Rogue Element

NSA Pacific HQ, Helemanu, Oahu, Hawaii, 2050 Zulu, Tuesday, 28 April

The NSA is the world’s most sophisticated eavesdropper. It keeps the airwaves safe for Uncle Sam, gathering information any way that it can, mostly through an extensive battery of antennae dishes scattered around the world. The dishes harvest the low frequency signals, the frequency range generally preferred by the world’s military. If atmospheric conditions are right, these can bounce off the biggest dish of all, the earth’s ionosphere. The higher frequency transmissions are trickier, the line-of-sight comms. To patrol this frequency range, the NSA deploys all manner of assets, including a flotilla of spy ships masquerading as ocean survey vessels and, of course, spy planes.

The NSA monitors most frequencies in the radio and microwave spectra around the clock; phone and Internet lines are also filtered. Even general phone communications are regularly sampled. The bottom line is, very little communication escapes the NSA, especially when attempts are made to hide it. If you’re Milly chatting to Maude in the suburbs of Atlanta, Georgia, there’s a good chance the NSA knows your gossip. If you’re a Russian tank commander positioning assets around a Chechen enclave, you can guarantee it.

Occasionally, the NSA picks up transmissions that are only meaningful in the context of hindsight, such as the radio clicks passed between an F-16 and a ground controller in Indonesian airspace in the early morning of Tuesday, 28 April.

Ruth Styles was aware that the Indonesian air force had been particularly active for some time, trying to regain its edge after the recession that gutted the Asian Tiger economies and the subsequent fiscal constraints imposed by the World Bank. Perhaps it was this knowledge that activated the IAE’s personal radar. She had already passed on some recent interceptions from Indonesia to HQ in Maryland. There was something irregular about them. Why? Had she been asked, Ruth wouldn’t have known, but she always listened to her inner voice, no matter how faint its call.

Ruth tried to remember who the analyst for South-East Asia was. Wasn’t it Gioco? Hadn’t she met him at one of the conferences held to foster interdepartmental cooperation within COMINT, the communications intelligence department of the NSA? She tapped the enquiry into the box. The answer was instantaneous. Yes, Bob Gioco: thoughtful, intelligent, hard-working. Unusual name for a black man though, she thought.