Soar (2 page)

Sam’s reading may have begun as an intellectual exercise to help him in making recruitments. It ended, however, with his enthusiastic acceptance of Suvorov’s strategic doctrine as the basis for his own intelligence-gathering operations. He took many of the field marshal’s dictums (“Speed is essential; haste harmful” and “Train hard, fight easy” were two of his favorites) to heart, and consciously employed them in the field. And so, what his deskbound superiors often thought to be impetuous, seat-of-the-pants decisions were in point of fact meticulously designed, boldly executed operations that resulted in the obtaining of valuable intelligence for the United States.

Sam’s capacity for audaciousness coupled with careful planning was a critical factor in his current role as team leader—at least so far as the three volunteers traveling with him were concerned. That was because SIE-1, which was Langley’s bureaucratic acronym for the four-man Sino Insertion Element No. 1 Sam led, was composed of NOCs.
³

That meant Sam and his team entered China using real but nonetheless bogus British, Irish, and Canadian passports issued under aliases. They’d posed as a four-man independent TV crew shooting an “Outward Bound Trekking along the Silk Road” video for a London-based travel company that wanted to expand its “extreme sports” tour packages. Yes, their travel documents had survived the
scrutiny of Turkish, Azeri, Uzbek, Kazakh, and Chinese border guards and other officials. And yes, if anyone had called the accommodation addresses and telephone numbers in London, Dublin, or Toronto that were printed on their business cards, drivers’ licenses, credit cards, and other miscellaneous wallet detritus and pocket litter, all of which had been provided by Langley’s document wizards, the team’s bona fides would have been authenticated beyond a doubt. But all of that didn’t lessen the knowledge that in plain English, nonofficial cover meant they were working without a net.

Their objective, precisely expressed in National Security Directive 16226, which had been signed by the president of the United States nine weeks previously, was, quote:
“For officers of the Central Intelligence Agency and/or other officials of the United States government to covertly insert and position at a specific location inside the People’s Republic of China a technical means for ensuring that all the conditions of the current-draft nuclear weapons agreement between the United States and the People’s Republic of China will be met.”

The word
covertly
meant that for Sam Phillips and his team there was no diplomatic immunity. There was no Geneva convention. If they got caught, it was prison or summary execution. Full stop. End of story. Like the characters in the
Mission: Impossible
movies, the administration would deny any responsibility, etc., etc. Except what Sam and his crew were doing wasn’t Hollywood. It was real—and the consequences could prove fatal.

The operation was also complicated by the fact that there were four of them. Typically, case officers are solitary workers, meeting their agents only after taking exhaustive steps to ensure they have not been compromised by the opposition. NOCs generally work singly. Not always: sometimes,
a pair of Honeymooners—DO
⁴
slang for husband-and-wife NOC teams—were assigned if the mission required it. A four-man covert infiltration crew was a rarity these days, especially a team like SIE-1, which had been assembled for this one critical mission. The fact that he, Kaz, X-Man, and Dick hadn’t worked together before made Sam a little nervous.

But the four of them gelled remarkably well during the two weeks of mission prep they’d been allowed before assembling in London to pick up their equipment and commence their Odyssey through Ankara, Baku, Bishkek, and points east. And Sam had watched with a critical eye as they made their way from Almaty, aggressively bargained themselves through the organized thievery that is Kazakh passport control, and crossed into the free trade zone just outside the ramshackle Chinese border post east of Khorgos. For kids who hadn’t had his years of training or street experience, the trio had handled themselves like real pros.

They had been diligent about their tradecraft. China is what is known in the intelligence business as a denied area. For SIE-1 it meant that even in Western China, two time zones from Beijing,
⁵
the
Guojia Anquan Bu,
or Ministry of State Security, still maintained aggressive technical surveillance on foreign visitors. So, Sam and his security officer, Chris Wyman, took it for granted that any hotel room they were given contained listening devices and even perhaps video. That meant they had to be careful about how they spoke and acted, even in private.

They’d been observant, too, noting the augmented military activity in the cities. Sam had been briefed on that before he’d left Washington. It was an additional operational wrinkle to fret over—that they might be compromised not because of Chinese suspicion about covert American operations but because of a recent increase of separatist violence in Xinjiang, to which Sam coyly referred in a cartoon Boston accent as
terra irredenta.
The past few months had seen an increase in ambushes, kidnappings, and even the occasional car bomb.

Indeed, Sam’s preinsertion research showed that Chinese-based Islamists were currently giving refuge and support to a panoply of terrorist organizations that ran the gamut from the complex and sophisticated, like al-Qaeda, to smaller, hit-and-run splinter groups such as ETIM—the Eastern Turkistan Islamic Movement—or the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan.

ETIM was an unknown quantity. But Sam had worked against the IMU in Dushanbe. Despite the specificity of its name, IMU guerrillas had once ranged over a region that spread from Chechnya to the Mongolian border; and from Afghanistan through all the old Soviet “Stan” republics. In the 1990s the IMU had been well financed, supported by funding and weapons from Iran, and overt support from the Taliban. CIA’s counterterrorism analysts estimated that it had made millions more through smuggling, drug dealing, and kidnapping operations. But since 2002, the IMU had gone into a decline. Many of the group’s leaders, including its military chief, a former Soviet paratrooper named Juma Namangani, had been killed during America’s campaign in Afghanistan.

According to the CIA analysis Sam read in London, the IMU “currently presents no credible threat.” But Sam knew from experience how flawed Langley’s research could be
these days. And so he did his own—and unearthed among other documents a broadside issued by a Tajik Islamist group in North London, hinting that a nucleus of IMU hard-liners had recently forged an alliance with the Uighur separatists of Xinjiang Autonomous Region. If true, that meant another bunch of no-goodniks to worry about during SIE-l’s insertion. At least, Sam rationalized, the IMU’s current numbers would be in the hundreds, not thousands.

“L
ET’S SEE
where the hell we are.” Sam unlatched the Velcro flap of his deep thigh pocket and fumbled past the pock-etknife and the spare change until his hand closed around the Visor Handspring with its attached GPS module. He pulled the PDA out, snapped the cover off, switched it on, and watched as the screen came to life.

The Visor was indicative of how cavalier Langley was these days when it came to supporting operations that put human beings on the ground in denied areas. The damn thing had been handed to him in London with dead batteries. If he hadn’t taken the time to test it before stowing it, they’d be sitting out here with no way of knowing where the hell they were.

It was lucky they had the GPS, because the Agency’s classified maps certainly hadn’t helped get them where they had to be. The Western China branch chief in London—a white-haired former executive secretary from the moribund Division of Administration whose London posting was her first overseas assignment—had actually demanded that Sam sign a security document before handing over six three-foot-by-four-foot tactical charts stamped
secret
, on which Sam would plot the team’s infiltration and exfil, as well as contingency plans in case they were discovered in flagrante delicto.

Except, after Sam had spent seven precious hours working with the highly detailed l:100,000-scale documents
(and been amazed at how primitive the road system appeared, given the escalating number of tourist buses working their way along the Silk Road these days), he happened to look at the fine print on the bottom left-hand corner of one of them. It was dated 1985. Then he checked the others. None was more current than 1992. The bloody things were a decade-plus old. Obsolete, outdated, and useless. So he’d summoned the branch chief to the safe house, returned the maps, and shredded his release form. Then he checked the phone book, located a travel-book store on Long Acre, and hiked the mile and a half from his hotel to Covent Garden.

Sixty pounds sterling later, Sam had purchased half a dozen commercial road maps and Lonely Planet guidebooks that showed all the new highways. (Like, for example, the very one they’d used this morning, which had originally been built in 1998 as a north-south military conduit and was nowhere to be found on the CIA’s oh-so-secret chart.)

S
AM CHECKED
the handheld’s screen. They were within a half mile of the coordinates he’d programmed into the GPS unit.

He took a reading, showed the screen to Kaz, who, fist clenched, pumped the warm air with his right arm. “Right on course, Pops.”

“That’s the good news.” Sam swung the camera off the ground and onto his shoulder. “The bad news is that we’ve got to head southeast,” he said, his jaw thrust toward the intimidating dunes towering over them like tsunami. Then his voice took on a forcedly optimistic tone. “What the hell, it shouldn’t take us more than an hour.”

P
RESIDENT
P
ETER
D
E
W
ITT
F
ORREST
set his mug of decaf down on a coaster emblazoned with the presidential seal and turned to face his national security adviser as she came into the residence’s sitting room.

“Johnny, give us a minute, will you?” He waved the Secret Service agent out, waiting until the door closed behind the young man’s broad back. Then he rolled his shoulders and cracked his left-hand pinkie knuckle joint. “What have we heard from the team, Monica?”

Monica Wirth, who’d gone on to Georgetown law school after eight years as a Ph.D. CIA analyst, had worked on national security issues for Pete Forrest since he’d been elected governor of Virginia back in the mid-1990s. So she read his body language well enough to know that whenever the Leader of the Free World tried to mask tension, he cracked the finger joints on his left hand.

“Nothing, Mr. President. We’ve heard nothing because they’re maintaining radio silence until the job’s completed.”

“But they’ve been sending progress reports all along, haven’t they?”

“Yes, sir.”

“So why can’t they update us now?”

“They’ve been using steganography to throw the Chinese off-track, Mr. President.”

Pete Forrest blinked. “Steganography?”

“The communications officer has been sending digital pictures to an accommodation address in London on a daily basis,” Wirth explained. “A sort of visual ‘progress report’ on the travelogue they’re supposed to be making. The team’s reports are embedded in the images. That’s steganography.”

“Hmm.” Pete Forrest pulled on his left thumb until the joint popped. “But when they’re in the clear, Monica …”

“When they get to Yutian they’ll telephone the accommodation address in London and acknowledge.”

The knuckle joint of the president’s middle finger popped audibly. “But they do have a phone, don’t they?”

“Yes, Mr. President, they’re carrying a cell phone. But the team leader doesn’t want to use it until they’re in the clear.”

“So we won’t get word until they’re where? Yuti-something, wasn’t it you just said?”

The National Security Council staff had, as always, made sure she was as prepared as he. “Yutian, Mr. President.” She took a quick peek at the three-by-five card in her left palm then slipped it into the pocket of her black pantsuit jacket. “It’s an old caravan way station on the Silk Road.”

Craack.
“How long before they get there?”

His apprehension was contagious, and she began to pace behind one of the two facing Empire couches—four nervous steps followed by a quick reverse of course. “Tomorrow, sometime. They’re scheduled to implant the devices today. Then it’s a three-hundred-kilometer trip south on that new connector road, followed by another hundred on the main east-west road. And of course they have to stop and shoot video from time to time.”

“Video,” he repeated absently, and cracked the ring finger on his left hand.

The president had been anxious about this operation from the very start. Not that he’d ever wavered. The mission was critical to the nation’s immediate national security interests.
Immediate
because in just over six weeks he was scheduled to sign a nuclear treaty at a summit in Beijing. But there was no way Pete Forrest was going to affix his signature
to the document unless there was a way to verify beyond a shadow of a doubt that the Chinese weren’t cheating by setting off ultra-low-level tests deep within the hundreds of miles of tunnels they’d dug over the last half century in the sandy flats around the Lop Nur test site’s prehistoric dry lake bed.

For maddening reasons Pete Forrest couldn’t begin to fathom, none of the National Reconnaissance Office’s current generation of satellites had the capability to distinguish an explosion that measured less than half a kiloton from a seismic anomaly. The president had a hard time with that, because a half-kiloton explosion is the equivalent of blowing a million pounds of TNT all at once. Which, as he had complained loudly to the director of central intelligence, who’d presented him with the bad news, makes for one hell of a seismic anomaly.

Worse, he’d been told there was no way NRO would be able to get an ultra-low-range-capable bird launched in less than three years. The existing ground sensors, which were located on the high mountain ranges of the Kazakh-Chinese border, had been designed to record the twenty-to eighty-kiloton underground tests the Chinese had performed in the mid-and late 1990s—tests that all measured 4.5 or above on the Richter seismic scale.