Before him was an array of screens, each one providing a different view of his surveillance sector. It was normally a high-interest area, but at present management was concentrating on the continental United States, not on Afghanistan and Pakistan.
His mission was to co-analyze production from the new Rugby Altair class Synthetic Aperture Radar satellites, and the Echo 12 systems in higher Molniya, invaluable for his current effort, because of their dwell capability. It was a piece of luck that the Echo 12s were at a high fuel level, having been refueled by Shuttle Mission STS-201 last month.
He had all manner of software assistance and his computers were essential to his work, but he had intentionally developed a reputation for liking to look at his imagery at once, rather than waiting for it to process. He was extremely careful and, he thought, extremely good. Never, at any time, did he do anything that might suggest that he had another agenda. Of course, they watched the Muslim with a special eye. Of course, they secretly despised him. It wasn’t their fault; it was the evil in them. Evil comes to us all. We must actively go to the good, and Crusader lies made it hard for these poor people to do that. Greed, the dark master of the West, had locked their hearts, and a good Muslim addressed their tragic state with compassion. This was what Nabila didn’t understand. When they were unpleasant to her in the shops or whatever, she cursed and spat and stomped out her rage. She should thank God for the blessing they gave her, which was a chance to give her suffering to Allah.
Rashid’s teacher at the mosque, who had brought him out of the folly of moderation and into the light of the truth, had said to him, “Evil exploits human weakness. The men of the West are not to blame any more than locusts are to blame. But we must still kill the locusts, or the field will be ruined.”
That was true, and look why—even now, there was blue water at the north pole in the summertime, the glaciers of Greenland were sliding into the sea, the oil of his homeland was being devoured by the Great Satan and his minions, and God’s beautiful earth was dying beneath an avalanche of plastic bags, discarded buttons, bottles, toys, and who knew what else—a mess being made by humankind, in defiance of the will of God.
Rashid never did anything to compromise his mission, but he also served his real master, and as he watched his screens he saw that this service was going to once again be needed.
His protocols dictated which sectors he was to observe most carefully, and the Pamir Panhandle was not one of them. This was why, when the clear outline of a Fennek reconnaissance vehicle appeared during a lookdown, he had to fight his rising heartbeat. This was important, because everybody knew that inappropriate indications of stress could bring on an incident-targeted lie detector test—and not with a polygraph, not anymore. The much more effective No Lie fMRI was now in use, and like all of his colleagues, he’d had a baseline exam that made it essentially impossible for him to conceal a falsehood. He must never forget, not now: all they had to do was ask the right question and he was finished.
He queried ISAF HQ, Afghanistan, for their deployments in or near 37°19'43"N, 70°44'35"E. What a Fennek might be doing in an area he secretly knew to be enormously sensitive he did not know, but it was very worrisome, and he had no choice but to take the risk of asking.
ISAF came back: “No deployment coordinates req.” So it wasn’t a Fennek but rather a vehicle disguised to appear to be a Fennek. This meant only one thing: Russians. Russians were within a few kilometers of their old installation. From its size and shape, he thought they must be in an old BRDM reconnaissance vehicle, fitted with plywood panels to make it appear from above to be modern NATO equipment.
Of course, they would have blueprints of the Pamir installation. They would know all the old trip wires, all the mantraps, and, above all, the secret ways in through the ventilation system, pathways that NATO would not have mined. They would be able to penetrate right to the heart of the place without detection. Would Russians understand what was being done there?
He could not even ask that question. The fact was that they were penetrating the place, so of course they knew something, possibly everything.
They must have come in through Tajikistan, a team of specialists. Putin must have realized his mistake in letting Inshalla have this base in the first place, and the Russians were there to clean house. They would kill Aziz and his entourage, and clean up the entire base to a forensic level of thoroughness. Inshalla had done Russia’s secret work in throwing America into chaos, and now it was time for it to stop.
It must not stop.
Perhaps he could suggest an attack on the Russian target. There were SiMiCon Rotor Craft available in Afghanistan, armed with Hellfire missiles. But no, that would look like he was reaching above his level of authority, perhaps attempting to bypass his superiors, and that would cause suspicion.
He composed an instant message: “Poss. Russian BRDM-2U camoed as German-marking Fennek observed scout mode coordinates near 37°19'43"N, 70°44'35"E. Unknown mission. Lookback shows route out of Tajikistan. Recommend immediate site investigation Sov era installations region.”
He could not warn anybody in Pamir. He knew this: if the martyrdom of Aziz as Mahdi was meant to be, it would be. God forgot nothing, knew everything. However, it was hard for Rashid as a technician in command of these powerful resources not to try to help Allah decide what his will was going to be.
“Allahu akbar, Allahu akbar. . . .”
The words had come as if from the interior of his own soul. They shocked him so badly that he almost lost his balance in his seat. Instinct caused him to pull down the cover that concealed his controls. And then he saw a face peering at him over the cubicle partition. His neighbor, Carol Wilkie.
“Hello, Carol.”
“God is a woman.”
“He will be surprised to hear that.”
“Saint Teresa of Avila went bald. Would she still have to wear a veil?”
“Why wouldn’t she want to?”
“It’s time for Asr,” Carol said, “by my reckoning.”
“Ah, thank you, my adan. I was far away.”
“Your keys told me that. Anything up?”
“It’s nothing. . . .” She was not need-to-know for his area, and compartmentalization here was extremely strict, especially now. “Actually, even this peering over the divider is illegal.”
She gave him a questioning frown.
“To look in here. You’re not cleared to see what I am doing.”
She sighed. “They should’ve put the walls all the way to the ceiling. Damn congressional cheapskates.” She laughed a little, and it was very pleasant to see and hear. She wore a black veil, out of respect for her coworker’s sense of modesty. It was a fine thing, and he was very appreciative of her for this act of respect for him—and, for that matter, for herself.
He was tempted by Carol of the long, soft hands and the wide eyes that so deliciously pretended innocence. But not now; she was not part of his mission and she had to go away.
“Want to meet for tea?” she asked.
“No tea today. Just work.”
“Understood.” She snapped him a salute and disappeared.
He unrolled his carpet and used a moist towelette to make quick wadu, then went down to his prayers, imagining his soul flowing across the world to Mecca, and coming as a supplicant to the feet of God. How he longed to be with God! How he loved God!
During the prayer, though, Rashid’s computer beeped the alarm of an incoming urgent message. One of the satellites had detected movement on the ground. He had consulted his mullah about moments like this, and it had been decided that Rashid could compress the prayer. Pilots did it, surgeons, soldiers in the heat of battle. You wrapped the whole prayer up into a single word, and sent it off to Allah with praise and thanks. Allah understood these things. Rashid had been instructed, “You must obey Allah and follow Allah’s laws to the letter, but you must also love Allah and enjoy Allah. Allah is the vengeful lion, but Allah is also the pomegranate in the sum
mer garden, ripe for plucking.”
It smacked of Sufism, but Rashid had accepted it, for this man who instructed him had himself an excellent reputation among Saudis in America, and had been the choice of Rashid’s father. He had known little of Salafism. He had not understood the beauty of its purity, or the power of its message of reform. He had not understood how it felt to belong to the deep truth of the faith, which was only available through total acceptance of the precepts of the Kita at-Tawib, and a return to the ways of the first and best generation, the generation of Mohammed.
Another beep came, and Rashid sent his prayer off on its voyage, and returned to his console, where he saw that a passing Rugby had detected movement along the river, seven figures moving south and west. They had sheep. Rugby satellites had almost no dwell time—a little more than the Lacrosse series they had replaced—but it had been enough to project the probable route the figures were taking.
He knew that this was the Mahdi Aziz and his entourage, escaping into Pakistan. Nobody would drive sheep in that hostile region, a freezing desert without sufficient grass to sustain them, let alone fatten them for market. So this meant only one thing: the Mahdi and his followers had escaped from the Russians in the BRDM.
Rashid saw a chance to end this threat. His supervisors would not know that there were no shepherds in that region. He could safely peg the alarm: “Shepherds seeking lowland pasture due to seasonal weather changes.” It was October, so of course they would be going to lower pastures, and nobody would ever know that he had saved the Mahdi, the very man who was delivering the human species from its long age of darkness into the light of Islam.
Rashid looked at the perfect image, the little band struggling along in what appeared to be a nasty wind. A glance at weather conditions told him that it was minus 8 degrees Celsius there, wind at twenty-two klicks out of the north. Winter was coming to the Kush, even though the Crusader billions were doing the work of Satan and destroying Allah’s beautiful world. They had no respect for the Tawid, the unity of God with his creation: “And it is He who spread the earth, and set the firm mountains upon it, and the rivers; and all manner of fruit.” So it was law that man respect the world, and not eat it with the jaws of a hungry caterpillar.
Then a hand came down on Rashid’s shoulder. His cubicle was locked; only his supervisor could enter. “Hello, Mark,” he said without looking.
“What is it?”
“Shepherds, I think. Have a look.”
“Running from whoever was in that BRDM?”
“With their sheep? I doubt it. Unless the Russkis are out for mutton.”
“Could be, could be. I see you called for a closer look from ISAF.”
“Something seems off. Why are the Russians there?”
“Those old installations are listed as destroyed, not useable.”
“So they say, Mark. But what’s on the books and what’s real—” He shrugged.
“Well, we’ll soon find out. They’ve got a chopper going in. Live bait.” That was the term around here for manned reconnaissance aircraft. The best possible information, but—well, there were many people in that area who might shoot at a NATO helicopter. Even children, just for a little excitement.
Rashid thought of the men in the chopper, churning through the cold dawn, being buffeted by the winds, watching for the wink of rifle fire, or the swift white arrow that marked a speeding rocket.
Mark shook his shoulder. “Good work, Rashid. If anything comes of it, I’ll buy you supper.”
“If anything comes of it, I’ll eat my hat.”
They laughed together. It was a close comradeship, here in this office. So very close.
23
SNIPER COUNTRY
As Jim’s plane landed at Andrews, he watched two dark blue jeeps loaded with air police pace it, then maneuver onto the apron that stood in front of the VIP receiving area. Of course they would assume that anybody flying in under current circumstances would be important. It went against Jim’s instincts, this. He preferred to be the same color as the walls he passed.
In the plane, he’d slept, but badly. Every time he began to go under, he’d see that terrible light blooming across the cowling of that bastard Ressman’s plane.
When they banked on their way to their landing approach, Jim had seen Washington in the distance, white structures afloat in the colors of autumn. He had come here to track backward through ONI records, trying to determine if Franklin Isbard Matthews, who had supposedly duped Arthur Kenneally into pulling the detector off Bridge 1 in Eagle Pass, was a real person. If he was, Jim was going to force information out of him.
That was the way it worked in this business. You swung on vines of information through a jungle of lies. Eventually, either you reached a dead end or you didn’t.
It was seven hours and forty-five minutes from now that frightened Jim. Given that they hadn’t already detonated the bomb that was certainly hidden here, they were going to do it at the most dramatic moment, which he thought would be the same as at Las Vegas: midnight. This would show their power, their absolute control of the situation. They could blow up cities on schedule, no matter how hard anyone tried to stop them.
As the plane’s engines wound down, he stepped to the rear and cracked the door. “Thanks, gentlemen,” he called up to the cockpit. “You got the fuel, I’d turn this lady around pronto.”
The pilot came into the cabin. “Yessir, we’re ready to roll.”
“Then go. Right now. Don’t even stop for a drink of water.”
The young man nodded and disappeared into the cockpit.
As Jim went quickly down the worn aluminum steps, the engines began gaining power. He heard the faint thump of the door closing but did not look back toward the departing plane.
He hardly saw the APs, either. He couldn’t bear looking at their young faces flickering with hope that this might be the man who does something. The weight of history oppressed Jim acutely. He crossed the tarmac, his worn sneakers whispering on the asphalt, a strange contrast with the uniform. As he moved toward the glass doors, the details of the moment crowded him, the faint rustling of his trousers, the slight movement of an awning, the smell of burning jet fuel lingering in the air, and the sweet, infinitely sad scent of—of all things—some sort of late-season flower. Where was it growing, he wondered, in this ocean of concrete?
A Sufi he had known and had sat with in a stifling tiny room in—God, was it Kabul, was it Herat?—had said to him, “The world is memory.” He had reacted in the way a young man does when facing the profound, with nervous, uncomprehending affection. He remembered that old, weathered man now, with his water pipe and his tea and the laugh lines around his eyes.
Jim pushed through the glass doors into the freezing, over-air-conditioned lobby. It was empty, utterly silent, a wide expanse of Air Force blue carpet, rows of plush leather seats, a large color photo of Secretary Robertson on the wall, beside him the smiling face of President Fitzgerald. Jim knew that Fitz was canny, but was he smart? There was a difference, and it could be huge. Jim needed Fitz to grasp things fast, above all to understand why an out-of-place operative was bucking the chain of command and agree to see him.
When he’d been in training, they had been given a lecture by old Gus McCall, a legendary guy, a very bright man, who had done hard things for his country. He had said something Jim had never been able to forget: “Presidents are scared. Not sometimes. All the time. And scared men can be dangerous. You are the messenger, remember, and the news you bring is always bad. If you do your job right or if you don’t, in the end he will want your head.”
How a man dealt with this fear was the measure of his success in that monstrously difficult office. Jimmy Carter had been frozen by it, Richard Nixon driven mad. Eisenhower had overcome it, Lincoln been made great by it, Johnson victimized by it. Fear—relentless, open-ended, cruelly distorting of everybody and everything—drove all presidents. So the question was, what was it doing to Fitz right now?
/> Out the far side of the building, Jim found a courtesy car waiting, a sedan that he knew at once would not survive a chase. But he wouldn’t be in it long. He knew that every intelligence service in the world had been interested in who was on the plane that flew from Texas to Washington during the tightest lockdown in history. He knew that AFOSI, the Air Force Office of Special Investigations, had this car bugged and fitted with tracking devices.
He drove quickly off the base, heading along the Capital Beltway into the city. His plan was to ditch the car as soon as possible and take the Metro to the Mt. Vernon Square stop and from there walk to the ONI offices. There he hoped to talk his way onto a secure line to the White House and an invitation to meet with Fitzgerald.