Gauntlet (9 page)

All he knew was that an extremely valuable cargo would arrive in the very near future. He had received the signal — Devil’s Anvil needed to be ready, and soon. Now he was on his way home; for that much money, he wanted to be personally involved. There could be no screw-ups. No more of that bullshit that Benny always brought with him. This transaction had to be smooth and seamless. The call had come in, cryptic and short, but the directions were very clear. So, first to Missoula, Montana, to arrange for an appropriate truck to be waiting, and then to Devil’s Anvil, to prepare for the cargo that was, apparently, incredibly valuable.

He rode on through the warm August night, wrapped up in his own greed and arrogance.

R
ICHARD SWITCHED OFF the Thuraya Satellite telephone. He smiled wryly as he realized that he could use the system, here, deep in the desert, without fear of detection. Only the satellites of the National Reconnaissance Office could detect and track Sat-phone transmissions, and since the CIA and the NRO had the same boss, and that’s whom he wanted to speak with, he didn’t care if the call was detected.

“You need Kingston from the NGA,” Baxter had told him. “He’s been reading Keyhole images for the past ten years. If anyone can help you, he can. No one does IMINT like he does.” IMINT was short for Image Intelligence.

Richard shook his head. “Has it ever occurred to you, Baxter, how weird you guys sound? Keyholes. NSA. NRO. IMINT. Perhaps we should add that I’m LOL and you’re FUBAR?”

Baxter snorted. It was well known that Richard’s sense of humor tended toward the dark side, and was drier than the sands of the Sahara. Personally Baxter had always found him quite funny, but this wasn’t the time for jokes. “The Prez says this one has priority. Everyone in the community has been advised. Washington is getting a little concerned about this,” he said. “Langley is definitely on edge, and in the last day or two we’ve had increased chatter about WMD. Goldberg’s message suggests a pretty big attack, possibly on one of the ports. Even compared to that, this Semtex thing is gaining ground on the radar screen.”

“OK,” Richard replied. “Well tell the Prez to take a Valium or something. We’re on it.”

“You’ll get all the help you need, on the ground and at Langley, and pretty much anywhere else you want to turn. It’s going to share the front page of the PDB with that Goldberg message, especially with American servicemen being killed.” With that, Baxter hung up.

Richard was in the process of reciting the conversation back to McMurray when the Thuraya rang again. “Under 60 seconds,” muttered the Sergeant. “They must be worried.”

Richard picked it up after the first ring. “Lawrence,” he barked.

“This is Captain Martin Kingston, from NGA. Just got a personal call from the Deputy Director of Central Intelligence telling me to drop everything I’m doing and talk to you. Seeing as how you’re Navy, I figured that probably means you’re out of toilet paper, but an order is an order. What do you need?”

The NGA was the latest alphabet soup concoction served up by DC bureaucrats, and stood for the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency. It had been known as the National Imagery and Mapping Agency, an amalgamation of various other mapping and imaging organizations within the Intelligence Community. The NGA was closely affiliated with the NSA, and was connected, via dedicated fiber-optic lines, to the supercomputers used in Crypto City. Kingston was in daily communication with his counterparts at the NSA, and had in fact trained many of that department’s image readers. These days, he had workspaces in both agencies.

Kingston usually worked on the top floor of what was now the NGA headquarters building in Bethesda, Maryland. Like so many others in his profession, it was rumored that he slept and lived in his office, which covered almost a quarter of the floor. His name was legendary in the small but somewhat eccentric school of image analysts. He was responsible for creating the term “blobologist”—a person who specialized in identifying fuzzy images on a computer screen. He had an identical office in the basement of the NSA OPS1 building at Fort Mead, where he was equally famous for his work. He was well into his 70s, but his skills were so valuable that both the NGA and NSA had done considerable lobbying to keep him on after his official retirement age. Not that he had complained. They would have had to drag him, kicking and screaming, from his office.

“Not funny, Captain,” replied Richard. “This is actually pretty serious. We’ve got a bit of a problem here.”

“OK, how can I help?”

Richard resisted the impulse to suggest that he could help by sending over 400 Percodans. The pain in his back and head was becoming unbearable. “Well, sir, I think 4.5 tons of Minyar’s Semtex just disappeared,” he stated bluntly. He gave Kingston a basic outline of what had occurred.

“So when do you think the DC-3 took off?” asked Kingston.

“That’s the question at hand. We think it left a little strip just south of Zighan, in the middle of the Libyan desert, sometime in the 12 hours preceding the blast,” said Richard, ducking away from the wasp that was buzzing around his forehead. “It probably vectored south, then entered northwest Darfur for refueling.”

“OK,” said Kingston. “I’ll have a look. But most of the NRO-deployed assets are focused on Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Korea. You know, the problem areas. We don’t have any of the new ORION’s covering your area. We may have something from one of the older Keyholes . . . maybe a KH-12 would have picked it up. I’ll put a team of people on this immediately, and get the guys at the NSA to help out. I’ll get right back to you.”

The KH-12 had been the designated workhorse for the Intelligence Community in the ’90s. When launched, it weighed more than seven tons. Most of that was an excess of fuel, which allowed the satellite to maneuver extensively while in orbit, to reach areas of greater interest. It could be serviced and refueled by the space shuttle. This particular satellite had sophisticated optics that digitally enhanced any images before relaying them to Earth, to provide full-spectrum image Intelligence data virtually instantaneously. It had high-res infrared imaging technology, capable of detecting camouflage and buried structures, with an image resolution of less than ten centimeters. An astounding feat, really, but nothing in comparison to what the KH-14’s and the new ORION’s could do. Richard would still be glad to have anything a KH-12 might have picked up.

“Well, now what?” asked McMurray when he hung up. Richard shrugged. He was about to suggest that a cold beer would be nice when he was hailed by one of the Night Hawk captains.

“We’ve been ordered to hang around,” Second Lieutenant George Clinton of the US Navy told them. “Two of the choppers are staying on the ground, and when we get the order we’re supposed to take you to an undisclosed location. Weird fucking orders, but apparently Langley’s involved, so that would explain it. Don’t go far,” he warned, smiling.

“Yeah, right,” laughed Richard. “I’m heading for the nearest sports bar to have a cold beer with the good Sergeant here.” He pounded McMurray on the back.

“Nah, I’ll be in southern Arizona,” replied McMurray. “Golf. Beaches. Wife and kids. The works.” They all laughed and hunkered down in the shade of the Night Hawk, trying to pretend they were anywhere other than the middle of the Sahara Desert.

S
O YOU KNOW this Goldberg?” asked McMurray. Richard had just finished filling him in on his telephone conversation with the new Washington Intelligence Agency.

“Yeah. He’s kind of like a brother,” said Richard. “We grew up together. His family took me in when my parents died in an accident in Pakistan. Then we served together. Crossed paths often. We both ended up in Islamabad, which is home for me, really. Haven’t seen Zak in years. He’s in deep cover somewhere in the Middle East. Went under about four years ago. Can’t really say more about it than that.”

McMurray could see that Richard was concerned. There were deep grooves carved into his brow, and he was speaking too quickly. His hand was automatically reaching for some sort of pain medication in his pocket. Not that he blamed the man. News of the Goldberg memo had spread far and wide within the Intelligence and military communities. There were no illusions about what it might mean . . . or the obvious danger Zak was facing.

G
LEANING MEANINGFUL INFORMATION from satellite imaging systems was a black art, studied by many and mastered by only a few. Martin Kingston had a knack for it. He loved it. What to the untrained eye was just a blur inside a shadow, a dark spot inside a smudge, was to Kingston a vehicle. Beyond that, it was a Ford or a Chevy, a model, and sometimes even a color. He boasted that someday he would even be able to read the serial numbers of cars found in this way. On the ORION’s, the image resolution was less than three centimeters. Now the scientists at the NRO and NASA were working on resolutions of one centimeter. Before long they would have Hubble-type telescope satellites, pointed back at Earth. Kingston joked that soon they’d be reading briefing notes from space, and that using infrared, the government could have a detailed account of who was having sex with whom, at any given moment. A brave new world indeed.

Kingston quickly determined, through the Master Progressive Scan Imaging Database (MP-Sid to those who knew it personally), which satellites had been scanning the area and time frame Richard needed. Three satellites—KH-11/02B, KH-12/021B, and KH-13/002—would have taken, in rapid succession, digital images of the desert sands of Zighan, at the very edge of their focusing area. He divided each satellite’s footage into four three-hour segments, and collared 12 of his coworkers to analyze, frame by frame if necessary, the appropriate area.

It was like looking for a needle in a haystack, but IMINT personnel had received assignments like this many times before. “Find out where Yeltsin’s plane was yesterday afternoon,” they had been told. “Find out if there was an explosion at such-and-such a place three days ago,” or “Find out how many tanks were at this location in North Korea at this time.” Many years earlier, when the art was still in its infancy, and the equipment was of Stone Age caliber, one President had tested a boast from a four-star General of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

“OK,” the President had joked. “A couple of my cows found a break in a fence, and disappeared into the Texas Mesa. Find them.”

And IMINT had. Finding a DC-3 would not be that big a problem for them. Once the workload had been appropriately segmented, the assignment wouldn’t take long at all.

A
S EXPECTED, Richard’s Thuraya rang within an hour.

“Lawrence,” he answered sharply, holding his head. Standing in the 120-degree heat of one of the largest deserts in the world, dealing with this situation, was doing nothing for the pounding taking place inside his skull.

“Richard, this is Captain Kingston from the NGA,” Kingston said. “I think we’ve got it. We’ve compared and isolated more than 500 frames from the area in question. A DC-3 did arrive at the Zighan airstrip sometime between 7 and 9pm, local time. It left around midnight. We have a couple of thermal scans that show maybe four or five individuals in the area just before then. They may have been loading or unloading cargo. We’re not sure.”

“Can you tell where the plane came from?” asked Richard.

“We can’t. But there are a couple of frames that tell us which direction it went.”

“Where?”

“It headed south by southeast.” Kingston gave Richard the exact coordinates.

“Any idea where it landed, or where it was heading?”

“No, sorry. It headed toward the Sudan, but we didn’t have any satellites scanning northwest Darfur during the time frame when it would have landed. You’re on your own on that one,” said Kingston.

“OK,” said Richard. “But maybe you could help me with one more thing. Your computers have access to a lot of image and mapping data. Given the vector of the DC-3, is it possible to draw up a list of places they might have been heading? Are there any landing strips in Darfur along the path they were taking? Options for us to check out?”

“Well, we could check that,” replied Kingston. “But it would take us awhile. The boys at TTIC could get it to you faster. They have access to an incredible pile of information, way more than us. And they have this monster interactive map, all done digitally. I haven’t seen it, but I’ve heard what it can do.”

“TTIC? I think I talked to them earlier. Aren’t they the ones who figured out the Madrid thing before Madrid figured it out?”

“Yeah, that’s them. Kind of an odd group of people, but they have access to pretty much everything. Their supercomputer is as powerful as the ones at the NSA. I’m going to see if I can put you through directly. Need to get authority. Hang on.”

Kingston called the head of IMINT, who called the DDCI’s office. Admiral Jackson called TTIC immediately.

Johnson answered. “TTIC control.”

The Admiral identified himself. Johnson nearly dropped his coffee in his lap when he heard the name. Big Jack. He straightened up instantly. “How can we be of assistance, sir?” he asked.

Big Jack, aka Admiral Jackson, aka the DDCI, explained the problem to him. “Look, we’re going to conference in Richard Lawrence, who’s in Bazemah at the moment, and Kingston from the NGA.”

There was a pause, and the sound of a line connecting. “Mr. Lawrence, are you there?” Big Jack continued, officially starting the call. “This is Admiral Jackson. We’ve got IMINT and TTIC on the line. Can you explain your problem?”

“One moment, sir,” Johnson interrupted. “I’m going to put you on our speaker system here in the control room, so that everyone here can hear this. Everyone has clearance.” He flipped a switch. The whole room was now in on the conversation. The advanced microphones, speakers, and feedback suppression electronics brought the conversation into the control room with virtually no distortion, hissing, or feedback.

“Turbee,” Johnson said. “Flip the map to Libya and Sudan.”

“One second, please,” mumbled Turbee, as he kept the DDCI, Richard, and his entire agency waiting while he saved his latest Grand Theft Auto chase sequence. “There.” He jumped up from his work area and went to the Atlas Screen control station. Dan, who’d been missing all morning, finally entered the room. Something important was officially up. Everyone sat up and started paying attention.

Meanwhile, Turbee was fumbling haplessly with the controls to the map. He was not as familiar with the system as some of the other members of the team. He had only played with it once before. He was desperately trying to put Libya and Sudan on the Atlas Screen, and having little success. Bolivia was displayed in great detail. Then Antarctica, followed by Mongolia. Then he managed to turn off the massive computer subsystem that served mapping images to the Atlas Screen. It would take a full five minutes to reboot.