Dead or Alive - Tom Clancy [13]
“Okay, take some measurements and some samples, then go see if Smith is done taking shots of the gomers’ faces and photograph the hell out of this thing,” Driscoll ordered. “How many SD cards we got?”
“Six. Four gigs each. Plenty.”
“Good. Multiple shots of everything, highest resolution. Get some extra lights on it, too, and drop something beside for scale.”
“Reno’s got a tape measure.”
“Good. Use it. Plenty of angles and close-ups—the more, the better.” That was the beauty of digital cameras—take as many as you want and delete the bad ones. In this case they’d leave the deleting to the intel folks. “And check every inch for markings.”
Never could tell what was important. A lot would depend on the model’s scale, he suspected. If it was to scale they might be able to plug the measurements into a computer, do a little funky algebra or algorithms or whatever they used, and come up with a match somewhere. Who knew, maybe the papier-mâché stuff would turn out to be special or something, made only in some back-alley shop in Kandahar. Stranger shit had happened, and he wasn’t about to give the higher-ups anything to bitch about. They’d be angry enough that their quarry hadn’t been here, but that wasn’t Driscoll’s fault. Pre-mission intelligence, bad or good or otherwise, was beyond a soldier’s control. Still, the old saying in the military, “Shit runs downhill,” was as true as ever, and in this business there was always someone uphill from you, ready to give the shit ball a shove.
“You got it, boss,” Tait said.
“Frag it when you’re done. Might as well finish the job they should have done.”
Tait trotted off.
Driscoll turned his attention to the ammo box, picking it up and carrying it into the entrance tunnel. Inside was a stack of paper about three inches thick—some lined notebook paper covered in Arabic script, some random numbers and doodles—and a large two-sided foldout map. One side was labeled “Sheet Operational Navigation Chart, G-6, Defense Mapping Agency, 1982” and displayed the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region, while the other, held in place with masking tape, was a map of Peshawar torn from a Baedeker’s travel guide.
4
WELCOME TO AMERICAN AIRSPACE, gentlemen,” the copilot announced.
They were about to overfly Montana, home of elk, big skies, and a whole lot of decommissioned ICBM bases with empty silos.
They’d be burning fuel a lot faster down here, but the computer took notice of all that, and they had a much better reserve than what they’d had westbound over the Atlantic a few hours before—with a lot of usable fields down below to land on. The pilot turned on the heads-up display, which used low-light cameras to turn the darkness into green-and-white mono-color TV. Now it showed mountains to the west of their course track. The aircraft would automatically gain altitude to compensate, programmed as it was to maintain one thousand feet AGL—above ground level—and to do so with gentle angles, to keep his wealthy passengers happy and, he hoped, turn them into repeat customers.
The aircraft eased up to a true altitude of 6,100 feet as they passed over the lizard-back spine of the Grand Teton Range. Somewhere down there was Yellowstone National Park. In daylight he could have seen it, but it was a cloudless and moonless night.
The radar-sending systems showed they were “clear of conflict.” No other aircraft was close to their position or altitude. Mountain Home Air Force Base was a few hundred miles behind them, along with its complement of young piss-and-vinegar fighter pilots.
“Pity we can’t steer the HUD off the nose. Might even see the buffalo on the infrared sensors,