Target Lock

NAVSPECFORCE Orbital Imaging Center Pearl Harbor Fleet Base, Hawaii 0835 Hours, Zone Time: August 23, 2008

BUMP THE ARAFURA RUN AND WESTERN NEW GUINEA TO THE HEAD OF THE STACK THIS WATCH, LINDIE. MAX PRIORITY.

Air Force Technical Sergeant Linda “Lindie” Peterson swore and set aside her cup of drink-dispenser coffee and breakfast Danish to answer the E-memo that had snapped into existence on her workstation’s secondary screen. She’d just barely made it through the door of her cubicle and her watch officer was already declaring a Chinese fire drill.

“Go ahead,” the imaging analyst muttered under her breath. “Take the joint service assignment with the damned Navy, Lindie. It’s a good ticket to get punched and the kids will love Hawaii.”

Savagely she clattered a reply back into her keyboard. EXCUSE ME, LIEUTENANT, BUT WE ALREADY HAVE MAX PRIS ON BOTH THE NORTHERN CHINA AND BLACK SEA RUNS. WHAT IS OUR EXACT TASKING ORDER?

The reply scrolled back across her screen. ALL INDONESIA SWEEPS HAVE ULTIMATE MAX PRI UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE. THAT’S THE WORD FROM THE MAN, EDDIE MAC HIMSELF. SAME FROM COMMANDER RENDINO. DO IT PERFECTLY YESTERDAY!

CAN I ASK WHAT WE’RE SUPPOSED TO BE LOOKING FOR, LIEUTENANT? Lindie typed.

QUOTE “ANYTHING UNUSUAL.” GET ON IT, SERGEANT.

She groaned and accessed the section tasking file. She found that she had been assigned a multispectral comparison run on the easternmost peninsula of New Guinea using an imaging block just downloaded from one of the big NSA Keyhole 13 reconsats. In essence, her day’s labor would be to play a titanic game of “Compare these pictures” involving a half-million square miles, seeking for terrain and environmental differences that might become apparent as images taken at various levels of the infrared, ultraviolet, and visible spectra were matched and compared. Variances in the imaging under different light forms might reveal evidence of human activity not apparent to the naked eye. For example, dying vegetation that had been cut and deployed as camouflage would reflect light differently than undamaged living plant life.

It would be a finicky, time-consuming job that required the sharpness of the human eye and the flexibility of the human mind.

Lindie lit off the two big thirty-inch analysis screens that overlooked her workstation console. Pausing to snap a bite out of her Danish, she called up the first sector scan.

Some four hours later her uniform jacket was draped over the back of her chair, her blouse collar was undone, and the crumbs of her pastry-and-coffee breakfast had been replaced with the remnants of a canned-soda-and-cheese-sandwich lunch. With her eyes burning, she continued the analysis drill. Pull up a satellite photograph of a block of the New Guinea coast as seen from a high altitude baseline on her A screen, then pull up the same image in an alternative light spectrum on the B screen, matching the two for deviations. When one was found, it was coordinated for further investigation at a lower baseline.

Lindie had completed the sweep of her block at twenty-, ten-, and five-kilometer altitude equivalencies and had found nothing extraordinary. That merely meant that now she must re-grid her block to a smaller scale and start over again from one K.

Her eyes burned and she took a moment to rub some tear moisture back into them with the heels of her hands. Simply to look at something different for a moment, she called up the base scale image of her analysis zone on her screens; that was the view of eastern New Guinea as seen unmagnified from low-earth orbit.

And caught something.

The spectrum imaging on her A and B screens had been slaved together. When she had called up the standard spectrum view of New Guinea on her A screen, the B screen had pulled up an IR variant of the same image. And there was a differentiation.

An odd little broken streak cut across the bottom of the infrared image. Nothing was apparent on the visible light photo. Possibly it was just a transmission or processing flaw.

Then again, maybe it wasn’t.

It was also far out of Lindie’s tasked analysis block, being well out in the Banda Sea off the coast. That, however, was irrelevant. A good photo analyst has mongoose blood, the instinctive need to go and find out. Using her computer mouse, she windowed around the irregularity, then blew it up to full-screen size.

Minutes later she was dialing her watch officer’s office number. This wasn’t a matter for an E-memo.

“Lieutenant Morgan, this is Sergeant Peterson. I think I may have stumbled across something pretty hot here. It’s out of my area, but it is in the Indonesian operations zone…. Yes, sir, Southeast Asian quadrant four…. Sector I-A-9… Block 30…. Try altitude baseline 50K in the infrared…. Yes, sir, I concur, a definite surface reflectivity variant, and that has got to be an artificial pattern…. Yes, sir, I would say that counts as an ‘anything unusual.’”