“There are an unknown number of nuclear missiles stationed less than a hundred miles from our coastline. Their presence constitutes a direct threat to our national security. I am therefore ordering U.S. strategic nuclear assets to DEFCON 3, and taking all U.S. military forces to yellow alert.
“I speak now to Supreme Leader Kim Yong-nam. You have put your nation and your people in dire peril. I place you on notice, sir. Any misstep on your part could lead to the gravest possible consequences.
“I urge you to move with the utmost caution, and make your diplomatic representatives available for immediate discussions. Do not provoke us. If you seek anything other than a peaceful conclusion to this situation, I give you my solemn promise that you will not like the outcome.”
CHAPTER 10
Officially, the Hobgoblin Unmanned Aerial Vehicle loitering 51,000 feet above Matanzas province did not exist. In fact, the Hobgoblin program itself had no official existence whatsoever.
The U.S. Government Accounting Office carried no budgetary allotments for a persistent wide-area surveillance drone program operated by the CIA. The Department of Defense, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, and the National Reconnaissance Office had no records of any such program. The funding stream for the drones was nearly as covert as the drones themselves — buried in an unintelligible federal appropriations bill for the rehabilitation of toxic landfills.
But the UAV cruising through the stratosphere over Cuba was quite real, and so was the ARGUS imaging pod attached to its belly.
Short for Autonomous Real-Time Ground Ubiquitous Surveillance, ARGUS had been developed by BAE Systems under contract with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. The core components of the system were two video processors, four image-stabilized telescopic lenses, and 368 cell phone cameras — each with a scan density of 5 megapixels — for an aggregated image resolution of 1.8 gigapixels.
A single ARGUS pod could surveil fifteen square miles of territory in real time, providing continuous high-detail scrutiny of an area roughly three times the size of downtown Los Angeles. It recorded everything within range of its camera array, internally storing a million terabytes of video a day, and simultaneously streaming the compressed and encrypted camera feed to orbiting communications satellites for relay back to a waiting ground station.
For the Hobgoblin ARGUS pod, the ground station happened to be a CIA safe house in a Boca Raton business park. The pod’s video stream was woven into the Ku band uplink signal for a second-tier commercial satellite television provider by a multiplexing software bot implanted in the satellite company’s server architecture. The bot, like the Hobgoblin program itself, was as inconspicuous as the CIA knew how to make it.
With sunrise six hours away and the moon only a quarter full, much of the terrain lay in shadow. The ARGUS pod was operating in infrared mode; cameras tracking heat blooms from oil wells, refineries, the Matanzas Bay supertanker facility, and the sugar mills that processed the harvest from the province’s numerous cane fields.
There were hundreds of industrial buildings, garages, and warehouses, any one of which might contain a North Korean mobile missile launcher — or a dozen. That didn’t include the thousands of work sheds, cane cribs, and shanties scatted across the countryside. And Cuba had fourteen other provinces besides Matanzas, every one of which held uncounted opportunities for concealment.
For all of its extraordinary surveillance abilities, Hobgoblin 7 was seeking an unknown number of hiding places for an unknown number of missiles. By comparison, the proverbial search for a needle in a haystack would have been an order of magnitude less challenging.
But Hobgoblin’s tiny engine sipped liquid hydrogen slowly, burning only enough fuel to generate the meager voltages needed to power the drone’s high-efficiency electric motors. The LH2 in the drone’s tanks was sufficient to cruise the skies of Cuba for another five days — long enough to scan many many haystacks.
CHAPTER 11
Zack Heller was dreaming when the call came. An odd rambling dream in which he could slide through walls like a ghost, but small items kept disappearing right when he needed them. His wallet. His cell phone. His wristwatch.
Every time an article vanished, a bell would ring somewhere, as if an unseen entity was keeping score. The absent possessions were mounting toward some inexplicable critical mass of ‘missingness.’ A vaguely-perceived threshold of loss, below which Heller would forfeit the ability to accomplish an important task.
The exact nature of the goal wasn’t clear, but — in the twisted logic of the sleeping brain — that didn’t make the task any less vital.
Just as he was realizing that his car keys had gone missing, he heard a different ringing sound. Not the scorekeeper’s bell, but something else…
He was double-checking his pockets when the new and different ring repeated itself.
His dream folded in on itself and retreated toward infinity, a shrinking origami trick composed of whimsy and random thought.
Hovering for a second in the liminal zone between sleep and waking, his mind tried to weave the noise into the fabric of receding fantasy.
The ringing sound came a third time, and his brain finally recognized it for what it was. His eyes fluttered open in the semidarkness of his at-sea cabin. He rolled onto his side and fumbled for the phone on the bedside table, pulling the handset loose from its retaining bracket.
He yawned as he lifted the phone to his ear. “Captain speaking.”
The voice on the other end belonged to Heller’s executive officer, Diane Dubois. “Sorry to wake you, sir. We have classified Flash message traffic. Immediate execute orders.”
Heller yawned again, tugged the sheets aside and sat up on his bunk. “Thanks. I’ll meet you in the wardroom in about five minutes.”
“See you there, sir,” the XO said.
Heller hung up the phone and reached for his coveralls.
Immediate execute? Maybe the brass had finally decided to do something about that mystery contact: the unidentified acoustic source that had torn across the sonar screens like a bullet on Sunday morning.
Or maybe it was the president’s blockade. Orders to join the naval surface force that would cut off all sea traffic to Cuba.
He yawned one last time for good measure. Better go find out…
Four and a half minutes later, Heller was seated at the wardroom table with a cup of black coffee in one hand, and a hardcopy radio message in the other.
//SSSSSSSSSS//
//SECRET//
//FLASH//FLASH//FLASH//
//250651Z FEB//
FM USSOUTHCOM//
TO COMFOURTHFLEET//
USS PHILIPPINE SEA//
USS GETTYSBURG//
USS HUE CITY//
USS BOWIE//
USS LASSEN//
USS ROOSEVELT//
USS WALTER W WINTERBURN//
USS FARRAGUT//
USS LITTLE ROCK//
USS SIOUX CITY//
USS WICHITA//