Steve nodded. “OK, so what should I do now?”
Mark frowned. “You’ve done everything you can for now. I’ll go back to the office that put out the original tasker and ask them how badly they want to find this task force. It’ll be up to them to decide the priority on this, and where to look.”
Mark Rhode stuck his head in Steve Foster’s cubicle, and chuckled when he saw his surprise.
“That was pretty fast, huh? It turns out the CIA requestor and several levels above him were very interested to hear that Iranian armored force went missing. We’ve got a dedicated MA-4C Triton mission out of NAS Sigonella to help us find it, with the feed being sent both to us and directly to the requestor.”
Mark had never seen Steve at a loss for words, but he was actually pleased to see that Steve understood just how unusual this response was for an intelligence tasking. Tritons could stay aloft for over thirty hours at an altitude of fifty-five thousand feet, outside the range of many but not all anti-aircraft systems. They cost over two hundred million dollars each, and as Navy drones were usually tasked for maritime or coastal missions. Their most impressive capability was combining what ships, planes, and land-based combat vehicles were seeing and broadcasting to create a common battlefield picture, which they could then rebroadcast.
“Your reaction is a lot like mine. I had trouble believing it too. The Triton should be on station soon, so I’m going to run through how this will work.
The CIA thinks the Iranians were probably sent north to Iraqi Kurdistan, maybe around Kirkuk, to pressure the Kurds to share their oil revenue with the central government in Baghdad more fairly. The Iraqi central government did that before in 2017 using its own troops. If now they’re using an Iranian armored force, it says a lot of bad things about just how much influence Iran has over the Iraqis. So, the CIA will check out images from northern Iraq that would support that theory.”
Steve nodded. “OK, so what are we doing?”
Mark shrugged. “Their next idea is that the Iranians doubled back, and are either on their way to the Syrian border or already back in Syria. The CIA has asked us to check out that possibility.”
Steve stared at Mark incredulously. “That’s ridiculous, and they know it.
The Iranians were already in Syria longer than they’ve ever been, and their replacement force has just crossed the Iraqi border. They’ll be in Syria within a day or so. Yes, it’s a little smaller. But there’s nothing going on in the Syrian conflict that would support the Iranians needing to send their first armored group back to Syria after crossing more than half of Iraq.”
Mark nodded. “I agree. But think about the alternatives. The Iranians headed south to Saudi Arabia. Yes, the Saudis have a lot of their forces tied up in Yemen. But I think they’d have noticed dozens of Iranian tanks crossing their border.”
Steve said nothing, and just shrugged agreement.
Mark hesitated, then added, “There’s only one other direction left. Back across the border to Iran, where they were supposed to go in the first place.”
Steve had never lost his temper in the office before, but Mark could see it was about to happen, so he quickly added, “Look, when the CIA told me they were going to task a Triton I reviewed the images you saw myself and didn’t see anything either. So, if the Iranians did go home and we just missed them, I’ll have my butt in a sling right beside yours.”
Steve visibly reined in his temper, and even managed to smile. “Dozens of tanks should be pretty hard to miss.”
Mark was relieved, and grinned back at Steve. “Right. We should start getting images from the Triton any minute. Let’s find those tanks.”
Mark Rhode and Steve Foster were sitting side by side in the cubicle, and had each been looking at the images provided by the Triton on separate monitors for hours. Mark’s secure cell phone rang, and after a quick look at the caller ID he answered.
All Steve heard was a terse series of “Yes” and “No” until Mark put down the phone with a visible look of disgust.
Steve said nothing, but was obviously curious.
Mark sighed. “The CIA. They’ve found nothing, and wanted to know if we’ve found anything. I told them no.”
Steve nodded. “I was about to suggest that we look south. We’ve looked east and west and the CIA has looked north, so whether it makes sense or not, that’s what’s left. I also suggest we skip the area between the Iraqi highway where they were last seen and the Saudi border. By now, if that’s the way they went they’re either at the border or have already crossed it. Besides, there’s nothing between that highway and the border but desert, so what would they be doing there?”
Mark looked thoughtful for a moment, and finally nodded. “Agreed. You take the sector near the Saudi-Kuwaiti border, and I’ll look at the Saudi border further west.”
Ten minutes later, Steve tapped his monitor. “Take a look at this.”
Mark leaned over and immediately said, “Fuel tankers and supply trucks.”
Steve nodded. "A lot of them. The Triton‘s pass shows no people, and no vehicle movement.”
Mark frowned. “So they abandoned them? Why?”
Steve tapped another key, and brought up an Iraqi highway map with the tankers and trucks appearing as a dot at the border.
Steve could hear Mark’s intake of breath. “The highway ends at the border.
Only the tracked vehicles could continue. The tanks and armored personnel carriers.”
Steve nodded. “That’s how it looks to me.”
Mark picked up his phone. “Look for them, starting due south. I have to make some calls.”
Steve reviewed images for another fifteen minutes, while his boss made phone calls. All Steve had to do was glance at Mark to get a hopeful, “Something?”
Steve shrugged and said, “Maybe. But I’m not sure what I’m looking at.
It’s dark there now, so the Triton has switched to thermal imaging. There’s not enough of a return here to be the Iranian armored force, or even a substantial part of it. It’s all I can find, though, and it’s definitely moving. It’s also moving faster than anything like livestock. Any ideas?”
Mark looked intently at the series of images, and finally shrugged. “Beats me. None of this makes any sense. I’m going to ask for the Triton to take a more detailed look at that specific area. Maybe then we can figure out what’s going on.”
Mark Rhode threw down the crust of the pizza slice that was the last of the only food he and Steve Foster had eaten over the previous ten hours. “So,” he said, “dawn in ten minutes.”
Steve nodded. “And from what we’ve been told, the Triton should be getting us the more focused look we asked for any minute at whatever’s moving down there.”
Right on cue, both their monitors lit up with a “feed active” message. Soon a series of high-resolution images appeared, becoming clearer as the rising sun provided more illumination of the landscape.
For a long twenty minutes, all they saw was Saudi desert that looked exactly like the Iraqi desert they had already looked at for hours.
Suddenly Steve pointed at his monitor. “See that, on the horizon?”
It was a formless cloud of dust. The Triton was headed right for it.
Five minutes later, the Triton‘s cameras were pointed straight at the billowing dust cloud rising several meters from the desert surface.
Steve shook his head. “Why can’t we see anything but dust? I mean, I see shapes and shadows, but I can’t pick out a single tank or APC. Am I going blind?”