“Pershing is chairman of the Joint Chiefs,” replied Buckingham. “He can move aircraft carriers and nuclear subs around if he wants to. The admiral has got all kinds of whack around the Pentagon and Langley. And TTIC is involved. Reading between the lines, General Pershing and Admiral Jackson simply issued the orders. Those two are rock solid, and no one below them in the chain of command would have questioned it.
“But here’s the political problem,” continued the ambassador. “Yousseff now practically runs the government in Afghanistan. Everyone there is on his payroll. He is a ‘close friend’ of the government leaders over there. He has allowed us to expand Bagram, and he is letting American companies in to mine the minerals in the foothills of the Kush. They have found huge fields of natural gas in the southwest corner of Afghanistan. American companies are developing it. American companies will build the pipelines. The USA desperately needs energy because of what happened on the Colorado. This is how they’re going to get that. The president does not want to undermine that. If Kumar has had some kind of attack of conscience and compromises Yousseff, the US will lose the inside track in Afghanistan. That is not a good thing.”
“Yes. Sure, Mike,” Richard retorted. “But 20,000 people, almost all Americans, are dead.”
“And we’ve got a more pressing problem.”
“What’s that, Zak?”
“If this is a rogue operation, and you just cautioned us about it, Mike, that makes you a part of the rogue operation.”
“It’s more than that, Zak,” replied Buckingham. “Unless you turn Kumar over, now, that makes you two part of the rogue operation.”
“And that means TTIC is part of the rogue operation,” Richard said.
“And Turbee,” said Zak, quietly. “And Turbee.”
“This thing is dirty, Mike,” Richard said. “This stinks. Yousseff walks and everyone from the admiral down to Turbee is rogue? There is no fucking way we are going to turn Kumar over. I say we scram, Zak, and take Kumar with us until we figure out what to do.”
The ambassador was silent for a minute or more. Zak and Richard likewise did not speak. At length the ambassador sighed. “I’ve got a garage full of cars underneath the embassy. Why don’t you grab one and take off with
Kumar. This thing may yet sort itself out.” “You game, bro?” asked Richard.
“I’m game, Rich. Let’s grab a fast car and hit the motorway. You get one. I’ll get Kumar.”
“I have a question for you, Mike,” Richard said as he was about to leave. “We were facing a life-and-death situation at Inzar Ghar. We were completely surrounded. Twenty or thirty of Yousseff’s guys with heavy weapons were between us and the gate. We were done. But then someone took them out. A Hellfire missile, or something like it, came out of nowhere, maybe a drone, and targeted them. Most were killed. We shot a few and waited for the chopper. Who fired the missile?”
“I have no idea, Richard. I don’t think it was us. An easy solution to the problem would be to take out the three of you, or just wait for Yousseff’s soldiers to do it. They obviously want Kumar dead so he can’t spill the beans on Yousseff. But whoever that was helped you.”
Zak shook his head. “Someone with enough pull was able to take out, with a Hellfire missile, some thirty men. DC probably wants Kumar, and probably Rich and I, dead. What the fuck is going on here?”
“You never know what’s coming from inside the Beltway these days,” said the ambassador. “It’s like a hall of mirrors.”
“Or a set of those nested Chinese boxes,” Richard added.
6
It took more than a year after the Colorado terrorist attack for the Terrorist Threat Integration Center, TTIC, to settle back into its normal rhythms. Turbee, more medicated than usual and under the careful collective scrutiny of a battery of specialists, returned to his station surrounded by a constellation of computers and screens.
He was quieter than usual and had aged ten years. His physical wounds inflicted by thugs and overzealous police officers had mostly healed. His psyche, however, was still in tatters. He was on a far more complex cocktail of medications and he wobbled more than usual. Adding to the psychological wreckage was the guilt he carried, personally, for failing to stop the terrorist attack—guilt that no amount of counseling could assuage.
It was well after midnight and Turbee was the only occupant of the center. The stunning control room had become legendary in the intelligence community. It was circular in design. The outer wall featured floor-to-ceiling video monitors, 303 inches along the diagonal that fit seamlessly together. Turbee had his favorite screen saver running: a 360-degree view taken from the peak of K2 slowly rotating around him. It took very little imagination to feel the chilling winds and see the stark precipices of the majestic peak.
The center of the room featured a new, slightly convex circular screen, forty-five feet in diameter, called the atlas screen. Around the perimeter of the atlas screen were two concentric circles of workstations, forty in all, the outer circle being slightly higher than the inner. Any video stream from any camera in the world could be displayed there, from dashboard cams to the Mars rover. The atlas screen usually featured satellite or drone footage and functioned like a gigantic Google Earth with one critical difference. All the feeds were live. Turbee and George Lexia, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, were instrumental in creating the software that managed this system. With direct links to the NSA, both in Washington and its data warehouse in Utah, and a cluster of IBM octa-core supercomputers, it
