Soar (3 page)

But according to the latest analysis, the current Chinese nuclear program was being directed more toward mini-yield tactical weapons than multi-megaton warheads. Which meant that the United States was essentially blind if Beijing decided to secretly test tactical nukes of a half kiloton or less. The president had concluded the only way to guarantee the Chinese weren’t cheating was to insert new ground sensors close enough to the tunnels to pick up the faintest of seismic readings emanating from the Lop Nur test site.

Which required a human element to infiltrate across
China’s border and place the devices covertly. And so, a little over two months ago, he’d signed the finding that set the operation in motion, even though he knew he’d be risking a confrontation with the Chinese, as well as putting American lives in danger. It was his job as commander in chief, and he didn’t have to like it—he just had to order it done.

Still, commonsense, straight-ahead grit was characteristic of the man. Unlike the great majority of future politicians of his generation, Peter DeWitt Forrest had volunteered straight out of Yale to serve in the Army—one of only eight from his class who would serve in the military. He’d qualified for jump wings and seen combat as a platoon commander in Vietnam, where he earned a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart. And he had returned from that mishandled war with deeply rooted beliefs about the use of force, and—just as important—about the quality of leadership.

Pete Forrest came away from Vietnam convinced the only difference between good leadership and poor leadership is whether the lives that leadership spends are well spent or squandered. In Vietnam, he saw too many squandered lives. It was those ghosts that shaped, tempered, and focused his modus vivendi.

As a banker and credit-card entrepreneur who’d once ranked sixty-seventh in the Forbes 500, he’d always demanded that those who worked for him be tough but fair. The hallways of Pete Forrest’s corporate headquarters were filled with posters promoting character and integrity. He demonstrated loyalty to his employees just as he demanded loyalty from them by sharing the company’s considerable wealth based on their performance, just as his remuneration was based on his own. Later, as governor of Virginia, he’d always tried (and most of the time succeeded) to be guided by a moral compass, as opposed to the amoral political pragmatism fashionable in the 1990s.

Perhaps most important, he never forgot the lessons he’d learned from his brothers-in-arms on the battlefield. Which was why Pete Forrest had taken a silent vow in the same breath with which he’d boldly affirmed the presidential oath. His hand on the family Bible, he swore to himself that as the nation’s commander in chief he would try never to squander a single American life.

And so, before putting Americans in harm’s way, Pete Forrest always took the time to consider the hard question of whether he was about to spend lives or squander them. If he determined it was going to be the latter, he found an alternative solution, no matter that it might be politically unpopular. But if it was the former, he never hesitated. Which was why, if the four CIA officers he’d put in jeopardy didn’t return from China, he’d be able to live with the fact that he had ordered them to their deaths. Their lives would not have been squandered, but spent in the pursuit of Duty, Honor, Country, just as so many other lives, snuffed out on Omaha Beach and Pointe du Hoc, on Mt. Suribachi, at A Shau and Plei Me and Mazār-e Sharif, had been spent, in the pursuit of Duty, Honor, Country.

P
ETE
F
ORREST
dropped onto one of the drawing room’s couches and stretched out his long legs, watching as his national security adviser did the caged-tiger thing. “Grab a seat, Monica, you’re making me itchy.”

Immediately, she dropped onto the couch opposite his. “I’m sorry, Mr. President.”

He eased up a bit. “One of the perks of this job is that people tend to do things when you ask ‘em to.” Then his face grew serious. “So, bottom line: we won’t know anything concrete until tomorrow.”

The national security adviser’s hands formed a steeple. “Well,” she said, “we’ll know when the sensors have been
activated, because they’ve been programmed to transmit a baseline reading.”

“I want to be notified as soon as that happens.”

“I’ve already had the word passed to the operations center at Langley,” she said. “The duty officer knows she’s to give you a call immediately.”

“Good.” The president cracked another knuckle. “She knows not to be shy—no matter what time?”

“I made that abundantly clear, sir.”

He nodded affirmatively. “Good.” The president stood up and stretched. “Then get out of here, Monica. It’s past midnight. Go home. Get some rest. Like you said, nothing’s going to break until tomorrow.”

“I think I’ll just grab a combat nap in my office, sir. If you need me for anything—”

“I know the extension, Monica.” He gave her shoulder a gentle nudge toward the hallway. “Go.”

I
T WAS FINALLY SHOW TIME.
Using what appeared to be two audio cables, Kaz ganged the video camera’s spare batteries together. Then he uncoiled a ten-foot-long, double-male-ended video cable and plugged one end of it into the batteries.

As he did this, X-Man was pulling the zoom lens out of its case. He handed it gingerly to Dick Campbell: “Hold this.” Then he turned the two-foot case upside down, reached inside, released the false bottom, and withdrew a small, cylindrical motor about the size of a soup can.

He handed the motor to Sam, who cradled it in his arms as gently as if it were spun glass. Next, as the communicator replaced the zoom lens, X-Man slipped the tripod out of its case. Using a pair of Allen wrenches, he disassembled the tops of the three legs from their hinges, removed the three support straps from the bottom leg collets, and snapped the pieces together, forming a four-foot six-inch drill shaft. He tipped one of the tripod legs over and unscrewed its spiked foot, which he reversed, revealing a drill bit. The bit snapped into the bottom of the shaft and locked into place with an audible click.

With Sam holding the power unit, the shaft was quickly attached by using a second spiked foot and locked tight with a pair of Allen bolts. As X-Man completed the drill shaft, Kaz was unscrewing the angled pan and slide-tilt head locking handles from the camera platform head. These he screwed into tapped receivers on either side of the power unit.

Sam checked his watch. The drill had taken less than five minutes to assemble. He looked over Kaz and X-Man’s handiwork. It sure was ugly, looking like the illegitimate offspring of a Dremel tool on steroids and the core-sample drills used by NASA’s Apollo lunar landing teams back in the 1970s. But it was also cannily, intricately, wonderfully ingenious. Designed, no doubt, by an engineer who’d been well inculcated in Goldbergian rubric.

Kaz hefted the drill, tested to make sure the connections were secure, and then pronounced it acceptable. “Let’s test it.”

The communicator handed the male end of the video cable to Kaz. “Insert Tab A into Slot B,” Kaz said as he screwed the connector home. He manipulated the switch on the motor’s top side, and the drill began to turn. “All
right!” Kaz
gave a thumbs-up to the rest of them and looked in Sam’s direction. “If Pops here will be so good as to verify our position, we’ll set the first of these babies so we can start getting home.”

Reflexively, Sam checked the digital watch on his left wrist again. It was well past midday. They’d been out for more than four hours now. They probably had more than an hour’s work to do setting the sensors, then burying the drill, followed by a two-and-a-half-to three-hour trek back to the Toyota. That would mean they’d be traveling at night. He
didn’t like the idea. The Chinese increased their patrols at night.

A
LIGHT SLEEPER
, Pete Forrest heard the start of the distinctive ring, rolled to his right, and reached for the secure phone before the instrument completed its first cycle. “Yes?”

“Mr. President?”

“Yes.” He sat up, hooking the phone receiver between his neck and shoulder and squinting at the red numerals of the digital clock, which read 04:49.

“This is Carrie at the Operations Center, Mr. President.”

“What’s the news, Carrie?”

“Signal received, Mr. President. Loud and clear.”

Pete Forrest exhaled audibly. “Good. Anything else to report?”

“No, sir, nothing else.”

“Okay, then. Thank you.”

“Good night, Mr. President.”

“Good night, Carrie.” He replaced the receiver in its cradle, then reconfigured the pillows on his side of the bed into bolsters. Forrest sat upright, his head touching the headboard rail, and stared into the darkness.

Next to him, his wife, Jennifer, stirred, semiawake. “Anything urgent?” she murmured.

“Just an update on something, sweetie,” he said. “Nothing critical. Go back to sleep.”

She purred and rolled over. Idly, he stroked her shoulder. Then he cracked all the finger joints on his left hand,
clasped both hands behind his head, and stared into the darkness. They’d done the job. God bless them. He’d have the team to the residence when they got back. Get to know them a little bit. Ask them about China. Listen to their stories. Let them know how much he appreciated what they’d done for the country.

But first, they had to get out. And exfiltration, Pete Forrest knew from his own combat experience, was the most dangerous part of every mission.

S
AM SAW THE BIG TRUCK
blocking the highway only because he was playing with his night-vision monocular. They were driving, as was the habit in this part of the world, with running lights. So his device hadn’t been blinded by the Toyota’s headlamps.

They came over a gentle rise in the road, and there it was—straight ahead, maybe a mile away. “Shoazim—
sür’ätni astiliting, sür’ätni astiliting
—slow down, slow down,” he ordered. The Toyota eased to a crawl on the darkened highway. They drifted off the rise, and the truck disappeared from Sam’s view.

“Pull over. Stop.”

The driver steered onto the narrow shoulder. Sam reached across the Uighur’s body and turned the running lights off. “There’s something ahead—a truck’s sitting in the middle of the highway,” he said by way of explanation.

Shoazim squinted into the darkness. “A truck? Where?” he asked.

Sam pointed. “Maybe a couple of kilometers down the road.”

The driver flicked his cigarette into the darkness. “This is most unusual,” he said. “It is not my fault.” “I know it isn’t,” Sam said.

He reached up and turned off the Toyota’s interior light switch. Then he opened his door and clambered down onto the sandy shoulder. “I’m going to take a look,” he said.

Kaz opened the rear door. “I’ll keep you company.”

“Sure.” Sam trudged ahead, his eyes growing accustomed to the dark, Kaz’s footsteps scrunching the loose sand a few steps behind his right shoulder.

“Think we have a problem?” Kaz whispered when they were out of earshot.

It was Kaz’s first overseas assignment, and Sam could sense the kid’s apprehension. That was to be expected. Kaz was one of the Agency’s new generation of post-9/11 hires: an IT guy, whose degrees included a B.S. in physics from the University of Maryland and an M.S. in computer science from Duke. He wasn’t the case-officer type but a techno-wonk. He’d been talked into this little jaunt because he understood precisely how the sensors worked, and—more important—exactly how they’d have to be inserted to do their job.

“Don’t know,” Sam said, trying to sound reassuring. “But I want to see what’s going on.”

The two of them walked another hundred yards or so in silence. When Sam felt the grade increase, he slowed down and put the monocular up to his eye. It was a cheap, first-generation Russian device that Sam had bought in Turkey. But cheap or no, it was still amazing how bright things were through the lens. After another twenty yards, Sam dropped to his knees and silent-signaled Kaz to do the same. “I don’t want us silhouetted against the crest of the hill.”

Then he stopped. Dead in the water. Sam closed his left eye and refocused the night-vision scope. It had only two-power
magnification. But that was quite sufficient for Sam to be able to make out the truck, its hood raised, straddling the two-lane highway at about a forty-five-degree angle, effectively blocking the road. Half a dozen uniformed figures, some of them carrying weapons, stood shuffling in the chill night air around the huge vehicle while one man, perched precariously on the front bumper, shone a flashlight on the engine with one hand and tinkered with the other.

Kaz’s hand touched Sam’s shoulder. “Can I have a look?”

Wordlessly, Sam passed Kaz the monocular. The tech peered through it for some seconds, then handed it back. “Army.”

“Yup, PLA,” Sam confirmed. “They’re in uniform—I could make out their hats clearly. Could you see any markings on the truck? I couldn’t.”

“Negatory.” Kaz shook his head.

The two of them backed off the crown of the rise. There was nothing wrong. At least nothing Sam could put his finger on. But the situation still made him uneasy. “I don’t like it.”

Kaz shrugged. “So what do you want to do?” Sam was already heading toward the Toyota. “Let’s talk it over.”

The X-Man was leaning up against the open front door when they got back. He pointed at Sam’s night-vision monocular. “Who are they?”

Sam said, “Let’s take a stroll.”

The four of them ambled past the Toyota’s rear bumper and turned west, into the desert. Their footfalls scrunching the sand, they walked about fifty yards. Sam hunkered down and drew a diagram in the sand with his index finger. “It looks like a PLA truck broke down.”

Kaz said, “Or, it could be a roadblock.”