recording the of the Lincolnshire Poacher, what do you think is going on?
Within the past few years, I’ve had the better fortune of running across a numbers station while also having access to the interwebs. I Googled the frequency, and bingo! Online research shed a bit of light on the phenomenon.
There are a decent amount of working theories on how these stations operate. What these theories have in common is the use of a shared cipher between the people doing the transmitting and the people doing the receiving. The most uncrackable of which is a "one-time pad" that is custom made for the code. Cruder versions involve translating the numbers directly into letters.
The method I am writing about in SBR2 is a combination of a numbers station and "book code." In other words, the repeating sequences of numbers are directing the listener to specific words on specific pages of a specific book to construct a message.
Now if you want a real treat, listen to the UVB-76, otherwise known as The Buzzer.
Sweet dreams!