morning through late Monday afternoon. Its second pass had taken it over the south Pacific, but the third had repeated the path of the first precisely, beginning before dawn on Tuesday morning and lasting until around noon. The information displayed on the big screen now was actually a compilation from both orbital passes, representing a total of some fourteen hours of observation and an astonishing amount of raw data nested in layers within layers of imagery.
“Good morning, gentlemen,” Rubens said, approaching Vanderkamp and Bailey. “What do you have on our NATO friend up there?”
“We have a destination, sir,” Bailey told him, “and we’ve backtracked and spotted the transfer.”
“Let me see.”
Vanderkamp used a remote to black out the big screen, then open it again. The display showed the NH90 Tactical Transport Helicopter flying low over a cotton field. “We missed the departure out of Kabul,” he said, “but we have tail boom numbers on that helicopter, and we know it was assigned to the French NATO contingent operating out of Kabul. French roundels. And we have a list of the crew members. They signed out of Kabul on a training flight at oh six forty on Monday — supposedly Kabul to Kandahar and back. CF-1 first picked them up about an hour and fifteen later. This is just west of Qurghonteppa, in southern Tajikistan. About two hundred and thirty miles. The flight took them an hour and a half.”
On the screen, the French helicopter slowed and began drifting toward a patch of dirt road slicing through the cotton field. A red pickup truck was waiting for them.
Vanderkamp used the remote to zoom in on the people waiting for the helicopter on the ground. There were five of them, four of them bearded, wearing turbans, and carrying AKM assault rifles. The resolution was just barely too low to allow the faces to be recognizable.
“We’re running the faces through E&I,” Bailey said, anticipating Rubens’ question. Enhancement and ID used high-tech processing models to attempt to identify faces photographed from orbit. It was an art as much as a science, and, depending on the quality of the image, it was an imprecise and unreliable art at best. “So far all we can say for sure is that they appear to be Muslim fundamentalists.”
“How do you know that? You catch them on their prayer rugs?”
“No, but they fit the profile. Beards. Weapons. I suppose they could be anti-Russian guerrillas, but since most of those are Muslim fundamentalists as well—”
“Point taken.”
“And you can see what they have in the back of the truck.”
The contents of the truck’s flatbed were covered with a dark tarp, but one of the men jumped up and began untying it. Under the tarp was a single wooden crate, measuring perhaps five feet tall by five wide and six deep.
“We’ve calculated the dimensions of that crate,” Vanderkamp said. “About a hundred and fifty cubic feet. Easily big enough to hold all twelve suitcase nukes. And the truck and the empty crate appear to match what our people found abandoned at Ayni yesterday.”
As Rubens watched, the helicopter touched down fifty feet away. One of the Muslims jumped into the cab of the truck and backed it toward the waiting aircraft. A man in a NATO uniform waved his hands from the open cargo bay, guiding the truck in close. The driver got out of the cab, and then everyone climbed onto the flatbed and began pulling smaller crates out of the big one and passing them along, fire brigade fashion, into the helicopter.
“There are twelve smaller boxes,” Barnes said. “If those are in fact the missing suitcase nukes, the whole crate would weigh about fourteen hundred pounds. Well over half a ton.”
“I wish we could get a radiation scan on that,” Rubens mused.
“Can’t do it from space,” Vanderkamp told him. “Not unless it’s leaking gamma rays.”
“I know. That’s why we have the teams over there.” He frowned. “That man, there.” He pointed. “Is he Chinese?” It was tough to tell, even at maximum zoom, but there was something about the roundness of the face …
Bailey nodded. “Seventy percent confidence on that, yes, sir. And his clothing … and the clothing worn by
“Zhern, Shams, and our friend Major Kwok of Chinese intelligence.”
Two of the men on the ground climbed off the flatbed and into the helicopter. The other three, the three highlighted on the display by Bailey, got into the truck, which drove off a moment later. The helicopter waited until they were clear, then lifted again into the sky.
Rubens began trying to piece it together. “Okay … those three and two others drive the truck all the way here from Stepnogorsk. They transfer the nukes to the helicopter. Zhern, Shams, and Kwok then drive back to Ayni and leave the truck there, where our people find it the next morning. They take a car and drive east — possibly heading for the Chinese border — and get themselves killed by Lieutenant Colonel Vasilyev. That all hang together so far?”
“Exactly so,” Bailey said. “Major Kwok wouldn’t want to risk being linked to the shipment, and perhaps he had reason not to rejoin the trade delegation. They may have been delivering him to the Chinese border, or possibly just to another airfield. We’re checking that.”
“So … the million-dollar question,” Rubens said. “Where did the NATO chopper take them?”
“Kabul.”
“Kabul? Our intelligence suggested Karachi.” The thought of one-kiloton nukes in the hands of the insurgents in Afghanistan wasn’t as terrifying as the idea of tactical nuclear detonations in twelve American or Israeli cities, but it was a disturbingly unpleasant possibility nonetheless. Were the extremists capable of destroying their own cities in order to inflict damage enough on the foreigners that they would abandon the country entirely?
It was possible … but not, Rubens thought, very likely. If the fanatics had twelve nuclear weapons, even small ones, they wouldn’t waste them on Afghan cities. They’d go after places with
Vanderkamp zipped forward through the imagery. Now the helicopter rested on the tarmac at Kabul International Airport.
“As it happens, sir,” he said, “the range of an NH90 is about four hundred and seventy-five nautical miles. That’s roughly Kabul to Qurghonteppa and back. Cruising speed of about a hundred and sixty nautical miles per hour. They returned to Kabul at oh nine fifty, had the aircraft refueled and serviced, then took off again at fourteen thirty. Once again, it was listed as a training flight. A Lieutenant Alfred Koch at the controls.”
“We lost them before they landed,” Bailey said. “We lost apogee dwell at around sixteen hundred hours. But by that time we knew they were heading for Quetta. That’s two hundred and eighty nautical miles from Kabul, and about halfway to Karachi.”
“Quetta. In Pakistan.”
“Yes, sir.”
“If the helicopter refueled at Quetta and took off immediately,” Vanderkamp said, “they could have reached Karachi by eighteen, nineteen hundred hours Tuesday evening.” He pushed a combination of buttons on the remote. “We lost satellite coverage until early the next morning, yesterday morning.” He shook his head. “We
It was an ongoing battle between the country’s intelligence services and the politicians who doled out the funding. Three satellites with CF-1’s capabilities, in three appropriately spaced orbits, could provide twenty-four hours of surveillance of a given target per day. Unless Congressman Mullins and others got their political way, though, it wasn’t going to happen.
And
Vanderkamp was again zooming in from space, this time coming down on an airport east of a sprawling metropolitan center hugging the coast. The image was being displayed at a considerably sharper angle, however; Karachi had been at the southern limit of the target request for the CF-1 passes, and the satellite’s view descended on a slant through a lot more atmosphere. As a result, the image now was blurred. You could still see people, but it was tough even to distinguish whether or not they were wearing uniforms. The helicopter was easy enough to identify, however, by the French red, white, and blue roundel and by the registry number on the tail boom. It was
