Executive Intent

Whack went outside and helped al-Jufri untie the fiberglass case from the roof. “Shall I drive you somewhere, Salam?” he asked after he lifted the case free.

“La, shukran,” al-Jufri said. “No, thank you.” He opened the back of the Range Rover and retrieved the battered bicycle, then stood beside it proudly, smiling at Whack-he did everything but hold out his hand. Whack took twenty U.S. dollars from his pocket-about four thousand Yemeni riyals, about a month’s wages for most working-class Yemenis-and gave it to him.

The man’s eyes almost popped out of their sockets. “Shukran, shukran jazilan! Thank you, sir!” he said over and over. “Please, if you need anything whatsoever, call. My sons will be by later in the evening and in the morning to look after the horses, and my wife and daughter will come to light the outdoor stove and lanterns.” He bowed several times, clasped Whack’s hand in thanks, then rode off.

Whack wished no one would come during the day, but for the mission he had to continue to accept the hospitality of the Socotra manager of the Yemeni Fish Company. Fortunately, the real robotic trap was coming in a separate shipment tomorrow, so his planned meeting and demonstration would take place as scheduled the day after tomorrow. That gave him a couple days to look around.

First things first. Whack took one of the laptop battery packs from his briefcase and the binoculars from his backpack, put on a Bluetooth earset, and went outside. He made it appear as if he were looking the place over, but he was checking to see if any of al-Jufri’s family members were already here. The place appeared deserted except for two Yemeni ponies in a stone stable. His last stop was the lighthouse. Although the outside looked original, it had obviously been extensively reinforced with steel inside. There was a ladder to the top, with a metal grate as the floor of the top story, and it was an easy climb up. He found some toys, a battery-powered radio, and a nice German telescope up there-obviously the owner’s grandkids liked coming up here.

He used his binoculars to scan the compound and the highway, then scanned the coastline and the nearby waters for any sign of surveillance-nothing. He then took the battery pack out of his pocket, flipped a hidden switch, and hid it as best as he could on the floor. The battery pack was actually a powerful ultrasonic motion detector that could detect any type of motion for several hundred yards in all directions, even through walls. Ignoring the soft beeps in his ear set, indicating his own movements, he went back down the ladder and to the house.

Whack brought his laptop computer and AC adapter to the patio outside the kitchen, booted it up, then selected an application from a hidden and password-secured menu. It showed a satellite image of the compound, along with red dots that indicated motion. He rotated the image until the dots representing the horses’ movements in the stable was aligned with the image of the stable. When he stood up, he saw the dot corresponding to his own movement on the patio, so he knew the image was properly aligned. Now he would receive a warning beep in his ear set when the motion detector saw something, and he could see where the movement was on the laptop. He was able to squelch out the movement of the horses in the stable from alerting him, knowing but accepting the fact that anyone else moving in that same area wouldn’t trigger an alert.

Perimeter security done, he opened his e-mail application. Armstrong Space Station and the Space Defense Force’s network of satellites provided most of the world with free wireless Internet access, and although in this part of the Middle East it was not high-speed access, it was still impressive service. Just in case the Russians were able to tap into satellite e-mail services, he sent an e-mail address to his phony home office’s address, then one to a phony colleague’s address. He knew if the Russians could beam damaging data to American Kingfisher satellites, they could probably pick up wireless data broadcasts for hundreds of miles around, so he had to make this look realistic.

He then opened a Short Messaging System chat window with a phony girlfriend, but writing messages took much longer than normal because he used a mental encoding routine he had learned in Air Force special operations. Every commando learned a system of messaging to be used on unsecure transmissions based on a twenty-five character alphabet, arranged in a five-by-five grid. The date of the message told which of six possible encoding grids was to be used, and the first word in the main message would indicate the sequence to pick letters out of words to use to compose the coded message.