Dead or Alive - Tom Clancy [81]
Barring coincidence, the most likely culprit was word of mouth. Rare was the day a helo could lift off from bases in either Pakistan or Afghanistan without a URC soldier or sympathizer taking note and making a call, a problem that had partially been solved by Special Forces teams making short, random hops around the countryside in the hours and days leading up to an op as well as using offset waypoints en route to the target, both of which helped keep prying eyes guessing. The rugged and unforgiving terrain made this problematic, though, as did the weather, which often made certain routes impassable. Just as Alexander the Great’s Army and the Soviets after them had learned, the geography of Central Asia was a foe unto itself. And an unconquerable one at that, Mary Pat thought. You either learned to live with it or work around it, or you failed. Hell, both Napoléon and Hitler had learned that lesson—albeit belatedly—each during a bold, if ill-advised, wintertime invasion of Russia. Of course, each of them had been certain of a quick victory, long before the snow started flying. And, hell, in Russia the land was nice and flat. Add mountains to the mix … Well, you’ve got Central Asia.
A courier appeared at the glass door, punched in the cipher code, and entered. Without a word he laid a stack of four brown, red-striped folders and an accordion folder before Margolin and then departed. Margolin passed out the folders, and for the next fifteen minutes the group read in silence.
Finally Mary Pat said, “A sand table? I’ll be damned.”
“Woulda been nice if they’d brought it back whole,” Turnbull said.
“Look at the dimensions,” Cummings said. “No way to get it outta there on foot. Not without compromising the team. Right call, I think.”
“Yeah, I suppose,” the Acre Station chief mumbled, unconvinced. Turnbull was under incredible pressure. While the official line was that the Emir wasn’t at the top of the United States’ Most Wanted List, he indeed was. However unlikely his capture was to turn the tide in the war on terrorism, having him on the loose out there was at best embarrassing. At worst, dangerous. John Turnbull had been hunting the Emir since 2003, first as Acre Station’s deputy, then as its head.
As good as Turnbull was at his job, like many current career CIA officers, he suffered from what Mary Pat and Ed called “operational disconnect.” He simply had no idea what an op looked like or felt like, in person, on the ground, and that disconnect led to a plethora of problems, which generally fell into one category: unrealistic expectations. In planning an op, you expect too much, either from the people working it or from the scope of the mission. Most ops aren’t home runs; they are base hits that slowly and steadily put points on the board that eventually add up to a big win. As Ed’s literary agent once told him, “It takes ten years to become an overnight success.” The same was generally true with covert ops. Sometimes intelligence, preparation, and good luck come together in the right way at the right time, but most times they’re out of sync just enough to keep that long ball from sailing over the left-field fence. And sometimes, she reminded herself as she continued scanning the report, you don’t know you’ve got a home run until well after the fact.
“You see this business about the Koran they found?” Cummings asked the group. “No way that belonged to anybody in that cave.”
No one responded; there was no need. She was right, of course, but barring an inscription and a “return to” address on the front cover, an antique Koran wasn’t going to do them much good.
“They got plenty of pictures, I see,” Mary Pat said. The Rangers had meticulously photographed all the URC faces in the cave. If any of them had been nabbed or tagged in the past, the computer would spit out the details. “And samples of the