Rodgers handed Nanda the paper when she arrived. He removed his coat, set it on the ice beside the hole, and told Nanda to put the map on it.
He said the coat would not burn but he needed to find something else that would.
'Very quickly,' he added.
'Hold on,' Nanda said.
The young woman reached into her coat pocket and removed the small volume of Upanishad. s she always carried.
She also removed the documents she was supposed to plant on the terrorists to help implicate them when they were captured.
'These devotionals will save more souls than the Brahmans ever imagined,' she said.
Obviously, Nanda was experiencing some of the same spiritual and atavistic feelings Rodgers was. Or maybe they were both just exhausted.
As the papers burned, the general withdrew the radio from the belt loop and laid it on the coat. He bent low over it.
The radio was made of one vacuum-formed casing. Rodgers knew he would not be able to break that without risk of damaging the components he needed. Instead, he stuck the knife into the area around the recessed mouthpiece. Rodgers carefully pried that loose. The wire behind it, and the chip to which it was attached, were what he needed to access.
Still listening for activity from across the clearing, Rodgers used the knife to fish out the chip that was attached to the mouthpiece. He could not afford to sever the chip from the unit. If he did that, the chip itself would have no power source. That power came from the battery in the radio, not from the battery behind the satellite dish.
He had to make sure he cut the right one to splice. He pulled the mouthpiece out as far as it could go and tilted the opening toward the light. Twenty years ago, this would have been a hopeless task. Radios then were crammed with transistors and wires that were impossible to read. The inside of this radio was relatively clean and open, just a few chips and wires.
Rodgers saw the battery and the wire that hooked the microchip and mouthpiece to it. The other wire, the one that led to the radio antenna, was the one he needed to cut.
Carefully placing the radio back on the coat, Rodgers used the knife to slice that wire as close to the radio antenna as possible. That would give him about two inches of wire to work with.
Crouching and using the tip of his boot as a cutting surface, Rodgers scored and stripped that remaining piece of wire. Then he picked up the scored cable from the satellite dish. He used his fingernails to chip the plastic casing away.
When a half inch of wire was exposed, he twisted the two pieces of copper together and turned the unit on. Then he backed away from the radio and gently urged Nanda toward it.
It was the unlikeliest, most Frankenstein monster-looking, jury-rigged device that Mike Rodgers had seen in all his years of service. But that did not matter. Only one thing did.
That it worked.
CHAPTER SIXTY-FIVE.
Washington, D. C. Thursday, 6:21 p. m.
It was something Ron Plummer had never experienced. A moment of profound euphoria followed by a moment so sickening that the drop was physically disorienting.
When the call came from Islamabad, Ambassador Simathna listened for a moment then smiled broadly. Plummer did not have to wait for the call to be put on speakerphone to know what it was.
Mike Rodgers had succeeded. Somehow, the general had gotten the message to the Pakistani base that monitored the silo. They had forwarded the message to the Pakistani Ministry of Defense. From there, the tape was given to CNN and sent out to the world.
'My name is Nanda Kumar,' said the high, scratchy voice on the recording.
'I am an Indian citizen of Kashmir and a civilian network operative.
For several months I have worked with India's Special Frontier Force to undermine a group of Pakistani terrorists. The Special Frontier Force told me that my actions would result in the arrest of the terrorists.
Instead, the intelligence I provided allowed the Special Frontier Force to frame the Pakistanis. The terrorists have been responsible for many terrible acts. But they were not responsible for Wednesday's bomb attack on the pilgrim bus and Hindu temple in the Srinagar market. That was the work of the Special Frontier Force.'
Ambassador Simathna was still beaming as he shut the phone off and leaned toward a second speakerphone. This was the open line to Paul Hood's office at Op-Center.
'Director Hood, did you hear that?' the ambassador asked.
'I did,' Hood replied.
'It's also running on CNN now.' 'That is very gratifying,' Simathna said.
'I congratulate you and your General Rodgers. I do not know how he got the woman's message through but it is quite impressive.'
'General Rodgers is a very impressive man,' Hood agreed.
'We'd like to know how he got the message through ourselves. Bob Herbert tells me that Colonel August is unable to raise him. The cell phone must have died.'
'As long as it is just the cell phone,' Simathna joked.
