The Beijing conspiracy

CHAPTER 32

T he National Reconnaissance Office or NRO top-secret satellite ground station connected to NORAD, the North American Aerospace Defense Command inside Cheyenne Mountain, and to many other similar stations besides – had a large plaque on the wall of the command centre. It was inscribed around the edges with ‘National Reconnaissance Office: We Own The Night’. The logo looked like something out of science fiction, but since September 11, a lot of science fiction and reality had become indistinguishable. The inner circle of the plaque was black with a pair of sinister-looking owl’s eyes peering out from behind a silver mesh that was identical to that on the Lacrosse series of satellites’ wire mesh antennae. The logo was a reminder to the operators hunched over their high-resolution screens that dozens of sophisticated US satellites were orbiting between 300 and 40,000 kilometres above the Earth, their cameras turning night into day. Some, like the Defense Support Program satellites controlled by the US Air Force operated in the infra-red spectrum to detect missile launches. Others were capable of reading the numbers on a letterbox. In the NRO command centre, Iraq was still dominating collection priorities, and the KeyHole and Lacrosse satellites were sending back real-time information as they passed over Baghdad, Fallujah, Mosul, Tikrit and other Iraqi cities every hour.

The Lacrosse satellites, codenamed onyx, vega and indigo, and weighing a massive 15 tonnes, were in a relatively low orbit – 650 kilometres above the earth. Travelling at over 6 kilometres a second, with huge power-generating solar arrays the size of the wings on a 747, the synthetic aperture radars were peering through clouds and weather that might have made targets hard to detect. Right now, a satellite from a sister program – the highly classified advanced KeyHole series KH-11 – was directly over Baghdad on its midday pass over the city. Launched from a massive but expendable Titan IV rocket and costing more than $1.5 billion, KH-11 was also the size of a school bus and its cameras operated in the near infra-red and thermal infra-red spectra, which enabled it to see at night, as well as operating in the visible light spectrum for daylight surveillance. The photostream could detect someone wearing a pistol, but even though the satellite cameras could pierce through clouds and bad weather, there was still no way for them to determine what vehicles might contain explosives.

Iraq was not the only place in the world being examined in minute detail, and another bank of computers further over was linked to the KeyHole series footprinted over the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. A few hours ago the huge satellite had passed over Peshawar and the nearby foothills of the Hindu Kush. The real-time photos of a white van with Hyderabad Laundry Company emblazoned on the side, approaching what looked like a dirt-poor village didn’t mean anything to the operator, but like thousands of other images that might be connected with the new war on terror, the file was marked for transmission to Langley, just in case.

Rob Regan ran his hand through his hair and stared at the imagery on the screen in front of him. The satellite photographs were grainy, but he could clearly make out the words ‘Hyderabad Laundry Company’ on the side of the white four-wheel drive.

‘What do you think a fucking laundry truck would have been doing in a place like Darra Adam Khel and why would it now be headed for Peshawar?’ he mused out loud.

‘Not collecting the sheets would be my first guess,’ his lanky deputy, Tony Carmello said, getting up from his own desk and ambling over to his boss’s.

‘Precisely. This war on terror would be a fucking sight easier if the Pakis got off their black asses and cleaned out this cesspool on their border,’ Regan grumbled.

‘Fat chance,’ his deputy responded. Both men knew that the Pakistani government had been unwilling to exert any serious control over the border with Afghanistan. Despite intense pressure from the United States and the UN, Pakistan had refused to regulate the madrassas, the Islamic schools that were financially supported by the puritanical Wahhabis from Saudi Arabia and other equally fanatical Islamists. Hundreds of the Taliban schools were flourishing in the North-West Frontier Province. The invective from furious and often illiterate Imams filled impressionable young minds with a burning hatred towards the West. The world was being flooded with a seemingly inexhaustible supply of suicide bombers, but any Pakistani leader who tried to rein in the madrassas and restrict their teaching to the real messages of the Qu’ran risked losing office at the hands of Pakistan’s Islamic hardliners and the ISI, Pakistan’s Inter-Service Intelligence agency, which was a strong supporter of the Taliban. In Pakistan’s relatively short history a coup was an ever-present possibility.

‘Have we heard from Crawford?’ Regan asked.

‘Not since yesterday; I’ll check what’s happening.’

A minute later, Tony Carmello handed his boss a handset that was connected through an encryption system that no terrorist would be able to break. ‘Crawford. He says his target hasn’t left the hotel.’

‘Back entrance?’ the station chief asked his latest recruit bluntly.

‘There’s a loading dock but I’ve got that in view as well,’ the young CIA agent answered confidently. ‘The only movement out of there has been a laundry truck and that was early this morning.’

‘Would that have belonged to the Hyderabad Laundry Company?’ Regan asked.

‘I think it might have,’ Crawford replied, less certain now.

‘If you’re going to be successful in this game, Crawford, you’re not only going to have to think, you’re going to have to know!’ Regan barked down the phone. The long hours were taking their toll. ‘How big was the truck? What colour?’

‘A Toyota four-wheel drive and it was white,’ the young agent replied nervously.

‘Get yourself up to Peshawar and find it because right now I’ve got satellite imagery that tells me a white four-wheel drive Toyota belonging to the Hyderabad Laundry Company is headed towards there and something tells my end of nose that it might be the same four-wheel drive you watched leave this morning. When you do find it, I don’t want any fucking heroics. Just keep it under surveillance and see if you can find out what they’re up to. And be careful. Peshawar isn’t a tourist resort.’

‘Whatever they’re up to, I think you’re right, it’s got fuck all to do with delivering clean linen,’ Regan said when he’d hung up the phone. Sometimes, all a CIA agent in the field had to go on was a hunch, but hunches based on years of experience sometimes paid off.