Dick Couch - Out of the Ashes

Charlie had elected not to share this with his management chain, at least not yet. They hadn’t come up the hard way like he did through the imagery branch. They’d moved laterally from elsewhere in NRO and, in the case of the Senior Executive in charge of his division, from outside the office. What the hell did she know except how to screw with my budget? he found himself thinking.

Charlie had sequestered himself in the corner of the vault and reviewed the short clip Laurie had sent him a half dozen times. He reached the same conclusion each time.

“Hey, Aaron, come here!”

Aaron Bleich walked up behind Maggie Scott, who was monitoring one of the screens in the Geek Tank. Not yet thirty, Maggie had been one of Op-Center’s early hires. Five feet seven inches tall and, in her words, a “fluffy” 170 pounds, with flaming red hair and a penchant for wearing whatever the latest Goth fashion was, Scott had made her bones at Amazon before Chase Williams hired her away.

“What ya got, Maggie.”

“You know how we altered our programs to pretty much zero in on intel coming from the Middle East, right? Well, they’ve had a while to churn now and we’ve got a confluence of information. We got comm intercepts coming out of Syria about what they are going to do with those DF-21D missiles, some communications between a Navy ship in the Gulf and NRO on SIPRNET, and some feeds out of Iran. The programs tied them all together and this is what it’s pointing to. What do you think?”

Bleich studied what was displayed on the screen at Scott’s workstation.

“This looks promising. Let’s run it through the decision support program. How long will that take.”

“Dunno. Maybe thirty or forty minutes.”

“Good. Holler when it’s done and if it confirms what you suspect, we’ll take it to Roger.”

Laurie was monitoring her SIPRNET e-mail queue while she stood watch in CDC when Charlie’s message hit her screen.

Laurie. I gave your video top priority and ran it through some of our most sophisticated analysis and I have an answer for you. Your suspicions were right. This video is hosed up.

You remember when we were doing some of the early work on Global Hawk? There were issues that were raised about the links going to and from the bird from the UAV’s ground station being susceptible to intercept and maybe even hacking?

Not sure if you were still here when that all got resolved, or not, but some of us here felt the contractors who manufactured the Global Hawk swept those concerns under the rug because they were worried the Air Force wouldn’t buy it because of those issues. However, that’s all in the past and none of us can fix that now.

Bottom line, what you suspect is absolutely right. I found a time-delay that had been inserted in the bird and did some calculations and that missile site isn’t in Syria, it’s in Saudi Arabia. The attachment to this e-mail has the latitude and longitude and the grid coordinates of where I think it is. I’m no expert on Saudi Arabia, but it looks like it’s definitely in the desert away from civilization.

Yet here’s the thing, Laurie. You’re right, but you’re going to have to do whatever you feel you need to do through your chain of command. Not to tell you too much, but we had a security inspection here at NRO about eight months ago and we didn’t do so well. As a result, security here has been jacked up to an unbelievable level. I can’t tell my bosses I did this or I’ll get slammed. Wish I could do more, but I just can’t. I hope you understand.

You’re right, Laurie, and I’m sure when you show them what I’ve got in the attachment the folks you work for will understand you’re right. Go get ’em, Laurie.

Be well,

Yours,

Charlie.

Laurie sat bolt upright in her seat. Now she had it. She’d go see the captain again, but this time armed with proof!

Trevor Harward was in a foul mood as he sat at the end of the table in one of the Situation Room’s two VTC conference rooms. Some of his senior National Security Staff populated other chairs around the table for this hastily called VTC with the Central Command commander, General Albin. Harward didn’t want the president at this VTC. He wanted Albin all to himself.

“Good morning, Mr. Harward,” Albin began.

“General, know you’re mighty busy so I’ll get right to it. I’ve been reading the reports you’ve been sending us and I just don’t get why things aren’t moving faster. We’ve got a threat to your forces in theater. We all agree we need to do something about it, but things need to move!”

“I hear you, Mr. Harward, but we are redeploying our forces as fast as we can. There are a lot of moving parts to getting this done. We’re proceeding as rapidly as possible to ensure we have all the forces we need in place before we move.”

“General, we’re not attacking China, or even Iran. This is a shithole that has been turned inside out by a years-long civil war, for God’s sake. This isn’t Desert Storm, either, and while we’re at it, why is it taking so God-damned long to get Truman under way? I asked for every-six-hour updates, and your last update had the time to get under way longer than the report before that one! Are we moving backward or what?” Harward was letting his exasperation get the better of him, and finally Albin had had enough.

“Mr. Harward, respectfully, let me address Truman first. As you know, the Navy rushed the Truman strike group here, but in doing so, they drove it through one of the worst Atlantic storms of the last decade. I’ve been aboard Truman, sir. The ship’s a mess and as the Navy digs into it to fix one thing, they find other issues with the ship and the aircraft. I can put my 5th Fleet commander or the Truman strike group commander on an aircraft today and one of them can explain this to you in person with more granularity than I can.”

“That won’t be necessary,” Harward snapped.

“Sir, we have moved USS Normandy, our missile defense ship, into position to protect Truman from missile attack as it undergoes repairs. I’m confident the ship is safe for now.”

“It had better be!”

“Now, Mr. Harward, about Syria and these missiles, as you are well aware, the site the Global Hawk discovered is no longer there or else it’s been extremely well camouflaged. We have the Global Hawk flying the same route and there appears to be nothing where there previously was a missile site.”

“Nothing?”

“There’s a limit to what we can see from sixty-five thousand feet, sir. While there certainly aren’t missile batteries at that latitude and longitude, there may be a building, but one that has been well camouflaged.”

“But what about satellites? I’ve been briefed on how many satellites we have covering the region, surely we can get some sort of confirmation,” Harward groused.

“Sir, we can’t be sure with only Global Hawk or satellite imagery. They just don’t have the granularity, but based on the comms intercepts we’ve received, we believe the Syrians have moved these missiles anyway, and that they have additional missile sites we haven’t located yet. Right now our overhead assets are so scarce we don’t know whether they have additional missile sites elsewhere in the country or where they are.”

“General, they are not ten feet tall!” Harward interjected. “Get some manned aircraft over the country and get eyes on. I’d have thought you’d done that already and I wouldn’t have to fight this war for you from here in the Sit Room!”

The national security advisor was becoming agitated and General Albin paused before continuing. “Mr. Harward, this is a bit out of my wheelhouse, and I’d suggest your European Command commander would know vastly more about this. However, when the Arab Spring was churning in 2011 and NATO made the decision to attack Libya, there was intense criticism for NATO not going into Syria as well.”