“Can that be?” Kelly wanted to know.
Quinn nodded. “As far as I can tell, STAAR appears to do nothing, which means it doesn’t attract any attention. The operating budget is hidden inside the highly classified budget of the National Reconnaissance Organization.”
He tapped his computer screen. “Actually, the most interesting thing about STAAR that I could find isn’t the budget but something that’s missing: there’s no personnel records for the people who make up STAAR.” He leaned back in his seat. “As far as the personnel paperwork trail that any organization affiliated with the U.S. Government has to have, no matter how secret, STAAR is an organization with no people. Hell, even the CIA has some paperwork on assassins it hires.”
Kelly stared at him. “What—” she began, but paused as Quinn suddenly leaned forward and began rapidly typing into his keyboard.
“Well, this is interesting. There’s a live link being picked up by the NSA involving STAAR,” he said.
“From where?” Kelly asked.
He pointed up at the screen at the front of the room. “From Aurora.” An electronic map of China appeared. A small flashing light on the wall screen sped across the overlay of the western edge of China, heading toward the safety of the ocean with surprising speed.
Kelly knew that Aurora was the top-of-the-line spy plane that the Air Force had, the successor to the SR-71.
“Data is being downlinked from Aurora to Scorpion Station,” Quinn added. “I’m intercepting a copy. Maybe we’ll learn something.”
Inside the STAAR command center deep under the ice, the woman who had run the organization for the past twenty-two years sat in a deep leather chair, looking at the various display screens that ran across the length of the front of the center. When she had to make contact with those in Washington or elsewhere, she had the ST-8 clearance that could get her whatever she wanted, no questions asked, and she was known only by her code name: Lexina.
She’d been picked by her predecessor for her intelligence, her loyalty, and above all her willingness to exile herself to Scorpion Station and never leave. She considered herself a soldier. A soldier who, like all soldiers, wished always for peace in her time but constantly prepared for the alternative and was willing to give her all if that alternative did occur.
“What is the status of Dr. Duncan?” Lexina asked.
“Airborne,” Elek, her chief of staff, answered. In STAAR the code name was the only way one identified oneself or addressed another. “Should be landing in Korea in less than an hour.”
“Who is on the ground waiting for them?” she asked. STAAR kept an active network of only twenty agents around the world. Add in the five members who ran Scorpion Base and they were an extremely small organization, which further added to their ability to maintain a veil of secrecy.
“Zandra is ready to meet the plane and brief them. Her cover is CIA,” Elek said. “Turcotte knows her as CIA from the Rift Valley mission, so that works best.”
The last was standard. STAAR used whichever government agency it saw fit as cover. Maintaining such covers had never caused trouble, due to their lack of intrusive activity over the years. Now Lexina saw trouble coming, but complaints from the CIA or NSA or any of the other alphabet-soup agencies were the least of her worries. She also knew it was just a matter of time before their initial veil of secrecy was pierced, but that didn’t concern her either. They had a plan in place for that.
“What about intelligence?” she asked.
“We haven’t heard anything out of China for—” Elek began, but Lexina cut him off.
“I know what we haven’t heard. That’s why we’ve authorized Duncan and her people to go in. How does it look for their mission?”
“We’ve got Aurora taking a look and gathering imagery,” Elek said. He typed into his keyboard.
Shaped like a black manta ray, Aurora was cruising at forty thousand feet over China, at a speed of Mach 5. As it approached the target area, it slowed down to less than 2.5, still over two thousand miles an hours, but slow enough so that the reconnaissance probe could be deployed.
In the backseat the RSO, reconnaissance systems officer, made sure all the systems were ready, then he activated them as they passed the target area.
“Anything on the HF or SATCOM frequencies we were told to monitor?” the pilot asked.
“Negative.”
“I wonder who the hell is down there,” the pilot said. “You couldn’t pay me to be on the ground in China these days.”
The RSO noted a red light flash on the left of his console.
“We’ve got missile launches,” he told the pilot. “I have what we came for. Pod’s coming in. Get us out of here.”
“Roger.” The pilot kicked in the afterburners. Both men were slammed back against their specially designed seats as the plane more than doubled its speed in less than fifteen seconds, leaving the missiles fired by the Chinese military well behind, the guidance systems electronically wondering where the target they had locked on to had gone.
“Downloading data,” the RSO said as the red light went out and the Pacific Ocean rapidly approached.
The data went through a scrambler and the garbled transmission was recorded onto a digital disk. The disk then played forward at two thousand times normal speed, bursting the message to an orbiting satellite. That satellite bounced the message to a sister satellite farther west and down to South Korea, where Zandra waited, the data also forwarded to Scorpion Base and intercepted by the NSA and sent to Major Quinn in the Cube.
“I’ve got a copy of the data,” Quinn announced.
“Is it going anywhere else other than Antarctica?” Kelly Reynolds asked.
“A copy is being forwarded to Osan Air Force Base in South Korea,” Quinn said.
“Looking through it, there seems to be mainly imagery of western China.”
“Osan is where Turcotte and Nabinger are being briefed,” Kelly said.
“I don’t get it,” Quinn said. “Who’s handling their operation? I thought it was CIA.”
“If you don’t know,” Kelly said, “I for one don’t know. But this may mean that whoever is in Osan waiting for them isn’t CIA but connected to STAAR.”
“It’s a possibility,” Quinn agreed. “But whoever’s there, they’re obviously getting the best possible intelligence for the mission.”
“What’s the political situation in China?” Kelly asked. She felt very uneasy in the closed confines of the Cube, so far underground. Everything here represented what she hated, and this intrigue about the mission into China was causing her to teeter on the verge of despair.
“CNN has the best coverage,” Quinn said as he turned one of the front screens to the news network. A reporter was standing in front of a modern building in Hong Kong as people hurried in the streets behind him. Ever since Hong Kong had been turned over to the Chinese government it had existed as a strange netherworld between the rest of the world and the government in Beijing. Any news that managed to get out of China came out of the small former colony like this reporter’s best guesses as to what was happening on the mainland:
“There have been unconfirmed reports that elements of the Twenty-sixth Army have moved into positions around the city of Beijing. Whether these reports are true is not known, nor is it known whether the government will use these troops in an attempt to abort this movement that has been going on for the past week.”
“So far things in the capital have been calm, but there are vague reports of fighting in the countryside, especially in the Western Provinces, where ethnic and religious groups have long chafed under the heavy hand of the Chinese government.”