Clancy, Tom - Op Center 04 - Acts Of War

by Acts Of War [lit]

  Unlike many "old soldiers" who longed for the old Ways, Mary Rose knew that the forty-something Rodgers relished this new challenge. He enjoyed new ideas and new ways almost as much as he enjoyed his bottomless supply of old aphorisms. As he'd told her with boyish enthusiasm when they'd settled into their seats early this morning, "Samuel Johnson once said, 'The world is not yet exhausted; let me see something tomorrow which I never saw before.' I'm looking forward to this, Mary Rose."

  Getting Matt's OLM up and running took just over fifteen minutes. When she'd loaded it and run the diagnostics, Rodgers asked her to break into the Turkish Security Forces computer file. He wanted to learn more about Colonel Nejat Seden, the man who was being sent to work with them. He said that Seden was undoubtedly being sent to watch them as well, though Rodgers had expected that. That was how what he called the "watch out" worked. It was the nitrogen cycle of spying. Rodgers himself was watching the Turks as well as the Syrians; the Israelis were probably watching them both, while the CIA watched the Israelis. Rodgers said it was only fitting that the Turks would watch them.

  But Mary Rose suspected that more than politics was behind his request. The general also liked to know the caliber of the individual with whom he'd be spending his time. Sitting beside him on the C-141A that had brought them to Turkey, she'd discovered one quality above all about General Mike Rodgers. He didn't enjoy being surrounded by people, even enemies, who weren't as committed to their jobs as he was to his.

  Mary Rose wriggled uncomfortably in her seat as she typed commands into the computer. Because chairs with wheels made a familiar and distinctive sound, the seats in the ROC were bolted to the floor. As Op-Center's Yale-educated Chief Engineer Harlan Bellock had said during the design phase, "Casters would be a tip-off to snoops. It would be very odd to hear the sounds of office furniture coming from an archaeologist's van, you know."

  Mary Rose understood. But that didn't make the aluminum chairs any more comfortable. She also felt sunlight-deprived in here, just as she did when she worked in her Op-Center cubicle. All of the windows in the back had been deeply darkened, and lead-lined walls separated the front section of the van from the rear, with only a narrow, doorless opening in the center. Stoll had insisted on that precaution because many modern spies were equipped with "detection kits" or "DeteKs." These portable receivers literally read the electromagnetic radiation that was emitted by the computer monitor and permitted the spies to monitor the screens from outside and from a distance.

  Maybe I should have been a Striker, she thought. Drill, play sports, shoot, rockclimb, and swim at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia. Get some rays. Kick some derriere. But she had to admit she got a lot of sun on her days off, and she loved computers and cutting-edge technology. So stop complaining and do your programming, young lady.

  The woman's long, fine brown hair was pulled back with a bow to keep it from tumbling onto the keyboard as she worked. Her hazel eyes were alert, her mouth tight as she modemed OLM to TSF headquarters in Ankara. There, like a perfect little spy, the OLM made room for itself by downloading a legitimate program to the ROC computer for storage.

  "Attaboy," she said, her shoulders and thin lips relaxing slightly.

  Rodgers chuckled. "It sounds as if you're coaxing one of your father's trotters and pacers."

  Her father, William R. Mohalley, was a magazine publisher who owned several of the finest race horses on Long Island. He had always hoped that his only child would ride for him. But when Mary Rose reached a height of five feet seven at age sixteen, and kept on growing to five ten, that became unlikely. And she was just as happy. Horses were one of Mary Rose's passions. She had never wanted it to become work.

  "I do feel like I'm racing," Mary Rose replied. "Matt and his German partners packed a lot of speed into this rig."

  Assuming the borrowed file name, the On-Line Mole slipped into the system. Once there, OLM found the information, it wanted, copied and downloaded it, then shed its assumed skin and left. As it departed, the program it had temporarily replaced was returned: one bit of OLM would leave as one bit of the original program returned, so that no change in available memory was ever registered. The entire procedure took less than two minutes. If, during the course of the operation, someone went looking for the file OLM had temporarily "become," OLM would quickly restore the program and either impersonate a different file or put the downloading process on hold. The OLM was much more sophisticated than the "Brute Force" attack programs used by most hackers. Instead of randomly flinging passwords at a computer, which could take hours or days, the OLM went right to the "recycle bins" or "trash cans" to find discarded codes. Unobserved in the computer's dumpster, the OLM quickly sought and usually found recurring sets of sequential numbers that gave it a key to valid programs.

  Nine percent of the time, nothing useful was located. When that happened, the OLM switched quickly to its "feed mode." Many people used birth dates or the names of favorite movies as codes, just as they did on personal license plates. The OLM rapidly fed in sequences including post-1970 years, which was when most computer-users were born; thousands of first names, including Elvis; and movie or TV titles and characters such as 2001, Star Trek, and 007. Nearly eight percent of the time, OLM found the correct sequence within five minutes. It resorted to "Brute Force" only when faced with the elusive one percent.

  Mary Rose beamed as Colonel Seden's dossier appeared, pulled from the recycle bin. "Got it, General," she said.

  Mike Rodgers slid to the left. It was a tight squeeze getting out of the chair, and there wasn't enough room for him to stand upright once he was on his feet. Rodgers stood, his head bent low as he leaned over Mary Rose's seat. His chin touched her hair and he withdrew quickly. She was sorry that he did. For a moment, Rodgers had been just a man and she'd been just a woman. It had been a surprising, very exciting moment. Mary Rose turned her attention to the dossier.

  According to, the file, forty-one-year-old Colonel Seden was a rising star in the Turkish Security Forces. He had joined the paramilitary gendarmerie Jandarma when he was seventeen, two years older than many new recruits. After overhearing three Kurds in a cafe plotting to poison a large shipment of tobacco headed for Europe, Seden had followed them to their apartment and single-handedly arrested them. He'd been offered a post in the TSF two weeks later. There was an eyes-only note in the dossier from Seden's commanding officer at the TSF. General Suleyman feared that the "takedown" of the Kurds had been too fortuitous. There was Kurdish blood on Seden's mother's side, and the general worried that the Kurds had willingly sacrificed themselves so that Seden could infiltrate the security force. However, nothing in the colonel's subsequent record indicated anything but complete devotion to the TSF and to the government.

  "Of course his record would be impeccable," Rodgers muttered when he reached that section of the file. "You don't slip a mole in and immediately set him spying. You wait."

  "For what?" Mary Rose asked.

  "For one of two things," he replied. "For a crisis, when you absolutely need data. Otherwise you wait for the person to work his or her way up to the highest levels of security clearance. At those levels, a mole can bring in other moles. The Germans did a lot of that during World War II. They would attempt to locate just one sympathizer in some area of the British aristocracy. That person would then recommend chauffeurs or domestics to lords or officers or members of the government. Those workers were all German plants, of course, who would then spy on their employers and pass information on to milkmen, postal workers, and others who had been bought by the Germans."

  "Gee, they never taught me that in my computer and fiber-optics classes," Mary Rose remarked.

  "It isn't even taught in most of the history classes," the general lamented. "Too many professors are afraid of insulting the German-Americans or the British-Americans or any other hyphenate group which might be wounded, every inch of it, if you insult a fraction."

  Mary Rose nodded. "So does this mean
Seden is absolutely tied to the Kurdish underground?"

  "Not at all," said Rodgers. "According to the Turks, only about a third of the people who have some Kurdish blood sympathize with their cause. The rest are loyal to their host country. It does mean we show him as little as possible."

  They continued to scan the dossier as they spoke. Seden was unmarried. He had a widowed mother who lived in an apartment in Ankara and an unmarried sister who lived with her. His father was a riveter who had died in a construction accident when the boy was nine. The colonel had attended secular school in Istanbul, where he'd studied hard and at the same time excelled at weight lifting. He'd been part of the Turkish weight-lifting team in the summer Olympics in 1992. He'd then quit school in order to join the Jandarma.

  "No dependents," Rodgers said. "Well, these days that doesn't mean much. Marriages of convenience between spies is the new thing. Investigators always look for lone wolves."

  Mary Rose closed the file. "So where does that leave us with Colonel Seden?"

  "Informed," Rodgers smiled.

  "That's all?" Mary Rose asked.

  "That's all. You never know when information will come in handy." Rodgers's smile broadened. "Why don't you take a break now. We'll continue after Colonel Seden has---"

  Rodgers stopped as one of his computer alarms began pinging softly but insistently. It sounded twice for a second, was silent for a second, sounded once, and then was silent for another second. After that it repeated the pattern.

  "That's the ABA warning," Mary Rose said. She bent her head sharpy as she stood and leaned behind Rodgers.

  The ABA, Air Border Alarm, was an advanced radar-and-satellite system that constantly monitored air traffic within a nation or province. Detailed relief maps could be brought up to tell the ROC how high and how fast the craft was flying. At the same time, heat tracking from space told the ROC how fast the ship was moving. Reconnaissance craft were typically slower-moving and flew higher than attack craft. The ABA also used a digitized template of a nation or province to ascertain when an aircraft was within a mile of crossing the border. That was the reason it had sounded now.

  A low-flying, fast-moving ship headed to the border was presumed to be hostile. The alarm sounded when such an aircraft was spotted.

  "It's heading almost due west," Rodgers said. "The speed and height indicate that it's a chopper." There was concern in his voice, but also excitement. The ROC was doing its job flawlessly.

  Mary Rose crouched beside a console to Rodgers's left. "Are you surprised to find one traveling alone?"

  "Border patrols travel solo," Rodgers said. "But this one is going too fast for just a look-see. It's got a destination."

  Mary Rose punched an auto-tune button on the console. At once, an antenna hidden in the van's dark, domed sunroof turned toward the ABA's target. It began listening to communications to and from the target vessel. The computer was programed with hundreds of languages and dialects. After digitally cleaning away static and other imperfections, the monitor displayed a simultaneous translation of any electronic transmission it received.

  "...find out there?"

  There was silence from the chopper.

  "Repeat, Mardin One. What did you find at the crossing?"

  There was still no answer.

  "The chopper is from the Turkish air base at Mardin," Rodgers said. He punched a few keys and brought up data on the facility. "What've they got there? Two choppers, both Hughes 500Ds; and a Piper Cub." He glanced at the ABA speed indicator. "This one's traveling at one hundred and thirty-four MPH. That sounds about right for the 500D."

  "So what have we got?" Mary Rose asked. "A lost pilot?"

  "I don't think so," Rodgers said. "It looks like a crew was sent out to reconnoiter and hasn't reported in. He wouldn't be flying at his maximum speed if he were lost. And it sure doesn't look like he's defecting because the chopper's headed further into Turkey."

  "Could the radio have been damaged?" Mary Rose asked.

  "Possibly," Rodgers said. "But again, they're butting right up against their maximum cruising speed. These guys are in a hurry."

  Jabbing at the keys with his index fingers, Rodgers asked the computer to check on military facilities in the southwestern section of eastern Anatolia. Unlike the rest of Turkey, which was mountain or desert, Anatolia was mostly flat plateau with areas of low hills.

  The screen quickly flashed a red X for negative.

  "They're not headed for an emergency landing," Rodgers said. "These guys are after something."

  Outside, over the low hum of the air-conditioner, Mary Rose could hear the putter of a motor approaching the van. She continued to read the transcript as it scrolled up one of the monitors.

  "....are out of our radar range and we are not picking up your signal. Is there a problem? Why do you not answer?"

  "Maybe someone's gotten into the country and they're chasing them down," Mary Rose suggested.

  "Then why wouldn't they report that to base?" Rodgers shook his head. "No, something isn't right here. I'll tell the TSF what we've got and see what they say."

  "Don't you think they'd have been alerted if there were a problem?" Mary Rose asked.

  "To the contrary," Rodgers said. "Out here, the rivalries between government factions make Washington politics seem like triple-A ball. They're almost as intense as the rivalries between religious factions."

  There was a knock on the door. Mary Rose leaned over, turned the handle, and peeked out. It was Private Pupshaw.

  "Yes?" she said.

  "Colonel Nejat Seden is here to see General Rodgers," the hulking Pupshaw said.

  "Please send him in, Private," Rodgers replied without looking over.

  "Yes, sir," Pupshaw replied.

  The private stepped aside and Mary Rose opened the door. She smiled pleasantly as a short, light-skinned man entered. He was powerfully built, with a neatly trimmed mustache and deep-set eyes that were also the darkest Mary Rose had ever seen. His curly black hair was damp and pressed down. From a motorcycle helmet, she guessed. He wore a .45 in a belt holster.

  Seden returned her smile. He bowed his head. "Good afternoon to you, miss," he said. His English was thickly accented, with the lengthened vowels and clipped consonants of his native tongue.

  "Good afternoon," Mary Rose replied. She had been warned that Turkish men, even enlightened ones, would be no more than courteous to her. Though Turkey had long ago granted equal rights to women, equality was a myth in the minds of many Muslim men. As Op-Center's staff psychologist Liz Gordon had told her, "The Koran decrees that women should always cover their heads, arms, and legs. Women who do not are regarded as sinners." Yet this man had a warm smile for her. He seemed to possess a sweet, natural charm.

  Colonel Seden turned to General Rodgers and saluted. Rodgers returned the salute. Seden took two steps toward Rodgers and handed the general a crisply folded yellow paper.

  "My orders, sir," Seden said.

  Rodgers looked at them quickly, then turned back to the screen. "You've come at an opportune moment," the general said. "We have one of your choppers on the screen... here." He pointed to a sharp red object moving across an ever-changing green grid.

  "That's strange," Seden said. "Military helicopters usually travel in pairs for security. Do you know where this one is from?"

  "It came in from Mardin."

  "Border patrol," said Seden.

  "Yes," said Rodgers. "The radio operator there has been trying unsuccessfully to raise it. What kind of armaments do you put on those ships?"

  "Typically, General, there is a machine gun and a side-mounted rotary cannon," Seden replied. "Usually the cannon is 20mm with a rotating barrel with one hundred fifty or so shells."

  "Where could it be headed in such a hurry?" Mary Rose asked.

  "I don't know that," Seden replied. He didn't take his eyes off the screen. "There's nothing out that way. There are no military targets and the villages are small and not strategic in any
way."

  "You're sure there are no terrorist groups based in any of them?" Rodgers asked.

  "I'm certain," Seden said. "Nor has there been any movement to the region. We watch all of them very closely."

  "Couldn't this simply be a hijacking?" Mary Rose asked. "Someone hides the chopper before it can be spotted, then uses it later for any number of things."

  "That is unlikely," replied Seden. "It is easier for helicopters to be purchased in Russia or India and smuggled into our country in pieces."

  "In pieces?" Mary Rose said.

  "On boats, by air, or by land, amidst shipments of machine parts," Seden said. "It isn't as difficult as you might think."

  "On top of which," said Rodgers, "the Turkish Air Force is certainly looking for this chopper by now."

  "But not there," Seden said. "Somewhere along its original flight plan."

  "We've picked it up," Mary Rose said. "Other radar is sure to. It will be found before very long."