Clancy, Tom - Op Center 8 - Line of Control

by Line of Control [lit]

  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
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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