October's Ghost (17 page)

The Russian physicist had no choice. Where once he had been a man respected for his ingenuity, he was now a prisoner of his value...and of his weakness. To stand up to his taskmasters would mean certain death, or, that which he feared more, a painful precursor to the release of the hereafter. Death, while not a welcome concept, was preferable to that which he could suffer, yet he was incapable of bringing that on to stave off the other. It was a circle of defeat few had mastered as well as the man who, in his brighter days, had mastered the atom and its destructive power. That mastery now remained as the sole bit of control that Anatoly Vishkov maintained over his existence.

And, in a twist of perception that he was incapable of realizing, it made him supremely powerful over a game he suspected he had just begun to play in the familiar role as pawn.

CHAPTER SIX

IMAGERY AND ICONS

It was known as Area 51 to most officially acquainted with its existence. Those more intimately involved with the goings-on at Groom Lake in the barren desert expanse of Nevada gave it more literal and crafted monikers. Dreamland, a name often shared by the nearby Tonopah Test Range, was one. The Black Hole was another. All, though, succeeded only partially in describing the mystical happenings in a place that, despite evidence to the contrary, didn’t exist.

The early afternoon light was painting the imposing mountains of the Timpahute Range a washed-out white and tan, and, unfortunately, was robbing Groom of the welcome cloak of darkness in which operations were almost exclusively conducted. Secrecy, normally a concern for intelligence and military agencies, was a well-crafted paranoia on the dry lake-bed facility that was surrounded by a piece of restricted government land the size of Switzerland. But, in homage to one of its nicknames and despite the oppressive and serious nature of the business that took place there, dreams not only existed at Groom, they took flight and soared as none could have imagined.

The aircraft was rolled out behind a tug into the harsh, breezy environment and was positioned at the threshold of Groom’s six-
mile
-long runway. Only ninety feet in length, it weighed in at 180,000 pounds, two thirds of which were the exotic super-cooled liquid-methane fuel that both fed the delta-winged aircraft’s twin propulsion systems and helped to dissipate the heat generated by high-speed flight from its airframe.

After allowing time for the tug and its operator to clear, the tower gave clearance to the pilot of the craft that had come to be known as Aurora, though the official government designation of the Special Access—or “black”— program was
Senior Citizen
. The pilot, more a mission manager, was an Air Force major who had logged more hours now at Mach 5+ than any of her fighter-driver cohorts. Four feet behind her the Reconnaissance Systems Operator sat, two high-resolution displays dominating his console of instruments, which controlled the array of imaging and signals sensors that were the real heart of the billion-dollar bird.

With the entry of a command into the flight-management system, the aircraft accelerated under a highly advanced form of rocket power down the concrete slab, the pilot providing only steering to keep the bird on the centerline. A thunderous, resonating roar, the product of Aurora’s unique two-phase propulsion, swept across the desert base, penetrating every structure above and below ground. Fifteen thousand feet after it began its roll, the computer brought the nose up. The climb-out was slow as the aircraft turned to the southeast, but once pointed in the right direction, a battery of microchips decided it was time to accelerate to operating speed and “pulled the trigger,” adding thrust that pushed the ninety-ton bird through Mach 2 in less than thirty seconds. With a nose-up attitude of seventy degrees, the Aurora was passing through thirty thousand feet when its forward momentum was sufficient (Mach 2.54) to switch over to the ramjet propulsion. Passing sixty thousand feet and somewhere over the Nevada/Utah border, the aircraft was breaking Mach 4. Directly over Cedar City, Utah, it passed Mach 5 at 120,000 feet. At this point the flight-management system eased the climb, leveling the Aurora out at thirty miles over eastern Texas, and set a constant throttle at Mach 6.2. Aurora was moving faster than any rifle bullet in the world just fifteen minutes into its flight.

Because of the relatively short distance to the target, no in-flight refueling would be needed on the return leg, making this an easy quick-pass mission. The pilot kept constant watch on the flight systems, particularly the surface and airframe temperatures, the former of which was hovering around a quite acceptable one thousand degrees.

Somewhere over the Gulf of Mexico the RSO activated three of his sensors. They had crossed through two time zones in just under thirty minutes, so the day was two hours older over their target. No low-light or IR imaging would be necessary, though. Today they would need just the two visible-light Casegrain telescopic cameras and the Synthetic Aperture Radar.

“Uprange one minute,” the pilot warned.

Sixty seconds meant sixty miles, give or take a few. That time evaporated quickly. Their pass over the long axis of the island of Cuba took just twelve minutes, the cameras and SAR dumping gigabytes of image data into the ample computer-storage capacity onboard. After turning back, the RSO began preprocessing the data, selecting the images that most closely matched the mission requirements. As the descent to Groom began over eastern Texas, he transmitted the selected data to a Milstar satellite in geo. NPIC had it a minute later.

The Aurora touched down seventy minutes after taking off, the total distance covered over forty-five-hundred miles. Its crew, after having spent $2 million of Uncle Sam’s money on what they considered to be an E-ticket ride, debarked in a hangar at the north end of the runway. Dinner was in a few hours and, thanks to their somewhat special ride, they rarely missed a meal.

*  *  *

They were legally breaking the law.

The white van pulled up adjacent to the third utility pole from the corner, its two occupants exiting and setting up their work area. Orange cones directed any traffic in the curb lane to move to the left, and their blue work overalls were properly soiled enough so that questions would not be asked.

But there were always those to whom curiosity was not a feeling but a driving force.

“Whas za problem?” the old man asked, sauntering up to the nearest workman.

Special Agent Chris Testra looked up from the loop of cable he was unspooling, the smell of alcohol having reached him with the old man’s words. “Cable-TV trouble, Pops.”

“Sheeeeit! The fize on anight.” He swung a disappointed fist at the air.

Testra laughed. “Don’t worry, Pops. You won’t miss it. Guaranteed.”

“Oh, man. Thainz.”

Testra and his partner, Special Agent Frederico Sanz, watched the old man stumble away.

“His life is bliss, man. Eh, Freddy?”

“Guess so. Come on.”

Their work was rather simple, and only a schooled observer would have recognized that the two workmen were not working on the thick black cable-TV lines but on thinner wires belonging to the phone company. Wiretapping had come a long way since the days of splicing and stringing additional wires to carry the eavesdropped communications. The method chosen for this operation, authorized by Federal Court Order (Sealed) #76-a-1212-5, was known as “shroud interception.” It required a relatively simple procedure that was only slightly invasive. A black-colored cylinder, five millimeters thicker than the standard nineteen-millimeter telephone line, was at the heart of the operation. It was actually two sections, split lengthwise, that were placed over the existing line and reconnected, creating an almost invisible “shroud” over the line. Several tiny, sharp probes, made of polished copper, pierced the protective synthetic coating on the wire and made contact with the cable bundles housed inside. The agents then plugged a remote dialer into one end of the shroud, which actually contained more computing power in its body than a second-generation PC. Special Agent Chris Testra then dialed the number they were authorized to tap into, waiting a few seconds before it was picked up.

“Yeah?”

“Is Raji there?” Testra inquired in his best feigned Pakistani.

“Wrong number.”
Click
.

Testra cleared the line and dialed another number, which rang in room 145 of the Golden Way Motel four blocks away, their home for the next few days at least. It rang only once before being answered by a machine that emitted four long beeps. Connection made. Any calls to or from the intercepted number would now be automatically relayed to the monitoring station in room 145 for recording and instant analysis.

They completed the operation in just under a half hour and picked up their cones, making a U turn on the street to drive past the house in question once again.

“What do you do in there, Meester Spy?” Sanz asked in his best Speedy Gonzalez as they passed the older-looking house.

“Hope he does whatever it is soon,” Testra said. “The boat has a new coat of paint”

“Well, maybe he’ll hear your heavy breathing on the line and just invite us over, Chris,” Sanz joked. “Surrender and confess right then and there.”

“I’ll pant my ass off if it gets me off this by Friday.”

*  *  *

A ten-power loupe was hung on the wall as a deferential tribute to the practitioners of their art who had come before. Trailblazers, really, men who had perfected the innocuous act of looking at pictures into a form of educated soothsaying that had saved their country from embarrassment, missteps on the international stage, and from being hoodwinked into situations with potentially deadly consequences for the unaware.

Much had changed since the first days of light tables, foggy slides, and long stints hunched over with a loupe stuck to one’s eye. Much had evolved at NPIC. Photo interpretation was now more correctly known as imagery analysis. Computers had replaced the three-by-three slabs of backlit Lucite mounted on box tops as viewing apparatuses. Cataloging, storage, and retrieval of data were now instantaneous. Yes, the men who practiced the craft had a new, sophisticated array of tools with which to perform their wizardry, and, not surprisingly, some of those “men” were no longer of the anticipated gender.

Senior Analyst Jenny MacNamara, while differing in anatomy from her ancestors in the field, had all the skills requisite in a top-notch interpreter, namely a good pair of peepers and an innate sense of curiosity. To look at an image and see trees was one thing, but to look at the trees and wonder what kind they were was another. To take that wonder one step farther and determine the last time a mountain alder in the rolling foothills west of the Rockies had received rain based upon the growth rate of its leaves was the type of self-enforced lunacy that made Jenny one of the best. It had also earned her a place of respect in the eyes of her colleagues, and the nickname Spot, which was representative not of her looks, which were above average by any standard, but of her ability to spot the incongruous. To some she saw what was not there. That was, of course, until she politely pointed it out to them.

The data dump of images had come in a few hours before. Over fifty image “packages” were received, some containing a thousand separate pictures that had been assembled into larger, more telling representations of what was really there. While Jenny knew what sensors obtained the images, she was not supposed to know from where. The same way she wasn’t supposed to imagine a red elephant when her logic professor at MIT had suggested that one couldn’t help but do so when the mention of one was made.
A big, fast bird
.

She pushed herself away from the workstation to the small refrigerator, retrieving a clear bottle of flavored seltzer that hissed open with a twist. The computer continued its task without its operator’s attention. Inside the four tower cases on a riser to the display’s right were parallel arrays of microprocessors, four hundred in all. The process was logically called parallel processing and took the simple analogy that two hands were better than one to a new exponent. Enough processing power was built into the system to allow image compilation that had only been possible in machines like the Cray some years before.

Still, the process Jenny had initiated was complex and time-consuming. More than looking at the visible light images, which she had done an hour before and noted that which deserved noting, she was now feeding the data from the Synthetic Aperture Radar through the computer to build a picture. In reality she was building an island.

The capability, which had revolutionized her job, was made possible by the SAR. Actually a grouping of thousands of small radar transceivers and receivers arrayed along a long, flat slab, the SAR took a radar picture of a target as it moved over its area of observation. What resulted were detailed pictures of a target from a variety of angles. These images were then combined to form a stereoscopic contour world consisting of billions of bits of digitized data, portions of which could then be called up for close analysis.

A series of quick beeps signaled the end of the computer’s task. Jenny slid back to the workstation’s thirty-inch monitor. “Harry, it’s up.”

Her assistant, Harrold Fastwater, moved to the adjacent identical display. Grandson of one of the famed Navajo codetalkers of World War II, he had come to NPIC after a stint in the Navy, following the same career path as his senior partner. The Navy, as was recognized by those not in the rival armed services, had a superior cadre of image analysts, and surprisingly allowed them to migrate to other government agencies quite easily. Spreading the blood around, the Navy brass quietly joked.

“Jesus!” Fastwater exclaimed at the data count on his screen.

“Ain’t nothing, Harry. Remember, you’re not playing with that real-time garbage anymore.” Jenny herself had graduated to the more complex assembly-and-analysis process eight months before. “You want to watch TV, tune in the soaps. This is big-time data.”