National Security Agency, Fort Meade, Maryland—Yemen desk
Nadia Hirsi-Simpson sighed as she considered the queue of incoming intercepts on her computer screen. She imagined computers all over the world Hoovering up streams of data from computers, mobile phones, and every other digital device. The data was sifted by algorithms, and suspicious bits were sent to analysts like her for further investigation.
Her eyes slid to the clock in the lower right-hand corner of her monitor. Only one hour to go until the weekend. She had reservations with her husband at the new Indian restaurant on Dupont Circle, then maybe a movie … anything but listening in on the conversations of other people from the other side of the planet.
She’d only been to Yemen once, as a teenager, a trip that still stuck with her to this day. The country she remembered was young and vibrant, full of colors and rich smells and wonderful food. But the Yemen she pictured in her mind as she translated selected intercepts might as well have been another planet. So much destruction and death …
It broke her heart to watch the news here in the US. The average American couldn’t even find the country of Yemen on a map, much less understand that Iran and Saudi Arabia were fighting a proxy war on the backs of the Yemeni people.
She sighed as she highlighted an audio file on her secure terminal. Nadia adjusted her headset and clicked the little arrow to play the recording.
The file was a poor-quality audio recording of a woman’s voice on a mobile phone, strained across distance and partially unintelligible in places. It sounded like she was weeping.
“Hamdi!” the voice sobbed. There was a long pause. “Hamdi, can you hear me?”
“Yes, Zahra. I can hear you.” The man was shouting. “Go ahead. The connection is very bad.”
“They’re all dead! Everyone in the village is dead.” The digital signal faded and Nadia lost Hamdi’s response.
“… Mira is dead. The children are dead. Everyone in Yousap.” The woman was ranting, repeating herself. The man tried to stop her, but she just kept going, babbling about dead people and blood and bodies melting. It made no sense.
Nadia paused the recording and listened to it again. After tracing the call to the cell tower near the town of Haydan and studying detailed maps from the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, she finally found a place called Yousap. It was a flyspeck on the screen, not even dignified with a population estimate.
One eye on the clock, Nadia studied the latest intel. These places were far from the front lines of the fighting. An attack in this remote village made no sense. Nothing added up.
Nadia flagged her supervisor. Mark Gallarita was a heavyset NSA analyst with a perpetual frown and dark hair that flopped into his eyes whenever he moved his head. The Yemen desk was not where Mark wanted to be in his career, and he made that point perfectly clear every day.
“What is it, Nadia?”
She colored slightly, embarrassed. Mark’s demeanor was brusque, but she told herself he was just a guy trying to do his best on an assignment that he hated.
“I got a fragment of a cell-phone call,” Nadia said. “It sounds like a bunch of civilians are dead.”
Mark leaned over her terminal, where she had the maps pulled up.
“The caller made a reference to this village.” Nadia pointed to a tiny dot fifteen kilometers past Haydan. “It looks like it’s only accessible by footpath, not even a place to drive a car up there. Subsistence farmers, goat herders. Maybe fifty people at the most.”
Mark stared at the screen, still silent.
“She was panicked.” Nadia realized she was talking faster, trying to convince her supervisor she was right. She tried to calm her voice and slow down. “Said everyone was dead. She mentioned the bodies looked like they were melting.”
That piqued Mark’s interest. “Melting? Chemical weapons, maybe? But why in the middle of nowhere?”
Nadia tried to backpedal. “Well, I think she said melted. It’s a terrible connection and the dialect was tough for me.” There were dozens of Arabic dialects in the country of Yemen alone, especially when you went into the deep countryside. Her parents had insisted she learn Arabic when she was growing up, but her parents had both been raised in Sanaa, the capital city of Yemen, and were born to wealth. She could understand the gist of any conversation well enough, but the subtleties might be lost in translation. On reflection, Nadia was increasingly concerned that maybe she was misinterpreting some of the words from the intercepted phone call.
Mark straightened up. “Okay, here’s what we’re going to do. Send this intel on to the theater commander as unverified. Then get on the horn with Creech and see if we can get a Reaper to make a surveillance pass for us. Maybe they can pick something up from the air.”
Nadia nodded, looking at the clock. If she hurried, she might just have enough time to do this before she got off shift. Overtime on Friday night was not in her plans.
She routed a secure call to Creech Air Force Base in Nevada into her headset and spoke to the duty officer. “This is Nadia from the NSA Yemen desk. Requesting a flyby on these coordinates.” She read out the location of the tiny village in the mountains of Yemen.
A tired voice repeated the coordinates back. “Stand by, ma’am.”
Nadia listened to the Muzak in her headphones until the duty officer came back on the line. “We have an MQ-9 UAV in the area, ma’am,” he said, using the official designation of the Air Force Reaper drone. “I’ve emailed you a secure link to the drone feed and I’m patching you through to the operator now.”
Her phone clicked and a new voice came on the line. “NSA, this is your pilot, Charlie,” the voice drawled. “To whom do I have the pleasure of speaking on this fine day?”
“Hello, Charlie, this is Nadia from the Yemen desk in DC.”
“Well, welcome aboard, Nadia. Please place your tray tables in an upright and locked position and fasten your seat belt. You will be seeing a live feed from my drone in three … two … one … mark.”
Nadia’s screen popped to life, showing an image of the mountainous Yemen countryside at night using a high-definition, low-light camera. A three-quarter moon cast the scene in silver.
“Looks like it’s about one in the morning in lovely Yemen, Nadia. Our low-light cameras are pretty good, so I’ll do a visual pass first, okay?”
“Acknowledged.” She raised her hand to beckon Mark to her desk and handed him a spare set of headphones.
The mountain hamlet of Yousap came into view on her screen. To call it a village was an insult to villages. It consisted of ten structures bisected by a footpath barely large enough to accommodate a donkey cart. A few crude corrals surrounded the buildings and some gardens.
“I believe that is our target, Nadia. Looks like a lovely rustic—make that very rustic—hideaway. What are we looking for?”
Nadia quickly filled him in on the basic situation.
“Roger that. The fastest way to tell if we have any warm bodies is to use infrared. Stand by.”
The screen updated to show a ghostly image of heat gradients. Nadia could make out at least a dozen person-shaped images with barely perceptible heat signatures. Inside one of the houses, she made out a warm body—probably the woman who made the phone call.
Charlie’s voice was subdued when he spoke again. “Based on what I am seeing here, Nadia, I would say we have a whole lot of recently dead or dying people in this little burg.”
Nadia leaned closer to the screen. “Concur, Charlie. I’d like to see if we can ascertain a cause of death. The eyewitness described the dead as looking like they had melted.”
“Roger that. Let me see how much detail I can get for you. Stand by.”
Nadia and Mark watched as the remote pilot increased magnification. Charlie’s voice sharpened. “Nadia, we have a high-speed incoming bogey on an intercept vector.”
“I don’t understand, Charlie. What is—”
An aircraft entered the field of view. Charlie froze the image and Nadia was able to make out the desert camouflage painted on the top of the fuselage and the seal of the Royal Saudi Air Force.
“Jesus,” Mark said, “that’s an F-15E.”
“Nadia,” Charlie said, “we have been ordered by in-theater commander to vacate. Breaking off now.”
“Charlie, wait!” Nadia said. “Give us a visual of the target for as long as you can.”
There was no reply from the pilot, but the image stayed on her screen.
The F-15E released a weapon from under its wing. It streaked down toward the tiny hamlet of Yousap. Seconds later, the mountaintop erupted in a ball of flame.
“Laser-guided bomb,” Mark whispered. “Two-thousand-pounder. Enough to vaporize a city block. What the fuck is going on over there?”
“Nadia, this is Charlie. It’s been a pleasure, but I’m outta here.”
Nadia’s screen went dead.
“That woman was alive,” Nadia said. “We saw her heat signature. She was the one who made the call.”
Mark blew out a long breath and pushed his glasses up his nose. “We don’t know that for sure, Nadia.” He stripped off his headphones and handed them to her. “We don’t know what happened. It’s a war zone over there, and for all we know that heat signature might have been the next Osama bin Laden.”
Nadia stared at him until Mark looked away.
“All right, I’ll tell you what. There’s a new group over at CIA called Emerging Threats. My new standing orders are if it smells funny and doesn’t fit in our mission, we’re supposed to send it over to the ET group.”
“The ET group. Really?” Nadia looked askance at her supervisor.
“Hey, if this was chemical warfare, it certainly falls outside our normal mission.”
Nadia looked at the clock on her screen. Quarter past five.
“Fine. Emerging Threats it is.”