Allah's Scorpion

by David Hagberg

  “Where then?” Rencke asked.

  “Washington,” McGarvey said. Katy was watching him from the doorway, a sad, resigned expression on her pretty face.

  “Okay, kimo sabe, what do you want to do? We still have a few days.”

  “If he’s going to try what I think he will, I’ll need to borrow a sub driver and a SEAL team from the navy.”

  “How much can we tell them out of the chute?” Rencke asked.

  “Nothing. Not even my name, just that it’s a CIA op. We have to keep it away from the ONI in case the leak is at the Pentagon and not down at Gitmo.”

  “How soon?”

  “It’ll take at least a couple of days to set it up, so yesterday would be good.”

  “Keep your cell phone turned on,” Rencke said.

  “Right.”

  SS SHEHAB, MID-ATLANTIC

  The sun was setting a couple of points off the submarine’s starboard bow and Graham, standing on the cramped bridge, shielded his eyes against the glare. They’d been running on the surface for a little more than six hours and he was certain that they’d been spotted by at least one American satellite.

  Ziyax was on the bridge with him, scanning the horizon with binoculars. The late afternoon was chilly, even invigorating after the stuffiness below.

  Graham took one last deep breath, then keyed the ship’s intercom. “Con, bridge. Prepare to dive the boat.”

  “Aye, sir, prepare to dive the boat,” al-Abbas replied after only a slight hesitation. The crew had not understood his orders to run on the surface, but now that the boat was well ventilated, and all of them, by fours, had been allowed briefly on deck, they didn’t want to submerge.

  “What has this afternoon been about?” Ziyax asked respectfully.

  Graham glanced at him. The man wasn’t a bad officer, limited by his lack of good training. But he wanted to be home with his family, not out here for any cause. Especially not for the Islamic jihad. “Insurance.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I wanted to be spotted running on the surface, on this course, by an American satellite.”

  Ziyax was startled. “They know about us?”

  “It’s possible.”

  “Then they’ll be waiting for us,” Ziyax said. “For the sake of reason, for the sake of Allah we must turn back before we’re all killed.”

  Graham had no real idea why he was bothering to explain anything to the Libyan, especially something so obvious. But he wanted someone to know and appreciate the ruse.

  “You’re right about one thing, Captain. The Americans will be waiting for us. But we’ve been on the same heading since we cleared Gibraltar. Southwest, toward Central America. Toward the Panama Canal, which I … probed last month. They’ll believe that we’re trying to hit the canal again.” He looked into the Libyan’s eyes to see if the man understood the logic. But there was no one home.

  Ziyax merely stared at him.

  “Insurance,” Graham said. He keyed the phone again. “Bridge, con. Dive the boat.”

  “Aye, Cap’n, dive the boat.”

  Graham let Ziyax clear the bridge first, then, after one last look at the setting sun, dropped through the hatch, securing it above his head, and descended into the control room.

  “I have an all-green board,” Ziyax reported.

  “All compartments ready in all respects,” al-Abbas said.

  “Very well, dive the boat,” Graham said. “Make your depth four hundred meters.”

  Everyone in the control room looked up from their duty stations. That depth was well below the safety limits for a boat this age, and everyone knew it.

  Graham waited for just a moment. “Captain, if you please.”

  “Aye, Captain,” Ziyax said. “Diving Officer, make your depth four hundred meters.”

  Al-Abbas repeated the order, and went about the task of submerging the boat.

  Graham walked over to the chart table, on which a small-scale chart of the western Atlantic from twenty degrees north to forty degrees north was laid out. As the bow of the submarine began to cant downward, he plotted a great circle course to the mouth of the Chesapeake still two thousand miles away. Five days.

  He looked up. “I’m going to the wardroom to have my dinner,” he told his crew conversationally. “When we level off—but not before we level off—come right to new course three-zero-five, and make your speed All Ahead Flank.”

  Graham waited until Ziyax had repeated the order then headed aft to the wardroom. “Mr. Ziyax, you have the con,” he called nonchalantly over his shoulder.

  SIXTY-TWO

  COSMOS CLUB, WASHINGTON

  Noon traffic was in full swing along Embassy Row when McGarvey pulled up in front of the Cosmos Club on Massachusetts Avenue and let the valet take his Range Rover. Only a few people in the entire city knew about the threat they were facing, and he figured that they were the lucky ones. At least for now.

  He had given a lot of thought to how a missile attack on Washington might unfold, and what could be done to stop it. But although he had what he thought was a fair understanding of Graham, he was going to need a sub driver to lay out the tactics of a strike using a Foxtrot, and he was going to have to keep his ideas outside official military channels.

  Graham would know U.S. Navy tactics, and how to sidestep them, so they needed to throw him a curveball. Something he would not expect.

  The club, which was housed in an elegant three-story Victorian brownstone, had been in existence since the late 1800s, and was the gathering place for movers and shakers; the Nobel prizewinners, the presidents and CEOs of major corporations, the most powerful lawyers and politicians. Merely being wealthy didn’t guarantee acceptance, its members had to be people who were doing significant things.

  Just inside the elegant entrance, McGarvey gave his name to the receptionist and was directed to the lavishly decorated Smith Dining Room. The tuxedoed maître d’ brought him to a corner table where two men, both dressed in civilian clothes, were seated.

  McGarvey recognized the older, slightly built man with thinning white hair and pale blue eyes. “Admiral, thanks for agreeing to meet with me on such short notice.”

  Admiral Joseph Puckett, Jr., glanced up, but didn’t offer his hand. “The president said I was to cooperate with you, McGarvey. Sit down.”

  Puckett had the reputation of being one of the toughest officers ever to chair the Joint Chiefs. McGarvey had never dealt with the man before, but the admiral was also widely known as being a fair, if no-nonsense, man, which meant he was a military officer first and a politician a distant second.

  “Fair enough,” McGarvey said, taking a seat.

  Their waiter came immediately and when he’d left with McGarvey’s drink order, Puckett introduced the other man as Navy Captain Frank Dillon, a former Seawolf submarine commander, and now boss of his own squadron in Honolulu. He was a lean, well-muscled man with sandy hair, a thick mustache, and a pleasant, almost handsome face.

  He and McGarvey shook hands. “Weren’t you the director of the CIA a couple years ago?” he asked.

  McGarvey nodded. “I didn’t like dealing with politicians so I got out while I still had my hide intact.”

  Puckett nodded, then put his napkin on the table and pushed away. “I’ll leave you gentlemen to it,” he said. “Whatever Mr. McGarvey wants, within reason, you’re to comply, Captain,” he told Dillon.

  “Yes, sir,” Dillon said, obviously not at all sure what he was getting into.

  Puckett turned back to McGarvey. “You may know that I’ve sent a carrier battle group to screen the canal. Should get down there within the next forty-eight hours. What you might not know is that a couple hours ago a satellite spotted your boy on the surface in the mid-Atlantic, still heading southwest.”

  “Isn’t that unusual?” McGarvey asked. “Running on the surface in broad daylight. He’d have to know he’d be spotted.”

  “May have had trouble with his snorkel,” Puckett sa
id. He gave McGarvey a hard stare. “I know enough about you to know that you’re a good man to have around in a pinch. But I also know enough about you to know that whenever you get involved in something, a lot of people, some of them ours, get hurt.”

  “I don’t invent the bad guys, Admiral.”

  Puckett nodded, turned on his heel, and stalked off.

  “I probably could have handled that a little better,” McGarvey said wryly. He turned to Dillon. “Captain, have you been told why you’re here today?”

  “No, sir. Just that you’re working on an assignment for the CIA, with the blessing of the White House, and you need someone who knows submarine tactics.”

  McGarvey glanced around the half full dining room. Their table had been picked so that they would be out of earshot of any other diner. “Al-Quaida has gotten itself a Foxtrot submarine, a Perisher captain, a mixed Iranian-Libyan crew, and an unknown number of weapons, with which I think they mean to strike Washington.”

  “I see,” Dillon said, his eyes widening slightly. “What kind of weapons?”

  “We don’t know, but it’s possible they might have cruise missiles, maybe anthrax, possibly even a nuke. The thing is, I want to stop them before they can launch.”

  “That’s the problem,” Dillon said. “If we know when they were coming we could lay a screen and try to intercept them. But they could go silent a couple of hundred miles off and we’d be lucky to stumble across them before they launched.”

  “What about afterward?” McGarvey asked.

  “We’d nail them for sure. The Foxtrot makes a fair amount of noise, especially when the skipper puts the pedal to the metal. They’d have no chance of getting away.”

  “That’s the problem,”McGarvey said. “This guy’s not interested in suicide, which means he has a plan to fire his weapons and then get out of there.”

  “How sure of this are you, sir?” Dillon asked.

  “The name’s Kirk. And I’m not sure. It’s just a hunch. I think he’d like to get up into the Chesapeake somewhere, if that’s possible, fire his weapons, and then set his boat to self-destruct while he locks out and disappears ashore. He’s done something similar before.”

  “I did a classified paper for Homeland Security last year outlining just that possibility,” Dillon said.

  “I know, I read it a couple days ago,” McGarvey said. “I need your help to stop them, if you want the job, Captain.”

  “Name’s Frank,” Dillon said. “We’ll need a SEAL team. Do we have a timetable?”

  “Puckett said that the sub was in the mid-Atlantic a couple of hours ago. If he submerges and changes course right now, he could be off the bay in what, five or six days?”

  “About that,” Dillon said.

  “Then let’s get on with it,” McGarvey said. “How soon can you get a SEAL team together without attracting any notice?”

  “Now what are you trying to tell me?”

  “There might be a spy in the ONI feeding information to al-Quaida.”

  Dillon’s jaw tightened. “That’s just great.The son of a bitch.” He took a business card out of his pocket, wrote an address in Alexandria on the back, and handed it to McGarvey. “This is a friend of mine. I stay with him and his wife whenever I’m in Washington. Come over about six tomorrow. We’ll have a backyard barbecue.”

  “No specifics to anybody.”

  “I’ll leave that up to you tomorrow night,” Dillon said.

  SS SHEHAB, HEADING NORTHWEST

  Something woke Graham from a sound sleep in his cabin. The only light came from what spilled in around the curtain covering his door, and the dim green illumination of the dials on the clock and compass on the bulkhead above his pull-down desk.

  He’d been having the sex dream about Jillian again, but although he could see her naked body lying next to his, her face had faded over the past month or so and it frightened him. He’d known that he’d gone a little crazy after her death, but he was worried now that he might be losing his mind, losing his ability to think clearly, to reason, to act with purpose.

  It was a few minutes after 0200 Greenwich mean time, and the boat was quiet, even the deep-throated hum of the electric motors putting out enough power now to run at All Ahead Full were muted, barely discernible. The crew had been given the rig-for-silent-running order when they’d submerged, and so far there’d been no mistakes.

  Each time the batteries got below twenty percent, they would rise to snorkel depth and run on diesel long enough for the recharge and then return to four hundred meters in their push for the U.S. East Coast. They’d done that throughout most of the day, and they’d be good now for hours, even at this speed.

  Graham had pushed the boat and the crew hard so that none of them would have the time to stop and think about what was going on. If they had, they’d realize that this was going to be a one-way trip for them. Once the missiles were launched, the U.S. Navy would zero in on their position within minutes. There would barely be enough time for one or two men to escape, not the entire crew.

  He drifted back to sleep, trying to recapture the same dream about his wife, and it seemed like only seconds had passed when someone came into the cabin.

  “Wake up, English,” al-Abbas said.

  Graham opened his eyes. The Libyan officer stood above him, a 9mm Beretta pistol in his hand. He was out of breath and red in the face as if he had just gotten off a treadmill. Ziyax was behind him at the door, holding the curtain aside. He too looked winded, and angry.

  “What is this, a mutiny?” Graham asked calmly. Ziyax was also holding a pistol. The two men had evidently been arguing about just this.

  “An execution,” al-Abbas said.

  “Put the gun down, Assam,” Ziyax said.

  “It’s time to end this here and now. I will kill him, and then we can turn around and go home.”

  “Think about what his crew will do to us when they find out what you’ve done. They have more weapons than we do. It would be a bloodbath.”

  “I would rather die out here like that, than send nuclear missiles raining down on Washington,” al-Abbas said. “We’re not al-Quaida. It’s not our fight now.”

  “Colonel Quaddafi offered this boat to us, and it was he who ordered the nuclear weapons to be brought aboard,” Graham said. He’d reached the Steyr 9mm pistol at his side under the blanket and he eased the safety catch to the off position and slowly began to slide it up over his hip so that he would have a clear shot at the Libyan.

  “Two of my men who armed the weapons are sick,” al-Abbas said.

  “You have Geiger counters. The weapons don’t leak,” Graham lied smoothly. He had the pistol above his hip, his finger on the trigger.

  “But they’re sick, and none of your men had the nerve to go anywhere near the missiles,” al-Abbas argued. He was getting agitated and he started to wave the pistol around.

  Graham began to put pressure on the trigger.

  “I’m sorry, Assam, but I’ll do whatever it takes to get back to my wife and children,” Ziyax said, and he raised his pistol.

  “You’ll never get home. None of us will unless we stop this madman.”

  “If I can’t go home, then I will do whatever it takes to please Colonel Quaddafi, who will see to it that my family is well cared for.”

  “Tariq?” al-Abbas said, half-turning.

  “Put your gun down,” Ziyax said.

  Al-Abbas said something in Arabic and started to turn back, but before he could bring his pistol to bear, and before Graham could fire, Ziyax shot the man in the side of the head at point-blank range, blood flying everywhere.

  SIXTY-THREE

  ALEXANDRIA

  Liz and Todd had come into town to take Kathleen to dinner, which was one less concern on McGarvey’s mind when he showed up at the address Dillon had given him. The house was a small two-story Colonial in a pleasant middle-class neighborhood of shade trees, people washing cars or mowing lawns, kids shooting hoops above the garage doors,
and bikes or trikes parked in just about every driveway. It was this kind of a life that had never been possible for McGarvey and Katy, because of his job, but there was nothing he could do now to bring any of it back.

  The driveway was full with a BMW convertible, a Corvette, an older Porsche, and a plain gray Taurus with government plates, so McGarvey parked on the street and walked around the side of the house to the backyard.

  A man in a chef ’s hat was tending to a built-in barbecue at the edge of a small brick patio while Dillon, seated at a picnic table, was engaged in conversation with two muscular men and an attractive young woman. All of them were in blue jeans and sweatshirts, and all of them, including the woman, were drinking beer from bottles. One of them said something, and they all laughed.

  The man at the barbecue turned and spotted McGarvey. “Frank, the cavalry’s arrived.”

  Dillon looked up and got to his feet. “Glad you could make it,” he said, coming across to McGarvey. They shook hands. “Let me introduce you to everyone.”

  “Holy shit,” the woman said. “You’re Kirk McGarvey. You used to run the CIA.”

  McGarvey chuckled. “I must be getting old. I never got that reaction from a woman before.”

  “Don’t mind my wife,” the man in the chef ’s hat said, smiling. “Her handle is Lips, for more than one reason.” He came over and shook hands.

  “Lieutenant Commander Bill Jackson,” Dillon said. “This is his house. “And Lips, Terri, is his wife. She’s a lieutenant.”

  Terri laughed. “Half of it’s my house,” she said, shaking McGarvey’s hand. “I have a feeling this is going to be a real interesting party tonight.”

  Her grip was firm and her eyes direct. McGarvey got the impression that she was in every bit as good physical shape as the men here. “Nice to meet you.”

  “The other two are the chiefs, Bob Ercoli and Dale MacKeever,” Dillon introduced them.

  All four of them appeared to be in outstanding physical condition, and like most of the instructors out at the Farm they exuded self-confidence. “You’re Navy SEALs,” McGarvey said.