“Here’s the tricky part. If there is a guard watching the bulkhead, we will need to draw him away.”
“Why not take just him out?” Charlie asked.
“Same reason we can’t let them know we’re coming. If one goes down, the others will know something’s up.”
“Ike you have a big problem on your hands.” The Director looked worried.
“I have Bunky Crispins on hold. If we need a diversion, he and some of his watermen friends will arrive at the front gate, ostensibly drunk and rowdy, and accuse the putative property owners of spoiling the crabbing off their property. They did, as a matter of fact, so their anger will not have to be faked. As soon as the coast is clear—I’ve always wanted to say that. This is the first time I’ve ever been able to, about a real coast—anyway, the guys will signal us in. We take the rubber dinghy to the bulkhead, climb ashore, and search the property. We cannot, under any circumstances, be discovered.”
The director looked up from his notes. “How long will your watermen keep the ruckus up?”
“As long as we want or until the police arrive.” Ike stood and went to the screen. “The launchers have to be big. I may have missed it, but I see no evidence of camouflage netting, so it’s safe to assume they’re in a building. There are two possibilities: the garage, here,” he tapped the image on what appeared to be a multibay garage, “or here in this barn. There is a shed closer to the bulkhead. The time-lapse photos show it is a new structure. It is not large enough for a launcher, but since it’s new, we need to check it out.”
“Why an Arabic-speaking agent?’
“He’s a listener. All we have to go on, for identifying these birds as from that part of the world, is the ship’s name. Saifullah, The Sword of Allah. And the fact the missiles disappeared in Iran. I want someone to listen and, on the off-chance we find something written, to read it and maybe learn something new.”
“When you find the launchers, what then?”
“That depends. If we have a bead on the other Sunburns by then, we blow them. If we don’t, we sabotage them just enough to slow the launch process down and to allow us to react.”
“What if you don’t find them?”
“We’re screwed.”
Chapter 46
As Ike had hoped, clouds closed in and blotted out the scant moonlight over Eastern Bay. The black converted river patrol boat, its engines muffled, ferried them to the bay’s center. This time Ike allowed the captain to use his own GPU. With the coordinates he’d determined from the mapping done by the ersatz DNR boat earlier, he put the craft directly over the path of submerged lightsticks.
The divers and SEALs, with call signs Tiger One through Four, signs generated by Charlie, went over the side and disappeared into the inky water. Ike and the agent from Dubai, Tigers Five and Six, dropped into the Zodiac and waited. Ike would have to talk to Charlie later about those dorky call signs.
After what seemed an eternity, they received the all-clear to move to the duck blind. The advance team indicated it would go ashore and scout for guards. Powered by an electric outboard, the Zodiac slipped silently through the wash toward the rendezvous.
Ike could barely make out his hand in front of his face.
“No one so far,” rasped one of the SEALs. Ike pointed toward the bulkhead, and the Zodiac moved at a speed just slightly faster than the outgoing tide. When the bow bumped against stones, Ike crawled out and secured the boat to a large boulder. The two men crept forward and waited.
“We’re ten yards in and clear so far.”
“Spread out. Take the garage first, then the barn. If you see anyone, I mean anyone, freeze. If you have to, bug out.”
“Roger that, Tiger Five.” Ike shook his head. If he weren’t so scared, he’d have laughed. Tiger Five! Charlie, what were you thinking?
Ike signaled to his Arabic speaker to come close. “You make your way to the house and listen. Call me if you need anything or there’s something I need to see.”
The agent gave him a thumbs-up and melted into the night. Ike worked his way through the underbrush to the shed. He could have moved faster had he taken the gravel path, but he didn’t know if it was watched or monitored with cameras and motion detectors.
A light shone through a window at the shed’s rear. He edged around to the back. Standing off to one side so that anyone inside would not see him, Ike scanned the left side of the interior. He ducked under the window and repeated the process on the other side. Nobody home. That’s good or it’s bad. The lights are on. Where are these guys?
He crept to the door and tried the latch. Not surprisingly, the door was locked. He fumbled in his pockets for his lock picks and hoped he would remember how they worked.
“Garage is clear except for a car, an old tractor, and a workshop.”
“What kind of tractor, you mean like a farm tractor or a rig that pulls a trailer?”
“Farm—big one, too.”
“Anything interesting in the shop?”
“No, sir, nothing unusual. There’s some welding apparatus, big air compressor, boxes of tools, things like that.”
“Roger,” Ike mumbled. “Do the barn.”
The lock yielded on his third attempt. I used to be better at this, he thought. The door swung open without a sound. Ike stepped in and searched the area for a surveillance camera. He saw none. He hoped he hadn’t missed anything.
A cluttered panel with switches sat against the wall on a table that faced the bay. The identifying marks on it had all been taped over, but he felt sure it was foreign. He removed his camera and photographed the array. He pivoted and took in the rest of the room. A map of the United States was tacked to the wall behind the table. He photographed it. He pulled out a drawer in the table with the console and retrieved a rolled-up paper, thin paper. He spread it out on the edge of the table, and photographed it as well. He froze in place at the sound of footsteps on the gravel path. He quickly replaced the roll, closed the drawer and, moved to the hinge edge of the door so that he’d be behind it, and out of sight, when it opened. He held his breath and waited. If the guy came in and saw him, the game was up.
The door swung back. He heard annoyed muttering. A hand reached into the room and switched off the light. The door snapped shut and the bolt was thrown. He was locked in. He exhaled.
“Nothing in the barn either, Tiger Five. What now?”
“We go home now. Out.”
Ike counted to twenty-five, unlocked the shed door and eased out into the darkness. He relocked the door and started toward the water.
“Everybody out,” he said, “slow and easy.”
He tripped and almost fell headlong into a clump of bushes. He glanced down at his feet and saw what he took to be a tree root. He stepped over it and then looked again. It was too smooth to be a root. He reached down and ran his hand along its length. A sheathed cable that ran from the shed toward the water. He tried to follow it but the underbrush was too thick. He gave up and resumed his trek back to the Zodiac.
“Tiger One on base.”
“Tiger Two and Three in, too.”
Where are you Four and Six?”
“Four here. I’m about thirty yards out. No sweat.”
“Six?”
No answer. Ike made it to the bulkhead and counted noses. Five accounted for.
“Hold your position. I’m going back for Six,” he said. “If I’m not back in ten, pull out. It will mean we took another bus home.”
The four men looked at each other uneasily. “That’s an order. Charlie, are you monitoring this?” Charlie, back at the marina, answered he was. “Okay, give me ten and then blow.”
Ike headed back toward the house. At the porch steps he saw Six who held up his hands for Ike to be silent. Enough light filtered through the window next to him for Ike to see the listening device he’d attached to a pane in the corner. Ike held out his hand with five fingers spread. Five minutes.
The agent nodded, detached the device, crept
low past the window, and the two men quick-stepped to the boat. The other four were in and casting off when they clambered down the stones and joined them.
In silence they motored to the PBR, and once aboard, sped away to the marina.
They had not located the Sunburns, and Ike started to worry. Tomorrow would be two days down. Only three to go.
Chapter 47
There was no time to debrief before Charlie, Ike, and Clark Benson, the Arabic expert, boarded the chopper back to Langley. Ike checked the images on his camera, and Benson occupied himself in listening to the tape-recording of the conversations he’d recorded at the house. Charlie looked glum. They landed and hustled back to the conference room. A clutter of papers, photographs, and maps spilled out over the table and onto the floor. Ike thought he’d seen better organized landfills, and he would be the last person anyone would ask to organize a desk. The director waited for them.
“I gather you do not have any good news for me,” he said.
“Nothing yet. I still think we should have had radiation sensors, a Geiger counter, anything.”
“Ike, we’ve been over that. No nukes are missing.”
“They’d be warheads, Charlie. They might have been riding along with the Sunburns for years. You couldn’t possibly know—”
“Okay. We’ll send in someone, do a fly-over.”
“Get them to us. We’re going back, Charlie.”
“But we don’t have anything.”
Benson held up his hand. “It wasn’t a complete bust. I have some recorded conversation that is suggestive, and with some time to review and translate it, may give us a lead on the other sites or targets.”
“Get on it, then. It may be 3:00 AM, but we haven’t time to take any R and R. Charlie, there are a pile of papers on your desk you need to sort through. Ike, what do you have for me?”
Charlie left to retrieve his documents, and Benson put his ear buds in place and began listening to his tape. From time to time he scratched notes in a small notebook.
“Some pictures and an idea.” Ike opened his camera and ran through the series of shots of the console map and the rolled paper. “I’ll need those blown up.”
The director motioned for a young intern to take Ike’s camera.
“Get these processed ASAP, Bob, and hustle back here. Okay, Ike, what’s your idea?”
“Wait for the pictures to be analyzed. I tripped over a cable in the woods near that shed.” Ike pointed to the blow-up. “It seemed to run toward the water. Then, over here,” he indicated a second point on the photo, “is a large tank. It’s too big to be propane, although I guess it could be, but it’s rather far from the house for that.”
“And all that means what, exactly?”
Charlie bounced into the room with sheets of paper.
“In a minute, Director. Charlie, the four ships?”
“We have them. They are, names liberally translated, the Sword of God, we know about that one; the Allahu Akbar, God is Great; the Youmud Deen, Day of Judgment; and the Alhumdeullah, Praise be to God. Who’d have thought anything that sounds so lilting in Arabic could be so lethal?”
“Do we know where they are?”
“Not yet, but we do have photographs. Three are old freighters like the Saifullah; the fourth, Allahu Akbar, is a small tanker. The geeks in the satellite surveillance unit say they are good enough for us to get a pattern recognition program set up. We have the Littoral Scan System running dawn to dusk on all our coastlines. If they get within one hundred miles of our shores, we’ll know it.” Charlie looked pleased.
“Director, can you contact the Navy and put submarines on alert? If they get anywhere near us, we should simply sink them.”
“They’re not going to like it, but I’ll give it a go.”
“Tell them about the Sunburns and that one of those ships is responsible for the death of an Academy grad. The Navy is funny about their own.”
The messenger, Bob, returned with the developed photos and spread them out on the table. Benson took the buds from his ears and joined them. “That’s Arabic,” he said pointing to the photo of the rolled document Ike had taken from the drawer.
“What’s it say?”
“This is good. The conversation I recorded was mostly about how unhappy these guys are here. The food is bad, blah, blah, blah, and they think the restaurant is serving them pork in their burgers. But then there is a mention to something called ‘Choker’ and they start sounding, I don’t know, pumped.”
“And this is related to this document how?” Ike felt his heart beat quicken. He had it.
“This word at the top of this thing,, is choker. The other glyphs are the names of the ships Charlie just discovered.”
The director studied the document for a moment. “What the hell is all this to do with anything? So, Choker, ship names. Now what?”
“Bob,” Ike said, “Go back and have these two pictures developed the exact same size. This one,” he held out the latter document, “have them print up on transparency film. And hurry.”
“What are you up to, Ike?” the director said.
“Charlie, get that SEAL team and that DNR boat back to the marina. Tell the SEALs to bring some UEDs, a bunch of them.”
“A bunch of UEDs?”
“Underwater explosive devices. Yes, a bunch. What time is it?”
“Four AM.”
“Too early to call Bunky.”
“What…”
“You’ll see. Where’s Bob?”
“Ike, this had better be good,” the director muttered.
“Or what, Director? You can’t fire me. I don’t work here any more. And you’re going to like this. Have you called the Navy?”
“At four in the morning? Not likely.”
“Call them. Call them now. We have three days to shut this down. Tomorrow we can spike at least one of those missiles, I hope, but the other five…” his voice trailed off.
“The other five?”
“I’m assuming your guys were right that six Sunburns have gone missing. If I’m right, I know where at least one of them is. That means the others are aboard those ships. While you worry about disturbing the beauty rest of the chief of Naval Operations, they are heading toward their targets. The Navy is the only outfit that can effectively stop the ships.”
“We don’t know where they are and won’t until they come into view on the satellites, assuming the pattern recon works.”
“We’ll narrow it down in a minute.”
“How?”
“That document you all saw with the Arabic script was on thin paper. I didn’t see the significance at the time but, tracing paper, Director. It was tracing paper. The map on the wall is of the United States. The first has to be an overlay for it. When Bob gets back we’ll know for sure. Where the hell is he? We will put one on the other and know where the ships are headed and their probable or potential targets.”
Chapter 48
Ike stared at the photograph of the console, or panel, he’d seen in the shed. “Charlie, what else did those people buy from the Indian salvagers?”
Charlie shuffled through the pile of papers on the table, extracted one, and read, “Miscellaneous hardware thought to have come from a decommissioned Chinese corvette which included large, ten meter long tubes and cables…ah…an instrument panel, also from the corvette.”
“That was very careless of them.”
“Who?”
“The Chinese. You’d think they’d want to scrap weaponry hardware themselves.”
“Maybe they didn’t think the Indians would notice.”
“Are you kidding? India is on their border and is developing, or has developed, missile capabilities as well.”
“What exactly do you think they let go?”
The director re-entered the room. “I talked to the Navy. As I predicted, they are not happy. They said they will put submarines at the ready at 0500 and will wait to hear from us. If we’re wrong on this—”
“I said we, I meant we, Ike. So what do you have now?”
Bob came in with the two newly developed sheets. Ike laid the clear plastic over the map blow-up.
“There you are boys and girls, your ship positions and, by inference, your possible targets.”
The men leaned over the table and looked. The overlay showed the ships in four predictable locations and an oval circled Washington, D.C.
“Okay, now you know where to dispatch the submarines and, as a back-up, put an antimissile team on alert. The damned things will be coming in from the sea and low to the surface from one or all of these points, so it should be easy.”
“You are taking a lot for granted, Ike.” The director looked disturbed.
“What’s our alternative, sir? If we’re wrong on the date, no big deal as long as it isn’t moved forward. If we’re wrong about location, the havoc that will ensue will be so great, no one will care about how we missed the boat, no pun intended, until later when the pooh-bahs in Congress begin posturing and finger pointing. And if the strikes are really successful…well, we’re up the proverbial creek anyway.”
“I’ll call the Navy back.”
“What now?” Charlie asked.
“What does this array remind you of?”
“You mean the console thing?”
“Yes.”
“I saw something like that twenty years ago. We had pictures of the Russian boomer we raised from the ocean. It was part of the…oh, shit. It was part of the launch system for their missiles.”
“It wasn’t exactly like this, but close enough.”
“I’ll pull back the SEALs and dispatch the boat.” He moved to the door and then paused. “But in broad daylight? They’ll see us and push the button.”
“Throw the switch, you mean. That’s what Bunky’s for. We didn’t need him last night, but today, he and his friends will come out to harass us as Department of Natural Resources personnel. They will stay between us and that duck blind and cover the SEAL team’s entrance into the water.”
“To do what? I don’t get it.”
5 - Choker: Ike Schwartz Mystery 5 Page 22
