get caught — but they also clearly didn’t want to leave until the last moment possible.
“We know there were hundreds of ISI personnel in Kunduz at the time. And we know that Musharraf wanted the Taliban to stay in power. The rumor around Washington was that we’d threatened to bomb his country back into the Stone Age if he didn’t cooperate. So publicly he joined our side in the War on Terror. Privately, he provided safe havens for al-Qaeda. The ISI still tips off Taliban and al-Qaeda enclaves in Pakistan’s Northern Territories every time we prepare to send in a missile strike.”
“So … it’s politics as usual.”
Dean spat the word like an obscenity. “Yeah. Anyway, one Green Beret officer I was working with called it the Airlift of Evil, and the name kind of stuck.”
“Muslims stand up for one another,” Akulinin pointed out, “at least when they’re not trying to kill each other.” The riot in the street was getting louder. More men were streaming in from every direction, some of them with weapons. The local NATO forces appeared to be keeping out of it.
“
“Not all Muslims are like that, Charlie,” Akulinin replied. “You know that. These people out here are still more attached to their tribe than to any weird-ass notion like nation or civilized behavior. They’re still barbarians living in the Dark Ages, for God’s sake!”
“The problem is that some of those barbarians have nuclear weapons. And they have all of the restraint, all of the sound judgment, and all of the willingness to compromise of a spoiled-rotten four-year-old throwing a tantrum. Damn it, Sharkie, we
Police sirens sounded in the distance, but it was clear that the road into the city would be closed for some time to come.
Dean was glad they were already at the airport, that they would be flying out tomorrow. The time he’d spent in this country years ago had been far more than enough.
“Overnight intercept here,” Cathy Jamison told her shift supervisor. “Text message, and the sender was red- flagged.”
“Who do we have?” George Sotheby accepted the printout from Jamison and scanned through it quickly. Masood Azhar? Yeah, that might be something hot.
The Government Communications Headquarters was the arm of British intelligence tasked with providing SIGINT and information assurance to both the British government and the armed forces. With its major facility located at Menwith Hill in Yorkshire, it was the equivalent of the American NSA. In fact, the two organizations worked so closely together that some critics had suggested that GCHQ was little more than an arm of their American counterpart.
That was far from true, but Sotheby was still sensitive to the charge. “We do a
Menwith Hill was, in fact, a colossal ear, a collecting station tuning in to the radio waves bouncing through the atmosphere over Europe. A part of the old Echelon program, it had originally been designed to eavesdrop on the Soviet Union. Nowadays, though, it often listened in on cell phone calls transmitted by satellite from as far off as China.
Or, in this case, south Asia.
The various Islamic militant groups were getting smarter, more canny, more technologically sophisticated. Most of their cell phone calls nowadays were encrypted. What the Muslim fanatics didn’t know was that Menwith’s American cousins had cracked their current cipher — and they’d shared the key with GCHQ. The cipher was fairly simple, actually, with a cycling round of verses from the Qur’an. Today’s key was Sura 24, Verse 2. “The adulterer and the adulteress, scourge ye each one of them one hundred stripes. And let not pity for the twain withhold you from obedience to Allah, if ye believe in Allah and the last day. And let a party of believers witness their punishment.”
The theology of hatred. Scourge the bastards and Allah will reward you.
But type that verse into the cryptological software the NSA had lifted from the mullahs at their madrasah in Karachi, and you could listen in on their conversations with perfect clarity. GCHQ’s crypto nabobs had already deciphered and translated this one. He read it.
“Interesting,” he said. “So the rag heads are bumping off American novelists now? I wonder what that’s all about.”
“Hard to say, sir.”
He handed the sheet back. “Well, pack it off to Fort Meade, then, there’s a good girl.”
He’d not heard of al-Wawi, the call’s recipient, but Azhar was a bigwig with the Army of Mohammad, and anything from him was flagged and shipped off to the NSA.
11
They called it the War Room.
It was located next door to the Art Room, smaller, a little more crowded, and it was run by Dr. Frederick Bailey of the NSA’s Analysis Department. Where the Art Room focused on maintaining lines of communication with the various Desk Three operators in the field, the War Room concentrated on planning and strategy. An IMAX-sized display screen dominated one curving wall of the room, while large monitors at a dozen workstations showed maps, satellite imagery, and aerial views of target regions worldwide.
Rubens entered the War Room and glanced around at the technicians at their workstations. Vanderkamp and Bailey were standing near the main console, discussing some aspect of the data. The big screen behind them displayed at the moment the CF-1 imagery sent over from Langley the previous afternoon. A six-hour clip of the NATO helicopter Gene Vanderkamp had showed him yesterday had been playing here constantly since then.
The clip showed a helicopter with French markings … a helicopter operating under NATO auspices out of Kabul.
And it suggested corruption and betrayal on an almost unimaginable scale.
Crystal Fire used a Molniya orbit, a highly eccentric orbit with a period of twelve hours. The physics of orbital mechanics meant that the satellite, moving more slowly when it was farthest away from Earth than when it was in close, would enjoy what was known as “apogee dwell,” meaning that it hung over the same part of the Earth for as long as eight hours at a stretch. Molniya orbits originally had been a Russian invention — the name meant “lightning” in Russian — useful for satellite communications far north of the equator. The United States had been using them for spy satellites ever since the 1960s, however.
The twin mirrors used in Crystal Fire — larger than the mirrors used in the Hubble Space Telescope — provided superb resolution even when they were peering down from over eleven thousand miles overhead. There were certain highly classified constraints and limitations dictated by the atmosphere it was peering through, of course, but the shape of each mirror was adjustable by computer control, allowing an enormous increase in resolving power.
Crystal Fire had been hanging in the sky a bit north of Tajikistan for nearly eight hours, from early Monday
