Chapter 61
CIA OPERATIONS CENTER
LANGLEY, VIRGINIA
THERE it is!” Hannah Edwards said.
Irene had happily agreed.
Now she was tired, hungry, over-caffeinated, and fighting acid reflux all at the same time.
The glaring fluorescent lights hurt her eyes, the constant chatter fed her headache, and the low ceilings and bare walls hyped up her claustrophobia.
Unlike the storied Situation Room located in the White House, there were no polished oak tables, plush chairs, or coffee service and sandwich cart in the CIA Operations Center.
Instead, the subterranean area felt like the basement office it was, and the din of multiple conversations and closely packed bodies gave it more the feel of a Wall Street trading firm’s bullpen than the nerve center for the nation’s premier intelligence service.
The conditions did not dim Hannah Edwards’s exuberance in the slightest.
The young analyst was in her element and had proved to be an invaluable help coordinating the raw streams of intelligence as Irene kept the CIA’s operational partners and her superiors informed on Rapp’s progress.
On the political side, her point of contact was Christi Hawkins, since the president was in Kuwait.
From a CIA perspective, she was coordinating the effort since the president had requested that Stansfield travel with him.
Things were going well in that regard, but all the leadership coordination and intelligence correlation would be for naught if Rapp did not come up on the radar to announce that he’d made contact with the Iraqi weapons convoy.
Judging by Hannah Edwards’s outburst, that had just occurred.
“What do you have, Hannah?”
The majority of the Operations Center’s workspace was a visually unimpressive collection of people working at desks littered with computers, telephones, and an assortment of binders, hole punches, notepads, and more pens, pencils, and highlighters than there were stars in the sky.
The desks were arrayed in pods with pseudo cubicle walls to delineate each person’s office space, but in a nod to efficiency or just plain government stupidity, the cubicle walls didn’t quite reach to eye level.
Each person’s work was in full view of their neighbor.
But there was one aspect of the Operations Center that more mirrored what one might expect to find.
At the far end of the subterranean dungeon, a massive television screen occupied the entire wall.
The screen could be configured to display a wide swath of information, but at the moment, it showed a map of Iraq on which were overlaid the collection platforms currently gathering intelligence, as well as the convoy’s projected route of travel and pertinent data.
And one other thing.
A red dot located just to the east of Ramadi had begun to flash.
“Can we zoom in?” Irene said.
Hannah frowned as she manipulated the computer connected to the screen.
As imagery came in from one of the NRO’s Key Hole satellites or the Air Force’s high-flying U-2 reconnaissance plane, the data was pumped into the computer, where analysts worked to correlate the information and sort it by GPS coordinates.
The odds that there would be actual photographs of the red dot’s location were slim, but the hard drive should at least contain topographical or even city maps.
“This is the best I can do,” Hannah said as her fingers flew across the keyboard.
The television’s display changed to a military-style map.
As Irene had suspected, recent imagery of the area wasn’t available, but what she did see was reassuring.
The flashing dot was located on Ramadi’s outskirts in what appeared to be an old industrial complex.
In her mind’s eye, Irene saw abandoned buildings and empty parking lots.
The perfect place for a clandestine rendezvous.
“So far so good,” Irene said.
The red dot represented the location of a COVCOM, or covert communications, transmitter concealed in a Zippo cigarette lighter.
Rapp’s Zippo lighter.
GPS technology hadn’t progressed to the point where it could be miniaturized into a lighter-sized package.
Fitting just a transmitter, antenna, and power pack in the Zippo had been challenging enough.
Instead, American signals-intelligence-gathering aircraft loitering in Turkish, Saudi, and Kuwaiti airspace had scooped up the transmitter’s signal with their powerful receivers and used their known locations to triangulate the radio transmission’s point of origin.
The CIA S&T, or science and technology, officer who’d explained the COVCOM device’s workings to Irene had told her that the battery pack only had enough juice for three coms shots.
Accordingly, Rapp was to activate the device once when he linked up with the chemical weapons convoy, again when the convoy began to move west, and a final time two hours into the four-hour trip to the Syrian border.
These one-way coms shots would be used to cue the team of Navy SEALs standing by in Saudi Arabia as well as keep track of the vehicles’ western progress.
At least that was the official explanation.
The truth of the matter was that Irene was uneasy that her asset was so far removed from her ability to support him.
This was new ground for both Rapp and the Orion team.
He was operating in the belly of the beast without Ridley’s advance team or even Hurley to call upon.
She knew this was what Mitch had trained for, and more importantly, what he’d advocated for since joining the Orion program, but as with any good handler, she felt protective toward her asset.
The long hours since his last check-in, prior to crossing into Iraq from Syria, had passed with agonizing slowness.
That welcome red dot did more than just reveal the convoy’s location.
It signified that Rapp was alive.
Her relief was overwhelming. After clearing her throat to keep the emotion from her voice, Irene turned to Hannah.
“Get JSOC on the phone. The mission’s a go.”