PointOfHonor

by Susan Glinert Stevens

  “It was part of the plan?” asked Harper.

  “Yes. Stillwell was the prize. You were picked because we believed you could get to the Data Center. Well, if we were going to stop you here, then we needed to make sure we grabbed Stillwell. The Data Center, your backup tapes, and the mess you’ve left. It hurts us, but not that much. There’s a mirrored site. We set it up after you were here the first time.

  “As far as the weapon labs are concerned, nothing has happened. You degraded some assets. You—”

  Harper shook his head. “You’re lying.” He fired once. The bullet rushed by Duri’s ear, rupturing the eardrum. Harper waited for the Iraqi to regain his balance. “You were running an Oracle 7.1 site. You don’t have real time replication, which means you either had a standby database, or if you had a mirrored site, it was an absolute mirror. That takes a lot of bandwidth and I don’t think you have the infrastructure. I think your mirror site worked off a physical handoff. So try again.”

  A small trickle of blood ran down Duri’s cheek. “You seem to know your subject.”

  “You’ve read my file—what do you think?”

  Duri shrugged.

  Anderson drove up in the Jeep. Stillwell sat in the passenger seat, his face a white mask plastered around a pair of glazed eyes. Anderson got out of the Jeep and explained, “He didn’t take to being the bait too well.”

  “How about the wounded Iraqis?”

  “Hayes has got them wrapped up with duct tape. It’ll last for a while, but nothing very permanent.”

  “Okay, let’s get Burns and Kincaid wrapped up in a tarp or something. We’re bringing them home. I’ll take care of this garbage.” He waved the Glock towards Duri.

  Duri’s eye perked up. “So now you shoot me?”

  Harper shook his head. “No.” They started walking away from the Jeep and into the desert where Harper had hidden the tapes.

  “Where are we going?”

  Harper grunted, “I’ll give you a choice, Colonel.”

  Duri doubted he would like the choices. “All right.”

  “I leave you here to be found by your people. I doubt they’ll be very happy. One Data Center trashed, a bunch of dead soldiers, three missing helicopters, and intelligence operations compromised in the United States. Not my idea of career enhancing moves, or—”

  Duri stopped, cocking his head to hear clearly.

  “I take you with me and turn you over to the Kuwaiti authorities. I’m sure they can find a nice place to keep you safe from Saddam. Who knows, they might even let you live. Saddam is not very pleased with failures, and you, Colonel, are a failure.”

  “Not much of a choice, Major.”

  Harper shoved the Iraqi again. “A bullet in the back of the head would be too easy, and I don’t want it to be easy for you.”

  “The Kuwaitis will kill me.”

  “And Saddam won’t?”

  “I’d rather take my chances.”

  Harper pulled the trigger. Duri’s left knee kicked out from under him and Duri slammed to the ground howling. He leaned over the Iraqi and whispered, “Remember something.”

  Duri glared at him wide eyed.

  “If I ever see you near my family, I won’t simply cripple you. I’ll kill you.” He spat once and walked away to collect the backup tapes.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  J. Edgar Hoover Building, Washington, D.C.

  Monday, November 17, 1997

  10:00 A.M. EST

  Mary Kirsten looked up from her computer monitor and examined the two men standing at the opening of her cubicle. Harvey Randall and Larry Wheeler had not been to bed, and despite their best efforts to clean up before coming from Virginia to the JEH building, they looked bone weary and run out.

  “You two are quite something.”

  Harvey smiled. “You got any coffee around here?” he yawned.

  “Sure. Down that isle and to the left,” she paused, a twinkle in her eye. “Was the party worth it?”

  Larry laughed, “Don’t know yet.”

  “Thought you might be able to tell us,” Harvey said as he pulled out a paper sack and slid out a bubble wrapped IDE disk drive enclosed in a static bag and bound by large rubber binders.

  “What’s this?”

  “A disk drive,” offered Larry.

  Her lips pouted. “I know that—what’s this about?”

  “Maybe you could show us where that coffee is,” suggested Harvey.

  Mary fingered the evidence card taped to the top of the static bag. She read ODRICKS CORNER on the label. After the intense news coverage yesterday, Odricks Corner had become known to half the nation—the half that watched the twenty-four hour news channels. She wrinkled her brow and asked quietly, “That was you guys on the TV last night?”

  “Uh-huh,” replied Larry.

  She looked them up and down again. “Long night.”

  “Had better ones,” continued Larry.

  “Maybe we should get some coffee that’s better than the poison they brew on this floor.” She patted the disk drive and opened her desk drawer. She placed the padded package into her drawer and locked it.

  “That sounds nice.”

  Mary had been around the Bureau for twenty years. She was one of thecivilianemployees hired for her skills in areas outside of shooting and running. Mary was a computer guru. There simply was no other way of describing her. Give her a computer system, whether it was VAX/VMS, MVS, Windows NT, UNIX, or Win95, and it would soon give up its secrets to Mary. She was part of the elite group of people across the country that could pry, fiddle, and unlock a system.

  A mother of two and the wife of a submarine driver, Mary Kirsten chose to make her home with her husband Josh in Virginia. Six-month sea deployments put incredible strains on a marriage, but then they did make for tearful and joyful reunions. The Bureau recognized her abilities and created a flexible schedule to accommodate the needs of her family.

  Her cubicle wall had some aged crayon drawings of hillsides and daisy flowers, a photograph of a younger Josh when he had been assigned to the USS Nimitz, and their calico cat, Nicki. A big red heart was plastered on the Monday after Thanksgiving on her Thomas Kincaid calendar.

  “Josh coming home soon?”

  Her features brightened. “Two weeks. He’ll get to see the kids’ Christmas program this year,” she explained.

  They walked down the isle to the stairwell that led down to the cafeteria. Once the stairwell door closed behind them, she asked quickly, “What’s it all about, Harvey?”

  Harvey glanced up the stairwell and Larry checked below. “That disk may have operational details for a black op currently in progress.”

  They started walking down the steps, “So?”

  “The drive is from the house in Odricks Corner. They were Chinese illegals,” continued Larry.

  She nodded again more slowly. “And?” she prodded.

  “And—” Harvey looked around again. “And if the operational detail is on the disk, then someone very important gave it to the Chinese.”

  “How high?”

  He sighed and rubbed the back of his ear. “You know we’ve been trying to track down a mole inside the executive branch.”

  Her head bobbed up and down. “Everyone knows you two have been on the great spy hunt. From what I hear, it isn’t the most appreciated assignment in Washington.”

  “Yeah, there’s a lot of static.”

  “We think that what’s on the disk was passed to a Chinese agent known asGoldenrod . Oh, he has a name—lots of them in fact. None of them are real, and we don’t exactly know who he really is.”

  “The diplomatic thing?”

  Larry snorted. “You could say we had some words withGoldenrod .”

  “But he had diplomatic immunity,” added Harvey.

  “So if the stuff is on the disk—what’s that mean?”

  “We got a list of four or five people including the National Security Advisor and a Two Star General,” explain
ed Harvey.

  Her hand came to rest of the door leading out of the stairwell to the floor where the cafeteria was located. “What do you want me to do?”

  Harvey leaned his hand against the door and said quietly, “I want you to tell us what’s on the disk without officially entering it into evidence.” He glared at Larry and said just as softly, “Larry was never here. We never had this conversation.”

  Larry said just as quietly, “There may be real people getting killed over this right now.”

  “You need to bypass the bureaucracy.”

  Harvey nodded.

  “For how long?”

  “Maybe forever.”

  She opened the door and walked into the corridor leading down to the cafeteria. “There’s more to this than you’re telling me.” It was a statement of fact, no questions anymore. After all, a mother of two is a world-class expert in ferreting out the truth.

  “Yes,” said Harvey.

  “But I don’t have a need to know.”

  “It would be safer that way,” agreed Larry.

  They flanked her as they walked towards the bank of machines offering rolls, candy bars, chips, soft drinks, coffee, and fruit drinks.

  “When you say people may be getting killed, what sort of people are you talking about?”

  Harvey dropped three quarters into a machine and punched the button for Diet Mountain Dew. “Soldiers.”

  “Like Josh—those kind of soldiers?”

  Larry nodded and watched as his corn chips dropped to the bottom of the machine’s bin. “Yep.”

  “We’re not at war.”

  “We’re always at war,” corrected Harvey.

  “Are you saying someone sold out our people and now they may be getting killed because of it?”

  It was a terrible world they lived in. “Yes.” Harvey pulled the handle for a bag of Danish shortbread cookies.

  “Okay,” she said simply as they walked away from the machines. “What do you want me to do with the disk once we’re done with it?”

  “Lose it for a while,” said Larry.

  “And maybe forever?”

  “And maybe forever,” echoed Harvey.

  * * * *

  Two hours later, they had their answers. Everything was there: The original briefing papers, the U-2 spy photographs, the Q files for each member of the team, satellite signal beacon frequencies, mission targets, and parameters.

  Harvey, Larry, and Mary sat in a conference room on the same floor as her cubicle. They examined the printouts from the color laser printer: the contents of the Q files, which composed a massive amount of information. It piled up to almost an inch of paper before the printer finished spewing the contents.

  Mary pushed a slip of paper and said, “They uploaded everything to this web site. It was encoded with these two addresses. I don’t know where they sent it, but they used a commercial encryption key you can buy for a hundred bucks mail order. I have the key and everything else sitting on my hard drive.

  “I also have their Netscape history file and can track where they went. This looks like something from down the road at Langley.”

  Harvey nodded. “Could be.”

  “I’d suggest you give these Internet addresses to the National Security Agency boys and see if they might want to launch an attack on these web sites.”

  “You can do that?”

  Mary nodded. “If we get passed the firewall—assuming they have one—those boys can do some interesting things to their computer systems.”

  * * * *

  Louis Edwards found Harvey standing inside the Jefferson Memorial. The FBI man had a briefcase parked next to his foot as he read the inscriptions on the wall. Behind Harvey towered the nineteen-foot statue of Thomas Jefferson presiding over excerpts from his writings engraved on the walls.

  The white marble dome glittered in the whiter and harsher November sunshine. Harvey found Louis Edwards observing him with his hands clasped behind his back, and the ever-present minders hovering in the background. He wondered what Jefferson would have done, and chuckled. The man wrote the Declaration of Independence. He pledged his life, reputation, and fortune for an idea called America.

  A ragtag bunch of radicals took on and chased away the greatest empire of their day. They waded through swamps and dark forests, and died on bright fields. They used weapons that failed more often than worked in an age where a flesh wound could be fatal. Then in 1812, they did it all over again when the British set fire to Washington.

  Harvey found it ironic that fifty years to the day after the Declaration of Independence was penned, Thomas Jefferson died at his home in Monticello. He looked up to the third president and figured Jefferson’s generation would have had a pistol duel at dawn with the fog rolling in from the Potomac to settle the matters in his briefcase. They were men of action and ideas.

  He pushed the briefcase towards Edwards and explained, “It’s all in there.”

  Louis glanced down at the proffered briefcase. “And?”

  “It’s what you suspected, so I guess you deal with it.”

  Louis nodded.

  “Let me know if you need to arrest anybody, but I kind of figure someone will just end up missing some morning or something like that.”

  “Or something,” replied Edwards.

  “They know all about your boys. I mean everything. We didn’t have time to read it, we just printed it out, but it’s not the kind of stuff you’d want showing up in theWashington Post anytime soon.”

  Louis picked up the briefcase. It was the very worst security breach.

  “I was your only contact,” cautioned Harvey.

  Louis sighed. “Destroy the disk and get rid of the files. No publicity this time.”

  “You’re sure.”

  “It’s better this way.”

  “It’s illegal you know.”

  “So many things are illegal these days, Agent Randall. As far as you’re concerned, it never happened.” He turned and walked towards his minders.

  Harvey stood with his hands in his pockets alone with his thoughts. Truth and justice were not pretty words on a page. They were ideas that meant something. Harvey crossed a line today into the nether world populated with the likes of Louis Edwards. He chose to follow a risky path of uncertain destination. Finally, he looked up at Jefferson’s searching eyes and asked quietly, “Were you scared when you signed your name that day in Philadelphia along with Sam Adams and Ben Franklin and the rest?”

  Jefferson never answered, and Harvey shuffled towards his car. It was time to get some sleep.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  East Of Nukhayb, Iraqi Data Center

  Monday, November 17, 1997

  7:30 P.M. (+3.00 GMT)

  Colonel Duri finally opened his eyes. The sky was changing from the light desert blue to the deeper purplish night blue. The air had chilled considerably, and the pain blazing on his right knee had retreated to a pounding blossom of pain with each heartbeat. He licked his sand blown lips and considered the disaster that today had become.

  Harper would have been more merciful to aim higher. At least if he were dead, the torture meted out as punishment for his failure would be meaningless. Not that he was at all certain he would find the welcoming arms of Allah waiting for him. The certainty of Saddam’s anger was ensured now. He had no Americans to parade with blindfolds and handcuffs through the streets of Baghdad. There would be no grand news conference or displays of captured American hardware. There would be no interviews with survivors from the Data Center attack with terrible wounds and rasping coughs.

  This was a total failure. He would find himself in the capable hands of the scientists striving to perfect a biological weapon to unleash in Israel, London, Paris, and Washington. Perhaps he would be one of the test subjects drugged in some bizarre fashion to determine how quickly he would die and how rapidly he could infect others. Ultimately, his demise would be brutal and barbaric, as his internal organs would begin to hemorrhage and blo
od would dribble down his nose and out his ears. His lungs might fill with his own body fluids and drown him, or his heart could explode. It simply depended on how poorly his body dealt with the violence attached to his punishment.

  He propped himself up on his elbow and examined the bloody wreck just below his knee. There were other possibilities to consider. The crusty dark splotches around his leg told him how much blood he had lost. He needed medical attention, but medical attention would place him under thecareof Saddam’s Iraq. Medical care led to death.

  Using his good arm, he unbuckled his belt and fashioned a crude tourniquet above his right knee. He realized he had underestimated Jim Harper, a mistake he would not make twice. Duri tucked thoughts of revenge away for the moment. First, he had to escape his masters, and then get patched up before he could consider killing Harper and his family.

  He could see the crumpled remains of a soldier killed earlier today. His rifle was laying a few inches from his outstretched fingers. Duri pulled himself over to the dead man—a veteran of the Iraq/Iran and Gulf wars according to the battle patches on his arm. The soldier had survived human wave attacks, missiles, and Allied bombardment to fall to the hands of a single American commando.

  Duri pulled the rifle towards him by the barrel. As soon as he could, he pushed the muzzle away from his face. The last thing he needed was another bullet hole. He dropped the magazine on the dirt and worked the bolt by jamming the rifle stock against his hip. The chambered round cartwheeled from the ejection port. He levered himself to a standing position using the AK-74 as a crude crutch. He started the awkward drag and hop movement back towards his field radio.

  He considered Harper’s options. Most of them were poor. He could attempt the suicidal and unexpected by heading north into the desert and attempt to place Karbala between himself and Baghdad, then skirt the Iraqi/Syrian border until reaching southern Turkey. A very dangerous course, since he would leave the protective umbrella of the no-fly zone and become vulnerable to air and ground attack.