Chapter 9: Tradecraft

WestHem Military Intelligence Headquarters

Denver, WestHem

Friday, July 21, 2147

Colonel Oliver Whitestone looked at his Chief of Human Intelligence, Lieutenant Colonel Sheila Ward. “The Adjutant to the Chief of Staff called me. He wants to know the status on our agents on Mars and what usable intelligence they’ve been providing us.”

Ward nodded slowly. “And what did you tell him?”

“As little as I could get away with. Sort of like the level of intelligence I am getting from your department. What’s the story? I told him I would get back to him as soon as I could,” he said.

She sighed and shrugged. “I don’t have much to tell you. So far, we have been able to slip four agents to Mars. Of those four, two have been there for just a month or two, one just arrived three days ago, and one got caught by the Greenies and sent back on the return freighter. This is the toughest insertion program I have ever been involved in.”

Whitestone nodded but said, “So tell me what is going on. I’ll decide what I’m going to tell Morgan.”

“Let me ask you a question. You came up on the tactical side, right? Battlefield and operational intelligence? You’ve never done human intelligence, right?”

“True.”

“Picking and training agents is more art than science. You are looking for somebody who can blend in, a human chameleon. Forget the action vids, where we parachute an agent in a tuxedo directly from orbit into the EastHem cocktail party, where he seduces the general’s mistress and turns her to the side of right and virtue, preventing World War IV. It is utter nonsense. You are looking for the guy that nobody will notice, who fades into the background, that people will walk right by without anybody looking at him.”

Whitestone nodded in understanding and Ward continued, “Then you have to train them on blending in completely. Speaking the languages with the proper accent and dialect; entry and egress techniques; safecracking; techniques for identifying and turning assets. All the usual stuff. That’s just to get agents we can use against EastHem. Adding Mars to the mix just makes it ten times harder. Not only do we need to put the agent into EastHem, but they also then must get to Mars as an involuntary colonist. Then, when they get there, they have no support system at all. We can’t even get them money since they don’t allow anything but barter with EastHem.”

“So, the four agents, what’s going on with them?”

“Well, as I mentioned, the latest just got there three days ago. He’s probably still in their immigration quarantine system. The one before that got picked up by Martian Immigration. He doesn’t know why, either. He managed to make it into EastHem and got to Mars from there, but after a couple of days they yanked him out and sent him back to Earth. No explanation.”

Whitestone said, “I thought EastHem said they were going to send people back as freight, no water, no power, no food, no air.”

She smiled. “I think that was more to keep the jokers they sent on the straight and narrow. The ones who got sent back got dumped in Lagos. Our guy managed to get to a phone and called for a retrieval. We were debriefing him two days later, but he either can’t or won’t say how he got tripped up. Probably the first; he doesn’t know what got him. It might even have been a previous emigrant who couldn’t back up his story.” She shrugged. “It happens.”

“And the first two?”

“The first one got to Mars in May, not quite two months ago. The second guy got there a month later. The first guy is pretty much on his own and hasn’t gotten much of anywhere, though his reports are fascinating reading. For the second one we managed to hack a portion of their financial system, so he has access to funding the first guy didn’t. His reports aren’t as interesting, and he hasn’t had any success either.”

Whitestone asked, “What do you mean interesting?

Ward replied, “The first guy has been there a couple of months now, and though he hasn’t turned any assets, he has been able to report on Martian life. Some of what he reports is fascinating.” Her boss motioned for her to continue, and she said, “Let’s just say that the commonly held belief that the vast population of loyal WestHem citizens is under the control of fanatic communist terrorists is not completely accurate.”

Whitestone rolled his eyes. InfoGroup, WIV, and ICS were all pushing the theory the corporations liked. The loyal Martian citizens of WestHem had been deceived by corrupt politicians that were also communist terrorists. Anybody with a pulse could see the holes in the theory; anybody with a pulse who didn’t want to end up in a ghetto just nodded and went along with the theory. “Yeah. Just how bad is this information he is sending along?”

“Bad enough. Everything he is reporting matches with other stuff we are getting. All those poor misguided Martians who have been hoodwinked by the terrorists? They don’t exist. The average Martian citizen hates WestHem to the depths of his soul. He has two reasons, first that he’s a ghetto dweller and they hate the system that made them that way, and second because they know that Greenies get treated like shit even compared to other ghetto dwellers. The same goes for the Martian terrorists. Their military leadership was all trained by us, by the Marines and the Navy, and because they were Greenies, they were kept at the lowest possible ranks. Their generals were marine captains and lieutenants intentionally kept multiple levels below where they qualified to be. The Navy was even worse. In the entire Navy there was less than a handful of Martian officers. The current Martian Navy is officered by ex-WestHem petty officers and ratings who would have been officers in any other system.”

“Tremendous.”

“The Martians know it, too. They watch the WestHem news for amusement. There are MarsGroup comedy channels that run WestHem news side-by-side with MarsGroup news. They know just how many WestHem Marines and Navy they killed. They know the names of the ships they destroyed. They know they only lost thirty-two hundred in combat versus our two-hundred thousand. And they know they didn’t kill the seventy-five thousand prisoners they captured, and they know we did kill every Martian civilian in WestHem and the Navy and that we captured in combat. They even have vid footage.”

“Granted.”

“It all comes down to the general difficulty in finding assets on Mars. We don’t have a lot of options in recruiting people, but we do have an excellent source in terms of general information. The second guy hasn’t been as useful yet, but he does have money that the first guy doesn’t have. We’ll just have to see.”

“And they are getting the information back to us how?” Whitestone asked.

“We gave them the logins and passcodes necessary to download an encrypted communications program. They prepare a report and upload it through a standard communications channel. We also gave them some standard code phrases so that if they are being coerced or have been compromised, they can pass it along.”

“Can we get the second agent to contact the first and see if he needs assistance creating assets?”

Lieutenant Colonel Ward was slow in answering that. “We can ask, but I strongly urge that we don’t push it too hard. The general information we are getting is very useful. Even if all we get is verification of the information we are getting through other sources, that itself is useful.”

“Let’s try it once. If it doesn’t pan out, we’ll stick with general information and no recruitment.”

“Yes, sir.”

EastHem Military Intelligence Office

New Rome, EastHem

Monday, July 24, 2147

Archibald Bullstrode looked at his staff during his start-of-the-week briefing. As always, the main, and often only, topic was WestHem. Topics always included the status of WestHem military and naval forces, current intelligence and counterintelligence efforts, and current information campaigns, what had once been called propaganda, both for internal and external consumption. Only in the last year had it become important to discuss these topics in regard to Mars.

“Naval dispositions?” he asked his Chief of Naval Intelligence, Lieutenant Colonel Juan DeMarche.

“No significant changes. Their Californias and Panamas are all mothballed. Their fighter and attack craft are all being used, primarily in training. There have been a few accidents but nothing major, just the sort of thing you see with rookies and pilots with minimal training. By the time WestHem comes back, they will have more than enough fighter and attack pilots fully trained. They are still manning and working up a pair of Seattles. According to their press releases, once they get them working, they will split the crews and begin training on four Seattles. They will continue that until they get them all working. Everything they do points directly to a defensive posture only. You only need the Panamas and Californias if you are going to invade somebody.”

“And you believe their press releases?” asked Bullstrode.

“No reason not to. We have managed to sneak a Henry-class stealth ship close enough to watch some of their exercises. They are doing exactly what they have said, training and shakedown cruises.”

“That makes sense,” said Colonel Smith. “Everything my agents are telling us is that the Martians don’t lie about this sort of thing. If they were going to do something else, they would simply not say what they were doing.”

“How is that going, by the way? Any luck with inserting agents into Mars?”

Smith nodded, but then shrugged. “I can put any number of agents there, buried in the voluntary emigrants.” That earned her smiles from everybody at the word ‘voluntary’. “Most of the dissident groups we are sending we’ve had sleepers and agents buried in. We simply gave them the passwords needed to access a communications program we set up. We haven’t been able to turn anybody yet, but we are getting a steady stream of information back. There are a couple of things I wanted to mention, though.”

Bullstrode nodded. Smith said, “The Martians are playing it pretty cagey with the immigrants we are sending them. They have created an entire category of national security positions that non-native-born are banned from. They can’t get jobs with the Martian Planetary Guard or the Navy, the Department of Public Health and Safety - their police - and some defense industries. We don’t know if they plan to change these rules after they finish with WestHem, but my bet is no.”

“You expect them to win when WestHem launches Operation Martian Justice?” asked Colonel Dupont, head of digital intelligence.

“A barely trained rabble and a handful of Owls destroyed WestHem’s first invasion. That rabble is now highly trained, their navy is now larger, and now they know they can win. If you have any friends in the WestHem Marines or Navy say goodbye, because I think the next invasion will be treated even worse,” answered Smith.

“You had something else to say?”

“We’ve determined that WestHem is sending agents to Mars in our shipments of colonists. They’ve managed to slip some fake dissidents into the groups we are sending. At least one got caught and sent back.”

That raised a few eyebrows. “What did you do with him?” asked Bullstrode.

“Dumped him in Lagos with the other assholes the Greenies sent back. He was supposedly under surveillance, but he managed to slip out and got back to WestHem. I’m just curious about what we want to do about these guys. Do we let them keep getting through or let the Martians know?”

“They obviously know something is going on. Let them get through. According to the treaty, we provide no support to the communist Martian terrorists other than the barter of hydrogen for food. It’s their problem, not ours. Likewise, anything that weakens WestHem is good for EastHem. The enemy of my enemy is my friend.”

“Yes, sir.”

Horrigan’s Tavern

New Pittsburgh, Mars