“Uprange one minute,” the pilot warned.
Sixty seconds meant sixty miles, give or take a few. That time evaporated quickly. Their pass over the long axis of the island of Cuba took just twelve minutes, the cameras and SAR dumping gigabytes of image data into the ample computer-storage capacity onboard. After turning back, the RSO began preprocessing the data, selecting the images that most closely matched the mission requirements. As the descent to Groom began over eastern Texas, he transmitted the selected data to a Milstar satellite in geo. NPIC had it a minute later.
The Aurora touched down seventy minutes after taking off, the total distance covered over forty-five-hundred miles. Its crew, after having spent $2 million of Uncle Sam’s money on what they considered to be an E-ticket ride, debarked in a hangar at the north end of the runway. Dinner was in a few hours and, thanks to their somewhat special ride, they rarely missed a meal.
They were legally breaking the law.
The white van pulled up adjacent to the third utility pole from the corner, its two occupants exiting and setting up their work area. Orange cones directed any traffic in the curb lane to move to the left, and their blue work overalls were properly soiled enough so that questions would not be asked.
But there were always those to whom curiosity was not a feeling but a driving force.
“Whas za problem?” the old man asked, sauntering up to the nearest workman.
Special Agent Chris Testra looked up from the loop of cable he was unspooling, the smell of alcohol having reached him with the old man’s words. “Cable-TV trouble, Pops.”
“Sheeeeit! The fize on anight.” He swung a disappointed fist at the air.
Testra laughed. “Don’t worry, Pops. You won’t miss it. Guaranteed.”
“Oh, man. Thainz.”
Testra and his partner, Special Agent Frederico Sanz, watched the old man stumble away.
“His life is bliss, man. Eh, Freddy?”
“Guess so. Come on.”
Their work was rather simple, and only a schooled observer would have recognized that the two workmen were not working on the thick black cable-TV lines but on thinner wires belonging to the phone company. Wiretapping had come a long way since the days of splicing and stringing additional wires to carry the eavesdropped communications. The method chosen for this operation, authorized by Federal Court Order (Sealed) #76-a-1212-5, was known as “shroud interception.” It required a relatively simple procedure that was only slightly invasive. A black-colored cylinder, five millimeters thicker than the standard nineteen-millimeter telephone line, was at the heart of the operation. It was actually two sections, split lengthwise, that were placed over the existing line and reconnected, creating an almost invisible “shroud” over the line. Several tiny, sharp probes, made of polished copper, pierced the protective synthetic coating on the wire and made contact with the cable bundles housed inside. The agents then plugged a remote dialer into one end of the shroud, which actually contained more computing power in its body than a second-generation PC. Special Agent Chris Testra then dialed the number they were authorized to tap into, waiting a few seconds before it was picked up.
“Yeah?”
“Is Raji there?” Testra inquired in his best feigned Pakistani.
“Wrong number.” Click.
Testra cleared the line and dialed another number, which rang in room 145 of the Golden Way Motel four blocks away, their home for the next few days at least. It rang only once before being answered by a machine that emitted four long beeps. Connection made. Any calls to or from the intercepted number would now be automatically relayed to the monitoring station in room 145 for recording and instant analysis.
They completed the operation in just under a half hour and picked up their cones, making a U turn on the street to drive past the house in question once again.
“What do you do in there, Meester Spy?” Sanz asked in his best Speedy Gonzalez as they passed the older-looking house.
“Hope he does whatever it is soon,” Testra said. “The boat has a new coat of paint”
“Well, maybe he’ll hear your heavy breathing on the line and just invite us over, Chris,” Sanz joked. “Surrender and confess right then and there.”
“I’ll pant my ass off if it gets me off this by Friday.”
A ten-power loupe was hung on the wall as a deferential tribute to the practitioners of their art who had come before. Trailblazers, really, men who had perfected the innocuous act of looking at pictures into a form of educated soothsaying that had saved their country from embarrassment, missteps on the international stage, and from being hoodwinked into situations with potentially deadly consequences for the unaware.
Much had changed since the first days of light tables, foggy slides, and long stints hunched over with a loupe stuck to one’s eye. Much had evolved at NPIC. Photo interpretation was now more correctly known as imagery analysis. Computers had replaced the three-by-three slabs of backlit Lucite mounted on box tops as viewing apparatuses. Cataloging, storage, and retrieval of data were now instantaneous. Yes, the men who practiced the craft had a new, sophisticated array of tools with which to perform their wizardry, and, not surprisingly, some of those “men” were no longer of the anticipated gender.
Senior Analyst Jenny MacNamara, while differing in anatomy from her ancestors in the field, had all the skills requisite in a top-notch interpreter, namely a good pair of peepers and an innate sense of curiosity. To look at an image and see trees was one thing, but to look at the trees and wonder what kind they were was another. To take that wonder one step farther and determine the last time a mountain alder in the rolling foothills west of the Rockies had received rain based upon the growth rate of its leaves was the type of self-enforced lunacy that made Jenny one of the best. It had also earned her a place of respect in the eyes of her colleagues, and the nickname Spot, which was representative not of her looks, which were above average by any standard, but of her ability to spot the incongruous. To some she saw what was not there. That was, of course, until she politely pointed it out to them.
The data dump of images had come in a few hours before. Over fifty image “packages” were received, some containing a thousand separate pictures that had been assembled into larger, more telling representations of what was really there. While Jenny knew what sensors obtained the images, she was not supposed to know from where. The same way she wasn’t supposed to imagine a red elephant when her logic professor at MIT had suggested that one couldn’t help but do so when the mention of one was made. A big, fast bird.
She pushed herself away from the workstation to the small refrigerator, retrieving a clear bottle of flavored seltzer that hissed open with a twist. The computer continued its task without its operator’s attention. Inside the four tower cases on a riser to the display’s right were parallel arrays of microprocessors, four hundred in all. The process was logically called parallel processing and took the simple analogy that two hands were better than one to a new exponent. Enough processing power was built into the system to allow image compilation that had only been possible in machines like the Cray some years before.
Still, the process Jenny had initiated was complex and time-consuming. More than looking at the visible light images, which she had done an hour before and noted that which deserved noting, she was now feeding the data from the Synthetic Aperture Radar through the computer to build a picture. In reality she was building an island.