“Cranston, can you increase the magnification in the southwest quadrant? What is that?” Kingston asked.
“Looks to be two people moving along a ridge. No big deal. We see that a lot in there.”
“Good,” said Kingston. “Let’s zoom back out.” The magnification decreased by ten. “Hold it there, guys. I want to watch this for a while. This is Grand Central Station for the Afghan/Pakistani drug lords. We’re looking for drug smugglers. Maybe, just maybe, those are the guys we’re looking for.”
Kingston bided his time, and kept the live feed on his 42-inch plasma. He was slowly unwrapping a ham and cheese sandwich that his wife had prepared for him more than 24 hours earlier. He smiled to himself. She was long suffering, and he was lucky to have her.
More movement. It would have gone undetected by anyone lacking Kingston’s training and experience. One or two flashing pixels, at most. But there it was again. Just a flicker. “Cranston, zoom back in on the southwest quadrant. Just a factor of four, please.”
Cranston was happy to oblige. “Hey, you guys, look at this. What do you think is going on here?” Kingston asked his team.
“A search?” volunteered one.
“A chase, maybe?”
“How about a search and chase,” replied Kingston. “Look at these figures over here. People on foot? No… zoom in, Cranston. Aren’t those dogs?”
Cranston increased the magnification to the maximum possible. “You’re right, chief,” he said as the small workgroup clustered around the plasma screen.
“Zoom out a bit, fourfold, maybe,” ordered Kingston. The map zoomed back outward. The dogs became a small moving collection of dots. “Now look here. I would say that over here we have the handlers of those dogs. Behind them, more personnel. There seems to be a separate group over here. And there seems to be some vehicular activity in the area as well.”
He watched the screen for a few seconds, getting the big picture. “Zoom out a bit more. There. Do you know what we have here, gentlemen?”
There were no takers. Everyone waited breathlessly. “It’s a chase. These two people here are on the run. And it would appear that a good 100 people are after them, with dogs and off-road vehicles.” He sat back, seeking a different angle of the screen.
“Lawrence and Coe were tracking the source of the Emir’s messages,” he continued, after a moment. “They were going to see how Al Jazeera got those videos. They’ve disappeared. And here, we have two people being chased by dogs, men, Jeeps, and Lord knows what else. I think we’ve found them. This has got to go to the top right now.” He picked up his telephone to call the office of the Deputy Director of the NSA, was put through almost immediately to the Pentagon, and found himself speaking to Admiral Leonard Jackson.
Big Jack talked to the President directly. “It’s like this, sir. We think we’ve spotted Richard Lawrence and Jennifer Coe. They’re on the run somewhere in the Frontier Lands of western Pakistan. They probably have critical information about the Emir and those damned messages of his. They’re being pursued, as we speak, and may well die in the next ten minutes. We need the State Department to talk to the ambassadors for both Afghanistan and Pakistan. We need permission to scramble the choppers we have sitting at the Islamabad Airport. We need to do this now or there will be no point.”
Big Jack was lucky with the timing. Agreement was reached speedily, and the Marine helicopters were dispatched.
The sounds of the Super Stallions came closer, rising up from the valley floor. The dogs were 200 feet away. Then 100. They burst through the brush at the edge of the clearing. Four bloodhounds — no, six — charging at them at high speed. Richard heard the sound of the helicopters increasing rapidly, coming up from somewhere below the cliff edge. He closed his eyes and saw his parents again. He saw his two children, as infants, growing up, before everything went to hell. He saw the carrier crash — the dangerous crosswinds, the pitching sea, and the heaving deck of the Super Sara. The beautifully executed approach bedeviled by stormy seas. He almost had it. In conditions like that you went more on instinct than on what the HUD was telling you. He almost had it. A titch more left aileron, a touch of right elevator, a tiny bit of rudder, more thrust, no, less, no…
At the critical moment, the deck had drifted out of focus, just by a hair, just for an instant, but in those most dangerous of conditions, that had been enough. He overshot by a foot and landed long. The tail hook didn’t grab, and he crashed into a parked Tomcat. Richard, along with a good $20 million worth of fighter jets, had hit the black and roiling waters of the Indian Ocean. He was able to free himself from the cockpit as his Tomcat sunk below the surface. He felt the cold fingers of death surround his throat as he struggled for breath in the huge ocean swells. He was rescued, but then came the endless interviews, investigations, and hearings. The loss of flight privileges, the embarrassment, the anxiety, depression, and fatigue. He’d gone through a peer review, in which he was found wanting. The shame, psychological and physical anguish, and escalating drug use had come hard upon the heels of that decision. Soon after, there had been the divorce, the anger and rejection of his children, the bankruptcy, and ultimately the loss of all hope. Then there was a second marriage, a second divorce, and utter desolation. It was all too much.
“Fuck ’em all, Jen,” he said suddenly. “I’m done. I want the last 15 seconds of my life to be pleasurable. I’m done.” Holding tightly to his piece of bone, Richard took a few faltering steps toward the cliff edge, and jumped. He fell flat on his face.
“Fucked up my own suicide attempt,” he mumbled, curling into a fetal position in the dirt as the dogs closed in.
At that point the helicopters appeared, rising up from the valley floor before them. Jennifer turned to them, her hands raised in surrender. Then she saw the markings on the choppers. Americans. The Marines. They weren’t being captured, they were being rescued. She could scarcely believe the good luck, and stood mute for a moment. Then her training took over, and she broke into action, waving her arms, and pointing to the dogs rapidly closing in on them.
“Don’t worry, ma’am, we’ve got ’em,” said the Master Sergeant over the loudspeaker. He pointed to one of his men, who sprayed an ark of bullets from the mounted M240G machine gun, bolted to the helicopter floor, into the dogs. One was killed instantly, and the rest, either wounded or terrorized, turned tail and ran yelping back toward their masters. The M240G kept the pursuers at bay as the lead Super Stallion came to rest beside Richard’s limp body.
“It’s the Hoover Dam!” yelled Jennifer, struggling to be heard over the roar of the helicopters. “The Hoover Dam! The terrorists are going to destroy the Hoover Dam! That’s the sixth message!”
The officer was on the radio immediately, hooked by satellite to the Embassy at Islamabad. “Terrorists are going to blow the Hoover Dam,” he said, once he had a connection. “Let the Pentagon know.”
52
Once this information was out, it didn’t take long for it to be passed down the line. Islamabad called someone at the Pentagon, who called the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Langley, and the White House. From there the message went through offices like a row of stacked dominoes. It bounced down the chain of command of each arm of the military with lighting speed. The Intelligence Community knew almost immediately, as the message was beamed along at the speed of light, by fiber optic cable, laser, satellite, and telephone, by email, voicemail, and Blackberry and Treo message, from one department to the next. Within five minutes of Jennifer telling the Master Sergeant, most of the military higher-ups knew. The contingent of troops already patrolling the Hoover Dam was profoundly reinforced. Additional armaments, men, and material were moved from nearby Nellis, and the various bases in California. The President met with his National Security Advisor. The Southwestern states were brought under martial law within ten minutes of Jennifer’s announcement.