Jason pulled back the door flap and dipped inside the tent’s cool interior.
Provisions were stacked around its interior perimeter, leaving just enough room to accommodate three sleeping mats at nighttime (two men always remained awake and rotated watch duty). A section of the roof had been peeled back to let in some light. Crammed into a camping chair, Meat sat in front of a folding table that hosted his laptop and techno gear.
Jason swilled some water from his canteen and watched Meat tap away on the laptop’s keyboard. The guy looked like the ultimate terrorist, with his chequered headscarf, cocoa tan, bushy jet-black beard and eyebrows, and determined dark eyes searing with suppressed rage. But, unlike the jihadists who simmered on rigid interpretations of the Qur’an or gummy Middle East politics, Dennis Coombs struggled to reconcile an alcoholic mother, an absentee father, sibling rivalry, rural poverty and a fiancee’s serial infidelity. All of which had made him easy pickings for the marine recruiters’ notorious ‘poverty draft’.
‘Any luck?’ Jason asked.
‘Yeah, actually. The outside was cooked.’ He motioned with his head to the cracked-open plastic casing. ‘But the inside was raw.’ Pinched between tweezers, he held up the extracted circular, wafer-thin computer chip that was no bigger than the fingernail on his pinky. ‘Just like I prefer my steak cooked: black and blue.’
Jason smiled.
Next, Meat examined each side of the chip with a magnifying loop. ‘No stamps. Nothing. The data’s probably encrypted too. RSA or something similar, I’d bet.’
‘What do you think it was used for?’
‘It’s no library card, I’ll tell ya that. I’m thinking it’s an IPS chip.’
The Identity and Passport Service data chip, Jason recalled, was a smart card for biometric access systems — encrypted files containing a user’s retinal scan, fingerprints and other unique identifiers.
‘No worries, though,’ Meat said. ‘I’m sure we can crack it.’
Jason watched as Meat hooked a rectangular USB device, no bigger than a deck of playing cards, into his laptop — a hi-tech data reader developed by the NSA, which Meat commonly used to skim embedded information off passports.
Meat placed the chip on the reader’s flat surface.
The software interface launched on the laptop screen. It took only seconds before the chip reader identified the protocol, matched its key, and brought up the data.
‘That was fast,’ Jason said.
‘There’s good reason to be worried about cyber terrorism.’ Scrolling through the biometric data, what looked like a passport photo came up on the screen — the face of an attractive, thirty-something female. Meat whistled. ‘Yummy.’
Leaning in, Jason’s brow rumpled with confusion. ‘How can that be right?’ he said. The green-eyed brunette with a flawless complexion looked like a spokesmodel for Revlon. ‘That’s no Iraqi.’
‘Nope.’ Meat scrolled the data. ‘That’s Ms Brooke Thompson. Sorry, make that Professor Brooke Thompson. Female, as you can see … US citizen … Born April 19, 1975 … last clocked-in 15.02, May 2, 2003. No social security number, but her passport number’s here.’
‘What would she have been doing here?’ Jason aired his thoughts aloud.
‘And right after the Battle of Baghdad, in fact. This place was a battle zone back then.’
‘Transmit that data to the home office and ask them to send an agent immediately to find her and vet her.’
‘Got it.’
Jason waited for him to wrap up the call on his sat-com, then encrypt the data file and bounce it off a satellite to Global Security Corporation’s Washington DC headquarters.
‘Anything else?’ Meat asked.
Jason unclipped the binoculars from his neck strap, handed them to Meat. ‘Let’s have a closer look at some of the video I took earlier.’
Meat patched the binoculars’ hard drive into the laptop with a fire wire. A new program launched onscreen. ‘Tell me what you’re looking for and I’ll freeze the image,’ Meat said.
Jason leaned in close to review the playback. The high-resolution images were crystal clear. The frames skipped backwards until Jason spotted what he wanted. ‘There.’
Meat hit a key to pause the image.
‘Zoom in on the tall guy in the middle.’
‘That Al-Zahrani?’
‘You tell me.’
For a good minute, Meat replayed and advanced the footage. Satisfied that he’d found the best full frontal view of the guy’s face, he froze the image, dragged a frame over the head, and zoomed in. The enlargement pixellated before sharpening on the screen.
Meat slumped back in his chair and gave his beard a long, hard stroke. ‘Fuck me, Google. You’re right. That’s definitely him.’
‘We need to be 100 per cent on this.’
Meat held his hand out at the laptop. ‘That’s not a face to forget.’
‘Humour me and run facial recognition on it.’
Huffing, Meat leaned forward again to work the keyboard. He opened the biometric software in a new window, imported the picture file, and initiated the analysis. The program deconstructed the photo using virtual lines that measured eighty nodal points between the irises, the ears, the chin and nose, and various other facial landmarks. Ten seconds later, the ‘face print’ was complete. Using an encrypted signal, he linked to the military’s satellite network and routed an inquiry to the FBI. Meat’s limited clearance enabled him to pull Al-Zahrani’s biometric stats from the agency’s database. Then he instructed the program to compare the biometric statistics.
‘As close as I’ve ever seen to a precise match,’ Meat reported. ‘See for yourself.’
As Jason verified the results, excitement and concern came in equal measure.
‘Imagine if we catch this fucker alive,’ Meat said. ‘We’d be goddamn heroes. Not to mention the bounty. Shit. Ten mil? Forget this soldier-for-hire gig. We could all retire.’ He flitted his eyebrows.
‘Right. You wouldn’t know what to do with yourself,’ Jason scoffed. ‘The hunt’ gave them all purpose, and allowed them to exorcize their demons. Back home, a small fortune would do little to dispel the haunting memories that drove them here to begin with.
Meat considered the dream, then dickered it down in his mind to settle for something more realistic. ‘I’d at least take some R&R … eat some cheese steaks instead of MREs and vermin roast. Maybe even shit in a toilet instead of a trench with sand flies nipping my ass. You know, take a dump with dignity.’
‘I’d settle for a proper shower,’ Jason said, scratching at his beard. Getting back to business, he asked, ‘Hey, where’s the Snake?’
‘Over there,’ Meat said, pointing to a bulky case loosely covered by a goatskin.
Jason went to retrieve it. ‘Give me hand with this. I want to get up that hill … see if we can’t peek inside the cave.’
5
It took a lot to fluster Randall Stokes. Plenty of years spent skulking behind enemy lines to stare down the Devil made most of life’s stressors seem mundane. However, when the caller had conveyed what had transpired in Iraq, a sour taste came to the back of the preacher’s throat.
There’d always been the possibility that someone might accidentally stumble upon the cave installation. Precisely the reason so many security protocols had been built around the programme, including tripwires for unauthorized persons attempting to breach the main hatchway.
But what had happened just an hour ago was something even Randall Stokes could not dream up. Such an incursion fell far outside the limits of possibility — the outlier of outliers. The caller had indicated that a US helicopter gunship had misfired a missile — a freak accident. But Arab militants storming into the tunnels? Stokes thought. Certainly this was God’s plan. It was the only plausible explanation. Has the time already come?