The Scorpion's Gate Read Online Free Page A

the intercom button for his assistant. “Deb, call my wife on her cell and tell her I can’t make dinner with the Silversteins. Tell her I’ll call her in a bit, but they shouldn’t wait dinner on me.” MacIntyre’s friends were well used to his frequent no-shows, and had long ago learned not to ask why. He motioned for his eager staffer to continue.
    “Well, sir, it was a frequency not used by the Saudi military, but it was coming from the middle of the Empty Quarter, the open Saudi desert. Burst transmissions, heavily encrypted, narrow beam straight up to the Thuraya .” The Thuraya was a commercial satellite over the Indian Ocean. Connor was now unfolding a map of Saudi Arabia on top of the coffee table.
    “Yeah, so . . .” Oh shit, he thought, this kid is talking about some standard 505 report, just the usual low-level crap...Maybe I should have gone to the Silverstein dinner . . . Sarah will be pissed at me again.
    “So I called NSA, like you said we should when we needed more information than they gave us in the reports. I got the runaround almost the whole day, but finally, just after five o’clock, the assistant chief of D-3 called me back.” The young analyst started taking coffee mugs from MacIntyre’s collection of agency cups on the nearby stand, placing them on the corners of the map to keep it from coiling back up. Connor carefully secured the northwest corner with an NSC mug, the southwest with a NORAD cup, the northeast corner with one from CinCPAC, and the southeast one with a chipped blue cup with a gold SIS on it.
    “D-3?” The Deputy Director sat up in his leather chair, which had been with him since his first job on Capitol Hill. “That’s NSA’s branch for Chinese military, not the office that handles Saudi.”
    “I know, sir.” Susan smiled for the first time since she had entered the room. “The freq in the report is used only by Chinese Strategic Rocket Forces. It’s their nuclear command link.”
    “Huh? What did the guy from D-3 say, what’s his explanation?” MacIntyre was looking at the map. The red X that Connor had marked on it was certainly in the middle of nowhere. “That site makes no sense. Chinese? It’s right in the heart of the damned Rub al-Khali. Why the hell would that transmission be coming from the center of the Empty Quarter? There’s nothing there but a quarter million square miles of sand dunes.”
    Susan rearranged the mugs. “He said that it was unexplained, but he didn’t seem too worked up about it. Sounded like he wanted to go home. He said that his car pool was waiting and...”
    MacIntyre popped out of the chair and moved quickly toward his desk. 
    Connor began to mumble, “Maybe I shouldn’t have bothered you, sir, since NSA didn’t...”
    The Deputy Director grabbed a gray phone. “This is MacIntyre at IAC. Let me speak to the SOO.” 
    There was only one place in the government where there really was “a boy named Sue”—namely, NSA’s Senior Operations Officer, who ran the spy agency’s command center. Senior Operations Officer, who ran the spy agency’s command center. 37129-09. We were told that it was PRC strategic c-cubed.”
    Connor listened nervously, envisioning her career ending before it had even begun, especially if the answer was that it was really nothing more than Panamanian shipping comms. “Okay, and the lat-long places it where?” Another pause seemed to take forever. MacIntyre had turned his back to Connor and was fumbling through a directory. “Okay. Little odd, no? Okay, thanks.”
    The Deputy Director switched from a gray to a red phone. He looked again at his watch and then punched a speed dial. “I have a priority-two late insertion for the Placeset bird; my code is IACzero-two-zulu-papa-romeo-niner.”
    Connor was trying to remember what Placeset was: maybe the high-resolution electro-optical satellite.
    “Coordinates, lat five zero degrees, three zero minutes east; long two three degrees, two seven