Steve Abbott - Devil's Gambit

“Very well then, good-bye.” The arms dealer left them standing and got into the cab of the truck. With a crunching of gears, the vehicle lurched away from the plane. In minutes it was little more than a fading tan dust plume receding into the night.

Sykes jumped when Petros put a hand on his shoulder.

The Greek stared at the fading truck. “Do you think he came through with the rest of the money?”

“He’s no fool. He knows we’d come after him, not to mention the bad press he’d get if we weren’t paid.” Sykes moved to go inside the plane, “Come on, let’s grab the yank, find that gas and fuck off into the never never.”

“Gotcha!” Sergeant George Chatham sat back in his chair and rubbed at his eyes. He had spent the last twelve hours in the bowels of NPIC’s windowless monolith going over downloaded material from a surveillance satellite known only as Bird 202.

Bird 202 was in a near-perfect high latitude orbit. This orbit allowed it to move across the CIS, China and Canada. Its route covered the naval port of Vladivostok, most of what used to be the Eastern USSR and the rich oil regions and refinery plants there. Bird 202 also covered most of China and the Far East. The small polar orbit meant the passes were frequent. The amount of data to be sifted through was huge, even with the help of the building’s three CRAY supercomputers.

Chatham suspected from the clarity and quality of the data he was given that it came from a KH-14, a surveillance satellite about the size of a small bus that used a synthetic aperture linear scan radar to generate its pictures. The radar did a minute rapid-line scan of everything under it. So sensitive was the system, it could discern a height difference of just a few inches. Because it was a synthetic aperture, the width of the picture could be set for feet or miles. The strip pictures were then downloaded into one of the CRAY super computers kept in the sub-basement euphemistically called the “Dungeon.” There, they were converted into three dimensional computer images. The final image could then be turned on a terminal screen in any axis by an analyst.

Chatham’s labors yielded him a small boat, unrecorded in any of the region’s regular marine traffic logs. It was the wrong size and shape to be a fishing vessel. He leaned closer. With a rapid series of clicks on his mouse, the vessel was enhanced until it filled almost the entire screen. Another click and the color image rolled onto its horizontal axis until he had a good profile. Chatham manipulated the image further, until it was just a series of lines. Each one based on points of height, length and width. He now had a line drawing of a boat with long sleek lines, most likely some kind of drug runner.

Using a scaling subroutine program, the CRAY was able to assign a rough estimate of length, beam and possible draught of the vessel. This took a little over an hour and a half. A mind-numbing process to be sure, but Chatham, an avid solver of jigsaw puzzles, found work like this to be the ultimate jigsaw. He maximized another set of menus on his screen. The line drawing of the boat was fed into a search program and the CRAY began to compare it with every type of known ship the world over.

Chatham went back to the original program while the search was in progress. The image in its original form was called back to the screen and the lines of latitude and longitude were overlaid in faint green lines. A separate line with degrees, minutes and seconds was attached to the boat’s image. Bird 202 had a rotation period of three hours. Using the initial time of fix, Chatham proceeded to scan the block of video data, plus or minus fifteen minutes, to the next approximate fix. This took another two eye-straining hours, but at the end, he had the entire ingress track of his mystery boat through the Black Sea.

Unfortunately, the Bird’s last three hour pass did not allow him to see which port the boat had called in. It was too hard to pick its shape out of all of the ground clutter at the water’s edge of the Georgian coast. All he had was the vessel heading away from the coast on its egress track. The true beauty of the radar scan pictures were that they ignored things like night and cloud, giving reliable images regardless. In this instance, the skies were beautifully clear, but the Bird had not been tasked to use its Infra-Red cameras. Frustrating but only to a secondary degree.

A small yellow box flashed on and off at the top of the screen. The CRAY had finished its search of possible boat types. Chatham left what he was doing for the moment and called up the subroutine. A series of boat types, arranged from most to least probable, scrolled down the screen. The list was mercifully short, and started with a World War Two era British MTB patrol boat. The protocol for the next step was complex. All boats in that class had to be accounted for. That meant an interface with the Royal Navy Admiralty computer and its archival files. The boats, which had not been destroyed or scrapped post-war, then had to be located, and their owner’s political and criminal records checked for ties into drug or gun running in the Black Sea or Mediterranean area.

The trick to being a good data analyst was not knowing what questions to ask, but knowing how to craft a search program that would enable the CRAY to look for the information required. A skill in short supply at NSA, but Chatham had a real feel for the CRAY’s mindset. If the initial search turned up nothing useful, then he would go to the next boat type on the list and repeat the whole process. With a click of the enter key, the program was sent on its merry way. With luck, it would have something by Chatham’s next shift.

The scent of the hunt in his nostrils, he went back to the time search. Another hour and he had the egress track nailed down as well. This time, luck was with him. The vessel had diverted from its previous straight track. The next pass caught it just outside a small port town on the coast of eastern Turkey, marked by a small black x. He fed the town’s coordinates in and got the name: Carasamba.

The geographical location interface stated it was a fishing town, but was suspected of being a major stop on the drug trail heading west.

Chatham enhanced the image of the boat at its present position again. If it was a patrol boat, it would have little, if any, cargo space. Any cargo would be lashed to the deck somewhere. Chatham made a diagram was of the vessel in a stripped down form. The Sergeant then lay the first drawing over the last. One would cancel the other and all that would be left would be the size and shape of the cargo if it were indeed lashed to the deck.

He placed the image of one boat over the other and hit erase. A long, oblong box was left. He changed the box lines to a light green so that they would stand out and recalled the boat line image. Once again, this was super imposed on the initial video footage. Sure enough, outlined in light green lines, was a rough gray oblong that had not been there before. Chatham tried to enhance the picture of the box. Anything that could be gained at this point was a bonus. Unfortunately, the program was at its limits with the width of the beam to enhance any further. Chatham had his orders. He picked up the phone beside his terminal to notify the Duty Officer that he had a probable.

“We have the goods. Be ready for us.” Verkatt turned off the small cellular phone and closed it with an enthusiastic snap as he put it back in his coat pocket. In ten minutes, his troublesome cargo would be in the hands of his clients and he would be a much richer man. The Koreans would see him as a man who could get the impossible done. His future with them was very assured.