One of the club’s billionaire octogenarians, Otis J. Lynberg II, had lodged an official complaint with the Chairman, Palmer Weinberger. Visiting dignitaries should be invited to play elsewhere, he’d snorted. Later, when he’d spotted the President alighting from Marine One, Otis had immediately sought out Palmer again, wholeheartedly endorsing the President’s visit but expressing his displeasure that members were given no advance warning. He’d become even more irate when he was told that members were not going to be presented to the President. It was precisely the sort of scenario Dan Esposito wanted to avoid.
‘What a pity the cameras aren’t around when you want them!’ the President said, his voice raised in enthusiasm as he watched his drive off the first tee bounce down the middle of the long par five fairway.
‘Nice shot, Mr President,’ Richard Halliwell acknowledged grudgingly, as he prepared to tee up behind his host. The first tee was nearly half the size of a bowling green, and the immaculately kept turf was on top of a raised mound, three sides of which were protected by weathered sandstone. Halliwell stepped back from his ball and assessed his drive. For the first 200 metres the fairway dropped away towards a treacherous hazard – a deep creek that could only be crossed by walking over a quaint little stone-arch bridge. From there the fairway climbed a gently undulating slope to a huge green nestled in among stately redwood pines that were more than a hundred years old. He lined up his driver and adjusted his stance. He stared at the white ball imagining it represented GlaxoSmithKline. The silence of the first tee was broken by a sharp whistling sound as Richard Halliwell tried to get his ball past the President’s.
‘That’s big trouble in there, Hal!’ President Harrison shouted with the enthusiasm of a small boy in the middle of a marbles match. Halliwell’s lips compressed into a hard, thin line as he watched his ball take on a vicious hook and disappear into the thick rough underneath the trees just short of the creek.
‘It’s not over until the fat lady sings, Mr President,’ Halliwell replied, struggling to keep the jocularity in his voice. Much to the President’s amusement, Dan Esposito nearly put his ball in the creek but at the last moment it bounced into the trees on the opposite side of the fairway to Halliwell’s.
Halliwell combed the thick rough, trying to keep his agitation in check. Finding his ball in here would need a small miracle, he thought, and he was not one to believe in miracles. He took a quick glance back towards the fairway. Dan Esposito was in the rough on the far side and the President was giving him stick from his cart about 20 metres away. The Secret Service agents were all scanning the sides of the fairway ahead. Choosing a small clear area, Halliwell put his hand in the pocket of his golfing slacks, undid the zip that he’d had his tailor sew in the pocket and dropped a brand new ball down his trouser leg. He always played with a number one that was embossed with the gold Halliwell ‘H’, and as the ball rolled into a depression he gently moved it into a better lie with his foot.
‘Want some help, Hal?’ the President called.
‘Got it thanks, Mr President.’ Richard Halliwell walked back to the cart he was sharing with the President and selected a five wood. Moments later he watched with satisfaction as he drilled his ball over the creek and up the slope to within striking distance of the hole.
‘Nice recovery, Hal,’ the President shouted. Richard Halliwell waved his golf club in acknowledgment.
‘Number three, Mr Esposito?’ the Secret Service agent asked, looking at the partially buried ball. The Secret Service agents assigned to protect the President detested the arrogant little advisor. Esposito waddled over and grunted. ‘Stupid fucking game,’ he muttered, but ‘Whatever it Takes’ was Esposito’s motto in politics and in life and if today that was a golf game, then so be it.
While the President and Richard Halliwell played golf, both men yet to discuss their plans to change the course of history, satellite imagery from the top-secret National Reconnaissance Office in Chantilly, Virginia was on its way to Pakistan where a more violent and menacing history was about to be written.
CHAPTER 32
T he National Reconnaissance Office or NRO top-secret satellite ground station connected to NORAD, the North American Aerospace Defense Command inside Cheyenne Mountain, and to many other similar stations besides – had a large plaque on the wall of the command centre. It was inscribed around the edges with ‘National Reconnaissance Office: We Own The Night’. The logo looked like something out of science fiction, but since September 11, a lot of science fiction and reality had become indistinguishable. The inner circle of the plaque was black with a pair of sinister-looking owl’s eyes peering out from behind a silver mesh that was identical to that on the Lacrosse series of satellites’ wire mesh antennae. The logo was a reminder to the operators hunched over their high-resolution screens that dozens of sophisticated US satellites were orbiting between 300 and 40,000 kilometres above the Earth, their cameras turning night into day. Some, like the Defense Support Program satellites controlled by the US Air Force operated in the infra-red spectrum to detect missile launches. Others were capable of reading the numbers on a letterbox. In the NRO command centre, Iraq was still dominating collection priorities, and the KeyHole and Lacrosse satellites were sending back real-time information as they passed over Baghdad, Fallujah, Mosul, Tikrit and other Iraqi cities every hour.
The Lacrosse satellites, codenamed onyx, vega and indigo, and weighing a massive 15 tonnes, were in a relatively low orbit – 650 kilometres above the earth. Travelling at over 6 kilometres a second, with huge power-generating solar arrays the size of the wings on a 747, the synthetic aperture radars were peering through clouds and weather that might have made targets hard to detect. Right now, a satellite from a sister program – the highly classified advanced KeyHole series KH-11 – was directly over Baghdad on its midday pass over the city. Launched from a massive but expendable Titan IV rocket and costing more than $1.5 billion, KH-11 was also the size of a school bus and its cameras operated in the near infra-red and thermal infra-red spectra, which enabled it to see at night, as well as operating in the visible light spectrum for daylight surveillance. The photostream could detect someone wearing a pistol, but even though the satellite cameras could pierce through clouds and bad weather, there was still no way for them to determine what vehicles might contain explosives.
Iraq was not the only place in the world being examined in minute detail, and another bank of computers further over was linked to the KeyHole series footprinted over the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. A few hours ago the huge satellite had passed over Peshawar and the nearby foothills of the Hindu Kush. The real-time photos of a white van with Hyderabad Laundry Company emblazoned on the side, approaching what looked like a dirt-poor village didn’t mean anything to the operator, but like thousands of other images that might be connected with the new war on terror, the file was marked for transmission to Langley, just in case.