Executive orders - Tom Clancy [547]
The first two agents in the door called three more into the apartment after the break-in had been effected. They photographed the apartment first of all, looking for possible telltales: seemingly innocent or random objects which, if disturbed in any way, warned the occupant that someone had been inside. These could be devilishly hard things to detect and defeat, but all five of the agents were part of the FBI's Foreign Counterintelligence Division, both trained against and trained by professional spooks. Shaking the apartment would take hours of exquisitely tedious effort. They knew that at least five other teams were doing the same thing to other potential subjects.
THE P-3C WAS hovering at the edge of the RADAR coverage for the Indian ships, keeping low and bumping through the roiled air over the warm surface of the Arabian Sea. They had tracks on thirty emitters from nineteen sources. The powerful, low-frequency search RADARs were the ones they worried about most, though the threat-receivers were getting traces of SAM RADARs as well. Supposedly, the Indians were running exercises, their fleet back at sea after a long stand-down for maintenance. The problem was that such workup exercises were quite indistinguishable from battle readiness. The data being analyzed by the onboard ELINT crew was downlinked to Anzio and the rest of the escorts for Task Group COMEDY, as the sailors had taken to calling the four Bob Hopes and their escorts.
The group commander was sitting in his cruiser's combat information center. The three large billboard displays (actually rear-projection televisions linked to the Aegis RADAR-computer system) showed the location of the Indian battle group with a fair degree of precision. He even knew which of the blips were probably the carriers. His task was a complex one. COMEDY was now fully formed. Under way-replenishment ships Plane and Supply were now attached to the group, along with their escorts Hawes and Can, and over the next few hours all of the escorts would take turns alongside to top off their fuel bunkers-for a Navy captain, having too much fuel was like having too much money: impossible. After that, the UNREP ships would be ordered to take position outboard of the leading tank carriers, and the frigates outboard of the trailers. O'Bannon would move forward to continue her ASW search-the Indians had two nuclear submarines, and nobody seemed to know where they were at the moment. Kidd and Anzio, both SAM ships, would back into the formation, providing close air defense. Ordinarily the Aegis cruiser would stand farther out, but not now.
The reason for that came not from his mission orders, but from TV. Every naval vessel in the group had its own satellite-TV receiver; in the modern Navy, the sailors wanted and got their own cable system, and while the crew spent most of their time watching the various movie channels-Playboy was always a favorite, sailors being sailors-the group commander was overdosing on CNN, because while his mission orders didn't always give him all the background information he needed for his missions, very often commercial TV did. The crews were tense. The news of events at home could not have been concealed from them in any case, and the images of sick and dying people, blocked interstates, and empty city streets had initially shaken them badly, causing officers and chiefs to sit down with the men on the mess decks to talk things through. Then had come these orders. Things were happening in the Persian Gulf, things were happening at home, and all of a sudden the MPS ships, with their brigade set of combat vehicles, were heading for the Saudi port of Dhahran and the Indian navy was in the way. The crew was quiet now, Captain Greg Kemper of USS Anzio saw. His chiefs reported that the troops were not laughing and cutting up in the mess rooms, and the constant simulations on the Aegis combat system in the past few days had conveyed their own message. COMEDY was sailing in harm's way.
Each of the escorting ships had a helicopter. These coordinated with the crack