Executive orders - Tom Clancy [95]
That's nice, Major, who are you? Jack blinked his eyes and forgot to be polite, but probably the officer understood.
Sir, I'm the watch officer in Signals. We have a report with high confidence that the President of Iraq was assassinated about ten minutes ago.
Source? Jack asked at once.
Kuwait and Saudi both, sir. It was on Iraqi TV live, some sort of event, and we have people over there to monitor their TV. We have a tape being uplinked to us right now. The initial word is a pistol right in the head, at close range. The tone of the officer's voice wasn't exactly regretful. Well, they finally popped that fucker! Of course, you couldn't exactly say that to the President.
And you needed to figure who they was.
Okay, Major, what's the drill? The answer came quickly enough. Ryan replaced the phone.
Now what? Cathy asked. Jack swung his feet out of bed before answering.
The President of Iraq was just killed.
His wife almost said, Good, but stopped. The death of such a person was not as distant a concept as it had once been. How odd to feel that way about someone who could best serve the world by leaving it.
Is that important?
In about twenty minutes, they'll tell me. Ryan coughed before going on. What the hell, I used to be competent in those areas. Yeah, it's potentially very important. With that he did what every man in America did in the morning. He headed to the bathroom ahead of his wife. For her part, Cathy lifted the remote and performed the other ordinarily male function of clicking on the bedroom TV, surprised to find that CNN didn't have anything on but reports on which airports were operating behind schedule. Jack had told her a few times just how good the White House Signals Office was.
Anything? her husband asked, coming back out.
Not yet. Then it was her turn.
Jack had to think about where his clothes were, wondering how a President was supposed to dress. He found his robe-moved in from the Naval Observatory after having been moved there from Eighth and I, after having been removed from their home damn-and opened the bedroom door. An agent in the hall handed him three morning papers. Thanks.
Cathy saw that and stopped cold in her tracks, belatedly realizing that there had been people just outside her bedroom door all night. Her face turned away, forming the sort of smile generated by finding an unexpected mess in the kitchen.
Jack?
Yes, honey?
If I kill you in bed some night, will those people with guns get me right away, or will it wait until morning?
THE REAL WORK was being done at Fort Meade. The video had traveled from one monitoring station on the Kuwait-Iraq border and another in Saudi Arabia, known as PALM BOWL and STORM TRACK, respectively, the latter set up to record all signals out of Baghdad, and the former watching the southeastern part of the country, around Basra. From both places the information traveled by fiberoptic cable to the National Security Agency's deceptively small building in King Khalid Military City (KKMC) and uplinked to a communications satellite, which then shot it back to NSA headquarters. There in the watch room, ten people summoned by one of the junior watch officers huddled around a TV monitor to catch the tape, while the more senior troops, in a separate glass-walled office, sipped their coffee soberly.
Yes! an Air Force sergeant observed on seeing the shot, Nothin' but net! Several high fives were exchanged. The senior watch officer, who'd already called White House Signals, nodded his more restrained approval and relayed the original signal along the way, and ordered a digital enhancement, which would take a few minutes-only a few frames were all that important, and they had a massive Cray supercomputer to handle that.
RYAN REMARKED QUIETLY that while Cathy was getting the kids ready for school, and herself ready to operate on people's eyes, here he was in Signals watching the instant replay of a murder. His designated national intelligence officer was still at CIA, finishing his morning intake of information,