but he made it. According to Driscoll’s after-action report, the prisoner stood up during the firefight. On purpose.”
“Christ,” Mary Pat muttered. They’d seen that before with URC soldiers, preferring death over capture. Whether that was born of pride or an unwillingness to risk talking during interrogation was a point of heated debate in the intelligence and military communities.
“The second one tried to make a break for it when the helo went down. They dropped him.”
“Well, not exactly a dry hole,” Turnbull said, “but not the result we wanted.”
The problem hadn’t been the radio transmission, of that Mary Pat was certain. She’d read both the raw data and the analysis. Somebody had been transmitting from that cave using recognized URC plain-speak code packets. One of the words—Lotus—is something they’d seen before, both in asset debriefs from case officers and in NSA Driftnet intercepts, but what it meant no one had been able to determine.
They’d long suspected the URC had gone old school for its encrypted communications, employing onetime pads, essentially a point-to-point protocol where only the sender and receiver had the pad required to decrypt the message. The system was ancient, dating back to the Roman Empire, but reliable and, provided the pads were in fact fully randomized, nearly impossible to break unless you got your hands on a pad. On a Tuesday, say, Bad Guy A would send a series of key words—dog, cabbage, chair—to Bad Guy B, who, using his own pad, would convert the words to their alphanumeric value, so dog would translate into 4, 15, and 7, which in turn would translate into a different word altogether. Special Forces teams in Afghanistan had in raids captured a number of onetime pads, but none were current, and so far neither the CIA nor the NSA had been able to glean a pattern from which they might extrapolate a key.
There were downsides to the system, however. First, it was cumbersome. For it to work properly, senders and receivers had to be working on the same physical pads, switching to a new one at the same intervals, the more often the better, which in turn required couriers to move between Bad Guy A and Bad Guy B. Whereas the CIA had Acre Station dedicated to hunting down the Emir, the FBI had a working group called Clownfish, dedicated to intercepting a URC courier.
The big question, Mary Pat knew, was: What had prompted whoever had been living in the cave to bug out shortly before the team hit the ground? Dumb coincidence or something more? She doubted it was human error; Rangers were too good for that. She had, in fact, read the after-action report earlier that day, and in addition to a broken wheel suffered by the team’s CO and Driscoll’s own injury, the op had been costly: two dead and two wounded. All that for a dry hole.
Barring coincidence, the most likely culprit was word of mouth. Rare was the day a helo could lift off from bases in either Pakistan or Afghanistan without a URC soldier or sympathizer taking note and making a call, a problem that had partially been solved by Special Forces teams making short, random hops around the countryside in the hours and days leading up to an op as well as using offset waypoints en route to the target, both of which helped keep prying eyes guessing. The rugged and unforgiving terrain made this problematic, though, as did the weather, which often made certain routes impassable. Just as Alexander the Great’s Army and the Soviets after them had learned, the geography of Central Asia was a foe unto itself. And an unconquerable one at that, Mary Pat thought. You either learned to live with it or work around it, or you failed. Hell, both Napoléon and Hitler had learned that lesson—albeit belatedly—each during a bold, if ill-advised, wintertime invasion of Russia. Of course, each of them had been certain of a quick victory, long before the snow started flying. And, hell, in Russia the land was nice and flat. Add mountains to the mix . . . Well, you’ve got Central Asia.
A courier appeared at the glass door, punched in the cipher code, and entered. Without a word he laid a stack of four brown, red-striped folders and an accordion folder before Margolin and then departed. Margolin passed out the folders, and for the next fifteen minutes the group read in silence.
Finally Mary Pat said, “A sand table? I’ll be damned.”