Seville ditty
'Witch Doctor.' The young singer's low, torchy take on 'Oo-ee-oo-ah-ah' was always an invigorating way to start the day. Usually, when he crossed the grass here, he was in a different frame of mind. This early, dew would dampen his polished shoes as they sank into the soft soil. His neatly pressed uniform and his short, graying black hair would ripple in the strong breeze. But Rodgers was usually oblivious to the earth, wind, and water--three of the four ancient elements.
He was only aware of the fourth element, fire. That was because it was bottled and capped inside the man himself.
He carried it carefully as though it were nitroglycerin.
One sudden move and he would blow.
But not today.
There was a young guard standing in a bullet-proof glass booth just inside the door. He saluted smartly as Rodgers entered.
'Good morning, sir,' the sentry said.
'Good morning,' Rodgers replied. '
'Wolverine.'
That was Rodgers's personal password for the day. It was left on his Govnel e-mail pager the night before by Op Center internal security chief, Jenkin Wynne. If the password did not match what the guard had on his computer Rodgers would not have been allowed to enter.
'Thank you. sir,' the guard said and saluted again. He pressed a button and the door clicked open. Rodgers entered.
There was a single elevator directly ahead. As Rodgers walked toward it he wondered how old the airman first class was. Twenty-two?
Twenty-three? A few months ago Rodgers would have given his rank, his experiences, everything he owned or knew to be back where this young sentry was.
Healthy and sharp, with all his options spread before him.
That was after Rodgers had disastrously field-tested the Regional Op-Center. The mobile, hi-tech facility had been seized in the Middle East. Rodgers and his personnel were imprisoned and tortured. Upon the team's release. Senator Barbara Fox and the Congressional Intelligence Oversight Committee rethought the ROC program. The watchdog group felt that having a U. S. intelligence base working openly on foreign soil was provocative rather than a deterrent.
Because the ROC had been Rodgers's responsibility he felt as though he'd let Op-Center down. He also felt as though he had blown his last, best chance to gel back into the field.
Rodgers was wrong. The United States needed intelligence on the nuclear situation in Kashmir. Specifically, whether Pakistan had deployed warheads deep in the mountains of the region. Indian operatives could not go into the field. If the Pakistanis found them it might trigger the war the United States was hoping to avoid. An American unit would have some wiggle room. Especially if they could prove that they were bringing intelligence about Indian nuclear capabilities to Pakistan, intelligence that a National Security Agency liaison would be giving Rodgers in the town of Srinagar. Of course, the Indian military would not know he had that. It was all a big, dangerous game of three-card monte. All the dealer had to do was remember where all the cards were and never get busted.
Rodgers entered the small, brightly lit elevator and rode it to the basement level.
Op-Center--officially the National Crisis Management Center--was housed in a two-story building located near the Naval Reserve flight line.
During the Cold War the nondescript, ivory-colored building was a staging area for crack flight crews. In the event of a nuclear attack their job would have been to evacuate key officials from Washington, D. C. With the fall of the Soviet Union and the downsizing of the air force's Nurrds--nuclear rapid-response divisions--the building was given to the newly commissioned NCMC.
The upstairs offices were for non classified operations such as news monitoring, finance, and human resources.
The basement was where Hood, Rodgers, Intelligence Chief Bob Herbert, and the rest of the intelligence- gathering and -processing personnel worked.
Rodgers reached the underground level. He walked through the cubicles in the center to his office. He retrieved his old leather briefcase from under the desk. He packed his laptop and began collecting the diskettes he would need for his journey. The files contained intelligence reports from India and Pakistan, maps of Kashmir, and the names of contacts as well as safe houses throughout the region. As he packed the tools of his trade Rodgers felt almost like he did as a kid growing up in Hartford, Connecticut. Hartford endured fierce winter storms. But they were damp storms that brought packing snow. Before putting on his snow suit Rodgers would get his bucket, rope, spade, and swimming goggles and toss them into his school gym bag. His mother insisted on the goggles. She knew she could not prevent her son from fighting but she did not want him getting hit by a snowball and losing an eye. Once outside, while all the other kids were building snow forts, Rodgers would climb a tree and build a snow tree house on a piece of plywood. No one ever expected that. A rain of snowballs from a thick branch.
After Rodgers had his briefcase packed he would head to the 'Gulf cart'
parked at the back door. That was what the military had christened the motorized carts that had shuttled officers from meeting to meeting during both Desert Shield and Desert Storm. The Pentagon bought thousands of them just before what turned out to be the last gasp of face-to-face strategy meetings before secure video- conferencing was created.
After that, the obsolete carts had been distributed to bases around the country as Christmas presents to senior officers.
The Gulf cart would not have far to travel. A C-130 Hercules was parked just a quarter of a mile away, in the holding area of the airstrip that passed directly behind the NCMC building. In slightly under an hour the hundred- foot-long transport would begin a NATO supply trek that would secretly ferry Rodgers and his Striker unit from Andrews to the Royal Air Force Alconbury station in Great Britain to a NATO base outside Ankara, Turkey. There,
