Jason snorted derisively. 'And that one is the pigsty.'
Maria didn't take her eyes from the men below. 'And that would be because…?'
Jason shrugged. 'They may well know those pigs would go for them. Plus, how eager would you be to wade through pig slop up to your knees?'
Surprisingly, Maria smiled, the first time since leaving Sicily. 'I thought these people were nature lovers. Pig shit is part of nature, is it not?'
Chapter Twenty-six
Silanus, Sardinia
That night
The day seemed interminable, as long as those days Jason had lain in hiding before a night operation. Only this time he had little equipment to check and recheck to pass the endless hours. Jason and Adrian had decided that only one person at a time should keep watch, the other three remaining invisible in the cavern's recesses. Whether caused by darkness or apprehension, anxiety in the cave had reduced conversation to monosyllabic whispers and grunts. Even so, Jason feared they might be overheard by an unseen prowler.
When evening's shadows finally flowed across the small valley, they brought relief to the tension like flotsam on an incoming tide.
Twenty minutes after the first star winked on, Adrian surveyed the area with the nightscope. 'Sodding rotters still surrounding the house, far as I can see. Now's as good a time as any for whatever you plan to lay on.'
Jason retreated to the far reach of the cave, a flashlight in one hand, his BlackBerry in the other.
'You canna get satellite reception back there,' Adrian reminded him.
'Don't have to. I'm inputing a text message. Once I'm done, I'll step outside and send it.'
Adrian cocked his head. 'An' jus' to whom would you be sendin' such a message, the U.S. Marines?'
Jason's grin was visible in the flashlight reflecting from the stone. 'Close guess.'
'An' those blokes down there.' Adrian jerked his head toward the cave's entrance. 'You're betting they have no way of intercepting or tracing…?'
'Omnidirectional. If they had such equipment, it would tell them the message came from all three hundred sixty degrees. Second, transmission time to the satellite is in the nanoseconds, less time than it takes a lightbulb to go dark when you turn off the switch. Someone staring at a direction finder wouldn't even have time to see the indicator move. Finally, it's encrypted. Anyone listening in would hear only a single beep.'
Adrian's eyebrows arched. 'All this in a simple BlackBerry?'
'It only looks like one.'
Finished, Jason moved to the front of the cave.
'Be careful,' Maria whispered as he crept by.
'I'm not even going all the way out,' Jason said, extending an arm through the opening. 'There, done.'
'That quick?' she asked.
Chapter Twenty-seven
Aboard the USS Carney (DDG 67)
Eastern Mediterranean
Ninety minutes later
PO 2d Class Shawana Davis had a tough choice to make: her enlistment would be up in three months, and the navy would provide a substantial sum for tuition to any of the three colleges to which she had been accepted. Conversely, she had come to like her life in the military. It was something very different from the endless flat fields of dusty clay where soybean field met soybean field, where being able to buy something you wanted depended on the harvests and excitement was defined by whatever movie was on HBO. The job offered a genuine chance of advancement, too, not some bogus showcase job where the occupant's chief value was to demonstrate the company's commitment to equal opportunity for women and minorities. Any promotion she got in the navy would be one she earned.
She liked that, relying on ability rather than her sex or race, to get ahead.
She also liked the prospect of being not only the first person in her family to graduate from high school, but the first from college, too.
Tough choice.
What if she There was a loud buzz that startled her before she realized the ship was receiving a message. Unusual for this time of day-must be important. As the sole person on duty in the communications room, she watched an incomprehensible series of letters and numbers march across the screen. In the old days-at least, according to the old war movies she loved-the message would have clattered through the printer louder than two skeletons making it on a tin roof. Now, only the buzzer alerted her to incoming traffic.
She waited for the characters to stop and then picked up a phone on the bulkhead next to her station just below the bridge. She waited a second or two before Lieutenant (J.G.) Wade, tonight's duty officer, picked up.
He must have been daydreaming, too. Woolgathering, her daddy would have called it. Easy enough to do when the only sounds were the rhythmic throbbing of the engines and swish of the hull parting a flat sea.
His voice sounded as though she had woken him up. 'Wade.'
He didn't have to identify himself. His drawl was right out of North Carolina's tobacco fields.
'Sir,' Shawana said, 'incoming message received.'
'From battle group, fleet?'
Shawana frowned and held her head back from the screen as if that might answer the question. 'Don't think so, no, sir. Copy to fleet and battle group, but the communication appears be code ten.'
There was an audible intake of breath. 'The navy department? Direct to the Carney?'
'Looks like it, sir.'
Thank you, Davis. I'll be right down.'
The immediate clang of hard leather on metal stairs made good on the promise. Less than fifteen seconds later, Lt. (J.G.) Robert Lee Wade was looking over her shoulder. From his breath, Shawana guessed the spaghetti sauce in the officers' mess had been heavy on the garlic.
'That's something I've never heard of,' he said. 'Why would Washington communicate directly with a guided missile destroyer instead of going through channels?'
'Maybe somebody's in a hurry,' Shawana suggested. 'Maybe you ought to get this to the captain on the double… sir.'
'You may be right, Davis. I've never seen that particular cipher before.'
Neither had she, but she said nothing as he ripped the page from the printer and bolted for the companionway.
It took Cmdr. Edward Simms a full ten minutes of playing with his encryption computer to decode the message, and another ten to confirm he had done it correctly the first time.
'Balls!' he said to no one in particular. 'This makes no sense at all.'
The other four men in the room, Wade and the three men who had been playing bridge with the ship's captain, looked at one another before one said, 'It's from Washington. It doesn't have to make sense.'
Old joke. More truth than humor.
Simms held the offending paper up to the light as though there might be a secret message in light-sensitive ink. 'We're to program the specified target location into one of those experimental aircraft, launch, and recover it.'
'But sir,' one of the men protested, 'We have no armament for the Thing, only dummy bombs to test its stability and accuracy.'
'The Thing' was the nickname the Carney's crew had given the CRW (canard rotor/wing) X50A UAB
