October's Ghost

by Ryne Douglas Pearson

  “He’d say he could do better,” Omar joked.

  “I bet he could,” Art concurred, the spark flashing in his brain without warning. His eyes drifted away from the photocopy, the thoughts piling one atop another as they fought for dominance in the plan that was forming in the senior agent’s mind.

  Omar caught the intensity in Art’s demeanor before Frankie. “You got something, Art?”

  “I think we might.”

  Frankie’s attention level shot up at the positive tone in her partner’s words. “What? How?”

  “We’re waiting,” Omar implored.

  “I think with a little help from Jacobs we can pull this off,” Art said, without explaining what “this” was.

  “Pull what off?” Frankie asked.

  Art picked up the phone and dialed down to TS. “We’re going to play a little ‘lost and found.’ “

  “What kind of game is that?” Espinosa asked, playing along with Art’s crypticism.

  “The most satisfying. We’re the finders, and our perps are the losers.”

  * * *

  “You’ll want to buckle up now,” the Air Force lieutenant informed his five passengers. The Gulfstream would be landing on Andrews’ east-west runway in a few minutes.

  “Give me something, Dick,” the Post reporter begged. “I go all the way down there with you, hang back in the shadows like a good little reporter, and don’t look where I shouldn’t. What do I have from that? Nothing.”

  Congressman Richard Vorhees, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, laughed at the childlike begging and guilt projection Chick Hill was shooting his way. As the Post’s military-affairs correspondent, an assignment with fewer potential stories in the “days of downsizing,” he had been invited to accompany the congressman on a short inspection of several special operations facilities. His access had been understandably limited to nonsecure areas of the three bases, which had frustrated him to no end. The congressman had enjoyed every minute of it. The media hated to be told, with no chance for argument, that they couldn’t go somewhere or see something. “Childlike” might have been an improper characterization, Vorhees realized; “infantile” was more descriptive.

  “Hey, that sergeant offered you a chance to run the confidence course.” Vorhees heard the snickers from his staff in the seats behind as the Gulfstream began to descend. “You didn’t take him up on that.”

  Pig. Hill was treading water here, trying to make something of his new beat. The State Department had been a hell of a lot easier to cover than the Pentagon. At least there you could see the comings and goings of ambassadors and the like, things that gave an inkling if something was up. The wrong person in the right place at the wrong time could set the old noggin to thinking. That was the reporters’ sense. Somewhere after the sixth on the hierarchy of human senses, he figured. That ability, however, could not easily penetrate a stone wall, the likes of which Vorhees had erected around everything interesting on their short jaunt down South.

  Well, so be it. Hill knew that if he couldn’t get information he could at least get denials to the right questions. “What about Delta?”

  “Delta?” Vorhees asked with feigned ignorance. “What’s that?”

  A smile. “Weren’t you observing a demonstration of their techniques?”

  “Whose?” The game was fun to the congressman, a man who had developed a healthy disdain for the press during his tour in uniform. Plus, his professed lack of knowledge was the “literal” truth. The Army had no so-called Delta force. If that name stuck among its members, JSOC, and some uninformed members of the media, oh well. In the Pentagon’s nomenclature the unit once referred to as Special Operations Detachment Delta was now known as Special Operations Detachment Trumpet, and that designation would change again in three months. Delta hadn’t officially been “Delta” for quite some time, giving the politicos like himself a convenient answer when challenged on the existence of the unit. “Don’t know where you get your information, Chick.”

  “Then there is no unit called Delta?”

  A careful pause. “To my knowledge we have no unit that carries that designation.”

  “To your knowledge?”

  The congressman nodded.

  Well, let’s try this. “I heard someone mention that ‘some unit’ you were observing took off pretty quick from Bragg. Anything to that?”

  Vorhees had heard one of his aides let that slip and had chastised the staffer for it. “People on bases move at their own speed. Some slow, some fast. Everyone has someplace to go.”

  Okay, there’s an opening. “Would they be going anywhere in particular? Maybe where the action is?”

  Another laugh erupted from the jovial bureaucrat, giving him time to craft a response. “You give me more credit than I’m due, Chick. I’m a pencil pusher, remember?”

  “Maybe Cuba?” It was a stretch, but he had to cast his line somewhere.

  “Chick, come on. From what I can see that’s a coup d’état going on down there.” Vorhees had no knowledge of any American involvement, but the quick departure of Delta had made the same thought cross his mind. But speculation was not his job at the moment—deflection was. “You’re reaching on that one.”

  Hill could accept that. It would do. Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee Richard Vorhees, after a tour of facilities housing U.S. Special Operations Forces, denies that any of those forces are involved in the apparent coup under way in Cuba. Leads often generated as much information as digging for the story. He was certain he and his editors would be getting calls from the Hill concerning their “shoddy, speculative reporting.” At least the trip wouldn’t be a total waste.

  The Gulfstream touched down with the rising sun behind it and turned off the runway toward the secure area of Andrews before backtracking along the taxiway toward the military VIP terminal.

  “Jeez, she’s a big one, isn’t she?” one of the aides commented, looking out one of the aircraft’s left-side windows.

  Chick turned his attention that way. The observation just heard was adequate, he thought. The white 747 with its long blue stripe running from tail to nose was being pulled from its hangar by a dark green tug. Within seconds of stopping, a truck with stairs mounted on its back pulled to the left—Hill reminded himself of the military jargon: port—side door. As the Gulfstream taxied by, a black limousine pulled up to the stairs and let out... Granger? He instinctively leaned closer to the window and squinted. It was Granger. That smooth head and blue uniform were unmistakable, his peaked cap in hand as he ran—ran?—up the steps into the... That’s not Air Force One. Hill cocked his head and looked as far to the Gulfstream’s front as he could through the small glass portal. It’s there. The President’s plane, a modified 747 designated VC-25A, was similar in appearance to the jet they were passing, but its long stripe flared upward near the nose to paint the entire upper front a bright blue. That plane was out on the tarmac in its usual place. The Post reporter looked back to the other aircraft, wondering...

  The Doomsday Plane? It was a flowery, overly dramatic nickname that no Air Force officer would ever utter. The correct name was Kneecap, Hill knew. The National Emergency... Emergency? ...Airborne Command Post. Why was it rolling out, and why was the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff running up the stairs to it? Granger had been around long enough that everyone in D.C. knew he moved about as fast as he talked. That’s why he had chosen the Air Force for his military career path, the joke went, so he could let his fighters do the walking.

  Hill kept his attention focused on the hangar where the—what was the damned military designation? E-4B. That was it. He scanned the area around the E-4B. There was nothing else untoward, just a few guards. That was to be expected, he figured. But something still was stuck in his nosy craw. Granger running? It wasn’t a story; it wasn’t even a lead. Yet.

  The Gulfstream came to a stop five minutes later, more than two miles away from the aircraft that had sparked Chick Hill’s curiosity
. The congressman politely accompanied him to the terminal, benignly thanking him for the company and bidding him an appropriately smiling farewell.

  “Thanks for nothing, Dick,” Hill said after the congressman had gotten into the car waiting for him. I wonder why that perk hasn’t been cut. The Post reporter saw his perk waiting farther away.

  “Welcome back,” the Jeep’s driver said when Hill climbed in, tossing his two-suiter in the back. The kid was low on the totem pole at the paper, hardly more than an intern, actually, and drew the gofer duties often. “Back to the grindstone.”

  “No. Not just yet.” Hill took his cell out, an idea rising. “I’ve gotta check something out. You just drive.”

  “Drive where?”

  Hill told him as he plotted out what he’d have to do to get a story out of this, even if there wasn’t one. He almost laughed at that doubt. Anything could be made into a story.

  * * *

  Jenny MacNamara stared at the thirty-inch display like a child in awe of a new release from Nintendo. But this was no game.

  “Where do we start?” Harry Fastwater asked.

  “Your ancestral abilities would be much appreciated now,” she said, trying to inject some humor into the very serious atmosphere. SCI didn’t mean that those restricted by its conditions were without imagination. When one was told to look for an SS-4 missile, especially if that person or persons were blessed with half a brain and a rudimentary schooling in Cold War history, then forming a supposition of what might be unfolding did not enter the category of a difficult undertaking. “Barring that...”

  Before them was a computer-generated ten-thousand-acre haystack. Somewhere in it was a needle that had the sting of a lance.

  “We have to look for the proper access to all those buildings,” Jenny said. “Doors big enough to move the thing in and out.” She brought the magnification up until the boundaries of the Juragua Nuclear Generating Plant, a complex roughly the shape of a fat inverted T, filled the screen. The top of the T, at the screen’s bottom, almost touched the rough beaches west of the inlet to the Bay of Cienfuegos.

  “What about the north and south sides of those buildings?” Harry inquired. As the platform passed over the target from west to east, it achieved excellent three-dimensional coverage, with extremely high detail of the structured surfaces in line with the axis of the pass—the east and west walls, or those obliquely aligned with that direction of travel. Those surfaces on the north and south of the buildings received less detail coverage because there hadn’t been time to make a corresponding pass on a north-south axis.

  “We have some old stills we can use if we don’t find anything here.” The senior technician entered a command that rotated the view to one that approximated the path of the sensor as it approached the plant, though from a much closer vantage. “Okay, we’re going to follow the pass over at ten percent speed. You mark all the access openings that fit the bill from the centerline north, and I’ll take the south.”

  Twenty minutes later the pair had eighty-six “possibles” marked on the working video of the pass.

  “Now we do some geometry.”

  “How so?” Fastwater asked. His real question was a dumbfounded huh?

  “Well, even with eighty-plus ten-foot access doors scattered all over, it wouldn’t do a damn bit of good to put the thing in there if the structure doesn’t have sufficient interior space to hold it.”

  “Yeah, I get that. We make sure there’s more than seventy-eight feet possible clearance beyond the door. But where does geometry come in?”

  I should have been a teacher, MacNamara thought, not really minding. “You ever back a car around a corner?”

  “Sure.”

  “Then there’s no reason they couldn’t have maneuvered the thing in at an angle, kinda like doing a fifty-point turn, or whatever it would take.”

  The recognition flashed from the junior technician’s eyes. “I see. Yeah. So we don’t necessarily need a straight shot back from the door.”

  Jenny nodded. Her junior was a fast learner. “Could be a right angle. Plus, we’ve got to make sure there’s enough room on the outside of the building to get the missile and TEL out. Some of those are pretty closely spaced.” She ran a quick computer simulation to come up with the requisite dimensions. “Let’s check them.”

  This process took half as much time as finding the doors.

  “Thirty-nine possibles left.” Jenny frowned at the display. “Widely scattered, too.”

  Fastwater noted that a full third of the doors left in their search were in and around a gathering of eight large structures at the southern fringes of the facility, a quarter-mile from the beach. “What are those?”

  “Reactor buildings and cooling towers,” Jenny answered after a quick check of the database. “Damn!”

  “What?”

  “There’s too many, Harry! We can’t send this up saying ‘We’ve got almost forty possible locations. Happy hunting.’ There has to be a better way.” She took the magnification down in each of the sixteen-square-mile quadrants that she had divided the complex into. A few minutes later the computer spit out a reading of objects that it considered to be nonstructural.

  “Big concentration of trucks by the number-four reactor building,” Harry pointed out. He scanned some of the visible light images of the same quadrant, but the shadow cast by the tall cooling tower blotted out much of the possible detail. “What kind?”

  These readings from the SAR data allowed the computer to guess at the type. “GAZ tankers. Five-thousand-liter jobs.” Jenny counted them, and the other vehicles. “Oops, that’s one mistake.” She zoomed in on a fifty-by-fifty object, a hundred yards from the trucks, that the computer said was a nonstructural—in essence, a vehicle. “That’s a prefab building of some kind. A couple vehicles around it. Any heat sources?”

  Harry ran through the IR images. The pass had taken place in the early morning, before the heat of the day could fully rob objects of their infrared images. “Nothing special, but there is some.”

  Hmm. “Okay, mark that for reference.” She zoomed back in on the tankers. “Any people on the vis?”

  The junior technician juggled back to the digitized photos, taking the contrast up to compensate for the shaded area. “Yeah, there’s some folks down there. Seem to be pretty busy, all hanging out around that—what is that? A pipe?”

  “Pipes,” Jenny corrected. “Hmm. Tank trucks. Pipes. Looks like hoses on the ground.” She looked to her partner. “You thinking what I am?”

  “Fueling.” Harry got a sullen nod in response. They weren’t stupid enough to overlook what might be going on. “Jesus.”

  “I think we may be looking in the right area. But where specifically?” Jenny locked her display in on the area surrounding the four big reactor buildings. The missile itself was big, but it was lost somewhere in there. Hey. Yeah! “That’s a heavy thing we’re looking for, right?”

  “We aren’t following tracks in the mud, Jen.”

  “No, but a beaten path still shows wear.” She took the pass back to a point just before it traveled directly over the plant. “It’s slim, I admit, but it’s possible.”

  Harry wasn’t hopeful. He watched as she entered a command into the computer, telling the signal-processing subprogram to run the data back in raw numbers directly as received, but adding the proper algorithmic processing loop that would distinguish fine surface detail. The result was a simple forced-choice order for the program, which took the tangible data and processed it through a finite series of “fuzzy-logic” filters to come up with micro-processor-generated guesses. Those suppositions were then compared with their like, and if a pattern could be established, the computer would decide that something was there.

  That “something” in this case would be a shallow channel of wear on the concrete surface of the facility where the tires of heavy vehicles might have worn the pavement away, possibly in removing and returning the missile to its hiding place. If a paral
lel set of grooves running into one of the access doors could be found, then an educated finger could be pointed, allowing for greater scrutiny.

  “Flyby time,” Jenny said, taking the pass over the plant another time. This one was slower, as the raw-data package was being assembled as the imaginary sensor platform flew over the area. Concentrating on just the small sector encompassing the reactor buildings and their associated structures kept the duration manageable. This was a time-critical task. “Nothing. Huh, that looks like something from that prefab building.” A discernible channel ran from the square structure to one of the cooling towers. “Must have been a trench they covered up. Forward.” Her eyes bore into the display. “Nothing. Noth— Stop.” Her eyes fixed on an anomaly in the signal return, though not from where she had expected. “That’s gotta be a data flutter.” The bits of digital imagery were sometimes prone to electronic bugs, just as a visible-light image could be affected by a smudge on the camera lens. “No, that’s too uniform.” The light went off instantly. “Shut the process down and zoom in on this, Harry.”

  Fastwater ordered the signal processor to disengage from the data package and focused in on the desired area. “Fill the screen?”

  “All of it.” Jenny watched as the circular structure came up toward her. It was like the other three cooling towers for the reactors. In its intended use the nonradioactive water used to draw thermal energy away from the heat exchangers carrying the reactor coolant would be vented through steam pipes into the two-hundred-foot concrete towers, which were roughly the shape of hourglasses with the extreme top and bottoms sheared off (people had become familiar with the shape while watching coverage of the Three Mile Island disaster in the seventies). The majority of the steam would then condense on the walls, falling back into collecting basins in the interior base of the tower for recirculation.