Read Online Barracuda 945 by Patrick Robinson - Free Book Online

he said. “We have heard absolutely nothing from him since he left England last February. The mission was of course classified, and they did not even tell us he had been in Israel until August—three months after he disappeared.”
    Mr. Kerman pointed out that his wife was “brokenhearted,” and it was obvious there was a great deal not being told to them or anyone else. “We don’t know if Ray is alive or dead,” he said. “That’s a terrible burden for any parent to cope with. At themoment we are just living from day to day, hoping for news of our son.”
    And in that, Mr. and Mrs. Kerman were not alone. British Military Intelligence did not believe him dead. And they very much wanted to know where he was. But for rather different reasons.
    Major Ray Kerman knew a great deal too much about British Special Forces in the Holy Land—enough to cause a public outcry if the truth should ever come out. He was also in his own right, a military treasure to any other government or even a group of dissidents.
    Major Kerman was a lethal exponent of unarmed combat, a polished operator in every form of military activity, a man who could turn an armed disorganized rabble into a smooth, efficient force against the West.
    Ray Kerman, Harrow educated, star of his year at Sandhurst? That was one thing. Ravi Rashood, former student of the Koran, missing somewhere off the Jerusalem Road in Hebron? That was entirely another. And Britain’s innately suspicious Ministry of Defence understood the problem all too well.
    No one in Whitehall or Hereford would ever comment on the newspaper stories, but they found their way around the world in short order. Within two hours of publication, the Mystery of Ray Kerman, the Missing SAS Major, was on the Internet.
     
    Shortly after 10 P . M . (Eastern time), the CIA’s Middle Eastern desk in Langley, Virginia, electronically fired the Daily Mail ’s story onto the Duty Officer’s desk in the Military Intelligence Division of the National Security Agency (NSA), in Fort Meade, Maryland.
    The calculated speed with which the CIA moved on this was revealing. All Western Intelligence Agencies, and their natural allies, Special Forces and Special Agents, are apt to react with horror at the possible defection of one of their own. And the CIA had been tracking the situation for several weeks.
    But this new development in the British press, disclosing the Muslim past of the vanished officer, had ratcheted up the entire scenario by several notches. The midnight electronic communication from Langley to Fort Meade was a clear signal the CIAwanted the world’s largest and most powerful Intelligence agency to go to work.
    The NSA employs almost 39,000 people. It is more a city than a government agency, a vast complex of glass modern buildings, glowering behind razor-wire fences, patrolled by hundreds of armed police and bomb-sniffing dogs. It makes Beijing’s old Forbidden City look like open house. The NSA is known as Crypto City.
    Behind those gleaming bulletproof walls stand battalions of supercomputers with databases of septillion operations per second (that’s a 1 followed by forty-two zeroes). In here they don’t do seconds. They do femtoseconds—one quadrillionth of a second. This is military micromanagement gone berserk. Fort Meade sits at the center of a gigantic global listening network, connected to the satellites, intercepting, eavesdropping, hearing all, saying nothing beyond its prohibited ramparts. The NSA provides training for its linguists in ninety-five different languages, plus every possible dialect of Arabic, including Iraqi, Libyan, Syrian, Saudi, Jordanian, and Modern Standard Arabic. In this world it is virtually impossible to communicate across borders from one military operation to another without being heard, with immense clarity and understanding, by the electronic interceptors at Fort Meade.
    The vast compound covers 325 acres, with thirty-two miles of roads. There are more