“Another checkpoint,” Murphy suggested.
“They switched cars,” Rencke said. “After they made the second stop, Mac’s transmitter moves about five meters to the west, but at a direct ninety-degree angle to the line it was moving in.”
“I don’t understand.”
“When a car makes a turn, even a sharp turn like at an intersection, there’s a radius of curve. Cars just don’t turn on a dime like people do.”
“You’re saying that they stopped the car, Mac got out and walked over to another car, which took off in the opposite direction twenty minutes later.”
“Right. And now you know what I’m looking for here. The anomalies that tell us something,” Rencke said. “They head north after that, past the air base, and then northwest, but very slowly now. They’re off the highway and probably off even dirt roads. They’re in the mountains.”
“Then he goes on foot,” Murphy said.
Rencke used the mouse to speed up the sequence until about eight hours ago. With a few keystrokes he brought up a topographic overlay so that they were seeing elevations as well as the simple north-south orientation.
“This is bin Laden’s camp,” Rencke said. “We’ve had one satellite pass to confirm that there’re a lot more people down there than you’d expect to see in a nomad camp.” Rencke looked up. “Anyway, the only reason nomads go up into the high mountains in summer is for grazing land.” He grinned like a kid. “But they screwed up this time.”
“What do you mean?”
“No goats,” Rencke said. “Lots of people, a couple of big animals, maybe camels, a couple of horses, but no goats.”
The analysts over at the NRO had missed that one, but then Otto wasn’t working for them. “All right. In the next couple of hours Mac’s signal disappears once, reappears less than an hour later, then disappears for good. What’s your take on that sequence?”
“Look at the overlay,” Rencke said. He sped up the sequence. The icon moved down into the valley, and then back up the hill on the other side where it disappeared. “Bin Laden’s den of iniquity. He invites Mac in for a bite to eat and a chat. But something happens in there, and Mac’s signal suddenly reappears.” Rencke looked up again. “Too soon, too soon, General, don’t ya get it?”
“They weren’t in there for very long.”
“Exactamundo. Bin Laden tells us he’s got a nuclear weapon and he wants to parley. But they only chat for a few minutes? Wrong answer, recruit. Something went haywire in there, and you just gotta ask yourself what that might be, ya know.”
Rencke hit another couple of keys and the screen was suddenly split, the new half showing a pair of squiggly lines moving left to right, traces on an oscilloscope. “Okay, this is a recording of Mac’s uplink with our satellite. The top line is before he went into bin Laden’s cave, and the bottom line is when he came out.”
Murphy studied them. “Are they different?” he asked. “Because if they are I don’t see it. They look the same to me.”
“Did to me too, at first,” Rencke admitted. “So I put both signals through a spectrum analyzer.” He brought up a new display with two sets of signals running left to right. This time it was clear that the bottom signal was slightly different from the top one. It looked as if the spikes had shifted a tiny amount to the right.
“It’s a phase shift, actually. But the guys downstairs are big time for sure that this wasn’t caused by low battery strength, or a component’s tolerance variation in the chip. This was an induced shift.” Rencke grinned like a kid at Christmas. “I told them to try a metal detector, like we use downstairs at the front door, on one of the test chips.” He brought up a third trace, which exactly matched the one directly above it. They were identical. “Bingo,” Rencke said. “They got wise to something, ran a metal detector over Mac, and found it.”
Murphy looked at the screen in amazement. Rencke wasn’t afraid of taking an idea and running with it wherever it might go, unlike just about all of official Washington. He didn’t give a damn about his job, his only concern was for McGarvey’s safety. Murphy looked away from the monitor. “All you’re telling me is why they killed him, Otto. I’m sorry—”
“Another wrong answer, recruit. That’s two in a row.” Rencke restored the map with its overlay and started the time bar again. “Okay, he moves out of the cave and down the hill into a hut.” Before Murphy could ask how he knew it was a hut, Otto pulled up a second overlay on the map. This one was a screened down image taken of the camp by one of the satellites. The position of the icon exactly matched a small building. “That picture was taken later, but the positions match up,” Rencke said. “A few minutes later the signal disappears for good.”
“So they took him inside a building and killed him,” Murphy said.
“No, sir. An earlier picture shows a man in a white gown entering the building. A doctor. That’s a medical hut. They took Mac in there to remove the chip. Then they destroyed it. Don’t you see? Mac is still alive.”
Murphy let out a pent-up breath. “Is that it, Otto?”
Rencke realized that he had not made a good case, and his expression dropped. “General, I know he’s alive. I can feel it in my gut.”
“I understand. But that doesn’t alter the fact that we’re dealing with a madman who apparently wants to play games with us over a nuclear weapon. A man who is responsible for the deaths of hundreds, maybe thousands of people including Alien Trumble and his wife and children.”
“Give him a chance—”
“I’ll present this to the President, but he’s not going to buy it, Otto. He’ll want more.”
“But we need time, General. Goddamnit, we have to give Mac more time before we go charging in.”
“Is there any way that you can get through to him on his satellite phone?”
Rencke shook his head. “I tried, but he’s still got it switched to the simplex mode — send only. He’s in a position where he can’t call out, and he doesn’t want an incoming.”
“Or he’s dead,” Murphy suggested softly.
“He’s not,” Rencke snapped. He looked desperately over at the White House phone that connected directly with the President. “I could pull down the entire White House communications center so that the order couldn’t go out.”
Murphy said nothing, though he suspected that Rencke was probably not exaggerating.
“I could even get into the fleet’s command and control system so that they couldn’t so much as fart let alone launch a cruise missile.”
“I imagine you could.”
“I could shut down this entire town, and it’d be easier than you can possibly imagine.”
“I’m sure of that too, Otto,” Murphy said tiredly. “I’ll try to buy us as much time as I can. But I don’t think he’ll listen to me unless you come up with something more convincing. There’s just too much at stake.”
Rencke gave Murphy a bleak look. “Tell them not to miss. Because if they do, and bin Laden survives, he’ll come after us with a vengeance,” Murphy nodded. “Don’t say anything to his wife or daughter, okay?”
“Yeah,” Otto replied glumly. “Whatta bummer.”
CVN TO Carl Vinson The eastern horizon over the Arabian Sea was starting to show the first hints of a cloudless dawn when the battle group commander, Admiral Steph Earle, the Duke of Earl, put down the telephone on the bridge. He’d had a five-minute conversation with the President of the United States. There was absolutely no doubt in his mind about the mission.
He turned to the Carl Vinson’s skipper, Captain Robert Twinning. “Final Justice is a go, Captain. You’re free to launch on your command.”
“Aye, aye, Admiral,” Twinning said. He reached for the growler phone.
“Give ‘em hell, Bob,” Earle said.
Twinning looked up and grinned. “That bastard’ll never know what hit him.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
