DEW Line was a series of Distant Early Warning radar sites, meant to keep tabs on the Soviet Bear during the Cold War. Some three hundred miles east of Point Barrow, the Inupiat village of Kaktovik was on the northern edge of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. It now served as a hub for scientific research on climate change and a thriving tourist destination for watching polar bears that came to eat on the boneyard from the village’s yearly harvest of bowhead whales.
Ryan stood. The others were already standing, but van Damm got to his feet as well.
“Who’s Healy’s skipper?”
Forestall glanced at his tablet again. “Captain Jay Rapoza.”
Ryan picked up the pencil again, thinking, then tossed it back to the center of his desk.
“And he’s heading for the source of this coded signal?”
“Correct,” Burgess said.
“And that will take him near the place were Dr. Moon heard her sounds?”
Burgess glanced at Forestall.
“Right over the top of it, Mr. President.”
“Bob, get in touch with Rapoza’s chain of command and make sure everyone stays in the loop as things develop.”
“Yes, sir,” the SecDef said.
“Robbie,” Ryan said, causing Forestall to turn. “There’s one more thing I’d like you to facilitate for me.”
20
John Clark marked the police minders as soon as he boarded the aircraft. Both were Han Chinese men in their forties, seated three rows behind him on either side of the aisle. They read magazines, looking up periodically with feigned disinterest. The one on the right had thinning hair and a long, horselike face. He was dressed like a businessman coming home from a conference, open-collared white shirt, rumpled suit, an overcoat he kept in his lap like a blanket. He talked on his phone a lot — or pretended to. The other was slightly doughy with a blue ball cap and puffy blue ski jacket over a corduroy sport coat that looked too tight to button. Clark noted Horse Face’s shoe that stuck half out in the aisle. It was well worn, sturdy, and didn’t quite match the business suit. The Uyghurs who’d boarded in front of Clark recognized the minders for what they were as well, and leaned slightly away when they shuffled past, as if the men were contagious.
Clark had the entire row to himself. The China Southern Airlines flight was only around half full, but most of the passengers were Uyghur men. None of them wanted to risk being seen chatting with a foreigner by the two police minders.
The steady hiss of air flowing across the fuselage of the shabby but serviceable Airbus changed to a burbling roar as the pilots deployed flaps and slowed the plane in preparation for landing. Clark’s ears popped, alerting him to the aircraft’s descent. He hated airports, and didn’t particularly enjoy being crammed into a flying metal tube. But he wasn’t apprehensive about flying itself. At best, he was ambivalent. For him, slipping the surly bonds of earth was simply a means to an end. Some found the idea of flying a romantic notion. Good for them. Clark understood, a little.
He felt that way about the sea.
The pilots kept the cabin on the chilly side, so most passengers wore their coats or at least a heavy wool sweater during the flight. Most of the Uyghur men wore black fur hats pulled low over their eyes, like the winter hat worn by Brezhnev in all the newsreels. Others wore ball caps, or snap-brims. A couple of the older ones wore large fur Kyrgyz hats, similar to a Russian ushanka but wider at the earflaps, perfectly suited to their long white beards and Turkic features. Dark eyes and aquiline noses peered back and forth at the gathering twilight out of the windows on each side of the plane.
Clark watched the ground rise up to meet him out the window to his left. A dusty haze hung over the dull gray of the city and muted brown of the surrounding countryside. Patches of grimy snow clung to the shadows. The canal along the highway leading from the airport northeast of the town flowed full of chocolate-brown water. A convoy of three white-topped military troop carriers rolled down the highway east of the city. Pickups and larger trucks shared the roads with taxis and scooters.
Clark could already feel the grit of dust in his teeth and the chill on his neck just from looking out the window. It was no wonder everyone on the plane wore winter hats.
The plane bounced once, crabbing into a stiff crosswind before straightening up and settling onto Kashgar Airport’s only runway.
The police minders followed Clark off the plane and then jumped ahead when he was held up at Immigration and Customs. He was sure he’d see them again. No doubt about that.
The uniformed Han officer grunted as Clark slid his Canadian passport and visa, courtesy of Adam Yao’s friend in Beijing, across the counter. The officer perused it with the jaundiced eye of someone accustomed to being lied to on an hourly basis.
He asked Clark a couple perfunctory questions about the purpose of his trip. For his part, Clark tried very hard to hide the predatory edge in his eyes by acting bewildered. The three-thousand-mile trip from Ho Chi Minh City via Guangzhou and Urumqi had sapped him, and he was able to play weary traveler without acting. The officer barked something unintelligible, making the bewildered look easy to sustain.
It sounded as if he’d asked Clark if he had a jeep.
Clark shrugged and tapped his ear. It was better for the officer to think he was simply dealing with an old deaf guy rather than to be offended because Clark couldn’t understand his English.
“You have the GPS?” the officer pantomimed, using his index finger like a compass needle. “For navigation.”
“On my phone,” Clark said, honestly.
“Mobile phone!” The man snapped his fingers. “Give to me.”
Clark fished the phone out of his jacket pocket and passed it to the officer without argument.
“Extra battery?”
Clark dug out the spare charging block as well.
“Passcode!
“I…”
“Passcode or I do not give back,” the man said. He gazed up at Clark without lifting his head.
Clark gave him the code to unlock the screen.
The officer scrolled, perusing the various icons, then said, “Do not use in China.”
“The phone?”
The officer gave a disgusted shake of his head, then pointed to the map icon on the screen, raising his voice for the deaf Canadian at his station.
“No JEEPS in China.”
“I understand,” Clark said. “No GPS.”
The officer slid the phone and passport back, but kept the extra battery for himself, giving no explanation. It was a small sacrifice to the Immigration and Customs gods.
One problem down, Clark moved to the next. He traveled with just a carry-on, so he made his way directly through the terminal, past the crowd of passengers. They squatted on tiny plastic stools by their bags, eating instant noodles or shanks of meat, while they waited for flights that rarely departed on schedule.
The two police minders, Horse Face and Doughboy, resumed their tail before Clark made it out the glass doors. Blowing yellow dust muted the glow of the streetlamps, forcing Clark and everyone else to bow their heads against the biting wind. The two minders trotted to keep up as he skirted a group of construction workers in hard hats laying rebar for a new sidewalk between the buses and taxi stand.
He’d let them follow him for now. But sooner or later, he’d have to lose them or lie to them.
Clark was, in fact, extremely good at lying. Sociopathy within proper bounds, the shrinks at Langley called it. Clark had never considered himself a spy in the strictest sense of the term. He was an operator, had been since he was a pup. Operators lied to get where they needed to be — or, more often than not, to get out of the grease after the job was complete. He grabbed intel when he came across it, of course, but in the main, he used other people’s intel to go in, do his thing, and then slip away.