KBL (33 page)

“Y’never know, Mac. ‘Be prepared: That’s the Boy Scouts’ marching song,’ remember?”

“Only too well.” McGill retrieved the big Cuban cigar he carried in his breast pocket and stuck it in his mouth. “What’s the goal?”

“I need the Paks to be deaf, dumb, and blind. On command. But without making ourselves obvious.” Bolin pulled a tactical pilotage chart out of his briefcase and unfolded it on the conference table. He drew a line with his finger. “Coming from here, I run southeast, skirt to the north of Shahi Kowt,” he tapped the map, “then cross the border at Tawr Kham and run the corridor between the Pak West ADIZ and the Peshawar no-fly zone.” ADIZ stood for Air Defense Identification Zone. All flights entering an ADIZ are required to file a flight plan with the Pakistani military and remain in constant two-way contact during their transit.

For the past month, Bolin had examined satellite imagery and pored over pilotage maps. There were more direct routes to Abbottabad than the one he was leaning toward, but they also overflew some populated areas and, more to the point, came dangerously close to Pakistani military installations. Bolin wanted to thread the needle, flying the lowlands that skirted the demarcation line between several Pakistani commands.

He’d studied the Paks. Most of their military commands were stovepiped; they did not interact. So if Colonel Ahmed happened to catch a glimpse of unidentified choppers flying in Colonel Walid’s sky, that would be Colonel Walid’s problem, not Colonel Ahmed’s.

Then he’d had his intelligence people work the problem. They discovered that the Pak military didn’t even have a universal communications system. Each region had its own. Which made it even better odds that the Paki left hand would have no idea what the Paki right hand was doing, and Bolin’s SEALs and their Night Stalker stealth MH-60J and MH-47 helos could skedaddle hi-diddle-diddle straight down the middle. Invisible to everyone.

If it was dark enough. “Mac?”

“Sir?”

“Punch up moon phases for the next couple of months, will you?”

“Starting when?”

“Tomorrow would be good. And take it through fifteen May.” If POTUS hadn’t signed off by then, it would probably be too late.

The Ranger hunt-and-pecked at his laptop keyboard. “We’re in new moon now through the tenth.”

“Next new moon?”

McGill squinted at his screen. “Zero-three May.”

“And May tenth?”

“First quarter.”

Too much light. “Send me those dates, will you, please?”

“Yes, sir.” McGill did some typing. “Heading your way, Admiral.” He closed his laptop. “Sir, how big’s the package?”

“Six, maybe seven birds, to include a JMAU and an SSE in the secondary, and a FAARP backed up by a couple of Ranger platoons.” JMAUs were forensics-capable Joint Medical Augmentation Units; SSEs were sensitive site exploitation groups, more colloquially known as slurpers. FAARPs were forward area arming and refueling points positioned no more than thirty-five miles from the target.

“I could invade a country with six, maybe seven birds, a couple of Ranger platoons, a JMAU, and an SSE. Where you going?”

“Can’t say yet, except that it’s not an invasion. But I’m going deep on this one, Mac. I’ll need every fricking Pak air defense radar between the border and Islamabad north to go sightless for three, maybe four hours.” Bolin looked at the Ranger. “Can we do that?”

“Depends.”

“On?”

“Time, conditions, maybe a little bit of luck.” The big Ranger tapped the four-by-six-foot area map on the wall. “Most Pak radar faces east, toward the main enemy, India. There are Pak Air Force fields at Risalpur, Kamba, and Islamabad. Each has radar and missile defenses, and some of them come back this way. We’ve spoofed every single one except Islamabad on previous missions—and they never noticed a thing. But we’ve never smacked all the sites at the same time. That’s the unanswered question: Can we silence every site simultaneously?”

“And make them think nothing’s wrong. That’s the key, Mac. They have to believe everything is situation normal.”

“Sitnorm, sitnorm.” McGill paced back and forth, cigar chomped between his teeth, muttering the word like a mantra. He looked, Bolin thought, like a caged animal or a crated attack dog, winding into tighter and tighter circles as, brow knit, he scowled at the floor.

Then: “Here’s what.”

“What?”

“Every weekend they run maintenance.”

“And?”

“One at a time they shut down for about three hours, sometimes a lot more. Which one shuts down depends on the traffic, so it’s not as if they maintain a specific schedule.”

“And?”

“So take Islamabad. When I-bad goes dark, they signal Peshawar, Risalpur, Rawalpindi—all the other stations that they’re going dark. If we can screw with their comms, maybe we can make them think it’s okay to go dark. Not all—but some. And the others, we maybe capture signal, then tap their lines and rebroadcast it back to them—like a tape loop. Or we could spoof a power outage. Most of those installations rely on substations we know about—Sentinel should be capable of taking down the power grids.”

“Ever tried it?”

“Nope. But it’s well within their ROC.” ROC was military shorthand for range of capabilities.

“Who can you put on this right now?”

“Got some signals intelligence squirrels, and some MASINT contractors with cyberwar experience who maybe could program the algorithms we’d need to bore inside the power grids. Plus the Sentinel people and their contractors.”

“Make a compartment.” Bolin understood that secrecy was everything. “Read in those you have to. Get the proper paperwork. And maximum op-sec. No conversation except in SCIFs. You’re point, and you report to me, or to Joe.” Joe was Air Force Brigadier General Joseph Bradley Franklin, Bolin’s deputy back at Fort Bragg.

“Got it.” The Ranger’s gaze settled on the admiral. “Timeframe?”

“I need to know you’ve solved the problem by the sixteenth of the month, and I will need on that date a couple of paragraphs telling me exactly how you did it—and in nontechnical language, Mac.”

“Can do.” McGill stuffed the cigar back in the breast pocket of his ACU. “Anything else you’d like to tell me, sir?”

“Not right now.” Bolin took a long swig of the cold coffee. “But let me speak plainly, Mac: if you think you know what’s going on, or if you even think you think you know what’s going on, forget about it. No whispers, no RUMINT, no gossip. I can’t have it.” Bolin squinted at the Ranger general. “Got it?”

“Hoo-ah, Admiral. Heard, understood, and acknowledged.”

31

Bin Laden Group Operations Center, Langley, Virginia
April 5, 2011, 0545 Hours Local Time

Dick Hallett yawned, stretched, and scanned the message from Valhalla Base. Charlie Becker had been alerted, and the soil sampling was under way. He pulled a green pencil out of the mug of writing instruments on his desk, flipped open a spiral notebook, and drew two neat green lines through the appropriate portion of his to-do list. The notebook was two-thirds filled. Green lines stood for tasks accomplished successfully, red lines stood for screw-ups, and blue-highlighted items were requests or orders from Vince Mercaldi and were to be dealt with ASAP.

Hallett’s work schedule had been turned on its head ever since he’d become chief of BLG. Abbottabad was nine hours ahead of Washington, so he lived on a Pakistani schedule, coming to work just before midnight and dragging himself home somewhere between five and six the next evening. Unless there was a crisis, in which case he’d grab a combat nap on his couch and remain until it was solved.

His schedule had been like this since the previous August, and Hallett was exhausted, physically, mentally, and emotionally.

His wife, Sara, worked at the National Clandestine Service’s logistical support group, which created legends for CIA’s covert operations personnel. They kept regular hours. She wanted him to hang it all up. He had twenty-nine years in, four beyond what was necessary for full retirement benefits—more if you counted his five years in the Marines. And he was an SIS-2, senior intelligence service and holding the equivalent rank of a two-star general. She had only nineteen months left until she was eligible to retire. Why didn’t he just go now and spend the time fixing up their lodge in Idaho? Hunt. Ski. Play with the grandkids. Sleep.

But he couldn’t—he wouldn’t—quit now. Hours be damned, they were on the cusp of ending an almost ten-year hunt, and Dick Hallett was not about to leave before the mission was completed.

He scanned the never-ending, ever-expanding to-do list. Blue-highlighted was the terse note
KHAN MODEL.
That would have to wait. CIA’s technical services people worked normal schedules. They wouldn’t appear until seven.

He flipped the page. Picked up the phone. Dialed.

The phone rang twice. “Bailey.”

U.S. Navy Captain (SEAL) Larry Bailey was Wes Bolin’s detailee to the Bin Laden Group. Vince Mercaldi and Bolin had an eye-to-eye relationship, but down the chain of command, there was liaison. In JSOC’s case, liaison meant Larry Bailey.

“Larry, Dick Hallett. Morning.”

“Same to you.” Hallett heard the SEAL slurp his ever-present coffee. The tall, dark-browed Texas SEAL was a caffeineado. “What can we do for you, Dick?”

“You guys were supposed to get me a package for my guy in Abbottabad.”

“The Ranger you’ve got on the ground. Roger that.”

“And?”

“Arrival within the next twenty-four hours.”

“Super.” Hallett sipped from his mug. “What’s in it?”

“Fireflies.”

Hallett hadn’t heard the term before. “And they are?”

“We used to call them Phoenix Beacons.”

“Gotcha. We had ’em in Central America.” Between 1984 and 1987 Hallett had been deputy station chief in San Salvador and a trusted advisor to the government when it fought for survival against Soviet- and Cuban-supported communist FMLN guerrillas. Phoenix Beacons were miniature infrared flashers powered by 9-volt batteries. They were easily concealable and could be seen from hundreds of yards away. He’d supplied the Salvadorans with beacons over the protest of the State Department, some factions of which, Hallett believed then and now, had wanted the communists to win. The Salvadorans were basically blind after dark. The beacons helped guide their helicopters at night. The only problem back then had been short battery life. He mentioned the flaw to the SEAL.

“You probably had the nine-volt version,” Bailey said. “Today, they’re LEDs, powered by 2032 batteries—the ones about the size of a quarter—and they can blink away for a couple of weeks, maybe longer. Besides, today we remote-control them.”

Hallett heard the SEAL pour himself a fresh cup of coffee from the ever-present thermos on his desk. “We’re sending twenty, more than enough for your guy to lay out our approach.”

“Super.”

“He’ll do box-and-ones.” That was the five-flasher pattern favored by the Night Stalkers for a hot approach.

“Gotcha,” Hallett paused. “So you want Charlie to position the fireflies adjacent to the compound.”

“Affirmative. We’ll give him positioning data.”

“Clandestinely.”

“That’s the usual procedure.”