He could see the confusion in their faces. He was wearing a tattered shirt and a pair of underwear; that was it. The gash along his left leg was puckered and white from the salt water. He assumed that his face was corpselike. From the fear that was replacing their confused surprise, he knew that they were finally understanding the situation, that a dead man had come up out of the ocean and was pointing their own gun at them.
“Anybody speak English?”
Slow looks, one to the other. “I,” one of them said. “You fall from plane?”
“Boat.”
“Ah.” He gestured toward the gun. “You rob?”
“No. I pay. How much to take me to Qatar?”
The one who could speak English conferred with the others in what Flynn was now sure was Arabic. He turned back. “Where you money?”
“In Doha.”
“You fall off boat? What boat?”
“Pirates stole my boat.”
He spoke again in Arabic, relief clearly audible in his voice. “You thirsty? Hungry?”
“Yes.”
Judging from the stars, they were sailing south-southwest, which probably was the correct direction. Flynn had no idea how the Qatari port officials would react to him, but if he could get them to call U.S. Central Command at Al Udeid Air Base, he was fairly sure that he would be all right.
When they heated lamb stew over a camp stove, Flynn’s body reacted, and he didn’t think he could remember ever before feeling so hungry or so thirsty. They had orange sodas and bottled water to wash the food down. He could have consumed everything, all the drink and all the food, but he was careful to take only modest portions.
He stationed himself in the prow of the boat and fought sleep as they plowed along in what was becoming a heavy swell. They muttered among themselves and watched the ring that had appeared around the moon. It was October, but maybe there was still the risk of a simoon. The boat began falling into the troughs of waves. The right sort of wind could quickly turn the narrow Persian Gulf into a surging maelstrom, which a boat like this would not weather well, if at all.
They knew it, too; they had trimmed their sail as close as they dared, and the little boat was racing. The sail of the dhow is designed to survive sudden, intense winds, but a lengthy storm would be too much.
“How long?” Flynn asked, looking at the moon, which was now flying in tattered cloud.
“One hour.”
“Until the storm strikes, or until we reach Doha?” Flynn asked, but got a blank stare. The English was too complicated.
The storm came on them with the suddenness characteristic of the region, a roaring surge of white-hot wind stinking of the desert, bringing with it sand-thick spray. The boat leaped and then heeled, cords whipping, the sail as tight as a wineskin, and the crew began shouting the cry of despair universal to the Moslem world, “Allah o’Akbar,” again and again, as much an incantation against the storm as a prayer of resignation.
The sky had turned to ink swirling with spray. Close to the boat, pale, roiling surf thundered. The rest was darkness absolute. If they were still on course, God had indeed enacted a miracle. Still, the Persian Gulf isn’t like one of the great oceans. You can get lost in it for a while, but it’s no trackless waste. Sail east or west, and you will come upon land in a few hours. You can’t get out into the Indian Ocean without passing through the Strait of Hormuz, and a storm is certain to run you aground or drown you first.
The calling on God changed to cries of terror when, in a lightning flash, there appeared an onrushing wave so huge it looked like a great wing of water tipped with delicate pale feathers of foam.
The crew were cowering in the prow, so Flynn went to the stern and took the tiller. It would bite, then run free as the stern was lifted high out of the water, then bite again when she smacked back with a timber-shuddering crack. He got her prow into the wind, but she kept falling off, and he knew that it would not be long before she foundered.
He watched the crew in the prow. Their dark, resigned faces looked back at him, blank with despair. The boat shot into the trough of a wave and into a sudden silence. Gulls scudded, seeking fish in the wall of the oncoming roller. Then the boat began to rise, then faster, then so fast their ears popped, and suddenly they were in the roaring surge of the storm again. The boat crested the wave and went speeding down into the next trough like a surfboard.
Finally realizing that they weren’t going to die immediately, the crew broke out hand pumps and began working against the water building up in the hold. Still, the prow fell off dangerously as they climbed every wave. To really raise this boat in the water, they would have to dump their catch. Without Arabic and needing to stay back on the tiller, Flynn had to just hope they figured it out.
When they crested another wave, he glimpsed, just for an instant, a shimmer of light that shouldn’t have been there. It wasn’t lightning—too steady. So there was something out there, dead ahead.
They went deep into a trough, the boat wallowing, the men pumping furiously, then rose again to the next crest. The lights were there again. A distant city? Doha, maybe? Or could it be something far stranger than that? His worst fear, the one that could wake him up screaming, was of being kidnapped and taken to Aeon.
The next time he saw the lights, he also saw a dark outline, and understood after a moment that they were the running lights of a huge ship. Not only that, but it was less than a mile off. He was face-to-face with a true giant of the seas, an aircraft carrier. It was so large that it could only be American. No other country floated anything like this.
Salvation, then—or death? If they stayed on this course, they would slide along its side and be spit out through its props in the form of kindling and bloody pulp.
Flynn shoved the tiller hard astarboard. The fishermen began shouting and waving. The boat was now racing toward the carrier, drawn by a deadly suction.
The tiller helped, but not nearly enough. Either they attracted the attention of the ship’s company or they were dead. He had to leave the tiller and risk everything to find flares, if there were any. When he took his hand off it, the boat swung wildly and the crew lost their footing. Finally, they realized what he was doing, and the youngest of them, a boy of probably about twelve, threw himself at the supply chest. He pulled at it, dragging it open, and came up with a canvas bag. In it were three flares, wet but still possibly serviceable. He pulled one out and the four of them huddled around it, trying to get it lit with a cigarette lighter.
Finally, and much to Flynn’s surprise, a white flame erupted from it. With it, they lit the other two, and soon they were dancing on the deck for all they were worth, screaming and waving flares.
The stern of the carrier came up and went past, and once again the full force of the storm hit them hard. The dhow twirled like a top, its sail swept away into the dark.
The carrier sailed on, her lights almost immediately swallowed. The dhow was now little more than a canoe with a hold full of squirming squid and a deck awash in terrified fishermen.
Flynn stayed with the tiller, fighting to keep some kind of trim by using the sodden sail like a sea anchor. He did this because of what he had heard, which was the carrier dialing back its engines. The reason they were still alive was that the captain had reduced the prop suction, sparing the dhow.
It was then that he heard a new sound rising above the roar of the storm, an ominous thunder of rushing water. A moment later he saw it, an immense line of foam pale and churning in the darkness, so high that it might as well have been a mountain racing across the crazy seascape.
The next thing he knew, he was in the water in a swarming school of squid. Then the squid were gone and he saw two heads, members of the crew, also in the water.
He struck out toward them, but by the time he’d completed ten strokes, they were gone. He was alone in the ocean, treading water now, keeping his head up, letting himself be carried by the waves.
This continued for long minutes. In all of his
life, he had never felt this absolutely alone. He would be carried down into the trough of a wave, into the silence, then up again into the screaming storm, and so it went, again and again.
A streak of light appeared, flickered, and was gone. Was it a searchlight? Had the carrier released a tender? Flynn waved, shouted, then swam toward where he’d seen the light, but carefully, conserving his strength against the greater likelihood that he would end up still in the water.
The light appeared again, sweeping through the trough of the wave Flynn was riding, passing so close to him that he impulsively threw himself toward it—and went splashing and tumbling, sucked under by ferocious wave action.
He was dragged deeper and deeper yet, into the silence of the wave’s undertow. He sensed rather than saw some enormous presence near him, a whale of some kind, and then saw, far above, a light flickering on the surface of the water like the shimmering wing of an angel.
His head burst to the surface and as he gulped salty air he was flooded in that wonderful light. It was a tender, pitching in the waves, being handled expertly. This was no Iranian patrol boat. This boat belonged to the carrier, had to.
He cried out from the depths of him, from the hidden core that is within us all, that seeks for survival from the deeps of blood and soul.
A bright orange life ring splashed into the water a couple of yards away. He grabbed it and at once found himself being drawn through the water toward the pitching tender. Four sailors pulled him aboard. He tried to stand—actually, to salute—but his body said no, and he sank down on the deck and the lights went out.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
THEY TOOK him into the tender’s tight, neat cabin and wrapped him in a blanket. Nobody spoke to him, not sailors working a boat in a fearsome sea.
Waves crashed against it again and again, causing it to shudder and its engines to scream, but Flynn felt safe from the storm. This was the U.S. Navy. They weren’t going to sink.
As the boat heaved and tossed and plowed, his stomach gave a few slight turns, but no more than that. He’d been close to death this time, too close, especially given the information he had obtained.
In perhaps half an hour they were in sight of the carrier, and in another twenty minutes Flynn was aboard. He was taken to the sick bay and lay down on a bed so astonishingly comfortable that he had to fight not to sleep. A medical ensign came into the bay and peered at him.
“I’m an American,” he said. It was a barely understandable croak.
“Yeah?”
“I need a secure line right now.”
“Can you identify yourself?”
He did not reply.
“You need us to look you over before you do anything else.”
“Secure line. Now.”
“You’re injured, sir. Suffering from exposure. You need treatment.”
“I need to continue my mission, Ensign. Urgently. I need a secure line in your code room.”
“Do you want to confer with the intelligence officer?”
“He’s not gonna be need to know on my mission. I’m way behind and I’m in a hurry.”
The ensign picked up a wall phone. “The vic’s a citizen. He’s saying he wants a secure line. On a mission.” There was a pause. “Yessir.” He turned to Flynn. “We can give you that line.” He reached down and Flynn gripped his arm and let him lift him to his feet. He was too exhausted to move, but that didn’t matter. He had to move; he had to overcome his fatigue. Above all, he had to make that call.
As they navigated the carrier’s labyrinthine corridors, Flynn stumbled more than once on a doorjamb or a pipe, or slipped on narrow steps. The ship was big but so is the ocean, and the footing was precarious as the enormous vessel heaved and wallowed.
The communications center was at the base of the command island, a large space crammed with digital systems. Flynn looked for the telltale black-mirrored face of a quantum communicator. This was a supercarrier, and if the navy had this system, you would find it on subs and on ships like this.
The technology, developed from the Wire that had been given us by Aeon, was the only communications system believed secure enough to transmit messages that Aeon shouldn’t see. They could decode literally anything in an instant and they monitored not only all electronic communications systems, but also the minds of everybody they had implanted.
“I need to see the signals intelligence chief, the intelligence commander, and the captain. Right now, and I need them here, and I want this room cleared of all other personnel.”
The ensign picked up another of the internal phones. Flynn took it from him and hung it up. “No. Go personally. No more use of electronic equipment. Never mention me on a phone, an intercom, anything. Don’t e-mail or text about me, don’t write any digital notes. Just go get these men.”
“Sir, they’re busy, especially the captain. We’re in a storm.”
“I noticed that. Tell them I need them now. It’s a national emergency. Immediate dire threat to the nation.”
The ensign went pale and hurried off. Flynn sank down into the nearest chair. He leaned back and closed his eyes.
“Sir?”
He opened them. He’d fallen instantly asleep. Not like him, and a mistake he must not repeat.
“I’m Captain Petersen. But let’s be informal. You can call me ‘Captain’ and I’ll call you what?”
“‘The guy in the underpants.’ Look, I can tell by your layout in the intelligence center that you have a certain system so highly classified that only two of you have ever laid eyes on it. Am I right?”
His silence affirmed Flynn’s suspicion.
“I need to use it.”
The captain shook his head. “No can do, not without orders.”
Flynn had expected this. They had no idea who this man they’d pulled out of the ocean really was. “I’m an intelligence officer with urgent information to send to Washington, and there is no means of doing it secure enough except the QX.”
“Do you know how to use it?”
“I do, and I have a personal identifier that it will recognize.”
“I’ll need to signal the admiral for the OK.”
“Not in the clear, and everything except the QX is considered in the clear by our unit.”
“Which is?”
“Classified.”
“Clear the room, please, gentlemen, we’re going to pull out the egg.”
He waited until the room was emptied, then he twirled knobs on a safe embedded in a pillar. Captain Petersen opened the safe and drew out the QX, which was a gleaming black orb, looking something like a black crystal ball. When he applied power, the same endless darkness that made the Wire so eerie covered it, seeming to suck at your soul. There was something evil about these things, as if they were somehow a perversion of the order of reality.
The captain sat down at the keyboard. The letters he was typing floated onto the screen, then slowly faded. “IO pulled from sea requests permission QX use. No creds.”
On the flagship, which was over a thousand miles away in the Indian Ocean, response would take some time. Their QX would signal an incoming message and their intelligence station would then need to be cleared, the message decoded and considered.
Flynn pulled up a chair. He didn’t want to reveal to these men how weak he actually was, but standing here like this, he wasn’t going to last much longer.
They waited. The intel officer—his name tag read ANDREWS—said, “Rough night out there.”
“I’m lucky I made it. The four fishermen I was with didn’t.”
“It’s a treacherous body of water.”
Flynn laughed mirthlessly.
The signal came back: “If he can code-activate it, allow use. If not, brig him.”
Smart admiral.
Flynn took a seat at the console. He completed his code sequence and it completed its facial recognition scan. The dark screen lit up, then opened into that black infinity that nobody liked to see. He typed, “Flynn here
. Come back.”
The system was very smart. It would deliver the message directly to the detail’s office in the basement of CIA HQ. Diana would be there, he knew, waiting. She would have been there from the moment she had realized that he’d gone to Iran.
Words drifted up out of the darkness of the screen. “I thought you drowned.”
He had to admit that it felt good to be back in touch. Damn, damn good. He typed, “Aboard the Abraham Lincoln. Sub rendezvous failed.”
“I’m aware.”
“I have information as follows: Aeon hasn’t just abandoned us, it is in the process of forming an alliance with Iran. Possible also that Doxy was a MISIRI asset. Could mean deep penetration of White House staff. Confirm receipt of message.”
For some time, the screen remained black. Then, “Get back here. I’ll have a plane ready.”
The closest Aeon had ever come to destroying him had been when he was in a plane.
“Get me to Dubai. I’ll disappear into the crowd, go commercial.”
“You have creds in your underpants?”
“You get them to me.”
“How?”
He typed, “You figure it out,” and terminated the connection.
When he turned back to the captain, there was the eerie sensation of reentering the world from some dark and distant place. The QX and the Wire both did that. They left you with a lingering uneasiness that could go way south on you if you let it. More than one of the Wire clerks in the old days had ended up blowing his brains out.
“You guys use this thing much?”
The captain shook his head. “Except for the orientation session, this is the only time it’s been in use.”
“Be careful with it. Gets under your skin.” He was glad to see it pushed back into its safe and the door closed. “At this point, gentlemen, I need civilian clothes, food, and sleep. But the instant a package arrives for me, you’re to wake me up.”
The captain raised his eyebrows. “Excuse me. Do you understand that you’re aboard a ship at sea?”
“As soon as it arrives, wake me up. How far are you from Dubai?”
“Two hundred nauticals.”
The White House: A Flynn Carroll Thriller Page 13
