“Look at the dimensions,” Cummings said. “No way to get it outta there on foot. Not without compromising the team. Right call, I think.”
“Yeah, I suppose,” the Acre Station chief mumbled, unconvinced. Turnbull was under incredible pressure. While the official line was that the Emir wasn’t at the top of the United States’ Most Wanted List, he indeed was. However unlikely his capture was to turn the tide in the war on terrorism, having him on the loose out there was at best embarrassing. At worst, dangerous. John Turnbull had been hunting the Emir since 2003, first as Acre Station’s deputy, then as its head.
As good as Turnbull was at his job, like many current career CIA officers, he suffered from what Mary Pat and Ed called “operational disconnect.” He simply had no idea what an op looked like or felt like, in person, on the ground, and that disconnect led to a plethora of problems, which generally fell into one category: unrealistic expectations. In planning an op, you expect too much, either from the people working it or from the scope of the mission. Most ops aren’t home runs; they are base hits that slowly and steadily put points on the board that eventually add up to a big win. As Ed’s literary agent once told him, “It takes ten years to become an overnight success.” The same was generally true with covert ops. Sometimes intelligence, preparation, and good luck come together in the right way at the right time, but most times they’re out of sync just enough to keep that long ball from sailing over the left-field fence. And sometimes, she reminded herself as she continued scanning the report, you don’t know you’ve got a home run until well after the fact.
“You see this business about the Koran they found?” Cummings asked the group. “No way that belonged to anybody in that cave.”
No one responded; there was no need. She was right, of course, but barring an inscription and a “return to” address on the front cover, an antique Koran wasn’t going to do them much good.
“They got plenty of pictures, I see,” Mary Pat said. The Rangers had meticulously photographed all the URC faces in the cave. If any of them had been nabbed or tagged in the past, the computer would spit out the details. “And samples of the table. Smart guy, this Driscoll. Where are the samples, Ben?”
“Somehow they missed the helo out of Centcom Kabul. They’ll be here in the morning.”
Mary Pat wondered what, if anything, the samples would tell them. Langley’s Science and Tech wizards were miracle workers, as were the FBI labs at Quantico, but there was no telling how long that thing had been in the cave, nor was there any guarantee the mock-up would hold any peculiar traits. Crapshoot.
“Pictures we got now,” Margolin said.
He picked up a remote control from the table and pointed it at the forty-two-inch flat screen on the wall. A moment later an 8×10 grid of thumbnail images appeared on the monitor. Each was annotated by a date and a time stamp. Margolin clicked the remote and enlarged the first photo, which showed the sand table in situ from a distance of about four feet.
Whoever had actually taken the shots had done a thorough job, Mary Pat saw, photographing the sand table from the macro to the micro, using a miniature measuring tape for scale in each shot. Despite it being a cave, they’d taken care with the lighting, too, which made a big difference. Of the 215 shots Driscoll and his team had taken, 190 were variations on a theme—same view but close up or at a different angle—and Mary Pat wondered if there was enough for Langley to create a 3-D rendering of the thing. Something to pursue. Whether animating the damn thing would make any difference she had no idea, but better to try it and fail than later regret not trying. Somebody in the URC had gone to a lot of trouble to make this thing, and it’d be nice to know why. You don’t make a goddamned sand table on a whim.
According to the report, the remaining twenty-five pictures were repeats of three separate spots on the sand table, two on the front and one on the back, all displaying some kind of marking. Mary Pat asked Margolin to call these up on the monitor, which he did, setting it for slideshow. When it