“If he’s dead they’d have cremated him before the next sunrise,” McGarvey said. “It’s the Muslim custom.”
“Unless they somehow found out about the chip,” Gloria said. “But I don’t see how that’s possible.”
“Where’d you get this van?”
Gloria quickly explained what had happened from the moment she’d hung up from talking with Rencke. “Otto’s working on getting us out of Karachi.”
“Someone inside the hotel must have monitored your call to the front desk,” McGarvey said.
Gloria took the sat phone from her jacket pocket and handed it to McGarvey. “I got your money and passports too,” she said. “But whatever Otto’s planning better happen pretty soon. I don’t think it’s such a hot idea driving around in this van much longer.”
McGarvey powered up the phone, and when it had acquired a satellite he speed-dialed Rencke’s number. His old friend answered on the first ring.
“Oh wow, Gloria?”
“It’s me,” McGarvey said. “What do you have for us?”
“There’s a diplomatic flight that was scheduled to leave at six this morning,” Rencke said. “Assistant Secretary of State Joyce Fields. She’s on the way out to the airport now, and crew is already there prepping the plane. It’s a 737, coming back here via Ramstein. They’ll take off as soon as you get there.”
“What does she know about us?”
“That you’re CIA and that you’re in a bit of a hurry,” Rencke said. “Are you okay, kimo sabe?”
“I’ll live,” McGarvey said. “I want you to find out what happened to al-Turabi’s GPS chip. Could be that Commander Weiss knows something. Soon as Gloria gets home, figure out an excuse for her to get back down to Gitmo and lean on him again. I’m going to hole up here today, and go back in tomorrow. They won’t be expecting me a second time.”
“Wrong answer, recruit, the prez wants you back ASAP.”
McGarvey’s gut tightened. “Did you find the submarine?”
“Yeah, but it’s not a Kilo boat, it’s a Libyan Foxtrot, and it’s already on its way across the Atlantic.”
“Where’s it headed?”
“Apparently back to the canal for Graham to finish the job,” Rencke said.
“I don’t believe it,” McGarvey said. He’d done a lot of thinking about the Brit since their encounter aboard the oil tanker in the Gatun locks. That operation had been important, but it was never meant to be the big strike against us that al-Quaida had been promising since 9/11. In any event, a submarine would not be as effective as a tanker in damaging the canal in a decisive way.
Graham was a highly trained, highly experienced submarine commander, who now had a boat and crew, and presumably weapons. A man like him would not squander such a resource hitting the same target twice. Whatever he was planning would be up close and personal.
Every American remembered the events of 9/11 as if they were etched with acid. This time would be as bad or worse. And after everything that had happened to us since the Trade towers had come down—the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the near success of the suicide bombers trying to hit four of our small-town schools, and the terrible seasons of hurricanes and floods—another strike against us, any strike, would be nothing less than devastating.
“How do we get through security?” McGarvey asked.
“Someone will be waiting for you at the air freight entrance,” a relieved Rencke said. “It’s off Shahrah-e-Faisal Road. There’ll be highway signs.”
“We’re on our way,” McGarvey said. He broke the connection and turned to Gloria. “Take us to the airport. We’re going home.”
“What’s happened, Kirk?” she asked.
“Graham’s got his hands on a submarine and he’s on his way across the Atlantic with it.”
“The navy can stop him.”
“If they know where to look,” McGarvey answered absently. Once again he had the feeling that he was missing something. That all of them were underestimating al-Quaida’s ingenuity.
“What are we going to do?” Gloria asked.
“I don’t know.”
FIFTY-NINE
SS SHEHAB, IN THE ATLANTIC
It was 2000 GMT when the twenty-four-hundred-ton submarine came to a depth of twenty meters and extended her snorkel above the surface to take in air to run the diesels and recharge their badly depleted batteries. She was well out into the Atlantic now, running at fifteen knots, and by this time tomorrow evening she would be approaching the broad passage between the Maderia Islands to the north and the Canaries to the south.
“The snorkel is clear,” Captain Ziyax called from behind al-Abbas at the ballast board.
Graham ducked his head around the corner. “Are we still clear on the surface?” he asked his Libyan chief sonar man.
“The same targets well out ahead, designate them as probable commercial traffic, and the same aft.” Ensign Isomil looked up. “Sir, there’s nothing closer than ten thousand meters. Nothing that I think might be a warship.”
“Well done,” Graham said. He went back into the control room and raised the search periscope. The view in the lens was very dim by the standards of the British Trafalgar boats he had skippered, but adequate for him to make sure they were alone. It was a very dark night, no moon.
“You may open the snorkel and start the engines, number two,” he said.
“Yes, sir,” Ziyax responded immediately and crisply. Graham had spoken with him after the incident coming out of the Strait of Gibraltar, and the Libyan naval officer had come to see the error of his ways. It was Graham’s intimate knowledge of the captain’s wife and children, supplied by al-Quaida, that had finally convinced the man to cooperate fully.
The three diesels rumbled into life one at a time.
Graham took one last three-sixty, then slapped the handles up and lowered the scope. He turned and looked at his crew. They were well rested now after the long and stressful crossing and emergence from the Mediterranean. But those thirty-six-plus hours of adversity had melded them into something of a unit. Each of them, Iranian and Libyan, had one common fear, which was retribution by al-Quaida, and one common hate, which was Graham.
He smiled inwardly. They were children, unlike the English crews he’d commanded. Those men had been highly trained and motivated professionals, their equipment state-of-the-art, their weapons as accurate and lethal as those of any nation on earth.
For just an instant he felt a twinge of regret for how he’d thrown away his life, but then the constant image of Jillian’s face, contorted in pain, brought his hate back to the surface.
The ship’s com buzzed. “Captain, engineering.”
Graham pulled the growler phone from its overhead bracket. “This is the captain.”
“I think you’d better come back here, sir,” Lieutenant Mahdi Chamran, the Iranian chief engineer, said.
“What is it?”
“You need to see this for yourself, sir,” Chamran insisted.
Graham’s anger spiked, but he brought himself under control. “Very well.” He hung up. “Captain, you have the con,” he told Ziyax. “Maintain your course and speed. I’ll be in engineering.”
The Libyan captain looked at him sharply, almost as if he were suddenly afraid of something. But he nodded. “Aye, Captain.”
Graham turned, ducked through the open hatch, and headed aft to engineering, which took up nearly one-fourth of the volume of the boat. The three diesel engines, three electric propulsion motors for underwater maneuvering, the huge battery bank, electrical generators, pumps, parts storage, and a complete machine shop were all the responsibility of the chief engineer, who in some ways was even more important than the captain. The control room crew fought the boat, but the chief engineer made sure they had a warship to fight with.
No one was in the crew’s mess, or in the passageway. With only a skeleton crew even such a small boat seemed very large and very empty.
Lieutenant Commander Mahdi Chamra
n, the Iranian chief engineer bin Laden had supplied, was waiting in the electric motor room with Lieutenant Rasal Sayyaf, the chief torpedo man who’d also come from the Distal Volente.
The chi-eng was a short dark Arab with four days’ growth on his face, and black grease permanently etching his hands. He wasn’t a traditionalist so he didn’t wash five times each day before prayers. He’d been kicked out of the Iranian navy because of it; his superiors valued religious practices over good engineering.
Sayyaf, on the other hand, was tall and lanky, with a permanent smirk on his face because he knew that once his military service was completed he would take over from his father as imam at their mosque in Isfahan south of Tehran. He’d gone over to al-Quaida with the blessings of his superiors who thought he was too devout a Muslim. But like Chamran he was good at what he did.
They were all fucking misfits, Graham thought, coming through the hatch. A section of the deck grating had been pulled up and the two men were standing over the opening, looking down at something. No one else was in the compartment and the hatch to the aft torpedo room was closed and dogged.
“What is it?” Graham demanded, approaching them.
Chamran seemed excited, as did Sayyaf, but his voice was oddly subdued. “We’ve found two new toys for you, Captain,” the chi-eng said.
Graham reached the opening, but then pulled up short. Nestled in makeshift wooden cradles between banks of batteries were two metal cylinders, each about twenty inches in diameter and about three feet long. The DANGER: RADIATION symbol was painted on both of them. They were nuclear weapons.
“Are they leaking?” Graham asked.
Sayyaf held up a small Geiger counter. “Not much. But whoever has to handle them, and especially the poor bastard who has to open the packages and arm them, will take a hit.”
“They’re not Libyan,” Graham said. “Russian?”
“Iraqi, but the Russians probably helped get them to Libya,” Chamran said. He shook his head in wonderment. “The Americans were right after all. Uncle Saddam actually did it.” He laughed. “Quaddafi must have been shitting in his pants all this time. You were Allah-sent, Captain, to take these things off his hands.”
“Will they mate to the two Russian cruise missiles we found?” Graham asked, his breath quickening despite his iron will to remain calm in front of these men.
“With some jury-rigging, yes,” Sayyaf said.
“They probably won’t go critical,” Chamran warned.
“What makes you say that?” Graham demanded sharply. This was too good to be true. It was the opportunity that bin Laden had talked about in Karachi and again in Syria, but had refused to give specifics.
You will understand when the time comes, he’d promised. And your eyes will be opened to the wondrous light.
Graham understood now. It was Oppenheimer, he thought, in 1945 at Trinity in New Mexico when the Americans exploded the first atomic bomb. He’d called it the “wondrous light.”
“I don’t think they had the time or the materials to develop the initiator technology,” the chi-eng explained. He held up his hand before Graham could object. “But these toys will explode, Captain, if that’s what you want. It won’t be a nuclear explosion, but when they go off—wherever that might be—they will spread a lot of radioactive dust over a very large area.” He nodded solemnly. “More people than the Manhattan attack could die. It will not be another 9/11. It will be much worse.”
Graham’s soul was singing. He was going to strike back at the bastards in a way that they would never forget.
“That is if you have the stomach for it, Englishman,” Chamran said.
Graham smiled again inwardly. Oh, he had the stomach all right. “Disable all the Geiger counters.”
CIA HEADQUARTERS
Although Assistant Secretary of State Fields and most of the people in her small entourage recognized McGarvey from his days as DCI, no one questioned why he and Gloria had boarded in the middle of the night in Karachi. Or why they had remained aboard in Ramstein when the aircraft was being refueled.
“Glad to have been of some assistance,” she said, shaking his hand after they’d touched down at Andrews.
“Thanks for the lift,” he’d said. “But it might be best if you never mentioned this to anyone.”
She wanted to say something, he’d seen it in her eyes. But she nodded and left. Afterwards the aircraft was towed from the VIP ramp to an air force hangar where two men from security were waiting with a van to take them directly down to Langley.
McGarvey had slept for only a few hours on the flight over, and he was tired. But it was more than lack of sleep. Fish Harbor had been a trap. He’d been lured to the compound step-by-step all the way from Camp Delta and he hadn’t figured out how. The only bit of good fortune to come out of it had been Gloria. If it hadn’t been for her he might have bought it.
Yet there was still a nagging thought at the back of his head that he was missing something about her. Lawrence Danielle, his mentor from the early days, had warned that to every spy would eventually come paranoia. For some, the doubts and suspicions became so overwhelming that they were destroyed by their fears. Suicide was an occupational hazard. But the good field officer learned to listen to his or her instincts; they were often the difference between success or failure.
It was morning and rush-hour traffic was in full swing, people going about their business as usual. But McGarvey felt disconnected, as he always did when he returned from the field, and especially from an operation that had fallen apart on him. He would have to go back to finish the job, but for that he would need a new strategy, which at the moment completely eluded him.
“You’re going back, aren’t you,” Gloria said, as if she had read his mind.
They had crossed the Potomac on the Beltway and skirted Alexandria before heading north through Fairfax and Falls Church, the city in the near distance, a jet taking off from Reagan National. “I don’t know,” McGarvey replied absently as he stared out the window.
“I want to help you.”
“I know,” he said, turning to her. “Thanks for Karachi. It could have been messy.”
She smiled. “I was just doing my job.”
From the Beltway they took the George Washington Parkway down to the Building. One of the security officers escorted them up to the seventh floor using the director’s private elevator. Dhalia Swanson, Adkins’s secretary, passed them straight in.
“Good to see you back, Mr. McGarvey,” she said warmly.
“Thanks, but I’m not back,” McGarvey told her. She’d been his secretary when he’d served as DCI.
“Yes, sir,” she said, smiling.
Dick Adkins was waiting with his number two David Whittaker, Howard McCann, and Otto Rencke.
“Sorry to have to pull you out like that, but from what I understand you may have been walking into a situation,” Adkins said. “The president asked that we get you back here pronto.”
McCann had a scowl permanently etched on his square features, but Adkins looked like a man who’d gotten some very bad news and was flailing around trying to figure out what he should do about it. Americans had been rubbed raw by the events—natural and manmade—of the last few years, and they were increasingly looking to Washington to do something, or heads would continue to roll.
Counterterrorism had become the political hot potato of the decade. “It’ll take at least ten days for Graham to get across the Atlantic,” McGarvey said. “What do you need me for? The navy should be able to handle it.”
“A Second Fleet carrier battle group is already on the way to Panama to set up a blockade,” Adkins said. “There’ll be some tough questions when the media finds out, but that’s not our concern for the moment.”
“Do we have any idea what weapons are aboard?” Gloria asked. McCann shot her a furious look, but she ignored him.
“Quaddafi won’t even admit it’s his submarine,” Adkins said. “The president talked to him two hours ag
o. According to the good colonel, his submarine was scuttled in the Bay of Sidra. It’s anybody’s guess what’s aboard.”
“Graham’s not heading for the canal again,” McGarvey said. He’d had time to think about what he would do if he were in Graham’s shoes, with a boat and crew, presumably weapons, possibly even some very nasty weapons, and a deep-seated grudge against a system that he figured killed his wife. Graham had become a renegade of the worse kind; intelligent, highly trained, and well motivated.
“Where then?” Adkins asked. “New York? The president wants your best guess.”
“Washington,” McGarvey said. “They managed to do a number on the World Trade Center in New York, but except for a relatively small amount of damage to the Pentagon, their plans for Washington were a bust. They’ll try again.”
“They wouldn’t even have to get close if they had a couple of cruise missiles,” Rencke spoke up. “They could lay a couple hundred miles off and launch from there. We wouldn’t have much warning time.” He was sitting cross-legged on a chair, his red hair flying everywhere. “Better than even chance he’s got ’em, and maybe more bad shit.”
“Like what?” McCann asked.
“Anthrax at least. Maybe even a small dirty nuke or two.”
“Where the hell would Libya get anything like that?”
Rencke gave McCann an amused, condescending look. “Don’t you read the newspapers, Howie? The deserts over there are gushing with oil. And that spells m-o-n-e-y, with which an enterprising soul can buy just about anything.”
“The Foxtrot was on a southwest heading,” Adkins reiterated.
“Then why did you pull me out of Karachi?” McGarvey asked. Adkins shook his head. “Maybe we’re wrong about Panama. Or, maybe you’re wrong about Washington. We could probably come up with a dozen different scenarios that a man like Graham might come up with. But it’s the plan that we haven’t dreamed up is why we wanted you here. You know bin Laden better than anyone else on our side. And right now Panama is our most likely bet, and you are our insurance.”
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