Second Nature

Chapter 45

45 

The National Security Agency computer room in the sub-sub-basement of the Pentagon was so cold, Eberhard almost expected his breath to form little puffs of vapor. Cray supercomputers, taller than refrigerators, circled the room like shiny black monoliths from an ultra-high-tech Stonehenge. The idiot-savant brains hummed day and night, encrypting and decoding military radio traffic worldwide over a network of communications satellites. 

Despite the room's chill, half-moons of sweat dampened the armpits of Eberhard's Army dress shirt. The search for Gen had dragged on more than two weeks since the positive ID on the video footage from the zoo in Tallahassee. He was beginning to think this roomful of techies couldn't find their assholes with both hands and a GPS unit. 

No further leads had come to light from interviewing the witnesses involved in the zoo episode. Everyone had been hung-up on Gen's purple eyes and freakish face. Many of them pointed out that the guy she was with was strikingly handsome. Eberhard heard lines like, "Beauty and the Beast, but in reverse," so often they became cliché. The eyewitnesses contradicted each other, as usual, but most thought the guy looked biracial. Several witnesses mentioned a little girl, also with biracial features, possibly the man's daughter. 

By chance, one witness near the parking lot, an elderly lady, had managed to read a bumper sticker on the getaway vehicle. She could not identify the make or model or color of the vehicle and had not even bothered to check the license number, but she was sure about the bumper sticker. Go figure. It read: "Dimming shore lights helps sea turtles."  

So maybe the vehicle's owner lived in one of the scores of oceanfront communities on Florida's gulf coast. Or was it the east coast? Sea turtles laid eggs along both; it's one long, long shoreline. For that matter, the guy could as well live anywhere and just happen to have a thing for sea turtles. 

Eberhard had watched the video dozens of times, studying the way the man had handled himself against the attacking leopard. It was plain the man had martial arts training. That could mean a civilian martial arts school, but Eberhard didn't think so. His gut feeling shouted military training. Two Army Ranger instructors from Ft. Bragg had watched the tape and agreed the man had likely spent time as a commando. 

Last night, technicians had digitally manipulated the man's profile from the footage inside the snow leopard pen. Special software had converted his profile into a frontal view of the whole face. Then, after carefully measuring anatomical landmarks-eye sockets, nose bridge, cheekbones, jaw line-the software converted the man's features into a numerical model. Normally the model included a numerical value for eye-color, skin-color, hair-texture, height, and body type. But the color imagery on the videotape was unreliable, and so were the eyewitnesses. That forced the techies to try to identify the guy based on his facial features alone. 

A Cray computer was comparing his numbers to similar data-models that represented men who had served in the CIA, FBI, NSA, Secret Service, and Armed Forces. The computer had been mumbling to itself and blinking-thinking all day. So far, no matches. 

Two near-hits, one Army Ranger, and one CIA, had turned out to be Caucasians with noses partly flattened by bone breakage. For lack of a better lead, they had no choice but to continue fishing through the data pools until they snagged the man's identity, or reached a dead-end. Given that the computers were now crunching their next-to-last database-U.S. Navy SEALs personnel, 1970 to 2002-it was beginning to seem hopeless to Eberhard. 

He hovered over a young Tech-Sergeant parked in front of a terminal. Amber lights flitted across her eyeglasses in the room's dimness and her pageboy haircut gleamed like molded black vinyl. 

"How far along are we?" he said.  

She tapped a readout at the border of her screen. "We're, ah, eighty-four percent through the database, sir. Oh, eighty-five, now." 

Eberhard glanced at his watch. "Shit." A waste of a whole morning. But he couldn't think of how to proceed from here. "Guess I'll just have to go back to the zoo, interview the fuckin' leopards." He turned to leave the room. 

An image froze on the screen and the computer chimed. "Hang on, sir. Another hit."  

Eberhard spun back to stare at the screen. The sergeant tapped a few keys and the screen split vertically, the enhanced image from the zoo video on the left and a photo from the SEALS personnel database on the right. 

"Bingo. I think we've got him," the sergeant said. She fiddled with an electronic pen, tracing facial landmarks on the two images, but Eberhard didn't need to wait for the computer's confirmation. The photo on the right showed a younger, military buzz-cut version of the rastaman on the left. 

"Christ, that's him. That's him." 

He stared at the man on the screen. Hercules Cade Seaborne. Nearing his thirtieth birthday. Six-foot-two, 230 pounds. Six years of Navy service, all of them spent as a member of the elite Sea-Air-Land special forces. Persian Gulf veteran. Distinguished service medal. Navy Cross for heroism in combat. Resides at Cool Bay Inn, Stanton Hill Lane, Coolahatchee Bay, Florida. 

A second techie had already pulled up a map of Florida on an adjoining computer screen. Coolahatchee Bay was an island off the west coast, near Apalachicola.  

The computer chimed again. "Image comparison completed," the voice program said. "Positive match identified. Probability of error, one-hundredth of one percent." 

Eberhard smiled. You're dead meat, hero. "Have we got a recon-sat we can send over the island?" 

"I'll have that information for you in a moment, sir." The technician had already pulled up a moving map on her computer monitor that showed the real-time orbits of scores of military reconnaissance satellites. A tangle of multi-colored circles and ellipses crisscrossed the screen. She entered the latitude and longitude of Coolahatchee Bay and executed a search for the closest recon satellite. "Sir, we're in luck. Got a Keyhole satellite-multi-spectral digital imaging, plus radar-and it's definitely close enough. In fact..." she typed in more keystrokes. "Can nudge it over for a fly-by in, ah, forty-three minutes." 

"Excellent. Do it." 

He snatched up a blue phone from its cradle. He did not have to dial the Special Forces Operational Detachment, at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. "We've found her. A little island called Coolahatchee Bay, gulf coast of Florida." He spelled the name. "That's right. Assemble the team. We're going in. The staff here will transmit to you satellite photos, everything. We're going to hit them tonight." 

"We'll need boats, sir. An island. They can escape by water." 

"No shit, captain." 

"What I mean, sir...we'll need more time." 

"Fuck that. I'm hopping on a jet down to you as soon as my driver can get me to the airport. When I land in Fort Bragg, I only want to hear that Delta Force is good to go. No excuses. I want the field quarantine units ready. The biocontainment capsule with the liquid nitrogen. The choppers. The boats. And I want every one of your commandos to have a hard-on. Got that?" 

"Uh, yes sir." 

Eberhard hung up and took one last look at the screen, at the face that launched a thousand ships.  

Then he rushed out of the room.