Huston, James W. -2003- Secret Justice (com v4.0)(html) (8 page)

He tried to focus on the side of the screen as he clicked through the pages to the chat room. He had almost gotten to the point where he didn’t notice the images anymore but some of them were so jarring that he couldn’t ignore them. It seemed to him that the more perverse, the more disgusting the site, the more likely it was that the people he was looking for were there. They seemed to think that the government wouldn’t go to places where child pornography or bestiality was featured. They were almost right.

He finally made it to the chat room. There were pages of comments, some trying to be humorous, some by those for whom English was clearly not their first language. He adjusted his glasses as he read. He had come to recognize people, even those who tried to disguise themselves with several different names or identities. They misspelled or misused the same words or jammed hints or clues into their messages for their intended readers that were obvious to a cryptologist like Johnson, trained for years in the caverns of Navy cryptology. He was sure he could recognize a large number of the participants, much like a third grade teacher might recognize a student’s work.

Johnson read quickly. Nothing interesting or suspicious. He directed a recording device that copied the chat room’s writing onto a separate hard drive and went to Pornography Site Number Five on his list, his list of fifty. He recalled this site clearly as it was here he had found evidence of Wahamed Duar’s operation. Two people communicated repeatedly with different screen names, and hinted at dates that started lining up with other things he knew about Duar’s operation. It made him sufficiently suspicious that he passed his tentative beliefs uphill where his superiors had agreed with him. They had been impressed and told him so. It had given him a renewed sense of mission that was now starting to wane.

He leaned forward and rested his head on his hand as he looked at the comments in the chat room. He tried to envision the people on the other side of the screen typing these words. Probably mostly single men sitting in dark rooms desperate for affection, recognition, or companionship, who had twisted their idea of a relationship into what was before them. Johnson read on, his eyes drifting from one obscene comment to another when he noticed a couple of remarks that seemed out of keeping with the rest.

He concentrated on two who seemed to be having their own implicit subconversation. He quickly captured the usernames and began working backward to find their Internet addresses and the ISP—the Internet Service Provider—through which they were working.

The NSA’s ability to work with ISPs in other countries was little known. In fact the NSA had created a list of every single ISP in the world by country or area, four hundred eighty of them around the globe. No one knew the NSA could target an ISP by country. Many people believed e-mail to be anonymous, not so much in content, which they suspected might be intercepted, but anonymous in location. But the NSA had been busy. Pakistan, for example, only had fifty-five ISP address ranges registered to the country. The smaller the country, the smaller the pond he had to explore compared to the giant ocean of the Internet. If they wanted to know exactly how the routing worked, they would send someone to one of the numerous Internet cafés in, say, Pakistan, who would send an e-mail that could be easily traced. From then on, the NSA could track any e-mail coming from that block in Islamabad, or Karachi. And that wasn’t their only tool.

Johnson began his most recent exploration with a frown. He had heard that Rat, a good friend of his, had captured Wahamed Duar. Everyone had assumed Duar’s organization must be crippled. Yet from his recollection, the traffic he was now seeing on Pornography Site Number Five was strikingly similar to that he had seen from Duar’s organization before the attack in Sudan. Johnson began making electronic notes in a file on a pop-up window on his computer.

He dumped them into an electronic folder that was part of the NSA’s top-secret system for tracking Internet traffic, CARNIVORE, an electronic monitoring system that straddled virtually all the important ISP servers in the world and allowed the United States to monitor Internet traffic. When it was in the TCP full mode, it collected every word of every communication that passed through the server. The NSA could then use its supercomputers to monitor the words themselves for patterns, particular words such as “bomb,” or anything else they were looking for. They could even store the data and come back to analyze it later. They could track where it came from, and where it went. But they never acknowledged the ability to do either, even though CARNIVORE itself was being replaced by an upgraded system called DCS 1000, or as it was fondly known, ENHANCED CARNIVORE.

Johnson watched as CARNIVORE went to work. He drank his cooling coffee and wrinkled his nose at the staleness. He put the cup down. Shit, he thought. Duar’s organization was still kicking, still planning, and hadn’t missed a beat. It even looked like the same people.

Lieutenant Murphy dozed in the office just off the main treatment room of the sick bay on the second deck of the
Belleau Wood
. There was a rap on the door.

“Dr. Murphy, I think you’d better come look at our patient.”

Murphy looked up at the woman whose voice he didn’t recognize. It was a corpsman who had joined the ship the week before. “Huh?” he said as he tried to shake the cobwebs from his head. It was the tone of the corpsman’s voice that alarmed him, a tone of urgency. “What is it?”

“His vitals are off the charts. His temperature is a hundred and six, his breathing is extremely labored, and, frankly, I think he’s about to code on us.”

Murphy raced to the bedside of their lone patient. He was clearly struggling. He was flushed and seemed to be sagging into the bed. Murphy looked at the corpsman. “Get Dr. Satterly down here right away.” The corpsman ran out of the sick bay heading for the office to dial Satterly.

Murphy leaned toward the patient. “Mazmin!” he said loudly. “Mazmin, pull out of it!” Mazmin didn’t respond. His eyes were rolled up very high. Murphy could feel the heat of his skin without even touching it. He turned to another corpsman. “Get me some more ice packs. We may be nearing the end here.”

Rat turned his old Porsche 911 convertible into the underground garage at his Washington office, where he maintained his company, International Security Consultants, Inc. It allowed him and his team to operate anywhere and do whatever they wanted with complete deniability from whatever arm of the government was using their services at the moment. Officially he was still active duty Navy; a lieutenant in Dev Group, or DEVGRU as it was known in the Navy, when it was spoken of at all, usually with a quiet tone and a glance over the shoulder. But Rat was also with the CIA and carried other IDs that no one could refute or challenge because they were completely authentic. He was whatever he needed to be.

The meeting was scheduled for 0630, the same time Rat liked to start everything in the day. He liked to get meetings and discussions out of the way early to allow time for more important things. By the time he got to the conference room—a room certified for discussing top-secret intelligence—the rest of the team was already in place. Six of the eleven were former members of Dev Group. The other five were SAS members who had been placed in Rat’s group prior to Sudan, one of whom was new. Nubs’s replacement.

He was ten minutes early, as were they. They knew what happened to those who were late. Rat said if you couldn’t be on time for a stupid meeting in Washington, he had no confidence you could be on time for something important. He had thrown one man off the team for being five minutes late. The others had been speechless. They regarded Rat as friendly, fair, and even thought he had a good sense of humor. But when it came to operations, the preparation for which began long before the actual event, he was incredibly intense and serious. It was at least part of what accounted for his success and reputation. Nothing got in the way of results.

“Morning,” Rat said as he tossed his thin leather briefcase on the conference room table.

“Morning,” they replied. The atmosphere was one of self-congratulation. Most smiled and drank from paper coffee cups.

“Everyone read the report?”

They all nodded.

“Jacobs has the draft, but he’s waiting for the final. This is it. I know this is putting the cart before the horse, but Jacobs is in a hurry. So comments?”

Robby smiled. His dreadlocks hung down beside his dark black face. It was a wig he wore. He had closely cut hair, but when he wore his dreads he looked completely authentic. He could incorporate numerous accents if needed. “I noticed there’s no mention of our Jordanian friend wanting to slot the guy we captured.”

Rat smiled back, amused at the image of the Jordanian being turned loose on Mazmin, who was now complaining about his medical care and his treatment at the hands of the Americans. “I thought we’d let him off easy. In fact I left him out of the report entirely. We had to hint about the guy who gave us a signal that we used to jump in. But I don’t know who’s going to get this report. His existence is above the clearance level of about ninety-eight percent of the Agency.”

Robby flipped to another page of the report. “You didn’t mention the use of the Ultra Wide Band. That was its first tactical and combat use, unless I’m mistaken. That wall was pretty damned thick. Seems to me we ought to tell everyone how effective it was. Maybe they’ll fund it a little more.”

Rat nodded and made a note to himself. “Think you could do a paragraph on that?”

Robby nodded. “But I’m thinking we ought to do a separate report. Maybe an addendum, or technical report that could be attached . . .”

“No, they’ll ask for more if they want it,” Rat replied. “Groomer? Anything?”

“No, sir. Pretty much a textbook operation. We got Duar, we got another guy from his organization, we got the Jordanian, we got in and out of there with only one casualty—which is pretty amazing considering all the bullets flying around—and accomplished the mission. Frankly, we looked pretty good. Although I feel pretty shitty about Nubs.”

Rat nodded and looked at those around the table. “We need to have a farewell party for Nubs.”

There were immediate grunts of agreement.

“A wake. We’ve got to honor him. One of the finest men I’ve ever known. Just tears me up that he got hit. Unlucky. We’ve got to invite Carrie, and have a really ripping party. Who knows her the best?”

“I do,” Robby said. “I went to his house at least once a week.”

“You want to talk to Carrie and see if she’s up for it?”

“Sure. I’ll take care of the whole—”

Suddenly Rat’s small encrypted digital cell phone rang. He was annoyed but looked at the number on the readout. “Rat,” he said, quickly putting the phone to his ear. He listened carefully. “When?” He listened again. He nodded. “Okay. Thanks for calling.” He pushed the top of the phone down onto the rest of the shaft and tossed the phone onto his briefcase.

The others in the room waited. They knew only a few people had the number to that phone. “The guy we captured in Sudan who was in sick bay just died,” Rat reported.

Several of the men in the conference room looked away. They were the ones who thought his treatment of Mazmin had crossed the line. They had known better than to say anything in the middle of Sudan, but now that it was over, they showed their disapproval.

Groomer was the first to speak. “I’m pretty broken up about that,” he said, thinking instead of what Mazmin had done to Nubs. “I was thinking he and I could become close friends one day. But what got him?”

Rat picked up the phone and slid the top up and down nervously. “Pneumonia.”

“How the hell did he get pneumonia?” Groomer asked.

“Probably from the water and shit in his lungs,” Rat said.

“What difference does it make?” Banger asked. “I don’t give a shit about him, frankly. If I had the chance I’d have shot him right in the face.”

“That captain on the ship seems to care a lot. The ship’s surgeon.”

“Meaning what?” Banger asked. “What’s he going to do?”

“The same thing we all did,” Rat said. “Write a report.”

“Saying what?”

“He did an autopsy. He’s going to say the guy died from pneumonia caused by water and foreign objects in his lungs that got infected.”

“What foreign substances?”

“Vomit,” Rat said reluctantly.

“So what?” Groomer said, growing annoyed.

“The cause of the vomit’s the problem. Doctor’s going to put in his report that he died from torture.”

No one in the room said a word. They all understood the implications. Torture, as in intentionally hurting someone to get information from them, or just to hurt them, was illegal. Forbidden.

Sellers, one of the newer members of the team and one who was not from Dev Group, said, “So maybe we ought to just tell everybody exactly what happened. We don’t say shit about it in the official report,” he said, indicating.

“Why would we do that?” Rat asked.

“Because the truth is always the right thing.”

Rat opened his briefcase. “Starting Monday we’re all going to The Point. Jacobs wants us to get smart on small-boat operations. Some of you don’t have any experience in that at all, and there will be other SAS teams down there. We’ll rendezvous at Quantico. We’re going to helo down. We’ll be there the rest of the week. Any questions?”

Robby waved his hand. “We need to do anything about this report the surgeon’s going to do?”

Rat shook his head. “We’ll deal with it when it happens, if anything happens. We’ve got work to do.”

“May be too late then,” Robby said.

“I’ll take that chance,” Rat said. “Okay. So let’s talk about the Sudan op. Good, bad, and other. Except the interrogation part. We’ll leave that alone for now.”

John Johnson of the NSA, freed for a while from the pornography sites, pulled his old Cherokee to the end of the rutted road by the small pier on a base Johnson had never been to. In fact he had never heard of it, until he e-mailed Rat and said he had to talk to him. Rat had directed him to the secure Web site that detailed the base’s location. Johnson had jumped at the chance to get out of his cubicle and away from the pornography sites and drove down past the Great Dismal Swamp near Elizabeth City, North Carolina. He was to see Rat at the Harvey Point Defense Testing Activity, or The Point, as it was called. It was built during World War II to serve as a base for antisubmarine blimps. Now it was used as an advanced training center for the CIA. Most thought all high-level CIA training occurred at Camp Peary near Williamsburg, Virginia. The Basic Operations Course for the CIA was taught at the ten-thousand-acre Camp Peary, or The Farm, as it was called. The Farm was used extensively by the DO, the Directorate of Operations. But advanced paramilitary operations were all conducted at The Point in North Carolina.