October's Ghost

by Ryne Douglas Pearson

  “But we don’t really need a Talon. We can go with a Shadow.” Duc referred to the HC-130 Combat Shadow, the Talon’s cousin optimized for in-flight refueling of multiple helicopters.

  “Okay.” Sean knew that the lieutenant could be trusted implicitly when it came to getting them into and out of potentially hot LZs. And this might get hot, he thought, looking to the two-pintle-mounted 7.62mm miniguns. “Think those will be enough?”

  “I don’t want to have to find out. How about we get some backup? Something that can ruin the Cubans’ day if we need to.”

  Sean nodded agreement. “Anything else?”

  Duc thought for a moment. “I wouldn’t mind having one of those AWACS dedicated to watching our ass.”

  “I’ll tell the colonel.” That meant the colonel would get it for them. Bill Cadler had clout, and a hell of a loud voice.

  “Look at those,” the lieutenant said, pointing at the images of the plant. “Power masts all over the place. We gotta watch those.” His eyes traced a path around the logical path for any lines between the tall metal structures. “We gotta come in right.”

  “We should be able to get one or two run-throughs down,” Sean said, hoping they would have enough time. There wasn’t much time for preparation on this one. “I’ll let you know when we’re ready.”

  “Gotcha.” Duc took one copy of the map and satellite photos to the front of the Pave Hawk to begin planning the precise flight plan.

  Sean stood and took a few steps from the helicopter before looking back. This would be the first real test of this version of the Pave Hawk. It was a formidable-looking bird. The stubby wings that held the 230-gallon outrigger fuel tanks forward and above the side doors could also add to the twin miniguns’ firepower by holding air-to-air or air-to-ground missiles. There were also systems to prevent the Pave Hawk from being hit. Chaff-and-flare dispensers, tied to missile-launch detectors, could pump out the radar and infrared countermeasures from just behind the cabin, and the entire helicopter was covered in a black-and-green infrared-suppressing paint scheme. To help get it to any target, there was a FLIR system and a Terrain Avoidance/Terrain Following radar that allowed Lieutenant Duc to fly so close to the earth that new threats of collision had to be planned for. That was taken care of by the sharp, forward-facing blade protruding upward from the Pave Hawk’s fuselage a yard forward of the main rotor shaft. This was protection from wire strikes, the very real possibility of clipping a power or communication line as the helicopter skimmed low to the ground. Any contact above the nose and below the four blade rotor would direct the offending wire into the sharp blade, slicing it in two and—hopefully—saving the Pave Hawk. The system had proved itself during training flights, leaving certain local utility companies in the South and West scratching their heads as to how their lines came to be cut.

  All the systems inherent to the Pave Hawk were meant to make it one of the safest and most stealthy taxis for the special operations forces—Delta, in this case. It was a matter of mating the best with the best.

  The major’s attention shifted to the east-west runway just north of where he stood. From over the Atlantic a dark green C-130 descended and touched down gracefully. There were no markings visible on its exterior, which told Graber that it was the Herky Bird from the 23rd Air Force that was bringing down the gear he’d requested from Bragg, plus the technical expert from DOE. Sean watched the aircraft taxi to a blue Air Force Humvee, which waited for a single passenger to deplane and climb in. A second vehicle, which would get the equipment brought down, pulled up to the stern ramp as the Humvee drove away. In a minute it stopped just short of the Delta major.

  “Can’t you grunts do anything without me?” Joe Anderson asked loudly as he stepped from the vehicle. There was the slightest smile on his smallish face.

  Sean recognized the faint expression as the highest compliment from the man who had just added the final element to a team that was now, without a doubt, the best for the job that lay ahead.

  * * *

  The American Airlines flight from Dallas-Fort Worth landed on Los Angeles International Airport’s runway Two-Four right just as Angelenos were halfway through the morning weekday rush hour. It was the milder form of the red-eye, just a three-hour jump from the sprawling Texas airport to LAX. Most of the eighty passengers were businesspeople who had risen before the dawn to catch their flight. Two of those passengers, as much businessmen in their own eyes as any of the others on board, had connected from an earlier flight from Miami. From one panhandle to another.

  The two men, dressed in sweatshirts and jeans that gave them the appearance of youthful student travelers, took their carry-on bags and followed the crowd out to the baggage-claim area in Terminal 4 on the south side of LAX’s two-level loop. There were few people at the rotating oval baggage conveyers; businesspeople had learned to travel light, for fear of losing a needed bag.

  The two young men, however, knew that carry-ons had one disadvantage for the business traveler in their line of work—the X ray.

  The single blue Samsonite, which had been checked at the desk in Miami, slid down the ramp and was snatched up before it could start its transit around the stainless-steel racetrack. The men went next to the Budget Rent-a-Car counter and took possession of a subcompact car that was assembled by Chevrolet from parts imported from Japan. Five minutes later they were on the 405 freeway heading north, with traffic, toward the 10. That would take them into downtown L.A.

  Then the work would begin.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  RETURN TO SENDER

  Becoming a spy was frighteningly easy.

  Samuel Paul Garrity had done so because, like others who chose treason as an avocation, he wanted to get back at a government, at a system that he believed had prevented him from living the American Dream. That concept was no more than a pipe dream fed to the eager masses who wanted something better, he knew, and had for a long time. There was no dream out there. Just a bait, an illusion to satisfy the desires of those who wanted more. But they could never reach it. Like Garrity, they were treading water, unable to get ahead enough to keep from falling behind. It was a cycle of desire, appeasement, and denial that he had decided to step out of. No longer was he in the loop. In fact, he was so far out that he didn’t even retain empathy for those still in it. Sam Garrity had found his brass ring, and to hell with those who were stupid enough not to go for their own.

  As an employee of the Central Intelligence Agency, Garrity had at one time been a loyal citizen who found some pride in serving his country, even in the oft-considered menial work he did. The job had once been a source of fanciful dreams and musings as to what the Agency really did behind the red doors that marked the secure areas he could never hope to enter. But the natural curiosity had led him to seek out, on his own, the knowledge of what the wondrous things might be. There were dozens of companies in the area surrounding the nation’s capital that carried the “latest” in electronic and surveillance equipment that those in private security and investigative fields used in their daily work. These showrooms were also open to the general public, as a buck was a buck, and there were thousands of bright, shiny toys to cause the amateur sleuth to drool uncontrollably.

  Sam Garrity found himself in awe of the gear that was out there in the open, for the taking—with the liberation of a large amount of money from his savings. As he ogled at the plethora of “spy” toys, he came upon a device that he could combine with his passion of the moment—a high-end personal computer that had already eaten up a good chunk of that savings. It looked much like a small photocopy machine or, to an educated eye, an expensive scanner that converted documents or pictures placed under its cover to bits of digitized data to be stored on a computer connected to it. It was exactly that, and much more, and he had, after a particularly effective sales pitch from the store’s manager, taken it home with no idea what he would one day do with it.

  This day, though, after a long night cleaning the mess left by t
he obscenely well paid executives who ruled Langley like the appointed monarchs he saw them as, Garrity knew exactly what to do. As usual he took a short nap when he arrived at his two-bedroom home, then, later, went into his “playroom.” In it were his babies, the computer and the machine hooked to it that had helped change his life to one where he was in control.

  He repeated the same procedure each morning after work, though there was not always a yield from his efforts. First he switched on the IBM and started the program, called Deep Reader, that ran the scanning device. Next, he took the sheets removed from the DCI’s legal pad and scanned them one at a time into the computer memory that the program had set aside for the task. Several sensitive lasers swept over the blank pages and “read” the indentations left by the pressure of writing instruments on the sheets above. The process was familiar to law-enforcement agencies, who often used it to uncover the most mundane scribbles to tie criminal activities, or the plans of such, to certain individuals by way of handwriting analysis. Garrity knew who had written that which Deep Reader was scrutinizing and separating into distinct word patterns from the different pages. That man had made his path of treason all the easier with his incessant scribbling, something Sam had noticed during several of his late-night cleaning sessions while the director worked at his desk, despotically pointing out areas that needed more attention with the sweeper or the polish rag. At first he had taken the sheets on a lark, just to see if his new toy would work. Then, when references to individuals and groups he was familiar with started showing up, he made the leap from sleuth to spy, offering his services to the first one on the list. Surprising to him, they had accepted and were paying generously into a Canadian bank account that would ensure a very comfortable retirement beyond what he could ever have hoped for otherwise.

  “What’s on the director’s tiny little mind today?” he asked the screen, watching the digitized hourglass drain as the five-minute-per-page process wound to its end. It was more complicated than just scanning the page for indentations, a trick that had once been accomplished by a method known as electrostatic detection. That was archaic compared to this. Deep Reader not only “saw” what was on the page, more important, it sorted through the numerous words and scribbles from potentially tens of pages above to piece together the logical word strings and other writings of that day. Because there could still be “leftovers” from the previous day, the program “looked back” at what had been culled twenty-four hours earlier and disregarded it. So much data had been stored since Garrity first began his homespun business that he had to install a backup to dump the excess to; his main hard drive just wasn’t big enough.

  A bright blue FINISHED flashed in the graphically raised icon box. Garrity clicked on that with a sweep of the mouse and saw that Deep Reader had discerned seven separate pages of notes the director had made. He scrolled through them slowly, looking first for any notations that pertained directly to his paymaster. Those that didn’t were delivered as well. What happened after that was not his concern.

  The fourth page yielded what he wanted. He had trained himself to decipher the director’s exaggeratedly left-leaning—no pun intended—penmanship. The letters were always spaced close together, some overlapping, especially the cases where there were two of the same next to each other. This one looked as though he was jotting down something someone else was saying, as the thoughts were far too coherent to be his alone.

  “Shit!” Garrity said loudly, too much so, as evidenced by the “What’s wrong, dear?” from his wife in the kitchen. He dispatched with her question and went back to the notes. “They know,” he said more quietly. “But how...?” He found the answer on the next page. “Oh, my God.” That guy wasn’t just blowing smoke after all. He instinctively looked around the room, afraid for the first time since beginning his treachery that there was a real danger of being discovered. He knew that the DDI, that Drummond asshole, was looking for a leak in the wrong place, but what the Agency knew now could lead to his employers, which could lead to him.

  He had to warn them that the Agency knew. He quickly saved the data and switched the computer off, then went to the front room. “Where’s the paper?”

  “The Post’s on the couch,” his wife answered from the other room.

  “No, the USA Today.” His eyes frantically searched the living room.

  “Probably on the porch.” The back door closed, and the motor of their new Taurus started up as his wife headed off to work.

  Garrity was out there and back with the desired paper as his wife pulled out of the driveway. He flipped hurriedly to the sports section and looked for the... The Cards did it again, defying all... A. That was it. A was 1. The keying system was simple enough. Find the seventh word in the first story on the sports page concerning the dominant sport in season. There was none more dominant than baseball. The first letter of that word would then yield a number. A was 1; B, 2. And so on, stopping at 4 and starting with 1 again when E was reached, and again four letters later. The corresponding number was then added to the telephone number of a phone booth Garrity had preselected, and that number was then to be entered on the touch-tone phone after dialing his contact’s pager. It would then be reverse-deciphered, giving his contact a place to reach him in one hour. That was the drill—one hour from the time he entered the number.

  For added security he never called the pager from his home phone; that he would do from a pay phone chosen at random as he drove. He grabbed the keys to their old Audi—he and his wife, because they worked non-concurrent schedules, always took the nicer Taurus to their respective jobs—and went out to the double-wide driveway. The cracked vinyl of the Audi’s front seat squeaked under his weight when he climbed in. He pumped the gas several times in the ritual they had mastered over the years to get the finicky car started after a long time dormant. From the gas gauge it looked as if neither he nor his wife had driven it in days. He turned the key, keeping his foot on the accelerator. The starter spun, the engine coughed, then a series of rapid clicks came from the front, and the coughing ceased. He twisted the key again, getting the same clicking, but no motor sounds at all.

  “Damn!” It was the starter! He’d replaced it just three months ago with that reconditioned one his wife had warned him about. ‘Just buy a new one.’ She’d been right again.

  He got out and raised the hood in the expected and useless way. There was nothing under there he could fix. The damned thing needed a new starter...again!

  Why now? He couldn’t walk to a pay phone and just hang around for an hour, not in the neighborhood surrounding his quiet residential enclave. The phones there were frequented by drug dealers, and often by the police busting them. That he couldn’t chance. There was only one way, and it was a breach of the security measures he’d agreed to. But there was no other way. He walked into the house and dialed the number of his contact from memory, adding the 1 to each of the digits in his home phone number as he entered them with ten touches on the keypad.

  * * *

  “DiContino,” Bud said into the phone, checking the time on his Casio. Drummond would be there any minute.

  “Bud, it’s Ellis. Listen, I don’t know what’s going on, but I just ran interference for the President with the chairman of House Armed Services. He called and wanted to know why Kneecap was rolled out at Andrews with General Granger on board, and also about the chopper out back.”

  Vorhees was such a control freak, Bud had come to know firsthand. His domain was his, and in a way the NSA could understand that from recent experience, but he took his legislative duties to the line where oversight blurred with command. Never made it past colonel, did you, Richard? Maybe this was his way to get what had been denied him by that mine. “Ellis, you did right. Just spout the party line if he keeps bellyaching. The Pentagon is quietly calling it a readiness exercise.”

  “That’s what I figured, and I told him so,” the President’s chief of staff explained. “But Vorhees isn’t the big problem. Jack just got a
call from the Post asking for confirmation that the congressman had contacted the White House asking about ‘emergency relocation procedures’ for the President.” Jack Duffy was the White House director of communications, the newly in-vogue position that had replaced the press secretary as the President’s point man with the media.

  “Damn. Is it spreading?”

  “The senior White House correspondent from ABC is digging. If they get any sort of confirmation on this, we can expect something on the tube.”

  “Jack didn’t give the Post anything even close to one, right?”

  The COS snickered. “He’s going to ‘get back to them.’ ”

  “I suggest he takes his time,” Bud said. “The day’s half-gone already.”

  “Tomorrow, then?”

  “Things should be under control by then.” I hope.

  Gonzales heard the words “under control” louder than the rest of the weak assurance. “Bud, is there anything I need to know? Anything the Secret Service detail should be aware of?”

  Bud knew he’d have to expand the loop, because the COS had a right, and a responsibility, to know the story now that things were accelerating toward some sort of resolution... or confrontation. “The DDI is due here anytime. Where are you?”

  “My office.”

  The COS’s office was just down the hall from the NSA’s. “Why didn’t you just walk over for this?”

  Another snicker. “Your deputy is as much a pit bull as I am when it comes to protecting his boss.”

  “Nick takes his job seriously. Why don’t you come over and sit in with Greg and me. We’ll fill you in.”

  “Bless me with your gatekeeper?”

  It was Bud’s turn to laugh. “Done.”

  * * *

  “Now is the time, Fidel.” Raul had never seen his brother like this. He no longer resembled the charismatic, vigorous leader that he was just hours before. There was a look about him that was peaceful, of all things. A sort of resignation, but without the sorrow he had expected to see. Was the revenge they were going to unleash really that redeeming for him? Raul could think of no other reason for his brother’s demeanor.