I said, “Very nice to meet you, Miss Smith. I assume you work with Mr. Jones?”
“That’s correct. I’m his administrative assistant.”
“Well,” I said, “welcome to Tuzla.”
“Oh, thanks,” she said with that same shiny smile. Apparently Miss Smith also had just arrived from Washington.
“So where do we go?” I asked.
“Here, follow me.”
She led us to the back of the small office and, voila, there was a set of steep stairs that took us down into an underground compound.
Like a good tour guide, she talked as we walked. “We had this constructed underground because we had to shield the walls with lead lining. Modern microwave listening devices allow a sophisticated eavesdropper to read everything that passes through a computer. We, of course, have the most modern, shielded computers, but we still like to play it safe and get as much protection as we can.”
“That’s very smart of you,” I said, then mumbled, “like wearing two Trojans when you make love.”
“Yes, well, it’s expensive, but it’s worth it.”
“And what kind of strange things do you all do in this special facility?”
I was staring at the back of her blond head and couldn’t see her expression, but she didn’t answer for a very long moment. “Mostly target analysis for bombing,” she finally informed me, although she didn’t sound all that sure.
“Do you control any assets?”
“None that I know of.”
We had now reached the basement floor, and I sped up to walk beside her as she led us down a long, narrow passageway.
“That’s odd,” I remarked. “Someone… maybe it was Mr. Jones, mentioned that the U-2s are controlled from this facility.”
“Oh, yes, of course that’s right. I’m sorry, I’m just an administrative assistant. I’m really not the person to ask about these things.”
“Au contraire. You’ve been very helpful,” I said, and she smiled at that, too. Miss Smith smiled a lot, I noticed. And she lied a lot, too.
We had reached another large metal door, and she deftly flicked a plastic card through a doorlock, then pushed open the door. Mr. Jones was seated at the end of a long table, coffee cup in hand. He had traded in his dark suit and tie for more casual garb. In fact, he was dressed much like Berkowitz had been, duck-shooting vest and all. To me, he looked pompous, but like I said, he was a handsome guy with a lot of muscles. He stood up and walked around the conference table, while I introduced Delbert and Morrow.
Jones did a quick, automatic handshake with Delbert, then a long, lingering, smiley one with Morrow. I might’ve been imagining things, but when he said “nice to meet ya” to her, it sounded like it came from the bottom of his heart, or maybe it was from somewhere closer to his groin. Whichever.
Then he looked over at me, and I was instantly reminded that we seemed to instinctively dislike each other.
“You mentioned you wanted to see the raw footage, Major. What we’ve got are thermals taken from seven hundred and fifty miles up. These are cutouts, of course, taken from a much larger panorama, then blown up about nine hundred times. Because they’re thermals, the shots are grainy. You can’t identify the figures.”
“You didn’t have any photographic satellites over Zone Three?”
“Turns out we didn’t. For reasons that are none of your business, we’ve been limiting Zone Three’s coverage. Thermal matches the requirements Tenth Group was requesting, so that’s it.”
“Then there are no actual photos in your archives?”
“Great deduction there, chief. Don’t worry. I’m sure you’ll be very satisfied with what we have.”
Jones invited us all to have seats, and I noticed that he positioned himself right beside Morrow. I therefore positioned myself right beside the lovely, still smiling Miss Smith. Poor Delbert was left to position himself right beside, well… right beside poor Delbert.
The lights were dimmed by somebody in the rear projection booth, and then the film started. What we saw was all green, variously shaded, with a few tiny dots in brighter, almost translucent green. The particular group of dots we were looking at were gathered in a fairly small clot. One or two figures were moving around, but the rest were still. There were seven dots collected together, and two more some distance away.
Jones had a notepad in front of him, and he did the narrating.
“This film was taken at one o’clock in the afternoon of the fourteenth. The grid coordinates correspond with the position Tenth Group gave us for Sanchez’s base camp. We assume that what you’re seeing here are afternoon activities in a base camp. Weapons cleaning, maybe eating, the usual base camp activities.”
He pointed a finger at the two green dots that were separate from the others. “See those two dots right there? We believe that might be Sanchez’s security element.”
We watched more of the same for two minutes before Jones said, “This tape runs for another fifty-two minutes. If you’d like, Major, we’ll run the whole thing, but all it contains is more of the same.”
“No, this is good enough,” I told him. “What have you got next?”
“Glad you asked. The next film was taken on the seventeenth. I don’t want to ruin the suspense, so I’ll ask the projectionist to go ahead.”
A silent moment passed as the projectionist changed tapes. I felt like drumming my fingers on the table or whistling, or leaping across the table and strangling Mr. Jones. I settled instead for sitting perfectly still. It wasn’t easy, but I’m a very disciplined guy.
Finally, a new flash of green tones appeared on the screen, and it took a minute to sort out what we were seeing. This one had a hell of a lot more of the small, bright green dots, all of which were moving, some slowly, some more quickly. I watched for two minutes and felt my heart land somewhere in the pit of my stomach.
Finally, the equitable Mr. Jones stood up and walked over to the screen. He began using his hands to point toward this and that as he said, “For those who are unfamiliar with our technology, these smaller green dots are personnel. The larger, brighter dots, like this one right here, are from stronger heat sources. In this case, they correspond to automobile engines.”
Delbert asked, “Where is Sanchez’s team in that mess?”
“Good question. I wouldn’t have known the answer myself if I hadn’t called and talked directly with the team of analysts who did this work.”
He turned around and whipped a laser pointer out of one of the many pockets in his field vest, flicked it on, then flashed its tiny red beam at a small line of slowly moving green dots.
“Count here, and you’ll recognize there are seven dots. If you run this tape at hyper speed, then you realize they’re moving in a single file. Our analysts were thrown off at first, because they were told to look for a group of nine men. Eventually, an infantry officer on our staff mentioned that the team might’ve posted a rear security element.”
Jones’s little red pointer shifted position to show a pair of little dots located some distance behind the bulk of Sanchez’s team. “We think this might be Sanchez’s rear security element. Although they’re only two inches away on this screen, in true ground measurement they’re about a quarter of a mile back.”
Morrow said, “That must be Sergeants Perrite and Machusco.”
“If you say so,” Jones remarked, awarding her the kind of smile that said, “Good girl. I still want to sleep with you.” He continued: “Now, if you’d like we can watch this tape for another forty-nine minutes, or I can explain what you’re looking at.”
“Explain,” I said, feeling sick.
“Oh, before I do, one other piece of good news,” he announced with a lofty smile. “We also have audiotapes taken the same day from some of our other assets. They were sent in code, and the language is Serbian, but our analysts decoded and transcribed them for us.”
He paused for a moment to let the drama of all that sink in.
“What we have here is a massive manhunt in progress. All told, nearly seven hundred Serb troops were involved. A Serb recon unit reported the sighting of an American A-team at”-he paused and looked down at his yellow pad-“Let me see… at two fifty-eight in the afternoon. Immediately afterward, Serb militia radio traffic got
