Sting of the Wasp

by Jeff Rovin

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  PROLOGUE

  New York, New York

  July 22, 9:15 a.m.

  It did not feel like 2019.

  Eighty-one-year-old Ernie Keene, retired corporal, United States Navy, stood on the misty flight deck of the USS Intrepid and looked out at New Jersey. Only it wasn’t the Garden State his squinting gray eyes saw in the filtered summer sun. He didn’t see the other tourists who had come early to beat the summer crowds.

  It felt, to Keene, that the year was once again 1962, and the mid-afternoon sunlight had been sharper, the sky bluer, the sea endless off the coast of Puerto Rico. The smells? They were every American seaman’s constant companion, salt and fuel, a mix still present all these decades later, and welcome in Keene’s nostrils. Back then, after sixteen months, the sounds of the aircraft carrier had become white noise to Keene, but on that day, May 24, the heavy beat of the rotor of the HS-3 was different from before. That day, the Sikorsky helicopter was riding through a page in history.

  Peering into yesterday, Keene’s wrinkled, sun-bronzed cheeks framed a proud smile, his eyes moist as he looked, breathed, heard, was in the past. His daughter, son-in-law, and granddaughter were elsewhere on the decommissioned vessel, now a stately museum. They had flown him here for his birthday and he had wanted this moment alone with his old vessel … with the memory of the day Astronaut Scott Carpenter, the fourth American in space, was recovered from the sea following his orbital flight.

  Keene had not spotted the three parachutes of the Aurora 7 bringing the capsule down. The space traveler had been off-target, too distant to see. But the seaman would never forget the black, red-nosed chopper soaring in and settling down among them. The beaming voyager hopping out, as if he hadn’t just spent hours in a weightless state, the entire crew applauding him—and the nation. Our nation cheering their latest hero. And he would never forget the late Scott Carpenter who, after his career in space, made it his life’s mission to explore the sea.

  Fifty-seven years later, the vessel was once again under Keene’s feet, the shadows were vivid in his mind’s eye, and the lump was still thick in his throat.

  My God, Keene thought, his chin quaking a little, his breath tremulous as he relived that singular moment. Not just a moment in his life but a moment in the life of America. What we had, then, he said to himself. A new frontier. A visionary young president. A prosperous nation, at peace.

  He was privileged to have been a part of it, present for the recovery of an American who was just back from outer space. Keene was no longer in the Navy three years later when the Intrepid recovered Gus Grissom and John Young of Gemini 3, but he saw it on television and knew what every man onboard was experiencing. Keene still felt humbled, as he had then, just to be a cog in that grand effort, standing there with Petty Officer 2nd Class Dick Tallman as Commander Carpenter was deposited on the flight deck, this flight deck, right where Keene was standing now. Time, age, life, everything seemed to evaporate. He was youthful again, his wife alive, his daughter just a baby, the future long and deep and rich.

  Where had it gone? Keene wondered. Not just a lifetime but that powerful, uplifting sense of unity he had felt with every man onboard this very ship.

  Slowly, reluctantly, the Groton, Connecticut, resident returned to the present. The landscape of the intervening years returned. Here and now the choppers he heard were regular traffic along the Hudson River. The voices were not fellow seamen but tourists. The flight deck—well, it was not rolling and pitching and slippery with the sea but anchored emphatically in a river that seemed better-suited to pleasure boats and water taxis than to an 872-foot-long, 27,100-ton juggernaut.

  His sagging shirt pocket chirped. Keene fished out his cell phone, held it at arm’s length so he could read the message. It was a text from his daughter.

  YOU DOING OK?

  He thumbed the microphone icon. He spoke in a quiet voice, mindful that there were others around him enjoying their own thoughts and emotions. He said softly:

  FINE. BE THERE IN A MINUTE. LOVE POP.

  Susan, her husband Jason, and their youngest daughter Lisa were waiting for him in the space shuttle pavilion. He had wanted to rekindle his personal connection with history before enriching it.

  Keene poked send then, proud of his sudden inspiration, used the phone to take a picture of his feet on the deck. That was something he would want to look at again when he was back in his home, on his terrace overlooking the Long Island Sound. This vessel had taught him discipline, which, added to his inborn love of the sea, served him well in his career as a boatyard worker operating hydraulic trailers, lifts, learning maintenance, and finally managing a marina.

  Well, he thought with an inner sigh, every man onboard that day made his own journey. I thank God for the many joys in mine and—

  Ernie Keene did not get to finish his thought. It was cut short by a very loud and very powerful explosion not far behind him.

  * * *

  The operation had been worked out with military precision by a military officer.

  The plan, conceived by Captain Ahmed Salehi and Dr. Hafiz Akif of the Professor Abdus Salam Centre for Physics in Islamabad, Pakistan, had been personally approved by Salehi’s sponsor, the powerful prosecutor Ali Younesi of the Special Court in Tehran. The plan had been operational for five days, since they had traveled from Washington, D.C., to New York. Iran shared diplomatic space with the embassy of their fellow nation; under Islamabad’s “protecting power,” Iran enjoyed the same privileges as any foreign representative in America—despite the fact that formal relations between Washington and Tehran did not exist. A reciprocal arrangement existed between the United States and Iran via the U.S. Interests Section of the Swiss Embassy in Tehran.

  With the patience of a veteran seaman, Salehi had waited for exactly the right atmospheric conditions: mist rolling in from the harbor, lingering over the Hudson River, enough to dampen the air but not the plans of tourists. The meteorological records of the Atmospheric Science Department at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, were most thorough and helpful when it came to pinpointing humidity in specific regions of Manhattan and its environs. Dr. Akif had personally approved the conditions from the foot of 46th Street and 12th Avenue, right on the river.

  Salehi was a fearless, sixty-one-year-old former officer with the Navy of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard of Iran. Since “retiring” from active service, he had sailed the Middle Eastern, Asian, and South American seas delivering and acquiring black market weapons for Tehran. Less than a month before, his efforts to obtain nuclear missiles for the state had been thwarted by American commandos off the coast of Russia. Their lawless action had also cost the officer his ship, the cargo vessel Nardis. It had cost him his reputation as a man who could be entrusted to carry out the most difficult and dangerous missions. It had steeled him with a hunger for swift, merciless revenge.

  Salehi had arrived at the Intrepid Sea, Air & S
pace Museum with the chemist—the scientist wearing a Yankees baseball cap, pulled low—as well as with Akif’s daughter and granddaughter, Iram and Amna. The others remained on the street. The young mother had taken the nineteen-month-old from her stroller and was feeding her a bottle in a corner away from the water, against a gunmetal wall overlooking Pier 86 not far from the entrance. Pushing the collapsible pram—which was far from empty, despite being childless—Salehi had walked on like the eternally patient grandfather he was pretending to be.

  He did not have to play the part of a man who was simply waiting. That was what he did at sea—waited to leave a port, arrive at a port, cross a sea, go wide around a storm. His life was mostly waiting.

  And thinking. Right now he was doing both. He had been to the Intrepid a week before, wearing a Sikh turban, looking for the security cameras, picking a spot where he would be seen and where the event would be recorded from as many angles as possible. He had watched to see where tourists went first. Most arrived and took videos of the aircraft lined up side by side by side. Naturally, the security cameras were arrayed to cover those assets as well as the actions of those milling around them. It was a classic attempt at deterrent: a terrorist did not go there if he did not wish to be photographed.

  But what if he did? Salehi thought, making sure he did not look at any of the devices. Not yet.

  Salehi had padded his belly slightly with the turban, which he would need when he was finished here. There was a stuffed animal in the seat where Amna had been seated. It was a plush saber-toothed tiger he had bought at the American Museum of Natural History. He had taken pains that he and his family should show up on several video feeds so that facial recognition software would not show a known foreign advocate but someone who had a longer beard and a Jew’s head covering, someone who would get a pass on future automated profiling systems. To the NYPD, to the FBI, to Homeland Security and anyone else who was watching he was simply a Pakistani diplomat visiting several tourist spots over a period of days. A plastic beverage glass from Wicked had not only passed scrutiny, it barely got a first look from security personnel. It was a term he applied loosely since the man and woman he had encountered were openly bored and clearly expected no trouble. Had they opened the big container, they would have been the first to die when the specially fitted interior loaded with murky yellow chlorine trifluoride was exposed to the damp river air.

  Salehi was glad it hadn’t happened that way. He was prepared to die both as an Iranian officer and as a soldier in the eternal Revolution. He was not a jihadist, just a proud Iranian who honored the proud and ancient history of his nation. But he wanted to survive. He wanted the Americans to know who had done this, and why, and to compound their shame and misery with the inability to prevent future attacks. Dr. Akif, who would be following him onboard within moments, would see to their hasty exit using his diplomatic credentials.

  An elderly man was standing just in front of Salehi. He was looking out across the river. The American stood like a seaman: his slightly bowed legs seemed to grow from the deck and his wisps of gray hair blew like they had danced before with the sea breeze. But mostly it was his breathing. He was as a man reborn, inhaling as if he had been removed from life support. Salehi knew because he had felt that way as soon as he set foot on this deck. It did not matter that the ship was American; it was a beast of the sea, a creature without politics, only nautical experiences.

  It pained the Iranian to do what he was about to do. And yet, if he were to ask this man, if he were to commune with the metal hull below, this is the fate they would desire. As the proverb went, Choose not for others what you do not choose for yourself.

  * * *

  The fire emerged from the deck so abruptly, so forcefully, it was as if a rent had opened in the very roof of hell. The souvenir cup had attracted barely a glance but the self-igniting wall of flame turned every head on deck.

  For many of those observers, it was the last thing they saw.

  The fire caused the moisture in the air to transform into a deadly steam that melted the eyes and destroyed the throats and nasal passages of everyone it touched. At the same time, the chlorine trifluoride poured over the deck and under shoes and consumed everything and everyone it touched, beginning with Ernie Keene. One moment he was warmly embraced by the past, the next he was burning to death in the present. He fell to his knees, charred black; his flesh falling away in dead lumps. Other tourists shrieked in the few moments they had left, some, afire, attempted to hurl themselves into the river. But the burning deck overtook them, outraced them, the air sizzling incongruously as the chemical was carried toward the river.

  Salehi paused to look directly at a security camera before turning and calling for the Pakistanis posing as his wife and daughter.

  “Here!” Dr. Akif shouted, motioning him over—as if Salehi were a victim and not the perpetrator.

  The chemical engineer already had his diplomatic identity card in his hand as he ushered his daughter and granddaughter through the security checkpoint, just ahead of the mob that had managed to circle around the massive fire. Standing outside the museum, Dr. Akif actually got one of the guards to help him pull an older Jewish man through to safety. He had left the stroller behind, since it had mostly melted like candle wax in the conflagration; with a handkerchief over his mouth, all he took with him was the pungent smell of death inside his nostrils.

  The four made their way down the stairs. As always on their homeland, Americans were reacting to an event, concerned with the victims rather than the perpetrator. They could not afford to seal the area while tourists were trying to escape.

  The world of the Intrepid was comprised entirely of chaos and sobbing, of shouts and distant sirens, and the choking pall that had settled over the entire flight deck. Just breathing the vapors produced by the chemical was adding to the numbers of dead and their raw, dying screams. Security personnel who had raced in turned around just as quickly, realizing that they had no idea what they were dealing with and that, at the very least, gas masks were required.

  Salehi looked around as they hastened from the pier, observed as recreational boats moved from the stricken titan, as air traffic swung wide, as lights and police took up positions on the opposite side of the river to keep onlookers from the deadly cloud. At least getting away from the museum was easy, as no vehicular traffic was moving other than ambulances along with fire and law enforcement vehicles.

  The Iranian and the Pakistani scientist did not exchange looks. It was one thing to work in isolation, as he did, as Dr. Akif did at the Pakistan ordnance factories in Wah Cantt, Punjab. It was another to take a weapon of mass destruction into the field, helping to deploy it, and being forced to witness the results. However, the good life Akif and his family enjoyed—and Iram’s own future as a well-paid official at the Ministry of Industries & Production—demanded they cooperate. And they were not without their own hostility toward the United States. Father and daughter recalled the decades of abuse Pakistanis had suffered under American petrochemical companies before they were bought out by employees and local corporations. The educated elite in Pakistan resented the United States for violating its regional supremacy in the ongoing war against the Taliban and other terror groups. While few professional Pakistanis would have coveted this assignment, the tainted political climate had corrupted the moral environment as well. They would all be out of the country in a matter of hours. And for the Akifs, life would continue as before.

  In that turbulent region, the price of stability was often high.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Op-Center Headquarters, Fort Belvoir North, Springfield, Virginia

  July 22, 9:26 a.m.

  Every device owned by Chase Williams came active at once—personal cell, office cell, tablet, and all three landlines. He had been reviewing intelligence reports from Asia when the symphony of tones and beeps told him that something terrible had gone down. The only question the director of Op-Center—formally, the National Cris
is Management Center—had was who he wanted to hear it from.

  Williams chose the secure landline on his desk. The caller ID was Matt Berry, deputy chief of staff to President Wyatt Midkiff. The team of intelligence advisors who worked or visited the White House regularly was known around town as the “party planners”; among those, Berry was a bit of an outlier, a mystery. He did not have the respect of the heavy hitters but the president trusted him. Berry was a close friend of Op-Center’s Brian Dawson and he had become the team’s unofficial inside man at the White House. If Williams had to get bad news, the former Navy four-star combatant commander wanted it immediately contextualized. But he simultaneously flipped his desktop to CNN to see what he had missed. The crawl and live images gave him a quick, sickening synopsis. Nor was Berry’s information as comprehensive as Williams had hoped.

  “Matt?” Williams said. “What—”

  “Conference call with the president, in the Tank, now,” Berry said.

  Berry hung up the phone just as Deputy Director Anne Sullivan swung through the door. The sixty-year-old Op-Center director rose, answered her concerned look with a shrug, and told her what Berry had said.

  “You know anything?” Williams asked as he grabbed his sports jacket from the hook behind the door.

  “I think we’re in shit,” she replied, nodding toward his desk.

  He looked back at the tablet. There was a security camera photograph from the computer of Kathleen Hays, Op-Center’s visual analysis specialist. Beneath it was a name in black type.

  Williams swore. Anne was correct, as always. He jabbed the name with a finger, waited a moment. The only data that came up was a tab for the file they had closed on July 3.

  “Find out why we did not know this,” Williams said vaguely as he hurried past Sullivan toward the electronic and scientific brain center of Op-Center.