Locked On Part 31

Fabrice Bertrand-Morel's eyebrows rose slightly and he sipped his drink. "I can see how I could be asked to get involved with the hunt for this man, as my people are all over the world and very well connected. But what I do not understand, at all, is why I am being asked to do this by you. What is your involvement?"

Laska looked out at the bay. "I am a concerned citizen."

Bertrand-Morel chuckled; his large frame s.h.i.+fted up and down in his chair as he did so. "I'm sorry, Paul. I need to know more than that to agree to this operation."

Now the Czech-American turned his head to his guest. "All right, Fabrice. I am a concerned citizen who will see that your organization is paid whatever you wish to capture Mr. Clark and return him to the United States."

"We can do this, although I understand the CIA is working the same mission at present. I worry there is the potential for stepping on one another's toes."

"The CIA does not want to catch the man. They will not get in the way of a motivated detective like yourself."

"Are you doing this to help Edward Kealty?"

The older man nodded as he sipped his Cognac.

"Now I see why President Kealty's people did not come to me about this." The Frenchman nodded. "Am I to a.s.sume he has information that would be embarra.s.sing to candidate Ryan?"

"The existence of John Clark is embarra.s.sing to candidate Ryan. But without him captured, without the footage on the news of him being dragged into a police station, President Kealty looks impotent and the man remains a compelling mystery. We do not need him as a mystery. We need him as a prisoner. A criminal."

"'We,' Paul?"

"I am speaking as an American and a lover of the rule of law."

"Yes, of course you are, mon ami. I will begin work immediately on finding your Mr. Clark. I a.s.sume you will be footing the bill? Not the American taxpayer?"

"You will give me the figures personally, and I will have my foundation reimburse you. No invoice."

"Pas de probleme. Your credit is always good."

The wealth and connections of Gerry Hendley came in handy at times like these. Across four hundred meters of water from the Dubai safe house of Riaz Rehan in Palm Jumeirah sat the five-star Kempinski Hotel & Residences, and here a three-bedroom water bungalow was owned by an English friend of Gerry's who worked in the oil and gas business. Hendley told the man he needed to borrow his place, and the American financial manager offered an extraordinary sum for the property, paid out on a per-week basis. It would have been too perfect for the home to be empty at that moment. Instead the "friend of Gerry's" was there with his wife and young daughter. But the oil and gas man was only too happy to pack up his family and move over to the opulent Burj Al Arab, an exquisite "six-star" hotel in the shape of a sail that jutted out into the Persian Gulf.

All on Gerry Hendley's dime, of course.

The oil and gas man left his home just in time. The Gulfstream G550 landed at Dubai International Airport, cleared customs, and then parked in a great sea of corporate jets billeted at an FBO there on the ramp.

As Ryan, Caruso, and Chavez began unloading their gear from the baggage compartment, Captain Reid and First Officer Hicks stood gla.s.sy-eyed on the hot tarmac-not from exhaustion after the long flight but in amazement at what they figured to be something in the neighborhood of five billion dollars' worth of machinery parked around them.

Luxury jets and high-tech helicopters were lined up tip to tail, and Hicks and Reid both planned to get a closer look at each and every one.

The three operators had plans themselves to get a closer look at one of the craft. A Bell JetRanger owned by the Kempinski was waiting to ferry them and their baggage directly to their residence.

Twenty minutes after deplaning from the Gulfstream, Dom, Ding, and Jack were back in the air, lifting into the glorious morning suns.h.i.+ne. They flew low along Dubai Creek at first, the wide waterway that separated Old Dubai and its congested streets and low sprawling stone structures from the skysc.r.a.pers of New Dubai along the coast.

Soon they headed out over the water, flying over the five-kilometer-wide Palm Island itself, developed roads built up over the water in the shape of a tree trunk and fifteen palm fronds, all these surrounded by a crescent-shaped island that served as a breakwater.

On this breakwater sat the Kempinski Hotel & Residences, and here the helicopter landed.

The three Campus operators were led to their property, a luxurious bungalow alongside a placid lagoon. Four hundred yards away, Rehan's safe house sat on the end of one of the palm fronds. They would be able to see it from here with the Leupold binoculars they brought with them, though they planned on getting a much closer look once night fell.

At two-thirty in the morning Ryan, Chavez, and Caruso sat in a rubber boat halfway between the Kempinski Hotel & Residences and the "palm frond" upon which Rehan's safe house sat, and they watched the dark compound through their night optics. They were happy to determine that, other than the small permanent security force-a man at the front guardhouse and a couple of foot sentries on patrol-the grounds outside the main house seemed to be uninhabited. There would be cameras and motion detectors and perhaps even acoustic monitoring equipment, but Chavez, Caruso, and Ryan were prepared for this, so tonight they would execute the most dangerous portion of their operation.

They were much less concerned about equipment that could give them away and much more concerned about men who could shoot them.

They had rented the boat and the scuba gear from a PADI dive shop not far from their bungalow. All three men had significant scuba experience, though Domingo reminded them all that John Clark had more dives under his belt in one six-month period as a SEAL than Chavez, Ryan, and Caruso had in their combined lives. Still, the water was calm, and they were not planning on going very deep or staying under very long.

The small rubber boat was not optimal for the operation; neither was the scuba equipment they wore. But this was the equipment available to them, so when Ryan complained that their gear could be better, Chavez just reminded him that they would all have to "adapt and overcome."

If they had needed to make a true covert underwater entry on the compound itself, they would have preferred to use rebreathing equipment, regulators that did not emit bubbles but instead reprocessed the exhaled gas with fresh oxygen. Rebreathers were crucial for covert scuba work, but even though the basic open-circuit gear they had rented from the recreational dive shop would give off bubbles galore when they swam underwater, they did not plan on arriving close enough to the compound to attract attention before coming out of the water.

They dropped anchor and slipped into the water silently. Ryan handed weighted and watertight boxes over the side to the other two men before he climbed out of the rubber boat and attached his swim fins to his feet. Soon all three men, each with a box in his hand, swam down to a depth of ten feet and checked their dive computers, found the direction to their target, and lined their bodies up on the lubber line of their compa.s.ses. They headed out with Chavez in the lead.

Ryan brought up the rear. His pounding heart created an odd techno-style cadence when coupled with the hissing noise of his breathing through his regulator's valve. The warm black water coc.o.o.ned him as he progressed, giving him the sense of being totally alone. Only the slight rhythmic pressures of his cousin Dominic's swim fins kicking ten feet or so ahead of him reminded him that his colleagues were with him, and he was comforted by this knowledge.

Finally, after he was underwater for ten minutes, Jack's forehead b.u.mped gently into Dominic's tank. Dom and Ding had stopped; they were on a sandy terrace on the incline that led out of the water up to the narrow strip of beach by Al Khisab Road. The depth on the terrace was just eight feet, and here Chavez used a faint red flashlight to show the other two where they should deposit their scuba gear. The men took off their equipment, strapped it together, and lashed it to a large rock, and then they each took one more long breath on their regulators. This done, the three men walked out of the water, dressed head to toe in black neoprene and carrying the watertight boxes with them.

Ten minutes after leaving the ocean behind, Dom, Ding, and Jack had moved onto a darkened property four lots down from Rehan's estate. This home was neither walled nor patrolled, so they took a chance there were no motion detectors installed, either. Behind a large pool house, the Americans began setting up the equipment they'd pulled from the watertight cases. It took a good fifteen minutes of preparations, each man working on his own project, but shortly after three a.m. Chavez gave a silent thumbs-up and Ryan sat down with his back to the pool house wall. He placed a set of video gla.s.ses over his eyes, and he lifted a s...o...b..x-sized remote control module out of a box.

From now until the deployment of the surveillance equipment was complete, Jack Ryan Jr. was in charge of this mission.

With a well-practiced flick of a switch on the controller in his hands, Ryan's gla.s.ses projected the image transmitted from the infrared camera hanging from a rotating turret on the bottom of a miniature radio-controlled helicopter that sat on a foldout plastic landing pad a few feet away. The over-under propellers of the tiny aircraft were only fourteen inches in diameter, and the device looked not much different from a high-end toy.

But this was no toy, as evidenced by the sound it made when Jack engaged the engine. Its motor generated only thirty percent of the noise of a regular RC helo of this size, and the device also carried a payload from an operator-releasable locking mechanism on its belly.

The German company that manufactured the microhelo sold it as a remote viewing and transporting device for the nuclear and biological waste industries, giving an operator standoff capability to view unsafe areas and deliver remote cameras and testing equipment. As The Campus had moved from an a.s.sa.s.sination team to more of an intelligence-gathering shop in the past year, they had been on the lookout for new technologies that could serve as force multipliers in their endeavors. They had only five field operators, after all, so they did what they could to leverage their efforts with high-tech solutions.

Jack had a total of five payloads to deploy tonight with his microhelo, so he did not waste a moment before lifting his aircraft into the night sky.

When Ryan had his tiny craft hovering fifty feet above its landing pad, his deft fingers moved to a toggle switch on the right side of his controller. Using this, he tilted down the camera on the turret below the nose, and with ninety degrees of tilt he was looking down on himself and his two colleagues tucked tightly into the darkest portion of yard behind the pool house. He then called out softly to Dom, "Set waypoint alpha."

Caruso sat next to him with a laptop computer opened and displaying the transmission from the tiny chopper's camera. With a click of a b.u.t.ton, Dom created a waypoint in the memory of the microhelo so that when called back to "alpha," the craft's GPS and autopilot would fly it directly back to a position over its base.

After tapping the requisite keys of his computer, Dom said, "Alpha set."

Jack then climbed the aircraft to a height of two hundred feet. Once this alt.i.tude was attained, he flew over the three properties between his location and Rehan's estate, flying with a slightly downward tilt to the turret cam so that he could monitor the sky in front of him as well.

When he had positioned his helo and its payload directly over the flat portion of the roof of the estate, he called out to Dom, "Set bravo."

A moment later, the reply: "Waypoint bravo set."

Jack's target was the large air-conditioning vent on the roof of the building, but he did not descend immediately. Instead he used the turret cam, switched to thermal infrared, and began looking for Rehan's guard force. He had no great worry about the device being seen in the darkness above the roof, but he was instead concerned about noise. Because although the microhelo's engine was indeed quiet, it was definitely not silent, especially when operating over a darkened property on a dead-end street in the middle of the night. Ryan needed to make absolutely certain there were no guards on the roof or patrolling alongside the gardens at the northeastern part of the building.

There were some other limitations to the technology, as well, which Jack had to keep in mind, for the device's light weight made it susceptible to sea breezes coming in from the gulf. Even with the stability-control internal gyroscope, Jack had to take care that a breeze that pulled him off course did not disorient him and send him into a wall or a palm tree. He could combat this by trying to gain alt.i.tude or calling for Dom to send the helo back up to waypoint bravo, but he knew he would not have much time to make that decision once he got down closer to the ground.

He scanned slowly; with his video gla.s.ses all he saw through his own eyes was what was picked up by the tiny camera two hundred feet over the ground and one hundred fifty yards away. Both he and Dom were involved in what they were doing, so it was Chavez's job to serve as team security. He had no laptop to monitor, no goggles obstructing his vision. Instead he knelt by the pool house, using the infrared scope on his suppressed HK MP7 submachine gun, scanning for threats.

Through his goggles Jack made out the heat register of the man at the front gate, and a second man, standing outside the guardhouse chatting with him. Scanning back to the building he found a third signature, a sentry strolling lazily all the way over by the tennis court/helicopter pad. Ryan determined all three to be well out of earshot of his microhelo.

He finally allowed himself a second to wipe a thick sheen of sweat from his brow before it dripped into his eyes. Everything-their entire mission, their biggest chance to obtain actionable intelligence on General Riaz Rehan-depended on his fingertips and his decision-making in the next few minutes.

"I'm going in," he said softly, and he gently touched the Y-axis joystick on the controller, bringing his buzzing craft down to 150 feet, then 100 feet, then 50 feet. "Set waypoint Charlie," he whispered.

"Charlie set."

Quickly he panned the camera back to the front guardhouse, then back to the helipad. He saw the three perimeter guards; they were right where they needed to be for him to continue on with his mission. He scanned the roof again, and it was clear.

A breeze from the ocean sent his craft rocking to the left. He combated the motion with a countermotion on the X-axis joystick of the controller. Jack did not feel the breeze on his body by the pool house, but at fifty feet it had come very close to sending his helo tumbling off course. He had a backup microhelo in one of the watertight cases, but setting it up for use would waste precious time. They had decided that if they lost a helo on the insertion, they would use the second craft to attempt to recover the first, as they did not want to leave a radio-controlled helicopter with a high-tech camera and a transmitter on the grounds of their target, lest the security force there be tipped off to the surveillance mission against them.

Caruso leaned in to his cousin's ear. "It's okay, Jack. Just try again. Take your time."

More sweat dripped into Ryan's eyes now. This wasn't like back on the roof or in the parking lot of Hendley a.s.sociates. This was the field, the real world, and it bore no resemblance to his training.

Jack let the sweat drip freely now as he concentrated on landing his remote aircraft.

He touched down gently next to an air-conditioning vent on the roof. Immediately he shut down the helo, then put down the controller, and lifted a second controller from the gra.s.s, finding it only by feeling around for a moment with his hands. This device was a one-handed module, not one-third the size of the remote control for the microhelo. On this second handheld unit he pushed a single b.u.t.ton, and now his video gla.s.ses projected a new image over his eyes. It was a low-light camera image that showed one of the struts over the microhelo's landing skids, and behind it, the narrow slats of the ventilation shaft.

This second camera was fixed to a four-inch-long, two-inch-wide, one-inch-tall robot that had been attached to the bottom of the helo by a magnet. On command from Ryan's controller it released its magnetic hold, and when Ryan powered it up, two rows of tiny legs extended like a centipede, and it lifted off the roof.

The legs were the propulsion system of this ground-traveling bug-bot, and Ryan tested the device by ordering it forward and backward, then panning the 1080p video camera in all directions. Once satisfied that the robot was working nominally, he powered it down, then switched back to the helo controller. He ordered the microhelo to hit its three way-points and return to its helipad.

Five minutes later he was flying a second bug-bot to Rehan's roof, landing it near the first. The wind had picked up a little between flights, so the second sortie took almost twice as long as the first.

"Ready for number three," Jack whispered when the helicopter was back on its pad.

Chavez loaded the bug-bot on the aircraft. "Microhelo is ready to launch payload three."

"How are we on time, Ding?" Ryan asked.

After a moment's hesitation, Chavez said, "Fair. Don't rush, but don't f.u.c.k around, either."

"Roger that," Jack said, and he switched his video gla.s.ses back over to the camera in the swivel turret under the microhelo's nose.

After the third and fourth bug-bots were delivered to the air vent over the attic of the target building, Jack brought the helo back to waypoint alpha, two hundred feet above his head, in preparation for a landing. Chavez was ready with the fifth payload and fresh battery for the chopper, as they had determined it could not fly for more than an hour on a single charge.

"Okay," Jack said. "I'm bringing it down."

Just then a breeze caught the helicopter, pus.h.i.+ng it inland. Jack had dealt with a half-dozen such incidents in the past forty-five minutes, so he did not panic. Instead he brought the chopper back out over the water, it took a second for it to right itself, and he thought he had control. But it drifted again, and then a third time as he started his descent.

"d.a.m.n it," he whispered. "I think I'm losing her."

Caruso was watching the feed in his monitor. "Just bring her down a little faster."

"Okay," Jack said. At one hundred fifty feet the craft jolted forward, and Ryan had to pull it back. "I'm losing the GPS hold. Could be losing battery."

Caruso said, "Ding, can you see it?"

Chavez looked into the night sky above. "Negative."

"Keep looking, you may have to catch it."

But it was too late. Jack saw his video feed turn away from the water and the lights of the Kempinski Hotel as the microhelo began to spin slowly, and its descent speed increased sharply.

"s.h.i.+t!" he said, a little too loudly considering their covert position. "It's dead. It's dropping."

"I don't see s.h.i.+t," Chavez said. He was walking around with his eyes in the sky. How fast is it coming down?"

Just then the helicopter slammed into the gra.s.s ten feet from its launch pad. It exploded into a dozen fragments.

Jack took off his goggles. "Son of a b.i.t.c.h. Set up the reserve helo."

But Chavez was already moving toward the wreckage. "Negative. We'll go with the four bots we have in place. That's going to have to do it. We don't have time to send another bird up."

"Roger that," said Jack, secretly relieved. He was exhausted with the stress of flying the tiny aircraft into the target location, and he looked forward to getting back across the water, where Caruso would be in charge of operating the bug-bots in the air vents.

It was approaching five a.m. when the three men got back to their bungalow. Jack was beyond exhausted. While Domingo and Dominic set up the remote equipment for the bug-bots, Ryan dropped onto the couch, still wet from his swim. Dom laughed; he'd been through every bit of the physical exertion that his cousin had endured, but the mental strain of launching, flying, and landing had all been on Jack Junior.

Now it was Caruso's turn to drive.

Dominic had studied the architectural plans from the developers of several of the Palm Jumeirah properties in order to find the best entry points for their bug-bots. The attic vents were deemed the best bet, and as the former FBI agent drove his first little bug-shaped robot into the vent, he was happy to find no post-construction metal grating or wire mesh in his way.

The tiny legs on the robot could be magnetized for moving up and down metal surfaces, just like in the ductwork of the air-conditioning system, so he had no problem moving on both the X and Y axes as he progressed deeper into Rehan's safe house.

The video quality was amazingly good, though the fluctuating transmission speeds at times caused a degradation in the quality. Dom and the other operators at The Campus had also tested a thermal infrared camera, similar to but superior to the one in the nose turret of the microhelo's thermal cam, but ultimately they decided that that feature would not be necessary for the indoor work they had planned here in Dubai, plus the infrared cams drew more battery power and this would be detrimental to their mission, so they were not attached to the ground drones.

After twenty minutes of operation, he had his first bot in position at the ground a/c return duct in the master bedroom. Dom adjusted the tilt of the camera and checked to make certain that nothing was obstructing the pan. Then he set the white balance and focused.

The laptop in the bungalow displayed a near-perfect color image of the room, and even though there was nothing to hear at the moment, the rush of air through the vent convinced him the audio was working nominally.

Dominic Caruso repeated this process twice more over the course of the next hour. The second bug-bot he placed in a duct overlooking the great room. The camera afforded only a narrow view of the sofa area and the entry hall-by no means a perfect shot of every corner of the room-but Caruso felt sure the microphone was positioned well to record anything that was said in the room below.

The third bug-bot started normally and moved a few inches, but stopped within a foot of the entrance to the ventilation system. Dom and Jack spent a few minutes troubleshooting the problem, but finally they gave up, unable to tell if there was some hardware damage to the transmitter or if a software glitch was creating the problem. They declared the device dead, and Caruso moved on to the last robot. This one he placed in a second-floor office area without any problems.

By seven a.m. the operation was complete and Dominic powered down all the cameras. The surveillance equipment, the cameras and the microphones, were pa.s.sive systems, meaning they did not operate all the time-instead they had to be turned on remotely. This saved battery power greatly, but it also would be incredibly beneficial for an operation that was expected to last a week or more.

Caruso called Granger in Maryland, and Granger confirmed that they had been able to pick up feeds from three of the cameras and audio from three of the mikes, just as Dom, Jack, and Ding could from the bungalow. The feed needed to be sent to The Campus instantly as, it was a.s.sumed, much of the audio they would pick up would be in Rehan's native tongue, and Rick Bell had an Urdu-speaking a.n.a.lyst at the ready twenty-four/seven.

Caruso asked Granger if there was any news about Clark, but John had not checked in. Sam Granger also said that Sam Driscoll had not checked back in yet, either, but they had no reason to suspect anything was amiss.