Tom Clancy's op-center_ acts of war - Tom Clancy [111]
With nothing else to go on, the two men looked at photographs. Herbert wasn't certain what he was looking for. But as the pictures filled Stoll's twenty-inch monitor, the intelligence chief tried to think like the enemy.
According to Turkish intelligence, which was confirmed by Israeli intelligence, there were nearly fifteen thousand PKK soldiers. Some ten thousand of those were living in the hills of eastern Turkey and northern Iraq. The rest were divided into pockets of ten to twenty fighters. Some of these people were assigned to specific areas of Damascus or Ankara or other major cities. Others were in charge of training, communications, or maintaining supply lines through the Bekaa Valley. Now, the Bekaa was also apparently the home of a new, aggressive Syrian Kurdish unit. One which was working closely with, or perhaps even joined with, Kurds from Turkey and Iraq.
"So the terrorists capture the ROC," Herbert said.
Stoll let his forehead plunk down on his arms, which were crossed on his desk. "Not again, Bob."
"Yes, again," Herbert said.
"There's got to be something else we can try," Stoll moaned. "The farmers out in the fields contact their hands using cellular phones. Let's listen to them. Maybe they saw something."
"My team is doing that. They've picked up zip." Herbert took a mouthful of warm coffee from a chipped, stained mug which had once sat on the desk of OSS chief Wild Bill Donovan. "So the terrorists capture the ROC. They report back to their headquarters. Since we can't find the terrorists, we have to find the command base. The question is, what do we look for?"
"A command center has to have access to water, and it'll have generators for electricity and a radar dish for communications and probably heavy tree cover for security," Stoll droned. "We've been through this a zillion times. Water can be trucked in or flown in, generator exhaust can be vented by hose to someplace and dispersed so an airplane heat-sensor won't see it, and a radar dish is easy to hide."
"If you decide to chopper in drinking water, you'd have to make a hellava lot of flights," Herbert said. "Enough so that you stand a good chance of being spotted."
"Even at night?"
"No," Herbert said. "At night you stand a good chance of crashing into some of those peaks, especially if you're using a twenty- or thirty-year-old bird. As for trucks, water can only be trucked in if there's a road nearby. So if the base isn't near a stream--and there aren't very many in this region--it has to be near the highway or at least a dirt road."
"Granted," Stoll said. "But that still leaves us about thirty or forty possible locations for a terrorist base. We keep examining these same pictures and magnifying different sections of them and computer-analyzing the geology of the region, and we still come up with squat."
"That's because we're obviously not looking for the right thing," Herbert said. "Every human activity leaves traces." He was annoyed with himself. Even without some of the high-tech satellite and surveillance tools he'd normally have at his disposal, he should be able to find those traces. Wild Bill Donovan did. Lives and national security depended upon it. "Okay," he said. "We know the command center is somewhere in there. What other trappings would it have?"
Stoll raised his head. "Barbed wire hidden in vines, which we haven't seen. Mines, which we can't see anyway. Cigarette butts, which we could see