Chapter 19

Building B516 was, indeed, easy to find. That was partly due to the fact that the gate guard provided Bob with a map of the installation, which had J36 Headquarters marked on it. Then, of course, there was the LGM-118A Peacekeeper shell (most likely) standing tall in the sunlight on the front lawn of the building. He knew, of course, that the Peacekeeper had been decommissioned because of the START II treaty, but he still thought it was odd that what had been such a secret weapon was now out on display where everybody could see it. And, based on the friendly reception he got at the front gate, "everybody" could mean just about anybody, including Russian, Chinese, North Korean and Iranian spies.

He parked and went in through the glass doors, into a lobby that looked like it might belong to a high profile medical practice. Everything sparkled, and there were chrome and black couches and chairs scattered about adjacent to coffee tables that had magazines arranged on them artfully.

He approached the young woman who sat in an Air Force uniform behind a desk. She was wearing a headset with a microphone on the end of a boom near her mouth, and was speaking as he approached.

"I'll transfer your call now, sir," she said. She reached for a button on a small console and pressed it. Then she typed on the keyboard in front of her before looking up. "Can I help you?" she asked.

"If you've got work to do, I can wait," said Bob, pointing at the keyboard.

"I was just telling the person I transferred the call to who was calling and what it's about," she said, smiling.

"Wow," said Bob. "That's pretty snazzy."

"Yeah," she said. "Phone? Meet email. Email? Feel free to intrude on yet another part of life." Her smile widened into a grin. "Anyway, you must be lost. We don't see civilians around here."

"Actually, I'm supposed to have an interview with Colonel Hawkins," he said. "My name is Bob Jeffers."

Her demeanor changed as quickly as a chameleon can change color. She sat up more straightly and reached to punch a button.

"I don't have you on his schedule, sir," she said.

"That's because he only told me to come see him an hour ago," said Bob. "He told me to have whoever I talked to tell him I'm here, and he'd work me in."

"Are you with the press?" asked the airman. "Because if you're with the press you have to have an ID badge and you're supposed to be accompanied by somebody from Public Affairs."

"I'm not with the press," said Bob, holding up a hand. "I'm just here for a job interview."

"Job interview?" She looked confused.

"Can you just call him and tell him I'm here?"

She looked uncertain, but pressed another button on her console.

"Sir?" she said, carefully, "There's a civilian here who says you asked to see him."

Bob couldn't hear the response, but the airman looked even more startled.

"Yes, sir," she said, crisply. "I'll send him right up." She pushed another button and looked at Bob.

"Up those stairs, sir," she said, pointing at a marble staircase that wound in a half curve to a landing on the second floor. "Take the first hallway to your right, and go to the office at the end of that hallway."

"Got it," said Bob. "Thanks." He turned and started for the staircase.

"And sir?" she called after him. He turned and looked at her. "Be sure to knock first before entering."

"Got it," said Bob again. He didn't know quite what to think about her comment. As he climbed the stairs he chalked it up to military protocol.

He only saw two people during his trek to the commander's office. Both were wearing uniforms, but he couldn't tell much about them. The only uniforms he'd seen in the past had been heavily bedecked with ribbons and braid and stars and such. Both men were exiting what looked like a small lounge, and each carried a cup of steaming coffee. They stared at Bob as he passed them and went to the oak door at the end of the hallway. The door was flanked by two window lites that were a foot wide and six feet tall. The glass had a crackled texture on the outside which prevented one from seeing anything through it clearly. Bob opened the door, and then remembered to knock.

"Come in, come in," came a bass male voice.

Colonel Hawkins turned out to be a man who fit none of Bob's preconceptions. His voice had led Bob to think he would be tall and thin. He was thin, but stood only four or five inches taller than Riley did. For reasons he couldn't articulate, Bob had also expected the man to be muscled, and handsome. It was impossible to evaluate his muscles through the uniform, but Bob doubted many women would judge the man handsome. His face was thin, with a sharp, pointed nose, above a sharp, pointed chin. A pencil thin mustache marred, rather than graced his face, and the brown, plastic-framed glasses he was wearing didn't match either his skin tone or the few wisps of remaining hair on the sides of his head.

Still, the office radiated power, and the man in it was part of that feeling.

"Bob Jeffers," said the colonel, sounding as if Bob was a long lost friend, who had just been re-found. "I'm so glad you decided to come take a look at us."

"You're welcome," said Bob, who couldn't think of anything else to say.

"Sit down," said Hawkins. "Would you like something? Coffee? Tea? Soda?" He picked up the phone, obviously ready to call for refreshment.

"I'm fine, thanks," said Bob. He sat in one of three chairs that faced the desk. The colonel, instead of sitting back down in the huge, luxurious desk chair behind the desk, came around to sit in the chair next to Bob. He moved it so they faced each other at a slant.

"I'll get right to it," said Hawkins. "I understand you have significant experience with satellite surveillance."

Bob blinked. His exit briefing had been both firm and ominous, concerning the secrets he was expected to keep.

"I'm not sure I'm at liberty to answer that question, sir," he said, carefully.

Hawkins smiled. "I was just breaking the ice," he said. He stood and returned to his desk, where he reached to pick up a thick manila file. Returning to the chair he'd vacated, he sat and opened the file. He looked at Bob. "This is your personnel file from your previous employer. I took the liberty of requesting it when I found out about you. That you were looking for a job, I mean."

"And they gave it to you?" The surprise in Bob's voice was plain.

"I have a security clearance almost as high as yours was," said Hawkins, smiling. He tipped the file toward Bob. There were dark lines of redacted material on the page Bob could see. "They didn't give me everything, but I got enough to know you're the kind of man I'd like to have for a project I have in mind."

"Project," said Bob, wondering what that might mean.

"Yes," said Hawkins. "J36 has need of satellite imagery sometimes. We use it for various things, including targeting. It's possible that some of the images I've looked at in the past were supplied by you."

"Possible, but not likely," said Bob.

"That doesn't matter," said Hawkins. "What matters is that whenever we get satellite images, we have to get them through the office of the ISR Agency."

"ISR?"

"Air Force Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance," said Hawkins. "They're at Lackland. Great people. But the bureaucracy involved is time consuming, and the material is always classified up the yin yang. There are only a few people in my outfit who have clearances high enough to actually look at the images. We have to depend on the analysts at ISR to answer the questions we have, which is often why we ask for the images."

"Okay," said Bob. "That sounds pretty standard."

"What I want to do is create a new position in my command, an analyst position. I can't do it with military personnel because that would take an act of Congress." He grinned. "Well, not quite, but the Air Force won't give me that kind of slot. They are, however, willing to let me hire a civilian GS employee to do what I put in the job description."

"Maybe it's not important," said Bob, "but why would they let you hire a civilian, but not someone military?"

Hawkins waved a hand in the air. "Has to do with staffing levels and all that," he said. "Each military unit is designed by experts who probably couldn't find their way out of a straight tunnel with one sealed end. Those staffing levels are set in stone, so that staffing costs can be incorporated into the budget every year. The only way you can create a new military staff position is by shutting down another one. But money for civilian employees comes from a different hat. I can fight to get some of that money and, if I fight hard enough and smart enough, I win."

"And in this case you won," said Bob.

Hawkins laughed. "The reason I won is because they were convinced that I'd never be able to find a civilian candidate for the job who could meet the qualifications. The security clearance alone is a huge hurdle, because I want my analyst to be able to look at the data himself, straight from the source, without going through ISR. So they said yes, because they thought it was a pipe dream."

Bob blinked. The inference was obvious. "And then I happened along," he said.

"Exactly!" crowed Hawkins. "When I heard about you, and then got your personnel file, it was obvious you could qualify for the position. And you've been gone from your previous position for less than a year, so the update for getting your security clearance back shouldn't take long at all. You could be on the job within a couple of months."

"Analyst," said Bob. What he was thinking about was that, while his title at the agency had been "analyst", he had done very little actual analysis. At least for external customers. He did analysis all the time as he used the sats to perform whatever mission he'd been tasked with. But that analysis was only to the point where it ensured that the specific needs listed on the mission sheet were met. He wasn't sure that was the kind of "analysis" Hawkins was talking about.

Hawkins turned to the back of the folder in his hands. He lifted out a sheet that, even at a distance, Bob could see was a photograph taken by a satellite. Hawkins handed it to Bob.

"Take a look at this and just give me your reflections on what you see," said the Colonel.

Bob perused the photograph. He recognized it as a section of desert. The color of the soil suggested that it was made up of gravel and scattered rocks on top of a layer of sand. The color was also significant because there was only one area of the world where the soil looked like that. That color was the result of the oil fires in Kuwait, lit by Sadam Hussein's army in 1990. The smoke from those fires had eventually fallen to earth and stained the ground so heavily that it was still that color decades later.

But the area stained covered an entire region, and he couldn't specify what country he was looking at. That didn't matter, though, because whoever had taken this picture knew exactly where it was, down to a one meter tolerance.

He looked deeper, past the general characteristics of the area, looking for specific things of interest.

He saw vehicle tracks, but not on a road. Rather, they crisscrossed each other, creating long lines that were straight in some places, but then turned into long curves, as if the driver drifted off to sleep, and the vehicle drifted in one direction or another.

"I wish I had a shot from farther up," he said.

The Colonel pulled another photograph from the folder and handed it to Bob.

It was from a much wider angle, with the camera lens pulled back. The features on the ground were smaller, but he could see more ground. And he saw what he was looking for. At a distance of probably a mile or so away from the confusion of vehicle tracks out in the desert, there was a hardball road. The various vehicle tracks all led to that road.