glad to have her support, though.
'One of the vessels that responded to the Ishikari SOS,' Rubens continued, 'is the Ark Royal, a Royal Navy aircraft carrier. She's still about eighty miles from the sinking, but her skipper has agreed to deploy a couple of Harriers to check on the Sandpiper They may at least establish visual contact, even if the ships' radios are out.' He checked his watch. 'They should be over the Sandpiper and the Adantis Queen within the next hour.
'It also seems we have a possible agent in place on board the Queen. Quite serendipitous, actually. We're making attempts now to get in electronic contact with her.'
'An agent?' Collins asked. 'One of yours?'
'Indirectly. She's GCHQ, which means — '
'Which means she works for one of the NSA's subsidiaries,' Collins said with a throaty chuckle. 'Yes, we know.'
Not quite true, Rubens thought, but close enough to the truth that he let the barb pass. 'She happens to be aboard the cruise ship as part of another operation,' Rubens continued. 'If we can make contact with her, we may be able to get some direct intelligence on what's happening on those ships.
'If the Atlantis Queen or the Sandpiper or, as seems probable at this juncture, both ships have been hijacked,' Rubens continued, 'her intelligence may be invaluable. We do need to begin making contingency plans.'
'Meaning a military response?' Wehrum asked. 'Both of these ships are British. It seems to me the responsibility for any type of response should lie with them.'
'Maybe so,' Rubens said. 'The NSA gathers intelligence. It does not set foreign policy, nor does it carry it out. However' he added forcefully as Wehrum began to reply, 'half of the passengers on board the Atlantis Queen are American citizens, and it is our responsibility to protect them from hostile forces no matter where they are. We also have a treaty obligation to do whatever is necessary to safeguard the cargoes of those plutonium transport ships. At the very least, we're going to need to work closely with the British government on this one, making our military response assets available.'
'If we're the ones to go in,' Prendergast said, 'it means the SEALs.'
'Either the SEALs,' Rubens said, 'or Black Cat.'
'Black Cat?' Prendergast said, white eyebrows arching. 'What's that?'
v 'Combat Assault Team — 'CAT.' A counterterrorist unit operating out of Desk Three and the NSA,' Rubens said. 'It's new.'
Very new. More than once in the past couple of years, U. S. Navy SEAL units had assisted NSA operators in covert military missions in remote areas, including a recent one on the Arctic ice cap. The SEALs were unparalleled at getting into hard-to-reach places without being seen, carrying out their mission, and extracting again, often before the enemy knew they'd even been there. Not long after the op against the Russians in the far Arctic, Rubens had pushed through a Deep Black program called Black Cat — the 'Cat' portion of the name suggested by the counterterrorism, or 'CT,' nature of their mission as well as by the term 'combat assault team.' A highly classified number of active-duty SEALs and Army Delta operators had been seconded to the NSA, still drawing military pay but serving with and under Agency personnel. For the past six months they'd been training with combat- experienced NSA operators, including Charlie Dean and Lia DeFrancesca. Black Cat Bravo was based at Pawtuxet River, Virginia, and was under the command of Lieutenant Richard Taylor, the SEAL officer with whom Dean had deployed in the Arctic. Black Cat Alpha was based at the 'phib base in San Diego.
While the budgetary battles over Black Cat continued both within the Pentagon and at NCTC headquarters in northern Virginia — critics of the program insisted it wastefully duplicated already existent combat units such as the SEAL teams themselves — the unit promised to provide Desk Three with a tremendously valuable and powerful tool. The NSA gathers intelligence, he'd told them. It does not set foreign policy, nor does it carry it out. Right…
Sometimes, though, to carry out its more dangerous or complex missions the NSA needed something a bit more specialized and a bit more hard-hitting than a com-wired agent with a handgun. The important point was that with its own paramilitary force on tap, there would be fewer problems getting a clean interface between Desk Three and the pointy end of the stick. Clear communications were vital in any covert operation, and more than one major op — Eagle Claw, the failed mission to rescue American hostages in Iran in 1980, was a rather obvious example — had ended in disaster in part when communications broke down between rival services.
Rubens completed his presentation and took a few more questions from the group, ending the briefing with the suggestion that Desk Three begin exploring plans for inserting a covert team onto both the Pacific Sandpiper and the Atlantis Queen. Two Black Cat teams of about six men each might be able to gather intelligence about what was actually happening on those vessels and, if the decision was made to take them down, would already be in place.
'Your suggestion is noted, Mr. Rubens,' Wehrum said, leaning back in his leather chair. 'Thank you for the presentation.'
And Rubens was dismissed.
He was gathering up his notes and replacing them in his briefcase when he sensed movement beside him. 'Oh, hello, Debra,' he said as Collins drew near. 'Bill.'
'So… why were you being nice to me this morning?'
'What do you mean?'
'You were actually supporting me there on a couple of points.'
She made a face. 'Despite what you seem to believe, Bill, we are on the same side.'
'Sometimes it's a bit hard to keep that in mind,' he replied. He was surprised at the strength, even now, of his anger at this woman. It had been years, but once she'd betrayed their relationship, their friendship, to advance her own agenda…
The memory still burned.
It was necessary to keep up the facade, at least, of professionalism. But he would also keep watching his back.
'I just thought you should know, Bill,' she told him, 'that there will be no Black Cat op on this one.'
'Indeed? So the Agency is employing psychics now, to read the future?'
'No, but I can read the weather vane. The Sandpiper situation was included in this morning's pickle. The President is inclined to allow the Brits to handle this one.'
The 'pickle' was the old name for the President's Intelligence Check List, or PICL, a ten-page newsletter prepared by the CIA each night listing the top five or six intelligence developments of interest to the President and a few other high-level personnel, including DIRNSA, Rubens' boss. The system had changed oyer the years and was now an internal Web page supposedly routed through the NCTC, but insiders still referred to the Agency's intelligence briefs as 'pickles' and to the CIA itself as 'the pickle factory.'
'The British?' Rubens said. 'Why?'
'They're closer, for one thing. They have an aircraft carrier less than a hundred miles from those ships. Our closest carrier battle groups are in Norfolk and in the Med, four days away, at best. The ships are both British- flagged. And, frankly, if those ships have been hijacked, the President would rather someone else fell on his face right now.'
'I see.'
'A word to the wise, Bill. Don't make waves.'
Rubens considered this as he checked out past the various security checkpoints on his way to the underground White House garage. The current administration was coming under a lot of fire in the news media, lately. The energy crisis, the banking and global monetary crises, the unbearably slow ongoing extraction from Iraq and Afghanistan all had carried over from the last administration into this one, leaving scars and, worse, a bureaucratic tendency at every level of government not to do anything that might be construed as yet another failure in either foreign or domestic policy.
A hostage rescue was always a high-risk proposition, with a terrible possibility of innocents being killed, if not by their terrorist captors, then by so-called friendly fire as the hostage rescue team stormed in. The more hostages there were, the likelier it was that casualty figures would be unacceptably high. Even a successful rescue might expect a 5 percent casualty rate among the hostages. With something like 3,400 civilians at risk, 5 percent was 170 people dead and wounded.
