“Tell me about it,” Jack said, waving to a chair.
“I just got back from Dulles, talked to a few people. The JAL 747s set up for Trans-Pac flights are arranged very conveniently for us. The upstairs lounge is set up with beds, like an old Pullman car. It helps us. The room is very lively acoustically, and that makes for easy pickup.” He laid out a diagram. There's a table here and here. We use two wireless bugs, and four broadcast channels.'
“Explain,” Jack said.
“The wireless bugs are omnidirectional. Okay, they transmit to the SHF transmitter, and that one gets it out of the airplane.”
“Why four channels?”
“The big problem is cancelling out the airplane noise, the engine whine, the air, all that stuff. Two channels are interior sound. The other two are for background noise only. We use that to cancel out the crap. We have people down in S&.T who have been working on that for quite a while. You use the recorded background noise to establish what the interference is, then just change its phase to cancel it out. Pretty simple stuff if you have the right computer backup equipment. We do. Okay? The transmitter goes in a bottle. We aim it out of the window. Easy to do, I checked. Now, we will need a chase plane.”
“Like what?”
“With the right equipment, a business jet like a Gulf-stream, better yet an EC-135. I'd recommend more than one, have them form up and break off.”
“How far away?”
“As long as its line of sight… up to thirty miles, and doesn't have to be the same altitude. Not like we have to fly formation on the guy.”
“How hard to build it?”
“Simple. The hardest part is the battery, and that'll fit in a liquor bottle, like I said. We'll make it a brand that you usually find in a duty-free store — I have a guy checking that — one with a ceramic bottle 'stead of a glass one. Like an expensive bottle of Chivas, maybe. The Japanese like their scotch.”
“Detection?” Ryan asked.
Clark grinned like a teenager who'd just snookered a teacher. “We build the system exclusively from Japanese components, and we place a receiver tuned to the right freqs in the aircraft. He'll be traveling with the usual mob of newsies. I'll set a receiver in the waste bin of one of the downstairs heads. If the op gets burned, they'll think it was one of their own. it'll even look like a journalist did it.”
Ryan nodded. “Nice touch, John.”
“I thought you'd like that. When the bird lands, we have a guy recover the bottle. We'll fix it — I mean, we'll see to it that you can't get the cork out. Superglue, maybe.”
“Getting aboard m Mexico City?”
“I have Ding looking at that. Time he got a taste of planning operations, and this is the soft side. My Spanish is good enough to fool a Mexican national”
“Back to the bugging equipment We won't be reading this in real-time?”
“No way.” Clark shook his head. “What'll come across will be garbled, but we'll use high-speed tape machines to record, then we can wash it through the 'puters downstairs to get clean copy. It's an additional operational safeguard. The guys in the chase birds won't know what they're listening to, and only the drivers need to know who they're shadowing… maybe not even that, as a matter of fact I have to check on that.”
“How long to produce clean copy?”
“Have to do it at this end… say a couple of hours. That's what the S&.T guys say, anyway. You know the real beauty of this?”
“Tell me ”
“Airplanes are about the last place you can't bug Our S&T guys have been playing with it for a long time What made the breakthrough came from the Navy — very black project. Nobody knows we can do this. The computer codes are very complex Lots of people are playing with it, but the actual breakthrough is on the theoretical side of the math. Came from a guy at NSA. I repeat, Sir John, nobody knows this is possible. Their security guys will be asleep. If they find the bug, they'll think it's an amateur attempt to do something. The receiver I put aboard won't actually recover anything usable to anyone but us—”
“And we'll have a guy recover that also, to back up the aerial transmissions.”
“That's right. So we have double-redundancy — or triple, I never have figured what the right terminology is. Three separate channels for the information, one in the plane, and two being beamed out from it.”
Ryan raised his coffee mug in salute. “Okay, now that the technical side looks possible, I want an operational feasibility evaluation.”
“You got it, Jack. Goddamn! It's good to be a real spy again. With all due respect, watching out for your ass does not test my abilities all that much.”
“I love you, too, John.” Ryan laughed. It was his first in too long a time. If they could pull this one off, maybe that Elliot bitch would get off his back for once. Maybe the President would understand that field operations with real live field officers were still useful. It would be a small victory.
25
RESOLUTION
“So, what's the story on the things?” the Second Officer asked, looking down at the cargo deck.
“Supposed to be the roof beams for a temple. Small one, I guess,” the First Officer noted. “How much more will these seas build…?”
“I wish we could slow down, Pete.”
“I've talked to him twice about it. Captain says he has a schedule to meet.”
“Tell that to the fuckin' ocean.”
“Haven't tried that. Who do you call?”
The Second Officer, who had the watch, snorted. The First Officer — the ship's second in command — was on the bridge to keep an eye on things. That was actually the Captain's job, but the ship's Master was asleep in his bed.
MV George McReady was pounding through thirty-foot waves, trying to maintain twenty knots, but failing, despite full cruising power on her engines. The sky was overcast, with occasional breaks in the clouds for the full moon to peek through. The storm was actually breaking up, but the wind was holding steady at sixty knots and the seas were still increasing somewhat. It was a typical North Pacific storm, both officers had already decided. Nothing about it made any sense. The air temperature was a balmy 10 degrees Fahrenheit, and the flying spray was freezing to ice that impacted the bridge windows like birdshot in duck season. The only good news was that the seas were right on the bow. George M was a freighter, not a cruise liner, and lacked antiroll stabilizers. In fact, the ride wasn't bad at all. The superstructure was set on the after portion of the ship, and that damped out most of the pitching motion associated with heavy seas. It also had the effect of reducing the officers' awareness of events at the forward end of the ship, a fact further accentuated by the reduced visibility from flying spray.
The ride also had a few interesting characteristics. When the bow plowed into an especially high wave, the ship slowed down. But the size of the ship meant that the bow slowed quicker than the stern, and as the deceleration forces fought to reduce the ship's speed, the hull rebelled by shuddering. In fact, the hull actually bent a few inches, something difficult to believe until it was seen.
“I served on a carrier once. They flex more than a foot in the middle. Once we were—”
“Look dead ahead, sir!” the helmsman called.
“Oh shit!” the Second Officer shouted. “Rogue wave!”
Suddenly there it was, a fifty footer just a hundred yards from the George M's blunt bow. The event was not unexpected. Two waves would meet and add their heights for a few moments, then diverge… The bow rose on the medium-size crest, then dropped before the onrushing green wall.
“Here we go!”
There wasn't time for the bow to climb over this one. The green water simply stepped over the bow as
