Page 77

“I know,” Rapp said with frustration in his voice. “Now’s not the time to get technical with me.”
“Sorry. We’re searching for it right now. As you know, it’s standard field practice to turn these on sparingly. It greatly reduces the risk of being tagged.”
“I know, but ten phones is excessive.”
“He’s probably just switching out SIM cards.”
“Marcus,” Rapp shot him a cautionary look, “I’m well aware of how it works. Can we please focus on what is important and stop talking about semantics.”
Dumond nodded quickly and swore at himself for being so stupid. He’d known Rapp for a long time. Had worked with him on a lot of operations. Kennedy was like family to Rapp. The stress of this situation understandably had shortened his already short fuse.
Dumond pointed at the middle screen, which had a map of the greater Mosul metropolitan area. “These red dots represent mobile phone towers.”
Rapp noted that there was easily more than a hundred dots on the screen.
“Now if Mukhtar is using a satellite phone,” Dumond continued, “he’ll bypass these towers and the big bird up in space will get him.”
“Do you have Ashani’s voice programmed into recognition software?”
“Yep,” Dumond pointed at the third screen. “It’s all set to go. As soon as he comes online. I’ll have verification for you in ten seconds or less.”
“And Mukhtar?”
“We have no known samples, but we’ll be able to use this print and run it against everything we have in the archives.”
“How long will that take?”
“Even if we prioritize it, the search might take weeks. We’re talking about a lot of phone calls.”
“There’s got to be a way to speed it up.”
“If we get lucky and find a hit, we can narrow the search to a specific time frame and region. That would help.”
The door to the trailer opened and General Gifford entered with two other officers. All three were in full battle gear with sidearms strapped to their right thighs.
Gifford took off his helmet and said, “Mitc
h, Stan called me and said you guys might be close to finding a location.”
“That’s right, General.”
“How good is the intel?”
“We have Mukhtar’s mobile phone number, and we expect him to be receiving a call any minute.”
“We’ve got a hit on one of the previous numbers,” Dumond announced excitedly. He pointed at the middle screen. “This tower about ten miles east of town. My guess is he was traveling on this road right here.”
General Gifford hurried around the table and looked at the screen. “That’s Highway Two.”
“Hold on,” Dummond said, “the second number just came in.” He pointed to a tower near the Tigris. “This one was made after the first.”
Rapp looked at the new location and then checked the spot on the map where the ambush had taken place. “Based on the calls it looks like they tried to take her out of the city and then ended up coming back.”
“That’s assuming she’s still with this Mukhtar fellow,” Gifford said.
Rapp considered his point for a moment and said, “I don’t think he’d take his eyes off her.”
“The third number’s up.”