The Towers (31 page)

“That's what we're here for, Navy.”

The JOC had taken shape overnight out of GP tents and a section of hastily reroofed revetment-slash-hangar. Crews were still running cables even as headquarters staff ripped open boxes, snapped open folding tables, and began setting up computers and screens and cots for the watch sections. Dan stood back, letting the Army do its thing. Pondering, not for the first time, how organized human beings seemed to get at the prospect of destroying things. Something crunched under his boots. Looking down, he saw he was standing on a carpet of expended brass mixed with a box of nails that had broken open and been trodden into the dry dirt.

When he located what they said would be the targeting section, he and Henrickson moved in, taping up a ripped-off piece of cardboard box Magic Markered
US NAVY TOMAHAWK CELL.
This pulled in folks who'd been roaming the edges of the action, and by the time dark fell, Dan had a ATWCS version 3 crew set up with three chiefs and two lieutenants. He'd identified his intelligence flows and linked up with the briefing team, the S-3 and the S-2. He found a Navy Predator team and established a data link. Targeting from the drone to an in-flight Tomahawk, which was possible with the Block IIIs, would let them put a weapon on something as mobile as a vehicle convoy.

He also had his first assignment: to brief General E. H. Salter, USA, at 0800 the following day.

*   *   *

THE
next morning Donnie Wenck arrived. Wenck was another TAG member Dan had worked with on previous missions, a Navy first-class OS whose aw-shucks demeanor and occasional spaciness disguised a mastery of arcane software fixes. Dan put him and Henrickson to work smoothing out the rough edges of uploading targeting information and at 0745 headed to the command tent, cargo pockets bulging with notes and printed-out references.

As it turned out, it wasn't a one on one, but a command brief, and the brigadier wasn't even there. It was good for an overview of the Joint Task Force setup, though. There were Spanish, Italians, Canadians, French, Germans, and British, along with the occasional bewildered-looking Afghan, and what Dan suspected were Ukrainians too.

Two things swiftly became plain. The first was that the campaign was going astonishingly fast. The Air Force briefers glowed. Precision-guided munitions had stripped the regime of air defenses; B-52 strikes had decimated their ground forces, which had made the mistake of concentrating in trench lines in expectation of frontal attack. Alliance forces had taken nearly every major city and captured a third of the enemy's senior personnel. The second was that as far NATO was concerned, this was a Special Forces war. In fact, he got the impression that aside from air support, few regular forces other than the Tenth Mountain and Eighty-second Airborne had been committed.

When the chief of staff nodded, Dan stood for a three-minute overview of what his cell could offer in the way of planning and coordinating multiship Tomahawk strikes. Several officers had questions, all positive, which marked a change from the way the elder service had looked at the missile years before, when he'd first tried to sell it as a deep-strike platform.

The chief of staff said they'd be back to him with a follow-on target package soon. “Meanwhile, I have another question. We don't have a NAVFOR LNO assigned. We were promised one, but he's not here yet. We're still not sure we're going to organize by functional component or by service, but we need capabilities and recommendations, and we need them now.”

The LNO was a liaison officer, linking the supporting component—in this case, the Navy—to the task force commander. A sticky assignment, if you didn't have an exquisite sense of what was possible and what wasn't, as well as an extensive network of people you could call up and ask no-shit questions of. “Uh, yes, sir,” Dan said, thinking fast about what he'd have to do to not fall on his face. C2 channels, staff coordination, getting some kind of written authority with Salter's name on it—that would do to start with. The Navy air side was the area he'd have to get smart on fast. The USN was providing most of the air support for operations in the south.

“You feel capable of taking that on? Remember this is a NATO operation. Look at STANAG 2101. There's a procedure and comms checklist.”

“Yes, sir, I can handle that for you. Until you get someone senior.”

*   *   *

WALKING
back through the screams of descending aircraft, the higher-pitched whines of A-10s taking off, Dan tried to decide where he should be during the daily ops cycle to juggle both of his hats—heading up the targeting cell, versus fulfilling the traditional four duties of an LNO—monitoring, advising, assisting, and what was the fourth? Oh, yeah, coordinating. He had to call USEUCOM and let them know he was warming the chair until whoever they were going to send got here. He had to go back to the fusion cell, make sure the tie-in was there with targeting, and see if there was any other way TAG could help.

A huge earthmover beeped as it backed up. Halting to let it pass, he noticed a hollow rectangle of dirt being bermed up a few hundred yards to the side of the runway. Workers were stringing razor wire, guard towers were going up. The mover stopped, blasted black smoke from its stack, rattled forward again. He walked on.

“Call for you,” said Henrickson when he came in. Dan looked at the note.
Tent 65, SOF Compound.

When he lifted the flap, he halted. The long canvas tunnel held folding tables with at least a dozen laptops, all occupied, strung together with bright blue Ethernet cable. The cable led to a comm package, antenna pointed at the peak of the tent. Everyone was talking at once. Off to the side, a man at a screen made a come-here gesture. Another, next to him, was shaking the handset of a scrambled phone, frowning.

“Dan. We meet again. Let me send this and I'll be right with you.”

“Tony,” Dan said. Not without apprehension.

His path and Charles Anthony Provanzano's had crossed before. Most notably, in the Signal Mirror recon into Iraq, sent to find what they'd thought at the time was a quickie nuke mounted on an uprated SCUD. Just looking at him took Dan back to the Slammer. Provanzano, then a “civilian adviser” to CINCCENT, had visited the survivors at the Biocontainment Suite at Fort Detrick as Major Maureen Maddox had died slowly and horribly of a disease that wasn't supposed to exist anymore. Now he was wearing jeans, a button-down shirt, and a
UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND
sweatshirt just faded and torn enough to suggest authenticity.

“Yeah,” Provanzano said. “Salter happened to mention you were here.”

“Does he know me?”

“Does he know you? Who do you think got you that medal?”

“Which medal?”

“The Congressional,” Provanzano muttered in a tone that said,
I am exercising great patience; but I realize you are only a military man.
“Anyway, one thing led to another. And I thought maybe we could do business.” Provanzano glanced at the other man, who was logging out of the phone. He locked it and put the key down his sweatshirt on a blue lanyard. “Dan, this is ‘Beanie' Belote. Out of the bin Laden desk in DC, and the closest thing we've got to a Pashtun expert. Beanie, Dan Lenson, one of the sharper operators in the Navy.”

Belote had massive arms and a bull neck. His black hair was rubber-banded back in a ponytail. He was in jeans and a black leather Harley-Davidson jacket. He and Dan exchanged wary nods. Dan turned back to Provanzano. “I'm not sure where you're going with that, Tony. And I've got a briefing to get ready. So—”

“I know about the briefing. Siddown.” The Agency man pointed at a folding chair and lifted a plastic cup in a toast. “You don't drink, or I'd offer. But—do I understand right? You were actually in the Pentagon, when it was hit? Like to hear the story.”

“It's not a
story,
” Dan said. “Just a lot of innocent people, suddenly blown apart or burned to death. Not that complicated.”

“I see … that anger's good. If it doesn't get in your way.”

“It hasn't before.”

“I see what you mean. You're a survivor. Dumb, but a survivor. I'll give you that.”

Dan hesitated, then let himself down into the chair. “Yeah, just a dumb squid. What's on your mind, Tony?”

“Just thought we'd catch up. We kept tabs on TAG. The Shkval, getting your hands on it—that was a dirty, dirty op. And I hear you had something to do with taking down Al-Maahdi, or whatever he called himself.”

“The guy behind the Cosmopolite bombing?” Belote said, looking interested for the first time.

“The same. Dan, you might be interested to know: his buddy, the little fat one, hasn't been seen since the Saudis took him into custody. We doubt he's going to be involved in any more bombings.”

“Should I say thanks?”

“If you want to.”

Belote said, “I don't know you, buddy, but there's no reason to take that tone. We're all on the same side, right?”

“Are we?”

Provanzano said, uncapping a small white tube, “Yeah, we are. And never more so than now. An attack on the continental United States. We have to work together on this one.” He put the tube into a nostril and sniffed; then did the other one. When he saw Dan looking, he held it up. “Vicks. Helps, with all this dust in the air. Want a hit?”

“We might not have had to ‘work together' if you and the FBI had shared files.” Dan tried to keep the accusatory tone out of his voice, but wasn't succeeding. “The ‘Bin Laden Desk' might have figured out something was funny. Arabs taking flying lessons, but not bothering to learn how to land.”

Belote said, “Believe me, buddy, you don't have the faintest idea what you're talking about. We had a local team following bin Laden for three years. If during that time anyone had given us the green light—”

“Uh-huh.” Dan removed his hands from the sides of the metal chair, which were unpleasantly sticky, as if someone who'd just eaten a Bit-O-Honey had last grasped them. Wiped his palms on his uniform trou as the civilian went on.

“Point being, since 9/11 the rules have changed. The review committees, we can't do this, can't say that—ancient history. We need people in the field who know the field. We gutted our expertise during the de Bari years. Which reminds me, you hear the joke? Jimmy Carter, Dick Nixon, and Bob de Bari are on the
Titanic—
”

“I heard it,” Dan said. “Look, you've got your responsibilities, I've got mine. And mine just got a lot heavier.”

“They're the same responsibilities.” Provanzano set the cup aside. Looked at the inhaler again, but didn't pick it up. Dan smelled scotch and eucalyptus oil.

“Since he's here”—Dan nodded at Belote—“I assume this is about bin Laden. Is it? About him? Which seems to me to be the highest-priority tasking for all of us.”

“It'd be nice,” Belote said. “See that box?”

A large, heavy-looking, drab plastic crate with locking latches sat in the corner of the tent. “What about it?”

“Want to know what's in it?”

Dan suppressed a sigh. “Okay.”

“Dry ice. For shipping bin Laden's head back. That's our orders: Get the head.”

Dan dredged for a response, but none came.

“But even when we do, that won't be the end. This'll be a long war. Now. I want to hear about this localization program. The one you got Al-Maahdi with.”

“You mean CIRCE,” Dan said.

“We've got something like it,” Belote said. “But not as far along as yours, apparently. You started with what, a submarine program?”

“Antisubmarine,” Dan said.

Provanzano called up a file on his notebook. Read off the screen, “‘CIRCE: a Navy-developed stochastic modeling agent reasoning framework. Developed from an off-the-shelf circle-of-contacts product. Originally intended to integrate multiple near-chaotic inputs in a littoral environment to locate quiet submarines. Now a multiagent model that integrates comms, intel, social and spatial relations to predict both location and strategies of a unitary actor.' Accurate?”

“Close enough.”

“Who's your contractor?”

Dan said reluctantly, “We brewed it up in-house. With a local company. You probably haven't heard of them. They're not Beltway players.”

Belote dove for the plywood floor. Dan went down a fraction of a second behind him; Provanzano and the others in the tent dropped next. The
crack
was like the sky wrenching open. The tent rocked; dust sifted out of the fabric and made the air suddenly choking. A second explosion, even closer, jarred splintered wood into his cheek. He pressed himself into it, eyes closed. Waiting for the third and last detonation that would end them all.

Lying next to him, Provanzano just kept talking. Through the blasts, and the clatter of a machine gun from the perimeter. “Like I said: the gloves are off. We want bin Laden. We'll do anything necessary to get him. Any caveats?”

“No argument here.”

“Good, because you're on board. With us. With CIRCE. To find him.”

Dan considered it between explosions. He'd always steered clear of the intel side. Not even sure in his own mind why, but he'd avoided it. The table above them jumped, and a computer slammed down onto the deck and bounced. The lights went out to the shrill, insistent peeping of backup power supplies. The burnt-matches smell of explosives seeped through the canvas, and above him two rips magically appeared. “Getting serious,” Belote said. Looking at him, Dan saw he was grinning.

“I've got two assignments already. Targeting and Navy liaison.”

“By tomorrow, you'll be one of us orcs,” Provenzano said.

“Not volunteering.”

“Nobody asked you to.”

“Put up or shut up, buddy boy,” said the stocky agent. “You don't think we did our job, got the towers blown up? Okay, show us how it's done. Here's a clue. ‘The sheikh speaks from the Place of Kings.' Chew on that for a while.”