Red Metal

CHAPTER 18

Thirty-two-year-old Captain Apollo Arc-Blanchette of the 13th Parachute Dragoon Regiment hung up his cell phone, then rolled his chair back and put his boots up on his desk. His tiny office here at his barracks was spartan, but he had certainly made do with worse setups in worse locations, so he didn’t complain.

His battalion was winding down its six-month rotation as the duty unit at NATO’s Very High Readiness Joint Task Force. He and his men would return to France, and Germany’s Kommando Spezialkräfte unit would take over.

He’d been deployed in combat in Afghanistan multiple times, and he’d seen significant action during all his tours. He and his men had the battle scars to prove they were among Europe’s most elite unit of special forces, and even though they’d done nothing more than train here in Brussels over the past six months, he was proud to have served NATO.

A rotation with NATO’s VJTF was not the coveted Afghanistan deployment his men had wanted; they were hoping for a chance to fire real lead at a thinking enemy who fought back. But it was better than sitting at home at Camp de Souge, where the ammo was scarce, the live-fire training was hampered by constant fire danger ratings, and Apollo spent the majority of his time writing reports and filling out requisition forms.

But Apollo wasn’t thinking about any of this right now. No, he was thinking about his dad.

He didn’t know what to make of his father’s assertion that something weird was going on down in Africa. It was not that he doubted his father’s conviction that something was up; it was just that he worried his dad had been out in the field so long, he might have started to see ghosts.

Apollo and his sister, Claudette, had dealt with Pascal’s erratic and often spontaneous world traveling for their entire lives. The kids had thought their dad to be a commercial trade representative for the French Foreign Ministry, and it wasn’t until Apollo had received très secret défense clearance, the French version of “top secret,” that he discovered his father had spent the past forty years working for the Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure.

The younger Arc-Blanchette tried not to worry about his dad too much. Pascal had been taking care of himself for quite some time on his own in many foreign lands. He spoke eight languages with near perfect fluency, although he could be flighty, forgetful, and as unconventional a father as ever existed.

Pascal’s defense to his son’s accusations that he was “an absentminded old fool” was always to quote the French author Voltaire: “How pleasant it is for a father to sit at his child’s board. It is like an aged man reclining under the shadow of an oak which he has planted.”

His dad was too smart for his own good, Apollo always thought. And in his own way, by joining the French special forces, Apollo was following in his father’s footsteps, since they were both servants of the French government, although Apollo employed guns and helicopters, while his father used dead drops and encrypted phones.

Apollo’s mother was a society woman from Paris who had left Pascal for another man when Apollo was too young to remember her. As a boy, Apollo had strayed away from his sister’s and father’s inclination to read and write, and had instead gravitated toward organized sports and physical activity. He was the total opposite of his father, who had never engaged in a minute of nonmandatory fitness in his life.

The elder Arc-Blanchette always wanted his son to become a writer or a teacher, but Apollo instead joined the military and then the special forces. He loved the action, gravitated to the danger, and had flourished in the physical challenges and demands of the 13th Parachute Dragoon Regiment well enough that he had gained high regard from his French Army superiors.

And Apollo knew that his father worried about him because of the dangers of his job.

These and other thoughts gathered in his mind, as they often did just after he talked to his father. But today he couldn’t let go of his dad’s strange ramblings.

“Russian Spetsnaz in Djibouti,” he said out loud at his desk, as if hearing it might help him understand.

Apollo decided to use his position as team leader for NATO’s Very High Readiness Joint Task Force to see whether there was anything amiss down in Africa that might impact his father. He climbed out of his chair, left his office, and walked across the small Belgian special forces helo landing pads toward the ultra-classified areas of the base.

Soon he stepped into the VJTF’s joint intelligence center. A perk of being assigned to the duty squadron meant unlimited access to classified information. The downside these days meant fighting off his men’s boredom, since everything interesting going on seemed to be happening in the Strait of Taiwan.

Ah, good, thought Apollo on entering the JIC. His friend Lieutenant Luca Scarpetti, an Italian intelligence officer, was on watch.

“Hey, Luca.” Apollo scanned the place; the usually bustling highly classified intelligence center for NATO was all but empty. “I see they have you working over the Christmas holiday.”

“Yes, but it means I get days off for the… how you say, La Festa Degli Innamorati. The big festival of sexy.”

“I’m not sure that means what you think it does.”

“No, no, my friend, it is the day — how you say, the day for the lovers?”

“Oh, St. Valentine’s Day.”

“Yes, this. Now, how can I help you?”

“I heard a rumor there were some Russian Spetsnaz guys down in Africa. Djibouti City. You wouldn’t know anything about that, would you?”

“The United States AFRICOM headquarters put out a bulletin and asked all NATO allies to look out for any Russian-tagged cell phones and satellite phones broadcasting from Africa. We are monitoring, but no one is making a big deal. Russia is always, how you say, making little plans. Tutto a posto—it’s all okay?”

“Do you have a way to see Russian sat phones in Africa?”

“Sì.”

“Okay, can you pull them up?”

“I can show you the ones that we know about — you have the clearance — but you must, you know, keep the water in your mouth.”

“Keep it to myself, you mean? Yes, of course. I just want to see if my old man is crazy.”

“‘See if my old man is crazy’? French expression. It’s like… ‘Check it out’? See, even in your country some things don’t translate too well.”

Lieutenant Scarpetti pulled up the brief on North Africa off of the NATO intelligence system called CENTRIXS. Checking through a few briefs, he found the one he was looking for. Several signals intelligence units had put it together and it showed a map slice of the European and African hemisphere. Colored dots in Africa and a few in Russia denoted individual satellite phones and their usage over a period of time.

Scarpetti said, “The Chinese build back doors into the cell phone, and the Russians buy all their secret sat phones from the Chinese. We exploit the Chinese back doors. Someone built a batch intercept and tagged all the Russian sat phones in North Africa.”

“What are the dots still in Russia?”

“Probably Russian sat phones that were in Africa but have returned to Russia.”

Apollo noticed that one of the red dots was in Western Europe. “So, what’s this?”

“A stray cat? Perhaps a Russian general is on vacation, skiing.” Lieutenant Scarpetti laughed at his joke.

“If they are Chinese-made sat phones given to Spetsnaz, they are probably using them for a specific purpose. Did all these phones show up at the same time?”

“I can fish up the raw data. You wait.” Luca set a search for the original raw intelligence on the CENTRIXS system and a moment later pulled up a collection matrix. It was basically a chart with times and dates and lists of the units, or asset tags that helped identify each of the phones, even if someone switched the SIM cards or changed to a different satellite phone provider.

Luca cocked his head. “Here. This is unusual. They are all turned on in the same week. In the last ten days.”

Apollo saw that two of the tagged sat phones were in Djibouti City.

“Are you sure?” Apollo asked.

“Very sure.”

“So something new and Russian is happening in the Horn of Africa… The old man was right.”

“Again with the old man. But look here, this one, the one stray cat you saw on the master slide. It was yesterday. And it was in the German Alps.”

“Where, exactly?”

“I pull up the JIC intercepts. We can see the same data they do at the signals intelligence branch.” Luca punched up a map of Europe on the combined intelligence common operating picture. Like Google Earth, it showed intelligence collections in different zones of the world. He cleared away all layers but signals intelligence, then cut and pasted the asset code for the Russian satellite phone being used in Europe. A pulsing red dot showed up in Germany. “This one is radiating right now.”

“Someone is using it now?”

“Yes. Looks like they are talking on the phone.”

“Can you zoom in on the location?”

“But of course. Here…” Luca used the mouse wheel to scroll in, zooming ever closer to the red dot. Then the dot disappeared.

“Wait — is it lost?”

“No, they just hung up. But I can still see where it was. We had the position from the satellites. Sometimes we use several satellites and fake out the phone. This one was tasked to European signals intelligence; they do good work, so they at least should be able to give us a location. There — you see, it is in the German and Austrian Alps. Right on this mountaintop here, called… Zugspitze. Are you going to check it? You are still the alert force, are you not?”

“Yeah,” Apollo said, looking at the screen. “I might go take a look. It’s really curious that a Russian Spetsnaz sat phone tagged for North Africa has ended up in the Alps.”

“You think the higher-ups will have trouble with you trooping around the Alps?”

“It’s within my authority. No harm in going to just check it out. The German KSK guys aren’t fully ready to launch for contingencies yet.”

“Okay, Apollo. Hey, let me know if you want to go to the sexy festival. It would be so much fun, and we melt the girls’ hearts, you and me both.”

Apollo nodded and smiled. He patted his Italian buddy on the back, then stepped out of the JIC, still thinking about the odd connection between his father’s observations and the stray Russian sat phone in the Alps.