"Shit, it's the reason they recruited me."
With that, he pushed past Vaughn and left the latrine.
Royce read the message from Tai to ARPERCEN twice, then closed the lid of David's laptop. He was seated in David's Defender, which he'd parked along the side of a road overlooking Kaneohe Marine Corps Air Base. He put a set of binoculars to his eyes and looked down at the runway. A Gulfstream jet painted flat black was parked near the tower, door open and stairs down.
Royce adjusted the focus as a half-dozen people emerged from the building below the tower and made their way to the plane. Even without the aid of the binoculars he would have been able to spot David's figure among them. The other five were around David's age, but Royce had never seen any of them before. They were all dressed aloha style and seemed quite excited.
The heat was reflected off the tarmac, intensifying the effect of the sun. David put a hand over his eyes to shade them and looked up at the mountains to the west. He knew Royce was up there somewhere. He was going to miss his friend. He dawdled, letting the others pass him on the way to the plane. There was a distinct sense of anticipation among them – the payoff after decades of hard work in the trenches was at hand. It wasn't a normal retirement, but none of them had lived normal lives. The other five were from the mainland and had been flown to Hawaii the previous day. David had never met any of them before, though he knew it was possible he'd worked on missions in conjunction with some if not all of them. The Organization was big, its tentacles spread around the planet.
As he reached the steps up to the plane, he paused, looked past the mountain where he knew Royce was and to the sky. As his brother must have looked at the sky that morning over sixty years ago, he reflected. His last dawn. He and his older brother had been close for all of his fourteen years, before his brother enlisted and was shipped out to basic and then to Hawaii.
David had visited the Punchbowl the previous day and stood at his brother's grave, one of many with the same final date etched on the stone: 7 DECEMBER 1941. Leaving the grave for what he knew was the last time had been difficult, harder than leaving the small house on the east shore he'd called "home" for the last ten years. People in the covert world never really had homes.
A flash of light on the hillside caught his attention. He knew it was Royce, shifting his binoculars, the sun striking the lens. David waved, sighed, then stepped into the plane. As soon as he was on board, the door was pulled up behind him and the jet engines revved with power.
Royce tracked the Gulfstream down the runway and into the air. It was gaining altitude fast, rocketing up into the blue sky and banking to the west. He kept the craft in sight until it disappeared into the blue haze, then slowly lowered the binoculars and put them back in their case.
He glanced at the laptop lying on the passenger seat, feeling the pull of duty and work, but didn't pick it up for a while. The laptop was his link to David's – and now his – handler in the Organization. It was also the address where all information on the operation was collated. Royce had spent the morning recovering from the hangover that was the result of his and David's last night on the town, and then going through the computer after David disappeared in a cab to head to the Marine base. Royce had offered to drive, but David nixed that idea, saying they had kept their relationship secret all these years, there was no point in him showing up at the gate of Kaneohe with Royce at the wheel.
So Royce had checked what had been bequeathed to him by his old friend: an old truck and a new laptop. The setup inside the laptop was efficient. There was an address book with numerous points of contacts, each labeled with a code word and a brief summary of what that POC was responsible for. It was specific and extensive. If he needed weapons up to and including heavy machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades in Chile, there was a phone number and a code name. If he needed access to the Defense Intelligence Agency's most deeply held files, there was an e-mail address, a phone number, and a code name for that. There were even access points for most other country's intelligence agencies.
Royce had his own code name. Like the others, it was a six letter/number combination. An annotation told him that the code cycled every forty-eight hours, which required him to sync the computer to the satellite wireless system it automatically picked up every time it was on, at least every two days. He had no doubt he was hooked in to Milstar, the secure satellite system the Pentagon had circling the planet.
Since the satellites were linked to each other, Milstar provided initial security by requiring no ground relay, which could always be tapped in to. And the satellites used frequency hopping to transmit their encrypted messages. When he checked into Milstar after first using it several years ago – and he always checked everything he used, since his life depended on it – he discovered that the Air Force claimed there were five working satellites in the system, even though six had been launched. The publicity page on the Air Force website claimed that a mistake was made on the third launch in 1999 and the satellite had been placed in a nonusable orbit.
He very much wanted to know where that satellite was in geosynchronous orbit. He had a feeling it would tell him a great deal about the Organization he worked for, because he doubted that the orbit for that one had been a mistake. Perhaps from the Air Force point of view it had not gone where they wanted, but he believed that someone else was very happy wherever that satellite had ended up.
Royce sighed. All this thinking was keeping him from doing what had to be done. He opened up the laptop and read Tai's request to ARPERCEN one more time. It was either bullshit, stupidity, or something else. Because he had told Tai, as he'd told the others, in no uncertain terms, that she was no longer part of the big green machine and could never go back to it. So why was she sending an e-mail concerning a next assignment that would never happen?
She was not stupid. He had her file. Tops in her class at the University of Arizona. While on active duty, she had somehow managed to earn a Ph.D. in military history. Every efficiency report sparkled and glowed with that extra bit of effort that indicated her commanders had not been just routinely punching her ticket, but truly impressed with her. Until she was accused of abusing prisoners in Iraq, a strange departure from her straight and narrow record to that point.
Since she wasn't stupid, that meant the ARPERCEN request wasn't bullshit. Which meant it was something else, and the only thing Royce could come up with was that it was some sort of coded message Tai had sent to someone on the outside.
According to the file, she'd been recruited because of the prisoner abuse charges – and her personal motivation after losing her sister on 9/11. Her test – like those of all the others – had been to assassinate a target designated by the Organization. Even he had no idea why these people have been targeted. She had killed the target as ordered, so there was some degree of security in that – she'd crossed a line.
But…
Royce brought up her 201 personnel file once more and began reading it, searching for the thread he must have missed the first time through, now that he suspected that Captain Tai was more than she appeared to be. He glanced at his watch. The C-130 for the recon team should be ready on Okinawa by now. And Tai and Vaughn should be heading to the airfield.
Royce pulled out his secure satellite phone and punched in a number.