Hancock flipped open the covers and placed them side by side on his desk. He stared at the pictures clipped to the left inside cover of each one. One was of a thin, dark-haired and slightly built man, wearing a flight suit with no markings. In the background, Hancock could make out helicopters and a control tower. Painted on the control tower were the words rucker airfield, alabama, home of army aviation. The other showed a man who was larger, with sandy-colored hair, wearing camouflage fatigues with no rank or markings. His photo was taken with the jump towers of Fort Benning in the background.
"Gentlemen, gentlemen," Hancock said with a smile.
He added several other folders to the two on his desk, then leaned back and stared at the stack for a very long time. Then he rolled his chair over to the Civil War chessboard. He stared at the board for a long time, then his hands moved quickly, adjusting the pieces, moving those on both sides about until he was satisfied.
When both black and white were set at the stage he wanted, Hancock sat for a while with his chin in his hand, staring. Then he reached with his free hand and swiftly moved pieces on both sides of the board, deploying both colors further until suddenly he stopped. He stared at what had been done so far.
On the other side of the corridor marking the line between Operations and Direct Action, Welwood was also deep in rumination. He was staring at his computer screen, looking at classified information. He was searching as much for what wasn't in the reports he was reading as for what was. One thing he had learned early in his career with the CIA was that lack of information was information.
Samson and Delilah. Welwood wondered who had come up with those code names. He looked up as the door to his office swung open. He quickly shifted programs on the screen.
"Yes, ma'am?"
The figure in his doorway commanded instant attention. Kim Gereg, the director of Operations, was tall for a woman, exactly six feet tall, and solid, weighing in just over a hundred and sixty pounds. She was fifty-five years old, having started in the CIA working as a secretary over thirty years ago.
She'd left to get an advanced degree in Russian studies and returned to the Agency as an analyst. She was one of the first women to go through field agent training when that became available to females. If ever there was an example of working one's way up through the ranks, it was Gereg. Despite those efforts though, she was still a woman in what was one of the last bastions of the old boys' club in bureaucratic Washington. Although the CIA didn't exclusively recruit off the Ivy League campuses as its predecessor, the OSS, had, there was still a prevailing attitude that spying was a man's job even though the closest most CIA employees had ever gotten to violence was when two of their number had been killed at the gate to Langley by a Pakistani terrorist.
"What's going on?" Gereg asked.
Welwood knew Gereg did this often — wandered the hallways, popping her head in offices, checking on her subordinates. He supposed she thought it showed she cared about her people, but he just found it a pain in the ass.
"Following up on the satellite imagery from Bosnia," Welwood lied.
Gereg nodded. "Anything?"
"A lot of troop movement. The Serbs seem to have been resupplied with heavy weapons."
"Russia?"
"Some. There's a lot on the market right now from quite a few places."
"No surprise there," Gereg said. "Anything happening?"
"An IFOR patrol came across the bodies of those missing Polish soldiers. There was a dead Bosnian militiaman with them. It appears he killed the Poles — tied them to trees and tortured them first."
"That will throw some gas on the fire. Who killed the Bosnian?"
"We have no idea."
Gereg frowned and crossed her arms in front of her. "Where did this occur?"
"Just north of the Sava River."
"In Bosnia," Gereg said. "That's strange." She tappeda long finger on the bicep of the other arm. "Do you have the estimate for combat operations if IFOR acts against the Serbs?"
"The Balkan group is working on it with the military analysts."
"What's the initial readout?"
"I'll have it to your desk by noon." Welwood wanted her out of his office.
"Good," Gereg said, but she didn't leave. She stared at Welwood. He didn't exactly stare back, keeping his eyes from making direct contact with hers. After ten seconds she nodded slightly. "Keep up the good work."
The door swung shut behind her.
Chapter Nine
Takamura lived in a trailer on the west side of Fort Bragg. It was a long drive every day to and from the main post, but he enjoyed the solitude. His nearest neighbor was over a quarter mile away. The trailer was set in a small, secluded opening in the pine forest, accessible via a quarter mile of dirt road. Power lines ran about fifty feet behind the house, through a straight cut in the forest.
The thin walls of the trailer vibrated with the classical music every so often as the concert he was listening to went up in pitch, before sliding back down. He sat back in a battered leather recliner, a keyboard resting in his lap. His feet were up on the extended leg rest. On his head, a headset held a pointer that maneuvered a small white arrow on the large-screen TV eight feet in front of him. A small boom mike wrapped around from the headset to in front of his lips. A voice-activated program that he had personally modified allowed him to point with the headset and speak commands, removing the need for a mouse with a clicker.
Seventy-two inches allowed him to have several programs open on the screen. He was in four different chat rooms, under four different screen names, in each corner of the screen. Along the bottom an elongated box held the controls for every electrical device inside the trailer, including the stereo, lighting, and the heating/vibra pad on his recliner. Takamura could control everything from the deep comfort of the chair. It was the highest-tech low-rent trailer in North Carolina. What Takamura didn't spend on rent went into his computer system.
Right now, he was clearing the center of the screen, using the pointer and voice commands. He accessed the program he had used earlier in the day to try to penetrate the personnel database. He began scrolling through the program, his mind making sense of the letters and numbers, searching for a way to make it better.
The walls of the office displayed the accoutrements accumulated over eighteen years of service in the military. Plaques from units served in, certificates representing medals awarded, photographs of comrades, all dotted the wall.
What was more interesting and fresh in the memory of the person occupying this office in the first subbasement of the Pentagon were the units that weren't represented, the photos that weren't there.
Red Flyer and the Omega Missile.
Lieutenant Colonel Lisa Parker had served in both, and not only was there no sign of either unit in her office, records of each had been expunged from her official service record, leaving several years of her military service time unaccounted for.
Red Flyer had been a classified team selected from the various services whose mission was to covertly emplace a nuclear weapon anywhere in the world. Given that cruise missiles could target anyplace on the planet, the existence and potential use of Red Flyer had been more for political than practical reasons, a fact that had caused great consternation when the veil of secrecy surrounding it had been pierced.
Parker's last mission with Red Flyer had been to emplace what she had thought was a nuclear weapon inside of Israel, near their nuclear weapons storage facility in the Negev Desert. Although the bomb had been a dummy, the mission had had strong political overtones. She'd found out later that the mission had been run to counterbalance the Israeli Samson option — a nuclear weapon secreted in a house in Washington.