5 - Choker: Ike Schwartz Mystery 5

by Frederick Ramsay

  “You can’t bribe me.”

  “Don’t be offended. You may be the only operative we ever had who either did not overspend his funds, or didn’t pay for at least a month in Aruba from them, usually with a spouse or significant other. We always let that slide, as it seemed a small way to compensate them for their efforts. Besides, if you fail, it won’t make any difference what we do.”

  “I’ll do it without the bribe, Director.”

  “Charlie said you’d say that. But we never squared the accounts, so to speak, when you left us. As far as I am concerned, we owe you.”

  Ike swiveled around in his chair and studied the pictures on the wall, a collection of headshots of people he did not know. He spun back and shook his head.

  “I hate this, I really do, but I don’t see a way out. I’ll give it a go, but remember when this blows up in your face, I told you so. What happens next?”

  “It’s your op. You tell me.”

  “Well, first we need to get on the property opposite where the satellite pictures show the ship off-loading the Sunburn. It has to be searched, but whoever lives there cannot know we’re doing it. Second, we need to figure out how many, and where, the other Sunburns are, if, in fact there are others. Third…I don’t know what’s third. I think we need to sit and do some serious thinking. There’s something in those photographs that’s bugging me and I can’t put my finger on it. I need someone to hear me talk it through.”

  “Talk to Charlie. He’s a good listener.”

  “Hah.”

  “He’s all you have right now.” The director stood and left. At the door, he turned and faced the two men.

  “I don’t have to tell you what’s at stake. Give me an update every hour, twenty-four-seven, I want to be in the loop all the way. We have to find those missiles.”

  The two men sat in silence.

  “We could send in a team to the property. Say they were health inspectors or…” Charlie’s voice trailed off. “I’m not too good at this.”

  “We can’t do anything remotely suspicious. If they panic, they’ll just push the button early. That’s assuming there is a button on the property to push.”

  “What then?”

  “We need to look at pictures. Take me to wherever you do photo analysis of the satellite pictures.”

  Three minutes later they sat in the dark as a projectionist ran through the series of pictures.

  “Ask him to put up the pictures from the cell phone”

  “Right. We were able to salvage and enhance three, all pretty much the same. The angles are slightly different. Nick must have been circling the ship. They’ve cleaned them up as much as they can.”

  A series of images of an old freighter appeared. The photos were dim and blurry, but there could be no doubt what dangled at the end of the midships crane.

  “Can you make out the name on the stern?”

  “No, we tried. You have to remember, this was shot with a cell phone at night from a moving aircraft.”

  “Hold that one and go back to the satellite pictures of the day before—the Fourth of July shot.” The view of the Chesapeake Bay filled the screen. “Okay, now the next day.” The picture changed marginally. “Look, do you see that?”

  “See what?”

  “There’s a ship off to the east of the cluster waiting for a Bay pilot. You see? It’s much smaller. On the fourth it is in one location. The next day it is in another. It moved during the night and it must be the one in Nick’s picture. Now we know where it went. Can you zoom in on that?”

  The ship inflated before their eyes. The distortion was minimal. Soon they could make out the details of the deck and even a few crew members.

  “Can you make out the name and registry of it?”

  A voice, presumably from the projection booth replied. “It may take a while. We will have to go back to the original tape and work on it.”

  “If you have trouble with this shot, that ship will be in the next day’s surveillance, too. It will be a bit farther east and at a better angle for reading the hull.”

  “We’ll give it a go.”

  While they waited, Ike turned over the previous week’s activities. There was the barge and there was the…what?

  “We have it,” the voice in the dark announced. “It’s the Saifullah. Its registry, according to the markings on the stern, is Panama.”

  “Put the cell-phone picture back up.”

  Charlie looked at Ike. “Are you okay? What is it?”

  “That ship is too close to the shore.”

  “So?”

  “It’s something Bunky Crispins said…about the dredging and trot lines.”

  “About the dredging and trot…Sorry, I’m not with you. You asked me to look up that dredging contract, remember?”

  “Yes?”

  “I did, and it’s interesting.”

  Chapter 44

  “It’s the same consortium that leased the car and the yacht.”

  “Close. The reason it took me so long is that we had some trouble tracking the convoluted lines from the group that signed for the dredging back to the center of the holding company. But the bottom line is this: one of the arms of that octopus did, in fact, order up the equipment.”

  “Were you able to talk to the people who did the actual work?”

  “No, that’s the interesting part. They rented the equipment only and provided their own crew. We searched high and low. Whoever they were, they are long gone.”

  “Bunky said that there was supposed to be a twelve-foot trench from the deeper part of the bay to the bulkhead to accommodate a sailboat’s keel. But when we crossed the area, there was no trench. The bottom dropped off precipitously on the other side of the duck blind. Bunky said it might be due to current and tide, but we know better.”

  “We do?”

  “Look at the pictures, Charlie. What do you see? That’s no pleasure boat sitting next to the barge, it’s a full-sized old freighter. It can’t be more than one hundred yards from the shore. They weren’t dredging a sailboat slip. They were making channel deep enough to allow that ship to come in from the deeper part of Eastern Bay, drop off its cargo, and return to the Chesapeake afterward.”

  “What’s up with the barge? Besides being part of the dredging operation?”

  “I don’t think by the time Nick shot that picture, it had anything at all to do with dredging. Look at the pictures taken this month.” Ike waited until the more recent films were racked up. “See, no barge.”

  “That’s the duck blind you mentioned. What’s it doing there?”

  Ike stared at the image on the screen. He closed his eyes. Minutes ticked by. Charlie began to fidget. Finally Ike turned to him.

  “Here’s what I want you to do. It needs to be done like right away, like yesterday, you understand?”

  “Got it. Soonest.”

  “Even sooner. Get a boat out on the bay opposite the blind. Give it a cover, like, make it a Maryland Department of Natural Resources boat. Have the crew pretend to be taking water or bottom samples, something, anything. Each time they drop a line over, have them slip a lightstick, a twelve-hour lightstick, a big one with a weight on it so it will stay on the bottom even when the tide turns. I want a straight line of them from say, the middle of the bay on a line from the pier at Romancoke, to that blind. I’ll need one every twenty feet or so.”

  “You want to tell me why?”

  “Later. Just get on that. How soon can you do that?”

  “I don’t know. I’ll have to make some calls.”

  “Make them. Then have those divers you found for me last week to report back.”

  “To do what?”

  “I need that boat, the stealth thing from the ATF, again.”

  “I can borrow it from ATF again. They’re happy to work with us. I’ll have them deliver back to the marina, by dark. We can put the divers aboard it.”

  “One more thing. That ship, the Saifullah, find out who owns it, and if
you can do that, find out if they own any more.”

  “Ike, I’d really like to know—”

  “Get hopping on the divers and the boat. Put your best searchers on the freighter’s ownership and then come back and I’ll fill you in. I’m playing a hunch, Charlie. If I’m right, we can save time. If I’m wrong, we’ll still have time left to sort it out. Oh, and since it’s a hunch, I want those two Navy SEALs along for the ride. Oh, and get me an Arabic-speaking agent. He needs to be able to read and maybe write it, too.”

  ***

  Charlie brought Ike a sandwich and coffee and slouched in a chair. The day continued to slip by as the Agency mobilized. They’d not been this frenetic since September 11. Ike and Charlie returned to the conference room, which, by now, had become a war room. Men and women with worried faces came in and out with notes that they placed on the table in front of one or the other of the two men.

  “Catch me up. What are you up to, Ike? I need to give the director a report.”

  “Arrange for a chopper to ferry us to the marina. We’ll need some sophisticated underwater communications equipment, too. The SEALs can supply that.”

  “Okay, but what—”

  “Ships, Charlie, ships.”

  “We’re working on it even as we speak. It takes time. The merchant marine is involved. My question is, besides wanting to arrest the crew of the Saifullah if we can, why?”

  “What is the normal platform used to launch a Sunburn?”

  “They were ship-to-ship missiles originally. But they’ve been launched from submarines and land-based racks, and…oh, I see. Ships.”

  “You could put one or two of those beauties in the hold of a ship, any reasonably large ship, a ship like the Saifullah, for example, and launch anywhere in the world. Any city within seventy or eighty miles of the coast is vulnerable to attack. Even without a nuclear warhead, one or two of them on target in any major city would create a disaster as great as nine-eleven.”

  Charlie sat frozen in his chair as the enormity of the situation crystallized in his mind. “And they fly under the radar until the last second. A conventional antimissile defense system could not pick them up and therefore couldn’t stop them. Lord help us.”

  “We need to know if they have other ships and where they are, or where they’re headed. We have five days, no, make that four and less than a half.”

  Charlie started to rise, and then slumped back in the chair. “You think that ship, the Saifullah, is on its way back to the Chesapeake?”

  “No. Remember, it off-loaded a missile. My guess is that it’s finished with that venue. It’s headed somewhere else with that missile’s brother in its hold.”

  “Where?”

  Ike shrugged and pointed at a large map of the United States on the wall.

  “Your guess is as good as mine. Look at the possibilities. The hardware has a range of one hundred miles or so. If I were running the operation, I’d want to stay offshore in international waters and away from inspection, so figure the seventy or eighty I mentioned before. What would be your choice?”

  “Geez, starting in the northeast, Boston, New York, we already identified the cities in the Baltimore/Washington corridor…um…Miami, New Orleans, Galveston, Houston…in the west, good Lord, San Diego, LA, San Francisco, Seattle—”

  “Not Seattle, but Naval bases, airfields, strategic military targets everywhere, and SDI can’t stop the launch.”

  “But Washington—why not launch from a ship?”

  “Do the math, Charlie. To stay twelve to twenty miles off shore would put the missile out of range of the choice targets. The Delmarva Peninsula protects DC. It’s like a modern Fort McHenry, which protected Baltimore in the War of 1812. The Long Island Sound and Puget Sound in the west do the same for parts of New England and Seattle.”

  “But why not just sail in on Yom Kippur and shoot?”

  “Two reasons. They are well financed, probably by one of our putative Arab allies, and there is a rare skill set involved here. The operation requires people with both a suicide bomber’s mind set and the ability to pilot-navigate a ship across two oceans and a crew to run it. There can’t be too many fanatics who can do all of those things. So, they will land-launch here from the property. Washington has to be their number-one target and the one that they feel they must be sure to hit. The remainder of the missiles will launch from a ship or several ships elsewhere.”

  “But, I still don’t get why not enter a harbor first.”

  “Charlie, you’re the spymeister. You tell me.”

  “I can’t be sure. I guess if they were carrying nuclear devices, that would be the method of choice. The irony is, we have the capacity to intercept any warship on or under the sea to protect the country, but a commercial ship, boat, or dinghy can sail into any port with a carefully shielded device and before an inspection could be made, detonate a device, and there is nothing we could do about it.”

  “So?”

  “So, this is not good. And you want divers for…?”

  “Divers and SEALs. We’re playing a hunch and if I’m right, my policy has always been to have back up. You know, this is not a James Bond movie. He can walk into trouble, and the script will get him out. Laser watch, exploding fountain pen, hot dumb babe with a heart of gold, something.”

  “I’m for the hot dumb babe.”

  “Of course you are. But, this is the real thing and we don’t know what’s out there. I want some tough guys on my side. Where are we on all this?”

  “You didn’t give any of us much time. Like you just said, this is not a movie, and I can’t just order up a Maryland DNR boat, and—”

  “Time, Charlie. We don’t have. Did you get us that chopper?”

  “I said I’m working on it.”

  Chapter 45

  Like sand in an hourglass, the day drained away. No windows graced the conference room, but Ike could sense the sun setting. Pulling the whole operation was taking too long. The clock on the wall ticked away. As time dwindled, his frustration grew.

  “I wanted to go tonight. What’s the hold-up?”

  “You said it, Ike: this isn’t a movie. I can’t produce a Maryland Department of Natural Resources boat, an Arabic-speaking operative, and all the rest of this stuff in a heartbeat. We have your special agent flying in from Dubai. We have a smallish boat in the paint shop being tricked out to look both official and slightly used. That’s not easy, by the way. We’re piecing it together as fast as we can, but I have to tell you, it ain’t happening tonight.”

  “Five days, Charlie. Now we’re down to four.”

  “What can I say? We are on it, Ike. Come on, you used to do this. You know how it is. Anyway, I do have some news. The Saifullah was purchased from an Indian salvage yard. It seems the Indians bought the remnants of a fleet of old freighters and tankers from a Greek company that went belly-up. Before they had dismantled them, a company headquartered in Brussels bought four.”

  “Just four? Can we account for the remainder of that fleet?”

  “Four is the number. We’re still checking on it, but four looks firm.”

  “Any idea where they are?”

  “Not yet, Ike. Patience. The ships, cars, yacht, property, are all tangled in a Gordian knot of holding companies, shadow boards, and dead ends. There isn’t anything more I can do just now.”

  “Actually, there is. You can pick the most likely targets, given what we know, or think we know, and send some Navy muscle to the area. SDI can’t, but the Navy has the capacity to shoot down Sunburns. Have them put to sea on high alert, tracking radar on, twenty-four seven, and the antimissile system up and unlocked. I don’t know the drill, but don’t AWACs track missile launches? Better get them up in the air, too.”

  “What do we tell them?”

  “The brass has to have the story, I guess, for the ships’ crews. Say it’s an exercise to see if they’re proficient in antimissile protocols. For all they know, it’s a dummy launch.”

  �
��You finished, sahib?”

  “Almost. Dosimeters, Charlie. If we wander anywhere near a Sunburn and it’s nuclear, they’ll emit some or a lot of radiation. We need to know.”

  “Dosimeters? I’m guessing thermoluminescent would be best. Okay. Anything else?

  “If there’s enough daylight left, I want a flyover and photo shoot of the property.”

  “Way ahead of you there, Ace. I’ve had the satellite camera focused in on it all day. We have close-ups of every inch. You want to see them now, or later?”

  “Now would be good. Is the director on station?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you think he’d like to sit in?”

  “He thought you’d never ask.”

  ***

  “Since we have some time, will you fill me and the director in on the business of the light sticks? They were not easy to find, you know. We have just about one of everything in the warehouse, but your light sticks had to be ordered in special.”

  “Okay. Here’s the problem. We don’t dare spook these guys. They can’t know that we’re on to them. Since they burned Crispins’ boat, they are obviously skittish. If they get even a hint we’re after them, they’ll launch early—before we know how many Sunburns they have and, worse, where they are.”

  “I figured that part out on my own,” Charlie said.

  “You hear that, Director? Charlie is brighter than we thought.”

  “Bite me.”

  “Tsk, tsk. How you talk, Charlie. Did you hear that, Director?”

  “Cut it out, you two, and get on with it.”

  “As soon as it is sufficiently dark, we motor out in the borrowed stealth boat to a point on the line of light sticks. The word in the neighborhood of Eastern Bay is fog is normal and frequent. With any luck, we will have a foggy night or at least a cloudy one. Rain, again, would be good, too. So, either way, we put the divers and SEALs over. They follow the lightsticks to the duck blind. That’s a rendezvous point. The water is shallow after that. When they can stand, they unpack headsets and night vision goggles. Are you with me so far?”

  The two men nodded. The director jotted notes on a legal pad and studied the blow-up of the property on the screen in front of them.