already there. He was anxious to know what had happened, what had gone wrong.
He prayed it was nothing that might keep them from him.
If for some reason the others did not show up within twenty four hours, Ishaq's standing orders were to get to the cave and set up the radio he carried in his small equipment case.
Then he was to call the FKM base in Abbottabad, across the border in Pakistan. They would tell him what to do. That meant either he would be advised to wait for replacements or attempt to return home for a debriefing.
If it came to that, Ishaq hoped they would tell him to wait.
Going home would mean climbing the mountains to the Siachin Glacier. Or else he would have to attempt to make his way across the line of control. His chances of surviving the trip were not good. FKM command might just as well order him to shoot himself at the cave.
As Ishaq neared the point where the two cuts converged he saw the truck. It was parked in the middle of the road.
The flatbed was covered with an earth-tone tarp they carried and the cab was hidden beneath scrub. A smile fought a losing battle against the wind. He was glad they had made it. But that changed when his headlights found the team about two hundred yards ahead. As one they turned and crouched, ready to fire.
'No, it's Ishaq!' he cried.
'It's Ishaq!'
They lowered their weapons and continued ahead without waiting for their teammate. Sharab was in front with the girl.
Nanda was being urged forward at gunpoint.
That was not like Sharab.
This was bad. This was very, very bad.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN.
Washington, D. C. Wednesday, 10:51 a. m.
Bob Herbert was usually a pretty happy man.
To begin with, Herbert loved his work. He had a good team working beside him. He was able to give Op-Center personnel the kind of heads-up intelligence he and his wife never had in Lebanon. He was also happy with himself. He was not a Washington bureaucrat. He put truthfulness above diplomacy and the well-being of the NCMC above the advancement of Bob Herbert. That meant he could sleep at night. He had the respect of the people who mattered, like Paul Hood and Mike Rodgers.
But Bob Herbert was not happy right now.
Hank Lewis had phoned from the NSA to say that the latest information e-mailed from Ron Friday was being processed by decryption personnel.
It would be forwarded to Herbert within minutes. While Herbert waited for the intel he did something he had been meaning to do since the Striker recon mission was okayed by the CIOC. He pulled up Ron Friday's NSA file on his computer. Until now, Herbert and his team had been too busy helping Mike Rodgers and Striker prepare for the mission to do anything else.
Herbert did not like what he saw in Ron Friday's dossier.
Or rather, what he did not see there.
As a crisis management center, Op-Center did not keep a full range of military maps and intelligence in what they called their 'hot box.' The only files that were reviewed and updated on a four-times-daily basis were situations and places where American personnel or interests were directly involved or affected. Kashmir was certainly a crisis zone.
But if it exploded, it was not a spot with which Op-Center would automatically be involved. In fact, that was the reason Striker had been asked to go into the region and look for Pakistani nuclear weapons. Pakistani intelligence would not be expecting them.
Ron Friday was a very late addition to the mission. His participation had been requested over the weekend by Satya Shankar, minister of state. Department of Atomic Energy.
Officially, one of Shankar's duties was the sale of nuclear technology to developing nations. Unofficially, he was responsible for helping the military keep track of nuclear technology within enemy states.
Shankar and Friday had worked together once before, when Shankar was joint secretary. Exploration, of the Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas. Friday had been called in by a European oil concern to assess legal issues involving drilling in disputed territory between Great Indian Desert in the Rajasthan Province of India and the Thar Desert in Pakistan. Shankar had obviously been impressed by the attorney.
Since Op-Center was stuck with Friday, reading his file had not been a high priority for Herbert. Especially since the CIOC had already okayed Friday based on his Blue Shield rating. That meant Ron Friday was cleared to take part in the most sensitive fieldwork in foreign countries. Red Shield meant that an agent was trusted by the foreign government.
White Shield meant that he was trusted by his own government, that there was no evidence of double-agent activity.
Yellow Shield meant that he had been revealed to be a double agent and was being used by his government to put out disinformation, often without his knowledge or occasionally with his cooperation in exchange for clemency. Blue Shield meant he was trusted by both nations.
What the Red, White, and Blue rankings really meant was that no data had ever come up to suggest the agent was corrupt. That was usually good enough for a project overseer to rubber-stamp an individual for a mission. Especially an overseer who was new on the job and overworked, like Hank Lewis at the National Security Agency. But the Shield system was not infallible. It could simply mean that the agent had been too careful to be caught. Or
