“Huh? What did the guy from D-3 say, what’s his explanation?” MacIntyre was looking at the map. The red X that Connor had marked on it was certainly in the middle of nowhere. “That site makes no sense. Chinese? It’s right in the heart of the damned Rub al-Khali. Why the hell would that transmission be coming from the center of the Empty Quarter? There’s nothing there but a quarter million square miles of sand dunes.”
Susan rearranged the mugs. “He said that it was unexplained, but he didn’t seem too worked up about it. Sounded like he wanted to go home. He said that his car pool was waiting and...”
MacIntyre popped out of the chair and moved quickly toward his desk.
Connor began to mumble, “Maybe I shouldn’t have bothered you, sir, since NSA didn’t...”
The Deputy Director grabbed a gray phone. “This is MacIntyre at IAC. Let me speak to the SOO.”
There was only one place in the government where there really was “a boy named Sue”—namely, NSA’s Senior Operations Officer, who ran the spy agency’s command center. Senior Operations Officer, who ran the spy agency’s command center. 37129-09. We were told that it was PRC strategic c-cubed.”
Connor listened nervously, envisioning her career ending before it had even begun, especially if the answer was that it was really nothing more than Panamanian shipping comms. “Okay, and the lat-long places it where?” Another pause seemed to take forever. MacIntyre had turned his back to Connor and was fumbling through a directory. “Okay. Little odd, no? Okay, thanks.”
The Deputy Director switched from a gray to a red phone. He looked again at his watch and then punched a speed dial. “I have a priority-two late insertion for the Placeset bird; my code is IACzero-two-zulu-papa-romeo-niner.”
Connor was trying to remember what Placeset was: maybe the high-resolution electro-optical satellite.
“Coordinates, lat five zero degrees, three zero minutes east; long two three degrees, two seven minutes north,” MacIntyre said as he stretched the phone cord while reading the location off the map on the coffee table. “I want a ten-mile radius at Focal Level 7. What time will you have it?”
The Focal Level System was like a lens opening, or stop, on a camera, only the camera was 200 miles up in space. Connor remembered that seven was a real close-up, the kind that almost let you read the words on street signs. She realized that MacIntyre had taken her seriously enough to play a special chit, an after-hours personal request to divert a satellite from the targets that had been agreed upon just that morning by an interdepartmental committee from CIA, DOD, NSA, and the IAC.
MacIntyre put the red phone back in the cradle with his right hand and simultaneously picked up the intercom handset with his left. “Deb, order us the usual pizza, then go home, thanks.” The Deputy Director plunked down heavily in the chair again and smiled at his young analyst. “Now we wait. I hope you like anchovies.”
At moments like this, Rusty MacIntyre felt like a one-armed paperhanger. He and Rubenstein had tried and succeeded in keeping the IAC small; that way they avoided the bloat that had made the CIA so ineffective. But small also meant that Rusty usually ended up doing everything from editing reports to arguing with OMB and the Congress for more money, to hanging out and eating pizza late at night with young analysts.
It also meant he hardly ever got to see his wife. After ten years they still hadn’t gotten around to having a kid and now—with Sarah at thirty-eight—it was almost too late for them to start a family. She never complained about it. “Not to decide is to decide,” Sarah would say to him, “and I’m fine with that.” Maybe she actually was fine being childless, since she enjoyed her work at Refugees International so much, but Rusty wasn’t fine with it.
“Oh, I forgot: here’s your change from the pizza,” Susan said, placing four quarters on the small tabletop.
Rusty MacIntyre smiled at his young analyst. Then he took his empty glass and placed it under the table. Susan gave him a double take but said nothing. Silently, MacIntyre palmed the quarters, placed one in the middle of the table, and pressed his thumb on it. Clink. The coin had disappeared. And then another. Clink. Susan Connor looked under the table, where two quarters sat in the glass. Then MacIntyre did it two more times, apparently pushing the coins through the table.
Susan Connor ran her hand across the tabletop. “How did you...?” she asked, picking up the glass.
“Amateur magic, a hobby of mine. But it’s also a lesson. Not everything is as it appears,” Rusty said, sitting back in his chair. “Here’s how...”
“Blttt... Blttt...” It was the secure phone. It was almost eleven o’clock and the satellite’s ground site manager was calling. The image MacIntyre had requested could now be called up on the Intelwire. As Deputy Director of IAC, Rusty had few perks, but one he did have was a 72-inch flat screen connected to Intelwire. On it popped an amazingly high-resolution image of the Arabian Desert, in the middle of which a red crosshair cursor was blinking.
Using a handheld control, MacIntyre zoomed in and out and moved the cursor, quickly scanning the circle he had asked for, with its 10-mile radius. Connor could not keep up with her boss’s search and was getting vertigo from the image on the screen as it zoomed and swerved in front of her. It was as though she were looking down on the Arabian Desert from a blimp just yards above the sands. Suddenly MacIntyre stopped and sat back down behind his desk.
“Helluva haystack, Susan,” the Deputy Director said, shaking his head at the perplexed analyst. “Helluva needle.”
“I’m not sure I understand, sir. What was that on the image?” Connor was perched again on the edge of the couch, a plate on her lap filled with pizza crust ends and tomato-stained anchovies.
“That, Ms. Connor, was twelve underground missile silos and a central support base for mobile missiles. Judging from the one missile that was on a truck at the base, I would say it is the Chinese CSS-27, Beijing’s latest medium-range ballistic missile. Except they’re not in China, they’re in Saudi Arabia—ah, Islamyah.”
Susan Connor stood up, whistled, and then, slowly, said, “Ho-lee shit.” The anchovies were now on the carpet.
Aboard the USS Ronald Reagan in the Persian Gulf,
also known as the Arabian Gulf
Although the carrier was moving at 25 knots, preparing to recover a squadron of F-35 Enforcers, there was only the slightest sense of motion in the admiral’s suite, buried just under the flight deck of the 77,000-ton floating air base.
“Would you like a cigar, Admiral? It’s a Cohiba,” the new flag ensign offered. The three-star vice admiral, Bradley Otis Adams, grinned as he reached into the open mahogany cigar box. “First of all, Ensign, smoking a cigar in here is prohibited. Second, a Cuban Cohiba is contraband. And third, your predecessor briefed you very well.”
Leaning forward from his seat at the end of the table in the admiral’s dining room, one-star rear admiral Frank Haggerty took the beat-up Zippo lighter his boss offered. It was engraved with the words “HVT Bar, Baghdad.” Haggerty smiled, remembering Adams had a role in going after the high-value targets, the leaders of Saddam’s Iraq. Frank Haggerty lit up his Cohiba. “Ruck, you get these in Jebel Ali?”
Andrew Rucker was captain of the USS Ronald Reagan, a 1,040-foot behemoth with two nuclear reactors and a crew of 5,900. He looked across the table at his boss. “You can buy anything in Dubai,” he answered as he, like Adams and Haggerty, lit a cigar.
Smoking indoors on a U.S. Navy ship had been banned for years, but no one was going to tell that to the commander, Fifth Fleet, or his subordinate, the admiral in command of the Reagan battle group. So for the captain in charge of the Reagan, there was one slight benefit to having the brass dine in. “I think, sirs, that once Castro finally goes we are going to switch from being enemies of Cuba to its greatest friends. Real fast.”
Admiral Adams drew a long puff from his cigar and savored the aroma as it filled the room. The roly-poly fifty-year-old flag officer was young to be a three-star. Althoug
h his blond hair was thinning, he looked even younger than his age. He had been young to be in every position he had ever been assigned to for over twenty-five years. He joked that salt water ran in his veins, since two Otises and three Adamses had been U.S. Navy admirals over the past two hundred years. He had been in the Bahrain job for one month, acting as both commander of U.S. Naval Forces (Central Command) and commander, Fifth Fleet. Already he was getting cabin fever in the little island nation of Bahrain. He had choppered out from Bahrain to join his friends Haggerty and Rucker for dinner under way aboard the carrier. He also just wanted to be on a moving ship again, not tied to a shore desk.
Tonight he also needed to deliver a message, one that was for their ears only. He made a slight gesture toward the two aides standing nearby, and Rucker instantly caught his meaning. “Lopez, Anderson. That will be all, thank you.” The ensign and the seaman left the dining room and quietly closed the door behind them.
Adams stood up and took another long drag on his cigar. “Although he was a little shaken up by the lobby of his hotel turning into a charnel house, Mr. Kashigian did eventually emerge and come by the base for his briefing. Only, turns out he was actually here to brief me.” Adams handed Haggerty a sheet of paper, with the engraved seal of the Secretary of Defense on the top and the looping signature of Under Secretary Ronald Kashigian at the bottom. “Take a look.”
As the two read the documents, Brad Adams walked over to the wall and looked at the aerial view of the Gulf and the countries surrounding it. From space it seems as if nothing had changed at all, he thought, but now the al Sauds are gone and Iran had nukes, and we are in the middle of it all with not much more leverage than this fleet gives us.
“Does SECDEF really expect us to carry out all this while revealing nothing to anyone?” asked Haggerty. “I’m not sure that we can get the force prepped to do everything that he wants that fast without someone getting wise.”
Rucker shook his head as he looked at the document in front of him. “Admiral, I don’t mean to be out of place, but isn’t it SOP for orders like this to be transmitted over ARNET, not delivered by hand?”
Adams turned back to the two men. Rucker, now forty-two, had been a little iconoclastic since his Annapolis days. He thought independently, didn’t just accept the company line. It was amazing he had made captain. “They’re worried about leaks. Of course, they’re always worried about leaks. But this time they seem to be almost paranoid about it. It’s almost as if they are certain that if CIA or NSA or IAC gets word of what we are up to, then somehow it is going to get out.” Adams sat back down at the table as Rucker placed the orders on the table.
“Well, given the size of what they are planning, how do they expect it not to leak?” asked Haggerty. “They must realize that someone is quickly going to see not only what we are doing here, but all the movement in CONUS and the Med, too. You can’t move this many men and ships and position that many people for action without someone getting wind of it.”
“You’re right, Frank, and I tried to explain that to Kashigian,” Adams replied. “But SECDEF is locked into this thing with a religious fervor that makes the Shura look like a Unitarian Sundayschool class. I don’t understand it exactly, but they are moving ahead with this at a pace like I’ve never seen before. The only thing I can figure is that they’ve gotten some bit of intel that they haven’t shared with us or anyone else, or else—”
“Or else what, Admiral? This just doesn’t make sense. The Iranians are a threat to blow up the whole damn region, Iraq is still a mess, sending terrorists after us wherever we turn. Why the hell would we pick right now to stage a major amphibious exercise with Egypt in the Red Sea and pull most of the Fifth Fleet out of the Gulf for ten days?” Haggerty got up from the table and walked over to the aerial photo of the Gulf that Adams had been studying. “I really am not sure that I can do everything that they want in that time frame, Admiral,” Haggerty said as he looked at the picture. “There is a lot going on here, and we should not be denuding the Gulf of American forces for some silly exercise. What do you want us to do?”
“I expect you to follow orders, Frank. Remember, civilian control of the military? Even if sometimes the civilians don’t make sense. You and Ruck do what you have to so that you can get us ready to do these missions while keeping them quiet. The largest amphibious exercise in memory, two carrier battle groups, most of our assets from the Gulf, all for a landing on the Red Sea coast of Egypt? It might be meant as a message to Islamyah. When does that say the date is of the amphibious landing?”
Captain Rucker looked down again at the Planning Order. “Marines will assault Green Beach on 15 March.”
“The Ides of March. Guess somebody has a sense of humor, or history. That gives us some time to get ready... and to find out what’s really going on. Not much time, but some,” Adams said, smiling at Admiral Haggerty and Captain Rucker.
Vice Admiral Brad Adams drew a last puff. As he snubbed out his cigar in the big brass ashtray, an F-35 Enforcer executed a perfect nightime carrier landing. It hit the flight deck immediately above the Admiral’s Suite with a noise that the inexperienced would have thought was a crash. All three men’s eyes went to the video monitor hanging from the ceiling, to make sure that the jolt they had just felt was only an F-35 landing.
2
JANUARY 30
The White House, West Wing
Washington, D.C.
T he lead and chase Chevy Suburbans pulled to the curb after being waved through the first checkpoint near the Ellipse. The black Chrysler 300M they had protected moved swiftly to the second guardhouse. The uniformed Secret Service officer dropped the metal V barrier designed to stop an eighteen-wheel tractor-trailer.
MacIntyre watched his young analyst’s eyes grow big as they approached the fence line and the large gates that opened onto West Executive Avenue. “Ever been to the White House before, Susan?” he asked.
“Just on the tourist line in high school. Red Room, Blue Room, Green Room, but we never saw anything over here.” Susan Connor fumbled for her badge as MacIntyre showed his to the Secret Service officer through the car window.
“Well, the thing to remember is it’s just a government building filled with civil servants—and, of course, the guy who lives above
the shop.” The car stopped outside an awning-covered set of double doors that led to the basement, or ground level, of the West Wing. “You’ll be amazed at how small everything in the West Wing is. It’s a one-hundred-year-old building that hasn’t been enlarged in half a century.
“This street, West Executive Avenue? It’s the most sought-after parking lot in town. Tourists and local residents used to walk down it whenever they wanted to. Now it’s behind three layers of security. Most of the White House staff is actually in this big building behind us,” he said, pointing at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, the EOB. “At one time, the entire Departments of War, Navy, and State fit into the EOB. That was when an Army general named Dwight Eisenhower would go get a voucher to pay for the trolley ride to Capitol Hill when he had to brief the Senate Armed Services Committee.”
As MacIntyre spoke of the military leadership of seventy-five years before, the motorcade of the current civilian leader of the Pentagon screeched to a halt in front of the West Wing awning. Surrounded by civilian and military aides with briefcases and binders, Secretary of Defense Henry Conrad alighted from his armored Lincoln Navigator and strode through the open doors with barely a glance at MacIntyre and Connor, all the while jabbing his finger at another man.
“Well, hello to you, too,” Susan snorted. “Who was the horse’s ass on the receiving end?”
“That was the go-to guy, by far the most important of the many faceless princelings who do the bidding of the great one,” MacIntyre said. “Sorry. I mean, that was Under Secretary of Defense Ronald Kashigian, getting reamed out for something by his highness, the National Command Authority.”
Connor shot her boss a glance. “
I thought the President was the National Command Authority.”
“Half right. The President and the Secretary of Defense are both the NCA. Either can give orders for the use of force, including nuclear force.” Seeing Susan screw up her face in doubt, Rusty explained, “It’s meant to make a decapitation attack difficult, and also to prevent a slow response as someone tracks down the President while he’s getting his picture taken with the Red Sox again. Let’s go in.”
Once inside the ground level of the West Wing, Susan was surprised that the hallways were dark, with low ceilings. A Secret Service guard in a blue blazer asked to see their badges and checked their names on a computer as young White House staffers breezed by with food trays. MacIntyre continued his tour-guide role. “The White House Mess is down the hall. It’s a Navy-run restaurant that also does take-out for busy staffers who prove their importance by eating at their desks. Navy does the Mess, Air Force flies Air Force One, the Marines fly the chopper, and the Army runs the comms.”
“You worked here once, didn’t you?” Susan asked her boss.
“Clinton National Security Council Staff for three years,” Rusty whispered.
“I won’t tell a soul,” Susan whispered back.
They walked down a few steps and turned to face a wooden door, a television camera, and a telephone. On the door was a large colored plaster-of-paris Seal of the President of the United States and a brass plaque reading, “Situation Room, Restricted Access.” Rusty picked up the phone and looked into the camera. “MacIntyre plus one.” The door buzzed and they walked into a cramped anteroom.
Off the anteroom was a small, wood-paneled conference room. Ten large leather seats were forced in tightly around the solid, onepiece wooden table. A brass sign holder sat in front of every seat with a name of a principal, or member of the Cabinet-level National Security Council’s Principals Committee. A dozen smaller seats lined the walls. On the wall above the chair at the head of the table there was another presidential seal. In one corner Susan noticed a closed-circuit camera behind a darkened glass globe. A door with a peephole was in another corner. A large white phone console sat on a sideboard near the head of the table. The far wall had three digital clocks: “Baghdad,” “Zulu,” and “POTUS.” Zulu, Susan knew, was military speak for Greenwich Mean Time, or London. Doing the math quickly, she realized that today POTUS was Los Angeles time, the President of the United States was on a West Coast swing. POTUS time was whatever time zone the commander in chief occupied. “I never saw the final talking points for your boss’s meeting with the Chinese Premier,” Defense Secretary Conrad was complaining as he leaned over the table across from Deputy Secretary of State Rose Cohen. “You guys have to be tough with those bastards. They are after the same oil we are.” Cohen was sitting in for the Secretary of State, who was in Asia. Before she could even start to respond, Dr. William Caulder, the National Security Advisor, moved quickly into the room and sat at the head of the table, under the President’s seal.
The Scorpion's Gate Page 3
