The Threat

by David Poyer

  When he hung up Dan kept the handset against his ear to get a moment to think. He broke out sweating as the reality of what had happened penetrated another layer, like molten metal thawing its way through successive deposits of ice. By some unimaginable chance, they’d managed to kill the son and heir of the first leader who’d shown the inclination to rein in terror in the largest exporter of cocaine in the world.

  By chance … but even as he thought it, he knew that had to be wrong. This was no coincidence. That night, of all nights. That aircraft, out of all the hundreds in the sky. No. It was too horribly perfect.

  Some malevolent intelligence, some malign strategy must lie beneath.

  His fists were clenched. His jaw hurt. He felt as if he ought to, no, he had to do something. He was only here as an observer, true. So a press release could mention White House participation. But he wasn’t used to being surrounded by panic, confusion, and not doing anything. Command meant you gave orders, took action. Any action! That was Navy doctrine. Any action was better than none. Even the wrong move could confuse the enemy, blow his timetable, screw up his plan. Sitting on your hands, waiting for the situation to clarify itself—that was the freeway to defeat.

  When he looked up everyone in the center was looking at him.

  Of course they were. Wasn’t he the guy from the White House?

  He slid down, past two people holding up phones in his direction, and bent over the comm console. Glanced at a tote board with frequencies and call signs.

  “I’d like to talk to CTG 4.3 … belay that … where’s the frigate now? The one that confirmed the track, took the handoff from the radar in Texas?”

  The operator said Gallery was off station, headed east.

  “They still in satcom contact? I need a level-three voice channel.”

  The operator hesitated, glancing toward the closed door of the conference room. But finally nodded.

  Dan took the handset. Keyed, and waited. When a note signaled they were linked, he said, “USS Gallery, this is the director of drug interdiction from the president’s staff. Present in the Carib Ops Center. Request to speak to Gallery Actual.”

  When the commanding officer came on Dan explained who he was again, once more without using his name or rank. “This is in reference to ATOI 3, track 930, detected approximately 2200 last night when you were on station off La Guajira. I want you to replay your raw video data on that contact.”

  “Roger, understand you want to revisit the acquisition. And do what?”

  The problem was he wasn’t really sure. Just that he was remembering a conversation with a Treasury agent. “I can’t tell you exactly what to look for, but I need you to reconstruct the air plot,” Dan told him. “Not just track acquisition. Before that. And have your shit-sharpest air intercept controller eyeball it very closely.”

  Gallery didn’t ask why. Just said he’d have his ops specialist chief look at it too. Dan signed off. It most likely wouldn’t pan out, but he had to try.

  Quintero, back from the call to the combatant commander. Sweat glittered on his forehead. Dan told him, “My boss wants the cameras on the fighters checked. To make absolutely sure they didn’t fire. And the film or whatever they use as a recording medium sequestered as evidence.”

  Quintero told the command duty officer to make it happen. “What else do we need to do?”

  Dan reflected on the irony of an admiral publicly asking a commander for advice. But he was the Suit from Washington now. Here to help? More likely to get himself tacked up on a cross between Quintero and the pilots. “What else?” Quintero said again.

  “Well, I had one idea,” he began, when the console operator waved, holding up the red handset. He told the admiral he’d be right back.

  “This is Gallery Actual. Captain Starer here. We went over the plot again for the initial acquisition. Ran it through the point it went off the screen. Over.”

  “Anything out of the ordinary? Over.”

  “No. Nothing.” Dan’s heart dropped. Then the voice added, “Something funny before that, though. We didn’t have one aircraft come on the screen at 2210. We had two.”

  “Can you put this on speaker?” Dan muttered to the chief. He crooked a finger to Quintero and Bloom to come over and listen.

  The frigate’s skipper explained that by running the tape slowly and tweaking the display, they were able to make out not one but two aircraft approaching the coast. At the same speed and nearly the same altitude, but on converging courses. Just before meeting, one had vanished from the screen.

  “Which one?” Dan asked him.

  “Can’t tell. Blip meld; too close to distinguish.”

  “But one just … disappeared?”

  “Right. Two contacts, then there’s only one.”

  Dan tapped the handset against his shoulder. His brain felt like a generator with too much power demanded of it. Two contacts—then one. The frigate, and no doubt the more distant AWACs and over-the-horizon radars too, had continued to track the plane that continued north. “What happened to the other one? Over.”

  The distant voice sounded puzzled. “Like I said, from one sweep to the next we go from two contacts to one, proceeding to seaward. We passed it off to the E-2. Oh, and it goes dark—the target’s radar and IFF snap off.”

  “They snap off after the two contacts merged? Or whatever they did?”

  “Correct. That was what we were supposed to look for—right? A nonsquawker. IFF off.”

  A possibility took shape. Still murky, but it might explain at least part of what had happened. “How long after the first aircraft drops off the screen does the second one go black?”

  The CO said to wait. A moment later he was back. He said no more than a minute.

  Dan signed off, and found Quintero and Bloom both frowning at him. “What’ve you got?” the admiral said.

  “Gallery’s skipper says there were originally two aircraft,” Dan told them.

  “What?” said Bloom. Quintero just blinked.

  “One must have been Nuñez’s. The other, Tejeiro’s. Converging courses. Nearly the same altitude. Same speed.”

  He tried to think through what was still only a suspicion while he illustrated it with his hands, aviator-fashion. “Call them N and T. Let’s say … N takes off from Nuñez’s airstrip in Bucaramanga. Heads north. T takes off from Bogotá. It heads north too. But since they’re both headed for the same way point, their courses gradually converge.”

  “Okay,” said Quintero.

  “Obviously they’re at different altitudes, but maybe there’s not that much separation at their closest point of approach. For a few seconds the contacts merge. Especially to an ionosphere-scatter radar, lower frequency, thus lower resolution, than the frigate’s SPA-60. Then N disappears somehow. Making us think plane T is really plane N. Texas tracks T and hands off to Gallery, telling them it’s Nuñez. Gallery hands it off to the E-2, telling him the same thing. And everyone just buys that identification, no questions asked, from there on.”

  “Okay, two questions,” said Bloom. “What made Tejeiro’s jet blow up? And how does plane T just ‘disappear’?”

  “And why was the Lear flying without IFF or lights or radio?” Quintero added.

  “I don’t know how they blew it up,” Dan told him. “Maybe put a bomb aboard?”

  “They do that in Colombia,” Bloom said. “Judges, senators they don’t like.”

  Dan took a breath, aware that he was skating on thin ice. “But the second contact … assume Nuñez’s plane has some kind of spook gear that vanishes it from radar.” Quintero frowned. “I know, I know … but bear with me here. Once they figure we’ve merged the tracks, they turn it on for a few seconds. Long enough for us to miss the track split. Maybe it dives away till it’s below the radar horizon. So intel fusion comes out with one bird. Which we then track across the Caribbean.”

  “And vector our fighters onto, at which time they trigger the bomb.” Bloom looked impressed. “But how c
ould they make it disappear from radar? You mean like stealth?”

  “Not exactly. Stealth is just very low radar reflectivity. We’re talking something different … transmitting a negative image of the returned radar pulse, which effectively erases it as far as the receiving station’s concerned. It takes sophisticated computers,” Dan told him. “But it can be done. Given the money. Which I happen to know has been going to a French electronics company that’s been trying to sell that technology to the Navy.”

  “This is all new to me,” Bloom said.

  “I heard about it from a guy at Treasury who tracks cartel cash flows. I called the CIA division chief in Europe and checked it out. Turns out they’ve been trying to sell the same gear, or at least the technology, to the Chinese, too.”

  “What about the lights, the IFF?” Quintero asked again.

  Dan said, “I can only guess at that. Maybe a radio-controlled relay in the electrical system. They’d be close enough to make it work if they transmitted the signal as the planes passed. Tejeiro loses transponders, radio, radar, lights, everything. A black airplane, like you called it. So we read—drug smuggler.”

  “Beautiful,” Bloom said. “Not only does it get the top people out of the country right under our noses, it ruins us with President Tejeiro.”

  Quintero said, “It’s also a message to Tejeiro from the cartel. ‘Your son first. Then you. We can screw you anytime we want.’”

  Bloom said no, it would be that only if it had cartel fingerprints on it. “Which it doesn’t. To all intents and purposes, we shot down the president’s son. Oh, it’s beautiful. And it hurts.”

  Quintero said, “It’s impossible to prove. And even if we do, his son’s still dead.”

  “We can’t bring him back,” Dan said. “True. But I don’t think proving we didn’t do it is impossible. Not if we can find out where the second plane went. You archive your track data, right? If we can come up with a Falcon going north, that’s going to be our boy.”

  * * *

  They found it eventually, though it wasn’t heading north. The Falcon had headed to Port of Spain instead, far to the east, then landed to refuel before striking out along the island chain at dawn. USNS Capable picked it up there. Its flight plan was properly registered. It was squawking a proper Mode III IFF. Quintero pulled in Dutch assets to keep tracking it up the Antilles chain: a Fokker Friendship, a ground-based radar on Sint Eustatius. “Why doesn’t he just leave this masker thing on?” Bloom wanted to know. Dan explained that if the cartel had a way to make its planes invisible, it’d be smart to actually use the capability as little as possible. Once you knew such a device existed, there were ways to minimize its advantage.

  Meanwhile he fielded calls from Sebold, Gelzinis, and Tony Holt. He explained to each exactly what had happened, what he thought was going on, and what he hoped to do. Holt cursed Dan as if he were personally responsible. Eventually, though, the chief of staff grudgingly agreed that De Bari had to call President Tejeiro personally. But he wasn’t going to mention the fighters, or that the leased Lear had been under U.S. surveillance. Just that it had exploded over the Straits of Florida, and a cutter was on its way to the site.

  Dan pleaded with him to present the whole picture. The networks were already carrying the crash. So far no one had implicated U.S. drug interdiction, but that was only a matter of time. Holt cut him off angrily, saying he’d make that decision.

  At 1000 the AWACs reported that the Falcon had turned northwest, to pass through the airspace of the Turks and Caicos. Later it altered course again, to a southwesterly heading. Then it faded from the plot.

  Dan didn’t know if it had turned on the masker again, or simply dropped too close to the wavetops to pick up. By this time, though, he’d managed to get NPIC on the line, and persuaded them to redeploy satellite assets to follow it. They picked it up again a few miles off the coast of Hispaniola. Then lost it again. But Quintero had traced out a cone of courses on a chart. They looked down at it.

  “Get me Colonel Desrolles,” Quintero said.

  Desrolles was the Haitian liaison. Very dark, very tall, he listened courteously as they described the aircraft, the deception plan, and what seemed to be its destination.

  When they were done he cleared his throat. “Absolutely,” he said. “I know your media present my country as ever so poor. But there are also very wealthy families. They do not live in the cities. They have estates in the hills.” He pointed here and there above Cap-Haitien. “They are beautiful, and well guarded. These men will fly in, have their meeting, and fly out. If you like I can call someone I know. See if he has noticed any air traffic into the north.”

  Dan got on the phone again. He was using his contacts, reaching out to the people he’d met at interagency conferences and working groups. He didn’t have the authority to do some of the things he was doing. But if he could come up on the other side of this shit pond with whoever had arranged Emiliano Tejeiro’s fiery death, much would be forgiven.

  If he failed, he’d be out of a job.

  * * *

  Two hours later the satellite images came in over the data link. They showed eight aircraft parked about a grassy strip. Trucks and groups of men formed a security perimeter. It surrounded a large gated house with gardens, pools, courts, a tiled roof, and what looked like guardhouses set around it.

  By this time Bloom had pulsed the DEA’s rapid reaction team. Scrambled immediately, it could be in Haiti that afternoon, but with only three helicopters and ten agents. Counting heads on the perimeter manning and the airfield guard, and adding the personal security that was probably within the villa, they agreed the mismatch was too great to commit such a small force.

  But one of the marines on Quintero’s staff remembered that the 3rd Battalion, Eighth Marine Regiment, had troops in country with the Multinational Interim Force. Dan’s call to the Combined Joint Task Force–Haiti brought the information that a motorized patrol was out forty miles south of the compound. He half persuaded, half ordered them to redeploy as an anvil, lay fire, and pin down anyone in the villa long enough for the Haitian National Police to mobilize.

  The clock was ticking, though. They didn’t know how long the meeting would last. Not overnight, Bloom said. Don Juan never slept in a location he didn’t control. The essential thing was to block the airfield. Once their line of retreat was cut off and the compound was surrounded, negotiations for surrender could proceed.

  They worked this through the late morning into afternoon, and were rewarded by reports of a more or less coordinated descent on the airstrip a little after 1500. A few cannon rounds from a Cobra dispersed the guards on the airfield. The patrol reported both roads from the villa blocked.

  Then nothing. The circuits hissed mute in the cold conditioned air. Quintero looked strained. He went outside for a cigarette. Bloom, nervous as a cat, went with him. Dan sat in the leather chair, drumming his fingers.

  * * *

  Gelzinis called again late that afternoon. “Lenson? Mrs. C’s getting pissed-off calls from agency heads. All sorts of end-arounds. What in Christ’s name do you think you’re doing down there?”

  “We’ve captured Don Juan Nuñez,” Dan told him, weary but exultant. “The Baptist himself. Along with the cartel’s host in Haiti, the biggest drug banker in Medellín, and four other kingpins and twenty-two high-ranking staff.”

  He told the deputy adviser that along with the prisoners, the DEA team had seized notebook computers, forty-five kilos of documents, and six aircraft, including a Falcon Ten with infrared flares, drop tanks, and sophisticated electronic masking equipment. “Intel’s still going through everything. But you can call President Tejeiro now and tell him we didn’t shoot his son down. It was a cartel bomb.”

  “You’d better be able to prove it.”

  “We can,” Dan told him. “I’m sorry his son had to die. But this could cement his determination to cooperate with us. We’ve got video, too.”

  “Video?”

>   “There was a cameraman with the DEA assault team. Good stuff, they tell me.”

  “I want a personal report,” the deputy told him, but the accusatory tone was gone. “Get back no later than dawn. Be ready to brief the press secretary and Mrs. Clayton. Make absolutely sure that tape and a list of the documents are on a flight to D.C. tonight.”

  Dan said he’d get back as soon as humanly possible. When he hung up he felt wrung out, yet fairly pleased. They’d managed to retrieve the situation. The administration would come out looking resolute and effective.

  It occurred to him then, though only fleetingly, that the cartel might not be quite so happy.

  II

  SPRING WIND

  281221Z OCT

  SCHOLAST:

  //Logging on. Who’s here?

  281221Z OCT

  AMICABLE:

  //Here.

  281221Z OCT

  BLUE DANUBE:

  //Been here awhile.

  281222Z OCT

  HELLGOD:

  //Here.

  28122Z OCT

  SCHOLAST:

  //Sorry I’m late. Greetings all. Hellgod, love your handle. Any problems?

  281222Z OCT

  BLUE DANUBE:

  //Is this a secure site? For a discussion like this? And why so early?

  281222Z OCT

  HELLGOD:

  //Same question.

  281222Z OCT

  SCHOLAST:

  //Have already assured Amicable of airtightness of this site. No records will exist after power down. Not like your VAX system, or whatever it’s called now. Check the indicator, lower right of the screen, for who’s in the room. Should be just the four of us, that’s what I show.

  281223Z OCT

  AMICABLE:

  //Let’s get to it. The less time we’re online the better I’ll feel.

  281223Z OCT