Line of Control (12 page)

    They always met up here after a mission but never with such urgency.

    First, Sharab usually liked to go back to whatever house or hut or barn they had occupied in order to have a final talk with their host. She wanted to make sure that whoever she left behind understood that they would remain alive only as long as they remained silent. Some of the team members did not agree with her charity, especially when they were Hindus like Apu and his granddaughter. But Sharab did not want to turn the people against her.

    To her, whether they were Muslim or not, most of these farmers, shepherds, and factory workers were already Pakistani. She did not want to kill innocent countrymen, present or future.

    The skies were dark and Ishaq flipped on his headlights.

    A powerful lamp illuminated the road almost two hundred yards ahead.

    That was barely enough visibility to allow him to keep moving at his current pace. Curves came up so suddenly that he nearly went off the cut twice. Every now and then he slowed for just a moment to keep from feeling like he could fly. That was a very real delusion at this height and these speeds. He also took that time to glance back. He wanted to make sure he was not being followed. With the hum of the engine echoing off the crags and valleys, the sputtering of his cheeks, and the knocking of the thrown pebbles, Ishaq would not necessarily hear the roar of a pursuing vehicle or helicopter. He had warned Apu to stay in the house and he had cut the telephone line. But still-one never knew how a man would react when a family member was in captivity.

    Ishaq saw another roadside marker. He was at forty-five hundred feet now. He did not know exactly how far Sharab and the team would be able to go in the van. They were coming up another cut. Maybe they could get to five thousand feet before the road became too narrow to accommodate the truck. The roads joined a few hundred feet ahead. When he arrived, he would either see their tire treads or else wait for them at the cave.

    He hoped they were already there. He was anxious to know what had happened, what had gone wrong.

    He prayed it was nothing that might keep them from him.

    If for some reason the others did not show up within twenty four hours, Ishaq's standing orders were to get to the cave and set up the radio he carried in his small equipment case.

    Then he was to call the FKM base in Abbottabad, across the border in Pakistan. They would tell him what to do. That meant either he would be advised to wait for replacements or attempt to return home for a debriefing.

    If it came to that, Ishaq hoped they would tell him to wait.

    Going home would mean climbing the mountains to the Siachin Glacier. Or else he would have to attempt to make his way across the line of control. His chances of surviving the trip were not good. FKM command might just as well order him to shoot himself at the cave.

    As Ishaq neared the point where the two cuts converged he saw the truck.

    It was parked in the middle of the road.

    The flatbed was covered with an earth-tone tarp they carried and the cab was hidden beneath scrub. A smile fought a losing battle against the wind. He was glad they had made it. But that changed when his headlights found the team about two hundred yards ahead. As one they turned and crouched, ready to fire.

    "No, it's Ishaq!" he cried.

    "It's Ishaq!"

    They lowered their weapons and continued ahead without waiting for their teammate. Sharab was in front with the girl.

    Nanda was being urged forward at gunpoint.

    That was not like Sharab.

    This was bad. This was very, very bad.

    

    Washington, D. C. Wednesday, 10:51 a. m.

    Bob Herbert was usually a pretty happy man.

    To begin with, Herbert loved his work. He had a good team working beside him. He was able to give Op-Center personnel the kind of heads-up intelligence he and his wife never had in Lebanon. He was also happy with himself. He was not a Washington bureaucrat. He put truthfulness above diplomacy and the well-being of the NCMC above the advancement of Bob Herbert. That meant he could sleep at night. He had the respect of the people who mattered, like Paul Hood and Mike Rodgers.

    But Bob Herbert was not happy right now.

    Hank Lewis had phoned from the NSA to say that the latest information e-mailed from Ron Friday was being processed by decryption personnel.

    It would be forwarded to Herbert within minutes. While Herbert waited for the intel he did something he had been meaning to do since the Striker recon mission was okayed by the CIOC. He pulled up Ron Friday's NSA file on his computer. Until now, Herbert and his team had been too busy helping Mike Rodgers and Striker prepare for the mission to do anything else.

    Herbert did not like what he saw in Ron Friday's dossier.

    Or rather, what he did not see there.

    As a crisis management center, Op-Center did not keep a full range of military maps and intelligence in what they called their "hot box." The only files that were reviewed and updated on a four-times-daily basis were situations and places where American personnel or interests were directly involved or affected. Kashmir was certainly a crisis zone.

    But if it exploded, it was not a spot with which Op-Center would automatically be involved. In fact, that was the reason Striker had been asked to go into the region and look for Pakistani nuclear weapons.

    Pakistani intelligence would not be expecting them.

    Ron Friday was a very late addition to the mission. His participation had been requested over the weekend by Satya Shankar, minister of state.

    Department of Atomic Energy.

    Officially, one of Shankar's duties was the sale of nuclear technology to developing nations. Unofficially, he was responsible for helping the military keep track of nuclear technology within enemy states.

    Shankar and Friday had worked together once before, when Shankar was joint secretary. Exploration, of the Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas. Friday had been called in by a European oil concern to assess legal issues involving drilling in disputed territory between Great Indian Desert in the Rajasthan Province of India and the Thar Desert in Pakistan. Shankar had obviously been impressed by the attorney.

    Since Op-Center was stuck with Friday, reading his file had not been a high priority for Herbert. Especially since the CIOC had already okayed Friday based on his Blue Shield rating. That meant Ron Friday was cleared to take part in the most sensitive fieldwork in foreign countries. Red Shield meant that an agent was trusted by the foreign government.

    White Shield meant that he was trusted by his own government, that there was no evidence of double-agent activity.

    Yellow Shield meant that he had been revealed to be a double agent and was being used by his government to put out disinformation, often without his knowledge or occasionally with his cooperation in exchange for clemency. Blue Shield meant he was trusted by both nations.

    What the Red, White, and Blue rankings really meant was that no data had ever come up to suggest the agent was corrupt. That was usually good enough for a project overseer to rubber-stamp an individual for a mission. Especially an overseer who was new on the job and overworked, like Hank Lewis at the National Security Agency. But the Shield system was not infallible. It could simply mean that the agent had been too careful to be caught. Or that he had someone on the inside who kept his file clean.

    Friday's file was extremely skimpy. It contained very few field reports from Azerbaijan, where he had most recently been stationed at the United States embassy in Baku as an aide to Deputy Ambassador Dorothy Williamson. There were zero communications at all from him during the recent crisis in the former Soviet Republic. That was unusual. Herbert had a look at the files of the two CIA operatives who had been stationed at the embassy. They were full of daily reports.

    Coincidentally, perhaps, both of those men were killed.

    Friday's thin file and his apparent silence during the crisis was troubling. One of his superiors at the NSA, Jack Fenwick, was the man who had hired the terrorist known as the Harpooner to precipitate the Caspian Sea confrontation between Azerbaijan, Iran, and Russia. Herbert had not read all the postmortems about the situation. There had not been time. But Friday's silence before and during the showdown led Herbert to wonder: was he really inactive or were his reports made directly to someone who destroyed them?

    Jack Fenwick, for example.

    If that were true it could mean that Ron Friday had been working with Jack Penwick and the Harpooner to start a war.

    Of course, there was always the possibility that Friday had been helping Fenwick without knowing what the NSA chief was up to. But that seemed unlikely. Ron Friday had been an attorney, a top-level oil rights negotiator, and a diplomatic advisor. He did not seem naive.

    And that scared the hell out of Herbert.

    The decrypted NSA e-file arrived and Herbert opened it.

    The folder contained Friday's observations as well as relevant data about the previous antiterrorist functions of both the National Security Guard and the Special Frontier Force.

    It did not seem strange to Herbert that SFF had replaced the Black Cats after this latest attack. Maybe the SFF had jurisdiction over strikes against religious sites. Or maybe the government had grown impatient with the ineffectiveness of the Black Cats. There was obviously a terrorist cell roaming Kashmir. Any security agency that failed to maintain security was not going to have that job for very long.

    Either he or Paul Hood could call their partners in Indian intelligence and get an explanation for the change. Herbert's concerns about Ron Friday would not be so easy to dispel.

    Herbert entered the numbers 008 on his wheelchair phone.

    That was Paul Hood's extension. Shortly before Op-Center opened its doors Matt Stoll had hacked the computer system to make sure he got the 007 extension. Herbert had not been happy about Stoll's hacking but Hood had appreciated the man's initiative. As long as Stoll limited his internal sabotage to a one-time hack of the phone directory Hood had decided to overlook it.

    The phone beeped once.

    "Hood here."

    "Chief, it's Bob. Gol a minute?"

    "Sure," Hood said.

    "I'll be right there," Herbert said. He typed an address in his computer and hit "enter."

    "Meanwhile, I'd like you to have a quick look at the e-files I'm sending over. One's a report from the NSA about this morning's attack in Srinagar.

    Another is Ron Friday's very thin dossier."

    "All right," Hood said.

    Herbert hung up and wheeled himself down the corridor to Hood's office.

    As Herbert was enroute he got a call from Matt Stoll.

    "Make it quick," Herbert said.

    "I was just reviewing the latest number grabs from the Bellhop," Stoll told him.

    "That telephone number we've been watching, the field phone in Srinagar?

    It's making very strange calls."

    "What do you mean?" Herbert said.

    "The field phone keeps calling the home phone in Jammu, the police station," Stoll said.

    "But the calls last for only one second."

    "That's it?"

    "That's it," Stoll told him.

    "We read a connect, a one second gap, then a disconnect."

    "Is it happening regularly?" Herbert asked.

    "There's been a blip every minute since four p. m. local time, six thirty A. M. our time," Stoll told him.

    "That's over four hours," Herbert said.

    "Short, regular pulses over a long period. Sounds like a tracking beacon."

    "It could be that," Stoll agreed, "or it could mean that someone hit the auto redial button by accident. Voice mail answers non emergency calls at the police station. The field phone may have been programmed to read that as a disconnect so it hangs up and rings the number again." "That doesn't sound likely." Herbert said.

    "Is there any way to tell if the field phone is moving?"

    "Not directly," Stoll said.

    "What about indirectly?" Herbert asked as he reached Paul Hood's office.

    The door was open and he knocked on the jamb. Hood was studying his computer monitor. He motioned Herbert in.

    "If the phone calls are a beacon, then the police in Kashmir are almost certainly following them, probably by ground based triangulation," Stoll told Herbert.

    "All of that would be run through their computers. It will take some time but we can try breaking into the system."

    "Do it," Herbert said.

    "Sure," Stoll said.

    "But why don't we just call over and ask them what's going on? Aren't they our allies? Aren't we supposed to be running this operation with them?"

    "Yes," Herbert replied.

    "But if there's some way we can accomplish this without them knowing I'd be happier. The police are going to want to know why we're asking.

    The Black Cats and selected government officials are the only ones who are supposed to know that Striker is coming over." "I see," Stoll said.

    "Okay. We'll try hacking them." "Thanks," Herbert said and hung up as he wheeled into Hood's office. He locked his brakes and shut the door behind him.

    "Busy morning?" Hood asked.

    "Not until some lunatic decided to set off fireworks in Srinagar,"

    Herbert replied.

    Hood nodded.

    "I haven't finished these files," he said, "but Ron Friday is obviously concerned about us having anything to do with the Black Cats. And you're apparently worried about having anything to do with Ron Friday."