"If you decide to chopper in drinking water, you'd have to make a hellava lot of flights," Herbert said. "Enough so that you stand a good chance of being spotted."
"Even at night?"
"No," Herbert said. "At night you stand a good chance of crashing into some of those peaks, especially if you're using a twenty- or thirty-year-old bird. As for trucks, water can only be trucked in if there's a road nearby. So if the base isn't near a stream — and there aren't very many in this region — it has to be near the highway or at least a dirt road."
"Granted," Stoll said. "But that still leaves us about thirty or forty possible locations for a terrorist base. We keep examining these same pictures and magnifying different sections of them and computer-analyzing the geology of the region, and we still come up with squat."
"That's because we're obviously not looking for the right thing," Herbert said. "Every human activity leaves traces." He was annoyed with himself. Even without some of the high-tech satellite and surveillance tools he'd normally have at his disposal, he should be able to find those traces. Wild Bill Donovan did. Lives and national security depended upon it. "Okay," he said. "We know the command center is somewhere in there. What other trappings would it have?"
Stoll raised his head. "Barbed wire hidden in vines, which we haven't seen. Mines, which we can't see anyway. Cigarette butts, which we could see if we had a satellite that we could turn on the area. We've been through all that."
"Then let's look at it a different way," Herbert said.
"Fine. I'm game. Fire away."
"You're a terrorist leader," Herbert said. "What's the most important asset you need in a base?"
"Air. Food. Sanitation. Those are the biggies, I'd guess."
"There's one more," Herbert said. "A bigger one. The top quality you'd look for is safety. A combination of defensibility and impregnability."
"From what?" Stoll asked. "From spies or attack? From the ground or the air? For assault or retreat?"
"Safety from aerial bombardment," Herbert said. "Flyovers and artillery fire are the easiest, safest ways to take an enemy base out."
"Okay," said Stoll. "So where does that lead us?"
"We know that most of these caves are made of — what did Phil call them in his analysis?"
"I don't remember," Stoll said. "Porous rock, sponge rock, something that sounded like you could quarry it with a good karate chop."
"Right," said Herbert. "The thing is, that kind of rock only protects the terrorists from surveillance by air, not from attack. What does?"
"Protect from attack? You said that terrorists in the Bekaa move around a lot," Stoll said, "like mobile Scuds. Their best defense is keeping anyone from knowing where they are."
"True," Herbert said. "But this situation may be different."
"Why?"
"Logistics," Herbert replied. "If these terrorists are coordinating movements in at least two nations, they haves to remain centralized to distribute arms, bomb parts, maps, information."
"With computers and cellular phones, most of those capacities are pretty transportable," Stoll pointed out.
"Maybe you can move the trappings around," Herbert agreed. "But these guys would also have been training for a series of very specific missions." He took another swallow of coffee. Grounds washed along his gums as he reached the bottom of the cup. He absently spat them back in. "Let's think this through. When any strike force trains for a specific mission, they build replicas of the sites."
"These guys wouldn't have built a mockup of the Ataturk Dam, Bob."
"No," Herbert agreed. "They wouldn't have had to, though."
"Why not?"
"That part was pure muscle. The terrorists didn't have to work out technique and finesse because they just flew in, dropped their bombs, and got out. But if that was simply a precipitating incident, which it almost certainly was, they'll probably have follow-up assaults planned. Assaults which will have to be rehearsed."
"Why?" Stoll asked. "What makes you think those assaults won't be pure muscle as well?"
Herbert drained his mug. There were more grounds in his mouth. He spat them back into the cup before pushing it to the side of the desk. "Because historically, Matt, the first strike in a war or war-phase is big, surprising, and strategic — like Pearl Harbor or the Normandy invasion. It destabilizes and shocks. After that, the enemy is ready, so you have to shift into a more methodical mode. Careful, surgical assaults."
"Like capturing important towns or killing opposition leaders."
"Exactly," Herbert said. "That requires site-specific training. When combined with the other factors about communications, supplies, and commands, that means a more or less permanent base."
"Maybe," Stoll said. He pointed at the monitor. "But not in caves like the soft-rock jobbers we have here. You can't reinforce those. Lookit. They're not very big to begin with, only about seven feet tall and five wide. If you throw in a lot of iron and wood supports, you'd barely have room to move around."
Herbert chewed on a lingering coffee ground for a moment, then absently pulled it out. He looked at it. "Wait a minute," he said. "Dirt."
"What?" Stoll asked.
Herbert held out the dark ground and then flicked it away. "Dirt. You can't build much inside one of those caves but you can excavate. The North Vietnamese did it all the time."
"You mean an underground bunker," Stoll said.
Herbert nodded. "It's the perfect solution. It also narrows down our search. You can't blast a tunnel in caves like these or the roof'll come down on you—"
"But you can dig one,", Stoll interrupted excitedly. "You've got to dig one."
"Right!" Herbert said. "And to dig, you need dirt."
"From the descriptions on those pictures," Stoll said, "most of these caves were cut into the rock shelf by subterranean streams."
"Most," Herbert said as the data came up, "but maybe not all."
Stoll stored the Bekaa photographs and brought up the geological records which Katzen had organized before leaving for the region. Stoll and Herbert both leaned toward the monitor as Stoll ran a word-search for "soil." He came up with thirty-seven references to soil composition. The men began reading through each reference, looking for anything which suggested a recent excavation. They crawled through a mass of figures, percentages, and geological terms until something caught Herbert's eye.
"Hold it," Herbert said. He slapped his hand on the mouse and scrolled back a page. "Look at this, Matt. A Syrian agronomical study from January of this year." Herbert began scanning down. "The team reported an anomaly in the Thicket of Oaks region of the Chouf Mountains."
Stoll glanced at notes he'd been taking. "Ohmigod. That's the area where the ROC is."
Herbert continued reading. "It says here the A horizon or topsoil there is characterized by unusually high biotic activity as well as an abundance of organic matter which is typically found in the B horizon substratum. Movement typically occurs from A horizon to B, carrying fine-grained clay downward. This concentration of substratum material suggests one of two things. First, that an effort was made to enrich the soil with more active earth, and then abandoned. Or second, it could be the result of a nearby archaeological dig. The level of biological activity suggests the deposits were placed here within the last four to six weeks."
Stoll looked at Herbert. "An archaeological dig," he said, "or else a bit of bunker-building."
"Absolutely possible," Herbert replied. "And the time frame fits. They found the soil four months ago. That means the digging was done five to six months ago. That would have been enough time to put together a base and train a team."