“You’re not going to like what you hear, Lattimere, but there’s nothing to report. We haven’t heard from Bogner for almost four days.”
Considering the fact that it was Lattimere Spitz on the other end of the line. Packer was surprised at the protracted silence.
“No word? Nothing at all?” he asked.
“Banks reported in. We know he made it to Istanbul.
At that point everything was right on schedule. He met his contact. They were flying to Diyarbakir and driving to Simak, where they had arranged for a helicopter to take them to Ammash.
I personally handed him his papers and the Jade inventory before he left Paris. At that point all systems were go.”
Again there was silence on Spitz’s end of the line, and Packer could hear the President’s aide take a deep breath.
“So what do I tell President Colchin at that meeting in the morning?”
It was Packer’s turn to take a deep breath. He tried to hold the mouthpiece closer to his mouth so Sara wouldn’t hear him.
“Tell him the truth, Lattimere. Tell him we don’t know where Bogner is and we don’t know why we haven’t heard from him.”
Lattimere Spitz muttered something that sounded vaguely like a thank-you, apologized for the second time about the hour, and hung up.
Packer laid the phone on the nightstand, pulled back the covers, turned off the light, and crawled into bed. It was several minutes before Sara said anything.
“Is Toby in trouble?” she asked.
“Naw,” Packer said, “it’s probably just a—” Sara cut him off.
“Damn it, Clancy, I hate it when you try to be evasive. Tell me the truth. Is Toby in trouble?”
Packer waited for several moments before he answered. When he did, the answer was barely audible.
“I wish I knew, Sara. I wish to hell I knew.”
Chapter Six
Second Lieutenant Jarvis Reed was bored and there was still an hour to go. Thus far it had been what his shift chief. Major Carson, liked to call a “light night”—so light, in fact, that on this particular night he had finished filing the day’s reports an hour early. He had twice walked down to the vending area within the past hour, rummaged through the reading material in the dayroom, determined there was nothing interesting, and finally, primarily to stay awake, resorted to rerunning the day’s scanning reports on his computer.
Reed had never told anyone, at least not anyone with any bore and stroke in the assessment section, that he regarded reading the day’s reports as even less exciting than reading the list of contents on coffee-can labels in the canteen.
In the last two hours, he had double-checked the phone log, thumbed through the field reports and assessment files, and even looked up the name of the attractive brunette lieutenant in the admin section — the one with the cute little ass. The fantasy ended early on that one, though, not because she was married — but because her husband was a captain in the RTEP section. It was a revelation that caused him to spend several minutes trying to remember whether or not he had made one of his patented off-color assessments of the woman’s attributes to anyone else in the section. Like Bruno said, it was the little things that tended to get in the way of a man’s promotion.
Now, with less than forty-five minutes to go, he reached for the ringing phone to log in only his third call of the night. Reed answered, half expecting it to be Ty Murphy calling in to advise him he would be late for his shift. If Murphy did, Reed had already decided castration would be the only appropriate penalty. Jarvis Reed had every intention of stopping for a six-pack after work and watching what was left of the Knicks-Lakers game from the West Coast.
“This is Major Sanders at Rockwell,” the voice announced. Reed remembered. Sanders had one of those voices that sounded like it had been stripped out of a computer. There was no modulation, and no inflection.
“Lieutenant Reed here. Major. What can I do for you?”
There was a note of recognition in Sanders’s voice. “I believe you’re the same one I talked to a couple of weeks ago, Lieutenant.” Before Reed could confirm that fact, Sanders was already into the purpose of his call.
“If you’ll recall, the last time I called, I pointed out an anomaly in sector 77-T on one of our satellite photos.”
Reed remembered that too, but not for the reason Sanders would have imagined. The code name of the file at the time was Katcar, and Katcavage was the name of the brunette in the records section.
“I remember. That was the sheep incident on the Iraqi-Turkish border wasn’t it, sir?”
“Good memory. Lieutenant. Pull it up on your monitor. I want you to check something for me.
Compare the 21 OOGMT pass on the twenty-third and the same pass twenty-four hours later. Then tell me what you see.”
Jarvis Reed had learned to despise trying to find an anomaly on one of the satellite photos. He was never able to see what he was supposed to see. He referenced back and forth between the 21 OOGMT images on the twenty-third pass and the twenty-fourth several times. Finally, he saw it.
“I’ve got something. Major.”
“What’s it look like to you?”
Reed was glad the officer on the other end of the line couldn’t see him shrug.
“Well, sir, I’m looking at what appears to be an irregularity in a mountain region known as…” Reed’s voice trailed off as he looked for a reference.
“Is that Koboli Pass, sir?”
“You’re on target. Go to a second-level magnification, Lieutenant. See if you see the same thing I see.”
Reed brought the anomaly to an F-5 level and squinted at the white-and-black image.
“What is it, sir?” he finally asked. He could hear Sanders discussing the image with someone else on the other end of the line.
Sanders hesitated. “Best guess here is that it’s the wreckage of an aircraft — possibly even a helicopter.”
“One of ours, sir?”
“Maybe, maybe not,” Sanders said.
“NI has been in touch with us. According to the information they have, American personnel boarded a chopper in Simak, Turkey, three days ago. No flight plan.
Destination Ammash. As near as we can determine, the flight never arrived in Ammash. NI informs us there has been no further contact with any of the personnel aboard that chopper.”
“Think this is it, sir?”
“Can’t be certain, Lieutenant. We’ve plotted several different possible flight paths between Simak and Ammash. According to our computers, the Koboli Pass route represents one of those possibilities — and one of the shorter, if less desirable and more dangerous, routes. The NIMF choppers patrol that region heavily.”
Reed continued to appraise the image on his monitor, and finally decided the elongated object in the middle of what appeared to him to be nothing more than a pile of debris could be a helicopter’s main rotor.
“I’d like to show this to Major Russell when he comes on duty at midnight, sir.”
“Exactly what I was going to suggest. Lieutenant.
When he’s ready, have him get back to me. We’d like to make some kind of response to NI as soon as possible.”
Jarvis Reed waited until Sanders hung up before he turned his attention back to the intensified image on the monitor. The more he studied the shapes and shadows, the more he was convinced it was a helicopter rotor.
Josef Solkov lived alone. At age fifty-eight, his focus in life had been narrowed to a single objective, insuring that the Party returned to its former glory days. He listened intently to every shortwave broadcast from Moscow, read voraciously the doctrines of his political beliefs, and sought out as companions only those who shared his passion for the writings of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.