"Ahoy, pencil-neck. The China Lake heist three months ago. You know about it?"
"I have no idea what you're talking about. Who is this, please?"
"The civilian branches of the intelligence community know who ripped the Navy off. They're fast fucking friends."
"I'm going to hang up now." And he nearly did, but the voice that erupted from the receiver even as it hovered above the cradle froze him. It was the chief petty officer in Basic who'd put him through punitive PT until he'd thrown up stuff he ate in a past life. It was the bullying CO in Hawaii who'd made him become fluent in technical Chinese in six months. It was the voice of his father, forty-year veteran of the Ohio State Police, who made him learn to hunt.
"Get the shit out of your ears, junior! Do you love the motherfucking
U.S. Navy?"
Durban picked up the phone again and answered, "Yes sir," in more of a basic training bark than he'd intended. "But I don't know who you are and I don't know what you're talking about."
"There's a goddamned domestic terrorist army composed of rogue spooks and defense scientists operating in this country, and everybody in the defense loop knows about them except the military. You limpdick signals geeks at No Such Agency are sitting on the fucking proof. You want to believe I'm an internal security stinger, fine, but next time it happens and the Navy gets fucked up the ass, know that you were probably the only person who could've stopped it. Aw, fuck this—" and the caller had hung up on him.
Durban didn't sleep well that night, or the next. He knew only a little about China Lake because his office had processed a huge volume of domestic intercept traffic from Southern California after the theft. It'd been a troublesome time, with a host of cellular encryption systems cropping up that they'd never seen before. All the commercial carriers shrugged at them, and the computers had turned up, for the first time since he came to work at Ft. Meade, absolutely nothing meaningful. The indecipherable bunch had been shopped around the Puzzle Palace for a few weeks before dropping out of sight down one of its innumerable rabbit-holes, where somebody presumably solved them and found nothing helpful. Durban knew only that the weapons storage facility had been robbed on the Fourth of July, and that the Navy was pissed. The entire affair was classified Top Secret, but Durban had learned that a joint FBI and Navy task force had run the perpetrators to ground in a bunker in the desert only ten miles away from China Lake, and that was the end of it.
The caller tried again a week later, on a lazy weekday afternoon when he was alone in the house. Mitsy had taken the dogs to the park, leaving him to his model-building. He explained, more patiently but in the same colorful master seaman's language, that a terrorist group called the Mission had robbed the Navy, and that they had operated with at least partial assistance from the FBI and CIA. The military was hampered at every turn from zeroing in on the culprits, who had stolen napalm from China Lake, then used it on a civilian target. The Navy had been forced to assist in the cover-up. It had happened before, and would happen again, unless hard evidence was procured to the Pentagon. That evidence, the caller told Durban, was somewhere in Ft. Meade. "Look for domestic Southern California microwave intercepts from the night of the Fourth, and you will believe."
Durban thanked the caller and hung up and went back to his model. He was sure now that it was an intra-agency sting operation, only a lot more cleverly conceived than any he'd ever heard of. As a serviceman, Lt. Durban was exempt from much of the scrutiny and polygraphic harassment that focused on the civilian wing of the NSA, but he'd never entirely trusted them. It was civilian spooks who brokered weapons of mass destruction to Saddam, but it was Lt. Col. Oliver North who answered for it; American servicemen who suffered from exposure to the Iraqi weapons the Reagan and Bush administrations had sold; and civilian spooks again who suppressed transmissions from coalition units detecting leaks of chemical weapons throughout the conflict. Lt. Durban had helped collect the intercepted Belgian transmissions himself from a field listening post in southern Turkey. Using his loyalty to his military service to try to turn him was sharper than he would've given them credit for, but he wasn't about to fall for it.
He steadfastly clung to his ideals for a week and the better part of an eighth day before his curiosity got the better of him. As he did with any big decision, he plotted all possible outcomes, with his degree of commitment on one axis and the Agency's probable response on the other. Several such charts had to be plotted, based on the unknown quantity of the caller's identity. The curves based on a prompt report of the two contacts to his CO created a short, flat line segment; textbook procedure would deliver him out of all this with at worst a notation of his having failed to report the call the first time. If it was a screwball or a disgruntled former SIGINT spook or discharged sailor, it would come to nothing. If there were any merit to the charges, his CO would pass them up the chain, and there would, perhaps, be a Pentagon inquiry—someday. Another Iran-Contra, another dreadfully long and ultimately pointless congressional circus show-trial, with nothing gained but lower approval ratings for all involved, especially the military. The "evidence" destroyed long before it could be brought to light.
If there was something to see, the time was now. If he brought evidence to his CO, there would be less chance of this slipping away, or getting filibustered to death. The worst he would be guilty of would be a security infraction if any of the documents were outside his clearance, but it wasn't spying if nothing left the building.
Thinking this was bullshit, thinking getting caught could cost him his promotion and his security clearance, he reviewed the massive lists. The western microwave interception was down for the first week of July, but there was a field test of a miniaturized microwave interceptor at Twenty-Nine Palms throughout the summer. The NSA had been testing its new ECHELON-project COMINT vacuum cleaner, code-named MAUVE, but lovingly called Hoover by the propellerheads in Research. From what little Durban was cleared to overhear, the system could soak up long distance microwave relays and even local cellular transmissions from an entire state for hours at a time. This was not the sexy part, for the NSA had had this capability since the seventies, and the current ECHELON program already blanketed the world in a COMINT net. The new element lay in the speed and automation of the system, which was capable of sorting through millions of conversations at a time for precoded "loaded" words, such as "bomb," "heroin" and "Bubba," or other disrespectful nicknames of the current President and his staff, not to mention specific names. Privacy advocates had very little to fear from such a system, which listened only with mechanical ears, and only for sedition, and only in times of emergency. But field tests were required, and the Agency liked to test its products "to destruction," glutting them on "private" civilian telephonics until the processor overloaded.
It was, of course, a violation of federal statutes for the NSA to act on information gleaned from such tests, but the broadest interpretation of the COMINT statutes allowed the Agency to pass on records of wrongdoing to the appropriate client agencies. It was for this reason that Lt. Durban was cleared to review the paper transcripts of the thousands of telephone conversations which had aroused MAUVE's interest. The Navy had been forwarded nineteen separate files pertaining to illegal activity perpetrated by enlisted men and officers within two weeks of the operation's conclusion. What the MAUVE task group noticed right away, though, was the high count of privately encrypted and scrambled conversations which stood up to MAUVE's best efforts. Most of the encrypted conversations were fed into the mainframe computers at Ft. Meade, and the results compartmented far from his reach, but the scrambled conversations were still accessible. They'd been processed later, because scrambled connections jump from one frequency to another on a pseudorandom pattern encoded into the phone or a peripheral device at both ends. The batch of scrambled intercepts had been like a junk drawer full of jigsaw pieces from a hundred different puzzles, each consisting of thousands of bits of audio. These were still being compiled in the Special Project
s No.7 Building deep in the heart of the NSA complex, being strung together by audio techs with voice-matching software and lots of coffee. Most of the scrambled phone lines belonged to armchair privacy freaks and contained no realistic national security threats, so Durban had been able to find the one in less than five minutes.
It should not have been there.
ABOVE TOP SECRET-ROYAL CHANNELS ONLY
MAUVE Intercept 0010286-07-99
FW: MACHETE
7-5-99; 05:42:48 PDT.
VOICE 1 (97% match to ID-Hamilton Sibley [DOB-4-14-56; SSN: 370-00-4048], Dep. Asst. Dir., CIA): This is Sibley.
VOICE 2 (voice harmonics digitally altered, NO ID): You have to tell them not to try to stop this, Hamilton.
V.1: Stop what? Who is this?
V.2: We apologize for the unrest we have caused, and for the act we are going to commit. This is not an act of terror—
V.1: Oh God…Calvin, is that you? What the blue fuck is this about? Did your people steal that shit?
V.2: Listen carefully, Hamilton. This is not about terror. This is about DARPA. This is about RADIANT. This is our Mission. This is not retribution. This is the erasure of a mistake. Our only regret is that it has come to this, and that we have been forced to involve the innocents on the front lines. Please do not force us to take innocent human lives, Hamilton.
V.1: I don't understand any of this, nobody does! Have you lost your minds? The Navy is out of the loop, and they're too goddamned pissed to bring in, now. They're bringing in JSOC, and the FBI is spoiling for a full-fledged turf war. This is going to seriously jeopardize our relationship…
V.2: When all is said and done, you will come to recognize the importance of the seemingly random and chaotic events now unfolding. You will come to see this as but the next stage in building our relationship with your interests.
V.1: Now? You tell us now? What kind of a relationship do you expect to build on a fuckup like that? You have no idea who I have to answer to…
(Transmission lost at 05:44:18 PDT; signal scrambled to frequency outside MAUVE sweep bandwidth)
He noticed that it was not flagged by MAUVE, which used the standard ECHELON dictionary for sifting buzzword-heavy calls.
The message had been like hot wax pouring into his ear and solidifying around his brain. He'd looked over his shoulder all the rest of that day, waiting to be carried away. This was so far outside his NEED TO KNOW that it dared him to run screaming out of the complex. What he'd seen was an aberration—that he'd been able to see it at all suggested that it was a trap, or not what it seemed, at any rate. What did he know about ROYAL clearance? Or MACHETE? He'd never even heard of them. Even if the caller was right about what it meant, who was he to pass judgment on the strength of this, a minute of an eavesdropped conversation that he couldn't even understand?
He puzzled the answers to these questions over the next two months even as he found and photographed the complete MACHETE file. It was sickeningly easy to get access repeatedly and without accountability. The Agency had requested and received a titanic emergency budget spike to cover added security for Y2K. The NSA had nothing to fear from double-digit date errors, but it used some of the windfall to back up files on paper and magnetic tape and cart them away for storage under a mountain in West Virginia. It meant extra copies and review panels and cartloads of top secret SIGINT documents parked in corridors for hours on end like abandoned patients in a trauma center. He did not read more than he had to, but he learned enough to know he was now a spy, that something above top fucked was going on, and that men had been murdered for knowing less.
MACHETE delineated a pattern of cooperation between the intelligence community and an order of defected scientists, soldiers and spies who sabotaged military satellite launches and weapons tests, traded secrets to hostile foreign powers, including Cuba and China, and had most recently dropped napalm and worse on a town in California. They called themselves the Mission. And the government helped cover it up. There was more, references to another file he had copied onto disk but hadn't been able to decrypt, something the NSA called ROYAL PICA. The Mission was very upset about it, whatever it was. They called it RADIANT.
This was not the government he had sworn to serve. He knew in his heart that the core of the military was not tainted, even as he knew he could not go to his superior or any other officer affiliated with No Such Agency.
Now he had just removed the last of the MACHETE files from his colon and added them to the others in the cheap nylon overnight bag on the seat next to him. He was ready to deliver it to the mysterious caller who had ordered him to compound his risk by caching the files in a safe deposit box for a one-time drop. Fourteen CD's and three capsules of microfilm of stolen NSA documents on the seat beside him, like overdue library books. In the small of his back, for the first time in his Navy career, he carried a gun, a 9mm with hollow-points. If they were on to him, this would be the time. Here he was with the whole ball of wax, headed in the opposite direction from his commute home to Baltimore. He would meet the officer he'd spoken to over the phone for the first time.
Your controller, you mean.
No. He was a spy for the United States Navy. He was one of the good guys.
The traffic entering the southeastern quadrant of the Capitol on the 295 was dense and much more run-down than the flow he usually rode home with. He realized with a start that he had never come this way. He recognized the exits only from news stories he'd read, and cautionary tales told around the water cooler to illustrate the depths to which the world had sunk. He turned off into the shittiest part of Washington, DC at the appointed exit.
Only one streetlight down the entire avenue appeared to be working. The Navy Yard was somewhere nearby, but this was the industrial portion of a netherworld of rowhouses and teeming projects. He steered through it as he had been trained to do in places like Lebanon or southern Turkey— stick to the middle lanes, never loiter at corners, and scan the traffic double-time for recurring vehicles that might be a tail. There were none.
Lt. Durban was two blocks short of the Navy Yard and beginning to feel that he had made it undetected. He turned down a narrow residential street and made it halfway down the block when he realized the directions had steered him the wrong way down a one-way street, and there was a trash truck coming at him at speed. At least, in the sudden winter dusk, it looked like a trash truck, as did the one coming up behind him.
He flicked his brights on and off, but the trash truck only seemed to speed up, as did the one behind him. It was like a berserk game of chicken. Parked cars on both sides of the street formed solid barricades, and there were no pedestrians on the sidewalks, no lights on in the blind gray concrete towers that hemmed him in on both sides.
Lt. Durban was not a stupid man, nor given to freeze under stress. He unfastened his seatbelt, unlatched the door and threw himself out into the street just as the aft truck made contact with his rear bumper. His car surged forwards, the door slamming shut as it was driven into the reinforced grill of the fore truck. Air brakes hissed. The car buckled with a symphony of snapping, whining metal and a single beleaguered honk before it came to a halt, before he stopped rolling, under a pickup truck and into the ice-crusted stream in the gutter. He fumbled around his back for the pistol, but it must've come loose when he bailed out of the car. He reached out onto the sidewalk, the overnight bag tucked under his body like a football. Melting slush dripping off the drive train of the truck onto his forehead, the trucks roaring at each other as they retreated and his car settled on its cracked undercarriage. A pair of motorcycles stopped beside his car and flashlights swept the interior. Voices shot quick, monosyllabic noises at each other, then the bikes took off.
His hand found something—a signpost, the leg of a newspaper machine—and he dragged himself out from under the truck. Hands seized him and hauled him out into the glow of flashlights.
A man barked at him in a speech devoid of vowels, all glottal stops and fricatives. Dur
ban was no linguist, but he recognized Russian.
"I have nothing for you," he said. He rolled into a ball around the bag. "I just got lost—"
The heavy police-issue flashlight rose and fell on his ribs, and breath, reason and hope rolled away on a tidal wave of hurt. His legs kicked out but hit only the oversized tire of the truck he'd been hiding under. A gloved hand clamped over his mouth. The barrel of a short, ugly machine pistol smashed the bridge of his nose. Something scratchy and hot—a fresh new Spalding tennis ball, he would learn later—forced itself in between his teeth and electrical tape unreeled around his head four times before he could get out another sound.
They hit him again and again until he lost control of his legs and the bag rolled out onto the asphalt, and then they were lifting him up, one holding his arms and one his legs. He got a good look at one of them, but he learned nothing. The man wore a bandanna over his hair and a thick black beard covered nearly everything else. His eyes were black holes, but the light glinted off a gold upper front tooth. Crisp plumes of mist puffed out from his beard as he hoisted Durban across the street to his car. He thought they were going to stuff him into the driver's seat and finish crushing the car, and he fought as hard as he could with his legs tied together. They rewarded his efforts by banging his head into the doorpost as they brought him around to the trunk. It was stuck open, the mouth of the cargo space skewed by the initial impact. They dumped him in, and the one who'd been holding his arms leaned in close and said, "Dosvedanya, tovarisch. The Organizatsiya will not forget your service." He stuck a card in Durban's breast pocket, then he slammed the trunk. Lt. Durban waited in perfect stillness for them to shoot him. When it was clear they had gone, he passed out anyway.
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