Dead or Alive (43 page)

D
EAD DROPS,” Mary Pat Foley announced, pushing her way through the NCTC conference room’s glass door. She walked to the corkboard to which they had tacked both the DMA chart and the Baedeker’s Peshawar map and tapped one of the dot clusters.

“Come again?” John Turnbull said.

“The legend on the back—up and down arrows combined with dot clusters—their dead-drop locations. The up arrow is the pickup signal, the down arrow the drop box location. The location of the first tells you which box to check for the package. A three-dot cluster for the pickup signal location, a four-dot cluster for the box location.

“That’s some nitty-gritty Cold War shit right there,” Janet Cummings said.

“It’s tried and true—goes back to ancient Rome.”

The fact that her colleagues seemed surprised by this turn of events told her that they—and perhaps the CIA at large—were still working with a perceptual deficit when it came to the URC’s intelligence capability. Providing the agents working the dead drops were careful, the system was an effective way to make secondhand exchanges.

“No way to know if they’re still active, though,” she said. “Not without boots on the ground.”

The phone at Ben Margolin’s elbow trilled. He picked up the handset, listened for thirty seconds, then hung up. “Nothing so far, but the computers are chewing away at it. The good news is, we’ve eliminated a sixty-mile radius around the cave.”

“Too many variables,” John Turnbull, head of Acre Station, said.

“Yep,” Janet Cummings, the NCTC’s Chief of Operations, replied.

Mary Pat Foley’s idea for solving the “Where in the world is this?” riddle surrounding the sand table Driscoll and his team had recovered from the Hindu Kush cave involved a CIA project code-named Collage.

The brainchild of some mathematician in the Langley science and technology directorate, Collage had been out of Acre Station’s frustration in answering a question to Mary Pat’s, in their case, “Where in the world is he?” The Emir and his lieutenants had long been fond of releasing photos and videos of themselves traipsing about the wilds of Pakistan and Afghanistan, giving the U.S. intelligence community plenty of hints about the weather and terrain of their locations but never enough to be of any help to UAVs or Special Forces teams in the area. Without larger context, points of reference, and reliable scale, a rock was a rock was a rock.

Collage hoped to solve that by collating every available piece of raw topographical data, from commercial and military Landsat images to radar imaging satellites such as Lacrosse and Onyx, to family photo albums on Facebook and travelogues on Flickr—as long as the image’s location could be solidly fixed and scaled to some point on earth, Collage put it into the hopper for digestion and spit it out as an overlay of the earth’s surface. Also into this mix went a dizzying array of variables: geological characteristics, current and past weather patterns, timber-use plans, seismic activity. . . . If it involved the earth’s surface and how it might look at any given time, it was fed into Collage.

Questions no one thought to ask, such as, “What does the granite in the Hindu Kush look like when it’s wet?” and “In what direction would a certain shadow lean with thirty percent cloud coverage and a dew point of
x
?” and “With ten days of twelve- to fourteen-mile-per-hour winds, how high is this sand dune in Sudan likely to get?” The permutations were daunting, as was the mathematical modeling system buried within Collage’s code structure, which ran far into the millions of lines. The problem was that the math wasn’t based solely on known variables but also imaginary ones, not to mention probability threads, as the program had to make assumptions about not only the raw data but also what it was seeing in an image or a piece of video. In, say, a thirty-second 640×480 video, Collage’s first pass would identify anywhere from 500,000 to 3,000,000 points of reference to which it had to assign a value—black or white or grayscale (of which there were sixteen thousand)—relative size and angle of the object; distance from its foreground, background, and lateral neighbors; intensity and angular direction of sunlight or thickness and air speed of cloud cover, and so on. Once these values were assigned, they were fed into Collage’s overlay matrix, and the hunt began for a match.

Collage had had some successes, but nothing of real-time tactical significance, and Mary Pat was beginning to suspect the system was going to come up short here, too. If so, the failing wouldn’t lie with the program but rather with the input. They had no idea if the sand table was even a true representation of anything, let alone whether it was to scale or within a thousand miles of the Hindu Kush.

“Where do we stand with Lotus?” Mary Pat asked. The NSA had been scouring its intercepts for any references to Lotus, in hopes of finding a pattern with which the NCTC could start back-building a picture. Like the model on which Collage was built, the number of questions they would have to answer to assemble the puzzle was daunting: When did the term first come into use? In what frequency? From which parts of the world? How was it most often disseminated—by e-mail, by phone, or through websites, or something else they hadn’t yet considered? Did Lotus precede or follow any major terrorist incidents? And so on. Hell, there were no assurances Lotus meant anything. For all they knew, it could be a pet name for the Emir’s girlfriend.

“Okay, let’s play worst-case scenario,” Margolin said, bringing things back on track.

“I say we double-cover our bets,” Cummings replied. “We know where the cave is, and we know the signal had a fairly short reach—a few dozen miles on either side of the border. Assuming Lotus means anything at all, the chances are halfway decent that it caused some kind of movement—personnel, logistics, money. . . . Who knows.”

The problem, Mary Pat thought, was that personnel and logistics were often better tracked with HUMINT—human intelligence—than they were with signals intelligence, and right now they had virtually none of those assets in the area.

“You know what my vote would be,” Mary Pat told the NCTC’s director.

“We’ve all got the same wish list, but the resources just aren’t there—not in the depth we’d like.”

Thanks to Ed Kealty and DCI Scott Kilborn,
she thought sourly. Having spent the better part of a decade rebuilding its stable of case officers—much of it through Plan Blue—the Clandestine Service had been ordered to scale back its overseas presence in favor of ally-generated intelligence. Men and women who had risked their lives building agent networks in the bad-lands of Pakistan and Afghanistan and Iran were being reeled back into the embassies and consulates with not so much as an attaboy.

“Then let’s think out of the box,” Mary Pat said. “We’ve got tappable assets there—just not ours. Let’s reach out for some good old-fashioned ally-generated intelligence.”

“The Brits?” Turnbull asked.

“Yep. They’ve got more experience in Central Asia than anyone else, including the Russians. Couldn’t hurt to ask. Have somebody check the dead drops, see if they’re still viable.”

“And then?”

“We cross that bridge when we get there.”

At the end of the conference table, Margolin tilted his head back and stared at the ceiling for a moment. “The problem isn’t the asking; the problem is getting permission to ask.”

“You have got to be fucking kidding me,” Cummings said.

He wasn’t, Mary Pat knew. While Kilborn’s deputies in intelligence and Clandestine hadn’t guzzled the Kool-Aid like the DCI had, they were certainly imbibing. In choosing Kilborn, President Kealty had ensured that the CIA’s upper echelons would toe the executive branch’s new line, regardless of the consequences to the agency or to the intelligence community at large.

“So don’t ask,” Mary Pat said simply.

“What?” replied Margolin.

“If we don’t ask, we can’t get a no. We’re still spitballing here, right? Nothing’s operational, nothing’s funded. We’re just fishing. It’s what we do; it’s what they pay us to do. Since when do we have to ask anyone about a little chat with an ally?”

Margolin looked hard at her for a few moments, then shrugged. The gesture said nothing and everything. She knew her boss well enough to know she’d struck a chord. Like her, Margolin loved his career but not at the expense of doing his job.

“We never talked about this,” Margolin said. “Let me run it up the flagpole. If we’re flamed, we’ll do it your way.”

 

 

 

T
his was the real Russia, Vitaliy thought, with the harshest winters in a nation famous for bitter weather. The polar bears here were fat now, covered in a thick layer stored up for insulation, enough to allow them to sleep the months away in caves hollowed out amid the pressure ridges and seracs on the ice, waking occasionally to snatch a seal that ventured too close to a breathing hole.

Vitaliy stood up and shook himself awake, then shuffled into the galley to get the water started for his morning tea. The temperature was just above freezing—what passed for a warm fall day. No new ice had formed overnight, at least nothing his boat couldn’t crush or bypass, but the decks were coated in an inch-thick layer of frozen spindrift, something he and Vanya would have to chop free, lest the boat grow top-heavy. Capsizing in these waters meant almost certain death; without immersion suits, a man could expect to be unconscious within four minutes and dead within fifteen, and while he had enough suits aboard for everyone, his passengers had shown little interest in his explanation of their use.

His charter party was awake, struggling to stamp their feet and fling their arms across their chests. They all lit their cigarettes and moved aft to the boat’s primitive head facilities. All ate the bread and ice-hard butter set out for breakfast.

Vitaliy gave it an hour to get the day started, then he fired up his diesels and backed off the gravel beach on which they’d spent the night. His charts were already laid out, and he headed east at ten knots. Vanya spelled him at the wheel. They listened to an old but serviceable AM radio, mostly classical music beamed out from Archangel. It helped pass the time. There were ten hours of steaming remaining to their destination. About 160 kilometers. Ten hours at ten knots, so said the chart.

“That doesn’t look good,” Vanya said, pointing off the starboard bow.

On the eastern horizon was a line of swollen black clouds, so low they almost seemed to merge with the ocean’s surface.

“Not good at all,” Vitaliy agreed. And it would get worse, he knew. To reach their destination they would have to pass through the storm—either that or go far out of their way, or even ground the boat and wait it out.

“Ask Fred to come up, will you?” Vitaliy said.

Vanya went below and returned a minute later with the leader of the charter group. “A problem, Captain?”

Vitaliy pointed through the window at the squall line. “That.”

“Rain?”

“It doesn’t rain here, Fred. It storms. The only question is, to what degree? And that mess there, I’m afraid, is going to be bad.”
Worse still for a T-4 slab-sided landing craft with one meter of draft,
he didn’t add.

“How long until we reach it?”

“Three hours—a little longer, maybe.”

“Can we weather it?”

“Probably, but nothing is certain out here. Either way, it’s going to be rough going.”

“What are our alternatives?” asked Fred.

“Return to where we just overnighted or head south and try to get around the edge of the storm. Either option will cost us a day or two of travel time.”

“Unacceptable,” Fred replied.

“It will be dicey, going through that—and you and your men are going to be miserable.”

“We will manage. Perhaps a bonus for your trouble will make the inconvenience more palatable?”

Vitaliy shrugged. “I’m game if you are.”

“Proceed.”

 

 

 

T
wo hours later he saw a ship on the horizon, heading west. Probably a supply ship, coming back from delivering her cargo of oil-drilling equipment to the new oil field discovered farther east, up the Lena River, south of Tiksi. Judging by the ship’s wake, she was making her best speed, obviously trying to outpace the very storm into which they were headed.

Vanya appeared at his side. “Engines are fine. We’re locked down tight.” Vitaliy had asked him to prepare the boat for the impending weather. What they couldn’t do was either prepare their guests for what was to come or prepare for what the sea might do to the boat. Mother Nature was fickle and cruel.

Earlier, Vitaliy had asked Fred to have his men lend a hand in de-icing the boat, something they did despite their unsteady legs and seasick green pallor. While half of them chopped at the ice with sledgehammers and axes, the other half, under the supervision of Vanya, had used grain shovels to scoop the loosened chunks of ice overboard.

“How about after this we move to Sochi and run a boat there?” Vanya asked his captain after releasing the passengers to go below and rest.

“Too hot there. That’s no place for a man to live.” The usual arctic mentality. Real men lived and worked in the cold, and boasted how tough they were. And besides, it made the vodka taste better.

Ten miles off their bow the storm loomed, a roiling gray-black wall that seemed to visibly surge forward before Vitaliy’s eyes. “Vanya, go below and give our guests a refresher course on the immersion suits.”

Vanya turned toward the ladder.

“And make sure they pay attention this time,” Vitaliy added.

As a captain, he had a professional responsibility to ensure the safety of his passengers, but more important, he doubted whoever his party worked for would be forgiving, should he get them all killed.