October's Ghost

CHAPTER FOURTEEN ARRIVALS

The scene was reminiscent of a team meeting before the big game, but the players here were wearing suits and carrying guns. They also outnumbered their opponents by fifty to one. Yet they were at a distinct disadvantage, a fact well understood by the de facto coach and his players.

“Remember, these guys don’t have to play by the rules,” Art told the sea of agents arrayed around him. “We do.”

The senior agent seemed remarkably controlled in his approach to the situation, much different than some of his fellow agents had come to expect from past experience. The past was the past, they figured, happy to have Art Jefferson running this one with a cool head and measured determination.

“Is LAPD going to step up patrols?” Special Agent Shelley Murdock asked.

“Yeah, Shel. Metro is putting out four uniformed Adam cars to basically do runs around our perimeter-search area.” The LAPD’s Metropolitan Division was the elite of the department that provided specialized units for use throughout the city. In this instance it would back up the Bureau by increasing the department’s presence around the area to be checked. Within the area unmarked but obviously official FBI cars — government cars looked too plain to be anything other than official — would fill the twelve-square-block section around Olympic and Vermont. “If they see anything, they’ll call us in. We make the move.”

The agents took a last look at their assignments. There were sixty-seven motels or cheap hotels in the area to be covered, though no contact would be made with the individual businesses just yet. That part of the operation was yet to be planned.

“Okay, hit it.” Art hopped down from the chair he had used as a riser to address the gathering on the fourth floor. Omar Espinosa was the only one of the agents to remain, and coming through the stream of those heading for the basement garage was the partner Art had sent off to her room some hours before.

“How’s everything going?”

Art saw that the chance for sleep had not done much for Frankie. “Everything here is going fine. How about with you?”

She didn’t look up from the assignment list on her desk, prompting a worried look between Art and Omar. “Good. I slept a little.”

“How much?”

Frankie raised her eyes. “Enough. Now what’s the plan?”

So she was still pumped up, Art recognized. Maybe a little too much. He knew he’d still have to keep a close eye on her, for her own good. “Hal and Rob got the OP up and running about four hours ago. So far nothing from them. The teams are heading out to keep our friends’ heads down, if they’re where we hope.”

Frankie sat down. Art did so also, and Omar slid a chair over from an adjoining cubicle.

“Now we have to figure out how to find them,” Art said.

Frankie saw the report from the rental agency. It included two photocopied driver’s licenses. The pictures on each matched closely the composite sketches of the murderers. Suspected murderers, she corrected herself, falling back upon the proper method of classifying suspects. “The DLs check out?”

Art’s head shook. “No record of any Juan Quintana or Flavio Alicante with those numbers in Florida’s computers.”

“Some good counterfeiting,” Espinosa observed. The photocopies betrayed no telltale signs of illicit manufacture, something the Florida Department of Motor Vehicles was mighty disturbed to hear of. “Someone has some good resource people behind them.”

“More Florida connections,” Frankie said. “Still, this doesn’t give us much. The names are obviously aliases, maybe onetime identities if this is really something international. Maybe even if they’re just hired guns.” She looked at the faces closely for a moment. “At least we know our ‘puters can put out good sketches.”

That was an understatement, Art thought. They were actually photo-representations, mimicking the look of actual pictures. But those would do little good now unless they could come up with a way to use what they had to locate the men pictured.

“We can’t just do the rounds with these,” Art said, pointing to the color composites. “If we show these to a desk clerk who’s been paid to give a warning, then we may cause a mess. I want that avoided at all costs.”

“What about calling?” Omar wondered. “What if they used the same names to check in at one of the places? It’s possible.”

“Yeah, I guess it is, but we’d be taking the same risk of tipping them off.” The morning was young, and already the frustration was mounting. “Any ideas, partner?”

None that are legal, Frankie answered for herself. “Unless we get lucky and spot them without them knowing it, then we’re going to have to do some kind of approach. That means the desk clerk at every place, or a cleaning person. And it has to be in some way that won’t spook them, something that won’t set off alarm bells.”

“There’s the ten-thousand-dollar outline,” Art commented. “Now all we need is the ten-cent answer to make it fly.” He snatched up the photocopy of the licenses. “Almost as good as our boys could put out.” It was a little-known and infrequently used skill that the Bureau’s TS Section had mastered: producing counterfeit documents. Sometimes it was necessary to provide an undercover agent with documentation to prove his cover story. With the cooperation of agencies in all fifty states and several foreign jurisdictions, the Bureau had compiled a collection of authentic materials from which the required papers and IDs could be put together. Art studied the fine detail work. “Jacobs would appreciate work like this.”

“He’d say he could do better,” Omar joked.

“I bet he could,” Art concurred, the spark flashing in his brain without warning. His eyes drifted away from the photocopy, the thoughts piling one atop another as they fought for dominance in the plan that was forming in the senior agent’s mind.

Omar caught the intensity in Art’s demeanor before Frankie. “You got something, Art?”

“I think we might.”

Frankie’s attention level shot up at the positive tone in her partner’s words. “What? How?”

“We’re waiting,” Omar implored.

“I think with a little help from Jacobs we can pull this off,” Art said, without explaining what “this” was.

“Pull what off?” Frankie asked.

Art picked up the phone and dialed down to TS. “We’re going to play a little ‘lost and found.’ “

“What kind of game is that?” Espinosa asked, playing along with Art’s crypticism.

“The most satisfying. We’re the finders, and our perps are the losers.”

“You’ll want to buckle up now,” the Air Force lieutenant informed his five passengers. The Gulfstream would be landing on Andrews’ east-west runway in a few minutes.

“Give me something, Dick,” the Post reporter begged. “I go all the way down there with you, hang back in the shadows like a good little reporter, and don’t look where I shouldn’t. What do I have from that? Nothing.”

Congressman Richard Vorhees, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, laughed at the childlike begging and guilt projection Chick Hill was shooting his way. As the Post’s military-affairs correspondent, an assignment with fewer potential stories in the “days of downsizing,” he had been invited to accompany the congressman on a short inspection of several special operations facilities. His access had been understandably limited to nonsecure areas of the three bases, which had frustrated him to no end. The congressman had enjoyed every minute of it. The media hated to be told, with no chance for argument, that they couldn’t go somewhere or see something. “Childlike” might have been an improper characterization, Vorhees realized; “infantile” was more descriptive.

“Hey, that sergeant offered you a chance to run the confidence course.” Vorhees heard the snickers from his staff in the seats behind as the Gulfstream began to descend. “You didn’t take him up on that.”

Pig. Hill was treading water here, trying to make something of his new beat. The State Department had been a hell of a lot easier to cover than the Pentagon. At least there you could see the comings and goings of ambassadors and the like, things that gave an inkling if something was up. The wrong person in the right place at the wrong time could set the old noggin to thinking. That was the reporters’ sense. Somewhere after the sixth on the hierarchy of human senses, he figured. That ability, however, could not easily penetrate a stone wall, the likes of which Vorhees had erected around everything interesting on their short jaunt down South.

Well, so be it. Hill knew that if he couldn’t get information he could at least get denials to the right questions. “What about Delta?”

“Delta?” Vorhees asked with feigned ignorance. “What’s that?”

A smile. “Weren’t you observing a demonstration of their techniques?”

“Whose?” The game was fun to the congressman, a man who had developed a healthy disdain for the press during his tour in uniform. Plus, his professed lack of knowledge was the “literal” truth. The Army had no so-called Delta force. If that name stuck among its members, JSOC, and some uninformed members of the media, oh well. In the Pentagon’s nomenclature the unit once referred to as Special Operations Detachment Delta was now known as Special Operations Detachment Trumpet, and that designation would change again in three months. Delta hadn’t officially been “Delta” for quite some time, giving the politicos like himself a convenient answer when challenged on the existence of the unit. “Don’t know where you get your information, Chick.”

“Then there is no unit called Delta?”

A careful pause. “To my knowledge we have no unit that carries that designation.”

“To your knowledge?”

The congressman nodded.

Well, let’s try this. “I heard someone mention that ‘some unit’ you were observing took off pretty quick from Bragg. Anything to that?”

Vorhees had heard one of his aides let that slip and had chastised the staffer for it. “People on bases move at their own speed. Some slow, some fast. Everyone has someplace to go.”

Okay, there’s an opening. “Would they be going anywhere in particular? Maybe where the action is?”

Another laugh erupted from the jovial bureaucrat, giving him time to craft a response. “You give me more credit than I’m due, Chick. I’m a pencil pusher, remember?”

“Maybe Cuba?” It was a stretch, but he had to cast his line somewhere.

“Chick, come on. From what I can see that’s a coup d’état going on down there.” Vorhees had no knowledge of any American involvement, but the quick departure of Delta had made the same thought cross his mind. But speculation was not his job at the moment — deflection was. “You’re reaching on that one.”

Hill could accept that. It would do. Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee Richard Vorhees, after a tour of facilities housing U.S. Special Operations Forces, denies that any of those forces are involved in the apparent coup under way in Cuba. Leads often generated as much information as digging for the story. He was certain he and his editors would be getting calls from the Hill concerning their “shoddy, speculative reporting.” At least the trip wouldn’t be a total waste.

The Gulfstream touched down with the rising sun behind it and turned off the runway toward the secure area of Andrews before backtracking along the taxiway toward the military VIP terminal.

“Jeez, she’s a big one, isn’t she?” one of the aides commented, looking out one of the aircraft’s left-side windows.

Chick turned his attention that way. The observation just heard was adequate, he thought. The white 747 with its long blue stripe running from tail to nose was being pulled from its hangar by a dark green tug. Within seconds of stopping, a truck with stairs mounted on its back pulled to the left — Hill reminded himself of the military jargon: port — side door. As the Gulfstream taxied by, a black limousine pulled up to the stairs and let out… Granger? He instinctively leaned closer to the window and squinted. It was Granger. That smooth head and blue uniform were unmistakable, his peaked cap in hand as he ran—ran? — up the steps into the… That’s not Air Force One. Hill cocked his head and looked as far to the Gulfstream’s front as he could through the small glass portal. It’s there. The President’s plane, a modified 747 designated VC-25A, was similar in appearance to the jet they were passing, but its long stripe flared upward near the nose to paint the entire upper front a bright blue. That plane was out on the tarmac in its usual place. The Post reporter looked back to the other aircraft, wondering…

The Doomsday Plane? It was a flowery, overly dramatic nickname that no Air Force officer would ever utter. The correct name was Kneecap, Hill knew. The National Emergency… Emergency? …Airborne Command Post. Why was it rolling out, and why was the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff running up the stairs to it? Granger had been around long enough that everyone in D.C. knew he moved about as fast as he talked. That’s why he had chosen the Air Force for his military career path, the joke went, so he could let his fighters do the walking.

Hill kept his attention focused on the hangar where the — what was the damned military designation? E-4B. That was it. He scanned the area around the E-4B. There was nothing else untoward, just a few guards. That was to be expected, he figured. But something still was stuck in his nosy craw. Granger running? It wasn’t a story; it wasn’t even a lead. Yet.

The Gulfstream came to a stop five minutes later, more than two miles away from the aircraft that had sparked Chick Hill’s curiosity. The congressman politely accompanied him to the terminal, benignly thanking him for the company and bidding him an appropriately smiling farewell.

“Thanks for nothing, Dick,” Hill said after the congressman had gotten into the car waiting for him. I wonder why that perk hasn’t been cut. The Post reporter saw his perk waiting farther away.

“Welcome back,” the Jeep’s driver said when Hill climbed in, tossing his two-suiter in the back. The kid was low on the totem pole at the paper, hardly more than an intern, actually, and drew the gofer duties often. “Back to the grindstone.”

“No. Not just yet.” Hill took his cell out, an idea rising. “I’ve gotta check something out. You just drive.”

“Drive where?”

Hill told him as he plotted out what he’d have to do to get a story out of this, even if there wasn’t one. He almost laughed at that doubt. Anything could be made into a story.

Jenny MacNamara stared at the thirty-inch display like a child in awe of a new release from Nintendo. But this was no game.

“Where do we start?” Harry Fastwater asked.

“Your ancestral abilities would be much appreciated now,” she said, trying to inject some humor into the very serious atmosphere. SCI didn’t mean that those restricted by its conditions were without imagination. When one was told to look for an SS-4 missile, especially if that person or persons were blessed with half a brain and a rudimentary schooling in Cold War history, then forming a supposition of what might be unfolding did not enter the category of a difficult undertaking. “Barring that…”

Before them was a computer-generated ten-thousand-acre haystack. Somewhere in it was a needle that had the sting of a lance.

“We have to look for the proper access to all those buildings,” Jenny said. “Doors big enough to move the thing in and out.” She brought the magnification up until the boundaries of the Juragua Nuclear Generating Plant, a complex roughly the shape of a fat inverted T, filled the screen. The top of the T, at the screen’s bottom, almost touched the rough beaches west of the inlet to the Bay of Cienfuegos.

“What about the north and south sides of those buildings?” Harry inquired. As the platform passed over the target from west to east, it achieved excellent three-dimensional coverage, with extremely high detail of the structured surfaces in line with the axis of the pass — the east and west walls, or those obliquely aligned with that direction of travel. Those surfaces on the north and south of the buildings received less detail coverage because there hadn’t been time to make a corresponding pass on a north-south axis.

“We have some old stills we can use if we don’t find anything here.” The senior technician entered a command that rotated the view to one that approximated the path of the sensor as it approached the plant, though from a much closer vantage. “Okay, we’re going to follow the pass over at ten percent speed. You mark all the access openings that fit the bill from the centerline north, and I’ll take the south.”

Twenty minutes later the pair had eighty-six “possibles” marked on the working video of the pass.

“Now we do some geometry.”

“How so?” Fastwater asked. His real question was a dumbfounded huh?

“Well, even with eighty-plus ten-foot access doors scattered all over, it wouldn’t do a damn bit of good to put the thing in there if the structure doesn’t have sufficient interior space to hold it.”

“Yeah, I get that. We make sure there’s more than seventy-eight feet possible clearance beyond the door. But where does geometry come in?”

I should have been a teacher, MacNamara thought, not really minding. “You ever back a car around a corner?”

“Sure.”

“Then there’s no reason they couldn’t have maneuvered the thing in at an angle, kinda like doing a fifty-point turn, or whatever it would take.”

The recognition flashed from the junior technician’s eyes. “I see. Yeah. So we don’t necessarily need a straight shot back from the door.”

Jenny nodded. Her junior was a fast learner. “Could be a right angle. Plus, we’ve got to make sure there’s enough room on the outside of the building to get the missile and TEL out. Some of those are pretty closely spaced.” She ran a quick computer simulation to come up with the requisite dimensions. “Let’s check them.”

This process took half as much time as finding the doors.

“Thirty-nine possibles left.” Jenny frowned at the display. “Widely scattered, too.”

Fastwater noted that a full third of the doors left in their search were in and around a gathering of eight large structures at the southern fringes of the facility, a quarter-mile from the beach. “What are those?”

“Reactor buildings and cooling towers,” Jenny answered after a quick check of the database. “Damn!”

“What?”

“There’s too many, Harry! We can’t send this up saying ‘We’ve got almost forty possible locations. Happy hunting.’ There has to be a better way.” She took the magnification down in each of the sixteen-square-mile quadrants that she had divided the complex into. A few minutes later the computer spit out a reading of objects that it considered to be nonstructural.

“Big concentration of trucks by the number-four reactor building,” Harry pointed out. He scanned some of the visible light images of the same quadrant, but the shadow cast by the tall cooling tower blotted out much of the possible detail. “What kind?”

These readings from the SAR data allowed the computer to guess at the type. “GAZ tankers. Five-thousand-liter jobs.” Jenny counted them, and the other vehicles. “Oops, that’s one mistake.” She zoomed in on a fifty-by-fifty object, a hundred yards from the trucks, that the computer said was a nonstructural — in essence, a vehicle. “That’s a prefab building of some kind. A couple vehicles around it. Any heat sources?”

Harry ran through the IR images. The pass had taken place in the early morning, before the heat of the day could fully rob objects of their infrared images. “Nothing special, but there is some.”

Hmm. “Okay, mark that for reference.” She zoomed back in on the tankers. “Any people on the vis?”

The junior technician juggled back to the digitized photos, taking the contrast up to compensate for the shaded area. “Yeah, there’s some folks down there. Seem to be pretty busy, all hanging out around that — what is that? A pipe?”

“Pipes,” Jenny corrected. “Hmm. Tank trucks. Pipes. Looks like hoses on the ground.” She looked to her partner. “You thinking what I am?”

“Fueling.” Harry got a sullen nod in response. They weren’t stupid enough to overlook what might be going on. “Jesus.”

“I think we may be looking in the right area. But where specifically?” Jenny locked her display in on the area surrounding the four big reactor buildings. The missile itself was big, but it was lost somewhere in there. Hey. Yeah! “That’s a heavy thing we’re looking for, right?”

“We aren’t following tracks in the mud, Jen.”

“No, but a beaten path still shows wear.” She took the pass back to a point just before it traveled directly over the plant. “It’s slim, I admit, but it’s possible.”

Harry wasn’t hopeful. He watched as she entered a command into the computer, telling the signal-processing subprogram to run the data back in raw numbers directly as received, but adding the proper algorithmic processing loop that would distinguish fine surface detail. The result was a simple forced-choice order for the program, which took the tangible data and processed it through a finite series of “fuzzy-logic” filters to come up with micro-processor-generated guesses. Those suppositions were then compared with their like, and if a pattern could be established, the computer would decide that something was there.

That “something” in this case would be a shallow channel of wear on the concrete surface of the facility where the tires of heavy vehicles might have worn the pavement away, possibly in removing and returning the missile to its hiding place. If a parallel set of grooves running into one of the access doors could be found, then an educated finger could be pointed, allowing for greater scrutiny.

“Flyby time,” Jenny said, taking the pass over the plant another time. This one was slower, as the raw-data package was being assembled as the imaginary sensor platform flew over the area. Concentrating on just the small sector encompassing the reactor buildings and their associated structures kept the duration manageable. This was a time-critical task. “Nothing. Huh, that looks like something from that prefab building.” A discernible channel ran from the square structure to one of the cooling towers. “Must have been a trench they covered up. Forward.” Her eyes bore into the display. “Nothing. Noth— Stop.” Her eyes fixed on an anomaly in the signal return, though not from where she had expected. “That’s gotta be a data flutter.” The bits of digital imagery were sometimes prone to electronic bugs, just as a visible-light image could be affected by a smudge on the camera lens. “No, that’s too uniform.” The light went off instantly. “Shut the process down and zoom in on this, Harry.”

Fastwater ordered the signal processor to disengage from the data package and focused in on the desired area. “Fill the screen?”

“All of it.” Jenny watched as the circular structure came up toward her. It was like the other three cooling towers for the reactors. In its intended use the nonradioactive water used to draw thermal energy away from the heat exchangers carrying the reactor coolant would be vented through steam pipes into the two-hundred-foot concrete towers, which were roughly the shape of hourglasses with the extreme top and bottoms sheared off (people had become familiar with the shape while watching coverage of the Three Mile Island disaster in the seventies). The majority of the steam would then condense on the walls, falling back into collecting basins in the interior base of the tower for recirculation.

But there was something different about tower number one.

“Signal strength, pure return,” Jenny directed. “Process for strong return and detail.”

Harry ran the corresponding data through a simple program that gave high precedence to strong returns from whatever was in tower number one. This gave it a clear, almost photorealistic representation. “Wow.”

There it was, dead center in the tower that was now serving as a silo. “Those smart bastards. That thing would never have been seen by the cameras down in there. Not enough light. Check the heat signature.”

It took only a minute. “Just ambient.”

Jenny surveyed the structure itself. At the base of the tower were several rectangular voids where the radar return had been judged insufficient to process as strong. “There. Look, those are vents. The other towers don’t have those. No cooling tower should. Cool air is drawn in and goes upward. That keeps the interior temp to just an ambient level.”

“An IR shadow,” Harry observed correctly.

“Brilliant.” Her head shook at the simplistic artistry of it. “And they can also serve as vents for the launch gases.” Jenny slumped back in the chair, looking to the quarry that had just been found. The lance aimed at her country. It was a big sucker. Real big. Her eyes narrowed as she sat forward. Too big.

Harry caught her puzzled look. “What is it?”

“What’s the diameter of the top of the tower?”

He clicked the digitizer on the extreme opposite sides of the circular opening. “Thirty-nine-point-six feet.”

“Diameter of the object?”

He wondered why she didn’t call it, “the missile.” “Ten-point-eight feet. What… Wait.” He looked at the specs of what they had been looking for. It wasn’t what they had found. “Jen, the SS-4 has a diameter of five-point-three feet. This thing’s twice that!”

“I know.” She saw that the top of the object had a two-step taper from the sharply pointed nose down to about half the radius, then out further to the full radius. “Take a height measurement.”

The difference between the returns from the interior floor of the tower and from the nose of the object yielded the measurement. “One-hundred-and-eight-point-two feet. Christ, Jen, that’s more than thirty feet longer than the SS-4! What is that thing?”

Jenny did her own measurements on the strangely tapered nose. The top section, an almost perfect cone, was something to be expected. “Thirteen-point-two in length, five-point-three in diameter.” She turned to her partner. “That’s an SS-4 warhead nose cone.”

“And the section below is just a tapered fairing to connect it to the…what?”

“Let’s find out.” Jenny swiveled her chair to the right to face the second of three terminals arrayed around her workspace. “Let’s just call up the missile data here and see what we’re looking at.”

“Comparison search?” Harry asked as he slid closer, looking over his partner’s shoulder.

“Manual, Harry. The discriminator on the database has never been my favorite.” The desired data file, “Missile Dimensional Characteristics,” came up from NPIC’s central computer, which was wholly isolated from phone lines leading to the outside world. No possibility of “unclean” data infiltrating the system existed. “Okay, our guidelines here are twofold: liquid-fueled missiles and the proper dimensions. I’m more concerned with the diameter than the height, though we have to be close there also. But that damn fairing is going to throw off any purely identical comparison.”

“I can’t believe it. They just strapped the warhead to another missile!”

“A bigger one, Harry,” Jenny pointed out. She scrolled through the information on known missile systems produced and fielded in the past forty years by any and all nations. “The size of this scratches a lot of the candidates.

“SS-Nineteen,” Harry said as information on the Russian-produced missile, known to the SRF as the RS-18, came up.

“About twenty feet too short and a foot too thin,” Jenny responded. “Man, this is a big thing.”

Several more candidates for a match scrolled by. “This is too short for an SS-Eighteen,” Jenny observed, referring to the Russian heavy missile known by its NATO designation Satan, an altogether appropriate choice of nomenclature. “And the one we have is too fat by about a foot. Damn…”

“That’s all of the possible Russian ones,” Harry said. “And it’s not one of ours.”

“The Cubans certainly didn’t build it,” Jenny said assuredly. She’d seen enough from above to know that Castro’s inept government-controlled industrial capacity could be generously given the label of “backward.” The capacity had been there at one time, but they’d never exploited it. Another good example of the bearded wonder’s lack of foresight.

“But who, then? If it isn’t Russian or American, then who? Who builds them that big besides us and them?”

There was one other possibility, but it was a stretch. “The Chinese.”

Harry watched intently as Jenny switched to information on the PRC’s missiles. “Whoa. Lots of big clunkers.”

“They don’t build them pretty,” Jenny said, scrolling through until two measurements caught her eye. “But they do build them the right size.” That’s how…

“CSS-Four,” Harry read off the screen. “Exact match on the diameter. Just a foot off on the length. Throw weight of three thousand and eighty pounds. The SS-Four warhead was three thousand pounds. But how?”

“The DF-Five, Harry. The DOD designation is CSS-Four, but the Chinese call it Dong Feng Five. That means ‘east wind.’ The DF-Five is also the basis for the CZ-Three series of space-launching boosters. It’s an exact duplicate except for the payload and guidance systems, actually. One carries satellites, the other a very big bomb.”

Fastwater, in preparation for his assignment to work with MacNamara on the monitoring of the Cuban military during the rebellion, had versed himself in the goings-on of the past decade as they applied to the capabilities of the Cuban Revolutionary Armed Forces and associated elements. One of those elements was the short-lived Cuban Space Exploration Center project, a farcical attempt by Fidel Castro to construct a launch facility for satellites in the Caribbean to rival that of the French in Guyana. An attempt that received funding and technical support from the People’s Republic of China.

“That space fiasco.”

Jenny nodded at the screen. “One warhead. One booster. One very big problem.”

Harry stared at the visual of the missile squared off in a box to one side of the screen. “It’s really big. How far can it fly?”

“Three stages to push it out to seventy-five-hundred miles,” Jenny answered. “It can hit anywhere in the United States.”

“And a lot of other places,” Harry added, as the senior technician picked up the phone and quickly dialed the number she had been told to call immediately if anything was found. It rang on Langley’s seventh floor a second later.

“Pull over. Pull over. Here.”

The Jeep rolled to an illegal stop next to Pershing Square just across Fifteenth Street from the White House. The morning rush was flowing into D.C., filling the street on the east side of the presidential mansion with legions of cars. Chick Hill looked right past those to the South Lawn.

“This is a ticket here,” the wannabe reporter said worriedly, his head looking back, left, and forward for any sign of D.C. cops.

“Stop your whining.” Hill opened his door and stepped out onto the sidewalk, taking a few steps forward for a better vantage point looking over the Jeep’s hood. The expanse of green between the White House and the ellipse was visible through the bare trees; autumn had taken its hold on the nation’s capital.

The driver leaned across the front seat to the open door. “What are you looking for?”

“Anything out of the ordinary.”

“Everything looked fine from the front.” They had first taken a drive past Lafayette Park to survey the north side of the White House.

“That’s the ‘show’ side, kiddo,” Hill explained. “The South Lawn is where things happen.”

Hill scanned the area, looking for that one tidbit that would jump out, but from this distance any tidbits faded to clumps of colors blended in with the fall foliage. “Outside pocket of my bag, hand me the binocs.”

The driver retrieved the compact Bushnells and passed them out. “Why do you carry binoculars?”

Hill pushed his thick glasses atop his head and began scrutinizing the South Lawn through the 7X binoculars. “Kid, when your eyes get this bad, you learn to adapt. The photogs aren’t the only ones who need to see things.”

The back of the mansion looked normal, no obvious extra personnel. He swept left, farther south, the ugly gray of Old Executive in the background. The pad used by Marine One was empty. That caused his hopes for some connection to drop. Why pull Kneecap out and have no way to get the President to it? It was looking like some sort of practice run was under way, Granger and all. He continued left. Well, it had been worth a shot. Now he’d have to just go back to Limp Dick’s denials about Delta. Oh, we—

What is that doing there? Hill instinctively lowered the glasses away and squinted to see with just his eyes, but the streaking blurs of cars convinced him to give it up. He rolled the focus knob, zeroing in on the aircraft. It wasn’t the big one out of Anacostia, he knew. This one was low and sleek, its body a gleaming white with a thin stripe of blue along its side. It had to be from the 89th. He looked for details, of which there were none immediately obvious. There were two people on board, in the pilots’ seats, and a few outside looking very serious. Fully crewed? His hopes began to rise again. What else? This had to be a VH-60, one of those airborne VIP taxis that government honchos had at their beck and call. No. He’d been on one of those, up close enough to see that this one was different. All sorts of bulges and small, dorsal-like antennae protruded from the fuselage, and there was a—refueling probe? — coming out from the nose. Hill’s mind searched the mental files he’d made since joining the Pentagon beat. This was that command-post variant of the VH-60, the one supposed to be used by the President during crises when transiting between a ground station and the location of a more fully equipped airborne command post, such as… Kneecap.

“Black phone book,” Hill told the driver. “Same pocket as the binocs. Look up Congressman Vorhees’s office number.”

“Didn’t you just…never mind.” He flipped to the Vs and read off the number, Hill punching it into his cell.

“Congressman Vorhees’s office.”

Chick set the binoculars on the hood of the Jeep. “Yes, this is Chick Hill from the Post for the congressman. Is he back from Andrews?”

“Yes. I trust you enjoyed your trip with him. One moment.”

The moment stretched into four, but Hill had nowhere to be. His companion, however, was still sweating in anticipation of a hefty parking fine.

“Chick, so soon?”

“You know how much I miss you, Dick. Listen, I wonder if you’d care to comment on some peculiar things going on at Andrews and the White House.”

A playful chuckle came over the phone. “Sure, why not?”

“Kneecap was rolled out at Andrews when we landed; I believe one of your staffers commented on it. That’s what got me to looking. The funny thing was that chairman, Joint Chiefs, was there, running up the steps. Then, I drive by the White House, and what’s here but that fancy command-post chopper from the Eighty-ninth. Crown Helo is what they call it, if I’m not mistaken.”

“You’re not.” The congressman’s tone changed perceptibly.

“Anything to this?” Hill listened to the silence.

“The Pentagon runs the show, Chick. You know the routine. They can run readiness exercises whenever they want.”

“It’s a readiness exercise, then?”

“Must be.” What wasn’t said, said it all.

“Okay, Dick. Thanks.” Hill ended the call, but kept his phone in hand.

“What was that all about?”

“That was nothing, kid. Watch this.” He pressed last-number redial.

“Congressman Vorhees’s office.”

“Hi. Chick Hill again.”

“Well, hello. The congressman is on the phone right now.”

“Oh. He’s still on with the White House,” Hill said innocently, trying to remove any hint of a question from his words.

“Still? He just got on.”

Hill smiled into the phone. “Oh. No problem. I’ll call back later.”

The driver stopped his worrying long enough to admire the devious digging just witnessed. “Tricky, but what does that get you?”

“It gets me a lead,” Hill said after climbing back into the Jeep. “The sudden, unplanned deployment of emergency airborne command posts at the White House and Andrews Air Force Base prompted Congressman Richard Vorhees, Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, to contact unnamed White House officials for an explanation of the actions.”

“How can you spin that from the call?” the driver asked incredulously.

“All true, kid.” It occurred to Chick that he didn’t even know the kid’s name. “Just deductive reasoning.”

It sure wasn’t what the driver had learned at Columbia. “I don’t know. What comes after that is weak.”

“Kid, lesson number last: The lead is everything.” Chick watched the White House disappear behind the balding trees. “What comes next is fluff. Anyone can fill in the body. Only a pro can give you a winning lead.”

“Fluff?” the driver asked with more disbelief than before. “What about facts?”

Hill snickered at the traffic ahead. “The best facts are guesses that turn out to be on target.”

Major Sean Graber took the SATCOM radio’s handset from the Pave Hawk’s crew chief. “Graber.”

“Major,” Colonel Cadler drawled. “The spooks found you a target.” He went on to explain the location.

“What’s the aim point?” Sean asked. As in practice, you did not just fire wildly at a target — you chose a specific point on it. “The missile is one thing, sir, but it sounds like the way it’s set up now doesn’t point to someone just standing there and pushing a button.”

“My thought exactly, Major. The eagle eyes found one of those prefab sons o’ bitches that smacks of Chinese construction. Real close to those control bunkers we took a look at in Iran last summer.”

Sean had been up close and personal for that one. Almost too close. “And once we secure it?” He never thought in terms of “if’ when it came to a mission’s outcome.

“There’s a DOE tech guy comin’ down with the gear y’all ordered from Wally World.” Cadler didn’t expand, an unseen smile on his muscular face.

Another one of those. Sean knew Delta didn’t have a stellar record in keeping technicians from the Department of Energy safe when in their care. His thoughts momentarily went back to the man condemned to death during the last and only mating of their talents. He wondered how Anderson was doing.

“We’ll try and give this one back in one piece,” Sean said with some levity.

“Deal. Any assets you think y’all might need?”

“Let me talk to Lieutenant Duc.” Lieutenant Cho Duc was the Pave Hawk’s pilot. “We’ll run through an insertion to see. Are there photos on the way down?”

“The com center o’er on Crocodile Road should have ‘em ‘bout now.”

“Okay. We’ll get to it.”

“Fingers crossed, Major.”

“Fingers crossed, sir.”

The satellite photos were retrieved from the Cape’s com center and delivered to Sean and Lieutenant Duc, who were sitting in the open port-side door of the Pave Hawk. Duc, a twenty-eight-year-old child of the Nam experience whose earliest memory was of the American Hueys buzzing his family’s village north of Saigon, was a member of the Army’s 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, commonly referred to as the Nightstalkers for their inhuman ability to fly low and fast in total darkness. They were less well known as Delta’s taxi service.

“Long flight,” Duc commented, looking at the map. He was a small, thin man, whose neck was strangely overdeveloped from the constant wearing of NVGs during the Nightstalkers’ “normal mission profile” flights.

Sean watched him trace a line around the east end of the island before turning west, past Guantanamo Naval Base, to their target west of Cienfuegos. “Not overland?”

“Not with a war going on,” Duc answered, his voice inflected with the choppy influence of his native tongue. “We got two AW ACS up, one in the Gulf and the other this side of the keys. They say there’s still a bunch of SAM radars up and running. Plus, one lucky shot can ruin your whole day.”

“Then we go around past Guantanamo and come in from the water. We’ll have to tank, right?”

Duc nodded. “Ten men, four crew, a little gear. Probably a six-hour flight to avoid getting shot at until we want that.” He smiled deviously. “We’ll tank once east of the island and once right before we go in.”

“We should get a Combat Talon alerted,” Sean said. “The MC-130H Combat Talon was a Special Operations version of the C-130 Hercules. Its capabilities included communication, navigation, refueling, and in-flight extraction of troopers using the Fulton STAR recovery system, an E-ticket ride if there ever was one.

“You didn’t know? The Talons are all grounded,” Duc said.

“What? Why?”

“One of them took a beaucoup beating yesterday when one of the nose prongs came off in flight. Knocked out two engines and took a chunk of wing with it.” The nose prongs, normally folded back against the fuselage, were extended to form a forward-facing V when a pickup using the Fulton system was in progress. The prongs would catch a line hoisted skyward by a helium balloon and hold it until it could be fed into a winch system. On the other end of the line a trooper or troopers would be yanked from their earthly bonds and pulled into the aircraft. “They want to make sure it’s not metal fatigue.”

“But we don’t really need a Talon. We can go with a Shadow.” Duc referred to the HC-130 Combat Shadow, the Talon’s cousin optimized for in-flight refueling of multiple helicopters.

“Okay.” Sean knew that the lieutenant could be trusted implicitly when it came to getting them into and out of potentially hot LZs. And this might get hot, he thought, looking to the two-pintle-mounted 7.62mm miniguns. “Think those will be enough?”

“I don’t want to have to find out. How about we get some backup? Something that can ruin the Cubans’ day if we need to.”

Sean nodded agreement. “Anything else?”

Duc thought for a moment. “I wouldn’t mind having one of those AWACS dedicated to watching our ass.”

“I’ll tell the colonel.” That meant the colonel would get it for them. Bill Cadler had clout, and a hell of a loud voice.

“Look at those,” the lieutenant said, pointing at the images of the plant. “Power masts all over the place. We gotta watch those.” His eyes traced a path around the logical path for any lines between the tall metal structures. “We gotta come in right.”

“We should be able to get one or two run-throughs down,” Sean said, hoping they would have enough time. There wasn’t much time for preparation on this one. “I’ll let you know when we’re ready.”

“Gotcha.” Duc took one copy of the map and satellite photos to the front of the Pave Hawk to begin planning the precise flight plan.

Sean stood and took a few steps from the helicopter before looking back. This would be the first real test of this version of the Pave Hawk. It was a formidable-looking bird. The stubby wings that held the 230-gallon outrigger fuel tanks forward and above the side doors could also add to the twin miniguns’ firepower by holding air-to-air or air-to-ground missiles. There were also systems to prevent the Pave Hawk from being hit. Chaff-and-flare dispensers, tied to missile-launch detectors, could pump out the radar and infrared countermeasures from just behind the cabin, and the entire helicopter was covered in a black-and-green infrared-suppressing paint scheme. To help get it to any target, there was a FLIR system and a Terrain Avoidance/Terrain Following radar that allowed Lieutenant Duc to fly so close to the earth that new threats of collision had to be planned for. That was taken care of by the sharp, forward-facing blade protruding upward from the Pave Hawk’s fuselage a yard forward of the main rotor shaft. This was protection from wire strikes, the very real possibility of clipping a power or communication line as the helicopter skimmed low to the ground. Any contact above the nose and below the four blade rotor would direct the offending wire into the sharp blade, slicing it in two and — hopefully — saving the Pave Hawk. The system had proved itself during training flights, leaving certain local utility companies in the South and West scratching their heads as to how their lines came to be cut.

All the systems inherent to the Pave Hawk were meant to make it one of the safest and most stealthy taxis for the special operations forces — Delta, in this case. It was a matter of mating the best with the best.

The major’s attention shifted to the east-west runway just north of where he stood. From over the Atlantic a dark green C-130 descended and touched down gracefully. There were no markings visible on its exterior, which told Graber that it was the Herky Bird from the 23rd Air Force that was bringing down the gear he’d requested from Bragg, plus the technical expert from DOE. Sean watched the aircraft taxi to a blue Air Force Humvee, which waited for a single passenger to deplane and climb in. A second vehicle, which would get the equipment brought down, pulled up to the stern ramp as the Humvee drove away. In a minute it stopped just short of the Delta major.

“Can’t you grunts do anything without me?” Joe Anderson asked loudly as he stepped from the vehicle. There was the slightest smile on his smallish face.

Sean recognized the faint expression as the highest compliment from the man who had just added the final element to a team that was now, without a doubt, the best for the job that lay ahead.

The American Airlines flight from Dallas-Fort Worth landed on Los Angeles International Airport’s runway Two-Four right just as Angelenos were halfway through the morning weekday rush hour. It was the milder form of the red-eye, just a three-hour jump from the sprawling Texas airport to LAX. Most of the eighty passengers were businesspeople who had risen before the dawn to catch their flight. Two of those passengers, as much businessmen in their own eyes as any of the others on board, had connected from an earlier flight from Miami. From one panhandle to another.

The two men, dressed in sweatshirts and jeans that gave them the appearance of youthful student travelers, took their carry-on bags and followed the crowd out to the baggage-claim area in Terminal 4 on the south side of LAX’s two-level loop. There were few people at the rotating oval baggage conveyers; businesspeople had learned to travel light, for fear of losing a needed bag.

The two young men, however, knew that carry-ons had one disadvantage for the business traveler in their line of work — the X ray.

The single blue Samsonite, which had been checked at the desk in Miami, slid down the ramp and was snatched up before it could start its transit around the stainless-steel racetrack. The men went next to the Budget Rent-a-Car counter and took possession of a subcompact car that was assembled by Chevrolet from parts imported from Japan. Five minutes later they were on the 405 freeway heading north, with traffic, toward the 10. That would take them into downtown L.A.

Then the work would begin.