babies hang out at forty thousand feet. Your guy doesn’t have bionic vision, does he?”
Reilly frowned. He didn’t like it. “Even with the high altitude … This guy knows what he’s doing, he knows what they look like. The skies will probably be clear this time of year. He might spot it. Can’t we get one of the big birds?”
Like the station chief, Reilly knew the more widely used surveillance satellites—the Keyhole class popularized in movies and on TV—wouldn’t do, not in this case. They were more suited to monitoring a location once every couple hours for, say, the construction of a nuclear plant or the appearance of missile launchers. What they couldn’t do was provide live, constant monitoring of a fixed location. For that, Reilly needed something the National Reconnaissance Office tried to keep under the radar, so to speak: a surveillance satellite that could maintain a geosynchronous orbit above a fixed point on the Earth’s surface and relay live video back in real time. It was a very hard thing to achieve. Satellites drifted away from their positions due to all kinds of perturbations—variations in the Earth’s gravitational field in part due to the moon and the sun, solar wind, radiation pressure. Thrusters and complex “station-keeping” computer programs were needed to keep the satellite over its target for extended periods. And as the birds needed to be deployed at an altitude of twenty-two thousand miles to make this possible, they also needed to have exceptionally advanced imaging technology. Which was why they were bigger than a school bus and were rumored to cost more than two billion dollars each—if, that is, they existed at all. And why there weren’t enough of them to go around.
The station chief’s face crinkled at the request. “Not a chance. With all that’s going on out in that idyllic little part of the world, they’re constantly fully tasked. It’d be impossible to get hold of one. Besides, I don’t think we could even re-task one within the time frame you’re talking about.”
“We need something,” Reilly insisted. “This guy’s already done some serious damage, and he’s intent on causing more.”
The station chief spread out his hands appeasingly. “Trust me on this. An RQ-4 will give you what you need, and then some. Our boys in Iraq and in Afghanistan swear by them. More to the point—they’re your only option. So I’d say, embrace it and hope for the best.”
The station chief was underplaying the Global Hawk’s talents. It was an awesome piece of technology. A big aircraft with a wingspan of more than a hundred feet, the unmanned, remote-controlled drone could travel three thousand miles to its target zone, where it would have “long-dwell”—meaning it could spend many hours watching the same spot—and “broad area coverage” capability. It could carry all kinds of imaging cameras and radars— electro-optical, infrared, synthetic-aperture—and relay back images of the target, day or night, no matter the weather. At a unit cost of thirty-eight million dollars, it was a stunningly powerful and cost-effective way of obtaining IMINT—imagery intelligence—without any risk of ending up with a Francis Gary Powers kind of debacle.
The station chief regarded the map of the mountain again. “Now, assuming we get one, we still have some problems to work out. For one thing, there are too many approach routes to keep under watch. The target area’s just too big to have a constant fix at any resolution that’s useful. Unless we can narrow it down, we’ll need to rotate around it. In which case we might miss our target.”
“It’s all the information we’ve got right now,” Reilly grumbled.
The station chief mulled it over for a beat, then nodded. “Okay. I’ll talk to Langley. See if we can get the guys over at Beale to free one up for us pronto.”
“We just need it for a day or two,” Reilly told him. “But we need it now. No point in having it otherwise.”
“We’ll bust some balls and get one lined up,” the station chief reaffirmed. “But then, we still don’t know what we’re looking for, do we?”
“Just give me some eyes,” Reilly said. “I’ll make sure they have something to look for.”
HE FOUND TESS IN AN empty interview room, sitting at a table that was swamped by big maps. She had her laptop open beside her and was deep in thought. She only noticed his presence when he was standing next to her, and she looked up at him.
“So?” she asked. “How did it go?”
Judging by the tone of her questions, his funk was clearly visible.
He shrugged. “We can’t get the satellite I want, but I think we’ll get a surveillance drone. The target area’s too big, though … the coverage window won’t be as tight as I’d like it to be.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means we might miss something,” he said, his tone somber and heavy with fatigue. He pulled out a chair and plopped himself into it.
Tess smiled. “Maybe I can help.”
Reilly’s brow furrowed, then he managed a small grin. “Not a good time to be taunting me with a back rub.”
Tess shot him a look. “I’m serious, doofus.” She reached for a map of the whole country, laid it on top of the topographic map of Mount Erciyes, and tapped her finger on Istanbul, in the upper left corner. “Take a look.”
He moved closer.
“Okay,” she began. “Constantinople’s up here. That’s where Everard and his merry men, the first Templars to visit the monastery, started their journey.”
She glanced at Reilly to make sure she had his attention. He gave her a “go on, I’m all ears” nod.
“They were trying to get back to here,” she continued, “to Antioch, the nearest Templar stronghold.” She pointed out its location, on the Eastern Mediterranean, in present-day Syria. “But, as we know, they only made it as far as here,” she said as her finger arced back to the center of the map, “Mount Argaeus, where the monastery is.”
“That’s just … astonishing,” he ribbed.
“Look at this mountain, you bonehead. It’s round. Round like a dormant volcano should be. They could have easily gone around it, right?” She derisively stretched out the word “round” and twirled her finger around it on the map. “It’s not like it’s a wall or a barrier that they had to cross. And yet, for some reason, they decided to climb up it.”
Reilly thought about it for a second. “Doesn’t seem reasonable—unless they were trying to stay out of sight.”
She grinned with mock admiration. “God, that Quantico training of yours, the way you just see the most obscure connections … It just boggles the mind, you know that?”
“Well unboggle yourself and tell me what you’re thinking.”
Her tone reverted to serious. “Everard and his troupe
“Hang on, a Christian monastery in Muslim territory?”
“The Seljuks tolerated Christianity. Christians were free to practice their faith openly. They weren’t persecuted. But this was before the sultans and the Ottoman Empire. This area was like the Wild West, with all these gangs roaming around, looking for blood—kind of like the gangs of Confederate soldiers after the Civil War. They were dangerous, which is why the churches and the monasteries were tucked away in caves and mountains and not just out in plain sight.”
“Okay, but that doesn’t really help us,” Reilly told her. “Once Everard and his people started climbing, they could have gone clockwise or counterclockwise, right? Which means we still have the whole mountain to watch.”
“Maybe. But, check this out.” Now visibly enthused, she brought the mountain-climbing map back out. “Look at the contour lines, here and here.” She was pointing out an area just west of the north side of the mountain, kind of at the volcano’s eleven o’clock line. “See how tight they are?”
The contour lines that showed the elevation levels—in this case, at regular intervals of fifty meters—had converged and were virtually on top of one another, meaning that area was very steep. In fact, more than steep—it was a vertical drop.
