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“We’re up, Colonel,” Sergeant Lewis said.
Lieutenant Colonel Thomas J. Davenport, who commanded Gray Fox and who was unusually in personal command of this team operation, gave Sergeant Lewis a thumbs-up signal
but did not raise his eyes from the communications device on the ground between his legs. It looked, more than anything else, like a small laptop computer.
He read what he had typed:
1. ALL WELL.
2. (PROB-NINER) BIRD WAS HERE UNTIL DUSK YESTERDAY.
3. RECON PRODUCED:a. COVERT INTERROGATION OF FIFTEEN NATIVES INDICATES (RELIABILITY EIGHT).• I. A “BIG AIRLINER HERE.”
• II. AIRLINER MARKERS WERE STRIPPED AND NEW MARKERS PAINTED; NO DETAILS ON NEW MARKERS AVAILABLE YET.
• III. ALL AIRLINER SEATS REMOVED.
• IV. LARGE “RUBBER TENTS” PLACED ABOARD; DESCRIPTION OF SAME FITS (PROB-FIVE) FUEL BLADDERS.
• V. AIRLINER NOT REPEAT NOT FUELED.
• VI. WITH EXCEPTION OF AIRCRAFT CREW (TWO-MAN) WHO WERE IN "PILOT’S UNIFORMS” AND NEGROID IN APPEARANCE, NO WHITE MEN OR “OTHER WESTERNERS ” WERE SEEN.
b. FOLLOWING SUPPORTING DETAILS:• I. HAVE PLASTER-CAST IMPRESSION LARGE AIRCRAFT TIRES.
• II. PURCHASED ONE THREE-PLACE AIRCRAFT SEAT FROM MERCHANT.
• III. HAVE APPROXIMATELY ONE HALF POUND OF STEEL WOOL SCRAPS FROM PAINT REMOVAL.
4. SUMMARY:a. A LARGE JET TRANSPORT AIRCRAFT WAS HERE.
b. MARKINGS WERE REMOVED AND REPLACED; SEATS REMOVED; FUEL BLADDERS PLACED ABOARD (PROBABLY NOT INSTALLED).
c. AIRCRAFT DEPARTED FOR UNKNOWN DESTINATION AT DUSK YESTERDAY.
The first paragraph—“All well”—covered a lot of ground: Six men, and all their equipment, had successfully made a Halo parachute descent from a jet transport at 35,000 feet and landed with all their equipment (and themselves) intact and functioning precisely where they had intended to land. They had carried out their reconnaissance mission without being detected, which of course also meant that no one had been killed, injured, or lost.
The second paragraph reported—with a probability factor of nine on a one-to-ten scale—what Colonel Davenport believed to be the facts. The rest of the message gave his reasons and his best guesses.
There was no address and no signature. The way the system was set up at the moment, the message was going to Lieutenant General Bruce J. McNab only and he knew that only one person could have sent it.
When Colonel Davenport pushed the SEND key, the message would be first encrypted and then sent to a satellite circling the earth at an altitude of 27,000 miles. The satellite—having been programmed to do so—then would relay the message to a device that another Gray Fox communicator had set for General McNab in the VIP Guest Quarters assigned to him at the Royal Air Force Base at Medina, Morocco. There, when General McNab typed in the seven-digit access code, the message would be decrypted and displayed on the screen of what without the secret communications technology would be an ordinary laptop computer.
The entire process would take from three to ten seconds, depending mostly on how quickly General McNab typed in the access code.
Colonel Davenport looked at Sergeant Lewis, who checked to make sure all the LEDs were still green and then gave Colonel Davenport a thumbs-up.
Colonel Davenport pushed the SEND key and then straightened up and flexed his shoulders.
For some reason, whenever he was involved in something like this Colonel Davenport always thought of the signaling device that had fascinated him when—then a young lieutenant —he had first seen it in the museum at the Army Intelligence Center at Fort Huachuca, Arizona.
Like the signaling device he was using now, the purpose was to communicate between a scouting unit and a headquarters.
The device at Huachuca—which Davenport guessed had lain in a warehouse at the old Indian fighting post in the desert for maybe a century before someone had stumbled across it and decided it belonged in the museum—had never been issued. It had looked as if had come from the factory in Waltham, Massachusetts, last week.
It was mounted on a varnished wooden tripod, the legs of which were adjustable both for height and for uneven terrain. On top—where a camera would go—was a collection of simple mirrors, a lever, and a sighting device.
Cavalry patrols scouting for hostile Indians carried the signaling device with them, and, while looking for the Indians, also kept an eye open for high ground from which they could see their command post and on which the device could quickly be set up.
