Strike Force Alpha by Mack Maloney Page B

monitor up to 1,000 of these sites, around-the-clock.
    But this was not porn Ryder was looking at. In front of him was a 3-D photo analysis computer. The guy working the machine for him was Gil Bates, Head Spook, the top man down here in the White Rooms. He was tall and reedy, with tiny eyeglasses, spiked hair, a goatee, and earrings in both lobes. He’d been a child prodigy, earning a Ph.D. in Military (C-3) Theory from MIT at age 16. The government recruiters swooped in right away. By 18, he was a senior systems analyst for the NSA. He was now just 20 and had nine other eggheads working under him. He was supremely confident in his abilities but had a reputation for being a bit of a wiseass. He also had a thing for extremely bright Hawaiian shirts.
    Displayed on the screen was a digitized version of one of the photos Ryder had taken over the Med the night before. It showed three of the seven ships he’d spotted in convoy formation during the encounter with the Arab warplanes. The Spooks had developed his film, run it through a computer enhancer, and then fed it into this 3-D imaging machine. Bates’s conclusion: Yes, the ships seemed to be following one another in a convoy. However, the crates on their decks and in their holds contained nothing more than fruit. In fact, that’s how all of the crates were marked.
    “But how do you know that they aren’t just fruit crates with weapons or explosives inside?” Ryder asked him.
    Bates shrugged. He was so young he made the Delta guys look like retirees.
    “Materials used in weapons or explosives give off a heat signature completely different from organic matter,” he explained, slowly, so Ryder’s prehistoric brain could absorb what he was saying. “Even from belowdecks, we’d get a whiff of it. Now, we can’t get a real heat read off your photo, of course. But we are able to have the enhancer break down the spectro-magnetic image. Then, for every color in the spectrum we can assign—”
    Ryder cut him off. “OK, Einstein, I believe you.”
    This was a disappointment. Ryder had convinced himself the Arab aircraft were, for some reason, riding protection for the line of cargo ships. But if the ships were only hauling fruit, what would the point be?
    “Tell me this then,” he asked Bates. “Why were those ships sailing the way they were? All in a line….”
    “There’d just been a squall through the area,” Bates replied. “Small ships like to sail within sight of each other in bad weather. Safety in numbers….”
    “But seven ships? All in a row? How big was this squall?”
    Bates clicked his mouse button. A weather map showing the area the night before popped onto the screen. Another click and Ryder could see what looked like a microscopic hurricane about sixty miles off Tunisia. He scratched his graying head. He hadn’t seen any bad weather up there last night.
    “OK, I give up,” he said finally. “But can you keep all this on a file or something? You know, hang on to it for me?”
    Bates clicked his mouse again and said: “Forever and ever, sir…. ”
     
    Ryder left the White Rooms and began the long climb back up top.
    He’d really thought he’d had something, with the ships and the two planes from two different countries—a movement of weapons or the like. But he had to concede that just because it looked funny didn’t necessarily mean that it was. Sometimes his gut could be wrong, he supposed, though in all those black ops he’d been involved in years ago he really couldn’t remember his gut being wrong about anything.
    Maybe it was another sign of age. Maybe he was losing his touch.
    He reached the seven deck—just five more to go—when his cell phone rang. It was Martinez.
    “Find your little buddy and meet me on the fantail,” the Delta boss told him. “There’s something I’ve got to show you.”
    Ryder hung up and trudged up the next three levels. Something seemed different, though, when he reached the upper decks. He could