The Bear and the Dragon - Tom Clancy [200]
There was no way he could have known that, like any news cameraman, Pete Nichols could deal seconds as skillfully as any Las Vegas poker dealer. He winked at Barry Wise, and the four headed off to the van.
"Send it up now?" the producer asked.
"Lets not be too obvious about it," Wise thought. "Lets move a few blocks."
This they did, heading west toward Tiananmen Square, where a news van doing a satellite transmission wasnt out of the ordinary. Wise was already on his satellite phone to Atlanta.
"This is Wise Mobile in Beijing with an upload," the correspondent said into the phone.
"Hey, Barry," a familiar voice said in reply. "This is Ben Golden. What you got for us?"
"Its hot," Wise told his controller half a world away. "A double murder and a childbirth. One guy who got whacked is a Catholic cardinal, the Vatican ambassador to Beijing. The other ones a Chinese Baptist minister. They were both shot on camera. You might want to call Legal about it."
"Fuck!" Atlanta observed.
"Were uploading the rough-cut now, just so you get it. Ill stand by to do the talking. But lets get the video uploaded first."
"Roger that. Were standing by on Channel Zero Six."
"Zero Six, Pete," Wise told his cameraman, who also ran the uplink.
Nichols was kneeling by the control panels. "Standing by … tapes in … setting up for Six.., transmitting … now!" And with that, the Ku-band signal went racing upward through the atmosphere to the satellite hovering 22,800 miles directly over the Admiralty Islands in the Bismarck Sea.
CNN doesnt bother encrypting its video signals. To do so is technically inconvenient, and few people bother pirating signals they could just as easily get off their cable systems for free in a few minutes, or even get live just four seconds later. But this one was coming in at an awkward hour, which was, however, good for CNN Atlanta, because some headquarters people would want to go over it. A shooting death was not what the average American wanted with his Rice Krispies in the morning.
It was also downloaded by the American intelligence community, which holds CNN in very high regard, and doesnt distribute its news coverage very far in any case. But this one did go to the White House Office of Signals, a largely military operation located in the basement of the West Wing. There a watch officer had to decide how important it was. If it ranked as a CRITIC priority, the President had to know about it in fifteen minutes, which meant waking him up right now, which was not something to be done casually to the Commander-in-Chief. A mere FLASH could wait a little longer, like—the watch officer checked the wall clock—yeah, like until breakfast. So, instead, they called the Presidents National Security Adviser, Dr. Benjamin Goodley. Theyd let him make the call. He was a carded National Intelligence Officer.
"Yeah?" Goodley snarled into the phone while he checked the clock radio next to his bed.
"Dr. Goodley, this is Signals. We just copied something off CNN from Beijing that the Boss is going to be interested in."
"What is it?" CARDSHARP asked. Then he heard the reply. "How certain are you of this?"
"The Italian guy looks like he might possibly have survived, from the video—I mean if there was a good surgeon close—but the Chinese minister had his brains blowed right out. No chance for him at all, sir."
"What was it all about?"
"Were not sure of that. NSA might have the phone conversation between this Wise guy and Atlanta, but we havent seen anything about it yet."
"Okay, tell me what you got again," Goodley ordered, now that he was approximately awake.
"Sir, we have a visual of two guys getting shot and a baby being born in Beijing. The video comes from Barry Wise of CNN. The video shows three gunshots. One is upwards into the ceiling of what appears to be a hospital delivery room. The second shot catches a guy in the back. That guy is identified as the Papal Nuncio to Beijing. The third shot goes right into the head of a guy identified as a Baptist minister in Beijing. That one appears to be a Chinese national. In