by Greg Dinallo
A tense silence followed.
It was broken by the rumble of the barge’s old door sliding back. A figure emerged and started down the gangway in the darkness, reaching the bottom before a shaft of light illuminated Applegate’s face.
Stephanie paled at the sight of him.
Applegate stumbled across the dock, heading for the sedan, heading right for Stephanie and Spencer, who were crouching between it and the taxi. They froze with terror as he raised the pistol at point blank range. A single crisp report, a blue-orange flash that came from behind Applegate, split the night. The big man stiffened, swayed, and collapsed onto the wharf.
Shepherd lowered the Baretta he had taken from Applegate earlier, and hurried down the gangway. Stephanie let out a cry of joy and ran toward him. He embraced her, his head filling with her familiar scent. They clung fiercely to each other.
Spencer was bent over Applegate’s lifeless body. The bullet that felled him was the last of three that had found their mark, and the major was near death.
“He’s barely breathing,” Spencer announced. “You want me to take him to a casualty room?”
Shepherd considered it for a moment and scowled. “It’d serve him right if we threw him over the side,” he replied, gesturing to the Thames.
“You’ll be no better than he is if you do that,” Stephanie admonished.
“Yeah, I guess,” Shepherd said somewhat grudgingly, knowing she was right. “Besides, even if he pulls through, he won’t be in any shape to make trouble.” He and Spencer took hold of Applegate and loaded him into the backseat of the taxi. “Better say you found him in the street,” Shepherd warned before the cabbie drove off.
Shepherd stood there clinging to Stephanie, watching the clattering diesel climb the hill and disappear into the night. This certainly wasn’t the first time he had killed, but it was the first time he had done it face to face, the first time he hadn’t been insulated in his cockpit. He shifted his eyes to a small pool of blood on the wharf and stared at it for a long moment before he led Stephanie up the gangway into the barge.
The cassette recorder was lying on the floor of the cabin along with Applegate’s wallet and ID. “It’s all right here,” Shepherd said, retrieving the recorder. He saw Stephanie’s bewildered look and gently put a fingertip to her lips to stem the barrage of questions he knew was coming. “In the morning, okay?” he asked softly. He took her hand, crossed to the alcove, and collapsed onto the bed. They burrowed beneath the mound of wool blankets, their arms and legs entwined, torsos pressed together, breathing in unison and listening to each other’s heartbeats.
“The kids with your folks?” he finally whispered.
Stephanie nodded.
“What did you tell them?”
“I said I needed to get away for a few days to put myself back together,” she explained, her voice cracking with emotion. “I didn’t want to get their hopes up. I mean, I was going crazy. I knew you were alive but I was so afraid something would happen to you before I got here. I . . .” she paused, her eyes brimming with tears. “I love you so much,” she whispered.
They clung to each other for hours before their anxiety subsided and their passions rose. Soon they were inside each other’s clothing, his hands moving over the familiar swells of her body, hers gently grazing his bruised flesh, soothing the pain, releasing the pent-up tension. Several weeks had passed since they were last lovers, but the intervening events made it seem like an eternity. Grieving one minute, making love the next, they soared to moments of pure joy that crested in an electrifying affirmation of life; then, satiated and wracked with exhaustion, they collapsed into each other’s arms and slept.
IN WASHINGTON, D.C., dusk was falling when one of the Special Forces agents called Kiley from London to report that Shepherd had eluded them and that, after mysteriously vanishing from Liverpool station, Applegate had turned up dead on arrival at The London Hospital. “Better screw the lid down as tight as we can, sir,” the distraught agent concluded.
Kiley listened in thoughtful silence, his mind racing through the myriad of moves and countermoves like a chess master. “Maybe not,” the DCI finally said, enigmatically. “After forty years in this game, I’ve learned that sometimes, sometimes, the very thing we’re trying so desperately to hide is precisely what ought to be revealed.”
THE FOLLOWING MORNING in London, a cool, clear dawn broke over the Thames as the waterfront began coming to life, the slow-moving traffic gently rocking the river barge.
The haunting sounds that came through the windows were soon rudely joined by a voice, a familiar voice, a grating voice that drummed at Shepherd in his sleep. No! No, it can’t be, he thought, convinced beyond doubt he was in the throes of a cruel nightmare. Try as he might to shut it out, Applegate’s voice droned on, the insolent tone filling Shepherd with anger and fear. He suddenly sat bolt upright in the bed, emitting an anguished cry. His eyes wide with terror, he tried desperately to focus on the hazy figure hovering over him.
“Easy, hon,” Stephanie said, embracing him comfortingly. “Easy. It’s okay, everything’s okay.”
But it wasn’t; despite her presence, despite her assurances, the voice continued.
Shepherd’s eyes soon focused on his tape recorder atop a small built-in dresser next to the bed. “The tape,” he said with an immense sigh of relief. “You’re listening to the tape.”
Stephanie nodded, eyes full of compassion and concern, knowing now all that he had been through. She shut off the tape, draped a blanket over his shoulders, and kissed him lovingly; then she fetched them both a cup of coffee from the galley.
“Hard to believe, isn’t it?” Shepherd said, sipping from the steaming mug. “Our own people—”
“I know,” she replied glumly. “Your commanding officer works in the White House.”
“Larkin?”
Stephanie nodded.
“A little detail Major Applegate forgot to mention,” Shepherd observed, thinking he was going to need every piece of ammunition and data he had amassed.
He gathered Applegate’s wallet, credit cards, passport, and identification, which were strewn across the floor, and put them in a manila envelope along with his tape recorder and the cassette containing Applegate’s account of the conspiracy. He was about to add the strip of snapshots of him holding the signed newspaper when he paused thoughtfully, then fetched a pair of scissors from the galley and cut one snapshot from the strip.
“Hang onto this,” he said, giving it to Stephanie. “Anything happens to me you can—”
“Walt,” she protested.
“Just in case. You can use it to prove I was alive and well the day after the air strike.”
They left the barge, got into Applegate’s car, drove along the waterfront to Knightsbridge, in London’s West End, and parked in a multilevel garage around the corner from the Underground. A sense of exhilaration at having prevailed came over Shepherd as they hurried toward Bowater House, the modern office tower on Knightsbridge Road opposite Hyde Park, where CBS News was located.
CBS was the network of Murrow, Severeid, and Cronkite, the network that had exposed McCarthy, that had damn near invented electronic journalism and, for decades, had set standards of quality and integrity for the industry. Shepherd imagined the stunned reactions, the buzz of excitement as a dead man walked into the newsroom; imagined the lead story that evening as Dan Rather, with patented, thin-lipped gravity, would reveal the ugly conspiracy to the nation and world.
Stephanie sensed his mood and tightened her grip on his hand as they approached the building, its horizontal bands of gray granite and steel mullions in stark contrast to its Victorian neighbors. At the newstand on the corner of Sloane, Shepherd’s eyes darted to his photograph on the front page of the London Times and a headline that proclaimed: PILOT THOUGHT DEAD, A DESERTER; KILLS USAF OFFICER.
Shepherd stared at it in disbelief. “Better buy one,” he finally said to Stephanie in a hoarse whisper. He led the wa
y to Hyde Park, the seemingly endless expanse of greenery in central London, where they settled on a bench and read the story:
In a bizarre mix-up that has baffled U.S. Air Force officials, informed sources have told the Times that Major Walter Shepherd, reportedly killed during the raid on Libya, had actually gone AWOL moments before he was scheduled to take off in his F-111 bomber. Believed upset at having to fly a combat mission with a new weapons systems officer, the thirty-seven-year-old veteran of the Vietnam conflict failed to appear on the flight line. The last-minute switch of crews had apparently confused Air Force public information personnel, who referred to the original mission roster when releasing the names of pilots and weapons systems officers whose bombers had been shot down by Libyan surface-to-air missiles. Times sources have also learned that last night Major Shepherd allegedly shot and killed Major Paul Applegate of military intelligence, who had tracked him down. Though critically wounded, Major Applegate evidently managed to escape from his attacker and was found unconscious on an East End street by a taxi driver who took him to hospital. However, he expired before casualty room doctors could administer treatment. At press time officials were still trying to piece together other details of the story.
Shepherd looked up from the paper, feeling as if he had been kicked in the groin. “They took it away from us,” he finally said, the color draining from his face as he spoke.
“What do you mean?”
“The truth. It threatened them, scared the hell out of them,” he said, briefly savoring the idea. “They were terrified someone would find out I was alive before they could kill me. But not anymore. The bastards turned the whole damn thing around.”
“So what?” Stephanie replied, undaunted, trying to bolster his spirits. “The story has obviously been planted; the air force doesn’t know if it’s true or—”
“That’s my point. The moment I surface, I confirm it. I’ll be arrested, charged with desertion, charged with murder; anything I say will be seen as an alibi, as something I cooked up to cover my butt.”
“But it’s the truth.”
Shepherd shrugged. “I can’t prove it. I mean, it’s all so damned absurd. Who’d believe it?”
“You have the tape—”
“They’ll claim I forced Applegate to make it. Hell, the truth is I did. You heard it, so will they. Then they’ll say I killed him to shut him up.”
“Your word against theirs. What about a lie detector? Wouldn’t that—”
“Steph,” he interrupted. “Did I fly that mission?”
“No.”
“Did I kill Applegate?”
“Uh huh,” she replied dejectedly, seeing where he was headed.
“Exactly what they’re saying; the rest are shadings, details. The bottom line is I’m looking at a court martial no matter how I slice this. If I lose, I face a firing squad . . .” He let the sentence trail off forebodingly, then added, “Assuming I’m not killed resisting arrest.”
They looked at each other forlornly.
“You can’t run forever,” she finally said.
“And I can’t come forward unless I can prove what’s on that tape.”
“How?”
“There’s only one thing I can think of,” he said, intrigued by the audacity of the thought. “Get back my plane.”
29
THE MORNING AFTER the meeting in Lancaster’s office, Larkin drove to Fort Belvoir in Virginia to begin the search for a Mediterranean rendezvous between the PLO gunboat and a second, mystery vessel. The top-security installation where KH-11 data was monitored and recorded was located 10 miles south of Alexandria.
After identifying himself, Larkin was given a security badge and taken to a computer room where a technician waited.
The KH-11 satellite that had been spying on Tripoli and surrounding areas transmitted high-resolution color images by day and infrared images by night to the huge antenna atop the concrete blockhouse. The data was recorded and stored on videotape. Each of the special-sized cartridges covered a twenty-four-hour period.
The technician had a half-dozen stacked next to a high-speed videotape analyzer that was tied into Fort Belvoir’s powerful Cray Y-MP supercomputer. The data on the cartridges covered the time between the failed hostage exchange and the discovery that the hostages weren’t aboard the gunboat, the time during which they had been transferred to another vessel.
The technician loaded the first cartridge into the analyzer, then programmed the computer to ignore all land-based data, instructing it to search for two vessels side by side in open sea.
Since each frame of videotape depicted a large section of the Mediterranean, the technician further instructed the computer to break the frames down into grid squares and analyze them individually, starting with Tripoli harbor, working north, and east to west. The images were blown up and viewed on a 1,250 line per inch video monitor that provided twice the resolution of a standard television set.
That was two days ago.
Now in the center of the screen two elongated specks stood out against the dark texture of the sea. The technician typed on his keyboard and the infrared image on the monitor began zooming in slowly; the dark specks kept increasing in size until two hazy shapes filled the screen. The oblong blobs were heavily textured but devoid of definitive pictorial detail.
“Might be something,” the technician said.
Larkin shrugged, unconvinced; the hostage debacle had plunged him into an angry depression and the news of Applegate’s death had made it worse.
The technician typed another instruction. “For our purposes, we can assume those blobs are vessels,” he explained. “At supercomputer speed—that’s billions of operations per second—the image-enhancement program will compare groups of data particles against a library of known shapes, objects, and details. In this case I’ve programmed it to deal only with seagoing vessels of certain classifications. It begins with the general and proceeds to infinitesimal detail.” He nodded to the monitor, where the image had begun gaining definition. In moments the fuzzy details had resolved into the distinct, clearly identifiable decks of two vessels.
Larkin just about gasped when he saw them.
It was so simple, so obvious, so perfect, he thought. He could hardly believe his eyes. There on the monitor was the PLO gunboat and next to it—goddammit, connected to it by a gangway on which the infrared images of cowed men could be seen walking—was a submarine.
“Clever bastards,” Larkin said bitterly.
Indeed, while intelligence operatives were searching every slum and hellhole in the Middle East for the hostages, Abu Nidal had shrewdly hidden them beneath the sea. For countless months they had been cruising the Mediterranean’s inky depths—and they still were.
AS HE DID EVERY NIGHT before leaving the office, Bill Kiley was watching the network news. That morning he had paused longer than usual in front of the memorial wall in Langley’s lobby. Applegate’s death had ruined whatever satisfaction he had derived from neutralizing Shepherd; the thought that another star, an anonymous one, would soon be engraved in the Georgia marble had intensified his gloomy mood. He was cursing the media’s antiadministration bias when his secretary told him Larkin was on the line.
“That’s great news, Colonel,” he said enthusiastically when Larkin told him the hostages had been located on a submarine. “We can thank the Syrians for this one.”
“Syrians, sir?”
“Damn right. Moscow sold them some Romeos a couple of years ago; three to be exact. That explains why Nidal can’t make a move without clearing it with Assad first.”
“Well, if anyone can find that sub, it’s Duryea,” Larkin said encouragingly.
“I’m counting on it,” Kiley replied, tilting back in his chair, entertaining an idea. “Hold on for a minute.” He swiveled to his computer terminal and typed in ROMEO. A directory appeared on the screen. He scrolled through it and found the file he wanted. “How soon can you leave for the Mediterranean?”
<
br /> “Tonight,” Larkin replied, brightening at the chance to get out of the DCI’s doghouse and back into the field.
“Good. I have something one of our people picked up that I think Duryea will find useful. It’ll be at Andrews when you get there. Stay on top of this,” Kiley urged. “Get Fitz the hell out of there for me.”
30
THE TURN OF EVENTS had hit Shepherd with devastating impact. He and Stephanie abandoned Applegate’s car, took the Underground back to the East End, and returned to the barge. Though the major was no longer a problem, Shepherd had no doubt that along with CIA and the military police, every law enforcement agency in Europe would be on the lookout for him. Despite that, he knew exactly how he would get out of England; however, he had no idea how he was going to get back his F-111, let alone get into Libya.
“We could ask Gutherie,” Stephanie suggested.
“The congressman?”
Stephanie nodded.
“I don’t know,” Shepherd replied, wrestling with it. “How do we know he isn’t owned by the CIA?”
“He’s their watchdog; chairs the Intelligence Committee. And he’s been part of this from the start.”
“What do you mean from the start?”
“It was Gutherie who found out Larkin works in the White House,” she replied, explaining the circumstances that led to his listening to the tape with her.
Shepherd thought about it for a moment, then nodded. “Okay, but don’t tell him any more than you have to.” He remained on the barge while Stephanie went up the hill to a phone booth and made a collect call to Washington, D.C.
SEVERAL DAYS had passed since the congressman and Stephanie had listened to the tape. The possibility that the tape would provide him with a high-profile campaign issue had ended abruptly with the reports of Shepherd’s desertion and murder of Applegate.
Gutherie had just returned from the Capitol when his secretary asked if she should accept a collect call from Mrs. Shepherd in London.
