The colonel didn’t bother with another shot. He was an expert marksman who practiced with his comrades almost every day, and his open, blank eyes had seen the impact of his round. He didn’t turn, and didn’t waste time in fruitless efforts at self-defense. There was no point in killing the comrades with whom he’d drunk liquor and raped children. Others would see to that soon enough. He didn’t even smile, though it was very funny indeed, wasn’t it, that the Mustache had one instant looked at the square full of the people whom he despised for their adoration of himself–then to look Allah in the face and wonder what had happened. That thought had perhaps two seconds to
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form itself before he felt his body jerk with the impact of the first bullet. There was no pain. He was too focused on his target, now on the flat paving stones of the porch, already a pool of blood draining rapidly from the ruined head. More bullets hit, and it seemed briefly strange that he could feel them yet not the pain of their passage, and in his last seconds he prayed to Allah for forgiveness and understanding, that all his crimes had been committed in the name of God and His Justice. To the last, his ears reported not the sound of the shots, but the lingering cries of the mob, not yet grasping that their leader was dead.
“WHO IS IT?” Ryan checked his clock. Damn, the extra forty minutes of sleep would have been nice.
“Mr. President, my name is Major Canon, Marine Corps,” the unknown voice announced.
“That’s nice, Major, who are you?” Jack blinked his eyes and forgot to be polite, but probably the officer understood.
“Sir, I’m the watch officer in Signals. We have a report with high confidence that the President of Iraq was assassinated about ten minutes ago.”
“Source?” Jack asked at once.
“Kuwait and Saudi both, sir. It was on Iraqi TV live, some sort of event, and we have people over there to monitor their TV. We have a tape being uplinked to us right now. The initial word is a pistol right in the head, at close range.” The tone of the officer’s voice wasn’t exactly regretful. Well, they finally popped that fucker! Of course, you couldn’t exactly say that to the President.
And you needed to figure who “they” was.
“Okay, Major, what’s the drill?” The answer came quickly enough. Ryan replaced the phone.
“Now what?” Cathy asked. Jack swung his feet out of bed before answering.
“The President of Iraq was just killed.”
His wife almost said, Good, but stopped. The death of such a person was not as distant a concept as it had once been. How odd to feel that way about someone who could best serve the world by leaving it.
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“Is that important?”
“In about twenty minutes, they’ll tell me.” Ryan coughed before going on. “What the hell, I used to be competent in those areas. Yeah, it’s potentially very important.” With that he did what every man in America did in the morning. He headed to the bathroom ahead of his wife. For her part, Cathy lifted the remote and performed the other ordinarily male function of clicking on the bedroom TV, surprised to find that CNN didn’t have anything on but reports on which airports were operating behind schedule. Jack had told her a few times just how good the White House Signals Office was.
“Anything?” her husband asked, coming back out.
“Not yet.” Then it was her turn.
Jack had to think about where his clothes were, wondering how a President was supposed to dress. He found his robe–moved in from the Naval Observatory after having been moved there from Eighth and I, after having been removed from their home… damn–and opened the bedroom door. An agent in the hall handed him three morning papers. “Thanks.”
Cathy saw that and stopped cold in her tracks, belatedly realizing that there had been people just outside her bedroom door all night. Her face turned away, forming the sort of smile generated by finding an unexpected mess in the kitchen.
“Jack?”
“Yes, honey?”
“If I kill you in bed some night, will those people with guns get me right away, or will it wait until morning?”
THE REAL WORK was being done at Fort Meade. The video had traveled from one monitoring station on the Kuwait-Iraq border and another in Saudi Arabia, known as PALM BOWL and STORM TRACK, respectively, the latter set up to record all signals out of Baghdad, and the former watching the southeastern part of the country, around Basra. From both places the information traveled by fiberoptic cable to the National Security Agency’s deceptively small building in King Khalid Military City (KKMC) and
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uplinked to a communications satellite, which then shot it back to NSA headquarters. There in the watch room, ten people summoned by one of the junior watch officers huddled around a TV monitor to catch the tape, while the more senior troops, in a separate glass-walled office, sipped their coffee soberly.
“Yes!” an Air Force sergeant observed on seeing the shot, “Nothin’ but net!” Several high fives were exchanged. The senior watch officer, who’d already called White House Signals, nodded his more restrained approval and relayed the original signal along the way, and ordered a digital enhancement, which would take a few minutes–only a few frames were all that important, and they had a massive Cray supercomputer to handle that.
RYAN REMARKED QUIETLY that while Cathy was getting the kids ready for school, and herself ready to operate on people’s eyes, here he was in Signals watching the instant replay of a murder. His designated national intelligence officer was still at CIA, finishing his morning intake of information, which he would then regurgitate to the President by way of the morning intelligence briefing. The post of National Security Advisor was currently vacant– one more thing to address today.
“Whoa!” Major Canon breathed.
The President nodded, then reverted to his former life as an intelligence officer. “Okay, tell me what we know.”
“Sir, we know that somebody got killed, probably the Iraqi President.”
“Double?”
Canon nodded, “Could be, but STORM TRACK is now reporting a lot of VHP signals that started all of a sudden, police and military nets, and the activity is radiating out from Baghdad.” The Marine officer pointed to his computer monitor, which displayed real-time “take” from the NSA’s many outposts. “Translations will take a little time, but I do traffic analysis for a living. It looks pretty real, sir. I suppose it could be faked, but I wouldn’t–there!”
A translation was coming up, identified as emanating from a military command net. He’s dead, he’s dead, stsnd
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your regiment to and be prepared to move into the city ime-diately–recipient is Replican Gurds Special Operations regiment at Salmon Pak–reply is: Yes I will yes I will, who is giving the oders, what are my orders–
“Typos and all,” Ryan noted.
“Sir, it’s hard for our people to translate and type it at the same time. Usually we clean it up before–”
“Relax, Major. I only use three fingers myself. Tell me what you think.”
“Sir, I’m only a junior officer here, that’s why I draw the midwatch and–”
“If you were stupid, you wouldn’t be here.”
Canon nodded. “He’s deader ‘n hell, sir. Iraq needs a new dictator. We have the imagery, we have unusual signal traffic that fits the pattern of an unusual event. That’s my estimate.” He paused and went on to cover himself, like a good spook. “Unless it’s a deliberate exercise to smoke out disloyal people inside his government. That’s possible, but unlikely. Not in public like this.”
“Kamikaze play?”
“Yes, Mr. President. Something you can only do once, and dangerous the first time.”
“Agreed.” Ryan walked to the coffee urn–the White House Office of Signals was mainly a military operation, and they made their own. Jack got two cups and came back, handing one to Major Canon, rather to the horror of everyone else in the room. “Fast work. Send a ‘thanks’ to the guys working this, okay?”
“Aye aye, sir.”
“Who do I talk to to get things happening around here?”
“We got the phones right here, Mr. President.”
“I want Adler in here ASAP, the DCI . . . who else? State and CIA desks for Iraq. DIA estimate of the state of their military. Find out if Prince Ali is still in town. If he is, ask him to please stand by. I want to talk to him this morning if possible. I wonder what else . . . ?” Ryan’s voice trailed off.
“CENTCOM, sir. He’ll have the best military-intelligence troops down at Tampa, most familiar with the area, I mean.”
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“Get him up here–no, we’ll do that by landline, and we give him time to get briefed in.”
“We’ll get it all going for you, sir.” Ryan patted the officer on the shoulder and headed out of the room. The heavy door closed behind him before Major Charles Canon spoke again. “Hey, NCA knows his shit.”