The Threat

Dan had figured what the chief of staff meant was he wanted the administration to get credit for the bust. Well, he wasn’t averse to letting them hog the limelight. Or even to standing in for them if they wanted him on scene.

And now the runway of Key West International stretched ahead, streaked with the black crayon of hundreds of landings. With a thump and a shriek, they were down.

* * *

The sea breeze was warm. An Air Force colonel was waiting with an official car. Dan was wearing what he was starting to think of as his NSC uniform: gray suit, white shirt, subdued tie. Bloom had changed into boots, jeans, and a black windbreaker with “DEA” on the breast. He was also toting a holstered Glock now. But the suit and tie seemed to work better. The colonel called him “Mr. Lenson” with great respect, and opened the car door for him. While they listened to Rude Girl on the WAIL morning show Dan reflected on the advantages of being from Washington.

Tourists in bright shirts and funny hats were taking pictures of each other next to a concrete buoy. A sign marked it as the southernmost point in the United States. Just past it was the JIATF fence, barbed wire, palm trees, then the Coast Guard piers. The operations center was low, gray brick, isolated on a spit of land. The colonel introduced him to the director, a recently arrived Coast Guard two-star named Quintero. Then it was up a flight of stairs, and through a steel door with card-controlled entry.

In the joint operations command center four leather command chairs faced computer-driven back-projection displays. The command duty officer and the watch team, mostly uniformed but with intelligence analysts from Customs and DEA, sat around a four-armed table crowded with computers. The beeps and murmurs of voice circuits kept on as the briefing began. Fifty-one brain-numbing PowerPoint slides, narrated by a nervous young lieutenant commander. Dan sat beside Quintero, only partially tuned in.

“JIATF East, originally Joint Task Force 4, was established when DoD became the lead agency for providing detection and monitoring throughout the transit zone. Our mission is to integrate the military’s C3I capabilities to assist law enforcement agencies. We now include representatives from DEA, DIA, NSA, FBI, and the British and Dutch Royal Navies. Our area of responsibility encompasses a region comparable in size to the triangle bounded by the cities of Miami, Seattle, and New York, and includes the airspace of eighteen nations. We detect and monitor air and maritime trafficking activity in the transit zone, hand off this information to appropriate law enforcement agencies, and deconflict non-D&M counterdrug activities occurring in the transit zone.”

“D&M?” Dan muttered to Quintero. The admiral whispered back, “Detect and monitor.”

Dan was saying “Thanks” when the next slide came up.

Labeled “National Counterdrug Organization,” it showed the operational line running from the president, through the NSC, down to the cabinet secretaries: Defense, Treasury, Transportation, State. From there it went through the secretary of defense to the Joint Chiefs, where it split three ways: to JIATF East via the Atlantic Command, JIATF West via the Pacific Command, and JIATF South via the Southern Command.

Of course it didn’t mean Dan Lenson was about to give any direction to the secretary of defense. But it was a beautifully clear wiring diagram, and he contemplated its elegance before leaning again. “I’ve got to have that slide.”

“Hey, I’ll send you electrons on the whole brief.”

The rest was boilerplate — interdiction assets, baseline force laydown — but he paid attention when the ground-based-radar information came up. The main coverage was from ionospheric backscatter arrays. They could detect air targets two thousand miles away. Smaller radars on aerostats — tethered balloons — passed their pictures to the Caribbean Regional Operations Center, the room they were in. The rest of the brief was on a classified data link and the tactical analysis teams and local coordination centers that fed intel into the system.

“If there are no questions, we’ll take a break,” the lieutenant commander said, obviously glad it was over. “After which we’ll describe Operation Hot Handoff.”

* * *

Hot Handoff was the code name for the interception of the major players en route to the meeting in Miami. DoD was the lead agency, and assets would be coordinated from Key West. Cold Handoff was the stateside piece of the operation, run by the DEA Miami Field Division with assistance from Dade County, the U.S. Marshal’s Service, the FBI, and Customs. Admiral Quintero briefed from his chair as the slides came up.