"This is a sticky one," Hood said.
"Yeah," Herbert agreed. "What's your gut say?"
"It says to take this situation to the president and drop it square in his lap," Hood replied.
Herbert regarded Hood for a moment. "There's a 'but' in your voice," Herbert said.
"Actually, there are three 'buts' in my voice," Hood told him. "First, we're only guessing about what's going on. They're educated guesses, but we still don't have proof. Second, let's assume your intel is right. That there is a plot to start a war. If we tell the president, the president will tell State. Once you tell State, the world will know about it through leaks, moles, or electronic surveillance. That could scare the perpetrators off--or it could accelerate whatever timetable they have."
"I agree," Herbert said. "The SFF and their allies would have insecurity issues instead of security issues. Typical when you're keeping information from your own countrymen."
"Exactly," Hood said.
"All right. So what's the third 'but'?" Herbert asked.
"The fact that we may prove a nuclear attack plan is in place," Hood said. "If the United States exposes it we may actually give it impetus."
"I don't understand," Herbert said.
"In terms of military support and intelligence assistance, India has always leaned toward Russia," Hood said. "An entire generation of Indians considers the United States the opposition. Suppose we expose a patriotic plan. Do you think that will cause the Indians to kill it?"
"If it involves a nuclear exchange, yes," Herbert said. "Russia would come down on our side. So would China."
"I don't know if I agree," Hood said. "Russia is facing an Islamic threat along several of its borders. Op-Center just defused a crisis where the Russians were scared about Iran's access to Caspian oil. Moscow fought the mujahedin in Afghanistan. They're afraid of aggressive fifth-column activities in their own cities, in allied republics. We can't be sure they would back a Muslim nation against their old friend India. As for China, they're looking for allies in a move against Taiwan. Suppose India provided them with that, a kind of quid pro quo."
Herbert shook his head slowly. "Paul, I've been in this game a long time. I've seen videos of Saddam using gas and gunships against his own people. I've been to a Chinese execution where five men were shot in the head because they expressed dissenting political beliefs. But I can't believe that sane individuals would make a deal about nuclear strikes that will kill millions of people."
"Why not?" Hood asked.
"Because a nuclear exchange raises the bar for all of human conflict," Herbert insisted. "It says that anything goes. No one gains by that."
"Fair enough," Hood said.
"I still believe that we may have a radical group of Indian officials who may want to nuke Pakistan," Herbert said.
"Then valid or not, all three of my concerns point to the same thing," Hood said.
"We need more intel before we go to the president," Herbert said.
"Right," Hood said. "Is there any way of getting that electronically or from sources in the government?"
"There might be, if we had the time," Herbert said. "But we've got the Pakistani cell on the run in the mountains and the dead SFF commandos behind them. The Indians are not going to wait."
"Has anything been on DD-1 yet?" Hood asked. DD-1 National was the flagship station of Doordarshan, the Indian national television network. The broadcaster was also closely affiliated with Prasar Bharati, All India Radio, which was run and maintained by the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting.
"One of Matt's people is taping the newscasts," Herbert replied. "He's going to give me an assessment of how riled up people are and at what rate the media are adding to the whipping-up process."
"Can we go in and bust up their satellite?" Hood asked.
Herbert grinned. "They use five," he said. "INSAT-2E, 2DT, 2B, PAS-4, and ThaiCom. We can scramble them all if we have to."
"Good," Hood said. He regarded Herbert. "You're pushing for Striker to go in and grab the Pakistanis, aren't you?"
"Hell," Herbert said, "I don't want to just drop Mike and his people into the Himalayas--"
"I know that," Hood assured him.
"But I don't know if we have any other options, Paul," Herbert continued. "Whatever we think of what the Pakistanis have done, they have to get out to tell what they did not do."
"What would we do if Striker weren't headed toward the region?" Hood asked.
Herbert thought for a moment then shrugged. "What we did in Korea, Russia, and Spain," Herbert said. "We'd send 'em."
Hood nodded thoughtfully. "We probably would," he agreed. "Have you run this past Mike?"
"Not in so many words," Herbert said. "But I did tell him to sleep on the flight from Alconbury to Chushul. Just in case."
"How long is that leg of the trip?" Hood asked.
Herbert looked at his watch. "They've got another six hours or so to go," he said. "Four and change with a good tailwind and if we don't keep them on the ground in Turkey for more than a few minutes."
Hood clicked on the Op-Center personnel roster. He opened the file. "Matt is still here," he said, looking at the log-in time.
"He's going over the surveillance photos with Stephen Viens," Herbert said. "He hasn't left his desk since this started."
"He should," Hood said. "We'll need him to work on any ELINT that we need in the region."
"I'll have Gloria Gold spot him for a while," Herbert said.
Gold was the nighttime director of technical affairs. She was qualified to run tech operations though she did not have the same background in analysis that Stoll had.
"We also better get Lowell and Liz Gordon in on this," Hood said. Lowell Coffey was Op-Center's international legal expert. "We need to be up on Pakistani and Indian law in case they get caught. Psych profiles of the Pakistanis would also help. Did we get a detailed jurisdictional map of the region for Striker's missile search?"
"No," Herbert said. "That was going to be pretty tightly localized in Pakistani territory."
"We'll definitely need that, then," Hood said. "We're screwed if Striker stumbles into Chinese spheres of influence and gets caught."
"If Al George doesn't have those maps in archives I'll get them from State," Herbert said. "I've got a friend there who can keep his mouth shut."
"You've got friends everywhere." Hood grinned. It felt good to be part of a team that included people like Bob Herbert. People who were professional and thorough and there to support the team and its leader. It also felt good to smile. "What about Viens? How many satellites are there in the region?"
"Three," Herbert said.
"Will he be able to hold on to them?" Hood asked.
"That shouldn't be a problem," Herbert told Hood. "No one else is asking for intel from that region right now. Viens also has his entire team on rotation, so the satellite monitoring stations will always be manned. They can run three separate recons at once."
"Good," Hood said. He continued to look at the computer screen. There were other people he could call on if needed. Right now, though, he thought it was best to keep the number of people involved to a minimum. He would call Hank Lewis at the NSA and recommend that he do the same. He hoped that the new appointee would be content to let Op-Center run this as a "silent operation"--one in which the chain of command stopped short of involving the president.
Herbert left to get his personnel set up and to obtain the map. Hood called Coffey and tore him away from Politically Incorrect. Since Coffey's home phone line was not secure, Hood could not tell him what the late-night meeting was about. All he said was that the title of the TV show pretty well summed it up. Coffey said he would be there as soon as possible.
Hood thanked Coffey. He fished a few more Wheat Thins from the box and sat back. There was still a lot to do before he would authorize this mission. For one thing, Stephen Viens had to find the cell. Without that information they had nothing. Then Hood and Herbert would
have to decide whether to land Striker as planned and then chopper them near the cell or try to jump them in. Parachuting would be extremely dangerous in the mountains due to the cold, wind, and visibility. Perhaps they could get Ron Friday out there first to plant flares. But landing would also present a problem since Striker was expected in Srinagar for an entirely different mission. It might be difficult to break away from their hosts as quickly as Op-Center needed them to.
Besides, Hood thought, the fewer people who came into contact with Striker the better it would be for security. Lowell or Herbert could come up with a reason for them to have parachuted in. The Indian air force would have to go along with that or face the mission being scrubbed.
Hood thought about Rodgers and his team. He was proud to be working with them too. Regardless of how this unfolded it would be brutally difficult for Striker if they went forward. Thinking about it did not make Hood's own problems seem less immediate or important. Relativity never worked like that. Harleigh was traumatized by what had happened at the United Nations. Knowing that other people had lost their lives there did not make it any easier to deal with her condition.
But it did do one thing. It reminded Hood what courage was. He would not forget that in the hours and days ahead.
TWENTY-SIX
Washington, D.C. Thursday, 1:12 A.M.
"We may have something!" Stephen Viens declared.
Gloria Gold was leaning forward in her chair. The excitement in Stephen Viens's voice came through clearly on the computer audio link. He was right. After methodically scanning the terrain for hours the cameras had detected a promising image.
"Hold on," Viens said. "Bernardo is switching us to infrared. The changeover will take about three minutes."
"I'm holding," said Gloria Gold. "Nice work," she added.
"Hold the back-patting," Viens said. "It still could be just a row of rocks or a herd of mountain goats."
"That would be a flock of mountain goats," the fifty-seven-year-old woman pointed out.
"Excuse me?" Viens said.
"Herds are domesticated animals," she said. "Flocks live in the wild."
"I see. Once a professor, always a professor," Viens teased. "But who will have the last laugh if we find out it's goats being led around by a Sherpa with a crook?"
Gloria smiled. "You will."
"Maybe we should bet on it," Viens said. "Your microcam against my lapel pin."
"No go," Gloria said.
"Why not?" Viens asked. "Mine has the range."
"And mine has the substance," she replied.
The NRO recon expert had once showed her the MIT lapel pin he had customized. It contained a dot-sized microphone made of molecules that resonated one against the other. It could broadcast sound to his computer audio recorder up to two hundred miles away. Her microcam was better than that. It broadcast million-pixel images to her computer from up to ten miles away. It was better and it was much more useful.
"Okay," Viens said. "Then let's bet dinner? The loser cooks? It's a fitting deal. Infrared image, microwave meals--"
"I'm a lousy cook," said Gloria.
"I'm not."
"Thanks, but no," said the thrice-divorced woman. For some reason Viens had always had a crush on her. She liked him too but he was young enough to be her son. "We'll make it a gentleperson's bet," she said. "If you found the Pakistanis, we both win."
Viens sighed. "A diplomat's deal. I accept, but under protest."
Tall, slender Gloria Gold smiled and leaned back in her chair. She was sitting at her glass-topped desk in Op-Center's technical sector. The lights of her office were off. The only glow came from the twenty-one-inch computer monitor. The halls were silent. She took a swig from the bottle of Evian water she kept on the floor. After knocking over a bottle and shorting her computer the night after she first came to work here, Gloria had learned not to keep anything liquid on her desk. Luckily her boss, Assistant Director Curt Hardaway--"the Night Commander," as they called him--admitted that he had once done that as well. Whether he had done that or not it was a nice thing to say.
The levity about the bet had been welcome. She had only been at this an hour but Viens had been working all day. And the elements in the image-feed from the NRO did look very promising. They were at five-meter resolution, meaning that anything down to five meters long was visible. The computer's simultaneous PAP--photographic analysis profile--had identified what it thought could be human shadows. Distorted by the terrain and angle of the sun, they were coming from under an intervening ledge. Infrared would ascertain whether the shadows were being generated by living things or rock formations. The fact that the shadows had shifted between two images did not tell them much. That could simply be an illusion of the moving sun.
The Op-Center veteran watched and waited. The quiet of night shift made the delay somehow seem longer.
The tech-sec was a row of three offices set farthest from the busy front-end of the executive level. The stations were so thoroughly linked by computer, webcam, and wireless technology that the occupants wondered why they did not just tear down the walls and shout to each other, just to make human contact now and then. But Matt Stoll had always been against that. That was probably because Matt did things in private he did not want the rest of the world to know about. But Gloria Gold knew his dark secret. She had spied on him one night using her digital microcam hidden on the door handle of his minirefrigerator.
Four or five times a day, Matt Stoll washed down a pair of Twinkies with Gatorade.
That helped to explain the boundless energy and increasing girth of Op-Center's favorite egghead. It also explained the occasional yellowish stains on his shirt. He chugged the Gatorade straight from the bottle. Even now, while Stoll was supposed to be resting on his sofa, he was probably reading the latest issue of NuTech or playing a hand-held video game. Unlike his former classmate Viens, Matt Stoll, with his sugar and Gatorade rush, defined the word wired.
Gloria's mind was back on the screen as the feed from the National Reconnaissance Office was refreshed. The mostly white image was now the color of fire. There were a series of yellow-white atmospheric distortions radiating from hot red objects along the bottom of the monitor.
"Looking good," Viens said. "Whatever is making the shadows is definitely alive."
"Definitely," Gloria said. They watched as the image refreshed again. The red spot got even hotter as it moved out from under the ledge. The bloblike shape was vaguely human.
"Shit!" Viens said. "Bernardo, go back to natural light."
"That's no mountain goat," Gloria said.
"I'm betting it isn't a Sherpa either," Viens added.
Gloria continued to watch as the satellite switched oculars. This changeover seemed to take much longer than the last. The delay was not in the mechanical switch itself but in the optics diagnostics the satellite ran each time it changed lenses. It was important to make certain the focus and alignment were correct. Wrong data--off-center imaging, improper focus, a misplaced decimal point in resolution--was as useless as no data.
The image came on-screen in visible light. There was a field of white with the gray ledge slashing diagonally across the screen. Gloria could see a figure standing half beneath it. The figure was not a goat or a Sherpa. It was a woman. Behind her was what looked like the head of another person.
"I think we've got them!" Viens said excitedly.
"Sure looks like it," Gloria agreed as she reached for the phone. "I'll let Bob Herbert know."
Bob Herbert was there before the next image appeared.
The image that clearly showed five people making their way along the narrow ledge.
TWENTY-SEVEN
Kargil, Kashmir Thursday, 12:01 P.M.
Ron Friday liked to be prepared.
If he were going into a building he liked to have at least two exit strategies. If he were going into a country he always had his eye on the next place he would go to out of choice or necessity. If he had a mission in mi
nd he always checked on the availability of the equipment, clearances, and allies he might need. For him, there was no such thing as downtime.
After talking with Bob Herbert, Friday realized that it might be necessary for him and Captain Nazir to move into the mountains. He knew that the helicopter was good for travel at heights up to twelve thousand feet and temperatures down to twelve degrees Fahrenheit. They had enough fuel left for a seven-hundred-mile flight. That meant they could go into the mountains about four hundred miles and still get back. Of course, there was also the problem of having to set the chopper down at too high an altitude and having liquid-bearing components freeze. Depending on where they had to fly, it could be a long and unpleasant walk back.
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