Randy White - Twelve Mile Limit

“Nope,” I said. “Never heard of such a thing.”

“It’s true! So maybe it’s you, maybe it’s not. What it could be is some nebbish playing a trick on poor old Bernie, showing I’ve gotten so old I trust my ears, not my brain. Which is why I want you to speak a few more words, and let me make certain you are who you say you are.”

I pictured how it would probably be on his end of the line. He would be in the office of his desert adobe outside Scottsdale, Arizona, talking on the newest generation of high-security scrambler phones. The telephone would somehow be hooked into the bank of computers on his desk and around the room that he’d assembled lovingly by hand and interconnected. On one of the monitors would be a series of voiceprint images, old and new, but all of them seismic renderings of my voice.

All voices are distinctive, the uniqueness of each determined by the size of throat, nasal, and oral cavities, and the shape, length, and tension of the vocal cords. The manner in which speech muscles are manipulated is distinctive as well. Bernie would be using some esoteric program to confirm that my voiceprints matched. Presumably, he was using the same sophisticated computer system that made it possible for me to dial a Virginia area code yet end up speaking with the rotund and brilliant retired National Security Agency department head. How? I have no idea. My guess is, the same way you can dial a special seven-digit phone number and reach the security station at Kwajalein in the middle of the South Pacific. More of Yeager’s electronic wizardry.

Bernie is still a legend among the elite intelligence community familiar with the man’s work. It was Bernie Yeager who single-handedly unscrambled the Soviet nuclear subcode progression. It was Yeager who invaded and compromised computer communications between Managua and Havana during the Sandinista wars in Nicaragua. It was Yeager who discovered that, for years, the Mossad had the key to many code transmissions between the United States and Panama, compliments of a Mossad agent named Michael Herrera who Manuel Noriega had, amazingly, put in charge of his Panamanian air force. Next time you see a photograph of the former dictator in uniform, note the inverted paratrooper wings of the Israeli army-an honor bestowed on Noriega by a grateful Herrera.

All true.

And it was Yeager who consistently interrupted and intercepted radio and Internet communications between the Taliban in Afghanistan and Islamic terrorists in the United States. I’d heard through mutual friends that he had become obsessed with unmasking and destroying them individually and as groups. I knew that Bernie had lost both parents in Nazi concentration camps, so it made sense when our mutual friend said that Bernie considered the Islamic fanatics to be the Nazis of the new century. Nor was it surprising that he would become obsessive about destroying them.

Many of my friends in the intelligence community share the same obsession.

Bernie’s is not a name that is found in newspapers; he has never been invited to appear on national television and, hopefully, will never be asked. Yet he has done as much as any one person to safeguard the security of his adopted nation.

Several years back, I did a favor for the man because I like, admire, and trust him. His sister, Eve, the young mother of a three-year-old son, had a evening of silly, injudicious behavior. On a lark, at a party with a couple of former college room-mates, she tried a street drug that they were told was “coca candy.”

It was crack cocaine.

As a upper-class professional woman, she’d never experienced anything like it. A few days later, Eve rationalized a reason to contact the friend of a friend who had the stuff, and she bought a little more.

Slightly more than a year later, at Bernie’s request, I tracked his sister across four states to a suburban crackhouse outside Boulder, Colorado. It took me a couple of days to size up the hierarchy of males who exploited the women there and provided them with drugs. It took another couple days of research to find just the right way to leverage the crackhouse chieftain. I got her out without much trouble, and we got her into a superb rehab program. We gave it a month before we told her the bad news: Her distraught husband had divorced her in absentia and had secured custody of their son.

I stayed in close touch. I liked Eve very much; Bernie and I gradually became close friends. I joined the two of them, by telephone, for a small celebration the night Eve’s ex-husband said, yes, he was willing to try again. It should have been the storybook ending to an American tragedy. Unfortunately, storybook endings are seldom associated with the white rock. After more than a year of apparent domestic tranquility, Eve vanished. Bernie asked me to go a-searching once more. I found her in Colorado again, the same suburb, the same crackhouse. This time, she refused help. She was found dead a few months later.

I rarely impose on Bernie for favors. Friendship is based on loyalty, not on behavioral bookkeeping, quid pro quo. But when I do ask a favor, he never refuses.

After I told him the story of Janet Mueller and her two lost companions, Bernie said to me, “Awful! Tragic! In such a terrible mishmash, who wouldn’t want to help? Unfortunately, and as I keep telling you over and over, I don’t have access to the kind of data you need. But just out of curiosity, do you have the lat and long of the wreck they were diving? Or GPS numbers, perhaps?”

I was taught to think in terms of latitude and longitude and still prefer it over the more modern Global Positional System numbers. For some reason, it’s simpler for me to picture our planet covered with imaginary lines called parallels and meridians, or lines of longitude and latitude. It’s easier for me to calculate distances in my head, too. It takes the earth twenty-four hours for a full rotation of 360 degrees. Thus, every hour we rotate 15 degrees longitude, or one time zone. For the sake of precision, the imaginary lines are broken down into degrees, minutes, and seconds. There is exactly one nautical mile per minute, and there are sixty minutes (and sixty nautical miles) between degrees.

I told Bernie that the wreck of the Baja California lies at 25 degrees 21 minutes 60 seconds north latitude and 82 degrees 31.97 minutes west longitude.

“And you said the Coast Guard had found debris from the wreck, but not a trace of the divers themselves?”

I told him that, besides Amelia Gardner, all the Coasties had found were a length of manila line tied to a life jacket, as described by Amelia, a camera bag, a water jug, and two empty tanks, all scattered to the southwest.

I found it very reassuring when Bernie asked, “I don’t suppose you have the lat and long for the most distant item found?”

I told him an empty tank was found floating at 25 degrees 19.60 minutes north latitude and 82 degrees 46.50 minutes west longitude. The rough math was easy-twenty nautical miles or so southwest of the site of the wreck.

I heard him say, “ Humph, ” as if preoccupied, his keyboard clattering in the background, working on something else as we talked. Then he said, “So tell me what you know about satellite surveillance systems. Wait, I withdraw the question. Me, the computer nerd asking you, Mr. Live-in-a-Hut-Hermit. So let me tell you what is public information, which is why there’s no harm in me giving you a little crash course in what it is you’re asking. I tell you certain things, you judge for yourself if the satellite data you need are maybe available. Not that I can provide them.”

I said, “Understood and agreed.”

Bernie said, “Okay, so stand outside, look up at the night sky, and what you’re seeing is the makings of a junkyard. You laugh. The man thinks I’m joking. About satellites, I never joke. There are nearly ten thousand man-made objects up there orbiting this little planet of ours. More than three thousand of those objects are satellites, operative and inoperative, plus garbage you wouldn’t believe. Up there, we got nose-cone shrouds, lens covers, hatch covers, rocket bodies, pay-loads that have exploded, junk the astronauts or cosmonauts threw out or forgot. All sorts of stuff.