The whole organisation gave off a feeling of energy and quiet excitement. One bulletin board held rows of small black-and-white snapshots showing the high-ranking terrorists confirmed killed in Amir Taleh’s crackdown. Another tracked the ongoing disintegration of the HizbAllah’s command structure.
Thorn liked what he saw so far. These people weren’t just going through the motions. They were genuinely committed to their work.
He could also sense Rossini’s pride in his creation. In a little over a month, the big man had molded a disparate collection of forty or so counterterrorism experts drawn from everywhere across the vast alphabet soup of U.S. intelligence agencies into a unified team. That was an impressive accomplishment. Thorn knew a lot about motivating soldiers to work hard when their lives and those of their comrades were on the line. He was savvy enough to realise that he knew a lot less about motivating people when the stakes were more abstract.
The JSOC Intelligence Liaison Unit might be Major General Sam Farrell’s brainchild, but it was obvious that Joe Rossini’s drive and dedication had brought it to life.
His office was about as far back inside the complex as it was possible to get right next to Rossini’s. They shared a secretary and a photocopier. Beyond that and the same basic floor plan, the two rooms didn’t have anything in common.
The deputy director’s office was a mess. A series of framed photographs on the walls gave the room a personal touch. They showed a smiling Rossini, his wife, and an assortment of four or five children in a variety of settings. Everything else was work-related. Almost every square inch of desk and floor space was piled high with computer printouts and floppy disks. And books. Books on terrorism and psychology. Books on weapons, explosives, and sabotage. Books on the climates, cultures, and histories of different parts of the world. Stacks of books that were piled so high and so precariously that you had the feeling the slightest tremor would start an avalanche.
Slightly stunned by the sight of so much crammed into so little space, Thorn pulled his head out of Rossini’s room and ushered the big man into his own barren work area. None of his own personal effects had arrived from Fort Bragg yet not that he would have very much to hang on the walls even when they did, he realised.
He shut the door behind them, tossed his uniform cap onto his empty chair, and perched himself on one corner of the desk. He gestured toward the room’s only other seat. “Take a pew, Maestro.”
“Thanks.” Rossini sat down heavily.
Thorn watched the big man closely, noting the way he winced as he straightened his left leg out. He had been limping by the time they finished the brief tour. “Your knee giving you trouble?”
“A little. Too much football when I was younger and too many extra pounds now. My wife and kids watch my calories for me, but the weight doesn’t seem to come off.” Rossini dismissed his personal problems with a disinterested shrug. “What would you like to know first, Pete?”
“Well, I’d like a rundown on exactly how the outfit’s shaping up. Plus, where you see us fitting into the JSOC and Pentagon scheme of things.”
Thorn had read a huge stack of reports before flying up from North Carolina, but he wanted to hear it straight, without the usual official gobbledygook. From what Sam Farrell had said, Rossini had a reputation throughout the intelligence community for not pulling any punches even when keeping quiet might benefit his career. This seemed like a good time to find out how much of that reputation for candor was deserved.
Rossini didn’t disappoint him.
“We’ve got some damned good people working here, Pete.” The big man smiled gently. “Some of their social graces aren’t exactly up to snuff, but they’re some of the brightest puzzle-pushers I’ve ever seen. Too bright for the powers-that-be in their old agencies, I guess.”
Thorn nodded. He’d been worried by some of the things he’d read during his first quick scan through the Intelligence Liaison Unit’s personnel records until he’d begun to see the emerging pattern. Backed by Farrell’s carte Blanche, Rossini had recruited mavericks men and women whose skills were undoubted but who were widely viewed as square pegs in round holes inside the existing intelligence bureaucracies. At a time of declining budgets, the CIA, the NSA, and the other agencies were under increasing pressure to cut costs and staff. In those circumstances, the first to go were usually those who didn’t quite fit the button-down, yuppified tone emanating from each organization’s upper floors.
Those were exactly the kind of people Farrell had said he wanted for the ISOC liaison unit: people who were independent-minded and “just plain ornery enough” to take the analyses generated by the rest of the intelligence community, shake them up, turn them inside out, and basically play holy hell with the conventional wisdom.
Well, Joe Rossini had taken the general at his word, Thorn realized. The offices outside this room were crawling with men and women who loved nothing better than poking holes in other government agencies’ pet theories. Men and women who were now under his authority. Terrific. He had the sudden, unnerving feeling he’d just stepped out into a bureaucratic minefield.
He shook off the feeling and asked, “Any problems so far?” ’
“You mean besides our wonderful accommodations?”
Thorn matched Rossini’s wry tone. “Yeah. Besides that.”
“Frankly, not as many as I expected. The teams I’ve set up are shaking out pretty well. The data’s starting to come in and most of the agencies are cooperating or at least making a good first stab at it.”
Then Rossini shook his head. “But we need more focus, Pete. More practical input on the kinds of inter Delta, the SEALs, and the rest of the Command really need for planning and conducting operations. Without that we’re just another time-wasting loop in the information cycle.”
Thorn nodded, starting to understand why Farrell thought he could do some good here.
Providing the Joint Special Operations Command with highly accurate, up-to-date intelligence on terrorist groups and their foreign backers was the whole rationale for this new unit’s existence. The Special Operations Command already had a Directorate of Intelligence staffed by hundreds of dedicated professionals, but they were mostly sited far away from Washington, D.C. They were also often mired in the kinds of interagency rivalries and lockstep thinking that inevitably developed in large organisations.
For years Delta Force and the other American commando units had been complaining about the quality of the intelligence support they received. Delta even had its own detachment of covert operatives, nicknamed the Funny Platoon, to provide tactical intelligence just before any strike. The ILU was an effort to build on that to expand JSOC’s storehouse of reliable information to the strategic and operational levels. People outside JSOC saw Major General Farrell’s new unit as simple empire-building. People inside saw it as a matter of survival. Bad intelligence got good soldiers killed.
Apparently, the general was counting on him to give Rossini and his civilian teams the military and operational insights they lacked. Now, that made sense, Thorn thought, feeling a surge of excitement and satisfaction at the prospect of real, meaningful work work that could save lives. He wasn’t an analyst, and he certainly wasn’t a skilled “fixer” able to navigate the Pentagon’s tangled administrative backwaters. But he did know the kind of data commandos needed to survive and succeed.