Twelve Mile Limit

11

I listened to my old friend, colleague, and confidant, Bernard Yeager, Ph. D., say to me over long-distance telephone, “Satellites? So why should I know a satellite from a submarine? Tell me that if you don’t mind very much.”

Patiently, I replied, “Bernie, this is me at the other end. If you can’t talk, just say so. I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t important. Surveillance satellites: I need some general information, and maybe a little piece or two of specific information-if it’s available.”

“Trust me, it’s not available. Even if I had access to that kind of data, it’s not available. Which I don’t.”

I sighed and stared at the shelf of aquaria along the wall of my lab. It was feeding time, and eight football-sized octopi stared back at me from their individual tanks, while aerators in each created the sweet molecular odor of ozone and a soothing chorus of bubbles. I said, “Won’t you at least listen?”

“I’ll listen, I’ll listen, already! But first things first. You say you are Marion Ford. I know your voice well. You are my old friend. But these are dangerous times. Did you know that there are certain computer magicians who can record another person’s voice, download it, and then use microphone active software to make their own voice sound very similar to the one they’ve recorded?”

“Nope,” I said. “Never heard of such a thing.”

“It’s true! So maybe it’s you, maybe it’s not. What it could be is some nebbish playing a trick on poor old Bernie, showing I’ve gotten so old I trust my ears, not my brain. Which is why I want you to speak a few more words, and let me make certain you are who you say you are.”

I pictured how it would probably be on his end of the line. He would be in the office of his desert adobe outside Scottsdale, Arizona, talking on the newest generation of high-security scrambler phones. The telephone would somehow be hooked into the bank of computers on his desk and around the room that he’d assembled lovingly by hand and interconnected. On one of the monitors would be a series of voiceprint images, old and new, but all of them seismic renderings of my voice.

All voices are distinctive, the uniqueness of each determined by the size of throat, nasal, and oral cavities, and the shape, length, and tension of the vocal cords. The manner in which speech muscles are manipulated is distinctive as well. Bernie would be using some esoteric program to confirm that my voiceprints matched. Presumably, he was using the same sophisticated computer system that made it possible for me to dial a Virginia area code yet end up speaking with the rotund and brilliant retired National Security Agency department head. How? I have no idea. My guess is, the same way you can dial a special seven-digit phone number and reach the security station at Kwajalein in the middle of the South Pacific. More of Yeager’s electronic wizardry.

Bernie is still a legend among the elite intelligence community familiar with the man’s work. It was Bernie Yeager who single-handedly unscrambled the Soviet nuclear subcode progression. It was Yeager who invaded and compromised computer communications between Managua and Havana during the Sandinista wars in Nicaragua. It was Yeager who discovered that, for years, the Mossad had the key to many code transmissions between the United States and Panama, compliments of a Mossad agent named Michael Herrera who Manuel Noriega had, amazingly, put in charge of his Panamanian air force. Next time you see a photograph of the former dictator in uniform, note the inverted paratrooper wings of the Israeli army-an honor bestowed on Noriega by a grateful Herrera.

All true.

And it was Yeager who consistently interrupted and intercepted radio and Internet communications between the Taliban in Afghanistan and Islamic terrorists in the United States. I’d heard through mutual friends that he had become obsessed with unmasking and destroying them individually and as groups. I knew that Bernie had lost both parents in Nazi concentration camps, so it made sense when our mutual friend said that Bernie considered the Islamic fanatics to be the Nazis of the new century. Nor was it surprising that he would become obsessive about destroying them.

Many of my friends in the intelligence community share the same obsession.

Bernie’s is not a name that is found in newspapers; he has never been invited to appear on national television and, hopefully, will never be asked. Yet he has done as much as any one person to safeguard the security of his adopted nation.

Several years back, I did a favor for the man because I like, admire, and trust him. His sister, Eve, the young mother of a three-year-old son, had a evening of silly, injudicious behavior. On a lark, at a party with a couple of former college room-mates, she tried a street drug that they were told was “coca candy.”

It was crack cocaine.

As a upper-class professional woman, she’d never experienced anything like it. A few days later, Eve rationalized a reason to contact the friend of a friend who had the stuff, and she bought a little more.

Slightly more than a year later, at Bernie’s request, I tracked his sister across four states to a suburban crackhouse outside Boulder, Colorado. It took me a couple of days to size up the hierarchy of males who exploited the women there and provided them with drugs. It took another couple days of research to find just the right way to leverage the crackhouse chieftain. I got her out without much trouble, and we got her into a superb rehab program. We gave it a month before we told her the bad news: Her distraught husband had divorced her in absentia and had secured custody of their son.

I stayed in close touch. I liked Eve very much; Bernie and I gradually became close friends. I joined the two of them, by telephone, for a small celebration the night Eve’s ex-husband said, yes, he was willing to try again. It should have been the storybook ending to an American tragedy. Unfortunately, storybook endings are seldom associated with the white rock. After more than a year of apparent domestic tranquility, Eve vanished. Bernie asked me to go a-searching once more. I found her in Colorado again, the same suburb, the same crackhouse. This time, she refused help. She was found dead a few months later.

I rarely impose on Bernie for favors. Friendship is based on loyalty, not on behavioral bookkeeping, quid pro quo. But when I do ask a favor, he never refuses.

After I told him the story of Janet Mueller and her two lost companions, Bernie said to me, “Awful! Tragic! In such a terrible mishmash, who wouldn’t want to help? Unfortunately, and as I keep telling you over and over, I don’t have access to the kind of data you need. But just out of curiosity, do you have the lat and long of the wreck they were diving? Or GPS numbers, perhaps?”

I was taught to think in terms of latitude and longitude and still prefer it over the more modern Global Positional System numbers. For some reason, it’s simpler for me to picture our planet covered with imaginary lines called parallels and meridians, or lines of longitude and latitude. It’s easier for me to calculate distances in my head, too. It takes the earth twenty-four hours for a full rotation of 360 degrees. Thus, every hour we rotate 15 degrees longitude, or one time zone. For the sake of precision, the imaginary lines are broken down into degrees, minutes, and seconds. There is exactly one nautical mile per minute, and there are sixty minutes (and sixty nautical miles) between degrees.

I told Bernie that the wreck of the Baja California lies at 25 degrees 21 minutes 60 seconds north latitude and 82 degrees 31.97 minutes west longitude.

“And you said the Coast Guard had found debris from the wreck, but not a trace of the divers themselves?”

I told him that, besides Amelia Gardner, all the Coasties had found were a length of manila line tied to a life jacket, as described by Amelia, a camera bag, a water jug, and two empty tanks, all scattered to the southwest.

I found it very reassuring when Bernie asked, “I don’t suppose you have the lat and long for the most distant item found?”

I told him an empty tank was found floating at 25 degrees 19.60 minutes north latitude and 82 degrees 46.50 minutes west longitude. The rough math was easy-twenty nautical miles or so southwest of the site of the wreck.

I heard him say, “ Humph, ” as if preoccupied, his keyboard clattering in the background, working on something else as we talked. Then he said, “So tell me what you know about satellite surveillance systems. Wait, I withdraw the question. Me, the computer nerd asking you, Mr. Live-in-a-Hut-Hermit. So let me tell you what is public information, which is why there’s no harm in me giving you a little crash course in what it is you’re asking. I tell you certain things, you judge for yourself if the satellite data you need are maybe available. Not that I can provide them.”

I said, “Understood and agreed.”

Bernie said, “Okay, so stand outside, look up at the night sky, and what you’re seeing is the makings of a junkyard. You laugh. The man thinks I’m joking. About satellites, I never joke. There are nearly ten thousand man-made objects up there orbiting this little planet of ours. More than three thousand of those objects are satellites, operative and inoperative, plus garbage you wouldn’t believe. Up there, we got nose-cone shrouds, lens covers, hatch covers, rocket bodies, pay-loads that have exploded, junk the astronauts or cosmonauts threw out or forgot. All sorts of stuff.

“But the U.S. intelligence agencies also have some very amazing birds up there. I’ve read about this, understand, I got no firsthand knowledge. Not that anything is such a great big secret anymore. Our military shoots off a rocket, the world’s watching. The Chinese, the Saudis, everyone, they know that if the rocket goes east or west, it’s probably an electronic eavesdropping satellite. If it goes north or south, it’s most likely a photoreconnaissance satellite, doing what they call a polar orbit or figure-eight orbit. The photorecon satellites, that’s what might interest you.”

No longer gazing at the octopi, concentrating on what Bernie was telling me-telling me with words, and without words-I said, “Exactly. Satellite photographs. How good are they?”

“Even back in the 1960s, when the CIA first starting launching them, even then, they were pretty good. CORONA Satellite Photography, that was the name of the operation. Keyhole photography we…” Bernie paused, catching himself. “Every satellite had a KH, keyhole, designation. Carried large spools of seventy-millimeter film into space, great big panoramic cameras. After photographs were taken, the satellites jettisoned the exposed film, which was then snared in midfall by military planes. Amazingly complicated, but it worked pretty good.”

I said, “But it’s better now.”

“Better? Remember the old rumor that NSA could read the number on a license plate from outer space. That was ten, fifteen years ago. Bunk! Three-meter resolution, that was about as good as it got. So the rumor was complete nonsense up until a few years back when we launched a couple of ultra-high-tech birds, KH-12s and now KH-13s. Absolutely fabulous resolution… which is what I’ve read, anyway. Pictures are so sharp, they can count the rivets on equipment coming out of Iraqi factories. They can pick out a human face in a sea of people. And the KH-13s, what they can do is still classified so, of course, how is someone like me supposed to know a thing or two about something like that? Spectacular reconnaissance, that would be my guess. With all the improvements in sensor development, maybe they can see through clouds. At night. In a heavy fog. I’m not saying it’s true, but in such a world, name one little thing that’s not possible.”

Yep, Bernie definitely had access to the satellites, and the satellites had the capability. That’s what he was telling me. I found his line, a human face in a sea of people, at once subtly evocative and also haunting. Was it really possible that he could pull up photos that might isolate Janet, Michael, and Grace after they were adrift?

I said, “Just for argument’s sake, let’s say I wormed my way into the right department, filled out all the forms, jumped through all the hoops, and managed to get official authorization to check the satellite data banks-”

“Marion, Marion! Forget it. Don’t waste your time. It could never happen. If this country allowed intelligence satellites to be used in even one missing person’s case, the floodgates would be opened. You know how many people go missing every year? Not to mention the breach of security. The whole system would be compromised. It would be disastrous. Even if you were a U.S. Senator, the governor of a state, it wouldn’t matter. They wouldn’t release that information to you, or even admit they had it.”

“But let’s say I did manage to get access. What are the chances that one or more satellites flew over the area the night my friends were set adrift? That photographs were taken?”

Yeager’s voice changed slightly, had some emotion in there-additional reassurance. “The chances? A man so naturally lucky as you, what do you care about odds? I’ll put it this way. There is now in place a keyhole system called ‘Lacrosse’ that is part of the old Star Wars initiative. With the satellites they have, U.S. intelligence people are able to see all parts of Russia at the same time, twenty-four hours a day, no problem. We’ve got newer birds on station now. Could be, our people want to keep a close eye on Cuba. Or Panama, maybe. I wouldn’t be the tiniest bit surprised if that included the Gulf of Mexico, the Florida Keys, the whole kit ’n’ kaboodle. Isn’t that where you live, down there in the tropics? Coconuts and alligators, tourists wearing those horrible shirts. All that rain and humidity. Every summer we used to have to visit my aunt on Miami Beach. Whew! It’s yours, you can have it.” He was laughing now.

Yes, there would be photographs available, and Bernie could find them.

We talked for another fifteen minutes. We traded old stories, spoke of old friends. I mentioned the Islamic terrorists, and he went on a ten-minute tirade. “They have asked for a dirty war, and we are giving it to them!” he said more than once.

Yes, he was fixated on them, despised them.

Bernie was wrong when he said I have no appreciation for the electronic niceties of this century. I much appreciate the fact that I now have access to instant communications worldwide with people about whom I care deeply. Pick up a telephone, punch a few buttons, and we have an immediate conduit to those individuals who have made a mark upon our lives. Much of technology is a response to the loneliness of the human condition. Drums and signal fires, cell phones and Internet cafes-methods change, but our wistfulness, our rebellion against isolation, does not.

Finally, Bernie told me how well Eve’s son was doing. He was in high school now. Getting straight As and he’d almost aced his SATs on his first try. Sports, too. He was a superb point guard and played baseball as well. The proud uncle going on and on.

As we chatted, me standing in the lab, watching the octopi with cat-gold eyes watching me from their lighted tanks, I had an idea. Missing stone crabs were not nearly so compelling as three missing people, but the oddity of it still troubled me.

I said, “Hey Bernie, maybe you can give me some advice about another little problem I’m having. Someone or something is sneaking into my lab at night and stealing specimens. How hard would it be to rig a little night-vision camera in here and keep track of what happens when I’m away?”

“So, finally you ask for a favor that I can help you with! What I’m going to do is loan you a little digitized video camera. The night-vision lens is already attached, so what you’re going to do is mount it on the wall, plug in the converter, and walk away. Simple as falling off a whatever it is people say. A barrel? There’s a timer you could probably figure out on your own after futzing with it two or three hours, so it’s better if I program it here. How’s it with you I set it to come on at midnight, off at six? With enough memory to film nine, maybe ten, nights before you got to go to the menu and delete.”

“Perfect,” I said.

“Not a problem, old friend. You will be getting something from me in the next few days.”

I wasn’t certain if he meant the camera or satellite photographs.

The next night, Sunday, a cool, clear Pearl Harbor anniversary eve, Tomlinson came puttering up in his little rubber dinghy. I could hear him swearing fraternally at the ancient Japanese kicker that missed, coughed, sputtered, and threatened to stall. He’d had the thing for years, refused to get rid of it because, he said, it dependably sapped all the aggression right out of him each and every time he used it.

“The goddamn thing is an emotional laxative,” he explained. “A bad karma purge with a carburetor glitch that Jesus Christ himself plus the twelve disciples couldn’t solve if their holy asses depended on it. I still think it’s a bad diaphragm, by the way. Reminds me of my ex-wife, the ball-breaking dragon lady. Dealing with that rice-burning piece of crap is like meditation in reverse. It’s cheaper than therapy, plus I’m never in much of a hurry, so what do I care?”

Now I felt the rubber boat bump my inside dock, then felt and heard the clomp-slap sound of Tomlinson’s bare feet as he swung up onto the deck. Heard the heavy rustling of paper bags, so I flipped on the outside flood, then held the door wide as he came in, arms filled with two bulging grocery sacks. I don’t have air conditioning-don’t like it, don’t need it. Just ceiling fans and lots of big windows with screens. Even so, Tomlinson came in pushing a pocket of mangrove-dense air, hotter than the air inside, and rich with sulfur, iodine, and the oil fragrance he always wore, patchouli. Something else, too: the sappy sweet odor of marijuana clinging to his baggy surfer shorts and tank top, plus a hint of a familiar woman’s perfume, Opium. Opium was my sister, Ransom’s, favorite perfume. Apparently, they were keeping company again. I fanned the air away as I pulled the door closed and hooked it tight.

“Dinnertime, compadre. You eaten yet?”

I looked at my watch. It was more than an hour past sunset, nearly 7 P.M. Through the west window, I could see a quarter moon, coral pink among December stars, drifting seaward. I’d checked the Farmer’s Almanac: Moonset was at 10:46 P.M. A good, black night for stargazing if I decided to break out the superb Celestron Nexstar 5-inch Schmidt-Casselgraine telescope that stood angled on its tripod by the north window, next to my reading chair and lamp. It is an amazing piece of optics. With its built-in computer and GPS, all you have to do is point the barrel of the scope north, punch in the approximate lat and long, and you can then select from a menu of many hundreds of celestial objects, stars, and planets. Choose any one of them, touch a button, and the telescope will automatically find it.

I said to Tomlinson, “Amelia didn’t head back to St. Pete until after four, and I just finished working out. So the answer’s no, I haven’t eaten.”

He was taking objects out of the sacks, bunches of fresh herbs-parsley, basil, cilantro-a handful of Persian limes. “Did you run? Or go to the school and swim laps? They’re keeping the pool open late, I hear.”

“Both. Kind of. I went down by the old landing strip and ran a couple of miles along Algier’s Beach, then swam out to the jet-ski buoy and back.”

“You’re shitting me. This time of year, man, the water’s getting cold. Has to be in the mid, maybe low seventies.”

I said, “I don’t care. After the Gulf, the water in my cistern shower seems warm. I like it.” I looked at the counter as he unloaded his sacks on to it, noting that, along with food, they contained a pilot chart of the Gulf of Mexico, wirebound, plus a sheath of what looked to be printed material from the Internet. I picked up the pilot chart, then looked into Tomlinson’s deepset and sad blue eyes. “You called your buddies at Blue Water Charts in Lauderdale.”

“Yep, Rick and Dorie. They knew just what I needed and FedExed it over.”

“So explain. Are we making dinner or doing research?”

“You got any fish? Maybe some shrimp, something like that? I’m going to make a Panamanian chimichurri sauce.”

I loved Tomlinson’s chimichurri but could never seem to duplicate it exactly: diced bunches of parsley and cilantro, one clove of diced garlic, one small diced chili pepper, a pinch of kosher salt, a little drizzle of balsamic vinegar, the juice from half a fresh lime, plus a cup or more of olive oil. Sometimes he added tomatoes, sometimes he didn’t.

I nodded. “Jeth dropped off a couple of nice kingfish steaks. He says the mackerel are running two-ten off the light-house in thirty-five feet of water.”

Tomlinson was at the sink now, washing the greens, the veins in his biceps implying the tubular network linked beneath his skin, the complicated hydraulics of human physiology. We are delicate machines, indeed, fleshy pumps, electrodes, and cartilaginous wiring. He said, “In that case, we’re making dinner and doing research.”