The Lions Of Lucerne

20

When Harvath and Hollenbeck had hiked to the bottom of Death Chute, there was a Sno-Cat waiting to take them back to the command center. Once they were seated inside and were underway, Hollenbeck pulled a stack of Polaroids out of his parka and handed them to Harvath.

“Ever seen one of these back in your SEAL days?”

Harvath looked intently at the first picture. It was a box, painted white, about the size of the average surround-sound subwoofer. By its appearance in the picture, it had been found buried in the snow. Scot flipped through the shots, which were taken from different angles. In some, the box was partially obscured by the branches of a pine tree it was under.

“I don’t know. It looks like a white box,” Harvath said, handing the photos back to Hollenbeck.

“When our guys found it, we had no idea what it was either. Our gut said it might be an explosive device, so we got the bomb tech guys up there right away.”

“Where? Up there?” Scot asked, gesturing over his shoulder back toward Death Chute. “I thought this was an FBI investigation now.”

“It is, but we were operating outside the secured crime scene under the pretext of discovering if any of our agents might have survived the slide.”

“But you said they were all accounted for.”

“Now they are. But we hadn’t released that information to the FBI at that point. Listen, I don’t want to split hairs with you. I busted your ass up there because that’s my job. I’ve heard about that guy, Zuschnitt. He’s got a reputation with the FBI for being a real prick. That’s probably why he got stuck posting the crime scene. Think about it. That’s a pretty long rotation to be standing with your thumb up your ass in the freezing cold.”

Harvath laughed at the image. It was the first time he had laughed all morning. “I guess you’re right.”

“Damn straight I’m right. Now I want you to look at these,” he said as he pulled another group of Polaroids from his pocket. “Once we determined the device was not an explosive, we were able to discover that it was encased in panels and that the panels could be removed.”

Scot flipped through this set of pictures with greater interest. Each displayed a different exposed section of the box’s interior, which contained densely packed electronics.

“It looks like an air-sick bag for a supercomputer that had a really bad lunch. There must be at least a hundred circuit boards crammed in there. There could never be enough air circulation in there to keep whatever this thing is from overheating. Unless-”

“It was placed in the snow?” responded Hollenbeck, who’d already come to that conclusion. He pulled some more photos from his parka and narrated as he flipped through them. “The alloy construction of the box probably helped circulate the cold. There are also fans and a set of tubes with screened vents, which we think acted as a cooling system. Any guesses yet as to what its purpose is?”

“Judging from this picture,” said Scot, pointing to the one Hollenbeck had just revealed, “I’d say that little device there is a low-profile antenna. If you have your guys look up into the tree above where you found the box, at the very top you’ll probably find a camouflaged transmitter with a booster.”

“Yup, that’s exactly what we found.”

“So, this device is a transmitter of some sort. I’d be willing to bet you may have found the source of our communications problems.”

“It was. We shut it down, and the radios and everything else came back on line clear as a bell. What do you make of this?” said Hollenbeck as he removed a final Polaroid from the stack and handed it to him.

Harvath studied it carefully. “The writing looks Korean. By the sophistication of the equipment, I’m going to guess this is something from our friends in the north. Most of the components will probably turn out to be Taiwanese, but the overall design and assembly is probably North Korean.”

“I had our communications guy look at it, and then I slipped Jim Bates and some of his White House Communications Agency people up to take a peek. They’ve never seen anything like it, but they’re all guessing it’s a very sophisticated jamming system.”

“But why’d it jam our communications and not the CB radios?”

“It could be that proximity-wise they weren’t close enough, or-”

“Tom, proximity had nothing to do with it. Our radios were cutting in and out when we were on Deer Valley’s main runs. If this was an overall jam, the CBs would have been affected as well.”

“The other possibility Bates and his WHCA guys are kicking around is that the device can be tuned to jam specific frequencies and at different intervals.”

“On for a minute, off for twenty,” Scot said, more for his own benefit than Hollenbeck’s. “It got us used to the on-again, off-again status of the radios. Made us think it was some sort of natural anomaly.”

“Yup.”

“But for that, you’d have to already know at least what frequencies the Secret Service was using, and that’s a closely guarded secret.”

“Exactly. So, whoever was jamming had to have an inside line on the frequencies of not only our radios, but also Deer Valley’s and the Smocks.”

“Deer Valley’s wouldn’t be hard to get, but ours? Are you suggesting a leak? No way. Not possible.”

“I want you to stay quiet about this, Scot. Understand? I don’t want to start a witch hunt.”

“I wouldn’t worry about starting it. Pandora’s box is going to open all by itself. I’d be more worried about how you’re going to close it.”