Chapter 16
Near Tampa, Florida
Friday
11:30 a.m. Eastern Time
“Why did it take the damned CIA so long to get us this?” Lieutenant Colonel Francisco “Frank” Alvarez was pissed. There were a half dozen nukes out there somewhere and it had taken more than twenty-four hours to get a simple analyst report on scientists and engineers that could, perhaps, with a lot of help, make a Russian Topol-M warhead a viable single nuclear device. Why was that such a hard task? Was the CIA slow-rolling them for some reason? Didn’t they have this information collected already?
“Colonel, it has only been a day.” Dr. Ginny Banks sat down in the chair next to him. “Let’s look at what they got and see if it is useful. I’m certain many people stayed up all night developing this report.”
“I’m sure you’re right.” He still didn’t like having to wait so long for it, though. And conversations he’d had with Mac, Thompson, and Dugan overnight suggested to him that they had thought it a bit strange as well. Not strange enough for a conspiracy, but certainly strange enough for incompetence. There was plenty of the latter in the federal government.
The two of them sat in front of one of the big screens and the console table it was connected to. The IT teams and logistics crew had completely built a large high-tech room that had been approved for temporary use as a Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility. That in itself was a fairly amazing effort, but having the weight of the Joint Chiefs behind the task force probably lubricated a lot of sticky wickets in standard procedures, processes, and protocols.
“I spoke with the lead analyst and he assures me that he got no sleep last night.”
“Yeah, well, neither did I. And neither did you. And neither did Thompson and Dugan. And neither did McKagan over there. Hell, I bet A1C Shannon sat up all night looking at that damned map.” He threw a thumb over his right shoulder, pointing out that the SEAL had been up all night at his console going over every lead he could find. “Dead ends.”
Banks pulled the keyboard from in front of Frank and started tapping away at it. She worked the mouse over a few different folders until she had the right file path open.
“Here we go.” The top secret file opened with a spreadsheet filled with names, photos, descriptions, and last known locations and contacts.
“How many did it turn out to be?” Frank asked.
“About a thousand.” She scrolled down the spreadsheet to the bottom. “One thousand and seventy-one to be exact.”
“Damn long list. Hey, Mac!” Frank got the SEAL’s attention.
“What’s up?” Chief McKagan slid his chair in their direction so he could get a better view of their screen. “What is that? The geek list?”
“Yes.”
“Too big?”
“Too big.”
“Thirds?”
“Yep.”
“Okay, send me my third. You got my JWICS.”
“Ginny, you mind taking a third of this and going through it?” Frank asked the CIA operative.
“I planned to go through the entire thing,” she replied. “What about Dugan and Thompson?”
“Thompson muttered something about trigger circuits and he and Dugan went somewhere else. Said they’d be back in an hour or so,” McKagan explained. “So, we’re it right now.”
“Yeah, since we’re in a hurry. Dr. Banks, you start with the top third. I’ll work the middle.” Frank turned back toward McKagan. “Mac, you hit the from the bottom up.”
“Copy,” McKagan affirmed.
“Anything out of the ordinary—I mean anything,” Frank said, “don’t just flag it, bring it to everyone’s attention.”
“This will take some time,” Banks said. “Something we don’t have much of.”
“I know,” Frank agreed. “Damn it. I know.”
* * *
USN Chief Warrant Officer 4 Wheeler “Mac” McKagan had been awake going on two days. He’d made it for triple that during BUD/S but this was different. During Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL training it was more of a stamina thing. But now, at this moment, he was having to maintain his mental faculties at a level of an intelligence analyst and had to be able to make connections to the most minute of details. At least BUD/S had made his mind and body sharp enough to handle such situations.
He’d started with the scientists on the lists at the very bottom. Number one thousand and seventy-one was a Dr. Rama Zuzarte from New Delhi. Mac laughed at that. He knew Rama fairly well. The two of them had been on one of the Iranian inspection teams for the United Nations. Rama was a good guy. Mac read through the CIA analysts’ details in the report.
Zuzarte has potentially dangerous extremist political viewpoints involving state department policy with the Muslim tradition in local New Delhi and national politics. His right-wing extremism has been shown through his support of India’s long history with the current atmosphere heavily tilted in favor of right-wing extremist politics and lobby groups. His social media interactions have been shut down on all normal sites, though he is still actively posting on the newer right-wing extremist platforms.
“What is this gobbledy-gook?” McKagan said under his breath but kept reading.
Zuzarte’s right-wing extremist leanings are multisource verified and are based on multiple factors including his own personal opportunity editorial publications. Specific agendas include but are not limited to: 1) he has been in continuous opposition of the unchecked Muslim migration into and throughout India with outspoken pleas for closing the border; 2) he is outspoken with the belief that Muslim men are purposefully marrying Hindu women in order to convert them through “love jihad” likely based on his middle daughter of three marrying a Muslim man and converting to Islam; 3) he has been quoted as initially profiling Muslims as terrorists; and 4) he has been placed as a well-known and self-proclaimed Hindu zealot.
“How in the fuck is this useful?” McKagan whispered aloud. “Zealot? Rama had often said ‘praised be God’ to everything, but nothing out of the ordinary. This is crazy.”
Relying on secondary sources, Dr. Zuzarte has been noted as stating the incompetency of other political parties (including left-wing parties). Drawing on several examples, sources cite Zuzarte may be involved with the rise of fringe groups that openly campaign for the eventual turn against the government control of federal socioeconomic and medical systems. The CIA has placed him on a watch list of potential antigovernment religious zealots possibly linked to various insurrection groups.
The chief continued to read through the data and the mini dossier on his old colleague and wondered what they might write about him. The dossier information was, well, accurate, but completely taken out of context and overblown. He was getting the impression that someone was building a hit-piece on Zuzarte, but to what end he wasn’t sure. The one useful bit of information in the report was that Zuzarte had been at the University of New Delhi now for over a year and was in New Delhi currently with no travel or travel plans noted. Unless the bad guys were bringing nukes to the University of New Delhi, Zuzarte was clean.
“Next.” Mac continued up the spreadsheet from the bottom.
Tatiana Yorgolvech, currently at Tomsk Physical Institute. Previously employed at the Tomsk-7 Reactor Facility, Seversk, Russia…
After reading through the Yorgolvelch file, he paused and took a breath. This was inefficient. There had to be a quicker way to get through this information. Where was that damned Dr. Grayson’s supercomputer? Mac slowly scrolled the spreadsheet list upward and scanned at the names as they passed. There were Yamada, Yazaki, Young, Yates, Yi, three different Yuns and over twenty Yus, there were several names starting with Y he’d never heard of, and he was just getting started. He also noted that the list hadn’t been alphabetized, but rather the names were grouped by starting letter. He wondered why the analyst hadn’t bothered to use the function in the spreadsheet.
He continued to read down the list and then something there nagged at him. He wasn’t sure but there was something about one of the names he couldn’t put a finger on. Xi Singang. He stopped there and read it again to himself. Xi Singang. He’d heard that somewhere before.
“Xi Singang,” he read out loud. “Now why does that sound familiar to me?”
He opened up the dossier on Xi Singang and continued to read.
Xi Singang by birth name. Naturalized American Citizen with the name Thomas Sing. No known relatives. He was known as “Sing.” Dr. Sing achieved doctoral degrees in General Physics and in Nuclear Science and Engineering from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He was the lead scientist with Top Secret/Q caveat clearances among others as well as an active polygraph examination. He worked as a team lead on the Warhead Life Extension Program (LEP) at Oak Ridge National Laboratories. Dr. Sing’s whereabouts are unknown. He is suspected of being connected with the ring of spies known as the Chinese Confucious Institute. There are no open investigative actions currently as he is assumed dead.
“Assumed dead? Now that doesn’t sound like what I remembered,” Mac muttered to himself.
He continued to read through the rest of the information about Xi, but that was about it. There were three other Xis on the list but nothing else other than the name seemed to be correlated. He looked at those files and found nothing useful. The information on those Xis was almost as minimal and cryptic. Something just wasn’t sitting well with him on this entry. There was all that nonsense information on Zuzarte, but little on Xi or any of the other Xis for that matter. The Yu and Yun entries were short as well. He made a mental note to mark Xi for the time being and then compare other entries once he had more data.
Mac had been reading for almost an hour when he realized that someone was tapping him on his shoulder and his face was planted firmly against the keyboard. A slight bit of drool pooled at the corner of his mouth and had built up on the space bar. The hand on his shoulder startled him, making him spring awake instantly ready for action.
“Whoa! Easy Chief.” Army Major Casey Dugan stepped backward cautiously, giving the SEAL room.
“Uh, yeah, sorry about that, Major. Too many years in the Hindu Kush to be sneaked up on like that.” McKagan gathered his composure. “I might need some coffee.”
“Yeah, that or some freakin’ shut-eye.” Dugan laughed. “I know how you feel. They rolled that bed in my quarters but I never got to use it. After years in Iraq and Northern Africa, I’m a little edgy sometimes too.”
McKagan nodded in agreement, but decided on the coffee. He rolled his neck left then right and stood with a hybrid mix of sounds crossed between a grunt, a sigh, and a yawn. Then he pulled a Styrofoam cup from the stack by the coffee maker and placed the individual serving cup of dark roast into the device. He depressed the start button and nothing happened. Then there was a beeping sound, a little red light blinked displaying that the unit was out of water.
“Shit,” McKagan said. There was a stack of bottled water under the table for just such purposes. He went about tearing some bottles free of the packaging and then refilling the coffee maker. “What’s on your mind, Major?”
“So, Major Thompson and I were just talking about what you would actually have to do to reverse engineer a Russian warhead to make it your own personal warhead. We assumed you’d have a Russian instruction manual. We called a mutual UXO”—unexploded ordnance—“buddy of ours and talked that through with him.” As he talked, both Lieutenant Colonel Alvarez and Dr. Banks looked from their consoles and started paying attention.
“Yeah, go on.” McKagan finally got the coffee brewing. The familiar sounds of brewing and hot coffee streaming into the cup were reassuring.
“Well, there’s just no way you could get through the front electronics with keys and passwords and whatnot without, well, keys and passwords and whatnot.”
“I can see that,” McKagan agreed.
“So, we came to the conclusion that you’d need to strip all that away to the bare bones of the warhead and control the actions of the nuclear explosion process with a new circuit.”
Mac stirred a packet of sweetener into his cup and then carefully sipped it. It was hot. He hoped it would wake him up.
“Okay, so you need a new control box,” he agreed.
“Yeah, but who could build that? You’d need a new control box to replace the old control box. And you’d have to be able to disconnect the old control box without causing problems. I suspect there is a test unit that can be plugged into these things as they work on them, upgrade, or decommission them, right?” Dugan asked rhetorically. “Ours are, like, in Oak Ridge or the Pantex Plant in Texas or maybe out in Nevada. I’m not sure, but…”
“Wait a minute!” The SEAL set his cup down on the table and went back to the console he’d be using. It had long since locked him out and he had to retype his eighteen-digit password. “There is something to what you’re saying. Hold on.”
He quickly opened his spreadsheet back up, scrolled to the bottom, and then opened the files on Xi Singang. He scrolled to the main information passage and read it out loud.
He ended with “‘Dr. Sing’s whereabouts are unknown. He is suspected of being connected with Chinese Confucious Institute. There are no open investigative actions currently as he is assumed dead.’”
“Whereabouts unknown?” Dugan noted. “And he was at Oak Ridge.”
“The big thing is that he worked the nuclear LEP. That’s the program for refurbing and maintaining our nuclear arsenal. He would have had access to the test boxes like you are talking about.” McKagan had been certain there was something more to this guy than just missing. There was more on this man somewhere in other intelligence he’d seen somewhere else in his life. For the life of him, he still couldn’t recall it. “This could be our guy. There’s something about him.”
“What else does it say about him in the file?” Dr. Banks asked.
“That’s just it, there’s nothing else,” Mac said.
“That’s curious.” Frank turned to his screen and started scrolling. Mac could tell he was opening the same files on his monitor. “What the hell? Dr. Banks, I think your analysts got tired by the end of this thing.”
“What d’ya mean, Colonel?” Banks asked.
“The data files on average seem to be much smaller near the end,” Frank said.
“Hmmm. I hadn’t noticed that.”
“So, where does that leave us with this Sing?” Dugan asked.
“There isn’t enough data here to do much with. But I know I’ve read more on this guy somewhere.”
“Hang on a minute,” Frank told them. He grabbed the phone and dialed a number from memory. Wheeler and the rest of the team watched the marine curiously. The pause in the conversation gave Mac long enough to pick his coffee cup back up and nurse it some more.
“Who’s he calling?” Dugan asked Banks.
“I dunno.”
“Toby! Hey, man, it’s Frank.” Alvarez said cheerfully into the phone. “Can you go secure on your end? Okay…three, two, one, secure. There we go. So, look, I need everything the FBI has on one Xi Singang, aka Thomas Sing. Went to MIT. Worked at Oak Ridge. DOE Q clearance. Whereabouts currently unknown. I need it like five minutes ago… Yeah… Haha… No, it was a Davy Crockett. You owe me twenty bucks!… Yep. I checked in on him this morning. Just a knife wound. He’s gonna be fine… Right… Okay. ASAP, okay?… Alright… Tell Tammy I said hi. Thanks, buddy.”
“Friend of yours?” Banks asked.
“You could say that. We were at Parris Island together. Anything the FBI or Interpol has on this guy, we’ll know in about an hour or so. Toby is fast,” Frank said.