The Line

CHAPTER 10

“Think I ought to take this?” Trace asked, holding up a black sweatshirt with a large number twelve silkscreened onto, it. The Army mule, hooves kicking, was on each shoulder.

“This is from my firs tie year, December eighty two We all took off our dress gray in the fourth quarter to cheer.” She laughed at the memory.

“We got our butts kicked.”

“That was the game ut in California wasn’t it?” Boomer asked.

“No, it was in Philly. We lost twenty-four to seven that year.”

Boomer vividly remembered the four years of Army football he’d watched.

Every cadet did, because, like it or not, you were a fan once you were a cadet. The Academy took the money for season tickets out of every cadet’s pay.

A plebe who didn’t go to a home game wouldn’t have lasted the first semester hazing.

Of course everyone went. What else was there to do on Saturday afternoon at West Point? The one concession the Academy made for home football games during Boomer’s time was shortening Saturday morning classes. But that wasn’t so the cadets could get ready for the game.

It was so they could get back to the barracks and change into full dress uniform for the parade for the American public prior to every game.

The culmination of every season was the Army-Navy game. The team could lose all ten prior games, but all that went out the window when the classic interservice showdown rolled around. Boomer had never particularly enjoyed having to stand during every game, another great West Point tradition. He especially remembered standing in the fourth quarter during a 55-0 drubbing by Baylor his plebe year. Not his idea of fun.

“You have everything?” he asked, as Trace stuffed the sweatshirt into her overnight bag. Trace had spent the afternoon getting her leave approved and Boomer had stayed with her the entire time. Skibicki was back in the tunnel trying to unearth new information.

“I guess so.”

“Let’s roll,” he said grabbing the keys for her truck.

Boomer watched the rear-view mirror the entire way to Honolulu International Airport, but he didn’t spot anything.

He parked in the short-term garage. Boomer showed his special federal ID to the guard at the security gate and he was allowed to pass with the Browning High Power hidden in its shoulder holster. They arrived at Trace’s departure gate with a half hour to spare. Boomer choose seats for them where they could watch the center of the terminal.

“Am I off on a wild goose chase?” Trace asked, leaning back in her seat and regarding Boomer with skeptical eyes.

“And yes, I know people have died. But the more I think about it, the crazier this all sounds. You’re talking about the military taking action against the government. We’ve never had anything like what you suspect in the history of this country. I know the MRA isn’t very popular, but hell, there’s always been unpopular stuff going on.”

“When I arrived in 10th Group for my first Special Forces assignment, my company commander was a fellow named Major Stubbs,” Boomer said.

“When I went for my in processing briefing with him, he gave me a couple of books to read. He told me that being in Special Operations meant that I had to think differently and I also had to understand the history of covert operations.”

“This have anything to do with what I asked?” Trace asked, fingering her ticket and watching the waiting area.

“Bear with me a minute,” Boomer said.

“I was thinking about this because of that chapter in your manuscript, the one about Patton and the Second World War. One of the books I had to read was about covert operations in Europe during that war. The tide of the book. Bodyguard of Lies, came from a quote by Winston Churchill. He said: “In wartime, Truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.”

“I’ve heard it said that truth is the first casualty of war,” Trace said.

“Maybe it’s just misplaced,” Boomer replied.

“Anyway, anyone who’s studied World War II has heard about the city of Coventry and how Churchill had advance warning of the bombing raid there but didn’t inform the populace of Coventry because doing so would tip off the Germans that the Brits had broken the German secret cipher with Ultra. That’s one case where the bodyguard was the truth being withheld. But in this book, the author spent a lot of time talking about the Resistance in France and the Allies’ SOE, Special Operations Executive, the American contribution of which was called the OSS, Office of Strategic Services, from which both Special Forces and the CIA draw its lineage.

“The SOE sent agents into occupied France to work with the Resistance, particularly wireless operators to relay information back and forth. Of course the Germans weren’t too keen on that and ran counter-operations and managed to scarf up quite a few of these wireless operators along with their radios and ciphers. The Germans then set up a false network. Communicating back to Britain as if the agent was free and doing his or her job.

“After the war there were a lot of accusations that the SOE parachuted agents into Resistance nets that they knew had been compromised.

Particularly female agents.”

“Why women?” Trace asked.

“The feeling at the time was that the Germans would not believe that an English gentleman would sacrifice a woman in such a manner.

Deliberately giving her false information in training, then handing her right over to the Germans to eventually give up that false information as truth under torture prior to being executed.”

“Jesus,” Trace whispered.

“Is that true? Did that happen?”

“The author of the book said there was no proof,” Boomer said. He snorted.

“Of course there was no proof.

Who would have been stupid enough to document such a thing? Everyone wants proof, when all they really need to do is look at what really happened, instead of what they hoped happened.

“What I took from the book was that those radio operators had three security checks. The first was a cipher to encrypt the message. If they were captured before they could destroy their cipher, then that could be compromised and used by the Germans without the receivers in Britain knowing. The second was a security check — a code word’ each agent had memorized that was supposed to be in every message. If the code word wasn’t there, the SOE people in England knew the message was being sent under duress.”

Boomer looked at Trace.

“There were numerous messages sent that lacked these code words, yet the SOE handlers still sent agents into those nets. The excuse they used after the war was that they thought the radio operator had forgotten to include the safety code word. Can you believe that?” He didn’t wait for an answer.

“I’m sitting in an attic in occupied France transmitting valuable information to England and I’d forget to use the security code word that would verify my message as legitimate? Not likely.”

Boomer shook his head.

“The third one though, is the most damning. Every radio operator who sends Morse code, which is the mode they used then and we still train on in Special Forces, has what we call a’fist.” That’s each individual’s way of tapping the key. If you listen to someone long enough, their fist is like their personal signature and it can’t be duplicated. Quite a few of those messages that came back setting up drop zones for new agents not only lacked the proper security codeword, but the radio people at SOE headquarters could tell that the fist was not that of the radio operator they’d worked with in training.”

Boomer’s voice hardened.

“No matter how much they deny it, they knew at SOE headquarters that some of their nets had been compromised and they still sent people into them.

“After reading all that,” he continued, “there was one damn thing I was sure of, and it was the reason Major Stubbs had me read that book: I learned never to trust the’ official story. I think there’s a good chance The Line exists, and I think we’ve got to give that chance our best shot.

If we’re wrong, no harm no foul, but if we’re right…”

He left it at that.

He reached into his pocket.

“There’s something I didn’t tell you last night when I told you about what happened in the Ukraine.” He laid a plastic military ID card in Trace’s lap. It was smeared with dried blood.

“I took that from one of the bodies at the ambush site. I didn’t show it to Decker.”

Trace looked at it, reading the name through the red film. john k. stubbs. She raised her eyes to meet Boomer’s.

“I had known he was working some kind of NATO deal.

Most of the officers who work those sensitive assignments are Special Forces because of their background and training,” he said.

“The man who taught me not to believe what I’m told died because I believed the bullshit they were feeding me over there in Turkey. I can’t let this rest, not after that and what happened at your house.”

The waiting area was Beginning to empty as Trace’s flight began boarding. Boomer put the ID card back in his pocket and stood. Trace threw her overnight bag over her shoulder.

“I understand,” she said. She turned for the gate.

“Take care of yourself and be careful,” Boomer said walking with her, both stopping just short of the gate.

Trace stepped forward and wrapped her arms around him.

“You take care of yourself. Let’s hope this turns out to be for nothing.”

“That would be nice,” Boomer conceded, returning her hug.

Trace hesitated.

“The other night. That was like it was down in Texas, wasn’t it?”

Boomer hesitated, then answered slowly.

“I’m not sure what it was, but I don’t think it was like Texas.”

Trace smiled knowingly.

“Yeah, I didn’t think so.” She leaned forward and held him tight.

“Please don’t say anything, Boomer. Just hold me hard and know I need you.”

She let go just as suddenly and rapidly walked to the gate and disappeared.

Boomer stood there feeling the emptiness she had left.

“Please be safe, Benita,” he whispered.

On the far side of the boarding area. Sergeant Major Skibicki watched the embrace, the Calico hidden in his shoulder holster. He waited until Trace had entered the tunnel before approaching Boomer.

“Sergeant major,” Boomer said, surprised to see him.

“What’s up?”

“I thought I’d come by to make sure Major Trace got off all right,” Skibicki replied, walking out of the boarding area with Boomer.

“Vasquez wants us to meet her at the NCO Club at Shafter.”

“The NCO Club?” Boomer asked.

“I don’t trust the tunnel now,” Skibicki replied.

“Does she have anything?” Boomer asked.

“I guess she’ll tell us that,” Skibicki said.

The NCO Club at Fort Shafter was a round building with a central bar on the top level that had a beautiful view of the ocean. On a Friday evening it was packed with soldiers enjoying the end of another work week. Skibicki led Boomer through the throng until they spotted Vasquez at a table near the large windows. Two young soldiers were seated with her, vainly trying to get her attention.

“Get lost,” Skibicki growled placing a hand on the back of one of the men’s chair.

“Hey, screw off—” the soldier’s words froze in his mouth as he took in the grizzled old sergeant major and the officer standing behind him.

“Sorry, sergeant major, I was just trying to talk to the lady,” he tried explaining.

“The lady is a sergeant,” Skibicki said.

“And she’s my sergeant, and I need to talk to her, so hit the road.

“The two scattered and Skibicki and Boomer took their place.

“I didn’t need the help,” Vasquez said.

“They were amusing.” ‘

“No time for amusing,” Skibicki replied shortly.

“What have you got?”

Vasquez shifted her dark eyes to Boomer, then back to Skibicki.

“I checked on the KC-10 situation for tonight like you asked me.”

The young sergeant pulled out a notepad full of scribblings.

“Most tanker missions in this area of operation are flown by the Pacific Tanker Force of the 65th Strategic Squadron, which is located at Andersen Air Force Base on Guam. That falls under the command of the Pacific Air Forces headquartered right here in sunny Oahu at Hickham.

I’ve got a friend at PACAF who owed me,” she said with a smile that made Boomer wonder about the debt.

“He checked and he found a KC-10 tanker departing Andersen at 0430 zulu on the first. It’s scheduled to do a mission at 0830 zulu, at coordinates 178 degrees, twelve minutes east longitude, and twenty-three degrees, fifteen minutes north latitude.”

“Which is where?” Skibicki asked.

She had an 8.5-by-11 Xeroxed map of the Pacific in her notebook and she unfolded it and placed it next to the paper.

She drew a small circle on it.

“Right here. Five hundred and fifty miles southeast of Midway.” She consulted her notes again.

“The KC-10 is to remain on station to do another mission at the same spot at 1530 zulu. It’s scheduled to return to Andersen at 1930 zulu.”

“A second mission?” Skibicki said.

“Two aircraft?”

Vasquez shook her head.

“No. Same aircraft. Once going in and once coming out. I checked, using what you gave me, that it might be a Combat Talon that’s getting the gas. A 0830 Z refuel at this spot,” she tapped the mark, “given the Talon’s mission speed at altitude of 260 knots, puts the Talon here at Oahu at 1200 Z. Given that they come in low level the last fifty miles or so to get under radar.”

Boomer nodded. Exactly the time for the drop on the message.

“You weren’t able to find out anything about where the four Talons of the tst SOS are?” Boomer asked, referring to the 1st Special Operations Squadron which was stationed at Kadena in Japan.

“No, sir. That stuff is tightly classified and my buddy doesn’t owe me time in Leavenworth.” Vasquez continued with what she had.

“My figuring, though, has the same thing for the return of the mission aircraft. The second top off at 1530 Z gets the Talon on its way back to Kadena or wherever. I think it’s coming out of Japan or Okie because the refuel makes sense at that point. It’s just about 3,000 miles from those islands, which is the safe operational range of the Talon. Then they got a thousand miles in to here, a thousand back, another top off, and the 3,000 miles back to home base.”

“Son of a bitch,” Boomermuttered looking at the map, impressed with Vasquez’s interpolations.

“She’s good, ain’t she?” Skibicki said proudly.

Boomer looked at his watch.

“That means they’re in the air now. Hell, they’ll be refueling in three hours.” He looked around at all the people in uniform drinking beers and laughing together. He was only three days removed from lying in ambush above a road in the Ukraine. He felt the hard plastic edge of Stubbs’ ID card pressing into flesh through his thigh pocket.

“We’re going to have to check out the jump. Get an idea of what they’re up to.”

“Already thought of that,” Skibicki said.

“I drew some gear out of the tunnel for us to use. We’ll get to that in a little bit.” He turned back to Vasquez.

“You find out anything else?”

Vasquez pocketed her papers and map.

“Not really.”

“Not really?” Skibicki repeated.

“What the fuck does that mean?”

Vasquez shrugged, used to the sergeant major’s gruff manner.

“You told me to check for anything weird going on around the island, sergeant major. There’s some weird shit going on with SOS US and the imaging people over at Pearl.” She paused.

“If I knew what was going on with you two, I might know what’s important and what’s not,” she added.

SOS US Boomer asked.

“What’s that?”

Vasquez enjoyed showing off.

“The sound surveillance system the Navy uses to track submarines. The first SOS US systems were put together in the fifties and the sixties and laid along the Atlantic Coast. Then they put in Colossus, which is along the Pacific Coast. Then the Navy boys got real smart.

They moved it out to the Russians to catch their subs as they put to sea. The Navy put systems off the two major Russian sub ports at Polyamyy and Petropavlovsk.”

“What’s that got to do with Hawaii?” Skibicki asked impatiently.

“Those are over near Europe.”

“Slow down, sergeant major, I was getting to that.”

Vasquez leaned forward.

“The Navy’s been adding to SOS US all along. We got a line not far off the coast of the islands. It’s some pretty wild shit. The system consists of groups of hydrophones inside large tanks — and I mean large.

My buddy over at Naval Intel says each tank is as big as the oil storage tanks at Pearl. These things are sunk down to the bottom.

They’re all connected by cable and the cable is buried. That’s to prevent the Russians from trailing cable cutters off their ships or subs and severing the lines.” Vasquez shook her head.

“Man, there’s real shit going on out there under the waves all the time. It’s a whole’nother world.

“Anyway,” she quickly said, noting Skibicki’s growing impatience, ‘what the Navy did not too long ago was really smart. The various systems could pick up subs, but they weren’t too exact in pinpointing location.

Some whiz brain figured that since the hydrophones are real sensitive that if all the systems could be coordinated, they could get accurate fixes using triangulation from various SOS US systems.”

She pointed down at the map.

“Say the one off Hawaii picks up a sub. All they got is one direction and the sub is somewhere along the line. But if the one off the West Coast can pick up the same sub, then you got two directions.

Draw a second line and bingo.

“They hooked all the SOS US systems together using FLTS — that’s Fleet Satellite Communication System. The Navy’s got five satellites up there in fixed orbits. Well, my buddy is hooked into FLTS and when I discreetly inquired if there was any weird shit going on, he told me they picked up a bogey sub this morning on SOS US only it wasn’t a bogey, it was a friendly.”

“You’ve lost me,” Boomer said, his head still spinning from all her acronyms.

“Well, here’s the point,” Vasquez said.

“Most Navy subs patrol at the discretion of their own skippers within a large designated area, particularly the boomers, the nuke firers That way no one can find them and no one can give up the secret of where they are since the only ones who know where they are are on board. But the Navy realized after hooking the SOS US system together that they had to be able to tell friendly subs from unfriendly. I mean, since our own Navy doesn’t know exactly where half its own subs are, and certainly doesn’t know where the Russkie subs plan to be, then when SOS US pinpoints a sub, there has to be a way to know whether it’s friendly or enemy.”

Vasquez smiled.

“After all the friendly-fire hoopla after the Gulf War, the Navy figured it would-be bad to sink one of their own subs if we ever fought the big one. So every U.S. and NATO sub has an ID code painted in special laser reflective paint on the upper deck.”

“What good does painting a code on the deck do?” snorted Skibicki.

“They stay submerged all the time.”

Vasquez waved a finger under his nose.

“Modern technology, sergeant major. The Navy can read the codes by pinpointing a sub’s location using the SOS US then using one of the FLTS satellites firing off a laser downlink. They use a high-intensity blue-green laser. It penetrates the ocean to submarine depth and gets reflected by the paint and the satellite picks it up and reads it. It’s not useful in finding subs without the SOS US because the ocean’s a damn big place and a sub is pretty small.

“So now every friendly sub has this code. The satellite beams down where SOS US says there’s a sub and they get no reflection, then they know they have a bad-guy sub.

“Well, the computer dinks at Pearl had them an underwater vehicle on their SOS US about 400 miles off the coast, southwest. When they checked with FLTS and flashed the laser on it for an ID they got a hit and a friendly prefix, indicating it was one of ours, but the identifier code wasn’t in their book.”

“Meaning?” Boomer asked.

“Meaning that there’s a friendly sub off the coast, but it’s not one of the subs the Navy, or any of our allies, say they got.” Vasquez shrugged.

“So, I’d call that kind of strange. My buddy says when he talked to his watch commander about it, he was told in no uncertain terms to forget about it.”

Boomer glanced at Skibicki. “What do you think?”

Skibicki looked like he had a bad headache.

“I think we can’t do diddly squat about a sub 400 miles off-coast and I don’t have the slightest clue what it might have to do with all that’s going on. But we can go eyeball a parachute drop a mile off.” He tapped Vasquez on the shoulder.

“Good job on the KC-10 stuff.”