Jack spent the best part of an hour looking over the photos, and concluded that this miracle of modern technology told him all sorts of technical things, none of which were pertinent to his purpose. Whoever ran those camps knew enough to keep people out of sight when a reconsat was overhead—except for one which was not known to have photographic capability. Even then, the number of people visible was almost never the same, and the actual occupancy of the camps was therefore a matter for uncertain estimation. It was singularly frustrating.
Ryan leaned back and lit another low-tar cigarette bought from the kiosk on the next floor down. It went well with the coffee that was serving to keep him awake. He was up against another blank wall. It made him think of the computer games he occasionally played at home when he was tired of writing—Zork and Ultima. The business of intelligence analysis was so often like those computer "head games." You had to figure things out, but you never quite knew what it was that you were figuring out. The patterns you had to deduce could be very different from anything one normally dealt with, and the difference could be significant or mere happenstance.
Two of the suspected ULA camps were within forty miles of the known IRA outpost. Less than an hour's drive, Jack thought. If they only knew. He would have settled for having the Provos clean out the ULA, as they evidently wanted to do. There were indications that the Brits were thinking along similar lines. Jack wondered what Mr. Owens thought of that one and concluded that he probably didn't know. It was a surprising thought that he now had information that some experienced players did not. He went back to the pictures.
One, taken a week after Miller had been seen in Benghazi, showed a car—it looked like a Toyota Land Cruiser—about a mile from 11-5-18, heading away. Ryan wondered where it was going. He wrote down the date and time on the bottom of the photo and checked the cross-reference table in the front. Ten minutes later he found the same car, the next day, at Camp 11-5-09, a PIRA camp forty miles from 11-5-18.
Jack told himself not to get overly excited: 11-5-18 could belong to the Red Army Faction of West Germany, Italy's resurgent Red Brigade, or any number of other organizations with which the PIRA cross-pollinated. He still made some notes. It was a "datum," a bit of information that was worth checking out.
Next he checked the occupancy graph for the camp. This showed the number of camp buildings occupied at night, and went back for over two years. He compared it with a list of known ULA operations, and discovered… nothing, at first. The instances where the number of occupied buildings blipped up did not correlate with the organization's known activities… but there was some sort of pattern, he saw.
What kind of pattern? Jack asked himself. Every three months or so the occupancy went up by one. Regardless of the number of the people at the camp, the number of huts being used went up by one, for a period of three days. Ryan swore when he saw that the pattern didn't quite hold. Twice in two years the number didn't change. And what does that mean?
"You are in a maze of twisty passages, all alike," Jack murmured to himself. It was a line from one of his computer games. Pattern-recognition was not one of his strong points. Jack left the room to get a can of Coke, but more to clear his head. He was back in five minutes.
He pulled the occupancy graphs from the three «unknown» camps to compare the respective levels of activity. What he really needed to do was to make Xerox copies of the graphs, but CIA had strict rules on the use of copying machines. Doing it would take time that he didn't want to lose at the moment. The other two camps showed no recognizable pattern at all, while Camp -18 did seem to lean in that direction. He spent an hour doing this. By the end of it he had all three graphs memorized. He had to get away from it. Ryan tucked the graphs back where they belonged and returned to examining the photographs themselves.
Camp 11-5-20, he saw, showed a girl in one photo. At least there was someone there wearing a two-piece bathing suit. Jack stared at the image for a few seconds, then turned away in disgust. He was playing voyeur, trying to discern the figure of someone who was probably a terrorist. There were no such attractions at camps -04 and -18, and he wondered at the significance of this until he remembered that only one satellite was giving daylight photos with people in them. Ryan made a note to himself to check at the Academy's library for a book on orbital mechanics. He decided that he needed to know how often a single satellite passed over a given spot in a day.
"You're not getting anywhere," he told himself aloud.
"Neither is anybody else," Marty Cantor said. Ryan spun around.
"How did you get in here?" Jack demanded.
"I'll say one thing for you, Jack, when you concentrate you really concentrate. I've been standing here for five minutes." Cantor grinned. "I like your intensity, but if you want an opinion, you're pushing a little hard, fella."
"I'll survive."
"You say so," Cantor said dubiously. "How do you like our photo album?"
"The people who do this full-time must go nuts."
"Some do," Cantor agreed.
"I might have something worth checking out," Jack said, explaining his suspicions on Camp -18.
"Not bad. By the way, number -20 may be Action-Directe, the French group that's picked up lately. DGSE—the French foreign intelligence service—thinks they have a line on it."
"Oh. That may explain one of the photos." Ryan flipped to the proper page.
"Thank God Ivan doesn't know what that bird does," Cantor nodded. "Hmm. We may be able to ID from this."
"How?" Jack asked. "You can't make out her face."
"You can tell her hair length, roughly. You can also tell the size of her tits." Cantor grinned ear to ear.
"What?"
"The guys in photointerpretation are—well, they're very technical. For cleavage to show up in these photos, a girl has to have C-cup breasts—at least that's what they told me once. I'm not kidding, Jack. Somebody actually worked the math out, because you can identify people from a combination of factors like hair color, length, and bust size. Action-Directe has lots of female operatives. Our French colleagues might find this interesting." If they're willing to deal, he didn't say.
"What about -18?"
"I don't know. We've never really tried to identify that one. The thing about the car may count against it, though."
"Remember that our ULA friends have the Provos infiltrated," Jack said.
"You're still on that, eh? Okay, it's something to be considered," Cantor conceded. "What about this pattern thing you talked about?"
"I haven't got anything to point to yet," Jack admitted.
"Let's see the graph."
Jack unfolded it from the back of the binder. "Every three months, mostly, the occupancy rate picks up."
Cantor frowned at the graph for a moment. Then he flipped through the photographs. On only one of the dates did they have a daylight photo that showed anything. Each of the camps had what looked like a shooting range. In the photo Cantor selected, there were three men standing near it.
"You might have something, Jack."
"What?" Ryan had looked at the photo and made nothing of it.
"What's the distinguishing feature of the ULA?"
"Their professionalism," Ryan answered.
"Your last paper on them said they were more militarily organized than some of the others, remember? Every one of them, as far as we can tell, is skilled with weapons."
"So?"
"Think!" Cantor snapped. Ryan gave him a blank look. "Periodic weapons-refresher training, maybe?"