The issue that could complicate this particular HADFR was that Legard’s ship, the Gosselin, had a robust navigation radar with an operable ceiling of seven hundred feet. Bird would have to work some of what Fisher had come to call his “aviational magic,” or as Bird himself called it, “sleight of wing.”
Franco finished cinching the rig onto Fisher, then patted him on the shoulder.
Bird said in his ear, “Two minutes to ramp down. How’re ya feeling, Sam?”
“Like a flying worm.”
14
FISHER felt and heard the Osprey’s engines slow as Bird throttled back and rotated the nacelles to three-quarters, bleeding off speed for altitude as he dropped the craft into the Gosselin’s radar bubble. The Osprey would be directly over the ship now, Fisher knew, but in one of its radar blind spots—the other being a ring approximately three hundred yards in diameter around the ship at wave-top height, where the radar’s signal would be lost in sea clutter.
“One minute to ramp down,” Sandy called in Fisher’s ear. “We’re matching up the couplers. Stand by.”
Like Pave Low special operations helicopters, this generation of Osprey was equipped with what was called a hover coupler. When engaged, the coupler could lock the craft into either a precise fixed spot over the earth’s surface or slave its position to a designated target, in this case the Gosselin as it steamed out of the St. Lawrence Seaway and into the Gaspé Passage.
“Not going anywhere,” Fisher replied. Yet. He felt that familiar and welcome anticipation/adrenaline flutter in his belly. He closed his eyes and slowed his breathing, centering himself. As it always did, the image of his daughter Sarah’s face appeared before his eyes. This had become a ritual for Fisher, a good luck touchstone he performed before each mission. He opened his eyes. Focus, Sam. Time to work.
Outside, over the roar of the engines, he could hear the hail-like splatter of rain on the fuselage. “Weather report, Sandy?”
“True winds light, three to five from the northwest; relative winds between us and the target’s deck, fifteen to seventeen knots; heavy and steady rain; temperature forty-eight degrees Fahrenheit.”
“All in all,” Bird added, “a downright lovely day.”
“I’m sure they’ve got coffee aboard,” Fisher replied. “I’ll see if I can scare up a cup.”
“Altitude, four hundred ninety-one. Ramp down in thirty seconds. We’re slaved to the target. As soon as you’re out the door, steering and cable slack on your command.”
The cabin lights blinked out, then glowed back to life in night-vision-friendly red.
“Roger,” Fisher said, and pulled up the hood on his tac suit and settled his goggles over his eyes. A thought occurred to him. He leaned closer to Franco, who was buckling into a safety rig on the bulkhead, and said, “The fairing—”
“Freshly coated in DARPA’s own version of Rain-X. Water should bead up and roll away.”
“Right.”
“Ramp coming down.”
A moment later Fisher heard the whirring of the ramp’s motors. Accompanied by a sucking whoosh of cold air, the ramp’s lip parted from the curved edge of the fuselage’s tail, and a slice of black sky appeared. The ramp continued descending, then stopped, fully open. Outside, Fisher could see skeins of clouds whipping past the opening and, in the breaks between the clouds, the distant twinkling of lights; the ships moving up and down the St. Lawrence showing up as individual specks, the cities and highways along the Seaway as threads and clusters.
Franco patted him on the shoulder again and called into his ear, “Whenever you’re ready.”
Fisher nodded, performed a final check of his rigging, then turned around so he was facing forward, then back-stepped up to the edge of the ramp until his heels were dangling in space, then coiled his legs and launched himself backward.
Per the plan, Franco let out an immediate four hundred feet of cable, which brought Fisher to a halt a hundred feet above the Gosselin’s mainmast, still unseen in the darkness. Though the true wind speed was negligible, Fisher’s relative speed through space was almost eighteen miles an hour, which was enough to turn the otherwise vertical rain into a diagonal, slashing deluge that peppered the fairing like blown sand. True to Franco’s prediction, however, the water beaded up and sluiced away before it could obscure Fisher’s vision. Through his harness he could feel the cable thrumming with the tension, like a plucked guitar string.
“Cable stopped and locked,” Bird said in his ear. “On you now, Sam.”
“Roger.”
Fisher powered up his NV goggles and heard, very faintly in his ear, the familiar hum. His vision went to gray green. And directly below his feet, not more than a third of a football field away, he could now see the top of the Gosselin ’s mast and the crescent-shaped dish of the navigation radar making its slow rotation.
Fisher pushed a button on the LTD pod on his wrist and then extended his index finger, aiming it at the ship’s afterdeck. He’d chosen this spot for his insertion primarily because of the weather. In this rain, if a stern lookout was posted, he or she would have likely withdrawn to the overhanging awning on the second-level aft superstructure. Same for anyone taking a smoke break. He switched his goggles to IR and scanned the afterdeck and superstructure for human-shaped thermal signatures. He saw none. God bless bad weather, he thought and switched back to NV.
“Reading your LTD clearly,” Sandy said. “Confirm designated aim point as afterdeck, midline, twenty feet forward of stern.”
“Confirmed,” Fisher replied. “Give me sixty of cable.”
“Sixty feet of cable,” Franco repeated. “Spooling now.”
Fisher felt himself dropping through the air. He was now aft of the mainmast. The cross-girdered tower, partially obscured by the rain, appeared before his eyes, seemingly rising disembodied from the darkness. He was forty feet above the afterdeck and twenty above the superstructure, almost dead center on the ship’s midline.
Fisher felt himself bump to a stop.
“Cable stopped,” Franco called.
“Confirm cable stopped,” Fisher replied.
Again he scanned the superstructure and afterdeck and again saw neither movement nor heat signatures. He knew better than to do an EM scan; this close to the Gosselin’s navigation radar, all he would see is a blinding swirl of electromagnetic waves that would leave him with a three-day headache. He switched back to NV. Down the length of the superstructure he could see the faint yellow glow of light escaping from the pilothouse’s port and starboard bridge wing doors—and cast in shadow on either wing a lone figure standing at the railing. Port and starboard look-outs. Not a concern right now. Their attention would be focused forward.
Fisher said, “Give me thirty of—” He stopped. On the afterdeck, a door opened on the superstructure, revealing a rectangle of red light. Standing in the rectangle was a man-shaped shadow. “Disregard my last. Hold cable.”
“Holding cable.”
The figure stood still for a second, then lifted its cupped hands to its face. Fisher saw the flare of a lighter. The hands dropped away, revealing the glowing tip of a cigarette.
Fisher said, “Stand by. Got a crewman on a smoke break.”
Fisher dangled in space, swaying slightly in the wind, which was partially blocked by the ship’s superstructure, for another five minutes until finally the crewman finished his cigarette and then leaned forward and swung the door shut.
“Clear,” Fisher radioed. “Preparing to deploy.”
He heard the double squelch of “Roger” from Franco in his ear.
He scanned the afterdeck for a clean drop zone. There. A patch of open deck bracketed by a barrel-size bollard near the port rail and the raised, glassed-in control cabin for the stern winch. Fisher pointed his LTD at the spot.
“Read distance to deck.”
Sandy replied, “Thirty-eight feet. Stand by. Calculating vertical variance.”
In the cockpit, Sandy would be using the flight
computer to read the rise and fall of the Gosselin’s deck on the waves. Nothing got your attention or tended to break ankles like landing on a deck that was bucking up to meet you. It was like stepping off what you thought was the second-to-last step on a stairway only to find one more beneath your foot—only much worse.
“Variance of two feet, Sam.”
Four feet in either direction, Fisher thought.
He said, “On my mark, give me a sharp drop—thirty-four feet.”
“Roger,” Franco said. “Sharp drop of thirty-four on your mark.”
Fisher watched the deck heave and drop below his feet. In the corners of his eyes, beyond the port and starboard deck railing, he could see the roiling, curled white edges of the waves. For a fraction of a moment he felt a wave of vertigo; he focused on the deck and blocked out the peripheries.
Wait for it . . . wait . . .
The deck heaved upward, paused, then dropped again.
“Mark.”
He felt his belly lurch into his throat as Franco quick-spooled the cable. Half a second later Fisher jerked to a stop. He hit the rig’s quick release, felt himself dropping, then hit the deck on the balls of his feet, dropped his shoulder, and rolled right, behind the bollard.
“Down, safe, and clear.”
“Retrieving cable.”
“Thanks for the ride,” Fisher said. “I’ll call you when I’m ready to shake the tree.”
“At your service, boss,” Bird said.
Fisher did a quick NV/IR scan of the deck around him, then sprinted, hunched over, to the superstructure, where he flattened himself against it. Palms pressed against the aluminum bulkhead, he sidestepped until his shoulder was pressed against the jamb of the hatchway in which he’d seen the smoker. He crouched down, then undogged the hatch a half inch and inserted the flexicam. The lens revealed a red-lit passageway, ten feet long, and ending in a split ladder way, one going up and one going down.
According to Grimsdottir, the Gosselin’s crew numbered eight: captain, first mate, helmsman, three cargo handlers, and two engineers. It was four twenty. Most of the crew would be asleep, with the first mate and helmsman on the bridge and one engineer on duty in the engine spaces. The big question mark was, who, if anyone, was guarding Calvin Stewart? Had Legard sent a bodyguard or two to mind the prisoner? He would soon find out.
Fisher withdrew the flexicam, then drew his pistol, opened the hatch halfway, stepped through, and pulled it shut behind him. He crouched for a full minute, listening and watching, until he was sure he was alone, then holstered the pistol.
He tapped the OPSAT’s touch screen and called up the Gosselin’s blueprint. Drawn in green wireframe on the black screen, the schematic was fully three dimensional, and the OPSAT’s stylus let him pan, rotate, and zoom the image. He played with it until he found what he wanted: crew’s quarters, second level, forward, just below the pilothouse.
He crept to the ladder and peered down, belowdecks, and saw nothing, so he mounted the ladder and climbed upward until his head was even with the deck above. Another passageway. This one, which had no direct access to the weather decks and therefore had no chance of emitting light other ships might mistake for navigation lights, was lit not by red lamps but by wall sconces, which cast pools of dim light on the overhead and deck.
On cat’s feet Fisher climbed the remaining few steps, then started down the passage. He counted doors as he went. There were ten, one for each crew member and two spares. The doors were evenly split down the port and starboard bulkheads, five to each side, with an eleventh door—a janitor’s closet—in the middle of the port bulkhead. As Fisher had feared, there were no name placards on the bulkhead, so finding which room held Stewart would take more time than he had. It was time to test his ruse.
He walked to the end of the passage and stopped before the last door, where he crouched. From a pouch on his calf he withdrew a thumb-size cylinder of compressed air topped with an articulated and long-stemmed nozzle like those found on cans of WD-40.
Inside, suspended within the compressed air, were thousands of RFID (radio frequency identification) chips, each the size of a grain of sand—essentially RFID powder. Miracles of miniaturization, RFID chips had initially been designed for loss prevention in U.S. retail stores. Each product gets an adhesive tag into which RFID powder has been embedded and each chip, or grain, is equipped with 128-bit ROM, or read-only memory, onto which a unique identification number has been engraved by an electron beam. When a chip, or a sprinkling of chips, comes within range of a detector, the ID number is read and verified as purchased or not yet purchased.
For Fisher’s purposes, the good folks at DARPA had taken the RFID powder concept one step further, first by coating each chip’s surface with a silicate that acted much like a cocklebur that attached itself to anything and everything, and second by affixing to each grain an external antenna—a tiny ribbon of wire half an inch long and barely the width of a human hair—that extended the chip’s transmission range to twenty feet.
As usual, of course, Fisher hadn’t liked DARPA’s official name for the RFID powder, which contained so many letters and numbers it looked like a calculus equation gone wrong, and had renamed it Voodoo Dust.
He pointed the canister at the deck before the door and pressed the nozzle. He heard a faint pfft. He backed down the passage, pausing at each door to coat the deck with the powder until he reached the janitor’s closet, where he turned around, walked to the opposite end of the passage, and then repeated the process, back-stepping until he’d covered each doorway and returned to the closet. He opened the door, slipped inside, and shut it behind him. On the OPSAT, he zoomed and rotated the Gosselin’s blueprint until the passageway filled the screen; there, in the black deck space between two notional bulkheads, were several dozen tiny blue dots, each one pulsing ever so slightly. Each dot, he knew, represented roughly one hundred RFID chips. The dots were spread down the passageway, three or four of them per door.
Into the SVT, he said, “Paint job done. Shake the tree.”
“Roger,” Sandy replied from the Osprey. “On your button four. Ten seconds.”
Fisher tapped the OPSAT’s screen, calling up the communications panel, then switched his earpiece to the indicated channel. For five seconds there was nothing but static, and then Sandy’s voice: “Cargo vessel Gosselin, this is the Canadian Coast Guard patrol ship Louisbourg, over.”
Silence.
“I say again, cargo vessel Gosselin, this is the Canadian Coast Guard patrol ship Louisbourg, do you read, over?”
“Yes, Louisbourg, this is Gosselin, we read you.”
“Gosselin, I am on your zero-five-one, four nautical miles. Confirm radar contact.”
Ten seconds passed and then, “Roger, Louisbourg, we see you. How can we be of service?”
There was in fact a Canadian Coast Guard patrol ship named Louisbourg, and it was in fact stationed in Gaspé, Quebec, but unbeknownst to the Gosselin’s captain, Louisbourg was hundreds of miles south, patrolling the coast of New Brunswick. The ship ten miles off the Gosselin’s starboard bow was in truth a Japanese cargo ship carrying DVD players and plasma televisions to Montreal.
“Gosselin, you are in Canadian territorial waters. You are ordered to heave to and stand by for inspection.”
“Uh . . . Louisbourg, we are a cargo vessel home ported in Montreal and bound for Halifax. May I ask the reason for the inspection?”
“Gosselin, you are ordered to heave to and stand by for random spot inspection,” Sandy repeated, an edge to her voice now. “Confirm compliance, over.”
“Understood, Louisbourg. Heaving to. Gosselin out.”
Well played, Sandy, Fisher thought. Now, with the tree-shaking done, it was time to see what, if anything, would fall out. If Stewart were aboard and not already tucked away into one of the ship’s nooks and crannies, Sandy’s threat of a boarding party would likely scare his keepers into moving him.
Fisher snaked the flexicam out the lo
uvered panel at the bottom of the door and switched to a fish-eye view so he could see both ends of the corridor.
Two minutes passed without any activity. Then he heard it: a pair of feet pounding down a ladder somewhere forward of him and above. The pounding got louder until the footsteps entered the passage outside Fisher’s door. A man appeared at the forward end of the passage. Fisher tapped RECORD on the OPSAT’s screen, then switched the flexicam’s lens to regular view and swiveled it to focus on the man, who was now striding down the passage. The man stopped at the fourth door on the starboard side, slipped a key into the lock, then pushed through the door. Fisher heard muffled voices, then a shout, some scuffling. The figure reappeared, now with a gun in his right hand and the bunched collar of Calvin Stewart in the other. Stewart’s hands were duct-taped before him. His captor half dragged, half marched Stewart down the passageway, and then they disappeared from view down the ladder.
Fisher withdrew the flexicam and studied the OPSAT’s screen. Most of the blue RFID dots remained in the passageway, but four of them—about four hundred chips—had done their job and clung to the shoes of Stewart’s captor. The dots were moving aft and down. All hail the Voodoo Dust, Fisher thought.
He rewound the flexicam’s video feed to where Stewart’s captor entered the passageway, then manipulated the timeline bar, forwarding and rewinding until he had a clear, well-lighted view of the man’s face.
“Well, this is unexpected,” Fisher whispered.
The face on his screen was Asian—Korean, if he wasn’t mistaken.
15
“I agree,” Lambert said in Fisher’s ear. “This is unexpected.”
Fisher had already compressed the flexicam’s video feed and sent it to Third Echelon via encrypted burst transmission. Grimsdottir had quickly isolated the Korean’s face, pulled a still frame from the video, and was now running it through the NSA’s database—whose reach encompassed the CIA, the FBI, Homeland Security, and Immigration—looking for a match.
“You’re tracking them?” Lambert asked.