Dick Couch - Out of the Ashes

“But the communication with my contact at the National Reconnaissance Office was crucial. You saw, and the captain saw, that the Global Hawk had been hacked and video of the missiles in Syria wasn’t from Syria at all!” Laurie exclaimed.

“Yes, well, about that. I’m afraid the captain didn’t find your arguments and your proof compelling, and to be honest with you, Ms. Phillips, I’m afraid I didn’t, either. This is clearly the opinion of just one person in one agency, and I don’t see any reason why we should believe what he alleges.”

“Commander, I think if you’ll let me walk you through what I received from my contact at NRO, perhaps in more detail, you’ll change your point of view. You have got to do this. You have got to do the right thing!” Laurie shot back, feeling this was her last chance to convince Watson.

The ops officer sat silently for a few moments. Finally, he spoke.

“Anything else, Ms. Phillips?”

“Well, no. I do think you’ll change your point of view. Now, look at this—”

“Stop!” Watson interrupted. “My point of view, as you call it, doesn’t mean a goddamn thing on this ship, and yours means even less, Ms. Phillips!” he continued, his voice now betraying his anger. “The only, and I mean only, point of view that matters on this ship is that of Captain Peter Blackman. He’s our commanding officer. He has twenty-two years of Navy experience, seagoing experience. That makes him the most knowledgeable person on this ship, and if that weren’t enough, there’s a ream of United States Navy regulations that gives him paramount authority over everyone on this ship. That means everyone, military and civilian, embarked in Normandy .”

“Yes, sir, but—”

“NO, Phillips! I heard you out, now you listen and listen good! You may be a hotshot civilian analyst and think you can run your own little show here. My officers have gone out of their way to make you feel welcome and make you feel useful, and to your credit, most everyone says you’re trying to do a good job. However, you are way out of line challenging Captain Blackman on something like this. He takes his orders from Admiral Flynn, and from a long chain of command going up to the commander in chief. So the captain showed you enormous courtesy just by letting you come up to his cabin and give your little show, and I stuck my neck out by going with you. Now we are way past the point where everyone can just chime in with their personal opinion.”

“Yes, I know, but we may be making a terrible mistake. That video—”

“Phillips, you’re not hearing me!” Watson interrupted again. Now there was real venom in his voice. “We are in a war zone ! You are on a U.S. Navy warship ! The captain says jump, the only question we ask is ‘how high?’ Don’t compound your problems by trying to change anyone’s mind after the decision has been made. Time to get with the program, Ms. Phillips.”

Laurie opened her mouth to speak but Watson put up his hand.

“Look, Phillips. You don’t know what the hell you’re doing or what the hell you’re talking about. You have some pet rock theory about this video. You presented it to the commanding officer. You had your day in court. He heard you out. Now we’re moving forward, and you’re moving out of my stateroom, damn it; because I’ve got little enough time to do what I need to do on this warship! Clear?”

Laurie rose without a word and stormed out of Watson’s stateroom.

Sandee Barron took one look at Laurie as she slumped into their stateroom and knew something was wrong, really wrong.

“Laurie, what’s the matter?”

“Oh God, I’ve failed, I’ve failed miserably,” Laurie said, tears welling up in her eyes.

“What, what happened?” Sandee replied. She could see her roommate was about to lose it.

“Oh, I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what to do,” Laurie continued, beginning to sob.

“It’s OK. It will be OK,” Sandee said as reassuringly as she could as she put her arm around Laurie. “Look, sit down, tell me what happened.”

Laurie sat, the sobs coming more freely now, and poured out her story to Sandee. The younger woman tried to be a good listener, but what Laurie was telling her wasn’t making sense. How could they not believe her? It was so unfair. She was trying to do her duty, but she was being stonewalled. At the same time, she had never felt so powerless. Laurie was pouring her heart out to her and she couldn’t do a thing about it. Finally, Laurie was finished.

“Look, Laurie, we’ll figure this out together, I promise,” Sandee said as reassuringly as possible. “How can I help?”

Laurie made no reply, her sobs now turning to sniffles. How could anyone help her?

Roger McCord had complete confidence in Aaron Bleich, but what he was telling him was so off-the-chart he had trouble getting his brain around it. But once he did, he knew they had to take it to Chase Williams. The Op-Center director responded to McCord’s call by telling him to come to his office immediately.

“Boss,” McCord began, once he and Bleich were seated in Williams’s office. “Aaron has had the Geek Tank churning to get this intel. I’ll let him lay it out to you.”

“Aaron?” Williams began.

“Well, it’s like this, sir. Once you asked us to focus on the Middle East to the exclusion of almost everything else we were able to dedicate the bulk of our resources, including all of our high-performance computing assets, to what is coming out of that area. Naturally, we put the most intense focus on these Syrian missiles.”

“I appreciate that, Aaron, and I know you and your folks have been burning the midnight oil to do this.”

“Not a problem, sir. Well, I’ll just give you the bottom line up front. We are certain these missiles are not in Syria—”

“Not in Syria?” Williams interrupted. “If not there, where are they?”

“Well, we’re still working on that and expect to have an answer in a few hours. For now, the fact they are not in Syria, and that someone was able to hack into our Global Hawk downlink to make us think they are in Syria, tells us something really fishy is going on.”

“It’s a preliminary analysis, boss,” Roger McCord added, “but we wanted to bring you this much right away.”

“You did the right thing, Roger, but what about our JSOC flyaway team? We have them forward now, but are they in the right place?”

“I was thinking the same thing,” McCord replied. “My guess is that they’re probably close to where they’ll be needed if they’re needed. We’ll know soon.”

“I agree. Aaron, great job, please come in and update me as soon as you have more information. Roger,” he continued, “Brian and I talked about him going downrange with the team if things heated up. I think the kettle’s boiling. Tell him it’s time to saddle up and ask Duncan to get him to Incirlik ASAP.”

It took the nation’s intelligence agencies, all of which worked in the world of secret, top secret, and higher levels of classification, a bit of time to get and absorb the news, as it was gathered by the CIA’s Open Source Center. Nevertheless, the fact that it had come from a completely open source made it all the more stunning.

The Islamic Republic News Agency, or IRNA, the official news agency of the Islamic Republic of Iran, posted the broadcast on its Web site without fanfare at 2230 Arabia standard time on March 20:

Iraq has demonstrated criminal intent and proven that they are lackeys of Western governments by once again stealing oil from the Islamic Republic of Iran’s oil reserves. They have been tunneling horizontally to reach our oil, something they clearly could do only with Western help. At this moment they are shipping this oil from their facility at the Al Başrah oil terminal.