Deep Black

31

Malachi Reese slid his headset off, put both hands at the center of his scalp, and began to scratch. His fingers cut a symmetrical pattern across the top of his head, ending finally behind his ears.

He’d read somewhere that this increased the blood circulation to the brain. It was probably complete pseudoscientific bull, but Malachi liked the tingle it left. He bent his head back, then down, zoning for a moment on the tiny red light of his MP3 player. Then he pulled the headphones back and looked at the status screen.

“Decision time,” he told the Art Room, studying the computer’s proposed trajectory from Platform 2. “You have sixty seconds left in this launch window, and the next is three hours away.”

“We need listening devices on Site B,” said Telach finally. “That’s it.”

Malachi turned to the screens on the left, paging up a computer-rendered diagram of Site B, the facility in north-central Russia that the NSA ground ops had been turned away from. This was obviously a military base, not the best application for the Vessel-launched listening devices — they were small and looked like rocks but could be detected by a trained counterintelligence officer.

“We really should line up the RS-93,” he repeated.

“I know you want to fly the plane,” Telach told him. “But this isn’t worth the delay — or the expense. Do what you can.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Malachi uploaded the mission information into the flight computer, selected the proper configuration — all listening devices — and began the launch countdown as his MP3 whipped into a section of tunes from a Bob Dylan tribute. The Vessel whipped out from the satellite station in a sharp downward angle, and he had to sit on the retros to angle it into the proper path.

“Platforms, we’re going to need a diagnostic on Two,” he told the maintenance group when he was finally confident that he had the Vessel on course. “Hey, Baldie, I had a bad angle on the launch, dude, and it’s all your fault.”

Malachi sipped his strawberry-milk drink while the maintenance tech debriefed him. The bad launch meant he was going to have trouble getting the Vessel into a recovery zone following deployment; he’d have to red-button it.

“Gotta go,” he told Baldie as the computer flashed its five-second countdown to Hydra.

“Hey,” said Rockman over the NSA line.

“Hang tight, Rock.” Malachi hit his commands. He had good telemetry from the Vessel — the wings had deployed — but the track on SpyNet disagreed with his own data. The difference was only two meters — but at this altitude and speed, two meters would translate into several miles at the target. He tried two refreshes but couldn’t get them to agree. There was no time to run a diagnostic to find out which was right.

“Yo, Mom, listen, I have a disagreement on my course position,” he told Telach. “What I’m going to do is split the drop. I think I can hit both projected sites.”

He said that before doing the calculations.

“What kind of coverage are we going to have?” asked Telach.

Duh.

“A quarter of what we planned,” said Malachi. “Half the devices over half the area. I’ll jack the power if you want, but you’ll kill the endurance.”

“Acceptable,” said Rockman.

Malachi pounded the keyboard and got the two drop points worked out. The extra maneuvers left him with a self-destruct point only twenty miles from the second drop, which called for a verbal override not only from him but also from Telach.

“Go for it,” she said.

To interpret the voice intercepts provided by the miniature bugs, Desk Three used specialists from the NSA’s translation section, who were fed the intercepts in real time over a dedicated network. The translators used a version of Speaker ID — a neural network computer program based on the Berger — Liaw Neural Network Speaker Independent Speech Recognition System developed at the University of Southern California for the agency and the Defense Department. Speaker ID could separate recorded conversations into dialogue transcripts almost instantaneously; the exact speed depended on conditions and what the program’s mentors sometimes referred to as interference from the human linguists working with the gear. An uncorrected transcript appeared on one of Rockman’s screens in near real time; a more polished draft could be called up on a sixty-second delay. The runner preferred to rely on the translation supervisor, who could summarize developments quickly. The supervisor was with the translators in another part of Crypto City, though he could take a station in the Art Room for important missions.

“Macho talk,” said the translation supervisor, Janet Granay. “A lot of conversations. General stuff. We’ll start harvesting in a few seconds.” The corrected transcripts were entered into a computer program that searched for key words such as cities or military commands. The program would then flag the conversation streams, highlighting them for the supervisor. While the program was definitely useful, in prac- tice Granay could probably keep up with what was for her a limited number of conversation streams without its help.

“We’re looking at a Marine base then?” asked Rockman. “That’s my main question, if I can confirm my background.”

“We’re still working on it. We have only six conversations here. A lot of snoring. It’s nighttime over there.”

“I can wait,” said Rockman. Site B was a bit of an interesting mystery. The most recent satellite photo showed equipment ordinarily associated with Marine units, even though this was deep in Siberia, not a place known to house the extremely small Russian amphibious forces. A vehicle analysis put the force strength just short of a battalion — which would make it the largest concentration of Marines outside of naval bases in the Far East.

Telach theorized that they were looking at an Army unit that had inherited Marine gear, but NSA’s researchers could find no evidence of that. Large military units were routinely tracked across the globe, so the appearance of a fairly significant size force here was interesting in and of itself. So far no reference to it had been found in the mountains of daily intercepts out of the Kremlin and defense ministry.

Lia’s data didn’t provide much illumination. Her images of the men, transmitted over the phone hookup, showed that they were probably wearing Marine uniforms.

Rockman studied the eavesdropping data; one of the flies was close enough to pick up what seemed to be a conversation at the main gate. It consisted largely of a debate over how much vodka could be drunk without pausing to take a breath.

“So let’s say the helicopter belonged to them,” suggested Telach, sitting at the console next to him. “What’s it mean? Units operating independently of Moscow.”

“Private force, answerable to the defense minister,” suggested Rockman. “Big, though.”

“Why the defense minister?”

Rockman shrugged. “Who else? Yeltsin’s ghost?”

“Could be a mafiya network. Or something we haven’t tracked yet.” She rubbed her finger along her chin, considering the situation. “We’ll have to send Karr up there to see what he can find. It’s too big to ignore.”

“Yeah. Mr. Rubens is going to want to know.”

“Definitely.”

“What do you want to do about Dean?” Rockman asked.

“Have Fashona fly him and the metal back, pack it into a transport, and get it home.”

“Karr’s going to complain about having the Hind taken away.”

“Who’s running this operation, us or him?”

“You know Tommy.”

They were interrupted by Granay. “You ought to listen to this,” she said. “Line Four. And it matches, I checked it.”

Rockman punched the feed button, bringing up the raw intercept in his earphones. He was about to key in a translated overlay when he realized he didn’t have to: the voice being picked up by the tiny bug was speaking English.

American English. Reciting, in fact, a passage from the Bible — one so well-known that even Rockman, who was about as religious as Rin Tin Tin, could recite by heart.

“The Lord is my shepherd,” said the voice shakily in a low whisper. “I shall not want.”

Telach and Rockman looked at each other. They didn’t need the audio library to know the voice belonged to Stephan Moyshik — aka Stephen Martin.