She got a thrill every time she did this, knowing that she was one of the few people on the planet who actually “drove” a spacecraft, even if from the safety of her chair and office. She actually had a set of astronaut pilot wings that her late husband had made for her. They were pinned to the front of a baseball cap, the one her husband had always worn when he went fishing. The cap rested on top of her computer monitor.
Conners spent the intervening minutes double-checking all systems. As the KH12 swooped across Cambodia, infrared cameras took a series of pictures with other imagers recording their own spectral data. The satellite's telescope had an electro-optical resolution of less than three inches but they wouldn't even come close to needing that on this shot.
Conners quickly typed in new commands, getting a new screen. She looked at the map of the target area. With the regular spectrum camera she knew that great resolution wouldn't help much with the triple canopy jungle. The best effect would come from the infrared and thermal imaging. Of course, she didn’t know the objective of the search.
She believed that knowing what she was looking for would greatly increase her efficiency. She was the expert on the KH-12 and the other satellite systems the NSA controlled and she knew that she was the best-qualified to judge how the systems should be used. But she usually had no need to know, therefore she didn’t. One of her favorite pastimes was looking over the imagery requested and trying to figure out exactly what the requester was looking for.
Conners downloaded the data the KH-12 transmitted to her, making a copy for NSA's computer bank-every piece of downloaded data ever picked up by a satellite was somewhere in the NSA system-and bounced a copy to the designated MILSTARS address for Foreman indicated in the original tasking.
Out of curiosity Conners pulled up the downloaded data and ran it through her computer to the printer. She wasn't supposed to do that, since she certainly didn't have a “need to know” but Conners thought it was a stupid regulation. She was a human being after all, not part of some machine with no curiosity. Besides, she rationalized, the more she knew, the better she could do her job.
She made a cup of tea while the machine gently hummed, spewing out three pages. Taking a sip, she looked at the first one. Her initial impression was that the printer must be broken. It was a thermal image and the center of the shot was a fuzzy, white haze in the shape of a triangle.
“What the heck?” Conners muttered as she fanned through the optic and infrared shots. All showed the same triangle in north-central Cambodia.
“But that can't be,” Conners spoke the words aloud. There were no atmospheric conditions, which could block all three types of imaging.
She quickly sat down at her desk and checked the printer, running a test. It was working fine. She bit the inside of her lip. The next possible problem was the computer on board the KH-12. She checked-the satellite was now heading south toward Malaysia. She gave the commands for the imagers to take some shots. As the data appeared on her screen, there was no triangular blur on it. She sent it to the printer. The paper showed clear images.
Conners sat back at her desk and looked at the three images Foreman had requested. There was no type of man-made interference that could do that as far as she knew. Conners stared at the three pictures once more. But something had.
CHAPTER TWO
The golden retriever watched the frisbee fly just over her head, then followed it, waiting until it landed before reluctantly retrieving the disk via a very slow walk.
“Lazy dog,” Dane laughed. “I remember when you used to jump for it.”
The dog gave him a look, its golden eyes and white snout telling him that she was too old for such youthful maneuvers, but her wagging tail indicated she did enjoy the sport.
The two were standing on a grassy lawn, which had been disfigured by the treads of heavy equipment. To the right, smoke still wafted from the ruins of the factory complex. Firetrucks, bulldozers, backhoes and cranes all crowded around the rubble. There was an air of desperation in the air and the sound of jackhammers punctuated the steady rumble of the other heavy gear as they tore at the twisted steel and shattered concrete. It was morning and Dane was glad to see the sun after working most of the night under the blaze of the large Klieg lights that had been hastily rigged around the area.
Dane knelt and took the dog's head in his callused hands, rubbing her behind the ears. “Good dog, Chelsea, good dog.” He wearily sat down next to her and they both looked at the destroyed factory with sad eyes. Chelsea leaned her head against his shoulder.
“How can you do that?” A woman's high-pitched voice shrieked to his left. The owner of the voice came into view, a woman in her fifties, her eyes red from crying. She was hastily dressed and her hair was in disarray. “My husband’s trapped in there and you're out here playing with your dog! Have you no decency?”
Dane slowly stood. He spoke slowly, as if he'd said it before but was repeating it with respect for the woman's grief and anger. “Ma'am, Chelsea,” he patted the golden retriever on the head, “has been working all night long. You might not believe it, but she gets very depressed doing this. I have to keep her spirits up so that she can keep searching.
“Right now the fire department is clearing out another section for us to get into and search. I'm sorry about your husband and I hope we'll find him alive in there, but there's nothing I can do right now except keep Chelsea ready to go.”
The woman had been staring at him, hearing the words but not really registering it. Dane had seen and heard it before. In New York City, right after 9-11, with Chelsea just a puppy, he'd had a grief-stricken FBI man from the local office threaten him with a gun to get back in the building and look for his colleagues after catching Dane and Chelsea playing. That had been the worst ever, with so few survivors and so many dead. Dane had refused any more calls for eight months afterward.
A police officer came and took the woman by the arm. “Ma'am, you have to wait behind the lines. They're doing the best they can.”
The cop led the woman away and Dane sat back down. He could sense Chelsea's unhappiness. In New York, not only had he and the other handlers had to play with their dogs to keep their spirits up; some had staged mock rescues. They'd go into a cleared section and “find” a rescuer who pretended to be a victim. The dogs reacted positively and it kept them going. Dane was content tossing the frisbee to Chelsea; she was too smart to fall for the mock rescue technique.
Dane was bone-tired. They'd been here for ten hours now, searching in the rubble, without anything longer than a thirty minute break to gulp down some coffee. Dane hadn't eaten; he never ate during a search.
“Mister Eric Dane?” a low voice came from behind.
Dane turned his head without getting up. He saw a slender black man in an expensive suit walking toward them.
The man halted, looking at the dust and sweat encrusted coveralls Dane wore, searching for a nametag, but there was none. “Are you Eric Dane?”
“Yes.”
“My name is Lawrence Freed. I work for Michelet Technologies.”
Freed looked past him to the ruins. It had been a paint factory until last night; now it was a graveyard. Something had gone wrong with a batch of the chemicals used and there had been a massive explosion. The three story structure, poorly built during the thirties and poorly maintained, had pancaked until now there was only a ten foot mound of rubble. As part of his job, Dane had studied building structure and he knew that unexpected forces applied in an unforeseen direction could have devastating consequences on any structure.