Rubens looked up at the display monitor covering one wall of the Art Room. At the moment, it was showing the blue-bordered logo for the National Reconnaissance Office — a green and blue graphic of the Earth on white, circled by a satellite and its orbit in red.
Rubens yawned. The nap earlier had helped, but he was still dead on his feet. He hadn’t been able to get back to sleep, however. Mullins had spilled the beans about American operatives in Tajikistan on C-SPAN, an unconscionable breach of security. Was the guy an idiot, or did he simply not care? Rubens had gone through the entire speech twice now. Mullins apparently was grandstanding to get more money for the companies in his district that manufactured precision lenses and other parts for spy satellites.
But, while Dushanbe certainly suspected that U.S. operators were in their territory before, now they
His people in Tajikistan, Charlie and Ilya, were already on the way out. Thank God for
In the meantime, he’d received the word that some preliminary results had come through already from the CF-1 data transmitted that afternoon to Fort Meade from Langley. Despite how tired he was right now, he was eager to see it.
“What do you have for us, Gene?” he asked.
Gene Vanderkamp had come to the NSA from his position at the NRO as a satellite mapping specialist. “Our first pass, Mr. Rubens. As you directed, we concentrated our efforts on certain limited areas. But we’ve turned up something interesting.”
“Let’s see.”
Vanderkamp used a handheld remote to click the image on the wall, which flashed from the logo to satellite imagery of a huge swath of central Asia, from the dark-brown and glacier-white crinkle of the Pamir-Alai Mountains running east-west north of Dushanbe to the flat desert and irrigated fields around Kunduz, in northern Afghanistan.
“It looks like Google Earth,” Rubens said, referring to the popular mapping program available on the Internet.
“Yeah, but we can do things with CF-1 those guys can only dream about.”
“I know.” The image data was layered in such a way that an analyst could pick any area within the reconnaissance sweep and zoom in on it, revealing progressively more detail and higher resolution. It was the answer to American military leaders who’d wanted a surveillance system that could cover all of Iraq, a region twice the size of the state of Idaho. It required massively parallel computing power to process the imagery on the fly, but that was something at which the NSA’s computer center excelled.
Vanderkamp began zooming in on the landscape spread out across the display, using a click-and-drag box to highlight an area, then enlarge it. He was focusing on a region halfway between Dushanbe and the Afghanistan border, near the city of Qurghonteppa. The area as seen from space was intensely green, well watered, and covered with cotton fields. Cotton, Rubens knew, a crop known as “white gold” in this region, had made it one of the more prosperous areas of Tajikistan. The chief opposition party to the current Tajik government was centered in Qurghonteppa — formerly known as Kurgan-Tyube — the third-largest city in the country.
“Where is it?” Vanderkamp said, moving the view around. “Ah! There …”
Rubens found himself looking at a helicopter, an NH90 TTH, flying south above the cotton fields. The detail and clarity were amazing. As Vanderkamp zoomed in on the aircraft, Rubens could see the faces of the pilot and copilot behind the bubble canopy, the four blades of the main rotor frozen in midflight with almost no blurring.
A roundel was clearly visible on the helicopter’s tail rotor boom, a red ring around a white, with a blue center.
As Rubens realized exactly what he was seeing, his eyes widened. “Son of a bitch!” he said.
Dean had traded places with Akulinin half an hour ago and was sitting now in the Hunter’s front passenger seat, watching the landscape pass. The land around them had flattened out a lot since they’d crossed the Vakhsh River above Qurghonteppa, leaving the A384 and picking up another major highway following the river toward the Afghan border.
They’d passed through Kolkhozabad well after sunrise. The fertile valley of the Vakhsh River was a good twelve to fifteen miles across at this point, walled in between low and barren hills and endless stretches of wasteland. Gora Kyzimchak was the highest mountain visible to the west, and it was a mere twelve hundred feet higher than the river below, a slight elevation on the horizon fifteen miles distant. After the soaring towers of the Pamirs north of Dushanbe, the landscape felt eerily like the southern portions of the American Midwest — the cotton fields of Oklahoma, perhaps.
The border, he estimated, was less than half an hour ahead.
“We’ll have units on hand to pick you up at the bridge,” Marie Telach told him over the satellite link. “They’re en route from Kunduz now.”
“Why couldn’t they just slip in and pick us up inside Tajikistan?” Akulinin wanted to know. “I know they can’t get into Ayni, but a helicopter could set down anywhere in these fields. We could’ve been at the hotel in Kunduz by now.”
“We tried,” Marie told them, “but there’ve been … diplomatic complications.”
“What complications?” Dean asked. “Not our little party in Dushanbe last night, surely.”
“That’s a part of it,” Marie admitted. “Tensions right now are running
“I thought we were blaming it all on Pakistani terrorists,” Dean said.
“Yes, and right now Pakistan isn’t real pleased with us, either. It wasn’t you guys. A few hours ago, a member of the House Armed Services Committee made a speech in which he mentioned that the U.S. has intelligence personnel on the ground in Tajikistan, searching for stolen nuclear weapons. It was broadcast over C- SPAN, so of course the Russians saw it. They put two and two together …”
“Shit,” Dean said.
Putting two and two together was what most intelligence work was all about. Seemingly innocuous bits of information from disparate sources — a TV news show here, a newspaper story there, an informant from someplace else — allowed intelligence analysts at Langley, Fort Meade, and Lubyanka Square in Moscow to piece together a much larger, much more detailed picture of what was going on. The shoot-out in downtown Dushanbe, the disappearance of a former American citizen from the hospital, the burgling of an FSB officer’s safe at Ayni, and the theft of documents relating to stolen and smuggled nuclear weapons …
Yeah, put all of that together with a politician shooting off his mouth on-camera about a covert U.S. operation to find those nukes, and it became quite easy for the opposition to connect the dots. Worse, though, was the knowledge that the Art Room’s disinformation campaign would swiftly unravel now. Analysts at the FSB headquarters at Lubyanka would consider it
“You
