Inside the wall of guns, foreign money poured into aid projects, and various spooks scuttled about pretending to be something else.
As the Tracker read, head in hands, or studied images on the plasma screen in his office, an RQ-4 Global Hawk took up station over Kismayo. It was not weaponized, for that was not the mission. It was known as a HALE version, for high altitude, long endurance.
It came out of the nearby Kenyan facility, where a few American soldiers and technicians sweltered in the tropical heat, resupplied by air and dwelling in air-conditioned housing units like a film crew on location. They had four Global Hawks and two were now airborne.
One had been aloft before the new request arrived. The job was watching the Kenya/Somali border and the offshore waters for raids and incursions over the border. The new order was to circle over a once commercial zone in Kismayo and watch a building. As the Hawks would have to spell each other, that meant all four were now operational.
The Global Hawk has an extraordinary “loiter time” of thirty-five hours. Being close to its base, it cou
ld circle above its target for thirty hours. At 60,000 feet, almost twice the height of an airliner, it could scan up to 40,000 square miles a day. Or it could narrow that beam to four square miles and zoom in for pin-sharp clarity.
The Hawk over Kismayo was equipped with synthetic-aperture radar, electro-optical and infrared for night and day, clear or cloud, operation. It could also “listen” to the tiniest transmission on the lowest possible power and “sniff” changing heat centers as humans moved about below. All intelligence gathered went straight to Nevada in a nanosecond.
The second thing that happened was the return of the pictures from Clarksburg. The technicians there had noticed that on the masked images off the TV, the fabric of the mask seemed to be slightly bulked out from the face beneath. They theorized there could be a full black beard under there. So they sent two alternates, with and without beard.
They had the creases across the forehead and those around the eyes to work on, so the updated face was markedly older. And hard. There was a cruelty about the mouth and jaw. The boy’s softness and merriment was gone.
Hardly had Tracker finished studying the new photos than a message came from Ariel.
“There seems to be a second computer in that building,” he said. “But it is not emitting the sermons. Whoever is on it, and I think it is the Troll, has acknowledged receipt with thanks. No indication of what. But someone else is communicating by e-mail with that building.”
And Gray Fox came back. A total negative. No one has any “asset” living among the al-Shabaab.
“The message seems to be: If you want to go into that hellhole, you’re on your own.”
6
He should have thought of it while he was in Islamabad and mentally kicked himself for the oversight. Javad, the CIA’s mole inside the ISI, had told him the young Zulfiqar Ali Shah had vanished off all radar screens by 2004 after disappearing into Lashkar-e-Taiba, the anti-Kashmir terror group.
Since then—nothing. But nothing under that name. It was only when staring at the face in his office that another line occurred to him. He asked the CIA to recontact Javad with a simple query: Did any of their agents inside the various terror groups along the deadly frontier hear mention of a terrorist with amber eyes?
Meanwhile, he had another call to make with the same request he had vainly put to Langley.
He took an official car again but this time went in a civilian suit with shirt and tie. Since 9/11, the British embassy on Massachusetts Avenue has also been heavily protected. The grandiose building stands next to the Naval Observatory, home of the Vice President and also heavily guarded.
Access to the embassy avoids the columned portico at the front and is achieved down a small street to one side. His car stopped at the hut beside the barrier pole, and he offered his pass through the car’s open window. There was a consultation by handheld phone. Whatever the reply, it was enough for the pole to be lifted and the car to roll into the small parking lot. Less important creatures park outside and enter on foot. Space is scarce.
The door was much less grand than the front entrance, for security reasons now hardly used and only then by the ambassador and American visitors of exalted rank. Once inside, Tracker turned to the glass-windowed booth and again offered his identity card. It mentioned a certain Col. James Jackson.
Another phone conference, then the invitation to take a seat. Within two minutes, the elevator door opened and a young man emerged, evidently a junior in the pecking order.
“Colonel Jackson?” There was no one else in the lobby. He, too, examined the ID card. “Please come with me, sir.”
It was, as Tracker knew it would be, the fifth floor, the defense attachés’ floor, the level the American cleaning staff never entered. Cleaning had to be done by the lowest, albeit British, forms of life.
On the fifth floor, the young man led Tracker down a corridor past several door plaques announcing the inhabitants, and finally to a door with no marking but with a card-swipe mechanism instead of a handle. He knocked and on the command from inside swiped the card, swung the door open and gestured Tracker to enter. He did not follow but quietly closed the door.
It was an elegant room, with bulletproof windows giving onto the avenue. It was an office but definitely not the “bubble,” which was where conferences only of cosmic clearance level took place. That room was in the center of the building, surrounded on all sides, including floor and ceiling, by a vacuum and without windows. The technique of beaming a ray onto window glass and reading the conversation inside from the vibrations had been used against the American embassy in Moscow during the Cold War and required the reconstruction of the entire building.
The man coming around the corner of his desk, hand outstretched, was also in a suit with a striped tie that Tracker, after his years in London, presumed to be the hallmark of a rather good school. He was not quite expert enough to recognize the colors of Harrow.
“Colonel Jackson? Welcome. Our first meet, I think. Konrad Armitage. I took the liberty of ordering coffee. How do you take it?”
He could have asked one of the glamorous young secretaries employed on that floor to enter from the side door and serve it but chose to do so himself. Recently arrived from London, Konrad Armitage was the head of station for the British Secret Intelligence Service, or SIS.
He knew perfectly well who his visitor was from his predecessor and welcomed the meeting. The awareness of common cause, common interest and common enemy was mutual.
“So, what can I do for you?”