Despite the air-conditioning pumping outside, Norward felt a trickle of sweat run down his back.
“Any idea what it is?” Yakov asked.
“It’s definitely a virus,” Kenyon said. “But it’s moving way too fast. It’s got to be passed on quicker than blood contact to hit this many people so quickly. And it looks like it’s one hundred percent fatal.”
“We didn’t check the town,” Turcotte said. “Maybe someone’s alive.” “Maybe.” Kenyon didn’t sound very optimistic.
“Could it be airborne?” Norward whispered, the very thought enough to make him wish he were very far away from here.
Kenyon stared at the isolation box. “I never thought we’d see an airborne virus that killed this quickly and could stay alive in the open. It doesn’t compute in the natural scale of things,” Kenyon said. “But…” He shook his head. “But it’s got to be vectoring some way quicker than body fluid.”
“The Black Death was transmitted by fleas,” Yakov said. “Could this virus be carried by some sort of animal or fly or something like that?”
Kenyon was still looking through the microscope. “Possibly. But then, it probably doesn’t kill its host. We need more information. And quickly.”
Peter Shartran carefully dipped the tea bag in a mug of hot water. He placed it on a spoon, then wrapped the string around, squeezing the last drops out, then discarded the bag into the waste can next to his desk. He cradled both hands around the mug and leaned back in his large swivel chair, staring at the oversized computer screen in front of him. He had six programs accessed, and his eyes flickered from one to another.
The NSA was established in 1952 by President Truman as a replacement for the Armed Forces Security Agency. It was charged with two major responsibilities: safeguarding the communications of the armed forces and monitoring the communications of other countries to gather intelligence. The term “communications” had changed from the original mandate in 1952. Back then the primary concern was radio. Now, with the age of satellites and computers, it involved all electronic media.
Shartran had been “given” a special tasking by his supervisor — to watch two separate locations, one in South America and one in China. So far it had been uninteresting, but mainly because he had spent the last several hours shifting through the communications and signals generated by Chinese forces and trying to get an order of battle on forces deployed near Qian-Ling, a routine task for an intelligence analyst. There had been nothing from the South America locale.
Shartran’s ears and eyes were a battery of sophisticated and tremendously expensive equipment. A KH-12 satellite had been moved over to a fixed orbit over Qian-Ling in China. Covering South America was much easier, as he had simply tapped into the Department of Defense antidrug network that blanketed that region of the world.
Shartran took a sip of his tea, preparing to get back to work on the order of battle, when a flashing symbol on one of the displays caught his attention. Several minutes before, something most unusual had happened: someone had bounced a signal off a GPS satellite and then received a back signal through the satellite.
The signal was strange because the satellite uplink went to the GPS satellite instead of one of the commercial satellites that handled SATCOM traffic.
GPS, which stood for ground positioning system, was a series of satellites in fixed orbits that continuously emitted location information that could be downloaded by GPRs — ground positioning receivers. The transmission had been sent up in such a frequency and modulation that it piggybacked on top of the normal GPS transmission on the way back down both times.
Shartran looked at the data and took another sip of tea as he considered the brief burst. Why would someone do that? The first and most obvious reason was to hide both brief transmissions. Shartran knew that even a one-second burst using modern encoding devices was enough to transmit a whole message, but maybe this wasn’t a message. The key question was why use the GPS satellite?
“Because they want to know where something is,” Shartran said out loud. But then, why didn’t the people on the other end simply tell the first transmitters their location? The answer came to him as quickly as he thought the question: because there was no one at the second site. It was all clicking now, and the more Shartran thought about it, the more his respect grew for whoever had thought of this. Using the GPS signal allowed the first transmitter to get a fix on the response, which was blindly broadcast up. And there was more. Maybe, just maybe, Shartran thought, the second signal was very weak and needed the GPS signal to add to its power.
“Most interesting,” he muttered as he summarized the information on his computer and e-mailed it into the Pentagon intelligence summary section. As the report flashed along the electronic highway, it fell in among hundreds of other summaries coming out of the vast octopus of intelligence agencies the United States fielded. And there it spooled, waiting to be correlated and even perhaps read. But Shartran also made a copy and sent it to the address his supervisor had told him to.
CHAPTER 14
“This is our main training area,” Osebold told Duncan.
The dominating feature of the large hangar was a three-story-high water tank, almost a hundred meters in diameter. The exterior of the tank was painted a flat gray. Several ramps went up the side of the tank. There were also tracks suspended from the ceiling over the top of the tank, several having various devices hanging down from them.
There were several men gathered around the top edge of the tank, looking down at something inside. They wore shorts and black T-shirts with the trident, eagle, flintlock pistol, and anchor symbol of the Navy SEALs on the front. Each of the men looked as if he spent his entire day split between the gym and the beach — bronzed, well-muscled warriors. Captain Osebold led Duncan over to the side of the tank where his crew was.
“Aren’t you cutting it tight for launch?” Duncan asked.
As if on cue, the speaker blared once more. “Perform IMU preflight calibration.”
“We’ll make it,” Osebold said.
“How did the SEALs get tagged for this?” Duncan asked.
“Because we’re used to operating in a nonbreathing environment. Plus we have some degree of familiarity with a sort of zero-g operational area.”
Duncan knew about the SEALs. The acronym stood for sea, air, land — which pretty much had covered the three environments the naval commandos had been asked to work in up to now. Duncan wondered where they would add the “space” to their name.
SEALs were the most physically fit of all the special operations forces, taking great pride in their conditioning. They were adept at operating underwater with a variety of equipment, and it did make sense for them to be picked for a combat space force.
The SEALs had grown out of the Navy frogmen in World War II, called UDTs — underwater demolition teams — at the same time Turcotte’s Special Forces had grown out of the OSS, Office of Strategic Services. The SEALs had always been less of a sneaky-Pete type organization, more oriented toward combat. Along with Special Forces, the SEALs had been the most decorated force in Vietnam. The thing Turcotte had impressed Duncan with was that the SEALs had never in their entire history left behind one of their own — be he dead or wounded. No Navy SEAL had ever been taken prisoner.
But Duncan had to wonder why the military had been brought in on this operation. The military had run Area 51 and Dulce. Duncan returned her attention to this new unit. A rack was behind the team, holding five roughly human-shaped suits.
Osebold saw Duncan’s glance. “Those are our TASC-suits. We use them instead of NASA’s space suits.”