Dead or Alive - Tom Clancy [80]
“Am I late?” Mary Pat asked, and took a seat. Beyond the glass wall, the staff of the operations center silently went about its business. Like virtually every conference room at Liberty Crossing, the Counterterrorism Center was an EM tank—isolated from virtually all electromagnetic emissions, both inbound and outbound, save encrypted data streams.
“No, we’re early,” Margolin said. “The package is on its way down.”
“And?”
“We missed him,” Turnbull grumbled.
“Was he ever there?”
“Hard to say.” This from Operations Chief Janet Cummings. “We’ve got product from the raid, but how good we don’t know. Somebody was there—probably a higher-up—but beyond that …”
“Nine dead,” Turnbull said.
“Prisoners?”
“Started with two, but during the exfil the team was am-bushed and they lost one; lost the second when their LZ took an RPG. Lost some Rangers, too.”
“Ah, shit.”
Ah shit, indeed, Mary Pat thought. The Rangers would, of course, be mourning the loss of one of their own, but these guys were the best of the best; consequently, they took the hazards simply as part of the job. They were consummate professionals, but whereas their civilian counterparts might know how to unclog a drain or rewire a house or build a skyscraper, Rangers specialized in something completely different: killing bad guys.
“The team leader”—Cummings paused to check her file—“Sergeant Driscoll, was wounded, but he made it. According to Driscoll’s after-action report, the prisoner stood up during the firefight. On purpose.”
“Christ,” Mary Pat muttered. They’d seen that before with URC soldiers, preferring death over capture. Whether that was born of pride or an unwillingness to risk talking during interrogation was a point of heated debate in the intelligence and military communities.
“The second one tried to make a break for it when the helo went down. They dropped him.”
“Well, not exactly a dry hole,” Turnbull said, “but not the result we wanted.”
The problem hadn’t been the radio transmission, of that Mary Pat was certain. She’d read both the raw data and the analysis. Somebody had been transmitting from that cave using recognized URC plain-speak code packets. One of the words—Lotus—is something they’d seen before, both in asset debriefs from case officers and in NSA Driftnet intercepts, but what it meant no one had been able to determine.
They’d long suspected the URC had gone old school for its encrypted communications, employing onetime pads, essentially a point-to-point protocol where only the sender and receiver had the pad required to decrypt the message. The system was ancient, dating back to the Roman Empire, but reliable and, provided the pads were in fact fully randomized, nearly impossible to break unless you got your hands on a pad. On a Tuesday, say, Bad Guy A would send a series of key words—dog, cabbage, chair—to Bad Guy B, who, using his own pad, would convert the words to their alphanumeric value, so dog would translate into 4, 15, and 7, which in turn would translate into a different word altogether. Special Forces teams in Afghanistan had in raids captured a number of onetime pads, but none were current, and so far neither the CIA nor the NSA had been able to glean a pattern from which they might extrapolate a key.
There were downsides to the system, however. First, it was cumbersome. For it to work properly, senders and receivers had to be working on the same physical pads, switching to a new one at the same intervals, the more often the better, which in turn required couriers to move between Bad Guy A and Bad Guy B. Whereas the CIA had Acre Station dedicated to hunting down the Emir, the FBI had a working group called Clownfish, dedicated to intercepting a URC courier.
The big question, Mary Pat knew, was: What had prompted whoever had been living in the cave to bug out shortly before the team hit the ground? Dumb coincidence or something more? She doubted it was human error; Rangers were too good for that.