By Dawn's Early Light (2 page)

1923 EDT
NATIONAL RECONNAISSANCE OFFICE LANGLEY, VIRGINIA

A dozen pictures-in-picture on the big screen in the pit showed real-time images downlinked from the U.S. constellation of intelligence gathering satellites. The screen's in-motion wallpaper showed a Mercator projection of the earth with the current tracks of all 327 spy birds. One of the pictures had gone blank ten minutes ago, and despite Air Force Tech Sgt. Donald Day's best efforts, he wasn't able to restore the downlink.

A quick diagnostic on the Ku band, as well as a sideband of the 440 MHz channel, indicated that the
Jupiter
satellite was up and functioning on the most basic of levels; she was producing electricity from her solar sails to charge her batteries, though the voltage indicators he was looking at were fluctuating strangely. He didn't think he'd ever seen anything like it. But
Jupiter
was no longer producing product, nor was she responding to any commands from ground control.

Sergeant Day slid to an adjacent console facing the big screen and brought up the Astronomical Database out of NORAD in Cheyenne Mountain. There were no unusual solar flares predicted or observed that would affect the bird. He did a quick diagnostic on three other satellites to make sure he wasn't missing something, perhaps a meteor shower in the region. Two of them were the CIA's KeyHole series, the third was a GOES around twenty-four-thousand miles out in a geosynchronous orbit over the Indian Ocean. All three satellites were functioning with nominal ranges.

Next he dialed up Space Command's database of orbiting junk. Everything larger than an orange from hundreds of space missions that had been left behind either by accident or on purpose was plotted on a continuous basis until their orbits decayed and they burned up in the atmosphere. There was nothing closer than five miles in an orbit thirty miles higher than the
Jupiter.

Finally he brought up the NRO's own schedule of outages due to maintenance routines in case he had missed the NTO (Notice to Observers) when he had come on duty a couple of hours ago. But the daily log was blank for this satellite.

He slid back to his own console and got on the Autovon link to Col. Tom Leonard, the Jupiter program's night duty mission commander.

“This is Kermit Control. I'm showing a failure of JayBird four at approximately zero-zero-sixteen zulu.”

“Stand by,” Colonel Leonard said.

Sergeant Day looked up at the big board. This was the third satellite in as many weeks to go bad. Coincidence? He sincerely doubted it. But what the hell was going on?

“I'm showing the same thing,” the colonel said. “Rerun your diagnostics, and then pull up the last frame numbers. I want to know what she was looking at the exact moment she stopped transmitting.”

“Yes, sir. I'll have that done in the next few minutes.”

Colonel Leonard prepared the flash message for the Jupiter program's end users, which included the National Security Agency, the Central Intelligence Agency, the State Department, and the Office of Naval Intelligence.

Five minutes later Sergeant Day phoned back with the confirmation that JayBird four went down at 0013 GMT, at a set of orbital coordinates that put her over the Indian Ocean just as dawn was breaking there. This information along with the last several images taken by the satellite were transmitted to the Jupiter program as updates to the original flash traffic.

Forty-five minutes later Colonel Leonard's red phone from the CIA's Directorate of Operations next door chirped, and he picked it up.

“Jupiter Control.”

“For Christ's sake, tell me that it's not happened again, Tom,” his friend Preston Luney, who was pulling night duty on the technical means desk in the DO, said. They had gone through the Air Force Academy together, and had served on a half dozen assignments during their careers. Leonard had continued in the air force while Luney had resigned his commission. Ironically they ended up working next door to each other.

“You're seeing what I'm seeing,” Leonard said. “That makes number three.”

“Well, it's no coincidence. We've got a team on the ground in Pakland depending on that feed. What else can we put in position, and I mean pronto?”

Leonard had anticipated the problem and the request. He had dialed up every satellite that could possibly be swung into position to cover the gap left by the out of commission JayBird. “It's slim pickings, Press. The best we can do is move
Albatross-seven
up there. The satellite was one of the older KH-11 series. “But it'll take at least twenty-four hours, and the angle will be real low.”

“Okay, do the best you can,” Luney said. “What about the last frame?”

Leonard had the last image that the satellite had produced up on his monitor. “What do you mean?”

“Was that an external event, or was the bird already heading into failure mode?”

The image was normal except for a green spot in the middle of the frame. “We think it was a laser strike from a surface source.”

“Shit,” Luney said. “I was afraid you were going to say something like that.”

0913 GMT
KHARAN ADVANCED TESTING DEPOT WESTERN PAKISTAN

Interservice Agency chief of internal security for the depot, Col. Gonde Harani, put down the telephone with a surprisingly steady hand despite the decision he had to make. But he had a job to do, a responsibility to Pakistan.

The countdown clock showed T-minus seventeen minutes and a few seconds. At this point a specially modified Fokker 27 transport was at ten thousand meters about two hundred kilometers up range and heading for the drop zone. The weather was right, the American
Jupiter
satellite was blind, and the test was a go.

The television images transmitted from the surface one hundred meters above the control room showed a panoramic view of the desert to the west toward the distant border with Iran, and to the south toward the Sihan Mountain range, which was a dark blue smudge on the horizon. This was the most isolated spot in all of Pakistan; far enough from the Indian border so that there would be no possibility of a misunderstanding, and far enough from Islamabad that there would be no prying eyes until the test was completed.

One hundred twenty-seven handpicked personnel here and at the four front-range observation bunkers were geared up for the drop. Colonel Harani guessed that each of them was either thinking of Allah or was pissing in his pants, or both.

After this morning the entire world would be compelled to look upon Pakistan in a new light. The respect would be so immeasurable that even the new government in Islamabad would be able to do little except go along with the new order of things. Little Pakistan would be feared, especially by her neighbors, especially by India, whose army would never again be a threat.

Even the presidents of the United States and Russia, and the premiers of Great Britain and China, would be forced to concede that the dominant force in this region was Pakistan, not India.

Dar el Islam
was an ideal whose time had finally come around again. It wouldn't be like Osama bin Laden's warped version of the teachings of Muhammed, but Islam would rise again to the greatness that it once knew.

But not this morning.

Girding himself for what he had to do, Colonel Harani got to his feet and threaded his way down three tiers of computer and control consoles to the test director's position, manned this morning by Army Chief of Staff Gen. Karas Phalodi. Harani was a short, slender, diffident-looking man, especially next to the general, who at six-three was huge by Pakistani standards.

The general looked up, his broad features fiercely determined. As a young officer he had been captured by an Indian border patrol and had spent four years of unimaginable torture in a POW camp before he was finally repatriated. No one in Pakistan wanted this test to succeed more than General Phalodi.

“What is it, Colonel?” the general demanded.

“We have a problem, sir,” Colonel Harani said calmly. Only the fact that he was an officer in Pakistan's all-powerful intelligence service, the ISI, allowed him to get so close. He reached out, uncaged the range safety switch, and flipped it to red before anyone had a chance to realize what he was doing, let alone stop him.

The countdown clock halted at T minus 00:16:23. On the surface a red flare rocketed into the sky. Warning klaxons sounded throughout the test range. Aboard the inbound Fokker, alarms went off in the cockpit, and the drop and firing circuits were locked out. Even if the crew wanted to drop the bomb on target they would not be able to do it.

The aircraft commander throttled back and began a slow turn to the left while maintaining altitude, and radio silence. He was following the operations book to the letter. He involuntarily pissed into his bladder bag.

General Phalodi recovered his composure. He got to his feet as his security people, realizing that something was going on, came running. The general gestured for them to halt, as he looked down at Colonel Harani, his legendary temper just barely in check by sheer dint of will. Even so it was several seconds before he could speak, his features a mask of rage.

“What is our problem, Colonel?” he asked in a precisely measured voice.

“My security people at the southern perimeter bunker detected the presence of a small incursion force.”

General Phalodi looked over at the radar consoles, but the chief operator glanced at his scope and shook his head.

“Not by air, General. They are ground troops,” Harani said. “Three, possibly more.”

“Has this threatening ground force been identified?”

“Not yet, sir.”

“Had the test gone as scheduled, wouldn't they have been incinerated?”

“No, sir. They have taken up a position behind some sand dunes. As long as they kept their heads down they would have survived.”

“After which time your security people could have rounded them up?”

“Yes, sir,” Colonel Harani said, not daring to look away. “But not before they could have transmitted information vital to Pakistan's security to their handlers.”

“What information would this be, Colonel?” the general demanded. “The entire world will know very soon that we have developed a thermonuclear device.”

“Yes, sir. But only an observer on the ground would realize that we have developed a hydrogen bomb small enough to be carried by an airplane, and therefore possibly by a missile.”

“But no communications are possible because of the lingering effects of radiation, is this not a fact?”

“So far as I understand the technology, General. But the Americans may have developed—”

“Who is your second in command?” General Phalodi cut him off.

“Captain Amin.”

“Where is he at this moment?”

“With our southern perimeter security forces.”

“Very well,” General Phalodi said. He pulled out his 9mm Makarov pistol and fired one shot at point-blank range into Colonel Harani's forehead.

The colonel's head snapped back, and he dropped to the concrete floor like a felled ox.

The general holstered his pistol. “Call Captain Amin and tell him that he is now in command of depot security. He is to keep his head down until after the test and then he is to round up whoever is running around out there in the desert.”

“Yes, sir,” an aide said. He motioned for the general's security people to remove the body, but again General Phalodi waved them off.

“Leave it. Perhaps someone else here needs a reminder of what we are doing.”

All eyes were on the general. No one said a thing. No one in Pakistan, not even President Pervez Musharraf, dared cross him. He had the loyalty of the army.

“Recommence the countdown.”

0929 GMT
IN THE DESERT SOUTH OF THE KHARAN DEPOT

Former navy SEAL Lt. Scott Hanson crouched with his CIA insertion team behind a sand dune studying the distant depot through binoculars.

Eight Pakistani soldiers, dressed in ranger desert camos, had been on their trail for the past couple of klicks. They had come on foot, spread out, moving cautiously, their AK-47s at the ready.

Fifteen minutes ago a red flare had shot up into the sky, and just two minutes ago a siren had sounded in the distance.

The ranger commander with captain's pips on his collar tabs raised a hand for them to halt. He turned his head and seemed to be listening to something.

He looked up directly at where Hanson was hiding, stared for a few seconds, then gave the signal for his people to turn back.

They immediately headed for a concrete bunker five hundred meters away.

“What's going on, boss?” Bruce Hauglar asked.

“Looks like they're quitting for now,” Hanson said. “I don't like it.”

Hauglar and their radioman Don Amatozio climbed up to where Hanson lay, and cautiously looked over the edge at the retreating figures.

“Oh, shit, I was sorta hoping that we'd get to play with them,” Hauglar quipped.

In the distance to the north they could see the contrails of a high-flying jet. Amatozio pointed his binoculars toward it.

“Multi-engine,” he said. “Could be one of their Fokker transports.”

Hanson scanned the depot. Five French-made Alouette III attack helicopters were parked in heavily fortified revetments, the openings facing south. The aircraft were painted in camo patterns. The tie-downs had been removed from their rotors. But there didn't seem to be any personnel around them.

Nor did there seem to be any movement anywhere in the depot except for the rangers heading back on the run.

The Pakistanis were going to test a new weapon system here. Probably a multistage ballistic missile; one that would possibly be fired from an underground silo or bunker.

Hanson and his people had been sent in to find out.

So far they'd been lucky since they'd left Kuwait City five days ago aboard a modified P-3C Orion.

There'd been no real challenges, no threat radar lock ons down the Persian Gulf and out into the Gulf of Oman, because the U.S. navy all but owned these skies.

Then on the farthest loop of her supposed Anti Submarine Warfare training mission, the Orion dropped five packages into the Arabian Sea less than twenty klicks off Gwater Bay on the Pakistan-Iran border before making a 180 back to the barn.

All five chutes were made of RAM7 radar-absorbing material, as were the lightweight black-and-gray coveralls the four CIA special operations officers wore, the covers on the personal equipment pods that dangled five meters beneath each man, and the large canister that rode down on the fifth chute.

Radars from the warships of a half-dozen nations, including the French-made DRBV-20C long-range search radar aboard Iranian vessels; the Russian-made Head Net C Air Surveillance Units aboard Indian ships; and the American-made Spy 1D Phased Array System aboard U.S. ships, along with ground units at Bandar Beheshti, Iran and Jiwani, Pakistan painted the Orion, but no one spotted the units floating to splashdown at 0227, exactly three minutes ahead of schedule.

Five seconds after the big canister hit the water, it automatically opened, splitting into two segments. One inflated into a sophisticated six-man speedboat, the other contained a highly muffled thirty horsepower outboard motor, enough fuel for two hundred kilometers running flat out at thirty-five knots, their surveillance and communications equipment, plus some odds and ends such as C4 Semtex with a variety of fuses, a few Claymores, extra water and emergency rations, and one handheld Stinger missile.

Hanson figured that whatever was going to happen would happen any minute now. Everyone at the depot was under cover, and the rangers coming out to find them had been recalled.

It gave him an itchy feeling between his shoulder blades. Someone or something was taking a bead on him.

For the first time that he could remember he suddenly wanted to be home and not on a mission. He was married and he had two children in Williamsburg. They were the light of his life.

He had an older brother who was the president of the United States, the fact of which was very often the bane of his existance. Getting a job with the CIA after the navy had been all but impossible. And then being assigned to the Company's special operations unit within the Directorate of Operations had just about taken a good word from God himself.

No one wanted the president's brother in harm's way. His value as a hostage would be inestimable. But then Billy Carter had been allowed to practically come and go as he pleased. Even Chelsea Clinton attended college in California and England without too much of a fuss. She had Secret Service bodyguards, but hell, as Hanson explained to his brother, his team would be
his
bodyguards.

In the end it had taken a word from the president himself before Scott was allowed to go to work for the Company. Nobody liked it, least of all the president. But Scott was a strong-willed man.

From the moment he could remember growing up in northern California, his brother had political ambitions. It was the running joke in the family that someday Gerald would be the president.

When it became likely, however, Scott and his family had come under the media microscope. Practically every move they made was scrutinized and analyzed to death. The fact that he had served in the navy as a SEAL was great fodder for shows like
60 Minutes
and
20/20
. And when he'd joined the CIA three months before the election the media went wild.

Which lasted until forty-eight hours after the inauguration when the spotlight on Scott and his family was suddenly switched off.

They had been lucky coming ashore ten klicks east of the Pakistani naval air station at Jiwani five days ago just before dawn. By the time the sun had come up on the first morning, they were already nine kilometers inland, safely across the coastal highway, and well hidden for the day in the scrub.

It was summer, and conditions in the bush were less than ideal: heat, bugs, snakes, warm drinking water, and the occasional Pakistani security patrol. But at thirty-six, Hanson—who was the old man of the group—was, like the others, in superb physical condition.

As soon as it was dark they had moved out, putting another twenty kilometers between themselves and the coast by midnight. Each man carried an eighty-pound load. When they put their packs down their muscles burned and they were soaked with sweat. But they could have continued until dawn if that's what the mission required.

Working only by starlight they unpacked their inflatable paragliders, making certain that the shrouds were in direct untangled line with their harnesses and control lines.

Next, they attached the lightweight titanium folding propellers to the six horsepower backpack-mounted motors and filled the tanks with two quarts of gas, which would allow them to run for four hours before they had to land and refuel.

The glider canopies and shrouds were made of the same RAM7 radar absorbing material as the chutes. The motors were extremely well muffled; the sounds and the exhaust heat were direct skyward. The motors were covered with RAM7 and the propellers were painted with a derivative RAM coating.

The farther inland they got, the sparser the population was and therefore the less chance they had of being heard or spotted. But this near to the coast there were plenty of ears so they were careful.

Hanson dropped back to the base of the depression and unslung his 9mm suppressed Sterling submachine gun. He tested the slide. As he suspected, it was fouled by sand.

Amatozio lowered his binoculars to study what looked to him like a wooden bridge, or maybe even something like a very crude log cabin a long way out on the desert floor. It was possibly twenty-five or thirty klicks away. It had to be huge.

Hauglar turned around to say something to Hanson and Mike Harvey, who was still having trouble with his leg, when a flash of brilliant light blotted out everything.

Hanson instantly knew what it was.

Amatozio screamed at the same moment that Hauglar flung himself down the side of the sand dune.

“It's a nuke,” Hanson shouted.

The back of Hauglar's camo blouse was smoking, and most of the hair on the back of his head was singed off.

Hanson scrambled up the side of the dune, grabbed a handful of Amatozio's pant leg and hauled him down.

A mind-splitting thunderclap burst overhead, making any rational thought totally impossible. A second later the air danced in front of their eyes, the sand jumped as if it was water boiling in a pot on the stove, and the temperature went ballistic so that it was almost impossible to breathe.

Hanson shoved Amatozio facedown into the sand beside Hauglar and Harvey, and the four of them huddled together like helpless animals caught in a raging storm.