Ian Slater - Darpa Alpha

Margaret saw her husband’s brow furrowed with such intense concentration that she barely recognized him. She knew it was said of him that, like so many good leaders, he was a “quick study” and could home in on a vital piece of wheat amid the chaff of countless reports that used to flood his desk. And though he was retired, his was an administrative skill which he had kept honed daily, skimming through the plethora of newspapers, blogs, and magazines and journals from The Economist to Foreign Affairs . And so the e-mail he was about to send to an old friend, Charles Riser, who was presently U.S. cultural attaché in Beijing, was markedly short and to the point. And because the general was not privy to the present official ciphers or codes, the message was transmitted in plain language. Using the forensic report’s mention of the tancho as the vital clue for Riser, the e-mail, subject “Ornithologists’ Destination,” read “Group wishes to visit migratory bird sanctuary for tancho . Can you suggest prime location?”

Charles Riser, despite his prodigious knowledge of Oriental culture, did not know what tancho meant, and asked Bill Heinz, the embassy’s military attaché.

“Japanese crane,” replied Bill. “You’ve probably seen lots of ’em on postcards, Japanese watercolors. They’re a big deal in Japan.”

Now that Riser knew what tancho meant, his China hand’s knowledge came into play. “Well, one of the biggest sanctuaries would be Lake Khanka, the one up beyond Harbin. I think it straddles the Sino-Russian border.”

Riser e-mailed a coffee-quaffing Douglas Freeman about Lake Khanka. It was a huge four-thousand-square-kilometer body of water and marshland, ninety kilometers long and in places seventy kilometers wide, that constitutes one of the largest bird sanctuaries in the world. The wetlands and lake are fed by the upper course of the Ussuri River in a large depression where terrible forest fires over thousands of years had apparently rendered an area which should have been thick, boreal forest now only sparsely treed, leaving meadows and some copses of Mongolian oak. It was also reputed to be the last great refuge of the endangered far eastern leopard and Siberian tiger, and a vital refuge for hundreds of thousands of migrating birds, including the tancho . He also added, courtesy of Bill Heinz’s files, that there had been repeated complaints by Chinese “enviro nuts” about some kind of armament testing in the area adjacent to the lake.

In their computer-cum-music room Freeman forced himself to contain his excitement as, having quickly scanned Charlie Riser’s e-mail, he called up his meticulously cross-referenced military-industrial files, which he was confident were better than the Pentagon’s intel. “Lake Khanka” had rung a distant bell in his memory about Sino-Soviet border disputes, and its significance fairly jumped out at him from the monitor: Lake Khanka, at latitude 44 degrees, five minutes north, longitude 132 degrees east, on the far eastern Russia-China border, was less than fifty kilometers north of the Deng Jiang sulfur mine, sulfur being essential for any armaments, including the newer Man Portable Air Defense rockets of the kind that had downed his SpecOps Chinook at Priest Lake. Calling Margaret over, he pointed to the area map he had called up, zooming in on the area, highlighting a place southwest of the lake called Gayvoron, noting that it must be the railhead.

“Oh no,” said Margaret as she saw him snatch a light Windbreaker from the hallway. “Surely you can call from home.”

“Not this one, sweetie,” the general replied, grabbing his cap, giving her a peck on the cheek. “Sweetheart, Murphy is always hanging around. Get sloppy on security just once and it’s like leaving your car unlocked.”

From the repaired phone booth down by the 7-Eleven, Freeman dialed the White House and this time was immediately put through to Eleanor Prenty.

She got right to it. “You’ve read the summary, Douglas?”

“Yes. And I’ve deduced that everything points to those scumbags’ camp definitely being situated around a place called Lake Khanka. It’s situated in—”

“Yes, we know,” Eleanor cut in impatiently.

“What?” He was stunned. “ You know it’s Lake Khanka?”

He heard a sigh that conveyed to him a sense of patient resignation on the other end. “Douglas, I think you’re one of the most brilliant military commanders this country’s ever had, your failure to catch these terrorists notwithstanding. But you—” She was sighing again, really pissing him off. “Like us all, I guess, you have some surprising blind spots.”

“Such as?” he asked grumpily. “My failure to catch these terrorists notwithstanding.”

“Don’t be childish, General. I haven’t got the time. None of us have. Remember, you and all other senior officers, active and retired, supported the Patriot Act.”

Now, as Aussie Lewis might have said, the penny dropped in Freeman’s brain. “Son of a — you’ve been tracking my Internet inquiries.”

“I have not. NSA has. Surely you must know that their computers are surfing the Net 24/7. As soon as certain phrases or terms pop up, the computers automatically tag and record them. Hell, Douglas, they do the same with me. You might not realize it, but some terrorist cells have staged random break-and-enters so they can use a citizen’s computer. That way any backtracking of the terrorists’ METAs to that ordinary citizen’s line is futile.”

“METAs?”

“Messages to activate,” explained Eleanor. “It’s an NSA acronym.”

Freeman’s brain was racing, despite his acute fatigue. “So you knew? I mean, NSA put the forensic analysis together with my computer files on Lake Khanka and Gayvoron?”

“It was your sulfur mine around which all the forensic stuff jelled,” Eleanor told him.

“Then it’s a matter for our air force,” said Douglas. “I expect Moscow’ll be as pleased as we are to take out a terrorist camp.” He was thinking of how the CIA and KGB had joined forces and worked so well together to prevent a planeload of Russian nuclear scientists from leaving Russia for Iran.

“It’s not as easy as that,” cautioned Eleanor. “The president’s been in contact with the Russian premier. There’s no way Moscow will allow a bombing mission on Russian soil. Besides, even if they did, we’d need much more precise targets than Lake Khanka and environs. Do you know how big that place is?”

“Of course, you’re right,” commented Freeman, embarrassed by not having seen such an obvious problem. He sure as hell needed some sleep.

“Plus,” continued Eleanor, “once it gets out that we want to go after them by bombing, there’ll be an outcry from every environmental group in the world. Can you imagine it, Douglas? Americans bombing a hallowed bird sanctuary? We’re hated enough already around the world, without every bird lover and Audubon Society on earth screaming bloody murder!”

“So what’s the best they’ll allow us?” pressed Freeman. “What kind of force can we mobilize?”

“Moscow’ll allow an MEU to be ferried in by air and for us to hit the terrorists’ camp. But we’ve only got twenty-four hours, max.”

The general was rapidly estimating how much time it would take for a SOC MEU, a special-operations-capable Marine Expeditionary Unit, of two thousand men to be dispatched, fight a winter battle, win, and withdraw. “That’s hardly enough time to—”

“Well, that’s all the time they’ve given us, Douglas. It’s nonnegotiable. Moscow wants to clean up its backyard terrorists as much as we do ours. But even with all the goodwill we’ve engendered between us since the end of the Cold War, they’re still very prickly about the whole thing. It’s a political minefield for the guys in the Kremlin. We’re damned lucky they’ll let us in. Thank God for the KGB-CIA joint venture against the nuclear scientists trying to hightail it to Iran. At least that’s set a precedent.”