“No,” said Johnny Bib.
“They must not have used a landline to transmit the message. Otherwise Shark Siphon would have found it already, right?”
“Maybe yes, maybe no,” said Johnny.
Shark Siphon was an automated program that snagged communications on the Internet. It had taken all of the communications from Peru over the past twenty-four hours, examining them as possible sources of the communique by applying a variety of decrypting techniques. Unlike the smart viruses and worms that Gallo specialized in, it was a brute-force tool, made possible only by the agency’s massive computer capacity.
“Another possibility is Peru’s cell phone network,” said Johnny Bib.
Gallo sat up, eyes still closed. “We could hit the wireless companies’ databases, look for some transmission that would be long enough to send the message. I bet we could narrow it down to maybe a hundred phones or so. Even a thousand — we could check the names on the list against Peruvian intelligence files.”
“Yes,” said Johnny Bib in the singsongy way he used when someone had shared a good idea with him. “Ye- es. Very good thinking.”
“Want me to get in?”
“Ye-es. Ye-es.”
“On it.” Gallo opened his eyes gingerly. They felt a little better; once he launched the attack on the cell phone network, he’d run up and put the drops in.
“Are you having a vision?” asked Johnny Bib as he got up.
“Huh?”
“You were on the floor.”
“Oh.” Gallo laughed sheepishly. “My eyes just got teary with the screen.”
“Too bad,” said his supervisor, leaving the lab.
59
The green arrow in Dean’s goggles began to blink, indicating that he had three seconds before pulling the rip cord. He reached his hand to the ring, waiting. As the arrowhead changed to a plus sign and a tone sounded in his helmet’s headset, Dean pulled.
It was a good, solid tug, exactly as he had been taught as a Marine Corps “guest” at the Army’s Fort Benning airborne training center nearly three decades before. The parachute jerked him against his restraints — a very welcome jerk, given the alternative — and he reached for the control toggles. The green arrow was solid again and stayed there the whole way down, showing he was right on course.
Even so, his anxiety and adrenaline continued to build. Dean did everything right, braking the chute on cue and even managing to flex his legs as he hit the ground. But he tumbled over like a sack of potatoes and found he was hyperventilating so badly he had to rest a moment before getting up.
“Hey, Charlie, right on target,” yelled Karr, landing a few yards away. “Our gear and the boat are back about a quarter mile. Just missed landing in one of those funny-looking trees.”
Dean’s legs were so unsteady he thought he was going to collapse as he undid his harness.
“Hey, you OK?” said Karr, giving him a hand.
“I’ve been better.”
“Aw, come on. Don’t tell me it wasn’t fun.”
“Barrels,” said Dean. “I wish I could do it every damn day.”
The river was a half mile from where they landed. The large pack of equipment contained a small raft that inflated in a few seconds once Dean twisted the plastic lock on the air canister. As Dean loaded the backpacks into the raft, Karr assembled a small electric outboard motor. It looked like it had come from an oversize kids’ Erector set. The sturdiest part was the battery, which was about the size of a dictionary. But it proved not only quiet but relatively powerful, propelling them upriver against the current at about seven knots.
The village where the warhead had been found lay three and a half miles upriver, perched on the side of a cliff about two hundred feet above the water. Dean and Karr planned to stop at a bend about a half mile south of the village, hide their boat, and then sneak through the jungle. They had to get close enough to the warhead to get good pictures of it, take readings with a radiation meter Fashona had given them, and if at all possible plant a tracking device on the bomb or its transport.
Dean sat in the front of the boat, working as lookout as they made their way upriver. He tried warding off the memories of Vietnam, but they marshaled among the shadows along the riverbanks. He’d worked in terrain somewhat similar to this when he got the North Vietnamese sniper they called Fu Manchu. That had been in the highlands, too; drier on the whole, but there’d been a stream there as well.
As much as he tried to focus on the present dangers, the past ones clawed their way into his consciousness.
Fu Manchu had been hitting a South Vietnamese army outpost southeast of the demilitarized zone. The South Vietnamese were supposed to be interdicting the stream of North Vietnamese supplies, weapons, and men south, but what they were mostly doing was hunkering in an abandoned American bunker and trying to stay alive.
The ones who hadn’t deserted, that is.
A Marine unit was sent to stiffen their resolve. After they set up a post on the military crest of the hill near their ally’s bunker, the North Vietnamese sniper began taking shots at them as well. Dean and another Marine sniper called Turk ended up going after the man, volunteering one muggy afternoon and ending up on a cat-and- mouse chase that stretched nearly five days.
It was difficult to say who was the cat and who was the mouse. Turk was a gunnery sergeant, a veteran of two tours as a sniper in Vietnam, and as wily a hunter as Dean had ever met. Dean had only been in country a month and, though he’d seen quite a bit of action, was a novice at the trade.
Fu Manchu — Turk gave him the name for no particular reason — slipped through the jungles on both sides of a five-meter-wide stream so smoothly and silently that for much of the time they weren’t sure whether he was one person or three. They eventually discovered that he had several hides, where he prepositioned weapons and ammunition.
Something splashed in the water ahead. Dean jumped back to the present, raising not a sniper’s gun but the A2.
“Something?” whispered Karr.
Dean stared at the riverbank through his lightweight night goggles. A medium-sized cat hunkered down a few dozen yards away, eyes fixed on the strange craft as it sailed past them.
“Jaguar,” Dean said.
“I thought jaguars were extinct.”
“Then it’s a ghost,” said Dean.
Karr’s chuckle cracked the stillness.
They made landfall and stowed the boat under some foliage. A collection of small satellite-launched audio bugs had been dropped on the village, allowing the Art Room to scout the general layout of the troops there. Their runner, Sandy Chafetz, wanted Karr and Dean to launch a small unmanned aerial vehicle, or UAV, nicknamed a crow, so they’d have real-time visuals of the village. (It was called a crow because it was about the size of a large bird and looked like one, at least from afar and at night.)
“Not worth it with this foliage,” said Karr. “We won’t be able to see much, and it’ll be tough to recover. I think we just slide in and out. Plenty of gaps.”
“Your call,” said Chafetz.
“Thanks, sweets,” said Karr.
As they pulled on their rucksacks, Dean thought of the strange pack Turk had used in ’Nam. Taken from a North Vietnamese sapper, it was a big, sturdy bag with handy pockets and pouches. Turk had found a rigger or someone who could sew and added a few more of his own. At the time the Army was using very basic packs, and everyone who saw it was envious.
