The Sum of All Fears.pdf - Delta Force

itself.
***
'I can do it,' Clark announced, striding through the door like John Wayne into
the Alamo.
'Tell me about it,' Jack said, waving to a chair.
'I just got back from Dulles, talked to a few people. The JAL 747S set up for
Trans-Pac flights are arranged very conveniently for us. The upstairs lounge is
set up with beds, like an old Pullman car. It helps us. The room is very lively
acoustically, and that makes for easy pickup.' He laid out a diagram. 'There's a
table here and here. We use two wireless bugs, and four broadcast channels.'
'Explain,' Jack said.
'The wireless bugs are onmidirectional. Okay, they transmit to the SHF
transmitter, and that one gets it out of the airplane.'
'Why four channels?'
'The big problem is cancelling out the airplane noise, the engine whine, the
air, all that stuff. Two channels are interior sound. The other two are for
background noise only. We use that to cancel out the crap. We have people down
in S&T who have been working on that for quite a while. You use the recorded
background noise to establish what the interference is, then just change its
phase to cancel it out. Pretty simple stuff if you have the right computer
backup equipment. We do. Okay? The transmitter goes in a bottle. We aim it out
of the window. Easy to do, I checked. Now, we will need a chase plane.'
'Like what?'
'With the right equipment, a business jet like a Gulfstream, better yet an
EC-135 – I'd recommend more than one, have them form up and break off.'
'How far away?'
'As long as its line of sight . . . up to thirty miles, and doesn't have to be
the same altitude. Not like we have to fly formation on the guy.'
'How hard to build it?'
'Simple. The hardest part is the battery, and that'll fit in a liquor bottle,
like I said. We'll make it a brand that you usually find in a duty-free store –
I have a guy checking that – one with a ceramic bottle 'stead of a glass one.
Like an expensive bottle of Chivas, maybe. The Japanese like their scotch.'
'Detection?' Ryan asked.
Clark grinned like a teenager who'd just snookered a teacher. 'We build the
system exclusively from Japanese components, and we place a receiver tuned to
the right freqs in the aircraft. He'll be traveling with the usual mob of
newsies. I'll set a receiver in the waste bin of one of the downstairs heads. If
the op gets burned, they'll think it was one of their own. It'll even look like
a journalist did it.'
Ryan nodded. 'Nice touch, John.'
'I thought you'd like that. When the bird lands, we have a guy recover the
bottle. We'll fix it – I mean, we'll see to it that you can't get the cork out.
Superglue, maybe.'
'Getting aboard in Mexico City?'
'I have Ding looking at that. Time he got a taste of planning operations, and
this is the soft side. My Spanish is good enough to fool a Mexican national.'