Leon came back to the real world just as the speedometer crept over 90. He quickly applied his brakes. The last thing he needed right now was to get pulled over by some dumbass cop. Thinking about cops reminded him of something he’d heard that day, on some fragment of a newscast, about an enormous amount of plastic explosives that had been blown up somewhere in the Libyan Sahara. Big bang; big deal. He didn’t care all that much. At heart Leon was a straightforward man, not given to flights of fancy or emotion. And he didn’t care for those who put stock in such things. An explosion in the desert didn’t affect his life in any way, regardless of what it meant to Western civilization.
All he knew was that an extremely valuable cargo would arrive in the very near future. He had received the signal — Devil’s Anvil needed to be ready, and soon. Now he was on his way home; for that much money, he wanted to be personally involved. There could be no screw-ups. No more of that bullshit that Benny always brought with him. This transaction had to be smooth and seamless. The call had come in, cryptic and short, but the directions were very clear. So, first to Missoula, Montana, to arrange for an appropriate truck to be waiting, and then to Devil’s Anvil, to prepare for the cargo that was, apparently, incredibly valuable.
He rode on through the warm August night, wrapped up in his own greed and arrogance.
7
Richard switched off the Thuraya Satellite telephone. He smiled wryly as he realized that he could use the system, here, deep in the desert, without fear of detection. Only the satellites of the National Reconnaissance Office could detect and track Sat-phone transmissions, and since the CIA and the NRO had the same boss, and that’s whom he wanted to speak with, he didn’t care if the call was detected.
“You need Kingston from the NGA,” Baxter had told him. “He’s been reading Keyhole images for the past ten years. If anyone can help you, he can. No one does IMINT like he does.” IMINT was short for Image Intelligence.
Richard shook his head. “Has it ever occurred to you, Baxter, how weird you guys sound? Keyholes. NSA. NRO. IMINT. Perhaps we should add that I’m LOL and you’re FUBAR?”
Baxter snorted. It was well known that Richard’s sense of humor tended toward the dark side, and was drier than the sands of the Sahara. Personally Baxter had always found him quite funny, but this wasn’t the time for jokes. “The Prez says this one has priority. Everyone in the community has been advised. Washington is getting a little concerned about this,” he said. “Langley is definitely on edge, and in the last day or two we’ve had increased chatter about WMD. Goldberg’s message suggests a pretty big attack, possibly on one of the ports. Even compared to that, this Semtex thing is gaining ground on the radar screen.”
“OK,” Richard replied. “Well tell the Prez to take a Valium or something. We’re on it.”
“You’ll get all the help you need, on the ground and at Langley, and pretty much anywhere else you want to turn. It’s going to share the front page of the PDB with that Goldberg message, especially with American servicemen being killed.” With that, Baxter hung up.
Richard was in the process of reciting the conversation back to McMurray when the Thuraya rang again. “Under 60 seconds,” muttered the Sergeant. “They must be worried.”
Richard picked it up after the first ring. “Lawrence,” he barked.
“This is Captain Martin Kingston, from NGA. Just got a personal call from the Deputy Director of Central Intelligence telling me to drop everything I’m doing and talk to you. Seeing as how you’re Navy, I figured that probably means you’re out of toilet paper, but an order is an order. What do you need?”
The NGA was the latest alphabet soup concoction served up by DC bureaucrats, and stood for the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency. It had been known as the National Imagery and Mapping Agency, an amalgamation of various other mapping and imaging organizations within the Intelligence Community. The NGA was closely affiliated with the NSA, and was connected, via dedicated fiber-optic lines, to the supercomputers used in Crypto City. Kingston was in daily communication with his counterparts at the NSA, and had in fact trained many of that department’s image readers. These days, he had workspaces in both agencies.
Kingston usually worked on the top floor of what was now the NGA headquarters building in Bethesda, Maryland. Like so many others in his profession, it was rumored that he slept and lived in his office, which covered almost a quarter of the floor. His name was legendary in the small but somewhat eccentric school of image analysts. He was responsible for creating the term “blobologist”—a person who specialized in identifying fuzzy images on a computer screen. He had an identical office in the basement of the NSA OPS1 building at Fort Mead, where he was equally famous for his work. He was well into his 70s, but his skills were so valuable that both the NGA and NSA had done considerable lobbying to keep him on after his official retirement age. Not that he had complained. They would have had to drag him, kicking and screaming, from his office.
“Not funny, Captain,” replied Richard. “This is actually pretty serious. We’ve got a bit of a problem here.”
“OK, how can I help?”
Richard resisted the impulse to suggest that he could help by sending over 400 Percodans. The pain in his back and head was becoming unbearable. “Well, sir, I think 4.5 tons of Minyar’s Semtex just disappeared,” he stated bluntly. He gave Kingston a basic outline of what had occurred.
“So when do you think the DC-3 took off?” asked Kingston.
“That’s the question at hand. We think it left a little strip just south of Zighan, in the middle of the Libyan desert, sometime in the 12 hours preceding the blast,” said Richard, ducking away from the wasp that was buzzing around his forehead. “It probably vectored south, then entered northwest Darfur for refueling.”
“OK,” said Kingston. “I’ll have a look. But most of the NRO-deployed assets are focused on Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Korea. You know, the problem areas. We don’t have any of the new ORION’s covering your area. We may have something from one of the older Keyholes… maybe a KH-12 would have picked it up. I’ll put a team of people on this immediately, and get the guys at the NSA to help out. I’ll get right back to you.”