One Killer Force: A Delta Force Novel (11 page)

As director of Tungsten’s Department for Special Services, the blackest of black U.S. counterterrorist organizations, Carlos knew the facility, though he hadn’t had a reason to visit since the Cold War, some thirty years earlier. That he had reason now was both troubling and intriguing. You didn’t request the presence of a busy Tungsten director for trivial things. Few in the intelligence business even knew of Tungsten’s existence, for that matter.

Carlos nodded when he caught a glimpse of the giant golf-ball-looking objects that cut through the middle of the Pine Gap compound. Requiring unobstructed line of sight to orbiting satellites, the massive golf balls were impossible to hide. These were no weather radar units, no matter what the official statement said. These were state-of-the-art omnidirectional radome antennas that helped the National Security Agency pull metadata from the secret global surveillance networks ECHELON and PRISM.

If of suspicious mind—and after the Snowden affair, that was a given among large swathes of the public—it would be hard to miss the strategically located but shady defense spy facility that conspiracy theorists blogged about. They swore it was jointly run by the CIA, NSA, and National Reconnaissance Office, the NRO, and in that sense they weren’t entirely wrong.

Carlos sat back and closed his eyes. Twenty-four hours in an aluminum tube to travel around the world in the age of Skype and FaceTime. This had better be worth it.

Two hours later, Carlos walked toward an empty chair in a small conference room inside Pine Gap with no clearer idea of why he was there.

“The place has changed,” Carlos said.

“Yeah, we have to fight for funding every year,” Stephan Canary said. “NSA wolfs down funding like it’s candy; we get the crumbs left over.”

“I meant not much of a secret these days,” Carlos said. “Google is all over it.”

“We can thank Snowden’s big mouth for that.” Carlos chuckled at the Snowden comment before taking a seat in the maroon-colored leather chair, taking a sip of his coffee as he slid closer to the table. He placed his cell on the tinted blue glass table next to the facility-provided blank notepad and pen. The pen engraved with
JOINT DEFENSE FACILITY PINE GAP
was another sign that keeping Pine Gap a secret was long out of the barn.

Canary took a seat across the table, nonchalantly reached up to yank a cable from the sleek black video teleconference speaker, and tapped a few buttons on the ivory-colored portable keyboard.

“Can I get you to power off your phone, sir?” Canary asked politely, not hiding his reverence for a man that many in community considered a pioneer in covert communications.

Carlos obliged, tapped the screen a few times, and turned it toward Canary to show a dead screen. The sign on the wall out in the hallway was hard to miss.

“Twenty-first-century bugs,” Carlos said as he placed it back on the table. “I’m surprised you guys even let them inside Pine Gap.”

“We didn’t use to,” Canary said. “One of those convenience things. It’s a pet peeve of our director these days.”

Carlos nodded. He understood. He stared at the flat screen on the wall and watched as Canary skillfully drilled down through a half-dozen code-named file folders. The screen was oddly placed, high on the wall and not centered, almost as if some annoying interior decorator had insisted the screen hide the only wall electrical outlet. The angle from Carlos’s chair, coupled with the wicked glare on the screen from the flat ceiling lights, obscured at least half of what he could make out clearly.

Canary settled the arrow cursor on a folder obviously titled with a computer-generated code name. Carlos thought he read “Satin Ash” before Canary double-clicked, but he couldn’t be sure.

“How long you been here?” Carlos asked.

“Third tour, twelve years total now,” Canary said.

“You haven’t picked up the Crocodile Dundee accent.”

“I’m lucky if I get out of the basement twice a day.”

“Just the two of us?” Carlos said. “No offense, young man, but I dropped everything for a twenty-one-hour nonstop in coach. Figured I’d at least be seeing the vice, or maybe the director of ops.”

“My apologies, sir,” Canary said, “the director and ops officer are in Washington, D.C. Vice Director Fontaine planned to be here this morning, but with the latest developments, he said he might not make it.”

“Fontaine? Derrick Fontaine?” Carlos said, raising his eyebrows. “Big fat guy? Dirty blond hair?”

“Um, you are on Vice Director Fontaine’s itinerary immediately after lunch, though.”

Carlos saw Canary look quickly at the door, obviously concerned someone might barge in at the wrong time, then look back as he held his bladed hand near his mouth. “He was body-weight challenged but just had Lap-Band surgery. No longer dirty blond either,” Canary said just above a whisper. “His major comb-over is shiny gray now.”

That ass clown Derrick Fontaine. Can’t believe he is even allowed in a place like this, much less running the place.

Carlos wanted to ask Canary a little more about Fontaine. Maybe ask if he was still as much of a self-serving jack wagon as he remembered him to be. See if he had lightened up a little over the years or if he was still as rigid as a nun in a whorehouse.

“Got it!” Carlos said. “Fontaine and I go way back.”

“Yes, sir!” Canary said before turning toward the flat screen and drawing Carlos with him. “Does this gentleman look familiar?”

Carlos locked on the screen. A fussy black-and-white of a twenty-something Asian man filled the center. His hairline pushed down his forehead, full thick black hair combed up several inches and off his forehead, cropped just above the ears. The man’s eyes were narrow, ice dark, and slightly menacing, topping a proud, square jaw. His mouth was frozen slightly open, as if caught mid-thought when the camera snapped, maybe questioning his decision to become a traitor. Two oversized front teeth were obvious. The top three buttons of his too-big white collared shirt looked unfastened, letting the collar hang open, the upper neck rim of a ribbed, probably soiled, tank top undershirt just showing.

Everything about the man told Carlos that he was either a caricature artist’s wet dream or some asset that had been recently compromised and likely smoked. He looked vaguely familiar, but Carlos couldn’t place him.

“Is he supposed to?” Carlos asked without taking his eyes off the screen.

“I believe you took the picture, sir,” Canary said, showing a little unease, “using a covert matchbox camera in the fall of 1985. Same one the OSS used during World War II, right?”

Carlos’s head jerked forward. He rubbed his dark gray slicked-back hair from his forehead back to the locks just touching the collar of his pearl-colored, pressed dress shirt. His eyes narrowed, bunched tight, as he squinted hard to get a better look. He stood, took a few steps around the first two chairs to get closer to the screen, and pulled out his custom wire-rimmed eyeglasses from his denim blazer pocket. He quickly seated them on his ears and the bridge of his nose, and studied the screen from only a few feet away, as if he had seen a ghost.

“Kang Pang Su,” Carlos said before he removed his glasses and returned to his seat. “No doubt now. Code name Seamstress.”

“Yes, sir,” Canary said. “We have good reason to believe he is still active.”

“Swiss model thirty-five millimeter,” Carlos said as he looked back at Canary, “concealed inside of a small leather tobacco pouch. You advanced the film roll with a small spring-wound mechanism.”

“Amazing,” Canary said. “Old school!”

“Back then I didn’t think the damn thing would work.”

“We’re thinking the back and side shots didn’t develop,” Canary said. “The records were kind of vague.”

“Hell, it’s been close to thirty years, but I seem to recall being told that,” Carlos said as he heard a loud knock at the door behind Canary.

Canary tapped some keystrokes to whiten the screen, stood, and opened the door. In an instant, every bit of Derrick Fontaine’s body filled the doorway. Carlos noticed the man hesitate, balancing two donuts on a yellow napkin on his iPad and holding what looked like a jumbo Diet Pepsi bottle in his other hand. Kolt sensed Fontaine almost angling his body to get past the doorjamb, watched Canary close and lock the door behind him, then turn and pull the closest leather chair back several feet to allow Fontaine to sit down.

“You didn’t start without me?” Fontaine barked, setting his iPad and soda on the table.

“No, sir,” Canary lied, “just getting started.”

“Good!”

“Mr. Menendez, I’d like to introduce you to our vice director, Dr. Derrick Fontaine.”

“Have we met?” Fontaine said as he reached for a glazed donut and brought it to his mouth. He took a healthy bite, transferring obvious flakes of glaze onto his droopy cheeks.

“I can’t recall,” Carlos lied. “Certainly possible.”

Yeah, I remember you, motherfucker. And unless you are senile, or have dementia, I know damn well you remember me.

“You’re way overdressed for this place,” Fontaine said.

“The last time I was here everyone was in suits and ties.”

Canary keystroked to bring up the picture of Kang Pang Su again.

“I’m sure you know this man,” Fontaine said as he wiped his mouth with the back side of his hairy, Popeye-size forearm.

“Been a while,” Carlos said. “I do.”

“You recruited him, we know.”

“His father’s death made him a rare breed as the child of a martyr of the Fatherland Liberation War,” Carlos said. “The family even got a certificate.”

“We also know you provided him covert communications,” Fontaine said.

“You didn’t bring me all the way over here to confirm what you already know from my operational folder, did you?” Carlos said.

“What system did you provide?” Fontaine asked as he nodded to Canary to hit the next slide. “The HAL DS-3100?”

Carlos looked at the screen. He noticed the “June 1985” at the bottom of a brochure from HAL Communications out of Urbana, Illinois, advertising four different systems.

“The top left one is what you gave Seamstress. Someone found with one of those dinosaurs ought to be arrested,” Fontaine said, obviously jabbing the older Menendez. “I can’t believe we got anything done back then with that Tinkertoy junk.”

“They’d do a lot more to Seamstress than that if they busted him with one,” Carlos said.

“Indeed,” Canary said.

“But that’s not the one he has.”

“It’s not?” Canary asked.

“Nope. Bottom right,” Carlos said, “the HAL CWR6850 Telereader.”

“Impossible!” Fontaine said before choking down another swallow and crumbling the napkin with his donut holders. “I spent seventeen years with the agency, working communications abroad. No way you got your hands on a 6850 back then.”

“And why’s that?” Carlos asked.

“Because those were tightly controlled. Nothing to the USSR, China, or North Korea.”

“The DS-3100 was the size of a 1970s television and needed an external ST-6000 modem; the 6850 was an all-in-one unit more suited for our needs,” Carlos said.

“I know that, but how did you come by one?”

“Japanese manufacturing, HAL was the U.S. distributor. Hard to find but I stumbled on one at the Friedrichshafen Ham fest.”

“Bullshit! They wouldn’t sell a radio teletypewriter to an American even in Germany,” Fontaine said. “Not overseas during the height of the Cold War.”

“They did once to a Ham enthusiast with a heavy Hungarian accent and a good tan,” Carlos said. “Folks loved Eastern bloc countries back then.”

“Whatever system he has, we are pretty much convinced he is a nut job,” Fontaine said, obviously tired of matching commo knowledge with the slick-dressed Carlos.

“Can you fill me in?” Carlos said.

“Seamstress has transmitted two messages over the past few months,” Fontaine said, “something about nukes. We’re not even sure the guy on the other end is the real Kang Pang Su.”

“Did you authenticate him?”

“No way to do that,” Canary said.

“You guys should have reached out to me months ago,” Carlos said. “Send him a message requesting the code word. If he is the real deal, he will know it.”

“What’s to say he wasn’t compromised?”

“The only thing written in English was the cover name for the real authentication word. He wrote the word ‘smoke.’ I watched him scribble it in block letters.”

“After thirty years, how do you know he hasn’t forgotten the real code word and just used ‘smoke’?” Fontaine asked.

“Only a fake would send the word ‘smoke.’”

“Why’s that?” Fontaine asked.

“Because I had Kang hold my camera decoy.”

“The tobacco pouch?” Canary asked.

“Yep, he rolled the leather with his fat fingers,” Carlos said. “I remember clearly his larger-than-life hands, definitely out of symmetry with his smaller frame.”

“Damn,” Canary said with a wide smile. “Fascinating stuff.”

“Well, what is it? What is the correct authentication, then?” Fontaine asked. He fidgeted in his chair. “Tobacco? Leather?”

“Cigar,” Carlos said.

“Cigar?” Fontaine said.

“That’s it!” Canary said. “Both transmissions we’ve received on the teletype have included the word S-E-E-G-H-A-R.”

“I’ll be damned,” Fontaine said. “It’s him.”

“Kang was attending university at the time, but his English was shit. He could pronounce ‘cigar,’ though,” Carlos said as he lifted his coffee cup. “A bit of a Mongol accent, but we enjoyed the stogies just the same.”

“If the guy on the other end of the RTTY transmitted ‘cigar,’ then I’m absolutely confident it is Kang Pang Su,” Carlos said before sipping his coffee. “I recall he went to ground early, maybe sent one or two things. Figured he’d be dead by now.”

“How’d he get the code name?” Fontaine asked.

“Standard stuff back then. Culturally relevant, at least thirty years ago. Today it might be Nail Salon Artist,” Carlos said.

Canary smiled at the comment; Fontaine reached for donut number two.

“Seamstress going to assassinate Kim Jong Un, or what?” Carlos asked.

So far, Carlos had been providing all the answers. He was expected back in Atlanta ASAP, back to running his embeds within the NCA’s ultra-top-secret Tungsten program. But he wasn’t rushing to squeeze his designer clothes back into coach seating. For sure, killing another day’s worth of life with the twenty-one-hour return flight was unavoidable, but he’d take some answers with him.