"It was there for the National Security Agency, the NSA," admitted
Theodore Brock, his special assistant for national security affairs.
The atmosphere in the Oval Office was heating up.
"I'm now well aware of that," the President snapped, not bothering to
hide his annoyance. "What I'm not well aware of is who the hell
authorized it?"
The Oval Office, in the southeast corner of the White House West Wing,
was, in the eyes of many, a small, unimposing prize for all the effort
required to take up residence. John Hansen, however, seemed not to
notice. He commandeered whatever space he happened to occupy and made
it seem an extension of his own spirit. In fact, he rather liked the
minimalist quarters, heritage of a time when U.S. presidents had much
less weight on their shoulders. From here the wide world opened out.
For one thing, the communications here and in the Situation Boom in the
basement put the planet at his fingertips. Next to a gigantic push-
button multiline telephone was another, highly secure and modernistic,
digital voice transmission system that could take him anywhere.
As the old-fashioned Danish grandfather clock--his only personal item in
the office--began to chime the half hour, he glanced once more over the
crisis summary that Alicia Winston had hastily assembled and had
waiting on his desk when he returned from New York. Her office was
conveniently just behind one of the three doors that led into the Oval
Office. Another led to his personal study, passing through a small
kitchen, from which now came the aroma of fresh-brewed Jamaican Blue
Mountain coffee. The third opened onto a corridor, with the standard
six Secret Service people, through which he expected to see his
national security adviser appear at 1:45 P.M. Then, according to his
schedule, he had to try to put all this out of his mind at 2:30, when
he was due to host a delegation of troglodytes from the Hill. Nuclear
disarmament did not have a lot of friends in Tennessee and Washington
State. He was going to have to make some concessions, he knew, but
politics was about compromise, always had been.
"Apparently the ship was put into place without authorization," Brock
went on. "There was some back-channel request from NSA. They wanted to
keep tabs on a space project on an island in the Aegean."
"SatCom. Now we're spying on Americans, is that it?" Hansen leaned back
in his high, Kevlar-protected chair and tossed a telling glance toward
Morton Davies, his chief of staff, who monitored most of his incoming
calls. They both had received an earful on the Cyclops project from his
old professor, Isaac Mannheim--who claimed it would demonstrate to the
world that America's private sector still had plenty of life left,
could stand up to the Europeans and the Japanese when it came to
innovation. SatCom's independence from government, at least to
Mannheim's way of thinking, was precisely its greatest virtue.
"Well, damn NSA," he continued. "This is an outrage."
He recalled that he'd sent the new director, Al Giramonti, a pointedly
worded memo on that very subject. When John Hansen took office, the
National Security Agency was still liberally exercising its capacity to
monitor every phone call in America from its vast array of listening
antennas at Fort Meade. He had resolved to terminate the practice. He
thought he had.
"It was just routine surveillance," Brock insisted, squirming. He was
in his late fifties, bright, with horn-rimmed glasses and a high
forehead. He also was black, and he felt he had more than the usual
obligation to make his President look good. "There was a satellite test
launching in the works. The whole project has been kept under wraps,
and NASA wanted to know what was going on. The National Security Agency
had a platform in the area, so it all more or less meshed. There was
nothing--"
"And what do the Israelis have to say for themselves?" the President
pushed on. "The Hind had their markings."
"They deny they had anything to do with it." He squinted toward Hansen,
trying to seem knowledgeable yet uncommitted. Which way was the wind
going to blow next? "Even though the helo was plainly ID'd by--"
"That's what they claimed in '67," Hansen fumed, cutting him off, "when
they strafed, torpedoed, and napalmed NSA's Liberty, which was clearly
in international waters. They were hoping to prolong the Six-Day War
long enough to roll into Syria, and they didn't want us to monitor
their plans. So they took careful pains to knock out all our SIGINT
capability in the region, just happening to kill a dozen seamen in the
process. Afterwards the lying fuckers told our embassy in Tel Aviv it
was all a mistake and sent flowers. If anybody else in the world had
done that, we'd have nuked them."
"Well, at the time the Glover was hit, it wasn't monitoring Israeli
SIGINT," Brock noted, adjusting his glasses. "We think they're clean on
this one. At least what we have from Fort Meade so far seems to bear
that out. They're still running a computer analysis, though, pulling
out all the voice and code used by the Israeli Air Force during that
time. We didn't have that capability back in 1967. In a few more hours
we'll be able to put that question to rest, one way or another."
"Okay, maybe we should go slow till then. So in the meantime, let's
take them at their word for a moment and examine the other
possibilities." Hansen revolved in his chair and stared out the
bulletproof window behind him. The Washington sky was growing overcast.
And the clock was running. This whole screw-up would be in tomorrow's
Washington Post, garbled, just as sure as the sun was going to come up.
CNN had already picked up the BBC's "rumor" and was running it on their
"Headline" service, hinting the U.S. intelligence community had been
caught with its pants around its ankles, again.
"There's more," Brock said, interrupting his thoughts. "The Iranians
have been screaming about a stolen Hind for four days, blaming us, of
course. But they've quietly let Mossad know they think it may have
strayed into Pakistan, maybe as a diversion, and then ended up heading
out for one of the Gulf states, probably Yemen. The Israelis have
reason to believe it was delivered to a Yemeni-flagged freighter in the
Persian Gulf, then taken through the Suez Canal and into the eastern
Med. After that, all contact was lost."
Iran, the President thought. Pakistan. None of it sorted into a
picture. Unless . . .
"Incidentally," Morton Davies, Chief of Staff, interjected, "the
Israelis also have one other bit of intel that seems to have somehow
gotten lost in all of NSA's Cray supercomputers. An Israeli 'fishing
trawler' picked up a Mayday they triangulated as coming from somewhere
north of Crete. It supposedly claimed--the transmission was a bit
garbled--to emanate from the very Hind that had attacked the ship. The
broadcast said that terrorists had taken over the SatCom facility on
the island of Andikythera. If that's true, it would be the one that the
Glover was monitoring."
Hansen stared at him. "Are we supposed to believe any of this? That
unknown terrorists are behind this whole thing? That's exactly the kind
of disinformation the Israelis have used on us in the past. Besides, it
doesn't click. If terrorists did do it, they'd damned sure want the
credit. Nobody throws a rock this size through your window unless
there's a note attached. So where is it?"
That's when the import of what Davies had said hit him. SatCom. It was
going to be the pride of America, a symbol . . . My God, it was a
rocket launch facility.
He reached down and touched the blue button on the desk intercom on the
right side of his desk.
"Alicia."
"Sir," came back the crisp reply.
"Have NSA send over any recent PHOTOINT they have on the Greek island
of Andikythera. By hand. I want it yesterday."
"Yes, sir."
"Ted," he said, turning back to Brock, "somehow this time