Out of the Ashes

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Admiral Chase Williams emerged from the elevator in the basement of the headquarters of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, the NGA, in Fort Belvoir North, in Fairfax, Virginia, for his weekly meeting with his core staff. This location enabled the new Op-Center to have access to NGA’s products and personnel, secure movement of data, and supersecure spaces, all key assets in information-based war fighting. The site they had chosen was ideal — it was close enough to the Beltway for Williams and the Op-Center staff to get to the White House, Pentagon, CIA, FBI, and National Counterterrorism Center — but it was still a bit off the beaten path.

While Chase Williams had moved out quickly once he was given the job as Op-Center director, assembling a staff and devising an effective concept of operations for the new Op-Center had taken some time. While there were still a few holes to fill, the core staff was largely in place. Also, as part of establishing Op-Center, special relationships were established with the Joint Special Operations Command, the JSOC, as well as with the FBI.

The president had used significant political capital to get Congress to agree to re-create Op-Center. Then there was funding to put in place, hiring authorities to set up within the Office of Personnel Management, and relationships to establish with other organizations inside the executive branch. Finally, there had been the matter of selecting a location and then actually constructing the new Op-Center.

While the reasons for selecting a basement underneath the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, constructed from scratch because there was no unused basement in existence, were sound, the actual construction project, like many things done in government, took longer than it should have. During that time, Op-Center had been able to put notches in its belt by eliminating Azka Perkasa and Abdul-Muqtadir Kashif. Fortunately, there had been no major “seam crises” that required Op-Center’s attention.

“Boss, we’re ready to begin if you are,” Anne Sullivan, Op-Center’s deputy director, began.

“Great,” Williams said. “Looks like you have the usual suspects assembled.”

“All mustered, boss,” Sullivan replied, a bit of brogue in her speech, a leftover of her early years growing up in East Belfast. “I’ve asked Roger to kick it off with an intel update.”

Early in his tenure as Op-Center director, Chase Williams had told the staff to not address him as “admiral.” Sullivan, a career civil servant and retired senior executive supergrade — and the first person Williams hired — had settled on “boss” as a way to address him, and it had stuck.

As Op-Center’s intelligence director, the N2, Roger McCord, rose to begin his briefing. Williams chided him, “So, Roger, I see you’ve managed to make it all the way in from Reston once again without wrecking your Harley.”

“Barely, boss, barely ’cause I think it was your Beamer that almost ran me into a ditch during the merge onto Heller Road,” McCord replied, smiling.

“Perhaps,” Williams said with a straight face, “but there are a lot of BMWs in this town.”

If Williams had a persistent habit, it was to begin meetings on a light note. He also tended to joke with the Op-Center staff with military backgrounds just a bit more than with the others. McCord was a former Marine who commanded the Intelligence Battalion in the Marine Special Operations Command, or MARSOC, and had been a company commander in Fallujah and a battalion exec in Ramadi prior to that. Wounded twice, the second time leaving his right leg so torn up it ended his combat career, he was allowed to remain on active duty while he stood up the MARSOC Intelligence Battalion. Williams figured if anyone on the staff could take some gentle ribbing it was McCord, and he was right.

“Fair enough, I’ll try to be a little more careful next time,” Williams continued, shaking his head. McCord could give as good as he got, and that pleased him.

“All right, I’m just going to throw up a few slides to recap our discussions over the past month regarding what’s going on in the Mideast. No action for Op-Center anticipated yet, but we’re following this closely to stay ahead of the problem.”

“Excellent. You and Brian are still having your subgroup meetings on this twice a week?” Williams asked.

“We are, boss. Brian’s chairing them. I’ll let him give you a quick recap before I get rolling.”

Williams looked over to his operations director, the N3, Brian Dawson. The man was a wall, six feet four and a hard 225 pounds. Dawson was a recently retired Army colonel and former commander of the 5th Special Forces Group.

“We’ve kept you up to date regarding the way the United States is surging forces to the Middle East,” Dawson began, speaking in precise, almost clipped terms. “The Truman carrier strike group is leaving on their rotational deployment six weeks early. The Air Force is surging bombers into theater to just about everywhere we have basing rights, and the Marines are keeping one of their expeditionary strike groups in the Central Command AOR and extending their deployment for at least another month,” he said, referring to Central Command’s, or CENTCOM’s, Area of Responsibility. “There’s an enormous amount of churn in the Middle East right now and as you know, most of it is focused on the threats Iran is making against Iraq. The way we see it, this surge is designed to reassure Iraq and to make Iran think twice before carrying out any of their threats.”

“I see,” Williams replied. “The tension is worse, way worse, than when I was CENTCOM commander, and I can see why we want, and need, more presence in CENTCOM.”

If there was one person on the Op-Center staff who thought like Chase Williams, it was Dawson. A West Pointer with massive contacts in the Pentagon, at CIA, and at State, he had been one of the youngest colonels in the Army and been deep-promoted numerous times. Operationally, he was rock solid. He left the Army before the selection board convened to consider him for his first star. Dawson said he wanted to go out while he was on top, and the top for Dawson was operational command.

“Roger will give you the intel background on all this.”

“Good.”

“Boss,” McCord began, “you were the CENTCOM commander for three years, so I know I don’t need to give you a primer about tensions there. The intelligence community has increased the number of analysts looking at this, but in essence, the centrifugal forces the Arab Awakening released are still having a ripple effect. The militaries in an increasing number of countries are having so much trouble dealing with internal unrest in their major cities that they’re less and less able to deal with terrorist groups operating in the hinterlands.”

“Yeah, got that,” Williams replied. “Nothing we didn’t see coming back in 2011, is it, Roger?”

“Maybe not in kind, but in degree,” McCord continued. “In many ways, some of these countries — Yemen, Syria, even Egypt — are becoming almost like Lebanon, even Afghanistan.”

“And you know how massively we’ve increased security at embassies in the region over the past several years,” Dawson added. “Still, even at that, boss, you see why we’re surging forces into the region as a precaution.”

“No, I get all that,” Williams replied. “I think you all have summed up the situation, and Brian, I know you know the tribal politics in the region as well as anyone. As you all continue to plan, let’s factor in how we might get our JSOC cell into the region if we need to.”

“Well, boss, I’m no Gertrude Bell,” Dawson began, referring to the English archaeologist whose subtle understanding of tribal politics helped the British administer Iraq during the colonial period. “Even so, you’re right. If we move in on the ground there, I’ll need to reach out to the right tribal chieftains. Having them on our side will be crucial, especially once you get a few miles away from the cities and out into the deserts.”

As the morning briefing continued, Chase Williams reflected on where Op-Center had been and where it was going. They had come out of the gate fast and made their bones in finding and taking out Azka Perkasa and Abdul-Muqtadir Kashif for the stadium bombings. It was an act of justice as well as revenge. Plus they had accomplished this while they were moving to a new location and before he had recruited and assembled his full staff.

If there was anything that had kept Williams centered during his long career of service it was to pause often to count his blessings. One of those blessings was the trust he had in the staff he had so carefully assembled. Another was the trust the president had continued to place in him.

After the serious business of eliminating Perkasa and Kashif was over, Op-Center had not been called into action again. Since then, Op-Center had been just been an expensive, but unused, asset. The president signaled his confidence in Williams by letting him and Sullivan continue to build the capability they knew they needed and train their team. Yet, they both had to admit, they didn’t anticipate the costs of the Geek Tank Williams had promised the president he would create from whole cloth.

Williams was especially grateful for the fact that the president had never complained about the expense, or meddled as Williams got Op-Center up and running. Most of their interaction was through their POTUS/OC Eyes Only memos. Much of what Williams communicated to the president were reminders about the new, professional threat facing the nation. Without burying the president in details, Williams had carefully explained how Op-Center was organizing to defeat this new threat.

Half a world away, in his palace in Riyadh, Prince Ali al-Wandi was setting the wheels in motion to keep his dream of reaping the riches his position as “pipeline czar” for Saudi Arabia’s multibillion-dollar oil pipeline was going to bring him from slipping away. Forces completely beyond his control had put the project in jeopardy, but he had found a solution. He had one more task to perform, and then he would go and see what his handpicked crew had created many miles to the northeast in the Saudi desert.

“Enter,” he said as he pushed his 245-pound body from the expensive chair behind his smoke tree burl desk in his personal office. He moved around his desk to greet his visitor, pausing to catch his breath from this momentary exertion.

“Your Excellency!” the man said. “Thank you for agreeing to see me.”

“You have done good work, and I thought it was time we met face-to-face. Sit, please,” Al-Wandi said, motioning to one of the two chairs in front of his desk.

“It was an honor to be of service to a member of the royal family.”

Al-Wandi knew that was a lie. The man had done it for the money, plain and simple. He had paid him a substantial sum up front, and promised him even more upon delivery. Now this man was here to collect.

“Remind me again how you were able to obtain this technology,” the prince said, his voice conveying natural curiosity. He had acted through intermediaries to have the man do this for him, and he wanted to assure himself there were no loose ends — no trail that would lead back to him.

His visitor hesitated a moment. He didn’t know whether he should share this secret, but Ali al-Wandi had paid him well. Now the job was done. All he wanted to do was collect his money. Perhaps there would be another job and another payday in the future if he told the prince what he wanted to know.

“Your Excellency, until recently, I was an officer in our Royal Saudi Air Force and worked at a base where the Americans operated their Global Hawk unmanned aerial vehicle. The Americans were in the process of selling us our own UAVs, and I was one of the officers picked to learn how to operate them.”

“But, if you were just a UAV operator, how did you get hold of the technology?” the prince asked.

“It was easier than you think, Your Excellency. The United States was anxious to reduce its presence at our air bases and the contractors who taught us how to operate these UAVs were eager to sell these birds to the kingdom. In their zeal to ensure we kept our enthusiasm for these birds, they were … well … a bit careless in protecting their technology.”

Prince Ali inquired, “So you were able to just walk off with the technology that controls these UAVs?”

“Not precisely. As is always the case in such matters, money changed hands, but I assure you what I paid, and what you are paying, is a small price compared to the capability that you now have.”

“Indeed, indeed,” the prince replied. “You have earned your money. My assistant tells me you delivered what we needed to him yesterday morning.”

“Yes, Excellency, I did.” The man had, in fact, taken risks, many risks, and this Saudi prince had an immense personal fortune. What he was getting for his efforts was really a pittance, he rationalized. He smiled as he watched al-Wandi open his desk drawer and fish around for his reward, undoubtedly an envelope stuffed full of even more riyals than he received when he first took this assignment.

Al-Wandi rose and his visitor rose, too. But the man’s smile turned to a look of terror as he stared at the prince’s hand. The hand didn’t hold an envelope with riyals. He was looking at the ominously long barrel of a pistol!

“You have earned your reward, my friend,” Ali al-Wandi said as he leveled his pistol at the man’s head.

The silencer did its job and suppressed some, but not all, of the sound. The bullet hit him square in the right eye and he went down like a dropped sack, blood, bone, and tissue erupting from the back of his head.

Ali al-Wandi’s bodyguard appeared moments later.

“It’s done,” the prince said. “Get rid of his body and clean up this mess.”

Ali al-Wandi took no delight in killing. Actually, the act repulsed him, but obtaining this technology was the last step in an intricate chain of events the prince had conceived, and he could not leave anything to chance. With this man dead, nothing could be traced to him. Yet there was another issue. He operated in the shadows, but not in a vacuum. Those who did know of his business, like his bodyguard detail, had to fear him as well as obey him. The fact that he was not afraid to take a life, as well as to order it to be taken, would now not be wasted on those close to him.

His bodyguard bowed with a new measure of respect as al-Wandi strode out of the room.

“Three minutes till landing. Cinch down your seat harnesses, and tight!”

Laurie Phillips and her fellow passengers aboard the U.S. Navy Carrier-Onboard-Delivery aircraft needed no further urging from the COD’s crewman. The 240-mile flight from Norfolk, Virginia, to USS Harry S. Truman had been a bumpy one, and Phillips had already filled up her “barf bag” with what was once her lunch. What seemed like a good idea months ago, furthering her career at the Center for Naval Analyses by taking an assignment as a CNA analyst aboard the Aegis-class cruiser USS Normandy, now seemed like a really bad idea.

“Can you see the ship?” Laurie shouted to the man sitting next to her as they both hunched down in their backward-facing seats. They were already bracing for what they knew would be a bone-jarring landing, actually more of a controlled crash, on Truman’s four-and-a-half-acre flight deck.

Her seatmate stared out the tiny window, one of only two windows in the entire cargo compartment, or tube, of the C-2A. He was unable to make himself heard above the deafening roar of the aircraft’s two Allison T56-A-425 turboprop engines. So he turned toward Phillips, smiled weakly, and shook his head from side to side. Truman might be down there, but the dark gray clouds just below them completely obscured the surface of the Atlantic, to say nothing of the ship they were trying to land on.

Laurie saw the fear in the man’s eyes and hoped she wasn’t registering the same fear herself, but she knew she was. Why had she gotten herself into this mess?

“Arrughh,” choked Laurie reflexively as the COD pilot chopped the throttles and the aircraft dropped from the sky like a rock. They hurtled down through the dirty, swirling clouds toward the Truman’s wet, pitching flight deck.

Deep inside Truman, the Tactical Flag Command Center, TFCC for short, was the hub where the flag officer responsible for the ships, aircraft, and eight thousand men and women of the Truman carrier strike group directed the group’s efforts. Admiral Ben Flynn had more important things to worry about than Laurie Phillips and her fellow passengers.

“Chief of Staff,” he said to his second in command, “we did a damn fine job on our final joint training exercise. Hell, we hit it out of the ballpark. We should be pumped up, but the staff seems down. I know we’re not getting our normal thirty days in port for predeployment rest and resupply time, but we’ve got a damned important mission to do.”

“They’re a little stressed, Admiral, that’s for sure,” his COS replied, “but it’s not because we’re deploying to the Middle East. They’re all ready to do their duty, but everyone counted on this final period in port to spend some quality time at home. They all had to scramble to get a bunch of last-minute things done before leaving their families behind for six months.”

The loud, persistent hum of the air conditioning allowed Flynn and his COS to have a private conversation in the corner of TFCC. Across the dimly lit space, the two officers and four sailors in the command center tracked ship and air traffic on their two seventy-two-inch large-screen displays and on multiple smaller workstations. Status boards displaying all manner of tactical and operational information competed for space on the steel matte-black bulkheads of TFCC. Transmissions from several radios periodically crackled from various speakers in the overhead.

“I know that, COS, but this crisis has reached its flashpoint. The president has always called on the Navy to be his first responders,” Flynn replied. “Remember what happened in the Mideast in 2011? All it took was for some damn street vendor in Tunisia, what was his name, Mohammed Bouazizi, that’s it, to set himself on fire in December 2010, for God’s sake, and that started a crisis that snowballed to a half dozen countries. And things haven’t calmed down there since.”

The COS nodded in agreement, knowing his admiral was right. Despite major diplomatic efforts by every American president stretching back to Jimmy Carter, the greater Middle East remained a strategic riddle and one that demanded constant attention. Now, in the aftermath of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and in the wake of the forces unleashed by the 2011 Arab Spring, Mideast tensions were high. In Ben Flynn’s professional experience, they were higher than at any time since Saddam invaded Kuwait and threatened Saudi Arabia in 1991.

Yet the immediate reason for the Truman strike group’s rushed deployment was Iran. The theocratic government, now widely thought to be armed with nuclear weapons, had ratcheted up its rhetoric toward Iraq. The United States had spent enormous blood and treasure to oust Saddam, quell a long-running insurgency, and prop up the fledging Iraqi state. Virtually all U.S. ground forces were out of the Middle East. Now it was up to U.S. Navy carrier and expeditionary strike groups to deter Iran from moving against Iraq or threatening their other neighbors. If the United States had learned anything during its long history of trying to ensure stability in the Middle East, it was how counterproductive it was to put boots on the ground. All that did was enrage potential jihadists. No, naval presence was the answer and that was precisely what Flynn and the Truman strike group were going to bring to the region—presence. As radicalized as the mullahs governing Iran were, they did understand the firepower a U.S. Navy carrier strike group could unleash.

Flynn turned to his operations officer. “Ops O, once we get that COD aboard, what’s next?”

“Admiral, Fleet Forces Command gave us thirty-six hours to get all our people and parts flown out to the strike group before we put the East Coast behind us. Then it’s a dash for the Mediterranean and through Suez. We’re actually ahead of the power curve and still have about sixteen hours to get everything done.”

“Then stay on it,” Flynn replied. “I want those supply pukes to get us everything, and I mean everything, we need for this deployment.”

“We’re on the phone with them continuously,” said his logistics officer, raising his voice to be heard as an F/A-18F Super Hornet came aboard. The screech of the jet smashing into Truman’s flight deck and the near deafening, grinding sound of the arresting gear drowned out the man’s words. Reflexively, everyone in TFCC paused and looked up at the small camera monitor in the corner of the command center that showed the aircraft safely snared on Truman’s flight deck. Not all of those in TFCC were aviators, but they all knew the landing of a high-performance aircraft on a carrier was a crash landing — a safe landing, but nonetheless a crash.

“We’ve been fortunate so far, Admiral,” the logistics officer continued. “If the weather holds, we’ll be able to run our COD flights continuously, and with any luck we’ll get all the gear we need.”

On board the COD at that moment, Laurie Phillips felt anything but lucky. “What was that?” she asked of no one in particular as lightning flashed on both sides of the aircraft. The bird continued its rapid decent through the clouds as it was tossed about in the severe turbulence. Laurie flinched as the lightning flashed again and the booming thunder made it sound like they were inside a kettledrum. She watched the man next to her cinch his harness tighter and she followed suit.

“Forty-five seconds till landing,” shouted the COD crewman as he waved his arms animatedly to ensure the eighteen passengers crammed into the COD’s tube knew they were about to impact Truman’s flight deck. If they weren’t terrified enough already, the crewman’s crazed look and maniacal gesturing now put them over the edge of fear. As she screwed her five-foot eight-inch, 135-pound frame down into her seat and braced for the impact of the landing on Truman’s flight deck, Laurie began to dread what she suspected would be an equally harrowing helicopter flight onward from Truman to Normandy.

The Normandy. Once she got to Normandy, she had no idea of what to expect. She had never even been on the ship; the Center for Naval Analyses typically didn’t have their analysts show up on their assigned Navy ships until a few days before a scheduled deployment. All she had to go on were sea stories from CNA colleagues who had had similar assignments in the past, and one e-mail from the ship’s operations officer. Normandy’s ops officer had told her that she’d “enjoy her challenging assignment.”

Her mind snapped back to the COD as it continued dropping out of the sky. The challenge of staying alive in this rattletrap aircraft is more than enough, thank you.

“WHACK!” The COD smashed into Truman’s flight deck at 120 miles per hour and Laurie prepared for what she had been told would come next, the aircraft jerking to a halt as the arresting wire snagged the bird — but they were still moving!

Up in the cockpit of the COD, the drama of the carrier-landing dance took a turn for the worse. “Bolter, bolter, bolter,” shouted the landing signal officer, or LSO, the pilot on the platform jutting out from the port side of the flight deck who was in charge of coaching the COD down to the ship’s deck. The LSO watched the Greyhound’s arresting hook hanging down under the aircraft skip over each of the four arresting wires, or “bolter,” and saw the plane continue hurtling down the carrier’s deck.

“Power, POWER,” shouted the COD’s pilot to his copilot. The copilot needed no further urging; she had already fire-walled the engines, jamming and holding them into position to generate the power needed to get the lumbering aircraft away from the water a hundred feet below them.

“POWER, keep it climbing!” yelled the air boss from his perch in Truman’s tower high above the flight deck. The COD crossed the deck edge and begin settling toward the sea’s looming surface, now less than seventy-five feet away.

The COD wallowed as it slid further below the level of the flight deck, its engines howling in protest as they strained to arrest the descent. The pilots pointed the gawky plane straight ahead, trying to minimize their control movements as the Greyhound clawed its way back into the air and away from the menacing water below.

“Oh my God,” Laurie said, although no one could hear her.

Slowly, almost imperceptibly, the COD began to climb away from the water. The lighting flashed around them, and Laurie silently prayed to be delivered from what she was sure was going to be the aircraft crashing down into the swirling Atlantic below.

“Greyhound, the pattern is yours; when comfortable, turn downwind,” the air boss instructed.

“What happened?” Laurie shouted to anyone who might hear her as her terror ratcheted up several notches, especially after catching a momentary glimpse up at Truman’s flight deck. No one heard her above the din of the aircraft noise, but the look in the crewman’s eyes, a look of someone who had been through this harrowing experience many times before and was almost gleeful these poor devils were experiencing it, too, told her more than she wanted to know. This was a really bad idea.

“Here we go again, folks,” the crewman shouted three minutes later, after the COD had lumbered around the landing pattern and lined up on short final for another attempt.

“Easy with it, easy with it,” said the landing signal officer. This LSO was a pro. His voice was neutral, controlled, and even a little gentle. A bolter sapped any pilot’s confidence, and he wanted to get the COD down on this approach before its pilots really started to clutch.

“Little power … you’re a half mile from the ship … easy with the power … EASY … right for lineup … keep her coming … easy, easy with the power,” he said in the most soothing voice he could muster, trying to coax the aircraft down onto the gyrating deck.

Lightning flashed again, and the booming thunder told them the developing storm was intensifying.

With only a quarter mile to go before impacting the deck, the COD wallowed like a drunk as its pilots struggled desperately to follow the soft-spoken commands. In the tube, there was complete silence, and even the crewman had lost some of his bravado. Laurie willed herself to keep her eyes open, although she didn’t want to.

“Left just a bit … OK … don’t settle … little more power … that’s it … attaboy … power, more power!”

Faster control movements by the pilots now, seconds away from the moment of truth, the round-down, the curved, aft end of the flight deck, looming up at them, almost daring them to impale their aircraft on it short of the landing zone.

“Right for lineup, a little right, steady, easy with the power, easy, easy with it”—the LSO’s commands were coming on now like a tape on fast-forward—“steady, steady, don’t settle, a little power, easy with it…”

SLAM … SCREECH … the COD smashed into Truman’s deck, caught the number four wire, the last arresting wire, and was jerked to a halt in seconds, slinging Laurie and her terrified fellow passengers against their seat belts like rag dolls. Laurie Phillips took a deep breath. My God, I’m alive — I think. She didn’t know what was ahead of her or what awaited her on board Normandy, but surely it couldn’t be worse than this. Could it?

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

One of the first things Chase Williams did after hiring Anne Sullivan was arrange their calendars to enable him to have lunch with his deputy once a week without fail. This was a carryover from his many command tours during his Navy career. He believed strongly if the relationship between the commander and the deputy wasn’t rock solid the enterprise would fail, and fail spectacularly.

The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency’s atrium cafeteria wasn’t gourmet, not by a long stretch, but it made a decent chicken salad. Two chicken salads, along with freshly baked croissants and two glasses of Diet Coke, were sitting on the small, round table in Williams’s office in the NGA basement when Sullivan arrived at his door precisely at 1130.

“Mornin’, boss. Still good for lunch now?” Sullivan asked. Wearing a Blue Akris suit and off-white blouse with Manolo black pumps and sporting a twenty-inch Akoya pearl necklace with matching earrings, Anne Sullivan looked the part of a powerful, but understated, professional woman.

“As always,” Williams replied as he rose from his desk to greet his number two.

As Chase Williams seated Sullivan, he remembered why he hired her. He needed a number two who brought things to the table he did not. She did that in spades.

Anne Sullivan was a retired General Services Administration super grade who had made a career in Washington. She knew all about the government, including government contracting, hiring, firing, and funding, and how to sidestep the issues. These were things Williams never had to deal with, even during his multiple tours in Washington.

Unlike Williams, Sullivan came from money. Her father had fashioned a successful and lucrative career in finance with Bain Capital Ventures. Between that family money and her GSA pension, she was looking forward to a comfortable life as a retiree. She enjoyed the D.C. social and cultural scene and traveled often, primarily to Europe and especially to Ireland. That plan was interrupted when Williams recruited her — charmed her, really, she readily admitted — to be his deputy.

“So what’s on our agenda today, Anne?”

“You wanted me to update you on how close we are to getting our Geek Tank fully up and running. As you know, they’ve been pretty demanding, and there’s always some latest technology that they’ve simply got to have. Now that we’ve got their last server rack installed, I’ve just got to get them one more LCD display and I think they’ll be pretty happy — for now.”

“Still take some getting used to, don’t they?”

“Ah, I’m OK with them, boss, but I’m afraid Roger is still struggling. Coming from where he spent most of his professional life, he still does a double take every now and then. Yet we agree on one thing: They are all incredibly gifted, and they don’t mind working long after all the rest of us are done for the day. I can see why you recruited them.”

“I promised the president we’d create something different, and they are the cutting edge of our intelligence operation.”

“They’re good alright, and Roger says they’ve mostly stopped griping about no surfing beaches nearby and having to wear grown-up clothes. Still, they come in every Friday wearing their T-shirts.

“T-shirts?”

“Yeah, boss, they had some high-end designer make them these gaudy T-shirts with a picture of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency’s HQ building in the background and the words ‘Geek Tank’ in huge letters on top of that. It’s kind of their fashion statement.”

“Sounds like what we used to call unit cohesion in the military,” Williams replied, smiling.

If there was one part of Op-Center that was completely different from anything that had ever existed before, it was the unit Chase Williams and Roger McCord dubbed their Geek Tank. Williams had promised the president he would build an intelligence organization with a collation architecture and algorithms that could electronically filter all raw intelligence data and distill the basic elements of a problem faster than even the best analysts. He drew great satisfaction that he had done just that.

On his first flag officer assignment, Williams had directed Deep Blue, the Navy staff’s think tank. During that time, as well as during his subsequent tours, Williams had been a champion of innovation in the Navy. He had consulted frequently with the best minds in Silicon Valley and was on a first-name basis with many of its industry leaders. When he showed up years later, this time in a business suit rather than a Navy uniform, he found those CEOs still remembered him. When he asked for help in recruiting top talent for a classified national defense project, those same corporate leaders proved to be patriots. Far from being territorial and guarding their best talent, they helped Williams find those young men and women who were not only technically brilliant, but also welcomed the challenge of being involved in national security work. Aaron Bleich was his first hire and had already earned his spurs with the hits on Perkasa and Kashif. Now under McCord and Bleich’s direction, they had built the capability Williams had promised the president.

It hadn’t been an easy run, he had to admit. Some of his new geeks had not fully understood what they would be getting into and had asked to leave the project. He had also not anticipated the amount, and expense, of the equipment and software they needed to do what had to be done. Thankfully, as Sullivan had just briefed him, they were up and running, and most of the major expense was behind them.

“Think we ought to support that unit cohesion by getting some of those T-shirts and showing up in the Geek Tank one Friday, Anne?”

“I’ll see to it, boss,” she added with a chuckle. “Pick your color carefully.”

“I will. And to be honest with you, I find myself spending more time with those folks than with almost anyone else on the Op-Center staff. I see you snooping around there a lot. They seem to have piqued your curiosity, too.”

“Ah, just want to see our biggest investment at work.” Sullivan paused. “I’m not sure what it is, boss, but I just like being around them. They are so smart, but they are also simple, honest, and straightforward. It’s refreshing. They don’t have agendas,” she said, smiling. “I guess that comes from being a career bureaucrat in this town, where everyone has an agenda — present company excluded,” she added quickly.

Williams just smiled. Beyond the skills he knew she would bring to Op-Center, he found himself continuing to be struck by Sullivan’s wisdom.

Anne Sullivan all but worshiped Williams. Never married, and with no significant other, she had a wide array of outside interests, especially theater and dance. She also had a large extended family, consisting of three older sisters and one younger one, as well as two younger brothers, and traveled regularly to Ireland, where she still had strong family roots. When it came to finding the right place and person to focus her professional passion and loyalty, she had found that in Chase Williams. Loyal as opposed to patriotic, she wanted, even needed, someone to be loyal to. Williams was the one.

“Anything else on your agenda today, Anne?”

“Yes. Let me give you the details of some of the new hardware and software we’re installing in our command module. It’s a capability Brian Dawson says we need, and I agreed with the purchase.”

Their meeting continued, two seasoned professionals building what the nation needed and would come to call on again.

Half a world away, Prince Ali al-Wandi sat in his office in the Saudi Oil Ministry. He had now killed a man in cold blood. It bothered him at first but he told himself, this was business, both the doing and doing it himself. He realized, and not for the first time, he would do anything to see this project through. While al-Wandi was clearly the czar of Saudi Arabia’s multibillion-dollar pipeline, he was still subservient to the head of the Oil Ministry, Prince Nayef. The oil minister was a lazy bureaucrat, and he was beginning to resent al-Wandi’s fame. He reflected on a meeting with Nayef where he had had to work mightily to keep the project on track. Ali al-Wandi had surprised Nayef and asked for 80 million more riyals (about US$20 million) because his ambitious project was running over budget. Nayef had summoned him to his office on no notice.

“Enter,” Nayef replied to the knock on the open door of his opulent office, not bothering to look up at al-Wandi.

“You wanted to see me, Minister,” Ali began, barely hiding his annoyance. He was making things happen while this … this … bureaucrat did nothing but sit on his fat ass.

“Questions have come from the royal court,” Nayef lied. “They are beginning to have misgivings about this project, and there is even talk about terminating it.” Nayef had no trouble with the big lie; he wanted to put al-Wandi off balance.

Al-Wandi was able to hide his shock, but his brain was spinning. What was this all about? Why now? He’d only asked for 80 million riyals. Didn’t this pencil pusher get it?

“Minister, perhaps this is a good time to recap. Nothing has changed since you secured permission from His Majesty to undertake this project except the costs of labor and materials have gone up, not to mention the cost of security.”

“As you say,” Nayef replied. His tone and body language were all wrong.

“Here, I brought this just to refresh,” al-Wandi continued, rolling out a large map on Nayef’s desk.

The map showed the new pipeline at first taking the route of the old British Trans-Arabian Pipeline, abandoned decades ago. Then, instead of following the path of the old pipeline through Lebanon, it split off to the north through Jordan and Syria, then west to the Mediterranean at the Syrian port of Baniyas.

Nayef traced the dark red path of the pipeline, his hand stopping as it crossed into Syria and his finger tapping involuntarily.

“Yes,” al-Wandi said, acknowledging that country’s continued disquiet. “It’s not Switzerland, but the Alawite military regime is firmly in control, and our money will help make sure they stay in power.”

Al-Wandi didn’t mind pandering to Nayef if it got him what he wanted. Yet, just what was Nayef’s game? Al-Wandi sensed there hadn’t been any questions from the royal court, and certainly not from the king; he was in his mideighties and all but senile. No, Nayef just wanted to throw his weight around and show him who was boss. Fine.

“Doesn’t the pipeline go through tribal lands from here … to here,” Nayef said, tracing along the route al-Wandi had lain out.

“It does, and the tribal chieftains who control that portion of the desert will be paid, as will the central government officials.”

Even though the pipeline was almost a year from completion, al-Wandi was already brokering multiyear oil futures deals throughout a Europe hungry for Saudi oil, and skimming considerable money off the top of every deal. All he had to do was to deliver the oil to cash in on hundreds of millions of riyals in personal wealth. He wasn’t going to let Nayef screw that up.

“Yes, I can see all that,” Nayef murmured, “but I don’t see the return on investment here. Is there really going to be that large a payoff?”

“The riches that will come into the kingdom via this pipeline will dwarf the up-front investment. Our economists have pulled together substantial data, and paid handsomely for other information. What they have found is that the nations we once knew as Eastern Europe — Bulgaria, Romania, Poland, and the others — are at the beginning of a major economic expansion.”

Al-Wandi paused for emphasis.

“Their thirst for oil is set to double or even triple, over the next decade and a half. It’s a market Russia cannot begin to fill. We need to be first to market and have the ability to ship oil directly to them. And we can’t be hostage to Iran, or anyone else who might choose to block the sea routes our oil must now take, who wants to keep us from getting our oil to market—”

“The United States would never let that happen!” Nayef exclaimed, interrupting him and challenging al-Wandi’s logic.

“Ten or even five years ago, Minister, I would have agreed with you. However, the close bond we once had with the United States is fraying. The free rein we had when the House of Bush and House of Saud were figuratively joined at the hip is over. The relationship was never as good as it was when one of the Bushes was in office.”

“Yes, I’ll give you that.”

“Then, as you know, our bond with the United States began to fray more when we clamped down on our people during the so-called Arab Spring in 2011, and when we rolled tanks into Bahrain to help quell their protests, that bond took a major hit. Add to that the fact that the United States has discovered enormous shale oil deposits and sooner or later won’t be nearly as dependent on Gulf oil from anyone, and we can’t count on the United States for anything.”

“I see,” Nayef replied, beginning to be swayed by al-Wandi’s logic.

The conversation went on as Ali continued to lay out the facts and add his own spin, and eventually Nayef promised the additional 80 million riyals.

Ali al-Wandi smiled with satisfaction at how he had worked Nayef, but that gratification was short-lived as he recalled a subsequent meeting. Now it was more than his reputation and status that were tied up in the pipeline; it was now part of his personal fortune. The meeting where Nayef had shaken him down remained a bitter memory. He replayed the meeting in his head, the bile in his stomach churning.

It was late afternoon in Riyadh, and Prince Ali al-Wandi was packing his Tony Perotti black leather briefcase when his assistant came in. “Your Excellency, Prince Nayef has asked to see you, and he says it’s urgent.”

Al-Wandi just rolled his eyes. He had had the man checking their construction account several times a day since Nayef had promised him the 80 million riyals, but thus far nothing had been deposited. “Have you checked the account this afternoon?”

“Yes, Your Excellency, nothing yet.”

“He probably wants me to grovel some more,” al-Wandi muttered.

Al Wandi brushed past his assistant and strode down the long hallway toward Nayef’s office. He was getting tired of this lazy oaf making his life difficult. It was one thing if he felt the need to remind him who was boss from time to time. Fine. It was a relatively small price to pay for the fame, and access, he had garnered in his new role as pipeline czar, to say nothing of the fortune he was skimming off the top for each oil futures deal he made. Now Nayef was costing him money.

He needed the 80 million riyals to keep the pipeline project moving at the pace they had planned on. There were construction companies, suppliers, and security services to pay. Because of the lack of ready cash, a few of them had begun to withhold services and supplies.

As he entered Nayef’s outer office, al-Wandi was steaming and made straight for Nayef’s desk.

“Your Excellency, you asked to see me?” al-Wandi all but barked, almost spitting the words “Your Excellency” at Nayef.

“Yes, yes, please sit down.”

Al-Wandi sat in one chair, facing Nayef just a few feet away.

“Yes, well, I suspect you know the funding you have asked for has not been deposited yet.”

“Yes, I know that,” al-Wandi answered abruptly.

“Well, there is a problem, you see.”

“A problem?”

“Yes, a problem. I took this to His Majesty and the king is … well, to be truthful, he’s not completely convinced we need to move forward this rapidly.”

“Not sure?”

“Yes. Now hear me out, please. I know you are dedicated to this project, and His Majesty knows that, too. Yet you also must know what a drain this is on the kingdom’s resources.”

Oh, so this is what this is about. Nayef needs to plead poverty. Very well, I’ll hold my tongue and listen, up to a point.

“Yes,” al-Wandi replied. He didn’t know where this was going, but he figured if he kept saying yes, Nayef would get to the point and get this charade over with.

“Well, as I’m sure you know, the US$60 billion commitment we made with the United States in 2011 to buy weapons has been a drain on the kingdom’s treasury. You also know all too well the price of oil has not reached the levels we projected. Further, no one had anticipated…”

Nayef droned on, laying out the kingdom’s financial woes. Yet al-Wandi still didn’t know where this was going. His project was going to solve many of those woes. Was Nayef really that dense?

“So, in speaking with His Majesty, he is willing to add the additional eighty million riyals to the project’s funding stream. However, he would like you to add some of your personal funds to the project, just to show good faith mind you. His Majesty was thinking in the neighborhood of perhaps thirty-five million riyals.”

Al-Wandi’s head was spinning. Was Nayef bluffing? Did the king really decide this? Did he dare call his bluff?

“That is vastly more money than I have. I’m just a humble servant.”

“Well, no, that’s not quite right. You see, we have examined your finances.”

“Examined my finances!” al-Wandi exclaimed, pushing himself out of his chair. “Who are you to ‘examine my finances’? This is enough. You say this is coming from the king. Then let’s go see him — now! He can tell me this himself.”

“Now calm down. It’s not possible to see His Majesty; he is at the Intercontinental London Park Lane in his usual suite of rooms. He is in England for a medical procedure, but, I assure you, these are his wishes.”

Al-Wandi sat back down. Examining his finances? Asking him to put up his own money for this project? Why?

Nayef broke the silence.

“I would have assumed you would not have to think about this. As you said a moment ago, you are a servant of the kingdom, and these are His Majesty’s wishes.”

Al-Wandi just sat mute. Nayef had put him in a box.

“So I must ask you again. Will you put up your own thirty-five million riyals to support this important project or not?”

“Yes,” al-Wandi mumbled.

“Good. Then we are done. May Allah be with you and with our pipeline project.”

Al-Wandi all but staggered out of Nayef’s office and headed for the safety of his own office suite. He needed time to think.

After Prince Nayef had held him up for the initial thirty-five million riyals, he had come back to him three more times to put up additional money of his own, always upping the ante, and always as a “show of good faith for the king.” Now he was personally invested in the pipeline to the tune of over 250 million riyals.

His accountants had worked feverishly to ensure he would be the first person paid when the oil revenues the pipeline would generate found their way to the kingdom. Al-Wandi smiled to himself. Then he would be a hero and there would be money for everyone. He seldom drank anything stronger than tea, but once the money began rolling in he would part with that established practice. He had already purchased two bottles of 2005 Dom Perignon White Gold Jeroboam to celebrate when the first tanker was filled with pipeline oil in the Syrian port of Baniyas. That was in the future, or what he hoped was the future.

That all changed in an instant, and Prince Ali al-Wandi’s world was turned upside down. What was worse, he didn’t see it coming.

With the pipeline nearing completion, disaster struck for al-Wandi. Fueled by the 2011 uprisings, and especially by the Assad family’s brutal murder and repression of the Syrian people, Syria took a major lurch toward instability. The Syrian government, still dominated by the Alawites, was especially hostile to Saudi Arabia because of how ruthlessly the Saudis suppressed their own popular uprisings in 2011, to say nothing of how their autocratic state repressed its people today. When the dust had settled and some semblance of stability had been restored, the Syrian government reneged on the pipeline deal with Saudi Arabia and agreed to pay back the huge advance they had received “in due course.”

Now the government in Syria was not only impacting the Saudi monarchy, it was impacting him! No amount of manipulation, cajoling, or outright bribery of Syrian government officials by Prince Ali had been able to sway their decision. He suddenly went from being the toast of the Saudi royal court to the scapegoat for everything wrong with the kingdom. How much effort had he put into working his way to a position of power near the top of the Saudi Oil Ministry bureaucracy? How much money, and part of his own personal fortune to boot, had he lavished on those ministers and bureaucrats in Jordan and Syria until they relented and allowed the Saudis to build the huge pipeline from the Saudi oil fields through their countries to the Mediterranean? And now it would go up in smoke? Not if he could help it.

He was working to turn things around, but he couldn’t do it if the Saudi oil minister kept summoning him to his office to explain himself. Another beckoning. What now?

“So, Ali,” Nayef began once Al-Wandi was seated in his office. “You told us this was a fail-safe plan. Now we have spent billions and your pipeline is almost complete and we will realize nothing from it!”

“We still can! Don’t you see? Syria is the problem. The government is trying to consolidate power and doing it at our expense.”

“Yes, of course, I see that, you fool!” Nayef shouted. “You said you could take care of that, but clearly you can’t.”

“I’ve used all the resources I could lay my hands on, but the Syrian government won’t budge. There’s no way I could have anticipated this when we started the project. Now we have no choice but to attack them and force them to let us complete our pipeline,” al-Wandi continued. “We’ve paid the Americans tens of billions of dollars for the best military technology we could buy. If we strike while the current Syrian government is still trying to consolidate power, we should be able to reverse this setback. The new Syrian leaders know nothing about how to use their military. They’ll sue for peace soon after we begin our initial attacks.”

Nayef looked at al-Wandi as if he’d been shot. “Now, wait a minute. Don’t underrate the Syrians. We both know their military is vastly superior to ours,” Prince Nayef retorted. “If we attack them, not only will they repulse our forces, they could well attack our oil fields, and then where would we be?”

“Our military has the strength to prevail against the Syrians,” Al-Wandi persisted. The heated debate raged on, with Nayef and Prince Ali trading point and counterpoint. Finally, al-Wandi played his trump card.

“What if the Americans were to help us with this?”

Nayef was caught off guard. “What do you know that I do not?”

“I know the Americans are not happy with things in Syria. What if they were to become even unhappier?” al-Wandi asked furtively.

“Well, that would be to our advantage, but I can’t worry about what the Americans may or may not do, and I don’t think you should worry about that, either.”

“I think there is a way to do this!” al-Wandi replied.

“Look, Ali, we’re not getting anywhere with this discussion. I don’t want to hear any more talk about our nation attacking Syria. Understood?”

“Yes, as you wish,” al-Wandi replied as he left Nayef’s office.

Ali was seething as he always was when he met with Nayef. Yet he knew the oil minister had a point. While Saudi Arabia possessed a great deal of modern weaponry, most of it courtesy of the United States and the result of a US$60 billion purchase order put in place while the Mideast revolutions were occurring in 2011, it was still not as strong as Syria militarily on the ground. They had the technology, but not the ground combatants. The Syrians had been hardened by years of fighting. They would swarm over the border and make straight for the Saudi capital. The kingdom could be crushed if it went to war with Syria. Their only chance, Ali al-Wandi reasoned, would be if Syria were somehow weakened militarily in a substantial way.

After al-Wandi departed, Nayef sat at his desk, deep in thought. What does al-Wandi know that I don’t? Have I let him have too much power? Where was this talk of war coming from?

Price Nayef thought about it for a bit longer. He recognized Ali al-Wandi was an emotional man, while he himself was more clearheaded. He had told the so-called oil czar what to do and that was that. I will just watch him more carefully now.

Back in his office, al-Wandi knew he had but one course of action. Now I must have the Americans attack Syria.

Ali had spent many months working furiously, but surreptitiously, to ensure his dream did not slip away, and now he would redouble his efforts. Syria had to be weakened enough so Saudi Arabia could attack and be assured of winning a war. Or if that couldn’t happen, at a minimum, the current Syrian government needed to be decapitated, eliminating those who opposed completion of the pipeline. Only then could al-Wandi complete the pipeline and gain the unrestricted access to the Mediterranean Saudi Arabia needed. He had pulled together a plan that could work, that should work. Now all he had to do was to wait for the Americans to react, but he could only wait so long.

Far to the west of where Prince Ali was trying to salvage his plan and his fortune, USS Normandy wallowed in the quartering sea. Captain Pete Blackman, Normandy’s commanding officer, sat in bridge chair, his patience wearing thin. Rain pelted the bridge’s overhead and the windshield wipers on the bridge’s thick, laminated, glass windows moved back forth almost spastically, but unsuccessfully, trying to push the water away. Normandy’s bow floundered in the confused seas, forcing the ship’s head to vary as much as fifteen degrees from base course, and no one seemed to notice, or care. At least no one seemed to care but Blackman. He looked at the ship’s nineteen-year-old helmsman and mustered some semblance of a smile.

“Son, I would appreciate it if you would hold a steady heading, and I know the inbound helo pilots would appreciate it also.”

The young sailor grinned and responded, “Aye, aye, Captain, steady as she goes.” The old man might be demanding on his department heads and be a bit rough with his junior officers, but he had a soft spot in his heart for his enlisted sailors.

Blackman sat in his leather-covered captain’s chair, leaning against Normandy’s crest, stitched into the back of the seat cover. The crest featured a lion, an anchor, and other military symbols commemorating the Battle of Normandy, as well as the ship’s motto, Vanguard of Victory, a motto Blackman had adopted as his personal slogan. He surveyed the officers and sailors making up the bridge watch team as they swayed from side to side, fighting to maintain their balance on the bridge’s steel deck as the ship rolled in heavy seas. Yes, they are improving, he had to admit to himself, but they are still a long way from where they need to be, especially going into a potential combat zone.

As the young seaman fought to hold the ship on a steady heading, Blackman watched the flight deck TV monitor suspended from the bridge’s matte-black overhead. The monitor showed the helo pilot fighting to bring his H-60 aboard Normandy’s gyrating flight deck. Above him and to his right, the voice of his landing safety officer blared from the red speaker as he tried to coax the helo onto the deck.

“XO!” he shouted to his executive officer. “We’ve been at flight quarters for over an hour and a half taking helos the carrier is sending our way. How much longer is this going to last?”

“Once the bird over our deck lands and takes off, our helo will be back here in about a half hour. Then we have one more bird from Truman landing here just before sunset. That final helo has a part for our gyrocompass, the last part we need to fix it,” his XO replied, hoping some kind of good news would help ease Blackman’s frustration over the way his bridge team was handling the ship.

“Great … and it’s about time! What the hell are we paying those supply weenies for anyway?” Blackman groused to no one in particular.

His exec knew Blackman was always demanding. Now, with this new Mideast crisis brewing, he knew his captain could almost taste launching salvos of Normandy’s Tomahawk missiles at a new enemy. The U.S. Navy had pounded Libya with hundreds of Tomahawks in the spring of 2011, and Blackman was deskbound in a Pentagon job then. Now it was his turn.

Before his exec could reply, Blackman demanded, “Well, what’s our helo bringing us?”

“Oh, our bird is bringing that Center for Analyses rep joining us for the deployment.”

“CNA rep? What the hell are we supposed to do with a geek from some think tank?” Blackman asked, shaking his head in disbelief.

The XO had nothing to offer his captain. Nor was he in any mood to listen. He’d leave it to the CNA rep to tell Blackman why she was there.

Brian Dawson strode into Chase Williams office for their scheduled meeting with the staff international crisis manager, the N31, Hector Rodriquez, in tow.

If Op-Center had a de facto chief of staff, it was the operations director, the N3. Williams liked and needed Dawson, but he was certainly not your run-of-the-mill former Green Beret officer. Williams had recruited Dawson soon after he retired from the Army as a young colonel, based largely on his command tour with the 5th Special Forces Group and his proven ability to think outside the box to get things done. He had precisely the talents and experience Williams knew he needed in an ops director.

No one, in or out of uniform, had Dawson’s unique skill set. He spoke all the “right” languages (Arabic, Dari, and Pashto). He was skilled in assignation, extortion, bribery, agent handling, and false-flag recruitment. He had a deep and abiding knowledge of tribal politics, and leaders from other cultures seemed to like and trust him as if he were almost one of them. He also had baggage. As a B-Team leader, he planned the takeover of a small Central Asian country, and was almost cashiered from the Army when he set himself up as the interim ruler. He had recovered from that miscue and had, at one time, been a strong candidate for general rank. Yet the Army didn’t like controversy surrounding their general officers. Dawson decided not to put it to the vote of a promotion board. He decided to leave the Army following his last operational command.

Williams hired him conditionally, to a one-year-long tryout to see if he could play nice with others. If he passed that test, Williams promised he’d have broad authority as the ops director. Dawson had been with Op-Center for just over ten months, and while he was sometimes impatient and exacting in dealing with others, he had impressed Williams thus far and was on the road to fulfilling his expectations.

“Boss, you wanted to talk about our trip down to Fort Bragg next month to meet with our JSOC troop, so I asked Hector to come on in with me.”

“Good call, Brian. Hector, how’s it going?”

“Good, Admiral—”

The small man at Dawson’s elbow froze as Williams narrowed his eyes. After thirty-one years in the Army, if anyone at Op-Center had trouble not addressing the director by his military rank, it was the former battalion sergeant major, Hector Rodriquez.

“I mean, good, boss!” Rodriquez corrected himself.

“Mets doing OK in spring training so far?”

“Naw, lousy as always, boss, but they’ll bounce back come regular season.”

Williams just nodded in agreement. He knew his international crisis manager was a passionate New York Mets fan. Unless there was an operational crisis, he made every Mets — Washington Nationals game and bought the highest-price tickets he could afford.

“I’ll let Hector brief you on our plan,” Dawson began.

If there was one Op-Center staff member Dawson wasn’t impatient with, it was Rodriquez. As the international crisis manager, he was “Mr. Outside” and Op-Center’s primary link to their JSOC troop. The entire special operations community had enormous respect for Rodriquez and always welcomed him as a brother, and with good reason.

Puerto Rican by birth, Hector Rodriquez was born and raised in New York City and enlisted in the Army right out of high school. He came out of boot camp as an infantryman and went immediately to the 75th Ranger Regiment. After eight years in the 75th, where he rose to E-7 platoon sergeant, he transferred to the Army’s Delta Force, where he served for the next five years. As a senior E-7, he then went to the Q-course and into Special Forces, where he became a team sergeant, moved up to battalion sergeant major, and finally became command sergeant major for the 3rd Special Forces Group. Fluent in Spanish and Arabic, he finished his service career as the command sergeant major for the Joint Special Operations Command. Rodriquez knew everyone in the special operations community, and they knew him. Both Williams and Dawson knew he could open any door.

Chase Williams had gotten to know his international crisis manager well. Rodriquez was fifty-two years old, married with six kids. He lived for his family and for the United States of America. He was still fit and looked like he was thirty-five. His wife was twice his size and they were still in love. Their kids lived in fear of disappointing their father. For Williams, Rodriquez was America.

“So this is our agenda,” Rodriquez began. “You’ll see we’re going to go over some Operational Plans with Major Volner and Master Guns Moore. Then we’re going to review how the logistics worked out for that last surge we did.”

The easy banter continued between and among the three men, mapping out their day with their JSOC troop. More so than any two members of his Op-Center staff, Dawson and Rodriquez had bent over backward to acquaint their boss with the special operations community and the Joint Special Operations Command. They knew that when the time came, it would be Williams who would send these professionals downrange into harm’s way.

As Swampfox 248 approached the ship, the weather worsened, making Normandy’s flight deck appear small — that is, when Sandee Barron could see it at all. They were slipping below flight minimums, and she had a decision to make.

Ah, but Sandee, darlin’, that’s why they pay you the big bucks. Not many squadron pilots can do this, but you sure as hell can. She knew they’d be watching. Read ’em and weep, boys.

Then she went into the zone. It was part total concentration and part forced relaxation. She knew a part of her had to fly the helo, and another part of her had to let go in order to release all that muscle memory and experience from hours of flying in dog-shit weather like this. It was not unlike John Williams on the podium with the Boston Pops when he was really on his game — it was experience and technique, but it was also feeling and art.

Sandee Barron came by her confidence naturally. The only child of two Northwestern University college professors, Sandee had an idyllic childhood growing up in Evanston, Illinois. Her parents had visions of her following their same career path and becoming a tenured professor at Northwestern after receiving an Ivy League education. They enrolled her in only the best preschool and primary schools and carefully selected the exclusive Roycemore School as her high school.

Slight in stature, Sandee’s focus was on academics and the arts. Always near the top of her class and a straight-A student, Sandee had after school hours that were filled with piano lessons and ballet classes. Her parents didn’t wait until her late high school years to begin taking her on college trips. She visited her first Ivy League Campus, the University of Pennsylvania, the summer after her sixth grade, and the college trips — and parental pressure — to pursue an Ivy education only intensified from there.

Midway through her junior year at Roycemore, something happened to Sandee. Even now she couldn’t put her finger on it, but it all became too planned, too predictable, too someone else’s choice, not hers. She wanted something more, something different, and something she chose. Just what that would be eluded her. Then one evening, while she was laying out her clothes for the next day’s classes at Roycemore with the TV on in the background, she heard the sonorous voice of James Earl Jones intoning “America’s Navy — a global force for good.” For Sandee, it was the solution, a life of adventure, not comfortable predictability.

Sandee’s grades and her eye-watering SAT scores made her a competitive candidate for admission to the U.S. Naval Academy, and she easily secured an appointment from her congresswoman. At the Academy she was a good student and fit into the sports culture there by running cross country and was team captain of the women’s varsity cross country team her senior year. Once she started running cross country and winning meets her confidence soared and any shyness she had as a younger girl disappeared. She was a blue-chip athlete at a Division One college; she was good — damn good — and she knew it. Call it confidence, call it attitude, but by her senior year at the Academy she had it. Don’t mess with me or I’ll run you into the dirt. Introduced to all branches of the Navy during the school’s summer training programs, she chose Naval Aviation because it seemed to offer the best promise of high adventure. Now she was living that adventure. The landing safety officer’s voice was insistent.

“Ah, Swampfox 248, LSO here. We’re having difficulty holding a heading. Conditions are worsening. You want to abort?”

“Negative, LSO,” Sandee heard herself say. She was so in the flow and one with the machine that a part of her neither heard nor registered the exchange with Normandy’s landing safety officer, one of her fellow pilots.

When she was in the zone, all her senses sharpened. She could feel the sweat that collected between her lip and her lip microphone; she could smell and taste the burning jet fuel; she could even, without glancing over at her copilot, smell the stench of fear that came from him. If it was his call, they’d be back on the carrier waiting for better weather, but more than all this, she could feel the helo — she was one with the machine.

“Ah, 248, you sure about this?”

“Affirmative.”

Then, like John Williams during the adagio, she took the MH-60R to a hover over the ship’s bucking and kicking landing area and held it there while the flight deck crew hooked up the recovery-assist cable. With the RA cable assisting, it was Sandee’s task to finely maneuver the twenty-two-thousand-pound helicopter, with its eighteen-inch landing probe, into the three-foot-by-four-foot hydraulic jaws of the remote securing device — the “mousetrap”—attached to the ship’s flight deck.

The LSO, the senior pilot on Sandee’s otherwise all-male-pilot detachment, simply shook his head in awe. Only a fellow helo pilot could appreciate what he had just seen; only a helo pilot of immense skill could make that approach and hover in this kind of weather and make it look easy. On the one hand, it was pure, unbiased respect and admiration. On the other, it was a prayer. Why, God, did you give her that much talent? Why not me?

Now he knew it was his job to help her get her bird on deck.

“Left two, left one, steady. Land now! Down, down, down. Up, up, UP! Come left a little bit … easy with it … OK … steady … steady!”

Laurie Phillips couldn’t hear the calls from the landing safety officer, and it was just as well. The swirling winds, pounding rain, and gyrating flight deck were forcing the LSO to make his calls loudly, insistently, and increasingly rapidly. With each jerk of the aircraft, Laurie was tossed about in her seat, either bumping into the aircraft’s haze-gray soundproofing or knocking her knees against the helo crewman’s console in front of her.

Her short conversation with the helo’s commander right before they lifted off suddenly sounded prescient.

“All right,” Lieutenant Sandee Barron had begun winking at Laurie, “I’ll be your captain today. No smoking. Fasten your seat belt. Turn off all electronic devices. All you have to do is sit back and enjoy the flight. Normandy is less than twenty miles away, out ahead of the carrier.”

Then Barron’s face had hardened a bit. “Seriously, the weather conditions are marginal, and this will be a bit of a rough flight. But I’ve done this a lot, and I’m damn good at it. It’ll be piece of cake,” Barron had concluded with another wink.

Laurie, terrified after her COD experience, felt reassured. What was it about this pilot? She had been vaguely aware the Navy had a number of female aviators, but she had never met one. She didn’t sound cocky, but she did sound confident.

Laurie willed herself to look out the window on her left and down at Normandy’s pitching flight deck. She’d flown in Marine Corps helos and MV-22 Ospreys during her career in uniform, but they had been based on land, not on ships bobbing around like bathtub toys. Laurie was certain that at any moment their bird would crash on the pitching flight deck below. She willed her body to be transposed back to her warm office and tiny desk at the Center for Naval Analyses headquarters in Alexandria, Virginia, or anywhere else but here.

“Left one. Come left. You’re drifting right. Stop right. Don’t climb. You’re hooked on! Easy, EASY with the power.”

The LSO continued to talk, but Sandee Barron no longer heard him; it was just her, the helo, and the moving deck.

You’re over the circle. Do it! The muscle memory, the thousand-plus hours of flying, the instincts, took over, and Sandee planted the MH-60R hard in the circle on Normandy’s flight deck.

Laurie finally exhaled. She was totally disoriented as she found herself in her second completely unfamiliar environment in the last several days. The helo crewman unstrapped her from her seat, grabbed her right arm, and helped her climb out of the bird.

As she staggered out of the helicopter, Laurie’s right hand was gripped by the outstretched, outsized hand of Captain Pete Blackman. “Welcome aboard, shipmate!” Blackman shouted over the roar of the helicopter’s slapping blades and howling T700-GE-401C engines.

“Glad to be here,” Laurie lied. It was the captain’s custom to greet every new “shipmate” personally and administer a firm handshake. It let them know who was in charge right away.

As Blackman continued to pump Laurie’s hand, the pilots chopped the throttles, applied the helo’s rotor brake, and jumped out of the bird. Once out of the helo, Sandee Barron headed right for Laurie.

“Come on, I’ll show you where our stateroom is. The flight deck guys will bring your gear down in a minute,” her roommate-to-be said, rescuing Laurie from Blackman’s handshake.

“Thanks,” Laurie replied, as she tried to stand erect on wobbly legs.

Once inside the skin of the ship, Sandee Barron stopped.

“So, Ms. Phillips, looks like we’re going to be roommates.”

“So I’m told … and it’s Laurie, please.”

“OK, Laurie, fair enough. My name’s Sandee.”

“The captain seems … well … enthusiastic,” Laurie said as Sandee led her down a ladder to the deck below the flight deck.

“Yeah, captain’s a piece of work,” Barron said over her shoulder as they continued walking, “but you didn’t hear that from me. He won’t say much to you on the ship, but get him on liberty and put a few beers in him and he’ll open up and tell you more than you want to know. He was a big football star at the Naval Academy, a linebacker. You could probably guess just by looking at him.”

“He does seem a little larger than life.”

“Yep, but I think you’ll find him a pretty straight guy. We’re lucky, I guess. He grinds the ship’s company officers, but leaves us Airedales pretty much alone. We just try to keep a low profile and do our mission.”

The inquisitive look on her face told Sandee she ought to enlighten her new roommate further. She stopped walking, turned around, and looked directly at Laurie. “Look, you gotta understand something. The captain didn’t grow up with a silver spoon in his mouth. He came from some small mill town in North Carolina, and he only got out of there because he was recruited by the Academy to play football. This is his big chance as captain of Normandy. If he does a good job, he’ll probably get promoted and get his admiral’s stars. If he doesn’t, he’s yesterday’s news. He’s a little rough around the edges, but a ship’s CO has incredible responsibilities. If just one of us screws up badly, it’s not only our career, but his, too.”

Laurie nodded that she understood, but Sandee wasn’t done.

“Best advice I can give you is to just give the skipper a lot of room. He’s risen through the ranks because he gets the job done. Plus, whatever else happens, we’ve got to live with him for the next six months. We all just have to remember why we’re here.”

However, after two harrowing flights in the past several days, and in the foreign environment of a Navy ship at sea, Laurie Phillips had the profound sense of not, in fact, being quite sure why she was here. As Sandee led her through the maze of Normandy’s passageways and to their small stateroom, Laurie looked toward that future with some apprehension.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Even in March, the Saudi Arabian sun was already baking the desert, the air shimmering in the heat, but Prince Ali al-Wandi was seemingly immune to the weather. He was single-mindedly focused and was in the process of shaping his future. He was far from Riyadh and in the vast Saudi Arabian Desert, but at a location well within range of his Sikorsky S-92 executive helicopter. Al-Wandi watched as his team of handpicked men put the finishing touches on their building project.

He had just left the nondescript blockhouse a few meters away. There, another group of handpicked men, all engineers, were working with the Global Hawk technology his now-dead minion had stolen from the United States. They had their part of the operation almost up and running. The prince conferred with his chief engineer, the man he used as his chief of staff and alter ego. He was a Pakistani named Jawad Makhdoom.

“Do you think the Americans will take the bait?” the man asked.

“I know they will,” al-Wandi replied. “They can’t leave anything in this region alone. Look how they bully our leaders into keeping oil prices at unreasonably low levels, how they meddle in our internal affairs with all this antiterrorism rhetoric, and how they incessantly scold our king with this human rights nonsense.”

“I know,” Makhdoom replied, “and they have been doing it for a long time. But now you’ll make them do what we want them to do, in’shallah.”

“It is more than Allah’s will,” Prince Ali responded. “You’ve explained why the position of this camp is an ideal one. The prying eyes of the Americans don’t miss much and they won’t miss this.”

“Yes, but even if they see it, will it move them to action?” Makhdoom asked.

“I know it will!” al-Wandi replied emphatically. “Look, the government they have worried about for decades just took a huge jog in the direction of instability. The revolution the Syrians suppressed so ruthlessly in 2011 has continued simmering. The Americans will see what they see, and what they want to see.”

They had planned this out so well. As much as he admired the man he had handpicked as his chief of staff, al-Wandi suspected the Pakistani expat did not share his faith that what they were doing would succeed. Yet the man didn’t know everything that Ali al-Wandi did. Nor would he, ever.

“What about the prying eyes in our country? Do you think we’re well protected from discovery here?”

“Oh, don’t worry, we’re completely secure,” Ali al-Wandi replied, surprise registering on his face that his man could think he hadn’t taken care of this aspect of the operation. No, he had paid enough to ensure they would be left alone.

“Then you’re certain the United States will act?”

“Oh, they’ll act, and they will act soon!”

The prince knew he could order the man to do anything he wanted him to do. Yet he wanted to convince him what they were doing was the right thing to do for the kingdom, and not solely to continue to line his own pockets with bribes extracted from the oil deals he had cut. Further, he had not told his assistant about the money Nayef had extracted from him as a personal investment in the project.

“Look, if the Americans are friends of our kingdom shouldn’t they want to intervene with Syria? All they need is an excuse. Look what they did to Libya in 2011, and that country doesn’t have the strategic importance Syria does. If Syria explodes it will set their Mideast strategy back decades and if Syria threatens them, then it squares the circle. They’ll be chomping at the bit, just wait.”

“Yes, I think you’re right,” Makhdoom replied, though the look on his face showed he might yet be a bit skeptical.

Ali al-Wandi could see the man still had doubts. He wanted there to be none.

The prince looked the chief engineer dead in the eye. “Don’t lose confidence now,” he said as he laid his right hand on the man’s shoulder to reassure him. “I’ve listened carefully to what the U.S. president has said and have paid close attention to U.S. security policies.”

“Yes, Your Excellency, but they will have to act preemptively in this case, won’t they?”

“They will. We watched the United States employ its doctrine of preemption against Iraq in 2003, in Libya in 2011, and on other occasions, too. I am confident they’ll use that policy again if they feel they need to. Also don’t forget how this president’s predecessor was criticized for not intervening in Syria years ago.”

For the most part, Prince Ali was doing all this for the power and the money, but at his core he was a Saudi. Geography didn’t lie and he knew enough about history and geopolitics, and was shaken enough by the 2011 Arab Spring uprisings. So he was genuinely concerned for the future of his nation.

As a reasonably devout Sunni, al-Wandi’s nightmare scenario was a region dominated by radical Shias in Iran and their proxies in Syria. No, he rationalized, he had to do this. More than that, he must do this. Not for himself, but for his nation and for future generations of Saudis. Get the United States to decapitate Syria, move in militarily, oust the current government, and put the Sunni majority in charge of the country. That would not only get the oil flowing, but would also wrest Syria away from Iran’s embrace. He would not only be rich; he would also be a Saudi national hero. It was a beautiful plan. The United States would start the dominos falling and would help him achieve his dream. The Americans would do this, and it would be their own idea to boot!

His plan was as simple as it was clever. The Global Hawk would “see” a threat when it overflew what they were building, but it would be tricked into thinking that threat was in Syria. He shook his head in satisfaction. It was almost done and when he activated his plan things would move quickly.

Far from where Ali al-Wandi and the chief engineer were putting the prince’s plan in motion, two hundred kilometers north of the Syrian oasis city of Tadmur two men were engaged in conversation. The older man sitting in the passenger seat of the four-wheel-drive Range Rover was Hibah Nawal. He was the mukhtar of the Rulawa tribe, the largest of the eight nomadic tribes that roamed Syria’s half-million-square-kilometer desert. His driver, Feroz Kabudi, turned and said, “I don’t know why we aren’t moving this building to the next segment of pipeline. It does not make sense.”

The mukhtar smiled. Feroz meant “fortunate” in Arabic, and Hibah Nawal reflected on how fortunate Feroz was, as indeed were the men of their Rulawa tribe who had elected him as the leader of their tribal council. While he had grown up in the desert doing what most of Syria’s Bedouin population did, herd sheep, he had spent enough time in Tadmur to keep abreast of events in the nations surrounding Syria. The Bedouin tribes were insulated from most of the chaos of Syria’s civil war because Syria’s steppe and desert was considered of little value.

When Hibah Nawal learned of Saudi Arabia’s intention to build their oil pipeline through Syria’s desert, he saw opportunity. He jockeyed for position with the leaders of Syria’s other Bedouin tribes and secured a contract to provide services and labor to the army of engineers and construction workers who were building the pipeline. The contract was extremely lucrative for the Rulawa tribe and secured the long-term loyalty of his kinsmen who had elected him mukhtar. It had also allowed him to skim money off the top and reward himself with perks like this expensive SUV.

“Feroz, this pipeline is a big project, and it is not our job to manage it. Our job is just to help build the temporary quarters for the workers, deliver supplies to them at each of these base camps, and when they need our help, assist them with some of the construction.”

“Yes, I know that, Mukhtar. The pipeline is complete here and now we will be paid just to provide security, but the next segment of the pipeline is being built almost due north and we should be moving this temporary barracks north for the workers.”

“You think too much, Feroz. Our instructions are to help build a brand new barracks to the north and just leave this one in place here. Now we need to drive over there,” the mukhtar said, pointing in a westerly direction.

Feroz Kabudi just shook his head as he stepped on the accelerator and followed instructions.

Laurie Phillips and Sandee Barron sat in their tiny stateroom aboard Normandy, each chugging a Powerade sports drink, sweat dripping on the room’s deck as they both recovered from a ninety-minute workout. A midafternoon respite from flight operations had opened up the ship’s flight deck to joggers. After spending almost an hour running in endless circles on the flight deck they had hit Normandy’s tiny weight room in the bowels of the ship. Even in March, the arid, ninety-degree temperature in the region had dehydrated them both.

“Didn’t know if there’d be any way to work out on a Navy ship, Sandee. This isn’t bad, though that flight deck isn’t much of a track.”

“No, it’s not. It’s easier when we deploy on an aircraft carrier like Truman. A four-and-a-half-acre flight deck makes it much easier for running.”

“Didn’t you tell me you were a runner back at the Naval Academy?”

“Yeah, back in the day. Cross country.”

“Enjoy it there?”

“Nice place to be from. Hey, why don’t you hit the showers first? I’ve got to slam out an e-mail to my hubby back in Norfolk. He needs constant reassurance the guys on the ship aren’t hitting on me, or if they are, I’m ignoring them.”

“I’ll testify all you’re doing is flying, working out, and sleeping. Tell him to send more pictures. Your two daughters are too cute!”

As the easy banter between the two women continued, Sandee Barron reflected on how different their backgrounds were and how liberally Laurie had shared her unique life experience with her.

Born and raised in Des Moines, with an IT degree from a junior college, Laurie Phillips enlisted in the Marine Corps after she was jilted in an affair with a married man. Smart and good with languages, she was accepted into the Marine Corps Cultural Support Team program and trained to interface with local Afghani women in the battle space.

She did two tours in Afghanistan and was decorated for heroism, but an affair with a deployed Marine during her second tour went badly as he, too, was married. Sadly, a latent eating disorder forced her from the Corps when she was unable to control her weight, ballooning to well above Marine Corps weight standards and failing her semiannual physical fitness test. She continued on this bad eating path until finally converting to the South Beach diet and undertaking a workout regimen that she followed with near-religious regularity. She regained control of her life, and returned to school for a four-year degree in IT.

After graduation, she gravitated first to the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), then to the Center for Naval Analyses (CNA) as places where she felt she could be recognized and rewarded for her skills and strong work ethic. When the CNA accepted her application for this important shipboard position, it helped provide that recognition she so wanted. Now it was her job to make it work.

Now fit and modestly attractive, she was working mightily to guard against her eating disorder, which, like an alcohol addiction, was always present. She vowed never to go back there, and she packed much of her own chow for this deployment. Every nook and cranny of their stateroom was jammed with food she brought aboard or had shipped to her.

While she didn’t talk much about her personal life, she had revealed to Sandee she had a long-standing, on-again, off-again relationship with a techie friend from her days at NRO.

“So, Laurie, other than working out and sitting here e-mailing folks back home, we hardly see each other much.”

“Hey, roomie, you’ve been flying your ass off day and night. Did that waiver to fly more than a hundred hours in a month ever come through for you?”

“Yeah, thanks for asking. It did, just last week. How about you, though? Things working out the way you wanted them to for you professionally here?”

“Yep, pretty much. The playbook for CNA analysts on ships like this is to park in the ship’s Combat Direction Center for the deployment and take in as much data as you can. Some analysts I’ve talked with have had productive and satisfying tours doing this and some not so much.”

“And for you?” Sandee asked.

“For me, so far so good. I think it helped that our ops boss, Lieutenant Commander Watson, served with a CNA analyst on one of his previous ships. He seems to have the big picture of where I fit into his operation, especially in the Combat Direction Center.”

“Sounds pretty good. How’s it working out with the captain? I know he’s usually camped out on the bridge, but do you talk with him when he comes through CDC?”

“No, not really. He usually banters with the tactical action officer or the petty officer managing the Aegis tracks on the display. I’m pretty much below the noise. He says hello, but it’s kind of perfunctory.”

“With the captain, that may be a blessing. Hey, every time I come through there to get the flight brief I see you at one console or another doing what looks like interesting stuff.”

“Yep, I’m learning a lot. The watch team leader usually slots me into either one of the track management consoles or the Global Hawk consoles and I think I’m getting pretty good at both.”

“Global Hawk!” Sandee exclaimed. “Hey, you’d better keep those toy airplanes from T-boning my bird when I’m flying,” she continued, only half in jest.

“Tell you what, roomie. Just keep that eggbeater you’re flying below sixty-five thousand feet and you’ll be just fine.”

Laurie Phillips was, in fact, feeling accomplished in her work aboard Normandy. She just hoped it would keep up for the entire deployment.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Chase Williams sat at his desk catching up on paperwork, e-mails, and other messages when his N5, or planning director, arrived at his door for their scheduled meeting. “Morning, boss, ready for our meeting or should I come back?”

“Let’s do it, Rich. What do you have for me today?” Williams said as he motioned his N5 to a chair next to his desk.

“Well, I know you pay me to look way ahead, so I thought I’d update you on some of the intelligence trap lines we’ve got going. We’re trying to anticipate what this surge of U.S. military forces to the Mideast might precipitate.”

The most essential quality a planning director brought to any organization was to look beyond the immediate horizon, often way beyond. Someone had to anticipate what the organization would have to deal with in a distant future no one else was looking at. Richard Middleton was the right guy for the job. It was moments like this that reminded Williams why he hired this unusual and uniquely capable man.

Middleton was an Amherst graduate and a blue blood and had marched against the Vietnam War when he was in junior high. He went to CIA after a tour at State and was fluent in five languages. Middleton was far more cunning than anyone Williams had ever met. In the process of considering him for Op-Center Williams had learned Middleton was not well liked or terribly successful at the CIA until a supervisor at Langley saw in him the makings of a covert operator. There, and perhaps only there, he more than excelled, and became one of the best.

Manipulative and even Machiavellian, Middleton understood his role at Op-Center and loved planning. He was a classic big picture guy. Williams marveled at how his planning director could take a plan of operations and see around and ahead of the execution. Middleton had been the first to understand the shift to the terrorists-for-hire threat they were now dealing with and had helped the rest of the staff create the vectors that enabled the Geek Tank to ultimately finger Perkasa and Kashif.

He did come with baggage. Married and divorced twice, his longest monogamous relationship was with an expensive call girl who was now a little long in the tooth. Twice a month they met for dinner, the theater, and a sleep-over. He always paid her well.

“So what do you think we might need to anticipate?” Williams asked.

“I figured we’d want to look at the recent past and extrapolate ahead a bit, especially as it relates to domestic security.”

“Good idea. What you got?”

“The way I figure it, a surge like this, with a focus on Iran’s saber-rattling, isn’t going to stir up any enraged masses. The intelligence community is standing by what we learned in the wake of the NFL attacks. You’ve also advised the president by memo about the terror-for-hire threat.”

“And I appreciate you drafting those memos, Rich. I can tell you they resonated with the president.”

“Thanks, boss. Roger’s intelligence folks, and especially our Geek Tank, are all pretty much in line with what the intelligence community is saying — for the most part. The threat has changed dramatically. We can’t ignore jihadists in explosive vests or some other low-end weapons, but that’s not the way it’s happening today. At least not here.”

“We sure as hell saw that with Kashif and Perkasa, didn’t we?”

“Sure did. Roger and his folks have a great flow of information from the intelligence community. Adam Putnam’s people have delivered everything you’ve asked for and Aaron and his team digest it in real time. Looking ahead, while there are still groups like AQAP, Hamas, and the rest who just stay pissed off at us permanently, there doesn’t seem to be any one leader of a stature approaching bin Laden who’s got a master plan to do us harm.”

“So it’s going to be more random events? Is that what you’re suggesting?”

“I wouldn’t call it random, maybe more like episodic. You get one pissed-off Arab like Kashif with enough money who wants to poke us in the eye ‘just because’ and he hires a guy like Perkasa who’s nothing more than a professional hit man, and he sticks it to us. As far as the IC is concerned, and Roger and I agree with them, that’s the model we should anticipate in the future.”

“That’s a tougher one to deal with than just a dozen guys who want to get to paradise in a big hurry,” Williams replied.

“You’re right there, boss. So now that we know what our Geek Tank can do, Roger and the rest of his intel team think we should provide Aaron and his gang more guidance on where to focus most of their efforts looking ahead. They’re good — but they can’t cover everything all of the time. I have some thoughts on where they should be looking, but I wanted to run them by you.”

“I’m glad you’re doing that, Rich. So where do you think we ought to be looking, internationally or domestically?”

“Well, the easy answer is, both. However, the way my group looks at it, there’s probably not going to be another successful attack like the one on the Marine Barracks in Lebanon, or the U.S. embassies in Africa or the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, or the Cole in Aden Harbor.”

“You don’t think so?” Williams asked. He didn’t want to second-guess his planning director, but Middleton was raising important issues.

“No, I don’t, and for a number of reasons. Number one, we’ve gotten a lot smarter. We’ve hardened targets like embassies and consulates, stopped putting our troops in barracks where they can get blown up, and stopped making dumb-ass decisions like refueling ships in Aden Harbor, no offense to the Navy, boss.”

“No offense taken. My predecessor as CENTCOM commander when Cole was hit in October 2000 would tell you the same thing; it was a dumb move, one of our dumbest.”

“Roger that, but the other big thing is this. With targets that hard, any professional hitter is going to walk away from that kind of assignment. Oh, he’ll take the initial cash and scope out the target, but chances are he won’t try to complete the mission. The risk-reward curve wouldn’t be in his favor.”

“OK, fair enough,” Williams replied, “but what about domestically?”

“Completely different story. Something like those NFL attacks could happen tomorrow. As you know, we’ve turned up the gain in the intelligence community to focus on the kinds of things that have to happen to set those types of attacks up. In addition, now that we’ve got our Geek Tank cranked up and running on all cylinders, we should get intelligence and warning before the intelligence community does. Nothing’s foolproof, but we’re not defenseless, either.”

“So what should we do next?”

“Next time you speak with the attorney general or the FBI director, you might want to ask them if they think the FBI’s Critical Incident Response Group is staffed and ready to use the intel our folks provide. We can only push the intel to them; we can’t make them use it. To be honest with you, boss, talking with the staff and especially our folks who’ve gone onsite at the CIRG command center, we’re not sure they’re able — or even willing — to use the intel we push to them. However, we’re convinced Aaron’s team can provide the best actionable intelligence on a domestic threat before anyone else does. Armed with that, the FBI’s CIRG can intervene before we take a hit.”

“That’s a great idea, Rich. To be honest with you, I’ve had the same thoughts but haven’t reached out to the AG or the FBI director on this issue yet — but I will.”

Several days later, Prince Ali al-Wandi was again at his desert site. He was pleased. His men had done their job and done it well. The false ballistic missile site was in place, ready for the prying eyes of the Global Hawk. Now he walked the short distance from the mock-ups of missile launchers and canisters to the blockhouse to see what his engineers and technicians were doing.

“Come in, Your Excellency,” Jawad Makhdoom began. “I think you’ll be pleased with what you see.”

“I know I will. You have done a great deal in an incredibly short time,” al-Wandi replied. He had no particular love for these engineers, but they were loyal to him and were doing precisely what he wanted them to do. Right now that was all that was important.

Al-Wandi cast a sideways glace at a man, a white man, working in the corner of the blockhouse. “Is he doing what you are paying him to do?” the prince asked, his voice stern, his look hard.

“Yes. Yes, he is. We could not pull this off without him,” Makhdoom replied in as reassuring terms as possible.

Like most Saudis, al-Wandi hated infidels, especially American infidels, on Saudi Arabia’s sacred soil. However, Makhdoom had convinced him early on this man, an American engineer from Northrop Grumman, builder of the Global Hawk, was absolutely indispensable. He had patiently explained to the prince that try as they might — and even with the stolen technology he had obtained — his best technicians could not crack all of the security codes they needed to break. Without these codes, they could not make the Global Hawk do precisely what they wanted it to do.

Makhdoom had told the prince he had persuaded the man to leave Northrop Grumman and he would be paid handsomely for his efforts. He felt no need to tell him what he had to do in order to secure the services of this decadent American. The prince did not need to know he had to ensnare the man in a sex scandal. Had Makhdoom released the secret video he took of the American’s escapades, it would surely have caused him to lose his security clearance. That would have ended his employability by Northrop Grumman or any other defense contractor. Sending the video to the man’s wife, as he threatened to do, would surely have ended his marriage. The process didn’t matter; the results did. This former Northrop Grumman technician now worked side by side with his men. The American was doing precisely what Makhdoom needed him to do, and the prince was pleased. That was what really mattered.

Al-Wandi was curious enough to go see what this infidel was working on. Makhdoom darted ahead to ensure the man showed the prince the proper respect. He failed.

“My man tells me you have expert skills,” the prince began, his eyes narrowed and his tone harsh.

“I am doing what you pay me to do,” the man replied, his tone anything but respectful.

“I would hope so. I’m told we are paying you enough money,” the prince shot back.

“Look, you can’t do this without me. What you’re paying me is a pittance for what you’re getting. Deal with it,” the man replied, almost snarling as he looked up and down the prince’s enormous bulk with clear disdain.

“So you say,” the prince replied, seething, as he turned on his heel and walked away. He made a mental note to tell his bodyguard to kill this infidel, slowly, once their operation was complete.

Jawad Makhdoom was eager to placate the prince after that encounter. Although Prince Ali didn’t understand all of the technology, the chief engineer began to explain how they were able to do what they were doing. After a lengthy explanation, Ali al-Wandi was both pacified and pleased. His plan had come together and now he was ready for action.

“We picked this spot well,” Makhdoom continued. “As we predicted, we’re right on the flight path and under the footprint.”

“Good, this is exactly where we want to be,” Ali al-Wandi replied. “We are talking about the right footprint, aren’t we?”

“We are,” the man continued. “This location is far from civilization and the men grumble about that, but we are along the path of the standard route flown by the U.S. Global Hawk.”

“Please assure me that it is the right one,” the prince replied. He had too much riding on this and there could be no mistakes or oversights.

“Yes, it’s the Global Hawk the Americans call Two Bravo,” Makhdoom replied. “It flies from its small aerodrome near Central Command’s forward base in Qatar, then over our desert in a roughly northwesterly direction, and then over Jordan and Syria to the Mediterranean where it reverses course and returns, covering the same route.”

“That’s good, and we’ll soon have something to say about what it sees, won’t we?” al-Wandi replied. The prince’s soft brown eyes conveyed approval but his body language told the man his superior wanted it done right — or else.

Makhdoom knew the prince trusted him to do what was expected, but he felt if he explained how this all worked, Al Wandi would trust him even more.

“Your Excellency, what we’re doing is really quite simple given the technology you’ve provided to us. When Global Hawk Two Bravo passes over this ballistic missile site it digitally records what it sees, just like everything else on its flight path. We’ve calculated the speed of the bird and given the size of the site, the time it appears on the Global Hawk’s digital memory is precisely 26.47 seconds—”

“I had no idea you had it calculated that exactly,” the prince interrupted.

“Oh, we had to be that accurate, Your Excellency. That is critical to know so we can put a 26.47-second time-jump in the digital recording so what the Global Hawk appears to capture is just a continuous picture of an empty desert as it passes over our site.”

“I see.”

“Your Excellency, I can’t emphasize enough how precise our calculations must be. Hours later, when the Global Hawk is just where we want it to be, we insert that 26.47 seconds of video back into its digital memory. Then it ‘sees’ the site just where we want it to be seen, in the Syrian desert, not far from Damascus,” Makhdoom concluded with a bit of a flourish.

Ali al-Wandi allowed himself a slight smile. He knew the Americans would be alarmed the Syrians had this missile, the DF-21D carrier-killer, operational. He just needed them to take action when they did.

“You have done well. I could not have hoped for better results. We’ll put your system into action soon. Can you be ready at a moment’s notice?”

“Yes, we can, Your Excellency, absolutely.”

“Good. I will be back frequently to check your progress,” the prince replied. He was pleased. It was all coming together.

As for the American contractor, he would deal with him soon enough.

Hibah Nawal leaned against the hood of his Range Rover watching his two-dozen kinsmen break down the former pipeline-worker barracks. As they disassembled one portion of the prefabricated building, they used forklifts and portable cranes to load it on the semis parked nearby.

As each semi was fully loaded it drove off in an easterly direction to a location just over forty kilometers away. At that site to the east, other members of the mukhtar’s tribe were reassembling the building according to the specifications Nawal had provided to them. These men from the Rulawa tribe were being paid an extra bonus for this work, and the fact that the new “barracks” was in the middle of the trackless Syrian desert did not concern them. Nor was the fact that they also carried a truckload of camouflage netting to this new location. The mukhtar had given them a nearly impossible deadline to complete their work, and they had no time for wondering.

As Laurie Phillips had explained to her roommate, she was feeling a sense of accomplishment during her daily routine in Normandy’s Combat Direction Center.

Always shorthanded, the watch teams that manned CDC didn’t take long to recognize Laurie’s IT skills, the fact that she was a quick study, and her willingness to work hard. The officers, chief petty officers, and sailors laboring away in CDC looked at her as an increasingly valuable asset. As Laurie sat at the Global Hawk console looking up at the monitor, she reflected how things had come full circle since her days at the National Reconnaissance Office. She recalled her experience the first time she sat down at that console during her first week aboard Normandy.

Laurie had first entered Normandy’s CDC on that day and had walked into a whole new world. Three weeks ago it was an unfamiliar and almost alien place. She was still battling seasickness then, as the Truman strike group had dashed across the Atlantic through the teeth of a howling winter storm. The storm had bounced Normandy around and caused substantial damage to many of the strike group’s ships, but now CDC was home. She felt empowered, but more than that, she felt needed.

Laurie had quickly learned CDC was the nerve center of the ship. It had taken her a while to absorb all she was looking at in the sea of symbols on the four forty-two-inch by forty-two-inch paired projection screens on CDC’s port-side bulkhead. She had also learned to make sense of the detailed information on the five ASTABs, automated status boards, on other bulkheads, as well as all the other screens displaying a wealth of information. She was no longer in information overload; she felt she was part of CDC.

The low, incessant hum of the air conditioning, the dim lighting that cast an eerie, almost sinister, glow throughout CDC, and the flickering green lights on the UYK-21 computers surrounding her had initially made Laurie feel like she was in another world. At first, her brain couldn’t process everything she was seeing; but now it almost felt like second nature each time she sat down at a watch station in CDC.

She recalled the first time she had seen this console and monitor.

“What’s this monitor for?” Laurie had asked, pointing at a small video monitor right above the radar console. “Oh, that’s our UAV monitor,” Brian Clark, Normandy’s CDC officer, had replied.

Laurie was cheered. She had worked on unmanned aerial vehicle projects at National Reconnaissance Office as well as at the Center for Naval Analyses for years and knew quite a bit about them, but her knowledge was based on what she did in a laboratory environment at NRO and CNA. Seeing this actual monitor on a ship might help put her work in perspective.

“I’ll tell you, Laurie,” Mike Clark had continued, “those unmanned aerial vehicles were huge stars during Operations Enduring Freedom and Iraqi Freedom. Real vacuum cleaners bringing in tremendous amounts of information while flying in places we didn’t want to send manned aircraft.”

“And we’re using them now, right?”

“We are. Things haven’t really calmed down in the wake of the major Mideast uprisings in 2011, and the United States needs situational awareness of what’s going on here today more than we ever did. We use ’em all the time for ISR; that stands for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance. We display the streaming video they send right here on this monitor, and on the Navy Tactical Data Consoles at other spots here in CDC. Between the UAV feed and our SPY radar we don’t miss much.”

“That’s great,” Laurie had replied, seeing the clear application of what she had worked on ashore. There, she didn’t really understand how these things were used operationally. It was all just numbers to her, but she was fascinated seeing the big picture in CDC.

Now, weeks later, sitting at this console was providing her with the job satisfaction she sought. It wasn’t her permanent station. Like the officers and crew who stood watch in CDC, she rotated between several watch stations, filling in where there was a need. She was an integral part of a team, something she hadn’t felt since she was working village stabilization operations in Afghanistan as a member of a Marine Corps Cultural Support Team.

Mike Clark walked up and broke her out of her musing. “Don’t forget to save any particularly interesting video and put it into the playback queue so we can look at it later.”

“Will do,” Laurie replied.

She thought of Charlie Bacon, the on-again, off-again boyfriend from her National Reconnaissance Office days she had told Sandee Barron about. She had worked with him on some of the early research on the technologies now used in the comms and sensor packages in these UAVs. Now some of that same technology was flying above the Gulf today. Laurie also thought about her growing friendship with Sandee. It had been a while since she had had a friend with whom she could share virtually everything.

However, this was no time for those thoughts or for her memories of Charlie and of a relationship they let fall apart for all the wrong reasons. Right now Laurie needed to just keep working. It cheered her when Mike Clark added, “You’re doing a hell of a job, Laurie. We’re lucky to have you here, and as things heat up, we’re going to need you even more.”

There was not much cheer, however, in the White House Situation Room, as a small group of the president’s advisors joined him in one of the Sit Room’s two secure conference rooms. The image of General Walt Albin, commander of the United States Central Command, or CENTCOM, covered the LCD screen at the front of the room.

“OK, General Albin, give us the lowdown,” the president said.

“Mr. President, as you know, things never really are completely quiet in this region,” Albin began. “The standoff between the Israelis and the Palestinians is as bad now as it’s ever been, especially after that series of suicide bombings last month. Iran is threatening Iraq again, as they fear the new democratic government we put in place there more than they ever feared Saddam.” Albin paused. “Mr. President, the level of tension has ticked up several notches over the past few weeks. As the new government in Syria tries to consolidate power, they are aligning even more closely with Iran as it jockeys for influence with the Saudis. As you know, Mr. President, Iran gives them massive military support, and, in turn, Syria aligns with them against Saudi Arabia—”

“And let me guess,” Midkiff interrupted, “because they’re pissed at the Saudis, lots of that splashes over on us!”

“Yes, sir,” Albin replied.

President Wyatt Midkiff had gone to the University of Florida on a Navy ROTC scholarship and had done a stint as a naval surface officer right after graduation. He respected his military advisors and didn’t like interrupting them, but his level of frustration with the continuing tensions in the Middle East was palpable.

Midkiff hadn’t been a key player in defense or foreign affairs during his sixteen years in the Senate and four years in the House, but he had absorbed something. Hell, even he saw these heightened tensions between Syria and Saudi Arabia coming back in 2011. Wasn’t anyone else smart enough to get it? Syrian President Bashar al-Assad was the most ruthless leader in suppressing his domestic democracy movement. Assad had slaughtered over one hundred thousand of his countrymen in the process. Even he eventually lost his battle for control and now the Alawite military controlled that country, and the Sunnis who had led the revolution were paying a terrible price.

The government in Syria, a cobbled-together alliance of Alawites, Shias, Druse, and even some Christians, didn’t really have complete control of the country, at least not yet. However, if that government had a single organizing impulse, it was enmity toward Saudi Arabia for killing and continuing to oppress its Shiite minority. The Saudis, who had no love for Syria in the first place, were now especially hostile toward the regime as it continued to oppress its Sunni majority.

Oh, and all that talk about the United States weaning itself off Mideast oil. Ha! From Midkiff’s perspective, that had gone down the tubes with the Deepwater Horizon disaster in 2010.

“Patricia, don’t we have any damn friends over there?” the president asked. He knew the answer to that question, but had to ask it.

“We do, Mr. President,” Secretary of State Patricia Green replied, “but this change in government in Syria, and particularly their hostility toward Saudi Arabia, is the worst possible scenario for us.”

“How bad is it?”

“It’s pretty bad, Mr. President,” Green continued. “Because of our long-term support for the Saudis, we’re getting the worst part of the guilt by association, and the Syrian government has now turned its venom on us.”

“I know all that,” Midkiff continued. “First Iran and Iraq, and now this. What are we doing about it? We can’t just let things spin out of control!”

“We are increasing our presence in Central Command area of responsibility as rapidly as we can, Mr. President,” Jack Bradt, his secretary of defense, reminded him. “General Albin is directing the build-up in-theater. We’re sending the Iranians and the Syrians, and everyone else for that matter, a clear signal that our interests in the Gulf are long term and that we’re prepared to defend those interests with military power.”

Actions were being taken to do exactly that. General Albin had already moved his command headquarters forward from Tampa, Florida, to his Joint Command Center in Al Udeid Air Base, Qatar. A host of forces, including the Truman strike group, were now in the Central Command area of responsibility.

“We’ve had pressure on the Iranians for a long time, Mr. President,” his national security advisor said, “and we’ll send a signal to the Syrians loud and clear.”

The president nodded that he understood.

“General Albin,” the secretary of defense said, directing his focus to the large screen display. “We want you watching the Syrians like a hawk. I don’t trust the bastards, and this isn’t going to be the next administration to get nailed by an attack on the U.S. of A. You tell us about any indications they’re gonna move against us and we’ll preempt that. Do I make myself clear?”

“Abundantly clear, Mr. Secretary,” Albin answered. “We’re using all the overhead imagery assets, principally satellites and UAVs, at our disposal to blanket Syria. It would be helpful, though, if we did have some more UAVs—”

“Great, keep up the good work, General. We’ll get you anything you need,” the secretary of defense interrupted as he turned and looked at the president. “Mr. President, we have our forces moving as quickly as we can. I think General Albin knows he has your full support.”

President Midkiff sat motionless and just nodded as he let the implications of what his advisors were telling him sink in. He recognized the gravity of the situation, but things were moving too fast.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Richard Middleton entered Chase Williams’s office for the early morning meeting wondering if there was a crisis brewing. Williams typically scheduled meetings well in advance and had a smooth, relatively predictable battle rhythm under way at Op-Center. Middleton had opened up his e-mail queue when he arrived at work that morning and found an e-mail from Williams asking to see him ASAP.

“Mornin’, boss. You wanted to see me?”

“Sure, Rich, come in.”

Middleton sat down, searching Williams’s face for clues. There were none. “Anything wrong?”

“No, and I didn’t mean to shake you up with an impromptu meeting, but I have been thinking about our conversation several days ago, the one where we discussed our support for the FBI’s Critical Incident Response Group. You were wondering how we might support them more, given your observations about the potential for another terror-for-hire attack here at home.”

“I’m glad you have, boss. The president’s given you a pretty broad mandate and now that we’ve got our Geek Tank cranked up I think we have a unique and valuable capability. I give Roger and his folks all the credit.”

As he sipped his coffee, Chase Williams thought about the relationship Op-Center had evolved with the FBI and the Critical Incident Response Group, the CIRG.

Op-Center’s relationship with their JSOC unit was one of direct operational control. This was something all concerned were comfortable with given Chase Williams’s extensive operational background as well as the military backgrounds of many of his core Op-Center staff. Williams could order his JSOC unit downrange and count on complete freedom of action.

Their relationship with the FBI CIRG was quite different, and there were strong reasons for that structure.

Americans were well accustomed to U.S. special operations forces working overseas in a covert manner and with the CIA operating in a covert, or even clandestine, manner. However, most U.S. citizens had a completely different attitude regarding what happened on American soil.

Having domestic forces under the full control of a shadowy agency such as Op-Center, no matter how well intentioned those leading Op-Center were, was not something most Americans were ready to support. Even if those actions would be designed to save American lives, that kind of freedom of action was something that moved well beyond the comfort level of most Americans.

So the Memorandum of Understanding, the MOU, between Op-Center, the White House, the Justice Department, and the FBI was crafted with great care. Boiled down to its essential elements, it stipulated that Op-Center would provide any intelligence it gained on international terrorists who could pose a domestic threat, as well as intelligence on any purely domestic threats, to the FBI Critical Incident Response Group. This notification would be made at the staff level and also by the Op-Center director directly to the attorney general or the FBI director. They, and only they, would direct the FBI CIRG to take action on American soil.

Middleton was worried this was not the most effective approach and he said so. “Boss, can you and the president revisit the relationship we have with the Critical Incident Response Group?”

“So you’d like us to have operational control of a CIRG element? Is that how I read what you’re saying? You know the sensitivities regarding action on American soil.”

“I do. Unfortunately, there is just too much at stake if the Justice Department can’t, or won’t, move fast enough. Shame on all of us if we don’t try to fix that.”

“I agree with you, Rich. You’ve laid out a good case. Test the waters with the FBI CIRG at your level and I’ll take it up with the FBI director. If we do our jobs right, they may be accepting of our proposal.”

Aboard Normandy, the watch teams had been at heightened alert ever since the ship passed through the Strait of Hormuz and entered the Arabian Gulf two days earlier. The dash across the Atlantic through a storm, through the Mediterranean, and through Suez and the Red Sea had been exhausting. The rough weather had taken its toll on people and ships alike. But morale aboard the ship had just hit bottom.

After evaluating the damage his ships had suffered during the sprint to the Gulf, the Truman strike group commander, Admiral Flynn, decided to pull most of his ships into port in the Gulf for badly needed repairs. Harry S. Truman had suffered the most damage, especially to many of her aircraft that had blue water crashing over them on her flight deck, and the ship was already pier side in Jabel Ali, near Dubai. Other strike group ships were in port in Bahrain and elsewhere.

Normandy was fortunate in that she had sustained the least damage, but it was a double-edged sword for the crew, as Normandy was assigned to remain at sea as the strike group’s air warfare and missile defense ship. Rumors were sweeping the ship that Captain Pete Blackman, eager to impress his boss, had volunteered to stay at sea while all the other strike group crews enjoyed just a bit of time ashore. Like many rumors on Navy ships, it was not true. In fact, given the heightened tensions in the Gulf, from an operational and tactical point of view, keeping Normandy at sea to defend the other strike group ships from missile attack made sense.

Laurie Phillips was new to all this, and as they jogged around the flight deck the previous afternoon she had asked Sandee Barron about all the grousing going on aboard the ship.

“Sailors bitching. Yeah, I’d say that’s pretty normal,” Sandee had reassured her.

“But they seem really upset,” Laurie had replied. “I mean, my entire four-hour watch rotation in CDC, all I heard was them moaning and complaining about not getting to pull liberty while the crews of all the other ships are ashore.”

“Listen, Laurie. First of all, if sailors ever stop bitching, then it’s time to worry. It’s just part of who they are. Hell, you’ve probably heard them say being on a ship is just like being in jail, except you can drown.”

“Yeah, I have to admit, I had heard that, even before all this ‘we’re not getting any liberty’ carping began,” Laurie had replied.

“Just the nature of the beast, we roll with it.”

Now at her watch station in CDC, Laurie reflected on the conversation with Sandee and how it had helped put things in perspective. What she also noticed was the increased tension and vigilance aboard the ship now that they were in the Gulf.

Weapons stations aboard Normandy were now manned constantly, extra watchstanders were stationed in CDC and on the bridge, and drills were conducted with more purpose. The captain’s secret battle orders were read aloud by the tactical action officer, the TAO, at the beginning of every watch rotation. Laurie had been inserted in the watch rotation to monitor Global Hawk video. Now as a part of the A-team in CDC, she felt a great sense of pride. Despite that, the hours were long. As she viewed the hours of video, often showing nothing as the Global Hawk transited seemingly endless desert expanses, she allowed her mind to wander. She reflected back to her earlier work at the National Reconnaissance Office and Center for Naval Analyses with UAV technology and recalled her relationship with Charlie Bacon, who worked on that technology with her at NRO. Their relationship ultimately crashed upon the rocks of professional competition. Bacon remained at NRO and she left for CNA. She knew he was still at NRO and had been promoted in the wake of her leaving. It was yet another relationship she had bungled. With a concerted effort she focused on her scope and put off thoughts of Charlie Bacon.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

“What is it?” Jawad Makhdoom asked as one of his assistants brought the satellite cell phone to him.

“It’s Prince Ali,” the man whispered, as he held his hand over the phone’s mouthpiece.

Makhdoom took the phone. “Yes, yes. We will do it immediately, Your Excellency. Yes, we are ready in all respects. No, Your Excellency, we are ready right now,” was all his assistant could hear as he listened to Makhdoom’s end of the conversation. The man knew what was happening.

He knew the prince was telling them to take the camouflage netting off the site they had so laboriously built and to activate their system and begin sending time-delay and positioning signals to the sensors on the Global Hawk as it streaked overhead at sixty-five thousand feet above the Saudi desert. As the bird flew on its preprogrammed route, its cameras snapped continuously and recorded precisely what they saw, a ballistic missile site on the desert floor below.

However, when they activated the system, the Global Hawk received a signal, this one from the nondescript blockhouse near the mock DF-21D missile site. This caused the Global Hawk to put the 26.47 second time delay signal into its memory. When the missile site appeared on the monitors of anyone watching the Global Hawk video, it would appear not in the Saudi desert, but at a position east of Damascus, Syria, and hundreds of miles away from where the bird was. That position was where Hibah Nawal’s kinsmen had just finished their assembly project.

Still at sea while the other strike group ships remained in port for repairs, Normandy’s watchstanders had remained at a heightened state of alert as the group’s air warfare and missile defense ship. Captain Pete Blackman worked mightily to ensure his watch teams didn’t lose their edge, but the new “eight-on, eight-off” watch rotation was beginning to take its toll.

It was five hours after the prince’s chief engineer activated his system. Aboard Normandy, a senior enlisted watchstander in the Combat Direction Center saw it first and called out for Lieutenant Junior Grade Mike Clark.

“Lieutenant, come look at this,” the man shouted, barely able to contain his excitement. Clark was quickly at his side.

“It’s right here. I’ve played it back twice. This video is from Global Hawk Two Bravo, and it wasn’t something that was there when it made its normal transit a day ago. It just sprang up out of nowhere,” the man said, seeking reassurance he was not misinterpreting what he was seeing.

“TAO, we need you over here!” Clark said, calling for the tactical action officer.

Soon, almost every watchstander in CDC was huddled around the screen looking at the replay of the Global Hawk video. What the video showed was unmistakable; there was a DF-21D ballistic missile emplacement in the Syrian Desert east of Damascus. Not only that, but it was a missile no one knew the Syrians had, and there were buildings adjacent to the missile launchers that looked like they had been hastily constructed!

Maybe their captain was right about this region being a powder keg ready to explode. This put a new urgency on what they were doing, and on what they were preparing to do.

“Mr. Clark, call the ops officer and get him down here,” the TAO said.

“Yes, sir,” Clark replied.

Laurie Phillips was one of those huddled around the console. She wasn’t on watch and didn’t want to preempt a senior watchstander, so she kept quiet as the entire CDC watch team stared at the Global Hawk video replay as if hypnotized by it.

“What have you got?” the ship’s operations officer shouted as he burst into CDC.

“Sir, this video from the Global Hawk is troubling. Have a look, sir,” the TAO said.

“Lemme up there,” the ops officer said as he pushed past the others to stand right behind the senior watchstander. He sounded exasperated. Normandy’s junior officers had called him dozens of times on this deployment and it always was some false alarm or something they shouldn’t have bothered him with. Still, it went with the territory as ops officer.

“OK, Chief, what ya got?” Watson asked as casually as he could. He’d show some interest, then leave and get back to doing what he was doing before they interrupted him. Everyone else in CDC was silent as the man patiently explained what he was seeing on the Global Hawk video while he replayed it for the ops officer. Watson showed no emotion as he looked at the video. Nevertheless, when he turned around and looked toward the assembled CDC watch team, his wide eyes betrayed his alarm.

“TAO, pass this to the battle watch staff on Truman, ASAP!” he nearly shouted.

“Mr. Clark, start writing that OPREP Three Pinnacle message now!” Watson commanded, referring to the highest priority emergency Operation Report naval message they could send, and one that “bumped” lower priority messages already in the queue. “I’m going to see the captain!”

Laurie’s head was spinning. DF-21D missiles suddenly appeared in the Syrian desert and during one of the worst periods of tension between the United States and Syria? In any case this was happening at the same time U.S. Navy ships were in port and unable to defend themselves from ballistic missiles. What did it all mean, and what were they going to do about it?

Often accused of being bureaucratic and ponderous, the United States military is anything but that when passing critical information up and across the chain of command. The Global Hawk information captured in Normandy’s CDC was rapidly passed to Admiral Flynn’s watch staff on Harry S. Truman in Port Jabel Ali; to the 5th Fleet Command Center in Manama, Bahrain; to the CENTCOM Command Center in Al Udeid Air Base, Qatar; to the National Military Command Center in the Pentagon; and then quickly to the White House Situation Room.

Without waiting to be called, the president’s chief advisors — the secretary of defense, the secretary of state, the secretary of homeland security, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and others — began to converge on the White House Situation Room. In the Sit Room harried NSC staffers rushed to pull this alarming Global Hawk video up on monitors.

Roger McCord showed up unannounced at Chase Williams’s office as he was going through his e-mail inbox.

“Roger?”

“Sorry to interrupt, boss. But we’ve gotten the same intel feed from several sources and we’ve got Aaron and his folks going into overdrive. I just wanted to plug you into a developing situation in the Middle East.”

“Sure. What have you got?”

McCord walked Williams through what had transpired since the Global Hawk video first showed up on the monitor aboard Normandy. The admiral asked few questions. Processing what he was hearing was challenging enough.

“Whew, Roger, that’s a lot to absorb.”

“Sure is, boss.”

“Let’s get the planning cell cranked up.”

“Will do, boss. We’ll come brief you as soon as we have more information.”

Even though he was young, inexperienced, and often asked annoying questions, Hibah Nawal continued to use Feroz Kabudi as his driver. There was a reason and it was loyalty. Feroz’s father was the kinsman who had pressed the hardest to have Nawal elected mukhtar of the Rulawa tribe and the man had asked Nawal to mentor his son.

As Feroz drove the Range Rover to the top of a short sand dune, the mukhtar looked down at the building his men had reassembled. As he looked around there was nothing else but trackless desert as far as the eye could see.

“Drive right down there,” Nawal commanded, pointing to the building and to the group of men sitting in the shade of a large, open truck sitting adjacent to it.

“Yes, Mukhtar,” Feroz replied, having finally been schooled by Nawal to do what he was told and stop asking about things that were none of his business.

As the Range Rover stopped in front of the truck the four men got up.

“It is time,” Nawal began. “Pull all that camouflage netting out of the truck and cover the building completely. Use everything in the truck. I want at least three layers of the netting covering the building.”

“Yes, Mukhtar,” the group’s foreman replied. With that, the four men sprang into action, and Nawal commanded Feroz to drive them back to their tents. The young man did as he was ordered to do, kept his mouth shut, but discreetly shook his head in disbelief.

Aboard Normandy, eight tense hours had passed since the ship sent its first streaming video of the Syrian ballistic missile emplacement and sinister-looking material surrounding a nearby blockhouse up the chain of command. Now the ship had settled back into its routine. For Normandy, already at sea, little seemed to change, but new messages continued to come in signaling the Truman strike group was increasing its level of readiness. Other ships were having their port calls abruptly cut short and Harry S. Truman would have only those storm repairs that could be completed in the next thirty-six to forty-eight hours done. The rest would have to wait.

Laurie had remained in CDC for virtually the entire time since the alert regarding the alarming Global Hawk video footage. She wanted to sleep, but she also wanted to remain in the battle rhythm of the ship so when she assumed her watch she would be as up to speed as possible.

“You ready to relieve me, Ms. Phillips?” the senior chief asked. As one of the A-team watchstanders in CDC, he had been monitoring his Tactical Data Consoles, keeping track of both Aegis radar contacts and the Global Hawk’s video.

“Sure am, Senior Chief,” Laurie replied. He wasn’t typically in the watch rotation right before Laurie’s, but as tensions had risen, Normandy’s senior watch officer had quietly pulled junior sailors out of the CDC watch rotation and replaced them with more senior people. Laurie was now included as a senior person.

“OK, then. Here’s the tactical situation. We’ve been ordered to steam in this box anchored around this position here,” the senior chief began, showing Laurie the center of the rectangular-shaped area Normandy was assigned to stay in. “Mustin has gotten under way from Bahrain and will be in our area in about ten hours. Other ships are getting under way just as fast as they can. Truman will probably take a little longer, maybe thirty-six hours or more, as their storm damage was more extensive. For now, our assignment is to just monitor air traffic in the area as well as keep track of what the Global Hawk is seeing.”

“I think I’ve got it, Senior Chief,” Laurie replied with as much confidence as she could muster. She was pleasantly surprised, no, come to think of it, she was stunned, she had been left in the watch rotation. Maybe her attention to detail and the extra effort she had made to learn her watch duties was paying off.

“Roger. You got it. Show’s yours. You’re going to get Global Hawk video pretty much continuously. Remember, there are three people in each watch section monitoring the video from that bird, but don’t assume anyone else sees what you see. Report anything unusual to the TAO.”

“Will do, Senior Chief. Any idea where the ops officer is? He usually spends a lot of time in here. I’m surprised I haven’t seen him, given what’s going on.”

“Oh, word is he’s been in the CO’s cabin with the captain and the exec. Something big must be cooking for them to be behind closed doors for that long.”

“Think it has anything to do with the Global Hawk video we saw earlier?”

“Yep. Things pretty much smoked up the chain of command as soon as the TAO saw that.”

“Yeah, guess you’re right, Senior.”

“Need me for anything else, Ms. Phillips?”

“No, thanks, Senior Chief … and thanks for filling in the white space for me.”

“No worries then. Gonna hit the rack myself.”

As the senior chief left CDC and Laurie settled into her chair for the eight hours of the watch rotation, she could feel the tension aboard the ship. However, she forced herself to put that in the back of her mind so she could focus on the puzzling Global Hawk video she viewed eight hours ago. During those eight hours, while Normandy’s officers had been involved in a frenzy of activity, Laurie had had time to reflect on what she had seen and she had tried to make some sense of it. She knew something about the optics in the Global Hawk and about the “footprint,” the amount of ground covered by its cameras as it streaked across the sky.

The Global Hawk video they had seen earlier was from the single bird that made its daily flight from Qatar to the Mediterranean and back, Global Hawk Two Bravo. It had to have been a profoundly lucky flight to have stumbled on this missile site all of a sudden, a discovery that had driven the level of activity aboard Normandy, and throughout the Truman strike group, from heightened, right through intense, to frenetic.

When she had viewed that video as one of a dozen people crowded around a small screen eight hours ago, something had seemed a bit odd. She wasn’t sure exactly what it was, just something different. She thought back to some of her work at the National Reconnaissance Office as well as at Center for Naval Analyses with UAV communications and optics packages and knew what she had seen on that footage wasn’t quite right, but she couldn’t put her finger on precisely what it was.

Now she had these displays to herself and a bit of free time, so she kept the current Global Hawk video, which showed nothing remarkable, on one screen of her UAV monitor. She used the playback capability of the system to display the video from eight hours ago on another screen. She played it back once, and then played it back again. She wasn’t sure what she was seeing, but she was determined to keep watching it until she found out what wasn’t right about this bit of video.

Seven time zones away, in the White House Situation Room, NSC junior staffers were scrambling to accommodate the president’s most senior advisors in both secure conference rooms simultaneously. As they did, they continued to field questions from other officials too junior to be included in the top-secret meetings and secure video-teleconferences.

These more junior officials crowded into the tiny Sit Room watch floor both to monitor the action and to be close to their principals should they be needed immediately. Their demand for information and other support was nearly insatiable. Captain Joe Wexler was the Sit Room director, and his ops deputy, Rick George, had seen this all before.

“We’re in a feeding frenzy again, Captain. This place is always a zoo at times like this. Don’t worry; it will calm down eventually, it always does. What do you make of it anyway? We gonna pull the trigger this time?”

Wexler knew George’s decades-long service on the NSC staff made him an invaluable asset. On the other hand, he also realized that after seeing dozens of crises and multiple tempests in a teapot, George took everything in stride, perhaps too much so. It was his job as Situation Room director to strike a balance.

“I don’t know, Rick. We may. What that video shows us is pretty ominous. Put that together with the rhetoric coming from some groups in Syria and I think it spells trouble.”

“Do you?” George asked.

“I do. The Syrians were never our friends to begin with. You remember the Duelfer Report said that Saddam probably transferred missiles and WMD to Syria right before Operation Iraqi Freedom? We also haven’t forgotten that the Syrians weren’t any damn help to us in the aftermath of that war; more insurgents got into Iraq across Syria’s border than from anywhere else.”

“You’re right there.”

“Yes, and now this new government in Syria isn’t that warm to us to begin with and it’s clear they don’t have complete control of their country to boot. The intel we pick up from multiple sources tells us groups like Al Qaeda and Hezbollah are operating with near impunity and maybe even with a wink and a nod from the government.”

“Sure,” George said, “I get all that. Then again we’re talking about just one missile site for God’s sake, not an entire country armed to the teeth to attack us.”

“No, you’re right, but here’s the thing. Those are Chinese-made DF-21D medium-range ballistic missiles. Remember when we first learned China was testing them back in 2006? DoD and Navy officials were catatonic and began calling it the first carrier-killer missile.”

“I remember that, and I also remember it was some of their most jealously guarded technology.”

“It was, but as China’s economy continued to boom and their need for oil became nearly insatiable, they cut a deal with Iran. It was sweet deal for both parties. In return for selling Iran the DF-21D, China locked up some lucrative oil contracts with Iran.”

“Yeah, but it’s a long journey from Iran to Syria, how’d that happen?”

“Look, you’ve had an insider’s view for years regarding what’s going on in the Middle East. It’s no secret that once this new government took over in Syria, Iran wanted to ensure its equities were advanced with the government as well as with elements in the country like Hezbollah. Hell, it’s no stretch at all to think Iran put those DF-21D’s directly in the hands of Hezbollah, knowing that group wouldn’t feel any constraints using them where the new government in Syria just might.”

“No, that all makes sense.”

“And for all we know, those aren’t the only DF-21Ds they have and we’ve got three carrier strike groups in the Central Command area of responsibility in range of them. Forget about worrying over what might happen to our friends in the area. Those missiles have a range of over 1,500 miles and can easily hit Harry S. Truman pier side in Jabel Ali and likely hit our other carriers and big deck amphibious ships in the area as well. We have to take action, and soon.”

“We’re worried about what they can put on them as a warhead, too, aren’t we?”

“We sure as hell are,” Wexler continued. “Those DF-21Ds can carry a nuclear warhead and the fact that the building at that site adjacent to the missile launchers has what appears to be fissionable material in canisters stacked up all around it is the worst possible scenario. We could be looking at ballistic missiles armed with WMD, most likely a radioactive dirty bomb.”

“None of that was there as recently as a week ago.”

“Right,” Wexler continued. “The technology is pretty basic and there’s little doubt Syria can put that all together in almost no time. If they lob just one DF-21D with a dirty nuke warhead and hit anywhere near Harry S. Truman, we’ll lose hundreds, even thousands, of sailors instantly and the ship will be useless for years, maybe decades.”

“So I get it, it’s something we can’t ignore, but…,” George continued, shaking his head, clearly unable to reduce their conundrum to an easy solution.

“The problem is, Rick, for all we know, the Syrian government may just be using the ruse they don’t have complete control of their country. That way, they’ll have plausible deniability if a missile gets launched from their territory.”

“It still comes down to the question, is the threat compelling enough to make us act preemptively? Will the voices within the president’s inner circle wanting action trump those urging caution?”

“Wouldn’t shock me,” Wexler replied. “We’ve been slow to deal with these kinds of threats in the past, and look what happened. Everything I’ve heard from the National Security Council principals coming in and out of here, including the national security advisor, tells me they don’t want to be that slow again. No, my bet is we decapitate Syria, period.”

George had to admit Wexler’s arguments were hard to refute.

In the Presidential Palace in Damascus, Syria, Hafez Shaaban listened to his advisors’ arguments, but said nothing.

“Excellency, the United States is an enemy of our government, don’t you see?” the first man said.

“They didn’t like the Assad regime, but they now complain more about the supposed chaos of our country,” another advisor added.

“Something has caused them to issue threats against us, there’s no doubt about that,” the first man said.

Even though he was an Alawite, Shaaban had been an early leader in the uprising against the Assad dynasty during the Arab Awakening in 2011. Now he led the brittle, cobbled-together coalition of Alawites, Shias, Druse, and Christians that was attempting to govern the country. Unlike other new leaders in the Mideast, Shaaban had never lived abroad. In fact, he had never been outside the borders of Syria, save for regular religious pilgrimages to Saudi Arabia. Shaaban was focused on internal matters. He had much to do inside of Syria’s borders to cure it of so many years of despotic rule.

Finally, he spoke. “The United States was never happy the Assad regime was close to Iran, and they thought when we replaced it, that would change. As you all know, we continue to get a great deal of support from Iran. The United States also thought we might move closer to Saudi Arabia but you know we continue to have issues with those responsible for Islam’s two most holy sites, Mecca and Medina.”

“But, don’t you see,” the second man said, “it’s exactly because we are united with Iran to challenge their Saudi lackeys that the United States now poses a threat to our nation. The Saudis are alarmed and that has translated to their benefactors being alarmed.”

“The Saudi Royal Court had become secularized and their moral leadership of Islam is weakening,” Shaaban replied. “We will fill that void. What the Americans do is not my concern.”

Hafez Shaaban did not want to be distracted by international events while he consolidated power within his country. He knew he didn’t have complete control of all groups within Syria. He feared that the same revolution that brought him into power might be pulling apart his country and making it another Lebanon. He depended on his close advisors to keep track of external events for him. He would listen to them, and he would do what was necessary, but he felt with all his soul his primary focus needed to be within the borders of Syria.

CHAPTER TWENTY

Aboard Normandy, Laurie Phillips was learning more by the minute, she just wasn’t sure precisely what it was. Whether intuition, or a hunch, she knew there was something inconsistent about the Global Hawk video she had replayed a half dozen times.

Laurie reflected a moment on how different her perspective was from that of the officers, chiefs, and sailors aboard Normandy. They were operators, not analysts. They were used to reacting to a situation and taking action. They saw what they saw in the Global Hawk video and took that as ground truth. Now their focus was on informing their chain of command of what they had seen and preparing their ship to carry out the orders of that chain of command should they decide to act on this information. Laurie was coming to realize the officers and crew of Normandy seemed certain their chain of command would take action.

As an analyst, however, Laurie resisted the temptation to jump to the same conclusion the others had drawn from the video footage. She had trained all her post — Marine Corps professional life to do exactly the opposite. She was supposed to challenge every assumption, to look at things in an objective manner, and to put even the most compelling evidence to the closest scrutiny with the ultimate goal of discovering the real truth.

As she subjected the Global Hawk video to this examination, she sensed there was something wrong with the shadows on different parts of the video and with the latitude and longitude displayed in the corner of the streaming video. She hesitated to ask any of the sailors or officers in CDC about these anomalies, even though they were the people who respected her professionally. No, she would figure this out herself.

Where could she go for help to get more information? This was pretty esoteric stuff she was dealing with. The officers on board Normandy were operators and the nuances of how the video was captured, what it conveyed, and its overall validity was not their concern. Laurie knew a lot of the “why” behind the “what” and she had her suspicions about what she was seeing. She just needed to vet her thoughts and suspicions with a professional colleague with a better understanding of these comms and sensor packages. That would help her validate what she was seeing.

Laurie knew precisely who that person was. All it would take would be to simply type his address into the Outlook mail queue, but was that the only way to find out what she wanted to discover? Wasn’t there a less risky way, one that wouldn’t open up old personal and professional wounds? Laurie was oblivious to everything around her in CDC as she found herself frozen in inaction for a tiny eternity.

Seven time zones away, in the White House Situation Room, less than twelve hours since the Global Hawk video had hit the Sit Room staff, the president’s small circle of senior advisors were trying to come to grips with what this all meant, and what, if anything, they could do about it. But their underlying core impulse was to do something. The Sit Room director, Joe Wexler, took little solace in getting it right in his discussions with his deputy, Rick George, the day before. The Sit Room staff had remained in place throughout the night orchestrating video teleconferences, pulling together intelligence reports, and preparing for the onslaught of action anticipated today.

President Wyatt Midkiff opened the meeting with his top advisors in the Sit Room’s larger secure conference room. “All right, ladies and gentlemen. I know it’s early, and we all are anticipating a long day, but this is something we need to deal with in real time. Adam, give us a recap, will you?”

The director of national intelligence, Adam Putnam, recapped what they all already knew. A DF-21D ballistic missile site had sprung up, seemingly overnight, in the Syrian desert, and there appeared to be fissionable material at hand that could be readily fitted into a warhead atop one of the four missiles at the site. Subsequent passes by the Global Hawk confirmed a great deal of activity by men in uniform, day and night, at the site.

The president turned to his secretary of defense, Jack Bradt.

“Jack, we know what we’re looking at. Now what do we make of it?”

“Mr. President, as Adam has described, there’s no new intelligence. We don’t know anything we didn’t know yesterday. We, Defense, and the intelligence community are moving to increase surveillance of Syria with various imagery and communications assets. We’re reasonably confident there won’t be any more surprises.”

“Good, Jack. Good.”

“I guess the only thing to add, Mr. President, and I hesitate to belabor the obvious, and I’ve conferred with State on this,” Bradt continued, nodding toward the secretary of state, “but Syria is a sovereign country. They live in a pretty bad neighborhood, and the flip side of all this is perhaps it’s just something that bears watching.” Bradt knew what he was suggesting to the president was contentious. He just didn’t know how much so.

“Jack, dang it. You’re my SECDEF! If anyone is leaning forward on this, I need it to be you.”

Bradt started to speak, but the president was in broadcast mode.

“Does 2009 ring a bell for anyone? Christmas maybe? Remember some guy named Umar Abdul Mutallab, a.k.a. the underwear bomber. We almost lost Northwest Flight 253 that day and do you remember why? Anyone?”

There was a nanosecond of silence in the Sit Room, so Midkiff plowed ahead.

“Because, as one of my predecessors in this office said, ‘We failed to connect the dots.’ He said it plain as day, and had we lost Northwest Flight 253 I’m pretty sure Barack Obama would have been a one-term president. Adam, I needn’t remind you, one of your predecessors was hustled out of his job as DNI pretty quick over that episode, and nothing happened; the flight crew did stop the underwear bomber before he took down that plane.”

No one spoke. The president’s body language made it clear they shouldn’t.

“So do we see any dots to connect here? We surge our forces forward to the Gulf as is our right in order to deal with threatening behavior from Iran. And just when we have five big deck ships within range of them, then what? Syria, who is clearly Iran’s proxy in the region, just happens to roll out the one missile in the whole God-danged world that can hit a moving, let alone stationary, aircraft carrier or big-deck amphib. Do I really need to have State here give you all a tutorial on the long-standing tension between us and Syria? Or how that has ratcheted up in recent months?”

“Ladies and gentlemen, it’s not just our job, it’s our sworn duty to connect the dots. You can do it on your own, or I’ll do it for you and drag you along kicking and screaming, but you will do it. Syria has demonstrated extreme hostile intent.”

The president turned toward his attorney general.

“Judge, you spent your entire professional life in ‘the law.’ Do you know the difference between first-degree and second-degree murder?”

“I do, Mr. President.”

“Then that’s what we have here. Extreme hostile intent: The difference between first-degree and second-degree murder. Adam, Jack, you have your folks turn up the gain on the intel side. I want an update this afternoon.”

Prince Ali al-Wandi willed himself to be patient, but it was no use. He wanted to know what impact his actions were having and he wanted to know now. Too much hung on the outcome to just let things play out without him taking some measure of control. He would have to influence the final outcome. He needed to know the right time to put the next part of his plan in motion and he couldn’t do that in a vacuum. He had paid enough money to and done enough favors for a few key people and now he was determined to call in those markers. Nothing would be traced to him.

How easy it was with e-mail. Here he was, a member of the extended Saudi royal family, soon to regain the respect of the Saudi king and move into the inner circles of the Saudi royal court. Yet in the Internet world he was a nameless, faceless address, savvy446@aol.com. He composed his e-mail to his associate in the Saudi Embassy in Washington, D.C. Oh, he was paid and paid well, but Ali liked calling him his associate. He was certain he would learn what he needed to know in short order.

Laurie Phillips and Sandee Barron were each hunched over laptops in their tiny stateroom going through work and personal e-mails. The two women had grown closer day by day. Although there were substantial differences in their upbringing, professional backgrounds, and current life-situations, they both looked at the world in basically the same way. Additionally, as two female professionals embarked in a male-dominated ship, there was a natural “we’re in this together” alliance they had struck.

Laurie knew her roommate was in a foul mood, so she was careful about how she initiated the conversation as both stayed hunched over their laptops.

“Still no flying, huh?”

“Shit no,” Sandee replied.

“Any idea when you’ll start again?”

“Maybe when the powers that be figure out how to do more than one thing at a time, or when hell freezes over, whichever happens first.”

“So what’s the deal? The missions you all fly are important. Why did this video put the kibosh on that?”

“Like I said, and as you can probably tell, captain’s pretty hyped up about being in the Gulf as it is. Now that we may have to be either chucking Tomahawk missiles at Syria, or knocking ballistic missiles out of the sky, or both, he just wants to just focus on one thing at one time. He says he doesn’t want to deal with any ‘distractions’ like us flying.”

“Not digging being thought of as a distraction, huh?”

“Nope. Not this aviator. I’m getting rusty just sitting on my hands.”

“Yeah, I kind of get that, too.”

“Look, maybe I’m just bitching, but hey, I’m a sailor too, it’s my right,” she replied, smiling. “But I figured we could be the eyes and ears of the ship while they’re so focused on missile defense, that’s all.”

“No, I agree with you. Maybe he’ll let up after a while,” Laurie replied as cheerfully as possible. “Hey, you got time for a pretty serious question?”

That caused Sandee to stop typing and look right at Laurie.

“Sure.”

“Well, I’m kind of new at this. I’ve got to tell you, this Navy stuff is completely different from everything I experienced in the Marine Corps,” Laurie began. “Anyway, now that you’re not flying I see you coming in and out of CDC now and then so you know all this heightened tension is due to this Global Hawk video we saw yesterday.”

“I’d say you’re right about that.”

“Yeah, well I think I told you, I’ve got a lot of experience with the optics and sensor packages on these systems from my previous work at Center for Naval Analyses and especially at the National Reconnaissance Office. I’ve got to tell you, there is something funny about this video of this missile site, something just not right…”

“Not right?”

“Yeah, Sandee, not right. I mean the shadows around the DF-21D missile site in the Syrian desert aren’t the way I anticipated they would be. Not only that, but the lat and long displayed on the screen kind of jumps right before and after looking at the site. I just don’t know what the problem is, but I’m convinced there is a problem.”

“So what’s the question? It seems like a lot is riding on that Global Hawk video. If it’s not right, well…”

“So the question is, what I should do next? I’ve sort of off-handedly mentioned it to some of the watchstanders in CDC and they’ve just shrugged and kind of given me the ‘it is what it is’ salute. I think I need some validation of what I suspect. I’m thinking of reaching out to one of my former colleagues and ask him about it.”

“You mean someone off the ship?”

“Yeah, a colleague back at the NRO.”

There was a momentary pause as Sandee struggled with her roomie’s question.

“If you’re asking me for advice, Laurie, and I think you are, you might want to try running this up the chain of command on the ship first.”

“Really? Everyone seems so busy they don’t even have time to answer pretty simple questions.”

“Yeah, but Laurie, you gotta understand. If there’s anywhere in the Navy, hell, in all the services, where the control mentality prevails, it’s on a Navy ship at sea. I know you served in the Marine Corps, which is the closest service to the Navy, but this is way different. The responsibility and authority vested in the captain of a Navy ship is like nothing in any of the other services. Like I told you when you first got here, if anything goes wrong on a Navy ship, it all comes back to the captain as far as accountability. Do I agree with the control thing all the time? Hell no. But I get it.”

“No, I sort of see that.”

“Look. It’s like this. In the aviation world we kind of live by the motto ‘It’s easier to beg forgiveness than ask permission.’ I guess you kind of lived by that in the Marine Corps from what you’ve told me about your career, but these guys are different, way different. And you have to understand, this captain is not like a lot of other people. No one has ever handed him anything. He’s succeeded because he’s always taken charge. Maybe the control thing is just part of it. Trust me; I’ve been burned before in my career when I’ve gone around the chain of command on a Navy ship. I’ve learned the hard way.”

“I see.”

“Didn’t you tell me you had a pretty good relationship with the ops officer, Lieutenant Commander Watson? If anyone on the ship needs to know about your suspicions, it’s him, and he can take them right to the captain. Why don’t you start out with him?”

Laurie thought about it a moment and agreed. “I will, Sandee. I’ll do that.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

The phone in the blockhouse rang and Jawad Makhdoom picked it up on the first ring. He had been anticipating the call from Prince Ali and he was almost certain what the prince would tell him.

“Enough time has passed,” the prince said. “Neutralize the site and let me know when you have completed your work.”

“Yes, we will do it immediately.”

Makhdoom rousted his men, shouting, “That was Prince Ali. Neutralize the site now. Let’s get moving.”

There was a frenzy of activity as his men swung into action. They had practiced this and they knew their roles. No other orders needed to be given.

Ali al-Wandi’s call to the Saudi Embassy in Washington the day before had not been to some bureaucrat or minor diplomat. He had spoken with the man in the embassy who held the science and technology portfolio. He paid him enough to be responsive to his calls.

That man had served in the embassy for a number of years. As the S&T expert he had been instrumental in brokering the US$60 billion deal in 2011 in which the United States sold the Saudis platforms and weapons they sorely needed, many of them representing the cutting edge of American military technology.

The United States, and especially American defense contractors, had been eager to close this deal with the Saudis and had granted this man unusual access and information regarding the capabilities of key U.S. military technology. This Saudi was lavish with his gifts to important officials at some of the biggest defense contractors. They, in turn, had granted him unprecedented entree. The man often boasted, and with good reason, he knew the specifications of the best U.S. military equipment better than high-ranking generals and admirals did.

What Ali al-Wandi wanted to know, and what the man had readily delivered, was how long it would take the U.S. military to rush other overhead assets to the Gulf to confirm what Global Hawk Two Bravo had seen in the Syrian desert. He also wanted to know how long it would take the United States to redirect one of the military’s satellites to peer down on the site.

Once he had his answer, al-Wandi had calculated how long he could leave his missile site in place before what Global Hawk Two Bravo was seeing was contradicted by another overhead asset. He knew how long it would take his men to disassemble and cover up the DF-21D missile site, added a few hours fudge factor just in case, and made the call to his chief engineer.

Now, minutes after his call, Jawad Makhdoom had his men disassembling the dummy missiles and fake missile launchers and putting them into the low-slung blockhouse. They then covered the blockhouse with roll after roll of camouflage netting and then for good measure used powerful blowers to blow sand over the blockhouse.

“What do you think?” his number two man asked Makhdoom.

“I think we’ve got it covered pretty well. Standing here, and maybe looking down from a few thousand feet, you can still tell something is here, but from the altitude the Global Hawk flies, it will just look like sand.”

“Are we going to stop hacking the Global Hawk’s sensors now?”

“Already done, and at the precise time we calculated.”

“Then why does Prince Ali want us to stay here,” the man asked. “Isn’t our work over?”

“My friend, we must never question the prince. He may want us to activate the site again, and while it is true I don’t need all of you here while I do this, the prince has instructed me to start playing the tapes he has prepared. For now, we wait.”

“Tapes?” the man asked.

“Yes, tapes of some constructed conversations we want the Americans to overhear, but I’ve told you enough already. The prince doesn’t want this information generally known.”

The man feigned ignorance, but living in the tight quarters of the blockhouse, there really were no secrets. The prince had paid someone to tape conversations that sounded as if they were coming from the Syrian army high command. The ominous-sounding exchanges were designed to make the Americans think Syria had multiple DF-21D sites in its vast desert and that it was on the verge of launching her DF-21D missiles at U.S. Navy ships in the Gulf.

“All right then,” the man replied, “but can we burn the Syrian army uniforms we have been wearing? The men are still angry they were made to wear them when they were outside the blockhouse.”

“Not yet. Not yet.”

On board Normandy, Laurie Phillips knew she hadn’t done everything she needed to do, but she was on a mission to do just that. She had mustered the gumption to take her roommate’s advice and go see Normandy’s ops officer and relate her concerns to him. Now, ten minutes after knocking on his stateroom door and having him listen to her worries about the video, she waited for Neil Watson to reply to her almost nonstop story.

“Ms. Phillips, you’ve explained what you’ve observed and related your suspicions. I’ve got to tell you, this is a lot to absorb. And you say you’ve shared this with some of my folks in CDC, and no one has a really strong take on this either way?”

“I think that about sums it up, Commander. I’m just not sure, but I am concerned something’s not just right.”

“All right then, we need to take this to the captain. He’ll make the call.”

“Captain, a moment?” Neil Watson asked as he appeared at the doorway of the captain’s at-sea cabin with Laurie Phillips in tow.

“Sure, Ops O, what you got?”

“Captain, well, it concerns the Global Hawk video showing that DF-21D missile site in Syria. Ms. Phillips has some concerns she shared with me and we wanted to bring them to your attention.”

That wasn’t the affirming introduction Laurie was looking for, but it would have to do.

“Concerns, Ms. Phillips?”

“Yes, Captain,” Laurie began, trying to be as respectful and diplomatic as possible. She certainly hadn’t rehearsed this, and if she had she might not have had the courage to say anything at all.

“Captain, we have looked repeatedly at the Global Hawk video, or I should say I have, and well, sir, it appears this video may not be what we think it is. What I mean is, well … it could be presenting false information, and since it is information that seems to be sending the strike group into overdrive, we should give it a second look.” This wasn’t coming out precisely the way Laurie wanted it to. She tried to regroup. “Sir, I’ve looked at the video many times, and there appear to be some issues with the location of what it is taking pictures of. I mean to say, sir, well, it doesn’t seem that based on the scenes shot earlier in the flight and the scenes shot later in the flight that the location of the DF-21D missile site is where this video is saying that it is.”

Laurie tried to keep eye contact with Blackman as her words poured out, but occasionally she also cast a furtive glance at Neil Watson for support. However, the ops officer just looked at his shoes.

“In any event, Captain,” Laurie continued, “since it appears the evidence we have against Syria is based solely on this video, perhaps we ought to tell our leaders there might be some issues with it.” Laurie mentally kicked herself for letting her voice trail off a bit as she finished her last sentence.

Captain Blackman stared at Laurie as if he had been shot.

“Well, Ms. Phillips,” Blackman began, “thank you for that … that … what is it you told us you came here to do?… that analysis.”

“Yes, sir, Captain. Not analysis, not yet, anyway, just a suspicion.”

“Do any of my other professionals in CDC share your suspicions? Mr. Watson, do they?”

“Well, not really, Captain; we wanted to tell you first.”

Laurie jumped in. “Captain, the point is there appears to be so much riding on this video, maybe even us attacking Syria, that I just think we ought to take a better look at this before acting.”

“Anything else, Ms. Phillips?”

Blackman’s tone and body language weren’t necessary hostile; they conveyed astonishment more than anything else. Yet they weren’t friendly, either.

“No, Captain.”

“OK, look. Let me tell you just a few things about the geopolitics here, Ms. Phillips,” Blackman continued, his tone almost tutorial. “These folks don’t really like us to begin with. They don’t like our form of democracy and they don’t like us telling them how to run their countries. Now, a long time ago we decided these repressive regimes were a hot bed for Wahhabi radicalism and a breeding ground for terrorism, a lot of it pointed toward us.”

Laurie worked mightily to keep eye contact with Blackman.

“So you see, Ms. Phillips, it’s perfectly logical to think the leadership in Damascus, a leadership who’s clearly taking orders from Tehran, has it in for us. When they stood up to the Assad regime we didn’t give them the same degree of support we provided to the rebels in Libya. They know we don’t like their alliance with Iran and they know we sure as hell don’t like them threatening our friends in Saudi Arabia. But they may be dense enough to think we’ll just stand by and let them have their way. Trouble is, they didn’t reckon with the United States of America or the United States Navy!”

Blackman was now becoming agitated.

“Now, about this video, we do know what the hell we’re looking at and we do know what the hell we are supposed to do with it. I don’t need anyone, and I mean anyone, second-guessing what we’re doing, especially someone who is a guest on my ship. And I want to be clear on this Ms. Phillips; I don’t need anyone trying to foist some cockamamie theory on us in the middle of a war zone.”

Blackman paused to frame his thoughts, but not long enough for Laurie to jump in.

“Look, Ms. Phillips, I give you credit for coming forward. You’re from CNA so I also give you credit for knowing a little bit about the Navy. There are only two ballistic missile defense ships in the strike group, us and Mustin. However, Mustin has a casualty to her SPY radar that might not get fixed for days; the part has to come all the way from the United States.”

Blackman paused again.

“That leaves us aboard Normandy as the only defense against those DF-21Ds should Syria decide to lob just one of them at Truman, or any other Navy ships within range. So right now, Ms. Phillips, I gotta tell you, I’m a little preoccupied with ensuring that Normandy does her job and protects American lives. You get that, don’t you?”

“Yes, Captain, I…,” Laurie stammered.

“Then help me do my job, OK? Just do your job. We’re way past the analysis stage here. We may be in a fight at any moment.”

Blackman’s tone had softened a bit, and Laurie began to get it. It wasn’t that he was a jerk or that he didn’t respect civilian techies or didn’t respect her because she was a woman. It was that what she was suggesting was so far outside the box of his background and experience that he couldn’t fit what she was saying into his worldview.

“Captain, thank you. I think Ms. Phillips gets it. We’re sorry to have bothered you.”

“No bother, Ops O. I thank you both for coming forward, but you know what our orders are.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Ms. Phillips?”

“Yes, sir, Captain.”

Laurie’s head was spinning as she and the ops officer left the captain’s at-sea cabin. He needed proof. OK. She would get him proof.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Sandee Barron was sitting at her desk going through her e-mail queue when the door to their stateroom flew open and Laurie Phillips stormed in.

“Hey,” Sandee began, but caught herself. Something was wrong.

“Well, that went over like a fart in church.”

“What?”

“Just came from seeing the captain about the Global Hawk Video—”

“Lemme guess,” Sandee interrupted. “He didn’t see it your way?”

It had been Sandee’s idea for Laurie to take this up Normandy’s chain of command. She felt invested in what Laurie was trying to do. She had evidently given her a bum gouge.

“That’s an understatement! I got ‘schooled’ in how things work around here. He didn’t chew me out or anything, but I gotta think any creds I’ve built up with him just went all to hell. I got patted on the head, dismissed and sent away to be a good girl.”

“Was it that bad, really,” Sandee asked, trying to be a good listener, but also trying to help her roommate work through this. She could tell she was steaming.

“I’m just pissed I didn’t have my shit together. I was stammering and stuttering. I can see why he didn’t buy what I was saying.”

“Look,” Sandee replied, slamming her laptop closed. “Let’s work through this together. Tell me the whole story from the beginning.”

Laurie poured out the details of her encounter. After a heated fifteen minutes, they were of like mind. Sandee said it first.

“You were right the first time, Laurie. You need to reach out to your friend at the National Reconnaissance Office.”

“Boss, you ready for us?”

“Come in, fellas.”

Roger McCord, Brian Dawson, Hector Rodriquez, and Aaron Bleich entered Chase Williams’s office. Williams rose and motioned for them to sit at the small conference table.

“Well, you all have my attention. Let’s hear it.”

“Bottom line up front,” McCord began. “Based on the flow of intelligence we have, we think we need to surge our JSOC team forward. Things were hot enough in the Middle East to begin with and now this Syrian missile thing has everyone going high order.”

“Think this could be the real deal? Is it something where we’ll need to give the president options?” Williams asked.

“It might be, boss. Brian and I have already engaged our logistics director and we want the N4 to start looking into this, and I’ve asked Aaron here to get the Geek Tank to focus their algorithms, anticipatory intelligence systems, and decision support software more intently on the Middle East. However, we wanted to bring this to you before going much further.”

“I appreciate it, boys. Aaron, your folks ready to wet their beaks on this one?

“Yes, sir, we are.”

If there was one person at Op-Center Chase Williams was still working to warm up to, it was McCord’s networks assistant and Geek Tank leader, Aaron Bleich. He was McCord’s “wunderkind” and he wanted to give his intelligence director the autonomy to run his own shop, but Williams had to admit to himself he still found Bleich to be an odd duck. He knew Bleich was McCord’s MVP and de facto number two, but for the love of Mike, this kid was only thirty-two years old. Nevertheless, Williams had to admit that Bleich was just flat, scary brilliant.

Recruited via a gaming company front at San Diego’s annual Comic-Con International Convention, Aaron Bleich grew up as a math and computer science prodigy. He skipped several grades in grammar school, attended the exclusive Francis Parker High School in San Diego, and won a full ride to Stanford. There, he dazzled Nobel Prize — winning professors with his computer and network skills.

On the surface, he was Op-Center’s point man for protecting Op-Center’s networks from external attack or internal compromise and also leader of the Geek Tank. Known only to Williams and McCord, he was also their chief hacker; he could get deep into any foreign or, for that matter, domestic network for information — or do irreparable damage. Bleich’s skills were so prized that McCord was able to convince Williams and Sullivan to hire him on as a contractor and pay him deep into six figures. Williams had to admit that because Bleich was so smart, the kids in the Geek Tank respected his brilliance, and he had somehow molded them into a cohesive team.

During his many visits to the Geek Tank, Williams had learned Bleich was unmarried, with few friends except a small circle of gamers with skills like his, and that he lived alone in a third floor Capitol Hill walkup. His only indulgence was a 200-gallon exotic fish tank he surreptitiously had installed in his rental apartment.

“You’re not going to ask Ms. Sullivan to buy you a whole new rack of servers just to take on this mission, are you?” Williams asked with a smile.

“No, sir,” Bleich replied, “but we are going to have to crash a bit and tune up some of our algorithms to alert us to what’s important and what’s not. There’s already an overwhelming amount of intel coming from that theater, as I’m sure you know, sir. Despite that, we’ll get it done, no problem.”

Confidence, Williams thought. This kid has confidence.

“I appreciate that, Aaron. OK, let’s get to it. Brian, I’d like you and the logistics director to brief me soon on your surge plans. I need to send a POTUS/OC Eyes Only memo to the president and we need to bring the combatant commander into the loop.”

“Will do, boss.”

Laurie Phillips felt empowered after her talk with Sandee Barron. She was several years older than Sandee but she found herself continually drawn to her. What was it? Her presence and her confidence, that’s what it was. Laurie didn’t feel she had a great deal of either of those attributes and she looked to Sandee for those qualities. She knew what she needed to do, and she didn’t have a lot of time to futz around thinking about it; things were moving too fast. However, this was bringing back bad memories. What was it? Was it a mixing of the personal and the professional that made her hesitate? Her relationship with Charlie had been great, and it was vastly more than just sex, though she admitted to herself that had been especially good.

Laurie had worked on some of the same projects Charlie did at the National Reconnaissance Office. The primary focus of their efforts was working with sensor and communications packages for UAVs. She smiled as she remembered how they had begun working together as colleagues, and how over time their collegial relationship had blossomed into much more. Yet there came a point when the projects they were working on began to compete for the same funding. There had been a major blowup between the two of them in front of their division director — and he had sided with Charlie.

As more of her most important projects lost out to Charlie’s, and as he continued to move up at the National Reconnaissance Office, she became more and more marginalized. The friction caused them to stop dating. He didn’t want to stop. She called it off. Her professional pride and her ego had gotten in the way.

Laurie’s thoughts turned back to the present. Now she needed Charlie’s help. Would he help her? She had to find out.

The mood was grim as the president’s advisors sat around the table in one of the Situation Room’s secure conference rooms.

“All right, Jack, you talked with General Albin a few hours ago. What’s his latest assessment?”

“Mr. President, as you’ve been briefed already,” Midkiff’s secretary of defense, Jack Bradt, began, “Syria took down that DF-21D site a few hours ago. We suspect, and the communications intercepts we’ve gotten support that suspicion, they knew we had seen it with our overhead assets so they took it down and moved it.”

“Moved it where?” the president asked.

“We’re still assessing that, Mr. President,” Bradt continued, “but those same communications intercepts strongly suggest this wasn’t the only DF-21D site Syria erected. We are rushing all the overhead assets we can to the Gulf right now, Mr. President, and we’re giving General Albin everything he’s asking for.”

“Good, good,” Midkiff replied.

“The other thing, Mr. President, as we’ve briefed you before, this might not be the Syrian government doing this at all. Our alternative theory is their government simply has to know that given tensions in the region, the United States would not sit idly by while they put DF-21D missiles in the field, missiles that directly threaten U.S. forces in the area, let alone U.S. allies. They’re not that stupid.”

“Maybe they are,” the president groused.

“Maybe, Mr. President, but the problem is, we just don’t know. As you’re aware, since the civil war in that nation, Syria has become almost as closed a society as North Korea so there is no one on the ground there, not even international news media, who can confirm what the Global Hawk sees.”

“I take your point, Jack.”

“Thank you, Mr. President, and as you know, there have been strident denials by the Syrian government that it even has these missiles, let alone has them deployed in a threatening manner. One possibility is that President Shaaban is truly not in control of all of its territory. It may be that in some ways Syria is becoming like Lebanon, and a rogue group has placed the missiles there and intends to use them to at least threaten Western interests.”

“I don’t discount anything you say, Jack, but I’m worried about our forces right now, not what President Shaaban can or can’t control in his own country.”

“But what about Truman?” Midkiff’s national security advisor, Trevor Harward, asked. “Can’t General Albin get the carrier under way sooner? She’s the biggest, most inviting, target.”

“He, and the Navy, are working on it,” Bradt replied, “but once they started tearing her apart to repair the storm damage, they found more hidden damage. They are only making the most essential repairs, but even working 24/7, it will be a good forty-eight hours before they can get the ship under way.”

“Get me more intel on Syria, Jack, and get if for me ASAP,” the president said.

As she typed her message, Laurie Phillips felt her eyes welling up. It had been the best relationship she had ever been in. Recalling it was more painful than she had imagined it would be.

If there was any ray of sunshine in this, she had unburdened herself to Sandee, telling her everything about the relationship with Charlie. She didn’t know what quality it was: Empathy? The ability to walk in her shoes? Just being a friend? Whatever it was, she had needed Sandee and she had come through.

She looked at the message in her e-mail queue and considered it for a final time.

She had reread the e-mail multiple times, and especially the last line, but she knew she needed to move forward — and quickly. She pushed SEND.

His advisors had to persist, and then persist some more, before Hafez Shaaban had relented and agreed to fly to Teheran and meet with Iran’s Grand Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Hosseini Khamenei. What they needed to talk about had to be done in person.

Shaaban knew the grand ayatollah was a religious man who had renounced wealth, but the limo that had picked him up at Teheran’s Imam Khomeini International Airport was something fit for a Saudi prince. Now he stood outside of the grand ayatollah’s office in the Niavaran Palace, which was opulent by any standard. Shaaban began to understand why Iran had been able to bankroll Syria for so many years.

“Hafez Shaaban, my brother, may Allah’s blessings be with you,” Grand Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Hosseini Khamenei said as he walked up to Shaaban and embraced him in the traditional manner.

“And with you, Grand Ayatollah, thank you for agreeing to meet with me, and on such short notice.”

“How may I help you?”

“First, Grand Ayatollah, you know I have been in office for but a short time, but I am aware of the long history of your country helping ours. We are in your debt and we remain your most loyal ally here in the region.”

“And we yours. Go on, please.”

“You know well our long-standing quarrel with the Saudis, but now their patrons, the Americans, are threatening us. I am afraid I must come to you for help.”

“Whatever we can do, with Allah’s help.”

With that, Hafez Shaaban poured out what his intelligence services had told him about America’s threatening moves against Syria. Of course, Ali Hosseini Khamenei’s intelligence sources were vastly superior to his, but he let the younger man pour out his story. The more Ali Hosseini Khamenei listened, the more he saw opportunity in the issues raised by Shaaban. Yes, some of what he was prepared to do would help take American pressure off Iran’s proxy, but more importantly, it would put Iran in a position to be the most powerful nation in the Gulf. It was something the Americans and their Saudi lackeys had denied them for far too long.

Laurie had been cheered when Charlie had gotten back to her, but she was pleasantly stunned by what he said in his reply.

Laurie headed for CDC and for a SIPRNET terminal, a node the Department of Defense and Department of State Secure Internet Protocol Router Network of interconnected computer systems used to transmit information up to the secret level. She wanted to get this suspect video to Charlie — and fast.

Miss you. Wow.