“They better watch out,” said Sal, as Prince, sitting up close to Choir, looked on, “otherwise a grizzly’ll bite them on the ass.”
“You be careful,” joshed Aussie, “otherwise—”
“General?” It was the Chinook’s loadmaster sergeant. “Radio call for you from a Richard Moffat.”
For a second, Freeman was wearing what Aussie had long ago dubbed his Patton frown. He took the phone, cupping the mouthpiece. “Richard who?”
“Chief scientist,” Choir reminded him. “Richard Moffat.”
“Hello, Doctor. Freeman here.”
“General, we think we might have an answer for you regarding Dr. Juarez’s ‘It’s spotted’ comment.”
“Oh yes,” answered Freeman.
“First, I should tell you Roberta Juarez didn’t survive.”
“Oh, shit!”
Prince’s head shot up, worried by the general’s sharp tone.
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Freeman told him.
“Thank you, General,” Moffat acknowledged.
“Anyway,” continued Moffat, “about her ‘it’s spotted’ comment. Apparently, for security reasons, only one person — who I found out was off sick today — knew about an arrangement that was insisted upon by the chief of naval operations—”
“Yes?” said Freeman, fighting the temptation to say that it was a damned pity that the CNO or somebody else hadn’t paid more attention to damned perimeter security in the first place.
“Well,” continued Moffat, “the arrangement, which was deliberately withheld from DARPA directors — as an added security measure should a director ever be taken hostage and interrogated under duress — was that two scientists here at DARPA ALPHA, one on the day shift, one on the night — the night shift person being Roberta — had agreed to ‘spot’ the disk.”
“Yes?”
“Well, what was meant by ‘spotting’ was that at the end of their respective shifts, these two people would take the disk, and I’m talking here about a three-and-a-half-inch floppy, faster than a CD-ROM but larger than a USB memory device, and for security they’d place a very small circular NDE (non-data-erasing) battery within the reverse — hollow — side of the metal hub so that—”
“So it would transmit a tracking signal,” Freeman said excitedly, anticipating Moffat, “in case it was stolen!”
“Yes. Normally the disk’s battery has a ten-second delay so it won’t be activated while the disk is put in its jewel case at the end of the day.”
“I get it,” said Freeman. “But if somebody steals it without its jewel case, its battery would be activated. A beeper!”
“Correct. I’ve passed this on to Pacific Coast Command and the E-2C Hawkeye out of Whidbey Naval Station. It’s festooned with electronic eyes and ears, and it’s going to patch you into its radio net as soon as it picks up any signal from the disk.”
“Brilliant!” said the general, using the declarative adjective he’d picked up from his sojourns with Britain’s SAS regiment. “Absolutely brilliant!”
“Ah, General, there are a couple of other things you ought to know about.”
“Shoot!”
“Dr. Grierson — the physician—”
“Yes,” said Freeman. “Mr. Cool. The doctor who was looking after Roberta.”
“Yes. Ah, well, the word’s out that he and the hospital are suing you as being complicit in, ah, Roberta’s death. I thought you ought to—”
“Fuck ’im!” said Freeman, his face reddening, the phone in one hand, the other holding a grab bar against the turbulence they were encountering. “Fuck ’im! But thanks for giving me the heads-up, Doc.”
“You’re welcome.”
“That prick physician,” Freeman told Johnny Lee, “who I had you arrest at the hospital? He’s suing me! Poor woman’s dead and he’s got a lawyer on my case.”
“Ah,” said Aussie disgustedly. “These guys’ve got attorneys comin’ out their ass.”
Prince was worried, backing up against the team’s two Zodiacs as if looking for protection. Choir reassured him that the general’s anger had nothing to do with him.
“But,” Freeman announced, “good news. That disk the pricks stole—”
“Has a beeper!” cut in Aussie.
“You’ve been listening in on my phone conversations,” charged Freeman, with mock severity.
“I have.” Everyone laughed.
“I ought to have you arrested!”
“General Freeman.” It was the helo pilot’s voice. “We’re descending to the Priest Lake turnoff.”
“Hold on!” cut in Freeman. “Don’t land here. I’ve just heard from Moffat that the terrorists are carrying a beeper, so I want to contact the Hawkeye to see whether they can get a fix on the bastards.”
“Roger,” answered the Chinook’s pilot. “We’ll take you back upstairs for a while.”
The general, allowing for Murphy’s Law, expected it to take much longer than it did to contact the Hawkeye but in fact they were exchanging info within five minutes. One of the electronic warfare officers aboard the Hawkeye was seeing a dot pulsing on his screen with the urgency of a boil about to burst. The E.W.O., one of the “moles” aboard the essentially windowless aircraft, sat beneath the rotating, spiral-painted rotodome. He routed his call through the “box,” and the binary codes of zeroes and ones sorted themselves out into a military frequency that could be heard on Freeman’s modular infantry radio, informing the general that the E-2C Hawkeye was picking up a clearly identifiable beep from Priest Lake. To underscore the sound, the electronic warfare officer brought the “beep” sound on line so that all the team members could hear it via their MIR’s earpiece. The Hawkeye informed Freeman that the plane would loiter on station to provide GPS-assisted intel.
“Thank you, Lieutenant,” Freeman told the E.W.O. “But I urge you to stay beyond MANPAD range.”
“Appreciate your advice, General, but I hardly think the terrorists would bother adding shoulder-fired rockets to their load.”
The general signed off and wasted no time informing his pilot that the Chinook’s new landing zone would have to be as close as possible to the beep point the Hawkeye was reporting. The signal put their prey two miles west of an island in the southwest corner of Priest Lake. The island itself was about a mile offshore.
“I love that fucking beeper,” said Aussie. “The fuckers are hoist by their own petard.”
“What’s a petard?” inquired Salvini, who was tightening the webbing that held the helo’s two Zodiacs firmly against the bulkhead.
“Johnny?” called out Aussie as he busied himself checking out his HK G36 assault rifle’s under-barrel grenade tube, the grenades festooned about him. “You’re our linguist. Tell this ignorant savage from Brooklyn what a friggin’ petard is.”
“I don’t know,” said Johnny Lee, the skin over his high cheekbones tightening with concern; for all his knowledge of Asian, Mideastern, Slavic, and Romance languages, he didn’t know what a petard was.
“It’s an explosive device,” Freeman explained, “formerly used to bust through walls. To be hoist by your own petard means you screw up your own plans by your own actions. What Aussie means is that the very thing those scumbags stole is giving them away.” He allowed himself a smile despite the serious business they were embarked on.
“Serves the bastards right,” said Tony Ruth, with grunts of approval from Gomez and Eddie Mervyn, who were tightening the slings on their navy rig Heckler Koch submachine guns.