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Dean asked.
“Roger,” the man back at the Art Room console replied. “We have good telemetry and a good image.”
“That’s the same Hip that left Ayni a couple of hours ago,” Akulinin said, peering through his own telephoto camera. “What did they find?”
Through his camera, Dean saw several members of the flight crew manhandling a stretcher out of the cargo bay and into the back of an army truck. It looked as if the stretcher was occupied, but the body had been wrapped in canvas and strapped to the stretcher’s frame.
As soon as the first stretcher was loaded onto the truck, a second appeared from inside the helicopter, followed by a third. Dean focused for a moment on the man who seemed to be in charge—a tall blond man wearing the rank emblems of a Russian Army lieutenant colonel. He was giving orders to the soldiers who’d just taken charge of the stretchers. He was holding a briefcase in one hand.
“You have an ID on that Russki officer?” Dean asked.
“Working on it,” Rockman replied. “It may take a few minutes to run through the files.”
The soldiers climbed back into several of the trucks. The officer entered a waiting automobile, and one by one the vehicles drove away from the grounded Hip, headed north toward the road to Dushanbe.
“Take a look at the Hip’s nose,” Dean said. “Especially the lower windshield, beneath the pilot. See it?”
“I see it,” Akulinin said. “A nice bright white star.”
“And bullet holes in the fuselage, farther aft.”
“And they brought back three bodies.”
“Well, three body bags, anyway,” Dean said.
“Got it,” Rockman interrupted. “That’s Lieutenant Colonel Pyotr Pyotrivich Vasilyev. Russian Special Forces. Currently assigned to Vympel, and with the FSB.”
Vympel, also known as Vega Group or Spetsgruppa V, had started off as an elite Spetsnaz unit within the First Chief Directorate of the KGB. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, it had been passed to the MVD, but finally transferred to the control of the FSB in 1995. It was now Russia’s premier elite unit for counterterrorism and the protection of the state’s nuclear assets.
“I think,” Dean said slowly, “we’d better find out where that convoy is going and what they have in the back of that truck.”
“Our satellite resources are stretched a bit thin,” Rockman said, “but we’ll put in the request.”
Dean continued shooting high-definition video of the departing convoy. “Commandeer a spysat, if you have to,” he said.
    NSA HEADQUARTERS
FORT MEADE, MARYLAND
WEDNESDAY, 0814 HOURS EDT
     
For half an hour, Rubens had been going through the reports on Haystack, extracting the necessary files for his briefing session with the NSC later. He was about to patch a call through to the Art Room and see if there was any more news when a chime and a winking red light indicated he had an incoming message. He typed his access code into his keypad and accepted the call. A moment later, the NSA logo appeared on his monitor, then vanished, replaced by the face of Marie Telach, down in the Art Room.
“Yes, Marie.”
“The NRO just got back to us, sir.”
“Yes? Do we have a confirmed slot?”
“No, sir,” she replied. “They’re still processing our request. But they did pick up an A2TI on 202. They knew we were interested in that AO and passed it up the line.”
Interesting. Desk Three had a request in to the National Reconnaissance Office for dedicated time on an 8X satellite pass over Tajikistan. With so many demands for satellite time—from the NSA, the CIA, the DIA and various individual military branches, and even State and Homeland Security—it could take days to reserve a specific pass over a specific AO, an area of operations.
An A2TI wasn’t scheduled, though. It stood for “accidental acquisition of a target of interest” and identified something that came up more or less randomly on a spy satellite pass looking for something else entirely.
“Let me see