Tom Clancy's op-center_ acts of war - Tom Clancy [32]
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TWELVE
Monday, 9:59 a.m.,
Washington, D. C.
Bob Herbert rolled his wheelchair into Paul Hood's office. "Mike was right as usual," the intelligence chief said. "The NRO confirms that the Ataturk Dam's been heavily damaged."
Hood exhaled tensely. He turned to his computer and typed in a single word: "Affirmative." He appended this to his emergency Code Red E-mail of 9:47 a.m. which contained Mike Rodgers's initial evaluation. Then he sent the confirmation to General Ken Vanzandt, the new Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He also copied it to Secretary of State Av Lincoln, Secretary of Defense Ernesto Colon, Central Intelligence Agency Director Larry Rachlin, and super-hawk National Security Advisor Steve Burkow.
"How close is the ROC to the affected region?" Hood asked.
"They're about fifty miles to the southeast," Herbert said. "Well out of the danger zone."
"How well is well?' " Hood asked. "Mike's idea of a buffer zone isn't the same as other people's."
"I didn't ask Mike," Herbert said. "I asked Phil Katzen. He had experience with the great Midwest flood of 1993 and he did some quick computations. He says that within the fifty miles there's a good fifteen-to-twenty-mile cushion. Phil figures the Euphrates will rise about twenty feet straight down through Syria to Lake Assad.That won't hurt the Syrians much, since a lot of that area is seasonally dry as toast and deserted. But it's going to flood out a lot of Turks who live in villages around the river."
Darrell McCaskey arrived as Herbert was speaking. The slim, forty-eight-year-old former FBI agent, now interagency liaison, shut the door behind him and leaned quietly against it.
"What do we have on the perpetrators?" Hood asked.
"Satellite reconnaissance showed a Turkish 500D leaving the site," Herbert said. "Apparently, it was the same helicopter stolen from the border patrol earlier in the day."
"Where's it headed?" Hood asked.
"We don't know," Herbert said. "There're a pair of F-4s looking for the chopper now."
"Looking for it?" Hood said. "I thought we had it on satellite."
"We did," Herbert said. "But sometime between one picture and the next it disappeared."
"Shot down?"
"Nope," Herbert said. "The Turks would've told us."
"Maybe," Hood said.
"All right," Herbert agreed. "Even if they didn't, we'd have spotted the wreckage. There's no sign of the helicopter for a radius of fifty miles from the last place it was seen."
"What do you make of that?" Hood asked.
"I honestly don't know," Herbert said. "If there were any caves in the area which were large enough, I'd say they flew right in and parked it. We're still looking, though."
Hood was annoyed. He wasn't like Mike Rodgers, who enjoyed putting clues together and solving mysteries. The banker in him liked information orderly, complete, and now.
"We'll find the chopper," Herbert added. "I'm having the last satellite photograph analyzed to get the exact speed and direction of the 500D. We're also running a complete study of the area's geography. We'll try to find a place like a cave or canyon where a helicopter could hide."
"All right," Hood said. "In the meantime, what do we do about the ROC? Just leave it?"
"Why not?" Herbert asked. "It was designed for on-site reconnaissance. You can't get any more on-site than this."
"That's true," Hood agreed, "but I'm more concerned about security. If this attack is a taste of things to come, the ROC is relatively vulnerable. They've only got two Strikers covering four open sides."
"There's also a Turkish security officer," McCaskey added.
"He seems like a good man," Herbert said. "I checked him out. I'm sure Mike did too."
"That's three people," Hood said. "Just three."
"Plus General Michael Rodgers," Herbert said respectfully, "who is a platoon unto himself. Anyway, I don't think Mike would let himself be evacuated now. This is the kind of thing