Lewis stared at her mapboard of the Middle East in a back corner of the intel shop’s “SCIF,” or secure office. She had carved out this small nook despite the fact that she was a contractor, the lowest of the low in the intel world. The cubicles around her buzzed with keystrokes, as analysts worked the classified databases shared among the sixteen different agencies of the U.S. intelligence community.
Computers are mindless. Human logic is more powerful than computational speed.
She held a minority opinion on this. The range fans of all the possible places the freighter could be right now blanketed the ocean from Pakistan to the Persian Gulf. Her division chief said the U.S. and allies had locked down every port from the straits of Bab el Mandeb to Hormuz, but everyone knew this wasn’t enough. Not even close. A clever captain could drop off small cargo almost anywhere, or rendezvous with another ship at sea.
I need to think like a sailor, Lewis thought. She picked up her legal pad and walked down several rows of cubicles until she found Chief Petty Officer Rick Hernandez, the lone enlisted man in the SCIF. She learned in the army to trust the common sense of NCOs, something often lost among senior officers.
“Ricky, have a minute?”
“Sure, Lewis. What’s up?”
“Find anything interesting?”
“Not yet. I’m charting all the new islands off Yemen’s coast in case they’re hiding there.”
“New islands?”
“Yeah, from volcanoes. I’m looking at recent satellite imagery and comparing it to pictures taken a few years ago. There’s quite a few around Zubair Archipelago.”
“I need your help,” she said. “I’m an army girl, and need to think like a sailor. These guys are at sea for weeks on end. What do they do day to day?”
“It’s pretty monotonous,” Ricky said. “Daily chores, TV, chores, card games, chores, sleep, Internet, and more chores.”
“Wouldn’t the smuggler captain turn off the ship’s Internet, like the AIS?”
“Of course, but sailors are clever, especially the bored ones.”
“How would they access the Internet?”
“Using a satellite phone like Thuraya or Inmarsat. They’re cheap these days and easy to smuggle aboard.”
“Wouldn’t our SIGINT guys catch them if they tried to make a call or text?”
“Not necessarily. It’s a small signal in a big ocean full of millions of signals.”
She bounced her pen off her chin.
“Did you read the CIA’s INTSUM from Gwadar?” he asked. INTSUMs are intelligence summaries. “They just came in.”
“No, not yet.”
“Four freighters matching our description left Gwadar yesterday,” he said. “A fifth was also spotted, according to a source, but not registered as leaving the port.”
“Interesting. What was its name?”
“HUMINT sources say Dona Iluire. We’re looking for it, but it vanished. Its name has probably changed, and the shipping lanes are full of group-three freighters with aft pilothouses. We’re trying to verify every single freighter, but there are too many. I’ll forward the reporting to you.”
“Thanks, Ricky.”
She made her way back to her computer, and logged on with her CAC card and password. Like all intel analysts, she had two computers: one for classified material and the other for everything else. Analysts rarely had their unclassified terminals on, but she knew better. The intelligence community fetishized secrets, ignoring open sources like the Internet to their peril.
She Googled Dona Iluire. Then she created a fake Twitter account and searched for all tweets that mentioned Dona Iluire. Nothing much.
“Lewis!” Colonel Brooks bellowed across the room, walking over to her. “Have you checked the reporting from DIA yet?” Translation: he wanted to know if she had scrolled through the endless intel reports from her parent organization, the Defense Intelligence Agency, in Washington, DC.
“Working on it,” she lied. It would be a dead end, but he wouldn’t believe her. If DIA had anything, they would have already flagged it.
“Work faster,” he said, walking away.
She nodded, then ignored him as she launched a Web Scraper, a proprietary software tool that could search thousands of social media accounts in milliseconds. She typed in “free,” “woman,” “ship,” and “navy,” and translated it into Arabic, Urdu, Farsi, Somali, Mandarin, Greek, Tagalog, and other languages.
“What’s that?” Brooks asked. He had circled back to look over her shoulder.
“Running a lead,” she said, quickly pulling up the DIA reporting.
“Taxpayers don’t invest billions in the intelligence community for you to check Facebook,” he said, loud enough for the entire SCIF to hear. “You’re the DIA liaison officer. Liaise!”
Prick, she thought, turning back to the Web Scraper results as he went off to terrorize another cubicle. Seventy-two million hits. She began quickly scrolling, scanning a hundred hits in a minute. Several minutes later, she paused on a tweet from a sailor aboard the Eleutheria, “freedom” in Greek. Her intuition flashed. Intuition wasn’t something you learned in school or coded into a computer. If she thought about it, she could have rationalized her intuition. Smugglers like their freedom, a cocky captain might change the name from Dona Iluire to Eleutheria, and only a cocky captain would take on a cargo of nukes. But ultimately it was a hunch.
Lewis opened the sailor’s Twitter account. It was written in Tagalog, the Philippine language, which the computer translated automatically. Most of it was complaining. They had no shore leave in Pakistan, even though they were in Gwadar for a week. The only thing they took on was a dozen small crates of machinery.
She continued to scroll. The captain beat him because he refused to speak Tagalog over the radio to the U.S. Navy. Finally, he grabbed the radio and said, “The captain can eat shit.” The skipper was satisfied, not understanding the language, and so was the sailor, who took the opportunity to gloat.
She scrolled down further, finding a dusk photograph of two sailors giving each other a high five on a ship. She zoomed in. It was a small cargo ship with an aft pilothouse, and a real piece of shit, too. The time and date was yesterday.
The ship matched the Dona Iluire’s profile, but where on the planet was it? She tapped her pen on her chin, then zoomed in on the constellations above the sailors’ heads. Opening a star-watching website, she plugged in the time and date of the photo. Then she punched in the estimated longitude and latitude of the mystery freighter at that time. The website displayed the night sky, and she compared it to the photo. The sky was hazy and the picture not so sharp, but she could definitely make out consistencies of the brighter stars and faint constellations. They were not identical but close enough.
Could this be our freighter? she thought.