Patriot games - Tom Clancy [177]
Next he checked the occupancy graph for the camp. This showed the number of camp buildings occupied at night, and went back for over two years. He compared it with a list of known ULA operations, and discovered nothing, at first. The instances where the number of occupied buildings blipped up did not correlate with the organization's known activities but there was some sort of pattern, he saw.
What kind of pattern? Jack asked himself. Every three months or so the occupancy went up by one. Regardless of the number of the people at the camp, the number of huts being used went up by one, for a period of three days. Ryan swore when he saw that the pattern didn't quite hold. Twice in two years the number didn't change. And what does that mean?
"You are in a maze of twisty passages, all alike," Jack murmured to himself. It was a line from one of his computer games. Pattern- recognition was not one of his strong points. Jack left the room to get a can of Coke, but more to clear his head. He was back in five minutes.
He pulled the occupancy graphs from the three "unknown" camps to compare the respective levels of activity. What he really needed to do was to make Xerox copies of the graphs, but CIA had strict rules on the use of copying machines. Doing it would take time that he didn't want to lose at the moment. The other two camps showed no recognizable pattern at all, while Camp -18 did seem to lean in that direction. He spent an hour doing this. By the end of it he had all three graphs memorized. He had to get away from it. Ryan tucked the graphs back where they belonged and returned to examining the photographs themselves.
Camp 11-5-20, he saw, showed a girl in one photo. At least there was someone there wearing a two-piece bathing suit. Jack stared at the image for a few seconds, then turned away in disgust. He was playing voyeur, trying to discern the figure of someone who was probably a terrorist. There were no such attractions at camps -04 and -18, and he wondered at the significance of this until he remembered that only one satellite was giving daylight photos with people in them. Ryan made a note to himself to check at the Academy's library for a book on orbital mechanics. He decided that he needed to know how often a single satellite passed over a given spot in a day.
"You're not getting anywhere," he told himself aloud.
"Neither is anybody else," Marty Cantor said. Ryan spun around.
"How did you get in here?" Jack demanded.
"I'll say one thing for you, Jack, when you concentrate you really concentrate. I've been standing here for five minutes." Cantor grinned. "I like your intensity, but if you want an opinion, you're pushing a little hard, fella."
"I'll survive."
"You say so," Cantor said dubiously. "How do you like our photo album?"
"The people who do this full-time must go nuts."
"Some do," Cantor agreed.
"I might have something worth checking out," Jack said, explaining his suspicions on Camp -18.
"Not bad. By the way, number -20 may be Action-Directe, the French group that's picked up lately. DGSE-the French foreign intelligence service-thinks they have a line on it."
"Oh. That may explain one of the photos." Ryan flipped to the proper page.
"Thank God Ivan doesn't know what that bird does," Cantor nodded. "Hmm. We may be able to ID from this."
"How?" Jack asked. "You can't make out her face."
"You can tell her hair length, roughly. You can also tell the size of her tits." Cantor grinned ear to ear.
"What?"
"The guys in photointerpretation are-well, they're very technical. For cleavage to show up in these photos, a girl has to have C-cup breasts-at least that's what they told me once. I'm not kidding, Jack. Somebody actually worked the math out, because you can identify people from a combination of factors like hair color, length, and bust size. Action-Directe