Tom Clancy's Op-center Balance of Power - Tom Clancy [39]
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EIGHT
Monday, 4:22 p.m.
Washington, D.C.
Paul Hood took his daily late-afternoon look at the list of names on his computer monitor. Just a few minutes before he had put his thumb on the five-by-seven-inch scanner beside the computer. The laser unit had identified his fingerprint and had asked for his personal access code. One point seven seconds later it brought up the closed file of HUMINT personnel reporting to Op-Center from the field. Hood used the keyboard to enter his wife's maiden name, Kent. That opened the file and the names appeared on the screen.
There were nine "human intelligence" agents in all. Each of these men and women was a national on Op-Center's payroll. Beside the names were their present whereabouts and assignments; a summary of their last report, which had been prepared by Bob Herbert (the full report was on file); and the location of the nearest safe house or exit route. If any of the operatives were ever found out, Op-Center would look for them at those places and make every effort to extricate them. To date, none of the agents had ever been compromised.
Three of the operatives were based in North Korea. Their mission was an ongoing follow-up to the Striker team's destruction of the secret missile site in the Diamond Mountains. The agents' job was to make sure that the missile launchers weren't rebuilt. Even though a traitorous South Korean officer had masterminded the construction of the base originally, no one put it past the opportunistic North Koreans to take advantage of the equipment that had been left behind by attempting to build a new missile installation.
Two Op-Center agents were located in the Bekaa Valley in Lebanon and two others were working in Damascus, Syria. Both teams were based in terrorist hideouts and were reporting on the political fallout due to Op-Center's activities there. The fact that Op-Center operatives had helped to avert a war between Syria and Turkey was not being looked upon favorably: the feeling in the Middle East was that nations there took care of their own problems, even if that solution was war. Peace brought by outside forces, particularly by the United States, was looked upon as illicit and dishonorable.
The last two agents were in Cuba, keeping an eye on developing political situations in that nation. The reports were that the aging Castro's hold was beginning to fray. Whatever the dictator's drawbacks-and they were considerable-his iron heel had ironically kept the entire Caribbean more or less stabilized. Whatever tyrant came to power in Haiti, Grenada, Antigua, or on any of the other islands still needed the approval of Castro to run arms or drugs or even maintain a sizeable military force. They knew that the Cuban leader would have rivals assassinated before he let them become too powerful. The concensus was that as soon as Castro was gone, chaos and not democracy would come to the island and to the region. The United States had a contingency plan. Operation Keel, to fill and control that power vacuum using the military and economic incentives. Op-Center's agents were key parts of the EWAP network-early warning and preparedness-which was designed to pave the way for the plan.
Nine lives. Hood thought. And for each of those lives there were maybe two, three, or four dependents. That was not a responsibility to be taken lightly. He examined the afternoon reports and saw that the situations were relatively stable and unchanged. He closed the file.
These foreign operatives counted on their files and their communications with Op-Center to be absolutely secure. They contacted Op-Center by calling a telephone number at an office in Washington, an office that rented space to executives. The number was registered to Caryn Nadler International Travel Consultants. The operatives spoke in their native languages, though each word they used was assigned a different meaning in English. "Can I book a flight to Dallas?" in Arabic could mean "The Syrian President is gravely ill" in English. Though the translation files were all dedicated,