“They’re eighteen years old,” said Mack.
“And?”
“Kick butt, Commodore.”
“I intend to,” she said, marching out.
With McKenna gone and his biggest logistical problem on its way to being solved, Mack began tackling the paperwork, signing his name with abandon. He was about a quarter of the way through the pile when the phone rang. Mack picked up the line quickly, only to find himself speaking to a woman with a thick Russian accent.
“Mr. Minister Smith, good afternoon; I am so glad to have this opportunity to speak to you,” said the woman.
“I didn’t quite catch your name,” said Mack.
“Ivana Keptrova. You have heard of me? I work with friends in the president’s office. The Russian president,” she added.
“Just the person I wanted to speak to,” said Mack.
“And I you. It appears you have hired an employee of mine.”
“Problem?”
“Not a problem perhaps,” said Ivana. “An opportunity maybe. But I would watch her.”
“Oh, I intend on it. Why are you calling?”
“You are in the market for aircraft, are you not?”
“I’m looking for a squadron of F-15s,” said Mack. “You have any?”
“You’re making fun. But if you were more serious, we could speak of the Sukhoi, a very excellent plane,” she said. “With some adjustments here and there, they are twice the plane the Eagle is.”
“Right,” said Mack.
“I can arrange a demonstration.”
“I’ve flown Sukhois,” said Mack.
“Then the sale will be easy”
Mack wondered if the encounter had been meant as a sales demonstration. There was only one way to find out.
“Maybe we can talk in person,” he suggested.
“Of course. How about lunch tomorrow?”
“Lunch?”
“You don’t mind mixing a little pleasure with business, do you Mr. Minister?”
“What time?” he asked.
Chapter 16
Jed Barclay was almost to the Metro stop when his beeper vibrated. He stopped, hung his head, and without bothering to check the number walked back to his office in the White House basement. He’d learned from experience that, whatever other virtues his boss had — and he did have many — understanding that his aides needed sleep was not one of them.
But it wasn’t Freeman who had called him. It was Mark Stoner, who’d sent a message to the NSC duty officer asking that Jed contact him immediately.
“I think you want to get a look at something that’s going on in Borneo,” said Stoner when Jed reached him at the apartment he was renting outside the city. “I’ve been looking at this all day with some of our guys”
“Borneo? 1 think maybe Fred would be better,” Jed told him, referring to a staffer who handled Southeast Asian matters.
“It may complicate that airplane deal the White House is pushing with Brunei,” said Stoner. “And you have some Dreamland people over there.”
Jed sighed. “Should I meet you at Langley?”
“I’d rather do this at your office,” said Stoner. “And I’m supposed to leave town in the morning. Pretty early.”
“Well, I’m here,” said Jed, pulling off his coat.
Stoner showed up a half-hour later. He had a day and a half’s worth of stubble on his face. Deeply tanned, he’d lost considerable weight since Jed had last seen him. If not quite gaunt, he looked more like a bleached-out castaway than a hardened former SEAL and CIA agent.
“I got an off-the-record phone call the other night from someone in Brunei,” he told Jed, starting right off without even bothering to say hello. “It didn’t make a lot of sense. So I hooked the person up with somebody there I met. And did some checking myself.”
“Okay,” said Jed, not quite following along.
“You have some satellite images from Dreamland’s deployment at Brunei. The images may include the northern part of the island, around on the eastern shore in Malaysian territory, south of Darvel Bay”
Jed turned to his computer and tapped into one of the databases. During the operations in the South China Sea, the U.S. had moved its satellites to provide extensive coverage of the region. They had also conducted surveillance with a variety of systems, gathering electronic signals and other information to compile a profile of activity. But most of the effort had been focused on China and India. America did not yet have the capability of observing every square inch of the globe twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Doing so with satellites was not only absurdly expensive but technically unfeasible given present limits in technology. Improvements were steadily being made, but the day when someone could sit in a bunker in Omaha and read license plates around the clock in Beijing — let alone a less important place like Borneo — was still a good way off.
Jed paged through some images, which had been filed as part of a routine series covering the Whiplash deployment. Borneo was a large island shared by three different countries. Brunei territory formed a misshapen W on the northern coast. Sabah, the Malaysian province on the northern part of the island, wrapped itself around Brunei. Below it was the Indonesian territory, Kalimantan.
“What are we looking for?” he asked.
“Piece of road that could be used as an airstrip. About three thousand meters.”
Jed hunted through the images, which mostly showed desolate rock or impenetrable jungle. “This?” he said finally, pointing at what looked like a thickened pencil line near Rataugktan.
“Compare that to an image a year ago,” said Stoner.
The only picture Jed could find was from two years before. The road seemed narrower and ended in a T, which no longer seemed to be there.
“What I think they did was widen and flatten a road that was there, making it into more of a highway. The photo interpreter I talked to says the concrete is pretty new,” said Stoner. “And that what looks like a gully on the northern end there is actually painted on. It’s fairly clever, and if you weren’t looking for it, you might not catch it.”
“So what’s going on?”
“I don’t know,” said Stoner. “But if you can tap into the Russian network and look at their archives, there are two photos that show aircraft on the strip. I came across it by accident when your person called. They were looking for a way to get an image of the island, and I knew someone who would have access to the mirror site that the Greenpeace hackers set up when they broke in a few months ago.”
“Someone?” asked Jed.
“Just someone,” said Stoner. “Private guy. Thrives on information. He probably can get into the Russian system on his own, but I didn’t ask.”
Jed couldn’t get into either the Russian or Greenpeace systems from his computer, since doing so would potentially leave a trail and therefore represent a security breach. He could have any of a number of people do it for him, however.
“What sort of planes?” he asked.
“I’m not sure,” said Stoner. “The interpreter thought they were Sukhois.”
“Breanna Stockard reported that the Brunei air force encountered Sukhois,” said Jed.
“Two plus two,” Stoner deadpanned.
“I could see having a base for counter insurgency there,” said Jed. “The guerillas are operating throughout that entire area. But why would you put interceptors there? Those are pretty useless against terrorists.”
“I don’t know,” said Stoner. “There was a ship that was blown up, right?”
“They’re still investigating. No one thinks it was sunk by a plane.”
“Maybe no one’s right, then,” said Stoner.
Jed turned back to his computer, tapping into SpyNet — the informal name for the intelligence community’s intranet featuring briefings and information from around the world. The CIA was tentatively agreeing with the unofficial Brunei assessment — a terrorist bomb had been planted in the ship.