They Disappeared

56

Darmstadt, Germany

“The game is going ahead as scheduled. Our team is favored to win.”

The American intelligence officer sat up in his chair at his computer monitor and used both hands to press his headset to his ears.

He quickly reread the notes the traffic operator, the linguist and the cryptologist had provided, then he replayed the recording.

“The game is going ahead as scheduled….”

The officer worked in a corner of a listening station that was part of a U.S. military complex hidden in the forests of the Rhine region, less than an hour’s drive south of Frankfurt. It was an ultrasecret tentacle of the National Security Agency’s foreign intelligence surveillance operations that few people knew existed.

Code name: HUSH.

The system had grown from ECHELON, a Cold War communications network operated by Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States, to eavesdrop on the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc. Since then it had emerged to monitor activities of pariah countries, insurgency, organized crime and terrorist plots.

HUSH went beyond monitoring satellite telecommunications traffic. It also used an advanced network of secret listening stations around the world that were strategically placed near major switching bases for fiber-optic communications.

In this sector, the path of much of Europe’s internet communications traveled through a critical exchange point near Frankfurt International Airport. Here, through its Darmstadt station, HUSH had been running a long-standing operation of tracking, capturing, decrypting and analyzing the phone and web traffic of scores of terror groups.

In most cases the targets used untraceable disposable phones, or encrypted satellite phones, or coded internet communication. HUSH’s experts drew upon information harvested from captured suspects and equipment. They also relied on the work of intelligence officers in the field whose sources and informants provided key but ever-changing numbers, codes, positions and data.

Intelligence operators and traffic analysts had to contend with some seventy languages and dialects. Linguists where often challenged understanding everything they’d heard. So much could be lost if one didn’t understand the cultural contexts. All intelligence operators, despite listening in on targets for months, feared they could miss something. They used technology and human resources to sort through millions of intercepted calls, decode keywords for further analysis.

The intelligence officer continued concentrating and replayed the fragment of captured communications several more times.

“The game is going ahead as scheduled. Our team is favored to win.”

These calls were very recent and had pinballed from Istanbul to Athens, from Grozny to Makhachkala, Dagestan, from Amsterdam to Mykrekistan, from Munich to Queens, New York.

The languages on this file had been a mix of Azeri, Chechen, Dargwa, Greek, Kumyk, Lezgian, Mykrekistani, Tabasaran, Turkish and Russian.

The officer checked his notes.

The targets had been European cells supporting a dangerous group of insurgents in the Caucasuses. CIA informants had indicated the insurgents had boasted of an attack planned for the UN meeting in New York City and that when the target’s plans moved closer to activation, the targets would encrypt their conversations to sound like they were talking about a specific football match-the game between the U.S. and Iranian national soccer teams to be played today in New York City.

The officer signaled to a supervisor.

“Sir, take a look at the notes, and listen,” the officer said. “I think we have something.”

The supervisor listened on his headset.

“The game is going ahead…”

He listened twice, consulted the notes and drew upon all the alerts he’d been privy to from the past forty-eight hours.

“Okay, get this to Langley and Iron Shield in New York.”