The Last Line

by Anthony Shaffer

  “The Iranian. Reyshahri.”

  “I think so.”

  “Have you looked for his name in the Cellmap data?”

  “Yeah. Haven’t found it. He probably has his phone account under an alias.”

  “You’re aware that ‘Shah Mat’ is Farsi,” Dominique said.

  He nodded. “It means ‘the king is dead’ or ‘the king is thwarted.’ It’s where chess gets the word ‘checkmate,’ which means the king can’t move, can’t escape, and the game is over.”

  “So are the Iranians behind the plot? A nuclear strike against the United States?”

  “Good question. It’s hard to see what they would get out of it, though. If we prove they launched an atomic attack against us—hell, we’d bomb them back to the Stone Age, as Curtis LeMay used to say. Maybe even retaliate with nuclear strikes of our own.

  “And what do they get out of it? Three to five kilotons isn’t enough to wipe out a city. It would do terrible damage, yeah, and could kill tens of thousands of people. But we’re talking about something a third the size of the Hiroshima device.”

  “Radioactive contamination,” Dominique suggested. “The center of the target cities might be unusable, uninhabitable, for decades.”

  “Maybe. It would hurt the economy, certainly, and our economy is hurting quite enough right now, thank you.”

  “I keep wondering about what Maria said about the nukes being like fireworks for the birth of a new nation.”

  “Aztlán,” Teller said, nodding. “I know. Me, too. I can see Mexico being behind that program. Hell, they’ve been agitating for an independent Hispanic Southwest for years now, and nuking Washington might give them the opportunity to try for a quick revolution. But Iran? Uh-uh. It just doesn’t make sense.”

  “Do you really think Mexico would attack us?”

  Teller shook his head. “Nah. They’re having enough trouble just staying intact as a country. They don’t want a war with us.”

  “The drug cartels?

  “They’re crazy … unpredictable,. Crazy enough to try to nuke the U.S.? I don’t see what they’d get out of it.”

  “So we’re faced with some imponderables,” Dominique observed. “The Mexican drug cartels want, what? A new country that they run, where drug smuggling is legal?”

  “Could be.”

  “While the Iranians are covertly involved … but the risk of being linked to a nuclear attack on the United States is just too damned big. And there’s no payoff for them, no reason to do it.”

  “Well, they don’t like us,” Teller suggested. “And they might think that if a couple of nukes can push us into social or economic chaos, it would keep us out of their hair. They’re heavily invested in Iraq and in Syria, and they want us well clear of what they see as their turf.” Teller frowned, thinking about that for a moment.

  “What?”

  “I’m not sure. But it almost makes sense. With us out of Iraq, the Iranians have been moving in big-time. Everyone knows it, though people in our government don’t like to admit it. Certainly, Iran is strong enough as the power behind the Iraqi presidency to block any policies or decisions the Iranians don’t like.

  “And Syria is enough of a mess now that the Iranians might decide to move in and prop up their puppets there—Hezbollah. That’s making Israel very nervous right now. It’s making Washington nervous, too, maybe nervous enough to intervene militarily.”

  “Would we really invade Syria?”

  “To stop Iran from gaining an empire that stretches from the Med to Afghanistan? An empire that borders Israel, our one solid ally in the region? Yeah. We might. But if the U.S. is tied down by what looks like a nuclear terror strike on a couple of our cities … infrastructure wrecked, government in a shambles, economy shot to hell … yeah…”

  “So now we know why the Iranians are involved,” Dominique said. “It’s a diversion to keep us from interfering with their plans for the Middle East.”

  “Maybe so. The thing is, it’s still such a long shot for Tehran. Incredibly dangerous for them, if we figure out that they’re behind it. I don’t think we know the whole story yet.”

  “Well, if we can find this Reyshahri character…”

  “Exactly. Him or Hamadi. That’s what I’m hoping for, anyway. I have a few questions for those guys.”

  “Unfortunately, you can’t threaten to send Reyshahri back to Mexico to make him talk.”

  “No. I’m still working on that part.”

  They were descending now, driving once again over solid ground as they passed between the flat green expanse of Terrapin Beach State Park to the left and the neatly ordered rows of sailboats and pleasure craft docked at the Chesapeake Bay Beach Club Marina on the right. Behind them, the sunset light was beginning to fade.

  “I still don’t understand how you plan to find the bad guys,” Dominique said after a while. “All we know is that the destination for one of those nukes is D.C.”

  “We know it pretty much has to come ashore on the Delmarva Peninsula,” Teller said. “Somewhere on the beach between the mouths of Delaware Bay and Chesapeake Bay, right? That narrows the search a lot.”

  “That’s still a hell of a long beach.”

  “But if we can spot a few blue dots gathered on the beach, like they’re waiting…”

  “Ah. A light dawns. But why do you think it will be tonight?”

  “Well, tonight or tomorrow. We don’t know exactly. But … well, top submerged speed for a Kilo is twenty knots, maybe a bit more. It’s about sixteen hundred nautical miles from Belize to the Delmarva Peninsula. We know they left early on the morning of the eighteenth. At twenty knots, the trip would have taken something like three and a third days. That puts them off the coast of Delaware around noon today.”

  “You don’t sound certain.”

  “I’m not sure they made the trip flat out, at twenty knots. Going that fast, they’re going to make noise, and our submarines and sonar nets might hear them coming. Not only that, but at more than about twelve knots, the water passing outside your hull makes so much noise you can’t use your own passive sonar. Makes you deaf to anything else in the water.”

  “So they might not be here yet.”

  “Today is the earliest they could possibly be here, if they decided to risk getting picked up by our sonar, yeah. If they chugged along at a nice, sedate twelve knots all the way from Belize, the trip will take five and a half days, which means they’ll arrive Wednesday. Two more days.”

  “Okay. How daring do you think they’re going to be? Twenty knots? Or twelve?”

  “I honestly don’t know. If the Iranians are running things, I expect they’ll take it slow and cautious. If the Mexican cartels are calling the shots, they might opt for quicker—which means a smaller window during which we could find them. They might have known we were hunting for them; they sure as hell knew once we raided Cerros. But even on the seventeenth, they knew we were interested in Escalante. Hell, de la Cruz put us onto Escalante in the first place, had us watching him. He knew we were here looking for the Zapoteca, and the nukes. I suspected he sidetracked us with Escalante, and passed the word to the Zapoteca and the Kilo crew that they needed to make a fast exit and a faster passage north.”

  “Makes sense. There was already a risk that we were going to intercept the nukes en route to the States. So even the Iranians would agree that a quick passage was better.”

  “Even if it meant we might hear them with our sonar nets?”

  “The more I think about that, the more I think it probably wouldn’t make that big a difference. Passive sonar picks up everything, and the eastern seaboard is pretty noisy. Lots of traffic. We’d need to know right where they are, pretty close, and use active sonar to find them—and that doesn’t depend on how noisy or how fast the target is. They might have decided it was worth the risk.”

  “So all we have to do is watch for blue icons on a hundred-and-thirty-mile stretch of beach.”

  “Unless the n
avy finds them,” Teller said. “I’m counting on an intercept at sea.”

  “You know of something to up the odds of spotting the Kilo?”

  “Let’s just say I’ve managed to introduce a competitive element to the hunt.”

  KILO CLASS SUBMARINE

  15 NAUTICAL MILES OFF BETHANY BEACH

  DELAWARE

  2125 HOURS, EDT

  The ping seemed to come in from all sides of the submarine at once, a sharp, ringing chirp that every submariner knew and feared: They’ve found us!

  “Sonar!” Basargin snapped. “Where did that come from?”

  “Bearing zero-six-five, Captain,” the sonar officer replied. “Range uncertain. It sounded like a convergence zone bounce, however.”

  So they still had time. Not much … but enough, possibly, to complete the mission.

  Turning, he looked at the two passengers. “Time to move,” he said. “And quickly. There is going to be a slight change in plans.”

  USS PITTSBURGH

  72 NAUTICAL MILES NORTHEAST OF BETHANY BEACH

  2125 HOURS, EDT

  “Bridge, sonar! Submerged contact, bearing two-four-five! First convergence zone, range seventy to seventy-five nautical miles!”

  Gotcha, Garret thought, grinning.

  Finding a target using sonar was not as straightforward as sending out a ping and listening for the return echo. Sound traveling underwater can behave in strange ways, depending on depth, salinity, and water temperature.

  In particular, sound waves can be focused in much the same way that a lens focuses light, allowing active sonar to probe much farther than might otherwise be the case. Convergence zones, or CZs, are concentric rings of focus surrounding the transmitting submarine from which echoes can be received across much longer distances than might otherwise be possible. Each ring tends to be narrow—only about 5 nautical miles wide—and the CZs are spaced out as nested circles about 30 to 35 nautical miles apart. If the first zone was at a range 35 nautical miles from the transmitter, the second would be at 70 miles, the third at 105.

  Garret had been fishing for the Kilo. As the Pittsburgh moved slowly toward the coast of the Delmarva Peninsula, she periodically sent out a single sonar pulse and listened for a return. The convergence zone was so narrow that the sonar crew had to send one pulse with every four or five nautical miles traveled, attempting to catch the target just as it entered the CZ’s focus.

  After several hours, the tactic had paid off; an underwater target had just been picked up two rings out. It might be an American submarine—but that was extremely unlikely. The next nearest boat searching for the Kilo was the Columbus, SSN-762, and she should now be some ninety miles to the south. Fifty miles southwest of the Columbus was an older L.A. boat, the Norfolk. No other submarines were supposed to be in this area.

  “Designating target as Sierra One,” the sonar operator announced.

  “Paint him again. See if he’s moving.”

  “Aye, sir.” A pause. “Target Sierra One is moving, but slowly. Course two-seven-one, speed three to four knots. Sir, he’s only about fifteen miles off the beach.”

  “That’s our playmate,” Garret said. “Helm, come to course two-four-five, ahead full.”

  While the official top speed for Los Angeles class attack subs was twenty knots underwater, they typically could hit thirty to thirty-three knots or a bit more.

  It would take them two hours to get into range of the target.

  TELLER

  OCEAN CITY, MARYLAND

  2131 HOURS, EDT

  They’d pulled into a parking place on Caroline Street, just off the boardwalk. That space was a lucky find. The city was jam-packed with tourists.

  Ocean City had started off as a small and secluded resort and fishing town on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, but the opening of the Bay Bridge decades before had provided an easy route from the population centers of D.C. and Baltimore, and the place had quickly grown to become one of the largest vacation spots on the East Coast. The city’s native population stood at something just under 8,000, but during the peak summer months the influx of tourists could push that number to well over 340,000.

  Late April was early for the summer crowd, but Ocean City was still bustling well after dark. The boardwalk was ablaze with light, as were the streets and storefronts, shops, arcades, and motels inland, and milling crowds surged along every sidewalk. For the past several years, many seasonal businesses—bars, hotels, amusement parks, and the like—had begun opening on St. Patrick’s Day instead of the more traditional Memorial Day in order to push the season just a little earlier.

  “I wasn’t expecting crowds like this,” Dominique said, peering over the steering wheel through the car’s front windshield. A bar called the Purple Moose was busy enough to do justice to Times Square.

  “Neither was I,” Teller said. “It’s a little late for spring break.”

  “Are there any contacts here?”

  Teller had his laptop open in front of him, displaying a map of the beach area from Virginia Beach to Cape May.

  “Lots,” he replied with glum frustration. “With this many people, I guess the dealers are out in force.”

  “If it’s this crowded now,” Dominique said, “what’s it like in July?”

  “Worse,” Teller replied. “Much, much worse. I was here once a few years ago, and the traffic was backed up halfway to Salisbury.” That was the largest city on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, about thirty miles inland.

  “So what do we do?”

  Teller studied the map for a moment more, zooming in to focus just on the stretch of beach from Ocean City to the Delaware border.

  “We need,” he decided, “to get away from the crowds. Our Iranian friend is going to want privacy, and he sure as hell isn’t going to find it here.”

  Dominique turned the key, gunning the car to life. “Okay. Which way?”

  Teller considered this. South, the way was blocked by the Ocean City inlet through the barrier island on which the city was built. Beyond that, the beaches were largely deserted; that was Assateague Island, most of which was taken up by a state park in the north and the Assateague Island National Seashore to the south.

  “Assateague Island?” Dominique asked, leaning over to look at the screen. “Long white beaches and herds of wild ponies.”

  “Maybe,” Teller said. Then he shook his head. “No. This early in the season the beaches might well be deserted, but Assateague has only one point of access—here, the Verrazano Bridge.”

  “That’s in New York City.”

  “Different Verrazano Bridge. If I were trying to smuggle a nuke ashore, I think I’d prefer to have several routes, so I didn’t get trapped on the beach.”

  “So … north?”

  He nodded as he closed the laptop. “North.”

  Chapter Twenty

  REYSHAHRI

  INDIAN RIVER INLET, DELAWARE

  2215 HOURS, EDT

  21 APRIL

  Captain Saeed Reyshahri sat behind the wheel of the Dodge Avenger they’d rented at Reagan International, looking out into the ocean’s blackness. Fereidun Moslehi sat in the passenger seat, a set of French UGO low-light optics strapped to his face. Available commercially from Thales Optronique, the day/night unit included a second-generation image-intensifier tube that allowed 4X magnification under extreme low-light conditions. For the past couple of hours, they’d been taking turns with the unit, swapping it back and forth as they studied the night-shrouded ocean.

  “I am growing tired of this,” Moslehi said. “How much longer?”

  Reyshahri looked at the luminous face of his watch. “Three more hours,” he said. “Assuming they get here tonight.”

  There was, in fact, no telling whether the submarine would reach this beach today, tomorrow, or even the next several days after that. There were so many variables—the Russian captain had promised to make the passage from Belize as swiftly as possible, but if he’d encountered American naval elements
along the way and been forced to reduce his speed, or even lie in wait to avoid being heard, he could be several days late.

  The plan did allow for that possibility. According to their orders, Reyshahri and Moslehi were to drive down onto this stretch of beach each night for five nights and watch between the hours of 2100 and 0200, waiting for the expected signal.

  “I hate the waiting,” Moslehi said.

  “As the Americans say,” Reyshahri replied, “it goes with the territory. The operations plan is a complex one. The planners could not anticipate every possibility.”

  “There are other ways this could have been done. Faster, more certain ways.”

  “More risky ways.”

  Operation Shah Mat had been designed to allow for failure or mischance at every step along the way, every step except this one—arguably the most important. He and other operatives had allowed themselves to be smuggled across the line between Mexico and the United States, knowing that if some of those operators were intercepted, others would succeed. The freighter Zapoteca had been hired from the Mexican drug cartel that owned it through multiple false fronts, to avoid any connection with Iran, and false leads had been planted so that if the nuclear weapons were intercepted, blame would naturally fall on the Sunni heretics—especially al Qaeda. There were even different possible targets, a long list of them, any of which would work as a place where a small nuclear weapon could be detonated with great effect. The agents who actually deployed the weapons had been given a great deal of latitude in the placement; if one target proved to be blocked or otherwise unusable, the agents themselves could decide on an alternative.

  The one deadly weak link in the plan was here, where the Iranian agents on land had to meet with the submarine and receive the weapons. This was where the Russian submarine was most vulnerable, most likely to be detected. If American intelligence had learned of the plan, this was where they might track the Iranian agents, to this beach, to catch them and the weapons together.