to kill innocent countrymen, present or future.
The skies were dark and Ishaq flipped on his headlights.
A powerful lamp illuminated the road almost two hundred yards ahead.
That was barely enough visibility to allow him to keep moving at his
current pace. Curves came up so suddenly that he nearly went off the cut
twice. Every now and then he slowed for just a moment to keep from
feeling like he could fly. That was a very real delusion at this height
and these speeds. He also took that time to glance back. He wanted to
make sure he was not being followed. With the hum of the engine echoing
off the crags and valleys, the sputtering of his cheeks, and the
knocking of the thrown pebbles, Ishaq would not necessarily hear the
roar of a pursuing vehicle or helicopter. He had warned Apu to stay in
the house and he had cut the telephone line. But still--one never knew
how a man would react when a family member was in captivity.
Ishaq saw another roadside marker. He was at forty-five hundred feet
now. He did not know exactly how far Sharab and the team would be able
to go in the van. They were coming up another cut. Maybe they could get
to five thousand feet before the road became too narrow to accommodate
the truck. The roads joined a few hundred feet ahead. When he arrived,
he would either see their tire treads or else wait for them at the cave.
He hoped they were already there. He was anxious to know what had
happened, what had gone wrong.
He prayed it was nothing that might keep them from him.
If for some reason the others did not show up within twenty four hours,
Ishaq's standing orders were to get to the cave and set up the radio he
carried in his small equipment case.
Then he was to call the FKM base in Abbottabad, across the border in
Pakistan. They would tell him what to do. That meant either he would be
advised to wait for replacements or attempt to return home for a
debriefing.
If it came to that, Ishaq hoped they would tell him to wait.
Going home would mean climbing the mountains to the Siachin Glacier. Or
else he would have to attempt to make his way across the line of
control. His chances of surviving the trip were not good. FKM command
might just as well order him to shoot himself at the cave.
As Ishaq neared the point where the two cuts converged he saw the truck.
It was parked in the middle of the road.
The flatbed was covered with an earth-tone tarp they carried and the cab
was hidden beneath scrub. A smile fought a losing battle against the
wind. He was glad they had made it. But that changed when his headlights
found the team about two hundred yards ahead. As one they turned and
crouched, ready to fire.
"No, it's Ishaq!" he cried.
"It's Ishaq!"
They lowered their weapons and continued ahead without waiting for their
teammate. Sharab was in front with the girl.
Nanda was being urged forward at gunpoint.
That was not like Sharab.
This was bad. This was very, very bad.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN.
Washington, D. C. Wednesday, 10:51 a. m.
Bob Herbert was usually a pretty happy man.
To begin with, Herbert loved his work. He had a good team working beside
him. He was able to give Op-Center personnel the kind of heads-up
intelligence he and his wife never had in Lebanon. He was also happy
with himself. He was not a Washington bureaucrat. He put truthfulness
above diplomacy and the well-being of the NCMC above the advancement of
Bob Herbert. That meant he could sleep at night. He had the respect of
the people who mattered, like Paul Hood and Mike Rodgers.
But Bob Herbert was not happy right now.
Hank Lewis had phoned from the NSA to say that the latest information
e-mailed from Ron Friday was being processed by decryption personnel.
It would be forwarded to Herbert within minutes. While Herbert waited
for the intel he did something he had been meaning to do since the
Striker recon mission was okayed by the CIOC. He pulled up Ron Friday's
NSA file on his computer. Until now, Herbert and his team had been too
busy helping Mike Rodgers and Striker prepare for the mission to do
anything else.
Herbert did not like what he saw in Ron Friday's dossier.
Or rather, what he did not see there.
As a crisis management center, Op-Center did not keep a full range of
military maps and intelligence in what they called their "hot box." The
only files that were reviewed and updated on a four-times-daily basis
were situations and places where American personnel or interests were
directly involved or affected. Kashmir was certainly a crisis zone.
But if it exploded, it was not a spot with which Op-Center would
automatically be involved. In fact, that was the reason Striker had been
asked to go into the region and look for Pakistani nuclear weapons.
Pakistani intelligence would not be expecting them.
Ron Friday was a very late addition to the mission. His participation
had been requested over the weekend by Satya Shankar, minister of state.
Department of Atomic Energy.
Officially, one of Shankar's duties was the sale of nuclear technology
to developing nations. Unofficially, he was responsible for helping the
military keep track of nuclear technology within enemy states.
Shankar and Friday had worked together once before, when Shankar was
joint secretary. Exploration, of the Ministry of Petroleum and Natural
Gas. Friday had been called in by a European oil concern to assess legal
issues involving drilling in disputed territory between Great Indian
Desert in the Rajasthan Province of India and the Thar Desert in
Pakistan. Shankar had obviously been impressed by the attorney.
Since Op-Center was stuck with Friday, reading his file had not been a
high priority for Herbert. Especially since the CIOC had already okayed
Friday based on his Blue Shield rating. That meant Ron Friday was
cleared to take part in the most sensitive fieldwork in foreign
countries. Red Shield meant that an agent was trusted by the foreign
government.
White Shield meant that he was trusted by his own government, that there
was no evidence of double-agent activity.
Yellow Shield meant that he had been revealed to be a double agent and
was being used by his government to put out disinformation, often
without his knowledge or occasionally with his cooperation in exchange
for clemency. Blue Shield meant he was trusted by both nations.
What the Red, White, and Blue rankings really meant was that no data had
ever come up to suggest the agent was corrupt. That was usually good
enough for a project overseer to rubber-stamp an individual for a
mission. Especially an overseer who was new on the job and overworked,
like Hank Lewis at the National Security Agency. But the Shield system
was not infallible. It could simply mean that the agent had been too
careful to be caught. Or that he had someone on the inside who kept his
file clean.
Friday's file was extremely skimpy. It contained very few field reports
<
br /> from Azerbaijan, where he had most recently been stationed at the United
States embassy in Baku as an aide to Deputy Ambassador Dorothy
Williamson. There were zero communications at all from him during the
recent crisis in the former Soviet Republic. That was unusual. Herbert
had a look at the files of the two CIA operatives who had been stationed
at the embassy. They were full of daily reports.
Coincidentally, perhaps, both of those men were killed.
Friday's thin file and his apparent silence during the crisis was
troubling. One of his superiors at the NSA, Jack Fenwick, was the man
who had hired the terrorist known as the Harpooner to precipitate the
Caspian Sea confrontation between Azerbaijan, Iran, and Russia. Herbert
had not read all the postmortems about the situation. There had not been
time. But Friday's silence before and during the showdown led Herbert to
wonder: was he really inactive or were his reports made directly to
someone who destroyed them?
Jack Fenwick, for example.
If that were true it could mean that Ron Friday had been working with
Jack Penwick and the Harpooner to start a war.
Of course, there was always the possibility that Friday had been helping
Fenwick without knowing what the NSA chief was up to. But that seemed
unlikely. Ron Friday had been an attorney, a top-level oil rights
negotiator, and a diplomatic advisor. He did not seem naive.
And that scared the hell out of Herbert.
The decrypted NSA e-file arrived and Herbert opened it.
The folder contained Friday's observations as well as relevant data
about the previous antiterrorist functions of both the National Security
Guard and the Special Frontier Force.
It did not seem strange to Herbert that SFF had replaced the Black Cats
after this latest attack. Maybe the SFF had jurisdiction over strikes
against religious sites. Or maybe the government had grown impatient
with the ineffectiveness of the Black Cats. There was obviously a
terrorist cell roaming Kashmir. Any security agency that failed to
maintain security was not going to have that job for very long.
Either he or Paul Hood could call their partners in Indian intelligence
and get an explanation for the change. Herbert's concerns about Ron
Friday would not be so easy to dispel.
Herbert entered the numbers 008 on his wheelchair phone.
That was Paul Hood's extension. Shortly before Op-Center opened its
doors Matt Stoll had hacked the computer system to make sure he got the
007 extension. Herbert had not been happy about Stoll's hacking but Hood
had appreciated the man's initiative. As long as Stoll limited his
internal sabotage to a one-time hack of the phone directory Hood had
decided to overlook it.
The phone beeped once.
"Hood here."
"Chief, it's Bob. Gol a minute?"
"Sure," Hood said.
"I'll be right there," Herbert said. He typed an address in his computer
and hit "enter."
"Meanwhile, I'd like you to have a quick look at the e-files I'm sending
over. One's a report from the NSA about this morning's attack in
Srinagar.
Another is Ron Friday's very thin dossier."
"All right," Hood said.
Herbert hung up and wheeled himself down the corridor to Hood's office.
As Herbert was enroute he got a call from Matt Stoll.
"Make it quick," Herbert said.
"I was just reviewing the latest number grabs from the Bellhop," Stoll
told him.
"That telephone number we've been watching, the field phone in Srinagar?
It's making very strange calls."
"What do you mean?" Herbert said.
"The field phone keeps calling the home phone in Jammu, the police
station," Stoll said.
"But the calls last for only one second."
"That's it?"
"That's it," Stoll told him.
"We read a connect, a one second gap, then a disconnect."
"Is it happening regularly?" Herbert asked.
"There's been a blip every minute since four p. m. local time, six
thirty A. M. our time," Stoll told him.
"That's over four hours," Herbert said.
"Short, regular pulses over a long period. Sounds like a tracking
beacon."
"It could be that," Stoll agreed, "or it could mean that someone hit the
auto redial button by accident. Voice mail answers non emergency calls
at the police station. The field phone may have been programmed to read
that as a disconnect so it hangs up and rings the number again." "That
doesn't sound likely." Herbert said.
"Is there any way to tell if the field phone is moving?"
"Not directly," Stoll said.
"What about indirectly?" Herbert asked as he reached Paul Hood's office.
The door was open and he knocked on the jamb. Hood was studying his
computer monitor. He motioned Herbert in.
"If the phone calls are a beacon, then the police in Kashmir are almost
certainly following them, probably by ground based triangulation," Stoll
told Herbert.
"All of that would be run through their computers. It will take some
time but we can try breaking into the system."
"Do it," Herbert said.
"Sure," Stoll said.
"But why don't we just call over and ask them what's going on? Aren't
they our allies? Aren't we supposed to be running this operation with
them?"
"Yes," Herbert replied.
"But if there's some way we can accomplish this without them knowing I'd
be happier. The police are going to want to know why we're asking.
The Black Cats and selected government officials are the only ones who
are supposed to know that Striker is coming over." "I see," Stoll said.
"Okay. We'll try hacking them." "Thanks," Herbert said and hung up as he
wheeled into Hood's office. He locked his brakes and shut the door
behind him.
"Busy morning?" Hood asked.
"Not until some lunatic decided to set off fireworks in Srinagar,"
Herbert replied.
Hood nodded.
"I haven't finished these files," he said, "but Ron Friday is obviously
concerned about us having anything to do with the Black Cats. And you're
apparently worried about having anything to do with Ron Friday."
Paul Hood had not spent a lot of time working in the intelligence
community and he had a number of weaknesses.
However, one of Hood's greatest strengths was that his years in politics
and finance had taught him to intuit the concerns of his associates,
whatever the topic.
"That's about the size of it," Herbert admitted.
"Tell me about this police line blip," Hood said, still reading.
"The last home phone-to-field phone communication came a moment before
the explosion," Herbert said.
"But Matt just told me that the regular pulses from field to home
started immediately after that. In ELINT we want three things to happen
before we posit a possible connection to a terrorist attack: timing,
proximity, and probable source. We've got those."
"The probable source being a cell that's apparently been working in
Srinagar," Hood said.
&
nbsp; "Correct," Herbert said.
"I just asked Matt to try and get more intel on the continuing blips."
Hood nodded and continued reading.
"The problem you have with Friday is a little dicier." "Why?" Herbert
asked.
"Because he's there at the request of the Indian government," Hood said.
"So is Striker," Herbert pointed out.
"Yes, but they've worked with Friday," Hood said.
"They'll give Striker more freedom because they trust Friday."
"There's an irony in there somewhere," Herbert said.
"Look, I see where you're coming from," Hood acknowledged.
"Friday worked for Fenwick. Fenwick betrayed his country. But we have to
be careful about pushing guilt by association."
"How about guilt by criminal activity?" Herbert said.
"Whatever Friday was doing in Baku was removed from his file."
"That's assuming he was working for the NSA," Hood said.
"I just put in a call to Deputy Ambassador Williamson in Baku. Her
Clancy, Tom - Op Center 8 - Line of Control Page 11