Dark Target

by David DeBatto

  DeLuca headed back to his hotel. He felt like he knew less now than he had when he woke up, but that wasn’t quite true. The day had raised a thousand new questions, and he wasn’t going to have time to answer all of them by himself. He had a number of calls to make, to Colleen MacKenzie and Dan Sykes and Julio Vasquez and Walter Ford and to Sami Jambazian, and maybe a couple of other people he wanted to add to his team. Before he did that, he needed to talk to Colonel Oswald, and Phil LeDoux too. Friend or not, DeLuca was angry. He was angry because it was becoming apparent to him that he’d been lied to. He wasn’t going to do anything more until somebody told him what he was really looking for.

  As he approached Noshaq Pass, in the Hindu Kush mountain range, on the border of Afghanistan and Pakistan, Army counterintelligence agent Sergeant Frank Pickett was growing frustrated. They were at sixteen thousand feet, working their way northeast across the Qadzi Deh glacier, and he needed to make a phone call. He’d given the battery to his SATphone to Amal, Ali Abu-Muhammed’s chief lieutenant, for safekeeping, but Amal didn’t know that the phone, developed by DARPA, had a second battery and was still usable. Pickett had been feigning altitude sickness as an excuse to lag behind, but Amal had stayed with him. Posing as a Russian arms dealer, Pickett had been working in the FATA along the Durand line for six months, selling SAM-7s and SAM-7As to Pashtun maliks in Khost and Bajorr and Miran Shah, each weapon he sold encoded with a concealed DARPA-installed GPS transponder, but the missiles were armed—he would have lost credibility had the test firings been less than effective. As a result, he’d gained access to a Talibani named Abdul Sahibzada who offered to introduce him to a Waziri chieftain who might be interested in buying antiaircraft weapons. That offer proved to have been a ruse. Instead, Pickett had been taken to meet Abu-Muhammed, currently considered second or third in command of Al Qaeda forces in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas and someone believed to meet regularly with Osama Bin Laden. Pickett had worked for a month to win Abu-Muhammed’s trust, brokering minor arms deals elsewhere, and it now looked like his hard work had paid off. He had reason to believe, based on what he’d learned at the campfire the night before, eavesdropping on people who were unaware that he was as fluent in Arabic as he was in Russian, that he was being taken to Razmak to meet with Al Qaeda leaders, including Bin Laden himself. It was information he wanted to pass along to U.S. Central Command in Kabul, but unless he could shake Amal somehow, he wouldn’t be able to.

  “You catch up with the others,” he told Amal in Russian. Amal had been a student in Moscow. His Russian was poor, but he was the only one who spoke it, which was why he’d been assigned to accompany the man he believed to be a Russian arms dealer.

  “I will wait,” Amal said. “It is good.”

  There were a dozen Talibani and Al Qaeda soldiers traveling in the group, accompanied by eight regular Pakistani army troops from the Balochistan regiment with Pashtun loyalities, the group’s supplies carried by mules also bearing perhaps half a ton of raw opium in burlap saddlebags flung across their backs. Pickett had little doubt that IMINT was following the caravan’s progress via satellite, the images from their body heat registering clearly to any infrared camera against the cold backdrop of the glacier, but knowing where they were wouldn’t matter unless CENTCOM also knew what they were doing.

  Pickett was considering how the presence of Pakistani troops precluded calling in an airstrike when he saw, up ahead, a flash of light, and then a second, joined by the sound of men firing their rifles, but at what? He looked up, as did Amal, listening for the drone of airplanes overhead. He heard nothing. He understood that Predators and G-Hawks could fly in virtual silence, but they fired missiles, and he hadn’t seen or heard any explosions. Ahead, he saw a third flash of light, then a fourth, and with each flash, the sound of rifles firing abated. Amal sent tracer rounds into the sky, firing blindly and running ahead to join the others. Pickett saw a lone mule racing across the glacier, and then it, too, disappeared in a flash of light. A hundred yards in front of him, Amal stopped and fired his weapon into the sky two more times. Then he was gone.

  When he reached the spot where Amal had stood, Frank Pickett saw only a perfectly round hole in the ice, burned down into the glacier as far as the beam from his flashlight could reach.

  He ran ahead until he arrived at the place where the caravan had been. There, he found a single backpack, a kaffiyeh, and the hindquarters of a mule that appeared to have been sawed in half, as well as a half dozen deep holes in the ice identical to the one where Amal had disappeared, each hole perfectly round and perhaps twenty feet across. Pickett had seen similarly round potholes worn into solid rock by eons of erosion, but nothing he understood could explain how such holes could appear instantaneously.

  It took him a minute to gather his wits, and then he turned on his satellite phone and called in to CENTCOM, giving his name and identification code.

  “How can I help you, Agent Pickett?” the lieutenant he spoke with asked.

  “What do you mean, how can you help me? You can start by telling me what just happened,” Pickett said.

  “What just happened where, exactly?” the lieutenant asked.

  “Right here,” Pickett said. “36° 26.03' north and 71° 53.84' east. Just now.”

  “One minute,” the lieutenant said, coming back a few moments later.

  “Not quite sure what you’re referring to, Pickett,” the lieutenant said. “We’ve got nothing on our screens. Agent Pickett? Are you still with me? Pickett?”

  But Pickett was gone, and where he stood, a final hole. By the time Central Command in Kabul was able to scramble a pair of Warthogs the next morning to overfly and surveil the site at 36° 26.03'N and 71° 53.84'E, the previously symmetrical round holes had been carved and blended into the glacial landscape and there was nothing to be seen, save for a lone mule, six miles away and still shaking. When the SOCOM was able to put men on the ground, flying in a Pavehawk HH-60 stripped of all excess weight to allow it to fly at that altitude, they found evidence that suggested a party of men had fallen into a bergschrund that had evidently been concealed by a snow bridge that collapsed—such was the danger of traveling on glaciers. The body of Sergeant Frank Pickett of Army counterintelligence was written in the report as unrecoverable, along with a recommendation that he be given a Bronze Star for valor, posthumous.

  Chapter Five

  IT ONLY SOURED DELUCA’S MOOD FURTHER when Colonel Oswald told him he couldn’t answer his questions because he was asking about a Special Access Program and he wasn’t read on. DeLuca had called on his encrypted satellite phone. “There’s a reason why we compartmentalize, Agent DeLuca,” Oswald said. “Your job is to find the girl, and find the disks, period. I know you CI guys think there isn’t a door in the world you can’t walk through, and if LeDoux tells me I’m out of line here, then I’ll be first in line for a crow sandwich, but right now, that’s how it’s going to be.”

  DeLuca had to wonder how far a crow would fit up a colonel’s ass. Why was it that so often, joint commands meant so many majors and colonels and generals seeing who could be a bigger prick?

  He bought a ticket on the next commercial flight to Washington and was at the Pentagon by 0800 hours the following morning. He’d left a message on Phillip LeDoux’s voice mail because he didn’t want to disturb his private hours with his new wife, but apparently LeDoux had taken a break from his connubial bliss long enough to collect his messages. DeLuca had said he was flying in for a briefing at the general’s earliest convenience, with or without Oswald in attendance. It was evident by the look on Oswald’s face that LeDoux had chewed him out.

  “Agent DeLuca,” Oswald said, returning DeLuca’s less-than-snappy salute. “The general will be with us in a minute. He’s meeting us in briefing room six. Let’s take a walk, during which I’ll try to describe for you how delicious the crow omelet I had for breakfast was, chased with a slice of humble pie. There is apparently much about CI I don’t understand, nor d
id I appreciate that Team Red is itself Special Access. General LeDoux explained to me how you were formed as CI special ops. This whole intelligence shake-up has got me a bit confused, and I don’t think I’m the only one. At any rate, I hadn’t been briefed, and that’s no excuse, but I apologize. I’m not just a full bird—I’m an old bird, too.”

  “No apology necessary, sir,” DeLuca said, impressed by the colonel’s contrition. The halls of the Pentagon were full of people, scurrying to and fro, including an admiral in a wheelchair who had to be ninety years old. They passed a barbershop, a gift shop, a copy center, and a post office. “I’m sure I probably struck something of an inappropriately strident tone myself.”

  “General LeDoux warned me,” Oswald said. “And I do like people to speak frankly.”

  “Just because I’m curious, what did he say about me?” DeLuca asked.

  “He said you could be an asshole,” Oswald said. “A stubborn asshole, but that there wasn’t anybody he’d rather share a foxhole or a dive bar with.”

  “The general is evidently going soft,” DeLuca said. “He used to call me a dickhead.”

  LeDoux explained that he had a funeral he had to go to later that morning for a former member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who’d passed away at Bethesda. The conference room was a long narrow windowless room with wood panels up to the chair rail and tan walls decorated with framed pictures of various vintage airplanes. There were glasses of water on the table and notepads with pencils next to them for whoever wanted to take notes.

  “Got your message, David,” LeDoux said. “I hope you weren’t too hard on the colonel here. I had to get permission to read you on to this mission separately, because that’s how sensitive this is. I also have to warn you—I had to put the PowerPoint together myself because nobody in tech support has the clearance to do it for me. It should be glitch-free, but you never know. Apologies in advance.”

  He lowered the lights, as a cue on the flat screen monitor mounted on the wall asked for a password.

  “Why don’t you tell us your concerns first?” LeDoux said as he typed in his ID code. “What exactly brings you back to Washington?”

  “It just doesn’t take that much intuition to know when I’m being bullshitted,” DeLuca said. “When people start contradicting each other or offering me answers to questions I haven’t asked yet, to lead me in a certain direction, or they know I’m coming before I get there—I start to get a sense I’m being given a cover story. They give me this elaborate explanation for why they don’t know what information Cheryl Escavedo took, which sounds plausible, I suppose, but they don’t offer me a thing about what she was working on the day or the week it happened, when I know they’ve got that in the duty logs. My gut tells me this is a whistleblower event and not espionage. Whistleblowers who are conscientious—and I have every indication that Escavedo was a conscientious soldier—usually go through channels first before they take things into their own hands. I get nothing on that. Everyone is acting like this happened out of the blue for no reason. That’s not how things happen. There’s a lid on. And then, in a matter of a few days, I find out two other people are missing, and I can’t even start to tell you why—maybe it’s nothing, but how often do three people, connected to the same event, go missing in the same week?”

  “What other two?” LeDoux asked.

  “Escavedo’s roommate,” DeLuca said, “and apparently a girl, in a cult that Escavedo was trying to contact.”

  “A cult?”

  “Don’t ask,” DeLuca said. “It’s probably unrelated, but it’s something I have to look at to make sure. Apparently Escavedo tried to contact them. The bottom line is, I’m going to need more people.”

  “You’re calling in your team?” LeDoux asked.

  “We’re meeting tonight in Albuquerque,” DeLuca said. “I’m trying not to be a pain in the ass, Phil, but when I took the mission with Team Red, I had the impression I was going to be given what I need. I can’t do my work with my hands tied and a blindfold over my eyes. That’s good enough for magician’s assistants, but it doesn’t work for CI.”

  “Okay then,” LeDoux said. “Fair enough. Colonel Oswald, why don’t you give us a little background.”

  “I’m going to walk you through some basic history,” Oswald said. “I want this to be understood in context. I’m sure you know a lot of this already, but bear with me.”

  Words came up on the screen:

  1981 SDI

  1982 Russian test ASAT

  1985 Congressional test ban/COIL

  1988 MHV canceled

  1989 KE-ASAT

  1997 MIRACL/LPCL

  1998 KE-ASAT minus $37mil/SBLRD

  2000 $7mil

  2001 $3mil

  WTC

  2002 SBL-IFX

  2004 THEL/BRILLIANT PEBBLES

  “I’ll try to be brief,” Oswald said. “I’m not going to talk about strictly surveillance birds, because that’s National Reconnaissance Office and not STRATCOM. You know about President Reagan’s Space Defense Initiative, SDI, the so-called ‘Star Wars’ program. In 1982, in response, the Russians tested a high explosive shrapnel-based antisatellite weapon, an SS-9 booster that detonated at fourteen hundred miles. Sort of a warning shot, I guess. Most of our milsats were higher than that, and only nine out of twenty Russian tests were successful, but that said, it was an operational system.”

  He clicked his mouse, and a new screen appeared.

  “In 1985, a Democratic Congress bans testing antisatellite weapons for fear of sparking a new arms race. That doesn’t mean we can’t test antiballistic missile weapons, and that includes the Chemical Oxygen-Iodine Laser, from TRW and Lockheed-Martin, with a wavelength that can penetrate atmosphere, but it needs a 6.6-second dwell at ten kilojoules to produce enough energy to pierce a missile casing, and of course there are other problems with target acquisition and tracking—basically missile tails and nose cones are already hardened against heat, so the only way to take out a missile with a laser, to this point, is to hit the fuel tanks. The point is, antisatellite research continues, disguised as antimissile work.”

  He clicked again.

  “Nineteen eighty-eight. MHV stands for Miniature Homing Vehicle, which is a two-stage missile fired from an F-15, a $1.6-billion Air Force program that gets killed, at which time the Army pushes forward with a KE-ASAT program, a rocket-launched kinetic energy satellite, which is basically an orbiting bomb that we could fly up next to a Russian satellite and blow it up. Funding for KE-ASAT peaks in 1991 at $91 million and declines under Clinton. Secretary of Defense Cohen says he wants capabilities that are temporary and reversible, meaning he wants to blind or jam instead of destroy, pursuant to the argument that a fully blinded nuclear foe is more dangerous than a sighted one.”

  He clicked. DeLuca saw the image of a large white building, in a desert setting, with the word MIRACL beneath it.

  “October 1997, the Army tests a Mid-Infra-Red Advanced Chemical Laser from a test bed in White Sands, challenging the vulnerability of our own satellites, supposedly, but the offensive capabilities of a ground-based laser are obvious, as are the limitations. The technology is hydrogen-fluoride, which is an improvement over oxygen-iodine, but the thing is huge and requires tons of fuel. There’s talk of mounting them on river barges. We also test an LPCL, a Low-Powered Chemical Laser, thirty watts, but it’s enough to blind. Meanwhile the kinetic stuff is getting hammered in Congress. Clinton uses a line-item veto to wipe $37.5 million from the KE-ASAT budget in 1998. At the same time, Boeing/TRW wins a contract to build a Space-Based Laser Readiness Demonstrator, the SBLRD, to use laser technology to destroy missiles in booster phase from space. The schedule is for a 2008 launch or 2005 accelerated, depending on funding. Kinetics continues to be defunded, with only seven and a half mil in 2000 and three million in 2001. Then comes 9/11.”

  The colonel clicked again. On the screen, the image of a large satellite.

  “SBL-IFX is what SBLRD turns into,
Space-Based Laser Integrated Flight Experiment. Funding isn’t a problem after 9/11. Also hydrogen-fluoride, which is nice in space because it reabsorbs waste heat, but the bird is still something of a battleship, 42,000 pounds with a 2.8-meter beam that kills down to 40,000 feet, with a 5,000-kilometer range. But cruise missiles fly considerably lower than 40,000 feet, and there are 7,500 of them already deployed with nuclear warheads, and we have no confidence that we’re going to keep these out of the hands of terrorists and rogue governments forever.”

  Colonel Oswald took a drink of water, then clicked again. DeLuca saw a picture of what appeared to be a truck-mounted antiaircraft cannon, except that the cannon didn’t look like anything he’d ever seen before.

  “Some think, at this point, that THEL is the answer. Tactical High-Energy Laser, developed as part of the Nautilus program with the Israelis, who didn’t much care for defending themselves with plastic sheeting and duct tape while SCUDS were falling on their heads during Gulf One. The original THEL is megawatt class continuous wave deuterium-fluoride, like MIRACL, but it has to be made compact and mobile enough to be deployed in theater. Hughes Aircraft builds the tracking system and the rest is Lockheed-Martin/Boeing/TRW. We get a beam out of a five-inch gun turret with 350 degrees of motion, capable of acquiring targets as close as 450 meters. We’re getting $170 million U.S. annually, mostly going to Northrop-Grumman and Ball Aerospace for miniaturization, and $80 million from the Israelis, paid to Rehovot Air and Yehud Industrial. In the year 2000, the MTHEL, a mobile THEL, tests and takes down twenty-three out of twenty-four Katyusha rockets—this is again at White Sands. Last summer the thing was knocking mortar rounds out of the sky with a 97 percent batting average. Artillery shells, SAM-7s—it’s unbelievable, really. Fantastic fire control. We’re not far at all from having a fully effective tactical defensive shield. I can’t tell you how happy that makes the Israelis. We have three Humvee-mounted THELs in Iraq at present, hunting IEDs.We’re probably looking at V-22 tilt-rotor and CH-47 Chinook and Bradley-mounted battlefield THELs by 2006, deployed out of C-130s, and possibly shoulder-fired by 2008. At which point the limitations become more human than technological.”