Authors: Christopher Reich
The morning’s work had been an unmitigated disaster. Danni had run him through five more courses. The route varied, but the objective remained the same. Spot the four tails. Each time, he had failed. His senses weren’t as dull as a butter knife. Sandstone was more like it.
Danni opened the door and led him into a foyer with concrete floors, a high ceiling, and paint chipping off the walls. They ascended a flight of stairs and stopped at the first room on the right. “Thirty seconds.”
Jonathan opened the door and stepped inside.
The room was pitch black.
Panicked, he ran a hand over the wall until he found the light switch. The question was whether to turn it on. He decided he must, or what was the point? He flicked the switch, and a bulb hanging from a threadbare wire threw a weak light around the room. Should he move or stay still? He took a step, and the floorboard groaned loudly enough to be heard in Syria. There was a king-sized bed with a ratty cover and four filthy pillows. There were two night tables with several books stacked on each. A chintz sofa took up one corner, a standing mirror another. He took another step, and the ungodly floor creaked even louder. If he were being judged on stealth, he had failed already. For some reason he found himself staring at the curtains, which were purple with green polka dots. At the far end of the room sat an imposing desk with lion’s paws for feet. He tried to see if it had locks, but the light was too dim, and the sensitive floorboards left him nervous about making so much noise. So far he’d seen nothing of the least interest to an intelligence agent.
Frustrated, he decided to forget about the creaky floor and set off on a circuit of the bedroom. He rushed to the desk and tried the drawers. All were locked with an old-fashioned key. There was a television with some papers on top of it, and next to it an electric fan. He kept moving and found a closet. The door was open. Inside was a safe, and on it another stack of papers. He reached for the papers just as a hand shoved him headlong into the closet. He hit the floor and turned in time to see Danni closing the door.
“I said, ‘Look, don’t touch,’” she said.
“How did you get across that floor without me hearing you?”
“Be quiet and tell me everything you saw.”
The dark in the closet was absolute. Jonathan pulled his knees to his chest and tried to re-create the bedroom. “A king-sized bed, some dirty pillows, a desk that I couldn’t open, and a stack of papers on top of a safe.”
“What about the diamonds?”
“What diamonds?”
“And the Kalashnikov?”
“Come on.”
“You didn’t see the terrorist hiding behind those horrid curtains?”
“Danni, let me out of here.”
“You’re right, there were none of those. But did you at least notice something else by the side of the bed?”
Jonathan imagined the night tables bracketing the bed. He saw two stacks of books, three on one side, four on the other. There was more. A pair of glasses. A pack of chewing gum. Trapped in the dark, he was able to examine his memory as if it were a photograph. “Yes,” he said. “On the right table, there’s a box with a black button on it.”
“That’s a panic button. Balfour keeps one identical to it next to his bed. He is paranoid to a fault. And the television?”
In his mind’s eye, Jonathan made a new circuit of the room. An old twenty-inch cathode-ray model sat in one corner. “Yeah, I see it.”
“Anything on it?”
“Papers.”
“Can you see what they say?”
“No … I mean yes.” His mind’s eye held a clear image of bold writing across the top of the paper. “‘Weapons and Armaments Available for Immediate Sale,’” said Jonathan with surprise, reading from the picture in his memory. “There are lots of items under it, but I can’t read them.”
“Try harder.”
“M4 automatic rifles. Grenades … ammunition … The rest is a blur.”
The door opened, and Danni helped Jonathan to his feet. “Are the papers his?” he asked. “Do they belong to Balfour?”
“They’re out-of-date. Otherwise they’re authentic.”
Jonathan walked directly to the television set and picked up the papers. His recall had been accurate. He looked at Danni, amazed. “Well?”
“Not bad.”
Sometimes you had to pull
in a marker.
Frank Connor tossed the piece of metal in the air and caught it in his palm. For a moment he gazed at the chunk of misshapen lead. The odds were fifty-fifty, no better. Fourteen years was a long time, and memory warped the past. Too often, people remembered events as they wished they’d happened. Still, Malloy was an honorable man, as most Navy SEALs tended to be. If he said no, Connor wouldn’t blame him. After all, he was asking a lot.
Slipping the metal into his pocket, Connor turned up the collar of his coat against the rain and locked the door of his car. It was a secure government lot, but that didn’t mean it was safe.
The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, or NGA, was situated on the grounds of Fort Belvoir in the rolling hills of northern Virginia, not far from Arlington National Cemetery. Its brief was simple enough: to provide imagery and map-based intelligence solutions to the U.S. defense establishment and private industry. The NGA was a jewel in the crown of the intelligence community, one of the sole agencies that produced an actual physical product that could be used to tangible effect by both public and private organizations, and as such, a moneymaker.
Connor entered the smoked-glass doors of the West Tower and presented himself to the security desk. “I’m here to see James Malloy. He’s expecting me.”
As he waited to be cleared, he looked around him. The complex consisted of three buildings. The West Tower and East Tower each stood six stories and were built like the two sides of a clamshell. In between them stood the Core, an eight-story glass cylinder that
housed the NGA’s Source Directorate, where all mission-critical operations were conducted.
“Go ahead, sir. Mr. Malloy’s office is in the operations office on the sixth floor of the Core. Someone will be waiting for you on the landing.”
Connor slipped a visitor’s ID around his neck, passed through security inspection, and rode the elevator to the sixth floor. The doors opened and he stepped into the welcoming arms of six-foot-three-inch, 220-pound James Malloy. “Frankie, good to see you.”
Connor stood awkwardly, briefcase in one hand, as Malloy hugged him. “Likewise, Jim. How’s tricks?”
Malloy released him and ran a hand through his black hair. “Just made watch officer.”
“Watch officer? Nice. You must be putting in the hours.”
“Just doing the job,” said Malloy.
“How many years now?”
“Five. You were right about me being a good fit. I owe you.”
“Nonsense,” said Connor, but his hopes rose a notch.
His relationship with Malloy dated to the ’90s, when Malloy was an operator attached to SEAL Team Six working in Bosnia. During a hunter/killer mission targeting the rebel leader, Radovan Karadžić, Malloy and his team were caught in an ambush. Malloy alone survived and was taken captive. Connor heard the news and sent a Division asset to recover him. The affair got messy before it even began. There were gunfire and civilian casualties, along with a dozen or so Bosnian regulars killed. In the end, the asset’s cover was blown. It was a disaster all the way around, except that Malloy had escaped with his life.
Malloy set off down the hall at a demon’s pace, with Connor struggling to keep up. It was hard to believe the man had a prosthetic leg, but of course, that was the point. Unable to meet the SEALs’ rigorous fitness standards, Malloy had left the navy and moved to the civilian side of things. He’d worked for a few of the bigger private contractors before Connor arranged for him to come back to the government. It was time to see if his good deed would pay off.
“Take a seat,” said Malloy.
His office was an open desk on a raised platform in the middle of the operations center. From it, he surveyed an impressive array of computer monitors, video screens, and high-tech gadgetry running 360 degrees around him, allowing him to supervise all real-time collection of data carried out by satellites tasked to the NGA.
“I came to ask a favor,” said Connor as he pulled his chair closer.
Malloy smiled uneasily. “I figured as much. I heard about your promotion, too.”
Connor leaned closer and explained about the cruise missile that had been lost when an air force B-52 went down in the Hindu Kush in May 1984. “We believe that someone’s found it and may be trying to sell it on the black market to a rogue nation or fundamentalist cell.”
“How good is your intel?”
“Near-actionable. The problem is, I don’t know exactly where the bomber went down.”
“With all due respect,” said Malloy, “why am I hearing this from you? Seems to me that if we’re talking about a nuclear-tipped ALCM, I should be fielding calls from Langley, the Joint Chiefs, and maybe even the commander in chief himself.”
“There are other issues.”
“Such as?”
“The incident was hushed up by the air force. As far as they’re concerned, the missile is sitting at the bottom of a thousand-foot crevasse. It’s not something they’re eager to see dredged up. Anyway, I’m not quite there yet. For all I know, the whole thing could turn out to be a wild goose chase.”
“But you don’t think so.”
Connor shrugged. “I’m here.”
Malloy considered this. “What is it you need from me?”
Connor started him off easy so as not to scare him away. “Historical data. I need you to check and see if you have any imagery for the area dating from May 1984. I’m looking for evidence of a plane crash.”
“In those mountains? You’re talking about a couple of thousand
square miles. That’s like looking for a needle in a haystack. You’re going to have to give me something more specific.”
Connor removed a folder from his battered satchel. The topmost sheet held the final map grid coordinates to which the air force had narrowed its search.
“Better,” said Malloy. “So we’re talking a fifty-square-mile search grid right smack on the border of Afghanistan. As I recall, there was something big going down in that part of the world in ’eighty-four.”
“The Russian invasion was at its peak. The Red Army had a hundred and twenty thousand men stationed in the country. It was about then that the agency started supplying arms to the mujahideen. It pays to think we had at least one bird making a pass somewhere in the region every day.”
Malloy typed a stream of commands into his workstation. “No go,” he said, frowning.
“What’s the matter?”
“Too long ago. In terms of satellite imagery, 1984 was the dark ages. We were transitioning from wet film to digital technology. Up to ’eighty-three, our birds would take pictures on good old Kodak film. There was no such thing as real time. The best you could hope for was a three-day lag. More realistically, you’d get your pictures in a week or longer. The pictures aren’t here anymore.”
“But someone did keep them?” asked Connor, who knew a thing or two about bureaucratic incompetence.
“Absolutely, but not here. We need to hit the archives. Time to get off that fat butt of yours, Frank, and do a little PT.”
“Fantastic,” said Connor, groaning as he pushed himself out of the chair and lumbered after Malloy.
Their destination was a suite of offices on the fifth floor. “Back in ’eighty-four, this place went by the name of Comirex—the Committee on Imagery Requirements and Exploitation,” said Malloy as he powered up a workstation. “It was a black organization. Totally off the books. Since then we’ve changed names too many times to count. Now that we’ve got it down to three initials, everyone’s happy. NGA sits at the top table with the CIA, DHS, FBI, NSA, and all the other big
shots.” He hit Enter and sat back. “Okay, here we are … Looks like we had four birds covering Afghanistan. Two were push brooms—they flew over the area with their apertures open wide and snapped pictures of everything. They won’t help. We need to drill down further. This is better. The other two were in geostationary orbit, maintaining a static post above their targets twenty-four-seven.” Malloy punched in some more commands. “Here we go. This bird was in your area. Looks like it was taking pics of a supply route over the mountains.”
The picture on the screen showed a section of earth from a high altitude. He saw a few black rectangles in one corner and lots and lots of mountains. Malloy refined the grid coordinates and the picture zoomed in on a section of mountainous terrain. “Bingo,” he said. “That’s where the flyboys were looking. No wonder they didn’t have any luck.”
“And that photograph is from May thirtieth or thirty-first?”
Malloy studied the screen, then scrunched up his nose. “Strange. I requested a pic from May thirtieth, but it shot back to the twenty-eighth. Let me try again.” Malloy repeated his commands and the same picture reappeared. He typed some more, then raised his hands over his head, blowing air through his teeth. “Every time I request a picture between May thirtieth and September thirtieth, it kicks me back to the twenty-eighth.”
“Of May? Is that normal?”
“Hell no, it’s not normal,” retorted Malloy. “If that satellite was up in the air, it should have been sending back pictures every minute of every goddamned day.”
“When do the pictures go current again?”
Malloy banged at the keyboard, his frustration mounting. “October first.”
“October first? That’s a long time for a satellite to be out of operation.” Connor studied the image. Approximately 120 days’ worth of photographic evidence was missing. He reasoned it was during that period that the air force had found the plane, or its debris, and destroyed it. “Snow,” he said. “The crash site is entirely covered. I guess that somebody wanted to make sure that no one found that plane.”
Malloy rolled back his chair. “Sorry, Frank. I can’t help.”
“Don’t be,” said Connor. “Now we know where to look. An area twenty square miles shouldn’t be beyond our capabilities.”
“But it’s November. There’s already a ton of snow up there. Even if the plane were still there, we wouldn’t be able to see it.”