Danger Close

by S L Shelton

  “Wait,” he said and then paused, presumably looking at the index keys I was sending him. “There's three sets of indexes here.”

  “Right…which is why I wanted you to process them,” I replied. “I need all three of them in sync before I run the image stacking software on them.”

  There was a momentary pause as his fingers clacked loudly on his keyboard.

  “I can't do this real-time without the reference frames,” he said finally.

  Shit!…that's what I was afraid of.

  “Are you alone in the server room?” I asked.

  “No. Mahesh is right here,” he replied with a questioning tone.

  “Hi Mahesh!” I said.

  “Hello, Scott,” he replied cheerfully.

  “Can you do me a favor?” I asked

  “Sure!”

  “Will you run down and quietly, without letting anyone else know that I'm on the phone, ask Jo to join Storc in the server room?” I asked.

  “No problem,” he replied.

  “And then take a thirty-minute coffee break,” I added quickly.

  “Ahhh,” he said knowingly. “Sure. I'll go get Jo.”

  “Thanks, Mahesh,” I said.

  I waited a few seconds until I heard the door close over the phone. “Is he gone?” I asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “No one else there?” I asked.

  “I'm alone,” he replied with amusement.

  “When Jo gets there, lock the server room door so you don't get interrupted and lock out the hard-line phones.”

  “Jesus, Scott. What are you sending me?” Storc asked as I heard him move away from the phone. Then, after a moment of silence, “Okay. The door is latched from the inside, and the hard-line phone is disconnected. Now tell me what you're sending me.”

  “Wait until Jo gets there,” I said.

  “I'm here,” I heard Jo say.

  “I'm sending you three satellite image feeds,” I replied. “I need them synchronized to each other on the tagged coordinates and the time indexes.”

  “Images of what?” Jo asked.

  “You'll see,” I replied. “I'm starting the feed now. Synchronize them as they come in and then feed them back to me as you link up.”

  “Running it now,” Storc said.

  In the three video windows at the top of the screen, I saw the raw image stream of the truck as it moved down the street toward the building that had exploded.

  “Okay. Griggs is looking for your missing Agent,” Piper whispered into my ear, having arrived behind me without me noticing. “What are you doing?”

  “I’m prepping frames for pulling more detail,” I said. “I have to download the software, but it’ll take the captured images and create an ‘average’ of each frame, bringing out more detail. It’s called an image stacker.”

  While the second set of video frames began compiling, I started a linked camera search on the avenue of approach for the truck. I counted twenty-one cameras that may have had a shot of the vehicle, so I began to try to access any that were network linked—there were nine.

  “How’d you get the indexed multi-image on the truck?” she asked.

  I shook my head dismissively. “Later,” I said. “I need to get some identifying marks on the truck logged so I can do the backtrail—Storc, how's it going?”

  “Fine,” he said with amusement in his voice. “You didn't need me. Jo's grabbing it all by hand and—holy shit!”

  Apparently they had just gotten to the part of the video where the truck and the building exploded.

  “Stay on task,” I said. “I need the imagery. You can freak out about it later.”

  “Please tell me you aren't there,” Jo said.

  “I'm not there,” I replied. “I'm on a base in Germany.”

  “Thank God,” Storc said.

  “Storc. Since Jo has the satellite imagery in hand, I need you to hack some video feeds for me,” I said as I compiled the list of cameras on the truck's approach to the building that had exploded and then sent him the list of IP addresses. “Sending now.”

  “Got 'em,” he said after a couple of seconds and started clacking away on his keyboard again.

  As he broke the security on each camera, I linked them manually to the video feed that was being returned to me by Jo.

  “I think that's it,” Jo said finally. “Did it all come through synchronized?”

  I watched the loop on the video twice, satisfied she had done it perfectly. “Right on,” I said. “Good work, Jo.”

  “Where is this feed from?” she asked.

  “It's best if you don't know—”

  “Midyat, Turkey,” Storc said. I shook my head. Of course he'd know that—I'd just sent him a list of IP addresses strung out along the main street down the middle of town.

  “Remember our talk,” I warned them.

  “Sorry, boss,” Storc said.

  One by one, as Storc sent me each street-level camera feed, I set about pulling the video streams. My fingers danced across the keyboard as I began clicking on image markers and then tagging them, like hanging digital wallpaper on the synchronized satellite feed Jo had just finished.

  Once I had five feeds, I started the third set of data compiling with the astronomy image-stacking software. I then began mapping the video images from the ground cameras to my growing matrix of data on the truck.

  “How are you doing that?” Sgt. Piper asked.

  “Later,” I said.

  “Who's that?” Storc asked.

  “Sergeant Piper,” I replied absently.

  There was a brief pause and then, “Is she cute?”

  I grinned and looked sideways as Piper continued to stare at my growing image model on the truck noting that she had started to blush.

  “Yes,” I replied mildly as I returned my focus to my code.

  “Do you think she might—”

  “Storc… Focus!” I snapped with an edge, though I couldn't help but punctuate with a chuckle.

  “Sorry,” he said sheepishly. “The last video feed should be available to you now.”

  Once my image matrix was completed and I had all the real-image data compiled, I inserted a wire frame of the trailing SUVs and traffic, copied the entire image compilation onto the map, and then ran the video. It was like a 3D movie of the chase—that ended on the first frame of explosion. I could manipulate the image of the truck, turn it in all directions, and zoom in on minute details captured by the ground cameras and the averaged ‘stacked’ images.

  “Sir,” I heard Piper say and looked up to see she was trying to get the attention of a Colonel who was standing in front of the big screen. He turned to look our direction before walking over to examine my monitor. “Put that on the big screen,” he said, looking at me with a little disdain—I assumed because of my appearance—my civilian attire and six days’ worth of beard were obviously not Air Force standard.

  I linked the image to the main screen.

  “What are we looking at?” he asked.

  “It’s a composite of three satellite feeds and eight ground cameras, superimposed on a 3D map of the scene,” I said before stopping the image and zooming in on the driver and passenger—they appeared to be firing their weapons through the back of the cab.

  I pulled the image down and focused on the license plate and any other identifying marks, copying each into a separate file for tracking as soon as the dog and pony show was over.

  After I had captured all the possible details, I dropped the image off the big screen so I could focus on the backtracking.

  “What happened to it?” the colonel asked. “Put it back up.”

  “Sir, I have to do the backtrail on the truck,” I said without looking up.

  He stomped back over to me and was about to read me the riot act when Sgt. Piper cleared her throat. “Sir. You haven’t been introduced to Scott Wolfe. He’s with Langley, sir…NCS.”

  He stopped cold and his expression softened immediately befor
e turning and walking back to the big screen. “If you get a chance, record a loop of that and pass it off to one of my people,” he said before turning and looking at me. “Please.”

  “Yes, sir,” I replied and immediately recorded a high-definition loop of the footage before dumping it to a disk.

  When I popped it out of the drive and handed it to Sgt. Piper, she smiled. “Thank you,” she whispered before taking the disk to another station.

  “No problem,” I replied and then returned my attention to the data.

  “How's it coming?” Storc asked.

  “It's tracking backward now,” I replied. It should have been a simple task of backtrailing the truck to its origin—at least I thought it would be simple. Satellite coverage is often spotty, and it is subject to orbital movement out of range.

  I tracked the truck backward to a small town in Turkey, near the Syrian border, where it emerged from a garage. I continued to run the feeds backward, often with huge gaps of time, not seeing any other sign of the truck.

  “How did you get there?” I muttered.

  I decided I had to fill some gaps. I looked over at Sgt. Piper and gestured with my head that I needed her.

  “What’s up?” she asked, stepping up behind me and putting her hand on my shoulder.

  “What access do we have to other satellite feeds?” I asked in a whisper.

  She shook her head. “Those were the only three in range when the explosion occurred.

  “I mean any satellites. Weather, USGS, anything with a camera…and not just for the time of the explosion. Any time in the past six days.” I said, showing her the garage I had backtrailed the truck to. “According to the imagery we have, the truck materialized spontaneously inside that garage…I know that’s not the case.”

  “Let me see what we have,” she said as she pulled up a chair at the station next to mine. After a few moments of clacking her fingers across the keyboard, she gave a satisfied grunt before transferring her findings to my station.

  “Awesome,” I said, looking at the list of available feeds. “Jo, I'm sending you more raw feeds,” I said into the phone. “I need the same thing done to these and then synchronize them to the first set you sent me.”

  “No problem,” Jo replied.

  We spent the next four hours linking, converting, splicing, indexing, and synchronizing all the various feeds. There were still gaps, but they were much smaller gaps—far easier to search surrounding roads for movement. I watched the growing video stream as the composite of roughly ten images showed the truck entering the garage the day before the explosion.

  As images dropped off and appeared in the time sequence, it was a strange disjointed impression of watching some sort of morphing electronic creature.

  When the playback reached a gap where all the images disappeared, I calculated the travel time in all possible directions and picked the truck back up when the images returned—an easy task most of the time, more difficult others.

  Running the feed backward in reverse order, I watched the truck travel from Turkey to Syria, stopping frequently under bridges or covered porticos—sometimes for a few minutes, sometimes for hours on end.

  There was another pit stop overnight in a small town in Syria. I tagged each of those time references and continued my backward search. Then, abruptly, the truck turned and went back toward Turkey again, stopping frequently under bridges and other covered areas, before returning across the border and stopping in another garage. There it stayed longer than I had feeds for.

  “Jo? Storc?” I said into the phone. “Thank you both. You saved me hours of work.”

  “My pleasure,” Storc replied.

  “I'll talk to you guys later,” I said.

  “Be careful,” Jo said.

  “Don't worry about me,” I replied. “I'm safely tucked away in a computer room, a couple thousand miles away from the action.”

  “Glad to hear it,” she said.

  I smiled at her concern. “Later, guys.”

  “Later,” they both said before ending the call.

  “Bizarre,” I muttered as I tucked my phone back into my pocket.

  “What?” Piper asked, leaning over my shoulder.

  “The truck came from Turkey, went into Syria on Monday, abruptly turned around after nearly reaching Al Raqqah, and then went back the way it came. It stopped overnight here,” I said, pointing at a small town in Syria. “Then kept going until it reached a garage in this town in Turkey, where it stayed until this morning.”

  “So the bomb must have been loaded either in Syria or in that garage in Turkey,” she said.

  Something didn’t add up. “It could have left Turkey the first time with the bomb in it,” I said quietly.

  “Then why drive into Syria at all? Why risk two border crossings with a bomb that size?” she countered.

  I thought about it for a second as my internal flowchart spread the data out in front of me in a visual hallucination. The collage of satellite images appeared as a variable in my flowchart.

  “Maybe—” I muttered as I opened the list of feeds providing my trail. I clicked off all the weather, USGS and other satellites that weren’t designated as surveillance feeds.

  “Why are you shutting off tracking from those?” she asked.

  “A hunch,” I replied, and then started the map animation again. The map on the screen showed the trail I had discovered in time-lapse, ten seconds per hour.

  I smiled as I saw the pattern. The truck only moved during surveillance satellite blackouts.

  “Tricky bastards,” I muttered and then looked at Piper with a grin. “They know the satellite schedules. If I hadn’t tied in the other imagery, there wouldn’t have been any way to backtrail them by satellite.”

  Her eyes went wide with understanding.

  I looked around the command center and saw the crowd had thinned out considerably, but there were still a few techs and watch officers around.

  “I need a private place to make a video call,” I said.

  She nodded toward a room off to the side. I dumped all my data to a pocket drive and then wiped the information from the station I was working on. She proceeded to lead me into the side office, which had two stations similar to the one I was working on.

  “Thanks,” I said as she turned and left.

  She smiled and nodded. “I hope you share that process with us,” she said, lingering at the doorway for a moment longer. “It would sure make our lives easier here.”

  “I’ll talk to someone about that,” I replied and began booting my data into the new workstation as soon as she left.

  Once it was all spooled up, I contacted John. The video call showed the wear on his face.

  “Did you find Charlotte?” he asked.

  “Not yet, but I found something else that might answer another question,” I said as I began streaming the path of the truck, but I did suddenly wonder what was taking Griggs so long to find Charlotte.

  He watched the feed as the truck moved across the map in time lapse. “That’s the cleanest trail I’ve seen on this group. How’d you get it?” he asked.

  “Jo, Storc, and I used about a dozen non-standard satellite feeds,” I replied. But watch what happens when I shift to standard tracking.”

  I removed all my “bonus” footage and played the track over again. The playback was only halfway through when realization struck him.

  “Shit,” he muttered. “They know the satellite orbits.”

  “Yeah,” I said plainly.

  “That means they have someone inside helping them,” he said.

  “It wouldn’t have to be anyone high up,” I said. “I shared a room with thirty people tonight, all of whom have access to the orbital data—and that’s just on one base.”

  “Shit,” he said. “Can you get the search process to our analysts here?”

  “Yeah. No problem,” I replied. “I assumed they’d want to use it on the other lost trails. The Air Force mentioned an interest
in the process as well…can I just give it to them?”

  “I'll talk to someone and pass it through channels. Thanks, Scott,” he said, his tired face trying hard to smile. “This is a big break.”

  “That’s what I’m here for,” I replied.

  “Go get some sleep,” he said. “I need you to be fresh in the morning. We’re stepping up our search.”

  “Aye, aye, Cap’n,” I said with a straight face.

  “And Scott,” he said, adding a tone of seriousness to his voice. “Good job.”

  “Thanks, boss,” I replied with a grin. “I’ll talk with you tomorrow.”

  I looked at my watch and saw it was 11:25 p.m., and though I had been awake for more than thirty-six hours, I wasn't terribly interested in sleeping—the action had me wound pretty tight.

  I walked back to my quarters at Ramstein Inn and pulled my laptop out of its case to go over Ukil's profile data again. As tired as I was, I couldn’t get my mind to calm down enough to get to sleep. It made sense—it was only 6:30 p.m. back home.

  As I stripped out of my clothes, there was a knock at the door.

  I pulled my t-shirt back on and went to the door barefoot and in my jeans. I opened the door and saw Charlotte Clark standing there in my doorway—actually, leaning there was a better description.

  She had a bottle of whiskey in one hand and had her forehead pressed against the doorframe, holding her up.

  “Who the hell are you?” she slurred.

  “Scott Wolfe.”

  “I don’t give a shit,” she replied before my words were completely out of my mouth. “Why the fuck do you want to see me?”

  “Come on in,” I said, reaching for her arm to help her.

  She swatted at my hand and nearly fell over. “I don’t need your help,” she hissed, the whiskey on her breath threatening to give me a contact buzz.

  “I know,” I said. “Just offering you a seat.”

  She looked at me suspiciously through slitted eyes, but then she staggered into my suite and dropped down heavily on the sofa, sloshing whiskey out of her bottle.

  “Bad day, huh?” I asked sympathetically.

  “Bad day?” she asked incredulously, trying to focus on my face, before her words trailed off into a mumble I didn’t understand.