He trailed after the younger man until they came to a brown steel door set into one of the corridor walls. It was equipped with an electronic card reader and a ten-key pad. The letters “JSOC-ILU” were stenciled at eye level in fresh white paint.
McFadden gestured toward the door. “Welcome to the Dungeon, Colonel.” He reddened. “I mean, that’s our nickname for it…” His voice trailed away.
Thorn took pity on him and smiled. “Seems appropriate, Mike. Okay, the Dungeon it is.” He pointed his index finger at the door. “Now let’s get inside and get to work.”
“Right.” McFadden moved in front of him to slide his ID card through the reader and to input the code needed to open the door. Thorn noticed that the other man was careful to block his view of the lock’s keypad. That was a mark in his favor. Even though the analyst didn’t pay much attention to his personal appearance, he obviously took the need for security very seriously indeed. So his priorities were straight.
The door buzzed suddenly and unlatched.
“We each have our own card, sir,” McFadden explained, stepping back as the door swung inward. “You’ll get yours and the number code when you sign in at the Security Office.”
Nodding his understanding, Thorn walked briskly into what McFadden called the Dungeon. At first glance the accommodations looked better than the bare corridor outside but not that much better. There was a lot more light, the walls were painted a pale blue, and at least someone had laid a worn brown carpet over the concrete floor.
Beyond the secure door a narrow hallway opened on to a common area. A large table surrounded by chairs filled the center of the room and a small table off to one side held a coffeemaker and a stack of paper cups. Other corridors led off-from this central room into the rest of the complex.
Thorn didn’t have time to notice more. Several men and a couple of women were gathered near the coffeemaker, clearly waiting to greet him. They ranged in age from their early twenties to their mid-to late forties. All of them were civilians.
One of the oldest, a tall, balding, heavyset man, stepped forward right away and held out a huge, bearlike hand. “Colonel Thorn? My name’s Joe Rossini. I’m your deputy director. Welcome aboard.”
“Thanks.” Thorn shook hands with the man who would be his number two for the next year. Steeling himself to make the white lie sound sincere, he said, “I’m glad to be here.”
Rossini nodded toward the others. “The rest of these eager, shining faces are your section leaders.” Dark brown eyes gleamed behind the thick lenses of his plain blackframe glasses. “They crack the whip on the other analysts, keep the computers humming, and generally do all the real work around here while I fill in the New York Times crossword puzzle and think deep thoughts.”
Thorn grinned. Whatever else he was, at least Rossini wasn’t the kind of pompous bureaucrat he’d feared being saddled with. He paid careful attention as the big man introduced the others one by one, matching faces to names for later reference. He hadn’t wanted this posting, but he was here now and he planned to do the best job he could.
When Rossini finished the introductions, Thorn looked the group over one more time. “I won’t make a speech right now. I’m sure you’ll all hear my voice far too often and far too soon.” There were a few mildly nervous chuckles at that. He waited for them to die away before continuing in the same easy, informal tone. “I do want to make one point, though. I care a lot about accuracy and about the truth. What I don’t care much about is strict military formality. So you don’t have to keep calling me ‘Colonel’ or ‘sir.’ My first name’s Peter and I expect you to use it. Okay?”
They looked relieved.
“Great. That’s it, then. I’ll see you all later in the day.” He turned and nodded toward Rossini. “Right now the Maestro here and I are going to get better acquainted.”
His new deputy’s thick black eyebrows shot up in surprise at Thorn’s use of his office nickname. Half hidden behind the other analysts, Mike McFadden gulped audibly and faded away down one of the corridors.
Thorn smiled inwardly. He’d filed away his guide’s first, accidental revelation of Rossini’s handle for use at the first suitable opportunity. In his experience it never hurt to have a reputation for being ultra-observant.
The man they called the Maestro wasn’t slow on the uptake himself.
Rossini saw McFadden vanish, glanced at Thorn, and pretty clearly mentally added two and two together. The big man shook his head in mock dismay. “So what do people call you behind your back, Pete?” he asked.
Thorn shrugged, smiling. “I suspect you’ll find out a hell of a lot sooner than I will.” He motioned in the general direction of the rest of the complex. “How about giving me the fifty-cent tour before we get down to business?”
“To hear is to obey.” Rossini led the way down the right hand corridor.
“We’ll start with the Regional Analysis sections…”
Beyond the meeting room, the Intelligence Liaison Unit’s quarters branched out into a warren of small offices crowded with cubicles, desks, computers, and filing cabinets. Maps, blackboards, and bulletin boards hung from the walls almost everywhere Thorn looked. Every room held two or three people either hunched over computer keyboards or conferring together in earnest tones. Television sets flickered in several corners, tuned to the major news networks with the sound muted.
The whole organisation gave off a feeling of energy and quiet excitement. One bulletin board held rows of small black-and-white snapshots showing the high-ranking terrorists confirmed killed in Amir Taleh’s crackdown. Another tracked the ongoing disintegration of the HizbAllah’s command structure.
Thorn liked what he saw so far. These people weren’t just going through the motions. They were genuinely committed to their work.
He could also sense Rossini’s pride in his creation. In a little over a month, the big man had molded a disparate collection of forty or so counterterrorism experts drawn from everywhere across the vast alphabet soup of U.S. intelligence agencies into a unified team. That was an impressive accomplishment. Thorn knew a lot about motivating soldiers to work hard when their lives and those of their comrades were on the line. He was savvy enough to realise that he knew a lot less about motivating people when the stakes were more abstract.
The
JSOC
Intelligence Liaison Unit might be Major General Sam Farrell’s brainchild, but it was obvious that Joe Rossini’s drive and dedication had brought it to life.
His office was about as far back inside the complex as it was possible to get right next to Rossini’s. They shared a secretary and a photocopier. Beyond that and the same basic floor plan, the two rooms didn’t have anything in common.
The deputy director’s office was a mess. A series of framed photographs on the walls gave the room a personal touch. They showed a smiling Rossini, his wife, and an assortment of four or five children in a variety of settings. Everything else was work-related. Almost every square inch of desk and floor space was piled high with computer printouts and floppy disks. And books. Books on terrorism and psychology. Books on weapons, explosives, and sabotage. Books on the climates, cultures, and histories of different parts of the world. Stacks of books that were piled so high and so precariously that you had the feeling the slightest tremor would start an avalanche.
Slightly stunned by the sight of so much crammed into so little space, Thorn pulled his head out of Rossini’s room and ushered the big man into his own barren work area. None of his own personal effects had arrived from Fort Bragg yet not that he would have very much to hang on the walls even when they did, he realised.
He shut the door behind them, tossed his uniform cap onto his empty chair, and perched himself on one corner of the desk. He gestured toward the room’s only other seat. “Take a pew, Maestro.”
“Thanks.” Rossini sat down heavily.
Thorn watched the big man closely, noting the way he winced as he straightened his left leg out. He had been limping by the time they finished the brief tour. “Your knee giving you trouble?”
“A little. Too much football when I was younger and too many extra pounds now. My wife and kids watch my calories for me, but the weight doesn’t seem to come off.” Rossini dismissed his personal problems with a disinterested shrug. “What would you like to know first, Pete?”
“Well, I’d like a rundown on exactly how the outfit’s shaping up. Plus, where you see us fitting into the
JSOC
and Pentagon scheme of things.”
Thorn had read a huge stack of reports before flying up from North Carolina, but he wanted to hear it straight, without the usual official gobbledygook. From what Sam Farrell had said, Rossini had a reputation throughout the intelligence community for not pulling any punches even when keeping quiet might benefit his career. This seemed like a good time to find out how much of that reputation for candor was deserved.
Rossini didn’t disappoint him.
“We’ve got some damned good people working here, Pete.” The big man smiled gently. “Some of their social graces aren’t exactly up to snuff, but they’re some of the brightest puzzle-pushers I’ve ever seen. Too bright for the powers-that-be in their old agencies, I guess.”
Thorn nodded. He’d been worried by some of the things he’d read during his first quick scan through the Intelligence Liaison Unit’s personnel records until he’d begun to see the emerging pattern. Backed by Farrell’s carte Blanche, ossini had recruited mavericks men and women whose skills were undoubted but who were widely viewed as square pegs in round holes inside the existing intelligence bureaucracies. At a time of declining budgets, the
CIA
, the
NSA
, and the other agencies were under increasing pressure to cut costs and staff. In those circumstances, the first to go were usually those who didn’t quite fit the button-down, yuppified tone emanating from each organization’s upper floors.
Those were exactly the kind of people Farrell had said he wanted for the
ISOC
liaison unit: people who were independent-minded and “just plain ornery enough” to take the analyses generated by the rest of the intelligence community, shake them up, turn them inside out, and basically play holy hell with the conventional wisdom.
Well, Joe Rossini had taken the general at his word, Thorn realized. The offices outside this room were crawling with men and women who loved nothing better than poking holes in other government agencies’ pet theories. Men and women who were now under his authority. Terrific. He had the sudden, unnerving feeling he’d just stepped out into a bureaucratic minefield.
He shook off the feeling and asked, “Any problems so far?” ‘
“You mean besides our wonderful accommodations?”
Thorn matched Rossini’s wry tone. “Yeah. Besides that.”
“Frankly, not as many as I expected. The teams I’ve set up are shaking out pretty well. The data’s starting to come in and most of the agencies are cooperating or at least making a good first stab at it.”
Then Rossini shook his head. “But we need more focus, Pete. More practical input on the kinds of inter Delta, the SEALs, and the rest of the Command really need for planning and conducting operations. Without that we’re just another time-wasting loop in the information cycle.”
Thorn nodded, starting to understand why Farrell thought he could do some good here.
Providing the Joint Special Operations Command with highly accurate, up-to-date intelligence on terrorist groups and their foreign backers was the whole rationale for this new unit’s existence. The Special Operations Command already had a Directorate of Intelligence staffed by hundreds of dedicated professionals, but they were mostly sited far away from Washington, D.C. They were also often mired in the kinds of interagency rivalries and lockstep thinking that inevitably developed in large organisations.
For years Delta Force and the other American commando units had been complaining about the quality of the intelligence support they received. Delta even had its own detachment of covert operatives, nicknamed the Funny Platoon, to provide tactical intelligence just before any strike. The
ILU
was an effort to build on that to expand JSOC’s storehouse of reliable information to the strategic and operational levels. People outside
JSOC
saw Major General Farrell’s new unit as simple empire-building. People inside saw it as a matter of survival. Bad intelligence got good soldiers killed.
Apparently, the general was counting on him to give Rossini and his civilian teams the military and operational insights they lacked. Now, that made sense, Thorn thought, feeling a surge of excitement and satisfaction at the prospect of real, meaningful work work that could save lives. He wasn’t an analyst, and he certainly wasn’t a skilled “fixer” able to navigate the Pentagon’s tangled administrative backwaters. But he did know the kind of data commandos needed to survive and succeed.
He {caned forward. “Okay. Let’s concentrate on developing that focus first, then. We can’t turn analysts into Delta commandos, but we can give ‘em a clearer idea of just what’s involved in putting a mission together and in pulling it off without getting killed. Here’s what I think we need to do…”
Rossinilistened intently while he outlined his ideas, interrupting only to clarify something or to offer alternate suggestions.
By the time they broke for a quick lunch, Thorn was feeling better about his new post. A lot of his success or failure in this assignment would depend on how well he and his deputy director worked together. Although it would take time to fully sort their relationship out, his first take was positive. Rossini might be carrying around a lot of extra weight, but none of that fat was between his ears.
JUNE
18
Fighting an urge to put a bullet through the computer screen in front of him, Peter Thorn forced himself to take another stab at understanding the procedures required to request photorecon satellite time. The acronyms and bureaucratic doublespeak glowing on his monitor were all starting to run together in one unintelligible mass.