Omega Sanction

by Bob Mayer

  Here, in this office, he was supposed to be checking files that would be used to determine whether a soldier was to be promoted or not, by a board that would never have met any of the personnel whose fate they were determining. The human touch seemed to have long ago disappeared and it made Thorpe feel like a dinosaur.

  The clock finally stopped and the screen cleared. Four hundred and twenty-two hits. The large number made Thorpe reverse his earlier judgment of computers and wish it could narrow the field down a bit. He began going through each file, one by one, searching for missing daughters.

  When he was finished, the workday was also almost done, but Thorpe had not noticed the clock on the wall. He had twenty-four possibles. He was surprised at the large number. He had the computer print him out a copy of the names and current assignments of each family.

  Twenty-four. The number bothered Thorpe. There was no doubt some of those girls had run away and cut off all communication with their family. But twenty-four?

  Thorpe knew it wouldn't be easy for a family member to run away while stationed in Germany. They couldn't simply fly back to the States because they'd traveled there on military orders with their parents, not on passports. They needed orders getting them back into the States and since they didn't have that, it ruled one avenue out. Thorpe supposed some of them could have run away and stayed in Europe, but the continent was so civilized now that someone without the proper papers would be picked up quickly, particularly in Germany, with its growing backlash against illegal immigrants.

  "Hey, Major, you going to lock up?"

  Thorpe was startled out of his dark reverie. "No, I'm leaving now too."

  Takamura noted the printout. "I don't mean to be a jerk, Major, but you need to be careful around here. They check everything you take out down at the front desk. Plus, the colonel is real picky about people doing anything personal on the computer.”

  Thorpe folded the list up and shoved it inside his shirt. "They don't strip-search you, do they?"

  "Not unless they have a reason to."

  "All right, then. Let's go."

  ***

  Several hundred miles up Interstate 95 in Maryland, an analyst sitting at a desk in the bowels of the NSA, National Security Agency, responded as he was trained to do when his computer screen indicated a flag alert.

  A flag alert meant that someone, somewhere in the massive federal computer network, was looking at material that someone else in the federal system, wanted to be alerted about if anyone looked. It could be anything from a congressman wanting to know about E-mail complaints coming from his district to someone digging into restricted weapons systems files.

  The analyst worked to put a name and location to both sets of someones and somewheres. The first pairing was G-l SOCOM at Fort Bragg. The second pairing, the ones who had put the flag alert in place, made him take notice. CIA operations at Langley.

  As required, the analyst forwarded the alert information to Langley.

  Chapter Seven

  Dublowski studied the list for a long time. Thorpe and he were in the sergeant major's house, just off post in Fayetteville. Marge was nowhere to be seen and since Dublowski hadn't offered, Thorpe hadn't asked. The large two-story home felt empty and lifeless.

  "There's eight disappearances around Stuttgart," Dublowski noted. "This is a lot of missing young women. How come no one's ever seen this pattern?"

  "No one's ever looked," Thorpe said. "Also, that covers a time period of two years and every U.S. military family that was stationed in Germany. A lot of people. And it might not be a pattern," Thorpe added, picking up his friend's mood.

  "Fucking CID," Dublowski said. "They should have checked."

  "CID is limited in what it can do overseas," Thorpe said. "After all, Germany is a foreign country."

  "They still could have checked."

  "We're not sure we have a pattern," Thorpe repeated. "Look, CID has the same problem in Germany that every unit has. Turnover. There's no institutional knowledge there like regular community police forces have."

  "Then why did you bring me this?" Dublowski said testily.

  "We can go to CID," Thorpe said, "and give them that. They can get hold of the families and check. Maybe some of these girls did run away and have shown up. Maybe some have been accounted for in other ways. Maybe the German authorities have found some."

  Dublowski stood. "Let's go."

  Thorpe looked at his watch. It was almost six in the evening. "Why don't we wait until tomorrow during normal duty hours?"

  Dublowski didn't answer. The screen door was already slamming shut behind him. Thorpe followed. He knew he was probably going to get in trouble for having used the computer to get the list, but he wasn't too worried about that. He'd broken bigger rules than unauthorized use of a computer during his time in service and now that he was a reservist there wasn't too much they could do to him except screw with his retirement benefits, and the army had already done that.

  He hopped in the passenger seat of Dublowski's truck. The ride to the Fort Bragg CID headquarters didn't take long. It was located in a new building across the street from the post school. Dublowski led the way in and they walked up to a man in civilian clothes manning a desk right inside the door. He eyed Dublowski, with his big gray mustache and civilian clothes, warily.

  "Can I help you?"

  Dublowski pulled out his ID card and laid it on the man's desk. "I'm Sergeant Major Dublowski and this is Major Thorpe."

  "Agent Martinez," the man replied. "What can I do for you?"

  Dublowski slapped the computer printout on top of his ID card. "This is a list of teenage dependent girls who have disappeared without a trace in Germany in the past two years. There's twenty-four names on the list. My daughter's is one of them."

  Martinez picked up the list and looked at it warily.

  "I was told that there was nothing CID could do about my daughter disappearing," Dublowski continued as the agent read. "I was told she ran away. I know she didn't and the list backs me up."

  "How does this list back that up?" Martinez asked with a frown as he scanned the list.

  "There's a pattern," Dublowski said. "Someone is kidnapping young dependent girls in Germany."

  Martinez cautiously put the list down and looked at the angry sergeant major. "I'm not really sure what I can do with this."

  "Then get someone who knows," Dublowski growled.

  "Hold on while I get the shift commander," Martinez said.

  In the next hour, Dublowski told his story and showed the list to three CID personnel of increasing rank. Thorpe stayed in the background. He felt that they were getting somewhere as the rank went up. At eight he found out exactly how far. The full colonel who was the regional CID commander finally came in. He listened to Dublowski's story, then took the list with him into his office and shut the door. Twenty minutes later he came back out.

  "Where did you get these names?" he asked.

  Thorpe stepped forward and explained his part.

  "Do you know what you did is illegal?" the colonel asked.

  "Not exactly illegal, sir," Thorpe hedged. "I was just—"

  "Exactly illegal!" the colonel snapped. "You're lucky I don't bring you up on charges, Major."

  He turned to Dublowski. "Sergeant Major, I am sorry about your daughter, but the official file on your case shows that CID-Germany investigated and ruled that there was no foul play involved. The case agent's notes suggest that your daughter most likely ran away. It happens all the time." He shook the list. "In fact, I'm amazed there are only twenty-four names on this list for a time period as long as two years, given the numbers of soldiers who rotate through Germany. I would have guessed the number to be much higher."

  "Do you know how many people disappear every day? And they aren't all victims of foul play. In fact, relatively few are. Even in our modern society, people can hide if they want."

  "Wouldn't it be rather hard to do that overseas?" Thorpe asked, sensing the bre
wing volcano next to him and trying to avert an eruption.

  "Not necessarily," the colonel said.

  "My daughter didn't run away," Dublowski said.

  "Sergeant Major, your friend here"—he pointed at Thorpe—"committed an illegal act when he used the computer at SOCOM to get these names. Those personnel files are restricted and can be looked at only on an official need-to-know basis. How would you like it if someone was looking through your personnel record for some reason of their own whenever they felt like it?"

  "Sir," Thorpe began, "I understand what I did was—"

  A female voice cut him off. "No, Major Thorpe, I don't think you do." Lieutenant Colonel Kinsley was standing by the door. She looked very unhappy to be at CID headquarters at nine-thirty in the evening. Her battle-dress uniform wasn't as crisply starched as when Thorpe had seen it earlier in the day. She turned to the CID colonel. "Are you done with them, sir?"

  The colonel walked over and handed the printout to Kinsley. "Yes, I am." He looked at Dublowski. "I'm sorry, Sergeant Major, but the case is closed."

  Dublowski didn't budge. "What about all those missing girls?"

  "Every one of those cases was investigated and closed," the colonel said. "Linking them together is not sufficient to cause us to reopen them. It's like saying every crime committed in North Carolina is linked. There's just no evidence. I hate to say it"—the colonel lowered his voice—"but the biggest problem with all of this is that of these twenty-four, not a single one has been recovered as a body. If your theory of a serial killer was true, then surely some bodies would have been found."

  The colonel was warming to the subject. "The fact is that most serial killers want the bodies to be found. They want the world to know what they're doing. CID-Germany did as much as they could, given what was there in the case file and the limits of operating overseas in another government's jurisdiction."

  "I'm sorry, but the case is closed. I will contact the CID office in Germany and check to see if anything new has turned up, but unless there is further evidence, there is nothing we can do here." With that, the colonel turned his back on them.

  Thorpe put a hand across Dublowski's chest, restraining him. "Let's go, Dan. We've done all we can here." He kept the physical pressure on Dublowski, herding him out of the CID building.

  Lieutenant Colonel Kinsley walked with them to the parking lot. Her last words to Thorpe weren't very encouraging. "Major Thorpe, I will see you in front of my desk at exactly 0900 hours tomorrow morning." She was in her car driving away before Thorpe and Dublowski reached the older man's truck.

  "I'm sorry I got you into this, Mike." Dublowski had calmed down.

  "It's all right. I've had my butt chewed by experts. What's she going to do, send me to a team and make me carry a rucksack?"

  Dublowski started the truck and they headed back toward the BOQ.

  "What do you think of CID's reaction?" Dublowski asked.

  "I hate to say it, Dan, but it's pretty reasonable," Thorpe said. "When I first saw the list, I thought twenty-four was a lot, but if you divide it by two years and the vast number of U.S. personnel going through Germany, then it's really a very low percentage. And the CID colonel was right: Most of those probably are runaways."

  Thorpe could see the muscle on the side of Dublowski jaw clenched, but the sergeant major didn't say anything. Thorpe knew he was treading on thin ice, but he also knew what Dublowski was capable of and he felt he needed to defuse the situation right now.

  "There was no evidence, no connection between the names," Thorpe continued. "Until we get that, we don't have anything. It was something I went off half cocked on, and we got caught on it."

  "Yeah," Dublowski reluctantly said, "I guess so."

  The truck pulled up to the front of Moon Hall and Thorpe got out. "Thanks anyway," Dublowski said.

  "I'm not going to give up on this," Thorpe said.

  "What can you do? That colonel you work for sounds like she'd love to have your ass for breakfast tomorrow."

  Thorpe laughed, indicating what he thought of that fate.

  "I'm going to call someone I know," Thorpe said, leaning back in the truck seat.

  "What for?"

  "We might not be able to do anything, but she might. She's got access to a lot of information and she's probably smarter than the two of us combined."

  "Some smarts would help," Dublowski acknowledged.

  ***

  The original CIA headquarters building was built in the mid-1950s by the same firm that had designed the UN building in New York. The then-director of Central Intelligence who oversaw the design directed that it be built like a college campus, perhaps a subconscious attempt to camouflage the mission of the organization even to those who worked there. The original building contained over 1.4 million square feet and was the hub of the nation's foreign intelligence gathering for the bulk of the Cold War.

  A new addition of 1.1 million square feet was built in 1984, and consisted of two six-story modern office buildings attached to the original headquarters. Despite being less than eight miles from the center of Washington, CIA headquarters was set on 258 acres of rolling countryside in northern Virginia that made Washington seem much farther away.

  The CIA was formerly founded by the National Security Act of 1947, which also established the National Security Council. Before that time, the organization traced its lineage through the Central Intelligence Group founded in 1946, and before that to the OSS, Office of Strategic Services, of World War II fame. The OSS had been led by Colonel "Wild" Bill Donovan, who had been awarded the medal of honor in World War I.

  During the Second World War the OSS had been a bastard stepchild to the British's SOE, Special Operation Executive, which had far more experience at the nefarious art of espionage, but by the end of the war, under Donovan's guidance, the American OSS had earned its spurs. Not only did it give birth to the CIA, but it was also the same unit that army Special Forces traced its lineage to.

  Despite being birthed from the same organization, over the years the CIA and Special Forces had more often been at each other's throats than allied in a common cause. This came to a head during the Vietnam War, when Special Forces felt it was being used by the Agency to fight its own dirty war. Many of the Agency's most controversial programs, such as Phoenix, were staffed by Green Berets. But when it came time for the Agency to support several Special Forces men accused of murdering a double agent at Nha Trang in 1969, the Agency refused to back up the military men, leaving them to dangle.

  The CIA had many ups and downs in the first fifty years of its existence. On the darker side lay early events like the Bay of Pigs. Of more noteworthy mention during that time period was the Cuban Missile Crisis. Abuses during the Cold War led to the formation of the Select Committee on Intelligence, which was at first supposed to be temporary, but was changed into a permanent organization in 1976, allowing Congress oversight on intelligence matters.

  In 1982, President Reagan signed a bill exempting the CIA from the requirements of the Freedom of Information Act, reversing a decade-long trend of more openness.

  On the grounds at Langley, a piece of the Berlin Wall was set up as a memorial to what the CIA considered its greatest victory—the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union.

  A solitary figure was now passing that memorial, the lights highlighting the cracked concrete piece of wall casting his long shadow along the walkway heading toward one of the new office towers.

  The man noted the piece of the wall every time he passed it because it represented several things to him. One was indeed the fall of the Soviet Union, but Karl Hancock wasn't too sure how much the CIA had had to do with that; in fact, having worked in covert operations for over thirty years, he knew how much CIA distortion of Russian military capabilities had added to American paranoia for decades and maintained the Western side of the Cold War at a footing far beyond what was truly necessary.

  The reality of the unreality of covert
operations was what the wall memorial represented to Hancock. And that reality could be manipulated by those who understand it to fit their own purposes.

  Hancock pulled his ID out for the rent-a-cop security guards who manned the entrance to the building. The first layer of security. He again pulled it out as he passed through the second layer, this time showing it to guards who were actually CIA personnel. He boarded an elevator and descended below the surface to sublevel three. He exited into a small lobby, where he was required to get his retinas scanned before the steel door on the other side would open. A guard sitting in a booth enclosed in bulletproof glass watched him without expression as he performed the maneuver. Hancock walked down a black-marble-floored hallway, passing framed placards with the Agency's vision, mission and values engraved on them. He didn't waste any of his time reading them. Public relations devices to appease a country that wanted to be safe and free but didn't want to be dirtied by the processes necessary to ensure that in a world full of dirty players.

  At the end of the hall a large CIA seal was bolted to the wall; double doors beckoned to either side. A fork in the road. To the left was the operations center. To the right, the Center for Direct Action.

  The Operations Center had a large sign identifying it. CDA simply had a black falcon painted on the steel, one claw of the falcon holding a lightning bolt, the other the American flag. Hancock had had it put there when he took over CDA and he always paused to appreciate the art before pushing the doors open.

  Hancock went down to the end of the hallway beyond the falcon painting to another steel door. He put his palm on the panel to the left of the door. It swung open with a hiss. He walked into his office, putting his coat on a hook just inside the armored door.