Читать книгу Primary Directive - Don Pendleton - Страница 12

It didn’t take long for Able Team to find the bodies of the two immigrants who’d been shot. As soon as they arrived, the trio took charge and formed a skirmish line. Two sheriff’s deputies located the bullet-riddled pair nestled between a large patch of sagebrush. Able Team ordered the teams to continue walking their skirmish line to search for any clues while they checked the bodies for identification. To no one’s surprise, they didn’t find any.

“No doubt they’re Hispanic, though,” Blancanales said as he eyed the grim scene before them.

Lyons looked up and squinted at the hills to the north as if the solution to this mystery might be hidden somewhere among them. “Okay, so we have bogus Border Patrol agents killing Mexican immigrants, and Arab terrorists, possibly al Qaeda, crossing into the U.S. unmolested. That makes no sense.”

“It would if we were to assume these two were the coyotes,” Schwarz replied.

“What?”

“Sure, think about it. Al Qaeda decides to use the Mexican pipeline to funnel terrorists into the country. It wouldn’t be difficult for Arabs to pose as Mexicans. They train them in the language, mark them up so the receivers on this end can sort out the wheat from the chaff, as it were, and there you go! An instant, nearly endless supply of bodies to assist in preparation for whatever operations they have under way.”

“It would be a pretty ingenious plot if you really think about it,” Blancanales added. “U.S. Immigration is so backlogged that they have to pass off a good amount of the scutt work to Border Patrol and local police agencies. Mostly they treat this problem like a day of fishing on the lake. Get one you don’t want, you just throw it back.”

Lyons nodded in understanding. “And they only take the most basic information in these roundups, so they can more quickly identify them if they return.”

“Right. This means we’d only be helping them build their identities as Mexican nationals.”

“It’s a ready-made recipe for deception,” Schwarz observed.

Lyons folded his arms. “So let’s assume for the sake of argument that al Qaeda’s cooked up a plot to use the Mexican immigrant system to smuggle operatives into the country. And let’s also assume they got caught with their pants down in Panama. Moving any kind of operation force across that many miles of jungle is risky, at best, not to mention the costs involved.”

“Not as risky as trying to sneak them straight into the country by more conventional methods,” Blancanales said. “You’re forgetting it’s a lot easier for them to get operatives with Muslim backgrounds into Central American countries than North American. They aren’t running planes into skyscrapers and bombing federal buildings in these countries, so officials feel they have much less to worry about from Islamists.”

“Nobody’s immune to the horrors of terrorism,” Lyons said.

“Yeah, sure, but tell that to these poor starving Mexican nationals when the terrorists are waving plenty of cash around. What we make in a month would take many of those people years to earn, Ironman. You should know that as well I do.”

“All right,” Lyons said. “But we need a place to start looking. If al Qaeda’s behind this, then its headquarters has to be close by. Question now is, how do we find them?”

Schwarz stuck up his hand. “I think I might be able to answer that one.”

F ADIL B ARI WATCHED the crowd of American policemen through binoculars from his vantage point in the nearby foothills. A couple of times he had to caution his men to be silent as they waited. Additional reinforcements had arrived, and they were scouring the dry, dusty flatlands, probably looking for signs that would assist them in picking up Bari’s trail. They wouldn’t find any. The man hadn’t built his reputation by being careless and unthinking.

Bari watched for another minute, then crawled behind a large boulder. Two of his crew waited there, watching him expectantly.

“They are still down there,” he told them. “I’m concerned they might spot us if we attempt to leave, yet we cannot hold here indefinitely.”

“What if we wait until dark?” one of the men asked.

Bari considered that a moment, then shook his head. “This will only give them more time to bring in additional personnel and equipment. I may not like it, but we should move now. Waiting only increases our chances of being cut off from the base.”

The men nodded, then all three of them crawled to another area where their six new arrivals waited.

Bari hadn’t counted on the Americans moving their construction project along as fast as they had. Many of al Qaeda’s connections had done everything they could to delay it. They had lobbied or bribed every politician and every leader of every special-interest group from the American Southwest to Washington, D.C. They’d also tried to infiltrate the scientific community, figure out exactly what the secret project called End Zone had to do with the construction of the border wall, but those attempts proved unsuccessful. Even their contacts inside the American press couldn’t figure out exactly what was happening until recently.

The cell leader and his men rallied the new arrivals and began the arduous trek over nearly half a mile of uneven terrain to reach the half dozen 4x4s that awaited them beneath heavy camouflage made with netting and natural elements. From that point, they would travel the twenty-odd miles to a natural lava flow along the area called Mt. Riley that had carved a belowground cavern converted to quarters for Bari’s cell.

Nearly four hours elapsed before the terrorist leader and his tired crew entered the comparative coolness of the rocky operations center. He ordered his men to point out sleeping accommodations for the six new men, and then get them cleaned up and fed. That attended to, he walked across the cavern and into a separate antechamber carved by the movement of superheated lava thousands of years before.

The chalky remnants of soot made it almost impossible to keep their computer equipment clean. Two of the men assigned to the operation were computer experts. The pair had hacked into a nearby cellular tower and used it to establish a wireless broadband connection. They had been using this to communicate with their support units around the globe via various Web site and e-mail servers used to deliver pornographic spam. Because those servers delivered thousands of e-mails an hour, it made it harder for U.S. security systems to sift through them to find the ciphers and other hidden code behind photographs. Al Qaeda’s specialists had found pictures of naked women and “legitimate” porn sites to be perfect methods for cryptic communications due to the sheer number of hits even one of those sites received in a single twenty-four-hour period. The computer specialists looked up when Bari entered. He nodded in way of acknowledgment.

“What have you discovered?” he asked.

Amer Rajiya, younger of the pair, replied, “It would seem the Americans are in the final testing phases of End Zone. It appears the system is designed to monitor the border wall and send information to their border patrol units. Additionally, the system also has some type of antipersonnel feature to it.”

“What kind of ‘antipersonnel feature’?” Bari demanded.

“We are not yet sure,” said Jainal Hapilon, a former member of the Abu Sayyaf. “But we know that it is capable of neutralizing our agents for an indefinite period of time.”

The news was anything but good. The operation wouldn’t be any easier from this point, and without proper support they might not be able to execute it at all. Everything relied on an adequate number of personnel, since the attacks required split-second timing and they wouldn’t get a second chance if they didn’t execute the plan in the proper places and under the proper timing. Bari didn’t believe in contingency plans. Missions for God were typically one-way missions, missions of sacrifice, missions of martyrdom. Bari had planned this one to the last detail—he knew he most likely wouldn’t survive.

“This is a disturbing development,” he told them. “We cannot move forward with our plans if we do not have everyone in place. We need to get word back to our people that we may experience a delay. As soon as you have done that, gather the team leaders together here for a conference.”

“What are we going to do?” Rajiya asked.

“What else can we do? We must destroy this technology and those who created it before it becomes fully operational. All else depends upon it!”

“I T’S KNOWN AS LANTIRN,” Aaron Kurtzman announced to Brognola and Price.

They were gathered in the Annex Computer Room and viewing a complex schematic of an electronic device projected on the massive LCD screen in front of them.

“That stands for Low-Altitude Navigation and Targeting Infrared System for Night. The Air Force originally used it on their F-15 and F-16 fighter craft, but it always had the ability to be retrofitted to any system with a military-grade digital multiplexer.

“The radar system inside of it operates at an altitudinal range of ten to one thousand feet, so fauna won’t give it any problems but it will track anything above that. Since the wall’s twelve feet in height, it’s easily capable of tracking any object that comes over. Additionally, it uses laser-range finder technology to create 3-D models of the terrain. Any deviation above a certain nominal limit will trigger the system into remapping. This will automatically tell the monitoring system what deviation has been detected and the most likely cause of the deviation, be it human, animal or otherwise.”

Brognola nodded. “Impressive.”

“Not as much as this next part,” Kurtzman said with a wicked grin. He tapped the keyboard to display a picture of an oval-shaped device mounted to a section of border wall. “We got this photograph courtesy of Gadgets.”

“Looks like one of those giant golf balls you see on the top of some pro shops,” Price noted.

“It may not look that impressive, but believe me when I say it’s quite the little gadget. What you’re seeing here is merely the outer shell. It’s originally based on the MPQ-54 Forward Area Alerting Radar first put in production back in the early 1970s. Although it’s had a number of impressive modifications through the years, including a brand-new computerized interface, the core technology is still the same. It’s been enhanced with the Firefinder family of ground radar systems, originally used to locate mortars and other ground-based artillery emplacements. A favorite of military tankers and engineering units.”

“How does it work?” Brognola asked.

“It’s pretty similar to its predecessors but again, lots of neat mods. It uses pulse-Doppler range gates to paint a three-dimensional picture of some given area, in this case a section of the border wall. The beam is translated via servomotors capable of scanning a 120-degree sector ten times per second. When combined with the other systems, the radar network it provides becomes virtually foolproof.”

Price raised her eyebrows. “Virtually?”

Kurtzman shrugged with a sheepish grin. “No system is perfect, Barb. Not even the one I created for Stony Man.”

“It’s close enough,” Brognola said. “So how are we thinking about using the system to help Able Team?”

“That’s where we get to the cool part,” Kurtzman said. “We already have a link to interface Gadgets’s laptop back here. The nice thing about this system is that it just so happens to have portable modules. Gadgets thinks he can modify the technology to work on his system. They’ll then transmit their data back here where our processing power can go to work on it. With a little bit of time and a lot of number-crunching, we may be able to pinpoint where the terrorists are operating. Able Team figures they’re operating close to the Columbus port of entry in New Mexico, and I’d have to agree.”

“Once you have the data, how long will it take to narrow the possibilities?”

“Well, that’s the trick. We don’t really know yet. Much of it depends on how long it takes our processors here to sort through the data. We’re talking about very complex mathematical operations here. But I can guarantee you we’ll ultimately get pinpoint accuracy in the results, and we’ll be able to do it much faster than with anything the boys have on-site there.”

Price waited a moment to make sure Kurtzman was finished, then turned in her chair to face Brognola. “In the meantime, Hal, Carl informs me they’ll have plenty to do.”

“How so?”

“Well, Able Team’s concerned about the people who created End Zone. It’s very likely if al Qaeda discovers we’re onto them, they might target the project’s scientists or military personnel to delay the system from going live.”

Brognola considered this point. Al Qaeda might just try something like that if it thought it would benefit. The President wanted to make sure there were no incidents, and this one would definitely add fuel to the fire. They wouldn’t be able to keep it out of the papers, of that much he was sure. They could suppress the footage of the cameras, but they still had two dead Mexican nationals on their hands. The Oval Office would have a bit of explaining to do not only to America but to Mexican officials, who would want the full details.

“I understand,” Brognola said. “Tell Carl I said he can do whatever he has to do. A protection detail is going to spread them pretty thin, but I don’t see as we have many other choices right now.”

“I’ll let them know,” she replied.

“The best we can hope for now is that Phoenix Force comes up with some answers down in Panama,” the big Fed said. “The trail has to start there somewhere. If they can choke off the pipeline, hit al Qaeda’s Central American network at the source, that might just buy us enough time to locate their operations on the receiving end and neutralize them before they can execute whatever operation they have in mind.”

“Well, we did recently come upon some information that might help us nail down who’s behind this,” Price said.

She accessed a nearby computer terminal, then flipped the screen so Brognola could see it. It displayed the picture of a dark-skinned man, middle-aged, with close-cropped hair and black eyes. He wore a long, traditional beard in the style of a Muslim cleric.

“This picture was taken a couple of months ago in D.C. during the Islamic Freedom Movement march on the White House. It was run through facial-recognition software by one of my SIG-INT contacts at the NSA, and she immediately called me to tell me about it. The man you’re seeing here is Fadil Bari. He’s a known member of al Qaeda, and according to the CIA, one of bin Laden’s chief operational strategists.”

“How come he wasn’t picked up immediately?”

“By the time the NSA realized it, the march was long over. It took nearly two weeks for this to surface. It might have been missed altogether except for the fact my friend just happened to return from an intelligence brief that contained, among other things, a complete dossier on Bari.”

Brognola shook his head. “When is Homeland Security going to learn they can’t sit on these things? They should have had an army of observers there.”

“Well, we think al Qaeda slipped Bari into the country during the influx of Arab Americans. You’ll remember the nightmare it created, the airports and train systems flooded with every size and color.”

“Not much point in racial profiling there,” Kurtzman quipped.

“It’s still no excuse,” Brognola said.

“Either way, this is too much to be a coincidence. If there is a new plot under way by al Qaeda to implement another terrorist attack here in America, you can bet your sweet bippy that Bari’s at the core of it.”

Brognola nodded. “Okay, make sure you get this to the boys right away. One way or another, I suspect they’re about to need all the help we can muster.”