Act of Terror

CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR

Arlington, Virginia

Thibodaux stood beside Palmer’s leather sofa at parade rest, eyes intent on an angry-looking radar image on a flat-screen monitor. “So,” the Cajun said, “we’ve found him then?”

Win Palmer sat behind his desk fiddling with a computer keyboard to zoom in tighter on the image. He put the cursor over a map of western China and the Wakhan Corridor of Afghanistan, where a red and yellow blotch marched across the screen. Beside the blinking arrow were the letters: LKP.

“His last known point was here.” Palmer used the mouse to wiggle the cursor slightly. “This is where he called in the Hellfire strike. I sent another agent over to talk to Dr. Deuben. She sent them somewhere over here…” He moved the cursor three inches to the west. “… to talk to a Kyrgyz woman about the orphanage.

“And what does this Kyrgyz woman say?” Thibodaux moved up next to the screen, as if closer scrutiny might reveal his friend’s location.

“That’s the glitch.” Palmer frowned. “That red blob there is the storm that’s been dumping snow on the area since late yesterday. We sent a Blackhawk over Boroghil Pass from the Pakistani side. Those Kyrgyz migrate down from the high pastures every year about this time before the big snows hit. There was no sign of the camp Deuben sent them to. They could have already headed down to Sarhad to get ahead of the storm. The Blackhawk had to get back to base before it got caught in a whiteout-no time to do a thorough search. They can barely keep a bird in the air at those altitudes anyway.”

“What about this spot here?” Thibodaux ran his finger along a band of light greens and blues on the map. “A break in the weather?”

“Bingo,” Palmer said. “Not big enough to get an aircraft on the ground, but if we run it through time lapse on Damocles it does show us something interesting.”

Palmer tapped that keyboard and brought up the same map with a time stamp of an hour before. The gap in the weather had passed over a mountain valley roughly ten miles from the spot the Kyrgyz camp was supposed to have been. Centered in the rocky scree along the mountain side was a small purple dot, nearly invisible to the naked eye.

“What am I looking at?” Thibodaux rubbed his jaw.

“Maybe nothing.” Palmer shrugged. “Maybe a fire.”

Thibodaux sighed. “I’ve been to that part of Afghanistan, sir. There’s not much to burn in those mountains except yak shit.”

“What we do know is that the dot wasn’t there five hours before. It’s some sort of anomaly and fire is the best guess.”

“If it’s a fire big enough to see from a satellite, it’s likely Quinn’s handiwork. Let’s get someone in there to get him out.”

Palmer leaned back in his chair, folding his hands across the flat of his stomach. “My thoughts exactly.” The muscles in his jaws and neck flexed like taut cables. “But we can’t. The next band of weather has moved in and stalled. All the technology in the world and we’re stymied by clouds. Until they move, we’re not getting anyone in or out.”