Shadow Watch

NINETEEN

It was 2:00 P.M. Pacific Daylight Time, April twenty-third, in San Jose, California.

It was 5:00 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time in Pensacola, Florida.

It was 6:00 P.M. Brazilian Daylight Time in the central Pantanal.

It was 3:00 A.M. the following day, April twenty-fourth, in Kazakhstan.

The variations in dates and time zones made no difference to UpLink International’s Hawkeye-I and — II hyperspectral high-resolution imaging satellites, nor to the relaying and data-processing equipment used to establish a real-time downlink to receiving stations in each locale — these only being machines, as Rollie Thibodeau readily pointed out to Megan Breen from behind a notebook computer on his hospital tray.

To the people involved in this synchronized monitoring operation, on the other hand, the whole process of coordination was a howling, troublesome bitch.

As Rollie was also free and quick to note.

Tom Ricci rubbed his eyes. Had it really been less than seventy-two hours since he’d left Maine, its deepwater urchin beds, and the reclusive life he had cultivated for over two years behind? Something like that, he guessed. So much mental and physical distance had been covered between then and now, it was hard to keep track. There had been the flight to San Jose, his meeting with Roger Gordian, the formal offer from Gordian to join UpLink in what had to his surprise become a position — its official title being Global Field Supervisor, Security Operations — that he would hold jointly with a guy named Rollie Thibodeau, who, if memory served, was the other candidate for the job mentioned to him by the high-and-mighty Megan Breen back in Stonington. There had been his acceptance of the offer despite reservations about working in partnership with Thibodeau, someone he’d never met, someone very much liked and preferred by Breen, a woman toward whom Ricci had taken an automatic dislike, which impression had seemed in his eyes to be a two-way street filled with bumps, potholes, and inevitable collisions. Only Ricci’s fidelity to the commitment he’d given Pete Nimec had overcome his second thoughts about agreeing to the modified proposition in Gordian’s office.

All of which had preceded his express shipment to Kazakhstan, a severe, inhospitable place populated with equally severe, inhospitable Russian military and scientific personnel whose antagonism toward him was more than a little reminiscent of his old friend Cobbs. They were indignant about his having taken command of site protection at their Baikonur Cosmodrome prior to the space launch. They had bristled at his front-line deployment of Sword patrol units and defensive systems. They viewed his assistance as gross interference, and had let him know it at every possible turn.

He wondered how much worse his reception would have been if they’d known this was, more or less, his first day on the job.

Fatigued and out of joint, his biological clock in jagged contention with the time displayed on his wristwatch, Ricci sat at an onboard vehicle computer in the trailer that was his mobile command center and logged onto UpLink’s secure intranet server via cellular modem, waiting for pictures from space that his instincts told him were about to reveal complications that would make every problem he’d encountered since his arrival in Central Asia — if not since his farewell urchin run with Dex — seem piddling by comparison.

Soon after the transmission began, those instincts proved themselves to be right on the money.

“This ground station’s part of our Geographic Information Service division,” Nimec was explaining to Annie. “Our clients include real estate developers, urban planners, map and atlas publishers, companies involved in oil, natural gas, and mineral resource exploration… a whole range of businesses that can benefit from high-res topographic imaging data. Essentially, though, the profits we earn from those contracts go toward defraying expenses the GIS piles up doing gratis work to satisfy Gord’s altruistic drives.”

They were alone in the first of several rows of theater-style seats climbing toward the rear of what could have been mistaken for a small movie screening room, but for the technical staffers at horseshoe-shaped computer workstations to their left and right. A large flat-screen display covered most of the wall in front of them.

“Spy-eye time as a charitable donation,” she said. “That’s a new one to me.”

Nimec looked at her.

“You remember that child abduction in Yellowstone about six months ago? The little girl, Maureen Block, got snatched out of her parents’ camper? The guy who did it was some survivalist nutcase, held her in a lean-to made of timber and leaves. She was found by park rangers after sweeps from Hawkeye-I penetrated his camouflage, captured infrared images of the girl and her kidnapper while they were in the shelter.”

Annie put her hand up to her forehead.

“I think,” she said, “I’ve just embarrassed myself.”

“No reason you should feel that way,” Nimec said. “Our involvement was never disclosed. We’ve worked with local police departments, the FBI, NSA, you name it. This isn’t quite classified information, but it is for the most part held confidential by the various agencies.”

“At whose preference?”

“Everybody’s,” Nimec said. “It’s pretty well known how competitive law-enforcement organizations can be. They like taking their pats on the back for closing cases, and we’re glad to let them. It tends to eliminate any inclination they might have to see us as sticking our nose in where it doesn’t belong and reject our assistance. It also has the fringe benefit of keeping the bad guys off guard.” He paused, quietly watching the techs key up for the satellite feed. “There’s a whole range of other situations we help out with, besides. The birds can detect toxic chemical concentrations in soil runoff, plot out the extent of oil spills, pinpoint the specific types of mineral depletion in agricultural areas to give farmers a heads-up on potential crop failure… it goes on and on.”

She looked impressed. “If I may ask, just what are your satellites’ capabilities?”

“Confidentially?”

She nodded, and gave him a faint smile. “If not quite classified.”

“Hawkeye can zoom in on objects less than five centimeters across and scan on over three hundred spectral bands, which matches anything the spooks at the National Reconnaissance Office have at their disposal. Same goes for the speed and accuracy of our analysis — and we hope to have moving real-time pictures within a couple of years. Also, the telemetry images we’re about to see here are going out over our corporate intranet to be viewed by members of our security team on three continents and examined by photo interpreters in San Jose.” He gestured toward the headsets jacked into the armrests of his seats. “These provide an audio link for anyone who’s got a request for the analysts, or wants a particular area enlarged, enhanced, or identified. You may want to listen in.”

Annie got a quick flash of herself playing host to Roger Gordian and Megan Breen in the LCC firing room at Canaveral what seemed an eternity ago, pointing to the lightweight phones on her console.

“When the event timer starts again you’ll want to put them on and eavesdrop on the dialogue between the cockpit and ground operators. ”

A chill ran down her spine.

Nimec noticed her far-off look. “Anything wrong?”

“No,” she said. “Just kind of dazzled by the scope of this operation.”

Nimec knew she was lying, but dropped it, although he couldn’t dismiss his peculiar interest in what was on her mind.

Then, from one of the techies, a wave.

“Get ready,” he said. “Show’s about to start.”

Some 2,500 miles northwest as the crow flies, Roger Gordian was in a room identical to the one in which Pete Nimec and Annie Caulfield were seated, watching, as they were, the first satellite images stream down from Hawkeye-I above Brazil. Filling the row to either side of him was the group of satellite recon specialists Nimec had mentioned to Annie, most former employees of the NRS and its PHOTINT section, the National Photographic Interpretation Center.

Over the previous twenty-four hours, Hawkeye-I had made a series of low-resolution passes over an area describing a radius of about three hundred klicks around the ISS installation in Matto Grosso do Sul, its field of reconnaissance determined by the results of a computerized vector analysis seeking those areas of highest probability from which the raid of April 17th might have been staged. Entered into these calculations were wind conditions on the night of the attack, approximations of the HAHO team’s point of descent into the compound, estimates of their maximum range of travel, flight controller logs from known airfields, likely sites for concealed airfields, intelligence about regional criminal and political extremist enclaves, and a galaxy of other data deemed pertinent by Sword’s electronic surveillance experts.

After reviewing the computer analysis and initial flyby imagery, the photo interpreters had systematically narrowed their interest to two geographic areas: the alluvial plains and savannah of the Pantanal, and an overlying region of rocky, semiarid escarpments called Chapada dos Guimaraes.

It was the highlands that came to attract their most intense scrutiny. Magnification of the images registered what appeared to be an ad hoc runway in a massive table formation at the Chapada’s western edge — some fifty kilometers from the ISS facility, and well within the bounds of a radar-eluding aircraft launch and HAHO drop. Further examination revealed the snaking, deliberate track of a roadway winding up the precipitous sandstone walls of the plateau. Light reflection patterns in the visible spectrum showed the definite earmarks of mechanical objects on the formation’s broad, flat top and in a narrow draw cut into the base of the slope — guessed to be fixed-wing aircraft and wheeled vehicles from their shapes and dimensions.

These initial evaluations, coupled with a studied look at infrared bandwidth patterns coming from the grotto that distinctly showed human heat signatures, the long-wave IR “hot spots” of motorized activity, and the contrasting emissions of camouflage and growing vegetation, led to a rapid decision to target the area for the high-res, full-spectrum scan now in progress.

Gordian watched as Hawkeye-I telescoped in on the flattened plateau and relayed its digital eye-in-the-sky shots from communications satellite to ground station at trillions of bits per second, a computer-generated map grid projected over the image on the display.

“Right over there, you see those planes?” a photo interpreter beside him said. He switched on his headset and mouthed a set of coordinates into it. “What’s our res?”

“We’re in at slightly under a meter,” a tech replied in his earpiece.

“Get us in closer, we need to see what kind they—”

“One of them is a Lockheed L-100, same damn transports we use,” Gordian interrupted. “The other’s an old DC-3 workhorse.”

“Lots of hustle and bustle around them. I’d say a total of thirty, forty individuals.”

The analyst on Gordian’s opposite side sat up straight and pointed. “The vehicles lined along the slope look like quarter-ton Jeep ‘Mutts,’ supply trucks… some heavy-duty rigs.”

Gordian leaned toward the edge of his seat.

“They’re pulling up stakes,” he said.

“Those guys in desert fatigues around the plane, how close can you zoom in on them?” Ricci said into his computer’s mike.

“Give us a minute, you’ll know if any of them have acne scars,” a techie replied via his earphones.

He waited, his attention rapt on the screen.

It took less than a minute.

The man at the foot of the L-100’s boarding ramp had short-cropped hair, an angular face with a strong, square jut of chin, and wore aviator glasses and a drive-on rag-type headband. He was clearly calling out orders, directing the upload of personnel and cargo.

“You see that one?” Thibodeau said. Hands gripping the tubular safety rail of his bed, he hoisted himself painfully up from his pillow, leaning closer to the notebook computer on his hospital tray. “You see him?”

“Rollie, maybe you’d better take it easy—”

“Le chaut sauvage, ” he said.

“What?”

“Got the look of a wildcat.” Thibodeau’s eyes were alight under the brim of his battered campaign hat. “He’s in command. An’ not just of gettin’ stuff onto the planes.”

Megan studied the screen from the chair beside his bed.

“You think we’ve got the top man in our sights?”

“Don’ know if he’s the brains… but combat leader, oui,” he said. “I tell you, I know.” He paused. “From the looks of ’em, the people he’s orderin’ around ain’t no drug runners or guerrillas neither. They’re mercenaries, for sure. Got to be the ones who hit us the other night.”

Megan turned her attention back to the face on-screen.

“We better find out who he is,” she said.

Thibodeau looked at her.

“Cherie, I think it’s more important that we find out where he an’ his boys are goin’… an’ if we can, stop them from gettin’ there.”

“The question is why they’re clearing out,” Nimec said into his mouthpiece.

Ricci from across the globe: “Agreed. And if they’re mobilizing, what for?”

“How long before we have Hawkeye-II transmitting optical images from over Kazakhstan?” Gordian asked over the voice link.

“There’s some cloud cover over the region right now,” a tech said. “Weather readings indicate a slow-moving front.”

“How long?”

Listening in, Annie turned from the face being close-upped on the wall and stared at Nimec.

“Kaza—” she mouthed silently.

Nimec cut her off with a motion of his hand as the satellite techs gave Gordian his answer. Then he briefly switched off his headset.

“Sorry,” he said. “I wanted to hear what—”

It was Annie’s turn to interrupt. “You think those people are out to stop the Russian shuttle launch? Cause the same sort of thing that happened to Orion?”

Nimec licked his lips.

“My feeling is they could be,” he said. “The satellite pictures will tell us more.”

She shook her head in anxious disbelief.

“What now?” she said. “We need to… are you going to contact the State Department?”

Nimec saw her hand trembling on her armrest, and took hold of her wrist.

“Annie—”

“It can’t be allowed to happen again, Pete,” she said. “It—”

“Annie.”

She looked at him.

“We’ll handle this,” he said. His grip was firm around her wrist. “I promise.”