him.
Louise looked up. “What did you bring me?” Hagedorn was only a couple of hours into his shift, but already his uniform looked as if it had been slept in.
“The navy’s gonna be pissed off.” Hagedorn laid a couple of the transparencies on an empty spot on the light table. “Unless I’ve been playing with myself too much and I’m going blind, I think that’s bin Laden in the lower right quadrant.”
Louise moved a large magnifying lens over the first photograph and studied the image in the lower right corner. It was definitely a man, and definitely dressed like bin Laden. His face was turned to the left, showing his profile. He was looking at a light bloom toward the center of the camp. Louise moved the magnifying lens, but she didn’t need it to see that what she was looking at wasn’t a fire or a secondary explosion; it was a missile strike.
She looked up.
“That was the second-to-the-last hit,” Hagedorn said. “But I wasn’t satisfied with the first shots, so I ran these through again, and played with some light values. The flashes from the HE warheads tend to fuzz out a lot of the details.”
Louise turned back to the transparency. “How sure are you that this is bin Laden?”
“The computer was about seventy-five percent with the first, but we hit near a hundred percent with the second.”
Louise switched to the second image, and this time the figure had thrown back his head and seemed to be shouting something up into the sky. There was no doubt in her mind that she was looking at a very-much-alive Osama bin Laden.
“That one’s after the last strike, so there’s no doubt that the navy missed him,” Hagedorn said.
Louise cleared the other transparencies off the light table, and Hagedorn spread the rest of the pictures he had brought in sequence. “You’ve enhanced all of these?” she asked.
“Had to, because we weren’t seeing diddly squat through the smoke, most of which incidentally came from burning diesel. Probably hit their fuel storage area. And the chopper was putting out a lot of smoke too.”
Louise took her time studying each of the photographs that had been taken at two minute intervals after the attack had ended. The camp was flattened, nothing she was seeing changed her earlier assessment about that. But there were a lot of survivors. She counted at least two dozen, maybe more. But most disturbing was the fact that bin Laden had survived.
“He’s carrying something,” Louise said.
“Somebody,” Hagedorn corrected. He laid out three infrared-enhanced transparencies, and it became immediately apparent that bin Laden was carrying a human form.
In each succeeding image the heat emanating from the body was fading.
Louise looked up. “Whoever it is was killed in the raid.”
“That’s what it looks like. The million dollar question is who. I mean bin Laden loves his men and all that, but he had a gimpy leg and he’s not about to dive into the middle of a missile raid and pick up just anybody.”
Louise went back to the photograph in which bin Laden had gotten to his feet. She could see that he was carrying somebody. She switched the magnifying lens to the next image showing him heading toward the middle of the camp, and then the next three, a cold knot beginning to form at the pit of her stomach. She looked up again and Hagedorn was staring at her.
“I think I’m going to show these to somebody who might know what they mean.”
“Your old friend the colonel?” Hagedorn asked.
Louise shook her head. “You wouldn’t know him. He’s next door in the DO. Name is Otto Rencke. But first I want you to enhance everything we’ve down loaded so far. I don’t want to make a mistake.”
Rencke went over to Murphy’s office. Dick Adkins and Dave Whittaker were already there with the general who’d just returned from his home in Chevy Chase. “He’s alive and on his way to Kabul,” Rencke told them triumphantly.
Murphy was rocked to the core. “Was he hurt?”
“His phone was going bad so we didn’t have much time. He was ten or twelve miles outside of bin Laden’s camp, and he figured that he could make it down to Kabul sometime tonight, his time. Another ten or twelve hours.”
“Then what?” Adkins asked. “And what the hell happened to his chip?”
“He didn’t say about the chip, but he’s going to try to make it to the ambassador’s old residence,” Rencke said.”
“I’ll see about getting our people over to him,” Whittaker said, but he didn’t sound so sure. “They’re under siege at the old embassy so it’s going to be a problem for them.” “Okay, assuming that he gets that far without running into a Taliban military patrol or the crowds, getting him out of the country isn’t going to be a piece of cake,” Adkins said.
“We’re not going to leave him there,” Murphy said firmly. “What do you have in mind, Otto?”
“There’s maybe fifty Americans in Kabul right now, and they have to get out too. It’d make sense if we sent a C-130 from Riyadh to pick them up.” “It’s likely that the Taliban are looking for him,” Adkins said. “If he’s spotted they’ll never let him get close to the airport, let alone get aboard — even if the Taliban do let us fly in.”
“Mac said that if we could get a C-130 in there he’d get aboard,” Rencke countered, keeping his temper in check.
“I don’t know how,” Whittaker said.
“If Mac says he can do something, then we’d better believe him,” Adkins flared. He turned to Murphy. “I can get the plane, that’s no problem, but we’ll have to put pressure on the Taliban government to give us flight clearance.”
“I’ll call the President right now,” Murphy said. “He promised that if we found out that Mac was still alive he’d give us whatever we needed to get him out in one piece.”
“I’ll get Jeff Cook started. He can pull some strings, and with any luck by the time the C-130 approaches Afghani airspace we’ll have the clearance,” Adkins said, and he picked up the phone.
Murphy glanced at the clock. It was coming up on two. “The rest is going to be up to Mac, although I don’t know what the hell the President is going to say to them.”
“We only hit bin Laden’s camp,” Whittaker pointed out. “It’s not as if we hit an Afghani civilian target. There’s nothing else up there.”
“There’s more,” Rencke said as Murphy reached for the direct line phone to the White House.
The general stopped.
“Mac told me that there’s no doubt now that bin Laden has the bomb.”
They all looked at him, the office suddenly very quiet. It was their worst fear. The reason they had sent McGarvey into what they all thought was a suicide mission.
“If he wasn’t killed in the raid he’ll use it against us.”
“Do we have anything new from the NRO?” Murphy asked, subdued.
“Not yet, but they’re working on it. The NSA is monitoring the usual lines of communications he’s used in the past, but unless we get lucky we might not know for sure until it’s too late.”
“Until it’s too late,” Murphy repeated softly.
Rencke nodded glumly. “Mac wants a SNIE developed for the National Security Council by first thing in the morning. I’ve already called Fred Rudolph and told him what might be coming our way, and INS will have to be notified asap. Mac wants all of our assets worldwide put on alert, because the only way we’re going to stop this shit is if somebody spots him.” Rencke shook his head. “Oh, boy, this is the big one. If bin Laden is alive, and he wants to get a nuclear weapon to the U.S. and set it off, he’ll do it.”
“We’re pretty good too, Otto,” Murphy said.
“Yeah, but if he’s alive he’s gotta be seriously pissed off, ya know? He’s gonna be one motivated dude.”
Adkins put the phone down. “Jeff will arrange the C-130, but they’ll need formal orders. They’ll have to fly down the Gulf to avoid Iranian airspace, but the real problem is going to be Pakistan. The President will have to talk to them for over-flight permission. As it is Jeff figures that the one-way air distance is around sixteen hundred miles. But if they have to fly another route, over India let’s say, it’ll take twice as long.”
