The Kill Button

by Tom Hron

  Alexis woke as well but looked embarrassed and said that she wanted to stay somewhere else, because she couldn’t afford the Plaza. She only had forty dollars left and then wondered if she could just stay in the car. Shawki looked at her as if she had set herself on fire. “I have a suite with three bedrooms,” he said. “Please, I would be much too unhappy if you didn’t stay with us.” She glanced at Harry and he nodded his agreement. Don’t argue with him, he told her, and I’ll sleep on the couch. Besides, we have more questions about the Black Dragon we need answered. With that, they went up to Shawki’s suite, gave her a bedroom, and went to bed.

  The next morning they slept late, then ordered breakfast from room service—ham, eggs, and potatoes for Joe—fruit, cereal, milk, and toast for the rest of them, with lots of coffee all around. Finally, there was a little lightheartedness, though mostly because of the dogs stoic disinterest in Tungsten and, in turn, his wild distrust of them.

  On his second cup of coffee Harry frowned and shook his head. When the others asked him what was wrong he told them that he’d never expected to fall in with such a motley crew—an Apache with two dogs, a Bahraini who was a buccaneer at heart, and a wannabe spy who claimed that she was a blonde. Talk about all sorts and conditions of men, he remarked, this was the epitome of it, and surely all their enemies must be quaking in their boots. Everyone laughed at his utter disbelief.

  “I didn’t know guests could bring their pets into the Plaza,” said Alexis afterward, looking puzzled. “I thought they’d have rules against that.”

  “Not if you’re a prince,” answered Joe with a proud grin. “We’re traveling with royalty, and you should see his airplane.”

  “Please, it is my uncle’s, not mine, and we should be thankful for his kindness.” Shawki self-consciously fiddled with his breakfast napkin.

  Alexis looked at Shawki first, then at Harry as if to say, “God, is it true?”

  “Shawki and I were roommates in college,” he explained, “and we’ve been friends ever since. He’s the most generous person I know.”

  Now Shawki’s napkin was in a knot. “Thank you, but we must talk about something else, okay? The Black Dragon and how we can find it? I want to destroy this leprosy bacterium if I do nothing else with my life. What greater horror can there be than in having somebody else salvage it first, whether it be Israel, this country, or another? What's more, can you imagine what Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad would do to get such a weapon of mass destruction, as you Americans call these things? You must understand how serious I am.”

  Surprised by his friend’s passion, Harry looked at Shawki. There was a real chance that Alexis’s story wasn’t true or was a cunning attempt to set them up, and what better way than to send them off on a wild goose chase. On the other hand, he owed Shawki his loyalty, whatever his fears might be. Torn inside, he swung his gaze back to Alexis. “What else can you tell us about this old submarine? You’ve made it sound as if it might be almost impossible to find.”

  “I know the name of the pilot who sunk it and even the names of the aircraft carrier and torpedo he used, so its exact location should be in the Naval Historical Center, and even if it isn’t, it should be in the ship’s log. The captain would have written that down, right?” Clear-eyed, she stared back at him.

  What was the magic question, he wondered, the one that would prove that she was for real? No matter what he asked, she seemed to have an answer … or had he gotten so paranoid that nothing would ever satisfy him? Then he had an idea. “You mentioned an exact location,” he said. “Does that mean you know where the Black Dragon sank?” He waited for her answer.

  “Yes, it was torpedoed off West Africa, on its way to Argentina.”

  “My God, you couldn’t have mentioned a worst place. West Africa is one of the most dangerous places in the world with all its sea pirates and border wars.”

  “I know, but I’m not afraid,” she said. “It would be a dream of mine to go. Shawki’s right, we have to destroy the bacterium before someone else gets their hands on it.”

  “If what you say is true,” he continued, “that the CIA is looking for the submarine as well, then you shouldn’t come along with us. I can’t think of anything more dangerous, and not only would there be the real chance they would spot you, but we might have to dive a mile deep. We wouldn’t want that kind of responsibility.” He had sugarcoated it as much as possible.

  Her voice hardened instantly. “I won’t help you unless I can come along, and it’s not fair that you would leave me behind. I haven’t any money or anywhere else to turn, and I can work as hard as anyone.”

  He saw that Joe and Shawki were eyeballing him and didn’t like what he was saying.

  Like a consigliore, Shawki tried smoothing things over. “Harry is just trying to protect you and think about how he must feel inside right now.”

  She had all the trump cards and wasn’t going to back down. “I don’t want to be protected, and I only want to help.” Her voice then strengthened. “Promise I can go along.”

  A long silence followed, and then Harry frowned as if he’d given her fair warning. “Listen, first we have to feel absolutely sure you’re not working undercover for someone,” he explained, “but more than that we’ve been in constant danger for the last couple of weeks. Joe’s home has been bombed, I’ve been shot at, and we’d both be dead if it wasn’t for Shawki’s help. I’m not sure that you realize what you’re getting yourself into.”

  “I’m still not afraid.” She looked at him right in the eyes.

  “All right, tell us how we can find the Black Dragon. We will have to know within a mile or so or we won’t have time to find it, since you’ve made it sound like we’re in a race with everyone else in the world.”

  She told them about the USS Portus and Lieutenant Commander Newman. I’ll hack my way into the National Archives if you will get me a good laptop, she added, and it won’t take me long. There will be maps, coordinates, and written reports telling precisely where the Dragon went down if the old files at Langley are any example. I had a ball going through all that old stuff before I was forced to run. Her eyes glowed with excitement.

  “There’s a computer on the Gulfstream,” said Shawki, “and, better yet, no one will know what you’re doing, since our communications are encrypted like your president’s Air Force One.”

  Harry pulled his eyebrows together and focused on the next problem. “Do you have access to a submersible and sonar equipment and a way to move both to West Africa?”

  “Yes, the equipment my country uses in oil exploration and underwater pipeline maintenance. Everything can be loaded on a C-130 Hercules the same day I call.”

  It all seemed way too easy, so what were they overlooking? he wondered.

  Shawki went on. “I know how you truly wish to find who murdered Catherine but now isn’t the time, okay? Help me with what I want to do this one time and let your heart heal a little. Trust me on this.

  “There is something more to remember as well. The Black Dragon may very well lead us right back here again, since we keep hearing all the same names. Maybe we will learn why.”

  Harry didn’t answer his longtime friend, simply gave a slight nod. Shawki was right, he told himself. However, why would David Skeleter want an ethnic disease from World War Two, for God’s sake? Then he thought that might very well be a rhetorical question and supposed they would find out soon enough. Clearly, it was time for action again.

  Shawki and Alexis left to buy clothing and personal things for her, which at first she insisted she didn’t need, but then changed her mind when she was told they wouldn’t take no for an answer. No one knew what he or she would be getting into, and they didn’t want her holding them up simply because she was missing something. Buy everything you need and for Pete’s sake don’t short change yourself, cautioned Harry. Rain gear, suntan lotion, you name it, don’t get caught short on anything because there won’t be any stores where we’re going. Alexis was getting h
er first taste of a major expedition.

  When they were alone Harry looked at Joe and said, “We didn’t give you much of a chance to say anything. Tell me what you think about all this madness.”

  “Shawki’s right. Now’s not the time for you to be bashing heads with people who hold all the trump cards. Give yourself a little time before you go after them. Besides, I’ve got an idea the Dragon will lead us right back here just like he said.” Then with a sigh, Joe looked out the window at the skyscrapers that made up the horizon. “There’s a lot more to it than that as well. I don’t care how weird it sounds but I want the leprosy destroyed as much as anybody does. My grandfathers were hunted down like varmints in this country and by the same kind of crooked bastards we’re fighting now. I don’t trust them one bit. Not many people know that trade blankets infected with smallpox were used to exterminate Native Americans back in history, so I got a personal stake in this.”

  Arching his brow, Harry looked at Joe. Inexplicably, the Black Dragon had now become their main focus, all on the word of a young woman they hardly knew. His friends were pulling him away to hunt the ocean’s ghosts, even before he had gotten the chance to exorcise his own. They were taking a hell of a gamble and not just because of him. If the CIA wasn’t bad enough, they’d have to outfox the Mossad as well. They had gotten in way over their heads.

  Then the door burst open and Shawki and Alexis ran back in with their eyes wide open. Turn on the television, they said, because you’ll never believe what everyone is talking about.

  Joe stepped over and switched it on.

  It was on every channel. The Air Force had just shot down a jet fighter from a top-secret air base in Nevada, and it had been targeting the Capitol. All the newscasters and talking heads were nearly hysterical in their excitement over the news. When would the president hold a news conference and take full responsibility? they repeatedly asked. How could President Connolly have let something like this happen with 9/11 still haunting the nation? When would Congress hold hearings? When would they start impeachment proceedings?

  Harry suddenly looked as if he’d lost all his blood. “We have to get out of here right away,” he said, “before there’s no one left except me.”

  CHAPTER 23

  ESPARGOS

  They flew away from New York that night on a flight plan for the Cape Verde Islands, the only place in West Africa that wasn’t rampant with border wars, genocide, and piracy. Nothing looks blacker than the ocean’s horizon after dark, thought Harry as he climbed higher and higher. The night was white-hot in the wing strobes and left him feeling lost in a world where there was no other light. Even the stars had disappeared in the vertigo, leaving nothing in the sky but the airplane. In five hours, they would come down to earth again and with the time change it would be morning. Then they would face a new hazard where there would be even greater terror than in flying, since diving was the most dangerous thing humans could do.

  “Watch the airplane while I go in back,” he said to Joe over in the co-pilot’s seat. “I want to see for myself if Alexis can break into the Naval Historical Center.”

  He walked back and saw Shawki and her at a conference table in the cabin with a laptop plugged into the airplane’s Sat Link and Omnifax scanner-printer. Both looked grim when he sat beside them. “Having any luck?” he asked after he had settled into a nearby chair.

  “Everything comes up empty when I search for the Black Dragon,” answered Alexis in a low voice. “There isn’t anything regardless of where I look or what site I use. The CIA must have deleted everything.”

  Not surprised, Harry next asked, “Did you try the Department of the Navy or the Naval Institute Press? Maybe they forgot something.”

  “It’s always the same results, unable to locate the server or access denied.” Her eyes gave him an uneasy look, as if to say, “Sorry I opened my big mouth back at the hotel.”

  He looked straight at her. “The government always forgets something. What about Annapolis?”

  There was still the uneasy look. “I tried that as well.”

  “How much do you remember about the top-secret files?”

  Her eyes refocused. “NR-seven-seven-one, box CBC fifteen, account two-eight-two-A, seven-six-forty-four. Almost everything. It was about the U dash one-one-one-three, a V-I-I-C slash forty-one German submarine.”

  Harry glanced at Shawki and saw that his friend’s mouth had fallen open. They had someone with a photographic memory on their hands, he thought to himself. Leaning back in his chair, he asked her to narrate everything that she’d read. There must have been an attack diagram of some sort, he said. Can you draw it for me?

  Lieutenant Commander Carl Newman, she explained, had taken off at dark from the Carrier Portus and found the Black Dragon with his plane’s radar. After dropping an illumination flare, he’d made a bombing run but had missed a little starboard, giving the sub the chance to make an emergency dive. Next, he’d dropped several acoustical buoys, found the submarine again, and lined up with the Navy’s newest weapon, a top-secret torpedo that homed in on propeller noise. Just minutes after he’d released the torpedo, he and his crewmen had heard an explosion, then afterward nothing but silence. On the following day, a destroyer had found a Nazi seaboot and an oil slick, evidence confirming the kill. The new Mark IV had done its job.

  The Navy had deliberately waited for the Dragon, having been tipped off about its navigation plan by Allied intelligence. Earlier in the war, the British had broken the German’s Enigma code and learned from Berlin’s radio messages where to find the submarine on its way to Argentina. The load manifest, the leprosy bacterium, everything had been discovered so the sub hadn’t stood a chance. Josef Mengele’s plan had been blown clear to hell, just as it deserved. Or had it? remarked Alexis. Evidently, the CIA and the Mossad didn’t think so.

  While she’d talked she’d taken pencil and paper and drawn a map, and Harry instantly recognized it for what it was—a procedure chart for the attack that Newman had made on the night of July 6, 1944, the last digits on the file she’d seen back at Langley, 7-6-44. The buoy markers, the turns the plane had made, compass headings, approximate scale, it was all there, and even some things he hadn’t expected to see. They might find the Dragon after all, he thought to himself, given some luck. “How can you remember these things so well,” he asked.

  “I have a good memory, especially for numbers.” She gave him a flat smile.

  “This uneven line that you’ve drawn, what is it?” he asked, wondering if he might already know.

  “It’s the shoreline.”

  He glanced at Shawki. “By this, the Dragon’s only about fifteen miles offshore. The problem is, though, we don’t know which country, Guinea-Bissau, Senegal, or Mauritania, none of which are safe. There’s never been a day when some military junta isn’t overrunning them at gunpoint, and some are even slave states yet.”

  “We’ve downloaded the information on Cape Verde,” replied Shawki. “They see lots of European tourists on the island of Sal, where we land, okay? It will be safe to leave the airplane there and we can hire a boat. West Africa is only four hundred miles away.”

  Only … Harry detested that word, since it so often preceded trouble. Frowning, he turned back to Alexis. “You talked about a new torpedo. Why did that stick in your mind?”

  “It was the first time it had sunk a submarine.” Then she lifted her head as if she had seen a flash of light. “The first time it sunk anything at all,” she murmured.

  “Search the major colleges on the east coast for military historians who specialize in submarine warfare. One will remember the Mark Four. If that doesn’t work, try all the defense contractors, since the Navy still uses the Mark series torpedo. I learned that when I was still in the Air Force. Someone must have the information we need.”

  Alexis flew at the computer, snapping its keys as if she were under its spell. With his head turned part way, Harry gestured to Shawki that they should leave, then led
the way to the cockpit where he took the pilot’s seat again. Joe looked curiously at both of them.

  “If Alexis can find where the Dragon went down,” said Harry while pointing at the instrument panel, “we can pull up that location on our Honeywell GPS and look at the map. It might tell us all about our neighbors.”

  “And if we need to be armed to the teeth,” said Joe with a wry smile.

  Then all three watched time drag by as the Gulfstream shot through the night. Sometimes they heard Alexis talking to herself, sometimes they heard her talking to others on the Webcam. Worrying they had lost touch with reality, they yo-yoed between skepticism and impatience. For three weeks, they had lived in a dangerous conundrum with things happening to them that would never otherwise happen to anyone. When would it all end? They wondered back and forth. Somehow, they had to get back on the right side of the mirror.

  All at once, the humming printer and Alexis’s big smile changed their mood. She ran forward and handed Harry a copy of a military dispatch dated July 7, 1944. He read the nomenclature, then its summary:

  (THIS IS TOP SECRET. NAVY (RDO WASHINGTON) INFO TO DATE) TBF AVENGER MADE VISUAL CONTACT WITH U-BOAT USING RADAR AND FLARE ILLUMINATION, THEN LAID SOUND BUOYS AT 12-16N AND 15-30W. DEPTH BOMB ATTACK MISSED STARBOARD SIDE. SECOND ATTACK LAUNCHED ON UNDERWATER SCREW NOISE WITH MARK IV. EXPLOSION AND BREAKING UP CONFIRMED FOUR MINUTES AFTER WEAPON DEPLOYMENT. NO SUBSEQUENT ACTIVITY NOTED.

  “Where did you find this?” he asked afterward, gazing at her for a second and then looking back at what he’d just read. This will get us really close. We can pretty much judge where the Dragon sank, combining this with what you drew earlier.” Next, he turned to the airplane’s avionics. “Let’s see what the GPS has to say, then we’ll print everything out.”