And it was Yablonski’s turn to be embarrassed.
Otto got a visitor’s pass and drove Yablonski up to the OHB where he parked in his underground slot, but instead of taking the elevator up to his third-floor office he led his guest through a couple of security checkpoints on the other side of the garage, then down a long tunnel that ran beneath the main entrance and the circular driveway.
“When did it finally hit you?” Otto asked.
“I was dreaming about the oil rig and how I would sabotage it, if that were my assignment,” Eric said. “I mean that may be a big assumption, but it’s something to start with.”
“Not such a big assumption. Mac and I looked down that path but neither of us came up with what you did.”
“I figured that our contractor was probably in some military somewhere — from what we know and guess, most likely South Africa — and standard operating procedure for those guys is planning and training. Either he got the use of an oil platform sitting out in the Persian Gulf — assuming he’s been hired by someone with connections to OPEC, or at the very least someone in the oil markets — or he got the blueprints for Vanessa Explorer and had a mock-up, or at least a partial mock-up, built out of plywood and two-by-fours.”
“That’d be a big construction project. Out in the desert somewhere.”
“Saudi Arabia?” Yablonski asked.
“One of the Royals might be funding the op, but they wouldn’t put something like that on Saudi soil. My guess was Syria or Libya. But if it’s there, it would have to stick out like a sore thumb, even if it was camouflaged.”
“Where are we going, by the way?” Yablonski asked.
“The Dome,” Rencke said. “Have you heard of it?”
Yablonski was impressed. “Jesus,” he said. “Only rumors.”
“Well, you wanted to know if we’d spotted anything interesting in the past thirty days or so, and I think we’ve come up with something in the Libyan desert about six hundred klicks southeast of Tripoli.”
Nearly a hundred yards down the bare concrete-walled tunnel they came to another security door, where Rencke had to submit to a retinal scan, and inside a small anteroom an armed security guard, who’d monitored their progress from the parking garage, looked up from where he was seated behind a small desk. Getting beyond this point required visual recognition; only people the security guard on duty personally knew could pass.
“Good morning, Mr. Rencke. Your operator arrived fifteen minutes ago.”
Otto and Eric signed an electronic reader, and the security officer buzzed them through into a long corridor and then through another security door into a large dimly lit circular room with stadium seating for two dozen people under a domed ceiling much like the ones found in planetariums. A projection device with several lenses was built into a platform in the center of the room, computer-controlled by an operator in a booth in the rear. Each seat had its own monitor and keyboard to control the presentation if the material being displayed were too sensitive to be shared by an operator.
“Good morning, Mr. Rencke,” the operator’s voice came from speakers. “Are we ready to begin?”
“Yes, please,” Otto said, and he and Yablonski sat down.
The room lights dimmed further, and overhead a 360-degree image of what appeared to be a training base of some sort in the middle of a desert appeared on the dome. The image was so startlingly clear, almost 3-D, that they felt as if they were actually there in person.
“It’s a former Libyan army desert warfare training base at Al Fuqaha’,” Otto said. “But Gadhafi rents it out from time to time to anyone whose cause he finds worthy, and whoever has the most Western currency.”
“It looks deserted.”
“You’re seeing satellite images from sixty days ago,” Otto said. “But watch.” He touched an icon on the monitor.
The static daytime image began to move, shifting from sunlight into dusk and finally full night in which the view changed to an infrared mode in which anything mechanical like a car or truck engine or an animal that emitted heat would show up. But no heat blooms appeared anywhere.
Otto sped up the progression from day to night to day until ten days later when four trucks showed up in the middle of the night, and two dozen men began erecting what looked like circus tent poles over which, just before dawn, they draped a mesh fabric.
“Camouflage netting,” Yablonski said. “But the size of it!”
Otto stopped the image just after the sun came up when nothing was visible to the satellite except what appeared to be an expanse of empty desert, fifty or sixty meters on each side.
“Plenty big to hide a mock-up,” Yablonski said. He was excited.
“That’s exactly what happens over the next thirty days,” Otto said, and he moved the image forward. A steady stream of trucks and workmen arrived by night, unloaded what appeared to be construction materials that they placed beneath the netting, and were gone each morning an hour before dawn.
The trucks and workmen stopped coming after a month, and the camp remained deserted for nearly a week until a pair of small army trucks showed up one afternoon and disappeared from view beneath the netting. Otto slowed the image at nightfall, where the heat blooms of several people showed up, at least two of them brighter than the others.
“My guess is that they built the oil rig mock-up, and the two brighter images were standing on top of it closer to the netting,” Otto said. “Now watch this.”
Three nights later two brighter images showed atop the platform again, while four other heat blooms in two pairs approached from separate directions.
Yablonski sat forward. “That’s a military operation if ever I saw one,” he said.
Less than twenty minutes later, the four images on the ground stopped and then came together, and after a few minutes they walked away and disappeared, as did the two heat blooms on the platform.
“Where’d they go?”
“Watch,” Otto said, and the two panel vans appeared from beneath the netting and headed to the northwest. The next day the camp was once again deserted, and it remained that way.
“Thank you, Don,” Otto said. “That’ll be all for today.”
“Yes, sir. Would you like me to quit this program?”
“Yes, please,” Otto said, and after the images on the Dome blanked out and the auditorium’s lights came up, he turned in his seat and watched until the lights in the booth went out.
“I didn’t realize that we had this capability,” Yablonski said, impressed.
“And more,” Otto said. “But what’s more important is that I did some digging, and I found out that an ex- South African Buffalo Battalion officer by the name of Brian DeCamp used the training base about nine years ago. We have someone in Gadhafi’s government who found out for me. It was risking an asset, but I leaned on him and he came through.”
“It’s a start. Where’s he been since then?”
“He disappeared. No trace, not even a glimmer. And my source in Tripoli had no idea who used the base or why. But DeCamp fits our profile.”
“Do we have a photograph of him?”
“No. Not even a decent physical description. Our asset never actually met him.”
“Have you shared this with McGarvey?” Yablonski asked.
“I will this afternoon, I gotta check out something else first,” Otto said, and he explained McGarvey’s suspicion that one of the journalists who’d come aboard Vanessa for the news conference could have been DeCamp.
“Check their backgrounds. See if all of them actually filed stories, because it’s a safe bet that DeCamp is a killer but not a journalist.”
“I already have, and it’s a dead end,” Otto said. “But assuming our contractor is Brian DeCamp, the same guy who hit Hutchinson Island, and assuming he’s going after the oil rig — who’s paying him to do it and why?”
“Back to the money trail.”
Otto nodded. “For now it’s our best bet.”
