Line of Control - Tom Clancy [50]
Rodgers had his hands in his pockets, his eyes on the oilstained field.
He was thinking about the data Friday had sent to the NSA and the files Herbert had forwarded to him. He was also thinking about Ron Friday himself. And the many Ron Fridays he had worked with over the decades.
Rodgers always had a problem with missions that involved other governments and other agencies within his own government.
Information given to a field operative was not always informative.
Sometimes it was wrong, by either accident, inefficiency, or design.
The only way to find out for sure was to be on the mission. By then, bad information or wrong conclusions drawn from incomplete data could kill you.
The other problem Rodgers had with multigroup missions was authority and accountability. Operatives were like kids in more ways than one.
They enjoyed playing outside and they resented having to listen to someone else's "parent."
Ron Friday might be a good and responsible man. But first and foremost, Friday had to answer to the head of the NSA and probably to his sponsor in the Indian government. Satisfying their needs, achieving their targets, took priority over helping Rodgers, the mission leader.
Ideally, their goals would be exactly the same and there would be no conflict.
But that rarely happened. And sometimes it was worse than that.
Sometimes operatives or officers were attached to a mission to make sure that it failed, to embarrass a group that might be fighting for the attention of the president or the favor of a world leader or even the same limited funding.
In a situation where a team was already surrounded by adversaries Mike Rodgers did not want to feel as if he could not count on his own personnel. Especially when the lives of the Strikers were at risk.
Of course, Rodgers had never met Ron Friday or the Black Cat officer they were linking up with. Captain Nazir. He would do what he always did: size them up when he met them. He could usually tell right away whether he could or could not trust people.
Right now, though, the thing that troubled Rodgers most had nothing to do with Friday. It had to do with the explosion in Srinagar. In particular, with that last call from the home phone to the field phone.
Other nations routinely used cell phones as part of their intelligence-gathering and espionage efforts. Not just surveillance of the calls but the hardware itself. The electronics did not raise alarms at airport security; most government officials, military personnel, and business people had them; and they already had some of the wiring and microchips that were necessary for saboteurs. Cell phones were also extremely well positioned to kill. It did not take more than a wedge of C-4, packed inside the workings of a cell phone, to blow the side of a target's head off when he answered a call.
But Rodgers recalled one incident in particular, in the former Portuguese colony of Timor, that had parallels to this.
He had read about it in an Australian military white paper while he was on Melville Island observing naval maneuvers in the Timor Sea in 1999.
The invading Indonesian military had given cell phones to poor East Timorese civilians in what appeared to be a gesture of good will. The civilians were permitted to use the Indonesian military mobile communications service to make calls. The phones were not just phones but two-way radios. Civilians who had access to groups that were intensely loyal to imprisoned leader Xanana Gusmao were inadvertently used as spies to eavesdrop on nationalistic activities. Out of curiosity, Rodgers had asked a colleague in Australia's Department of Defense Strategy and Intelligence if the Indonesians had developed that themselves.
He said they had not. The technology had come from Moscow. The Russians were also big suppliers of Indian technology.
What was significant to Rodgers was that the radio function was activated by signals sent from the Indonesian military outpost in Baukau. The signals were sent after calls had indicated that one individual or another was going to be