CHAPTER FORTY-NINE Thursday, 2:59 P.M., Washington, D.C.
Hood’s wireless transmission was received by Darrell McCaskey’s executive assistant Sharri Jurmain. The FBI Academy graduate E-mailed it to McCaskey’s personal computer and to Dr. John Benn of Op-Center’s Rapid Information Search Center.
The RI-Search Center was little more than two small, interconnected offices with twenty-two computers run by two full-time operators and overseen by Dr. Benn. A former librarian with the Library of Congress, the British-born bachelor had been an embassy researcher in Qatar for two years when the Arab state declared its independence from Britain in 19? 1. Benn remained there for seven years before moving to Washington to stay with his sister when her diplomat-husband died. Charmed by Washington and by Americans, Benn remained behind after his sister returned to England. He became an American citizen in 1988.
Benn’s proud, singular skill, acquired during his otherwise uneventful years in Qatar, was quoting obscure lines of dialogue from English literature. Even with the help of Usenet groups, no one at Op-Center had ever correctly identified a single one of Benn’s characterizations.
Benn was taking an early tea and pretending to be Mr.
Boffin from Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend when Hood’s E-mail request came through. It was heralded by a synthesized electronic voice calling out, “I will arise and go now” from Yeats’s The Lake Isle of Innisfree, followed by the identification number of the person making the request.
“Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more,” Benn said with a flourish as they swung to the number one screen. He and his assistants Sylvester Neuman and Alfred Smythe immediately recognized Stoll’s “greeting,” the :-), his “smiley face” lying on its side. In one of his more paranoid moments, Stoll had arranged with them that if he were ever being forced to transmit data, he would input :-(, a frowning face.
The team went to work efficiently gathering the information.
For a biography of Deputy Foreign Minister Richard Hausen and any information on his father, Smythe went online and executed FTPs— File Transfer Protocols— to acquire data from ECRC Munich, Deutsche Elektronen Synchotron, Gerniart Electro-Synchotron, DKFZ Heidelberg, Gesellschaft fr wissenschaftliche Datenverarbeitung GmbH, Konrad Zuse Zentrum fr Informationstechnik Konrad Zuse Center, and Comprehensive TeX Archive Network Heidelberg. Neuman used three computers to enter gopherspace on the Internet and accessed information from Deutsches Klimarechenzentrum Hamburg, EUnet Germany, the German Network Information Center, and ZIB, Berlin auf Ufer. With the help of an aide to Matt Stoll, Deputy Assistant Director of Operations Grady Reynolds, they hacked into tax, employment, and education records of the former Federal Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic,.
The records of many Germans, especially the former East Germans, existed as hard copy only. However, the educational and financial history of politicial figures would have to have been put on disk for filing with various government commissions. Moreover, many large corporations had scanned their books onto computer. Those, at least, might also be available.
Darrell McCaskey’s office, which had dominion over contact with other agencies, put them on-line with the FBI, Interpol, and various German law enforcement agencies: the Bundeskriminalamt or BKA, the German equivalent of the FBI; the Landespolizei; the Bundeszollpolizei or Federal Customs Police; and the Bundespostpolizei, the Federal Postal Police. The Bundeszollpolizei and the Bundespostpolizei often caught up with felons who had managed to slip past the others.
As the two assistants word-searched data and retrieved blocks of information about Hausen, Dr. Benn wrote it up in essential, digestible chunks. Since Hood had requested a phone call, Benn would read it to him. However, the data would also be stored for downloading or hard-copy printout.
Reading the information which came in, and rereading the original request, he wondered if Hood had got things quite right. There seemed to be some confusion about which Hausen had done what during his career.
Nonetheless, Benn continued to work quickly in order to meet the deadline Hood had imposed.
CHAPTER FIFTY Thursday, 3:01 P.M., Washington, D.C.
All requests for information from the RI-Search division were automatically given a job number and timecoded by computer. Job numbers were always prefixed by one, two, or three digits which identified the individual making the request. Since requests were frequently made by someone in a dangerous situation, other individuals were automatically notified when those requests came in. If anything happened to the person in the field, their backup would be required to step in and finish the operation.
When Hood asked for data from RI-Search, Mike dodgers was alerted by a beep from his computer. Had he not been present, the signal would have sounded once every minute.
But he was there, eating a late lunch at his desk.
Between bites of microwaved hamburger from the commissary, he examined the request. And he began to worry.
Rodgers and Hood were unalike in many ways. Chief among the differences was their worldview. Hood believed in the goodness of people while Rodgers believed that humankind was basically self absorbed, a collection of territorial carnivores. Rodgers felt that the evidence was on his side. If it were not, then he and millions of soldiers like him wouldn’t have jobs.
Rodgers also felt that if Paul Hood had doubts about the Hausen clan, there must really be cause for concern.
“He’s going into France to search for a terrorist group with Matt Stoll as backup,” the General said to his empty office. He looked at his computer. He wished he could input ROC and have the Regional Op-Center, fully staffed and with Striker personnel on hand, on site in Toulouse. Instead, he typed in MAPEURO.
A full-color map of Europe appeared. He overlaid a grid and studied it for a moment.
“Five hundred and forty miles,” he said as his eyes went from Northern Italy to the South of France.
Rodgers hit ESC and typed NATOITALY.
Within five seconds a two-column menu was onscreen, offering selections from Troop deployment to Transportation resources, from Armaments to Wargame simulation programs.
He moved the cursor to Transportation and a second menu appeared. He selected Air transport. A third menu offered a listing of aircraft types and airfields. The Sikorsky CH-53E was free. The three engined chopper had a range of over twelve hundred miles, and it had room enough for what he was planning. But at 196 miles an hour, it wasn’t fast enough. He moved down the list. And stopped.
The V-22 Osprey. A Bell and Boeing vertical takeoff and landing vehicle. Its range was nearly 1,400 miles at a cruising speed of 345 miles an hour. Perhaps best of all was the fact that one of the prototypes had been turned over to the Sixth Fleet for testing in Naples.
Rodgers smiled, then escaped from the menu and called up his phone directory on-screen. He moved the cursor to NATO Direct Lines and selected the Senior NATO military commander in Europe, General Vincenzo DiFate.
Within three minutes, Rodgers had pulled the General away from a dinner party at the Spanish Embassy in London and was explaining why he needed to borrow the chopper and ten French soldiers.
CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE Thursday, 9:02 P.M., Wunstorf, Germany
“Stupid cripple!” Herbert had heard some strong epithets in his day.
He’d heard them being thrown at blacks in Mississippi, at Jews in the former Soviet Union, and at Americans in Beirut.
But what the young sentry shouted as he stalked toward Jody was one of the dumbest invectives he’d ever heard.
Weak as it was, though, it still pissed him off.
Herbert snatched the flashlight from his chair and took a moment to glance into the driver’s side of the car he’d followed here. Then he scooted to the side lest someone shoot at his light. He watched from the darkness as the sentry reached Jody and she finally stopped walking. Then Herbert pulled the Skorpion from under his leg.
Jody and the sentry were about ten yards from Herbert and twenty-five yards from the line of neo-Nazis. Beyond them, the rally continued undisrupted.
Jody was standing directly between Herbert and the sentry.
The boy asked something in German. Jody said she didn’t understand. He shouted to someone behind him for instructions about what to do. As he did, he stepped slightly to the left. Herbert aimed the Skorpion at the boy’s right shin and fired.
The brawny youth went down with a shriek.
“Now we’re both crippled,” Herbert muttered as he stashed the gun in a worn leather pocket on the side of the chair. He rolled quickly toward the passenger’s side of the car.
The crowd fell silent and the line of neo-Nazis hit the dirt well behind the wounded man. The rise in the terrain made it impossible for them to fire from where they were— though Herbert knew they wouldn’t stay there for long.
As Herbert rounded the car he yelled to Jody, “Do your thing and then let’s go!” The girl looked at him, then looked across the field of white faces. “You didn’t beat me,” she yelled in a strong voice. “And you won’t.” Herbert opened the passenger’s side. “Jody!” The girl looked down at the wounded boy, then ran back.