Dick Couch - Out of the Ashes

During his many visits to the Geek Tank, Williams had learned Bleich was unmarried, with few friends except a small circle of gamers with skills like his, and that he lived alone in a third floor Capitol Hill walkup. His only indulgence was a 200-gallon exotic fish tank he surreptitiously had installed in his rental apartment.

“You’re not going to ask Ms. Sullivan to buy you a whole new rack of servers just to take on this mission, are you?” Williams asked with a smile.

“No, sir,” Bleich replied, “but we are going to have to crash a bit and tune up some of our algorithms to alert us to what’s important and what’s not. There’s already an overwhelming amount of intel coming from that theater, as I’m sure you know, sir. Despite that, we’ll get it done, no problem.”

Confidence, Williams thought. This kid has confidence .

“I appreciate that, Aaron. OK, let’s get to it. Brian, I’d like you and the logistics director to brief me soon on your surge plans. I need to send a POTUS/OC Eyes Only memo to the president and we need to bring the combatant commander into the loop.”

“Will do, boss.”

Laurie Phillips felt empowered after her talk with Sandee Barron. She was several years older than Sandee but she found herself continually drawn to her. What was it? Her presence and her confidence, that’s what it was. Laurie didn’t feel she had a great deal of either of those attributes and she looked to Sandee for those qualities. She knew what she needed to do, and she didn’t have a lot of time to futz around thinking about it; things were moving too fast. However, this was bringing back bad memories. What was it? Was it a mixing of the personal and the professional that made her hesitate? Her relationship with Charlie had been great, and it was vastly more than just sex, though she admitted to herself that had been especially good.

Laurie had worked on some of the same projects Charlie did at the National Reconnaissance Office. The primary focus of their efforts was working with sensor and communications packages for UAVs. She smiled as she remembered how they had begun working together as colleagues, and how over time their collegial relationship had blossomed into much more. Yet there came a point when the projects they were working on began to compete for the same funding. There had been a major blowup between the two of them in front of their division director — and he had sided with Charlie.

As more of her most important projects lost out to Charlie’s, and as he continued to move up at the National Reconnaissance Office, she became more and more marginalized. The friction caused them to stop dating. He didn’t want to stop. She called it off. Her professional pride and her ego had gotten in the way.

Laurie’s thoughts turned back to the present. Now she needed Charlie’s help. Would he help her? She had to find out.

The mood was grim as the president’s advisors sat around the table in one of the Situation Room’s secure conference rooms.

“All right, Jack, you talked with General Albin a few hours ago. What’s his latest assessment?”

“Mr. President, as you’ve been briefed already,” Midkiff’s secretary of defense, Jack Bradt, began, “Syria took down that DF-21D site a few hours ago. We suspect, and the communications intercepts we’ve gotten support that suspicion, they knew we had seen it with our overhead assets so they took it down and moved it.”

“Moved it where?” the president asked.

“We’re still assessing that, Mr. President,” Bradt continued, “but those same communications intercepts strongly suggest this wasn’t the only DF-21D site Syria erected. We are rushing all the overhead assets we can to the Gulf right now, Mr. President, and we’re giving General Albin everything he’s asking for.”

“Good, good,” Midkiff replied.

“The other thing, Mr. President, as we’ve briefed you before, this might not be the Syrian government doing this at all. Our alternative theory is their government simply has to know that given tensions in the region, the United States would not sit idly by while they put DF-21D missiles in the field, missiles that directly threaten U.S. forces in the area, let alone U.S. allies. They’re not that stupid.”

“Maybe they are,” the president groused.

“Maybe, Mr. President, but the problem is, we just don’t know . As you’re aware, since the civil war in that nation, Syria has become almost as closed a society as North Korea so there is no one on the ground there, not even international news media, who can confirm what the Global Hawk sees.”

“I take your point, Jack.”

“Thank you, Mr. President, and as you know, there have been strident denials by the Syrian government that it even has these missiles, let alone has them deployed in a threatening manner. One possibility is that President Shaaban is truly not in control of all of its territory. It may be that in some ways Syria is becoming like Lebanon, and a rogue group has placed the missiles there and intends to use them to at least threaten Western interests.”

“I don’t discount anything you say, Jack, but I’m worried about our forces right now, not what President Shaaban can or can’t control in his own country.”

“But what about Truman ?” Midkiff’s national security advisor, Trevor Harward, asked. “Can’t General Albin get the carrier under way sooner? She’s the biggest, most inviting, target.”

“He, and the Navy, are working on it,” Bradt replied, “but once they started tearing her apart to repair the storm damage, they found more hidden damage. They are only making the most essential repairs, but even working 24/7, it will be a good forty-eight hours before they can get the ship under way.”

“Get me more intel on Syria, Jack, and get if for me ASAP,” the president said.

As she typed her message, Laurie Phillips felt her eyes welling up. It had been the best relationship she had ever been in. Recalling it was more painful than she had imagined it would be.

If there was any ray of sunshine in this, she had unburdened herself to Sandee, telling her everything about the relationship with Charlie. She didn’t know what quality it was: Empathy? The ability to walk in her shoes? Just being a friend? Whatever it was, she had needed Sandee and she had come through.

She looked at the message in her e-mail queue and considered it for a final time.

Charlie. Hi. It’s been a while. My spies tell me you’re still knocking it out of the park at NRO. I don’t think I told you, but I have a new assignment with CNA. As I write this I’m aboard USS Normandy , an Aegis cruiser in the Arabian Gulf.

Since you’re at NRO I suspect you know at least as much as I do, probably lots more, about the crisis here that got jacked up when our Global Hawk saw those DF-21D missiles in Syria. Who would have thought not that long ago when we were working on Global Hawk technology that here I’d be, seeing Global Hawk video in real time.

But I’ve seen the video the Global Hawk piped us from Syria and well, I’ll just say it. I think something is wrong, maybe really wrong. I can’t put my finger on it exactly but the shadows, the time hacks, a lot of things just don’t add up.

There’s a limit to the analysis I can do with the systems we have on the ship, but I know you have much more sophisticated gear at NRO. If I sent you a file on the high-side with this suspect video would you just look at it to see if my suspicions are correct or if I’m just imagining things? I think you know how important this video is. From what I can tell here, it’s a major factor that might cause us to go to war with Syria.