The Espionage Game

by Susan Glinert Stevens

  “Madeline,” he whispered. Tentatively, he leaned forward and kissed her on her lips. She didn’t react, but stood frozen, puzzled. Unexpected reactions stirred within her. Quivers raced through her body. His musky male scent evoked memories of lean hard bodies pressed against hers, the pleasures of being caressed and the carnal sensuality of a man probing deep within her body and, finally, the fulfillment of orgasmic climaxes firing through her very essence.

  How long has it been?she asked herself.Almost a year. God—that long! Her muscles contracted, anticipating, longing, needing.

  He kissed her again, this time more aggressively, wrapping his hands around her waist. She didn’t resist. Suddenly, impulsively, she pulled herself eagerly against his body, wanting to be held, possessed, her pent-up longings exploding. Tongue searched for tongue as they embraced, their bodies trembling one against the other.

  Jerry felt her breasts press against him. They rode up and down on his chest as she breathed, her animal scent inflaming his own needs. Slowly, he moved one hand down to her waist and undid the belt. Opening her bathrobe, he stroked her bare, silky smooth skin. Madeline reacted like a purring kitten, sensually rubbing her body against his touch.

  “I want you,” she groaned when she felt him touch her body. Madeline pressed forward, rubbing herself against him, imagining the pleasures of being with him. He gently pulled her down toward the floor.

  “No, not here,” she urged. Startled, Jerry paused. Madeline grabbed his hand and pulled him toward a door.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Carole Seyer tugged nervously on her ponytail while she waited for the computers to update the latest run of satellite images. A pretty twenty-five-year-old blonde who appeared eighteen, she was more than ready to go home. It had been a long day, most of it spent staring at a large full-color computer monitor. Today had been exceptionally long; two of her coworkers had called in sick and so she’d been asked to put in several hours of overtime. It was now nearly midnight. However, now that the long day was almost over, she could hardly wait to go home to her apartment, hop into the bathtub, and soak away her pent-up tensions.

  Except for the occasional flat tire, Carole’s life wasn’t very exciting. She got up in the morning, dressed, and drove down to the corner of M and First streets in Washington, DC, where she spent the day in the dreary-looking Federal Building 213.

  The place looked like little more than a warehouse with bricked-over windows. However, inside was the National Photographic Interpretation Center, the NPIC. It’s the federal agency officially responsible for interpreting all of the photographic and electronic imagery collected by America’s reconnaissance satellites and aircraft. Most of the information was piped directly into the building from space via the collection of satellite antennas mounted on the roof of the building.

  If asked, Carole would tell you that she was a photo-interpretation analyst. In reality, she was a spy, although her work was about as exciting as watching grass grow. Carole spent her workday examining photographs from space, searching for things that had changed. She had been originally hired because she had an eidetic, or photographic, memory and thus was able to remember the same scene from week to week and immediately spot any differences. However, even that challenge had been eliminated from her job by the dozens of computers that covered most of the first floor of her workplace.

  Now, whenever a new satellite run came in, the computers pulled the digitized image of the last satellite pass over any particular place on Earth from their massive arrays of disk storage, normalized it to the new data being received from space, and then compared the two. Any differences larger than three meters square were highlighted on the screen. It was Carole’s job, along with over a hundred other photo-interpretation analysts, to decide the significance of those differences. They called it “eyeballing,” and it was usually very boring and tedious work. However, Carole and her coworkers had to do it because the computers were incapable of judging the significance of the changes they spotted.

  The screen flashed as the computers finished their analysis of the latest run which ran over the eastern part of Russia, down the eastern edge of the Black Sea and then across the western edge of Iran. It was just after dawn there and the long shadows cast by the early morning sun would help her judge the height of objects.

  With a sigh of resignation, Carole reached forward and pressed a key on her keyboard. A moment later, the 21-inch high-resolution screen was filled with a full-color image of a seaside city taken from space; she instantly recognized it as Narvik, Norway. Carole had long ago memorized most of the surface of the Earth and could identify at a glance any of the major or even minor cities. The image on her screen was a wide-angle view, representing a sixty-mile square section of Earth taken from an Advanced KENNAN (or, as it is more popularly but incorrectly known, a KH-12 or KEYHOLE 12) satellite orbiting 181 miles above the little Norwegian city.

  The picture was actually a composite of literally dozens of images down-linked from the satellites over the last few days with the most recent data highlighted by being slightly lighter in tone than the older images. In the case of the Advanced KENNAN, which was designed for very-high resolution work, the view was only about eight miles wide although it was in the wide-angle setting. Thus, Carole saw the latest images as an eight-mile wide stripe down the center of her screen. On either side were darker stripes of older data that had been electronically composited by the computers with the new information. This gave her and her fellow analysts a wider frame of reference by which to judge the importance of what they saw. Her job was to review whatever had changed in the strip of new images as compared to the last run over that same strip. Those changes were indicated by being blinked.

  Even though the scene on her screen was a fairly coarse-grain picture of what the satellite saw, individual points of interest could be looked at more closely by simply moving the cursor onto the spot with the mouse and clicking a button. The computers would respond by showing the actual image and even enlarge it, if necessary, so that she could see all the detail available.

  The satellite had two modes of operation: wide-angle and telescopic. In the case of the wide-angle setting of the satellite, the resolution was about a meter, or three-feet. Much finer detail was also possible with the Advanced KENNAN—down to a centimeter, or a half-inch, when it was in telescopic mode and in low orbit. However, since the field of view in telescopic mode was so narrow—roughly a hundred meters or yards, it was only used on predetermined points of interest.

  “Ten more minutes,” she muttered to herself as the many lakes of Sweden flashed by. A few moments later she tapped the key and saw an expanse of sea two hundred miles southeast of Norway. It was the Gulf of Bothnia, the northern arm of the Baltic Sea. Several spots blinked on the screen. All of them were small and obviously in normal shipping lanes.

  “Big deal, dummies,” she sneered sarcastically at the computers that had taken most of the challenge out of her job, “so there are ships on the water.”

  Anxious to finish her very long workday, Carole impatiently tapped her fingers while the computers composed and then displayed the next view in wide-angle mode. One screen full of Eastern Europe marched by as her tour took her over the Ukraine, the Black Sea and Turkey. Finally, the image covered a large section of the border between Iran and Iraq. Then she saw them: dozens of blinking spots in the middle of nowhere. Carole knew that they hadn’t been there a week ago. She raced the cursor over her screen and picked the largest spot in the middle of a small isolated valley near the border. She left-clicked on the mouse to see what the computers knew about it. The paste-on box appeared an instant later. It read, “Unknown Anomaly.”

  “Oh, god,” she whispered as she right-clicked to zoom-in on the valley. The screen was quickly filled with a view the bowl-shaped valley. Although the resolution was poor, she could clearly make out work being done on the railroad. In addition, the valley was dotted with hundreds of individual work sites, each barely
a few yards wide. Finally, in the center of the isolated little valley were what appeared to be the foundations of a large building. She had foundOperatsiyaBronirolovo Kulaka , Operation Armored Fist.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Thump! Thump! Thump!

  A loud noise woke Lazarus Keesley. Lying on a couch in his office and wrapped in a blanket stolen years ago from some hotel, Lazarus had decided to sleep in his office rather than taking the risk of driving home tired after working until almost midnight. Besides, Beatrice, his wife, was still away in Boston, taking care of her bachelor brother who had recently had a mild heart attack.

  The pounding on his office door resumed.

  “Wake up, Lazarus,” somebody shouted. “Open the door! I know you’re in there.”

  “‘By all the holy glue in China’,” Lazarus grumbled to himself while he searched in the dark for the switch on the table lamp next to his head.

  “C’mon, Laz,” a male voice pleaded as Lazarus switched on the light. “Open up.”

  Lazarus finally recognized the voice. He got up and unlocked the door; it was Jonathan Boswell, the Director of the CIA.

  “Can’t a man find a moment’s peace?” Lazarus demanded as he opened the door. “What time is it, anyhow?” he added while trying to read his watch bleary-eyed.

  “Just after three a.m.,” Jonathan Boswell replied. Like Lazarus, he was unshaven, even though he had changed into jeans and a leather windbreaker. “I’ve been searching for you for hours, Laz. Come on,” he said, tugging on Lazarus’ arm. “We’ve got to hurry. We only have about a half hour before they drop one of the ADVANCED KENNAN satellites down for a close-up look-see at the Gomazal Valley.”

  “The what valley?”

  “The Gomazal Valley,” Director Boswell repeated. He turned and headed for the front door of Lazarus’ outer office. Lazarus hurried after him.

  “It’s in northeast Iraq,” Boswell explained as he opened the door. “One of the analysts at the NPIC spotted some new activity in the area a couple hours ago and so requested a closer look. One of our night shift people reviewed the request and found an entire Russian motorized division surrounding the place. Those troops weren’t there last week, and nobody noticed them move. That’s when they got hold of me. I’ve been hunting for you since two o’clock. I think you should see the live coverage.”

  “How the hell did you know where I was?” Lazarus demanded as they hurried to the elevators.

  Jonathan Boswell laughed. “I had a dickens of a time finding you until I checked with the guards downstairs. They told me that you signed in after dinner but never signed out. A simple deduction told me where you were. You were reading those files from the funny-farm people, hunting for the mole, weren’t you?” Lazarus responded with a grimace.

  A few minutes later, they were in the main hallway of the basement heading for the local branch of the National Reconnaissance Office or NRO. Created in 1960, the NRO is the top-secret governmental group who actually own and operate the American spy satellites. Other organizations such as the CIA merely interpreted the data collected. However, few people outside of the American intelligence community ever heard of the NRO mainly because its assets, budgets, and even offices are hidden away in other organizations. Thus, the NRO liaison with the CIA was in the form of a suite of offices tucked away in the basement where only those who had a need-to-know knew who they were.

  Jonathan Boswell headed for a door at the end of the hall; an armed guard was standing behind a podium next to the door.

  “Good morning, Mr. Director,” the guard said. He checked Jonathan Boswell’s identity badge and pointed to a blank line on the sign-in sheet. “If you would sign here, please. And Mr. Keesley, if you would sign here, too.”

  When Lazarus had finished, the guard pressed a button and the door opened with a buzzing sound. Inside was what had once been a large storage room; little effort had been spent on hiding that fact when the racks of electronics that now lined the walls were installed. Several computer workstations, each with two large color monitors on the desks, were located at the far end of the room. Only one was turned on, manned by three young men Lazarus didn’t recognize.

  “How’s it going?” Jonathan Boswell inquired casually as he and Lazarus walked toward the workstation. The three men got up nervously, obviously unused to such high-ranking visitors.

  “We have about fifteen minutes, sir,” David Baxter, one of the men answered. “We deorbited number three satellite about an hour ago. It’s somewhere over northern Saskatchewan or Manitoba, Canada.”

  “Good.” Jonathan Boswell rubbed his hands together in anticipation. “Is that coffee I smell?”

  “Oh, I’m sorry, sir,” David Baxter apologized. “We don’t get many visitors on the graveyard shift. Our manners must be slipping. We have a fresh pot over there. Jack, can you get our guests a cup.”

  “Black for me,” Jonathan said.

  “Have any tea?” Lazarus asked hopefully.

  “Sure thing.” Jack hurried off.

  “You actually control the satellite from here?” Lazarus queried. He peered at one of screens of the computer workstation. The color monitor appeared to be displaying a videotape shot of Earth taken from a high- flying jetliner. Lazarus could clearly make out the thousands of ice- covered lakes that span northern Canada.

  “Only the camera, sir,” David Baxter explained. “We can point the satellite to some degree with one of the controls, but only indirectly. The actual control of the satellite’s vernier thrusters that point the camera is left to an onboard computer, which precisely calculates the amount of thrust and counter-thrust. We can’t leave that to humans. One slight miscalculation and we could lose a billion-dollar investment.”

  Lazarus looked at the young man. “Then this is a live picture?”

  “Yes, sir, it is.”

  “But it’s so bright—like daylight,” Lazarus noted, gazing at the screen. “If the satellite is over Canada, as you said it is, then it would still be in the dark, wouldn’t it?”

  David Baxter grinned. “That’s correct, sir. The onboard image processor can increase the brightness so that we can see things even in the dark. As long as there is some moonlight, we can see almost as good an image of something as when it’s in daylight.”

  “‘By all the holy glue in China’,” Lazarus muttered. He paused and then pointed to the two joysticks in front of the workstation’s monitors. “I suppose you control the satellite with those?”

  “Yes,” David answered. “Like to try it?”

  “Me?”

  “Certainly,” the young man replied with a laugh. “It’s no harder than a video game. Sit down and try it. You use the right joystick to point the camera left, right, forward, or back. The other joy stick controls the zoom lens.”

  “Is that all there is to it?” Lazarus sat down and tentatively touched the controls. The view, which initially looked like that from the window of a Boeing 747 flying at forty thousand feet, suddenly appeared more like that seen through the window of a Piper Cub flying at a thousand feet.

  “Whew!” Lazarus exclaimed. “You can get airsick playing with this. Tell me, how does it work?”

  “Well, we use a computer link to the MILSTAR satellite network in space to transmit the control signals up to the Advanced KENNAN satellite. The video comes back via the same route.”

  Lazarus shook his head in disbelief. “To think that we used to sneak over the fence with a camera hidden in our back pocket just a few years ago. Boy, how things have changed.”

  “Laz,” Jonathan asked quietly while he sipped his coffee, “have you ever been given a technical briefing on the Advanced KENNAN?”

  “Not in detail,” Lazarus told him. “I know the basics. There are four of them up there. They take nice pictures. You know how it is with us old farts. We concern ourselves with policy, direction, and that sort of thing, and we leave technical details to the young ones, like Mr. Baxter here. However, if we have a few minutes,
David, maybe you could give me a quick overview.”

  David Baxter glanced nervously at Jonathan Boswell who nodded and said, “I think we have about five minutes.”

  “Well, certainly, sir,” David replied. He inhaled deeply and paused to compose his thoughts. “First, let’s just go over the facts and figures.”

  “Sounds good to me,” Lazarus replied agreeably. He relaxed in the workstation’s seat and studied the young man.

  “Well,” David began, “the modern Advanced KENNANs are really a highly updated version of the original Advanced KENNAN satellites, which were grounded years ago because of the shuttleChallenger disaster. When theChallenger accident grounded the original Advanced KENNAN for over a year, they took the time to improve them. The main difference between the Advanced KENNANs and their predecessors, such as the KH-11s, is that they are designed to remain in space permanently. That is, they can be refueled and repaired in space, and, if necessary, they can be returned to earth for more extensive repairs. Thus, we’ve given them a virtually unlimited life span. This one has been in orbit since 1993.”

  “Is that so?” Lazarus murmured appreciatively.

  “Because of that,” David continued proudly, “little expense was spared in making the Advanced KENNAN as useful as possible.”

  He held up a forefinger. “First, it was made highly maneuverable by the addition of more powerful thruster rockets and the ability to carry as much as fifteen thousand pounds of hydrazine fuel. Thus, not only can the Advanced KENNAN maneuver out of harm’s way, but it can also change orbits at will. Given a few hours notice like tonight, we can swoop it down from its normal parking orbit of roughly two hundred miles to as low as sixty miles altitude and take high-resolution pictures over just about any place in the world we want.”