The Last Line

by Anthony Shaffer

  Reyshahri looked away from the ocean, studying the night. South, perhaps a kilometer away, a point of light flickered against darkness—American civilians enjoying a bonfire on the beach. Beyond that, on the horizon, light glowed from beach houses and private homes, and from the streetlights and businesses of a town called Bethany Beach.

  There was no sign at all of American surveillance or a military presence.

  Of course, American intelligence was very good at using technologies that at times seemed downright magical. Their satellites, for instance, could easily pick out this car sitting on the sand just above the high-water mark from hundreds of kilometers up, might even be able to photograph his license plate.

  The question was whether the American intelligence analysts knew that this one vehicle out of millions offered a potential threat.

  In truth, Reyshahri was more concerned about those he was forced to work with on this operation. The Mexican drug lords, especially, could not be trusted. They were greedy, and they were mindlessly vicious in a way that appalled Reyshahri, with a lust both for blood and for drama that could easily jeopardize a mission that depended on invisibility to remain off the enemy’s radar. As for the Aztlanistas, the gangs and the political extremist groups seeking independence for U.S. states in the southwest—their passions made them careless, and their outspokenness made them targets for government surveillance.

  Even the man sitting here next to him, in Reyshahri’s opinion, was a weak link. Moslehi, code name Kawrd, was a member of Quds Force rather than VEVAK, the regular Iranian secret service. Quds Force was … less than dependable. They certainly were very good at what they did; they were members of an elite group within Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guard, subject to iron discipline and superb training—but that also meant they were motivated by the passions of their ideology. Quds Force was designed to export the Iranian revolution to other nations, to Iraq, Lebanon, Afghanistan, and Yemen in particular. Their ideological intensity could make them blind sometimes, blind especially to their own weaknesses.

  That made a professional intelligence operative like Reyshahri as nervous as did the smugglers of drugs and people across the U.S.-Mexican border.

  A case in point was the recent purported attempt by Quds to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to the United States. More than anything else, that had been a rather clumsy effort by the American government to accuse Iran and damage Tehran’s relationship with various of her allies. However, an overeager operative with a connection to Quds Force had allowed himself to be sucked into an American sting operation and given the Americans the ammunition they’d needed. Tehran had been quite busy after that trying to repair the damage to the government’s global image.

  VEVAK would not have allowed itself to be so easily deceived.

  “It’s about time for me to take the night goggles for a while,” he told Moslehi.

  “Good. My eyes are … wait.”

  “What?”

  “The signal! I see it! Two shorts … a long … and repeating!”

  “Let me see.”

  He accepted the goggles from Moslehi and pressed them against his face. Looking in the indicated direction. He scanned the horizon slowly … there! A single tiny light winked against the horizon. Short-short-long. Short-short-long …

  Once he knew where to look, he lowered the goggles and saw the light winking without magnification.

  “That’s it,” he said. Handing the NVDs back to Moslehi, he turned the key and started the car. Reaching down, he turned the car’s headlights on, repeating the signal: Short-short-long. Short-short-long. “Very well, my friend,” Reyshahri said. “It won’t be long now.”

  KILO CLASS SUBMARINE

  3 NAUTICAL MILES OFF INDIAN RIVER INLET

  DELAWARE

  2218 HOURS, DST

  The Kilo submarine surfaced gently, water cascading off the rounded surface of its hull. Captain Second Rank Besargin emerged from the hatch in the vessel’s long, low sail moments later, using binoculars to scan the coast to the west. That fire on the beach just to the south—that could be trouble. Swinging slightly to the right, he studied the stretch of beach where he’d seen the signal moments ago through the periscope.

  It was too dark. He picked up the intercom handset. “Sail, Bridge,” he said. “Flash ‘surfaced’ recognition signal.”

  High above him, on one of the periscope masts, a light flashed, using a different code this time: Short-long-long-short. Not the Morse Code U for utets’ya, which meant being enclosed or cooped up, but P for pover’ii, which meant surface. A moment later, the reply came—a set of automobile headlights repeating the code: Short-long-long-short. Short-long-long-short.

  “Break out the raft,” Besargin ordered. “And the cargo. Quickly! The American submarine will be on us soon!”

  Men began spilling out of the forward deck hatch below him.

  TELLER

  FENWICK ISLAND, DELAWARE

  2242 HOURS, EDT

  They’d driven ten miles north along the Coast Highway, Route 1, entering the state of Delaware from the south and passing through a resort town called Fenwick Island. Just to the north, the beachfront homes and resorts tapered off, and Dominique had pulled off onto a dirt track that gave access down through the dunes to a deserted stretch of beach.

  This, Teller had thought, was more like it—an empty expanse with no nearby houses or signs of habitation, though there were some condominiums on the west side of the highway, well back from the beach and more or less screened from the waterline by dunes and lines of brush and small trees. The barrier island here was quite narrow; they were sandwiched in between the Atlantic and Little Assawoman Bay, which meant that if the smugglers were spotted here they’d be more or less trapped. The only way across to the mainland here was Route 54, two miles to the south. Three miles north, past Fenwick Island State Park, was the town of South Bethany—more motels, more resorts, more beach houses … but more choices for someone trying to find alternate routes away from the coast.

  He’d booted up the laptop again and was studying the constellation of blue Cellmap dots showing from South Bethany up to Bethany Beach. He picked one more or less at random, an isolated icon on the Bethany Beach boardwalk, and opened a program that let him listen in, using the target cell phone as a bug. Illegal as hell, but he was running out of ideas.

  It took a moment to make the connection. His laptop was using a mobile hotspot to provide him with Wi-fi service, linking him by satellite to the larger computers back at Langley. Then his laptop’s speaker hissed, and he and Dominique were listening in on a conversation perhaps five miles north of their parking spot.

  “Yeah … what the dillio, dude?”

  “Jes’ coolin’, m’man. What can I do ya for?”

  “The usual, man. Eight-ball o’ white.”

  “Y’got four yards?”

  “Four! Shoo, you shittin’ me? That stuff is taxed!”

  “Hey, watch the six o’clock, man. Times is tough, nah-mean?”

  “All I got is a coupla Cs, man.”

  “Shit. That there’ll buy ya a teener, no more.”

  Teller switched the link off. A drug deal, going down on the boardwalk. He’d been able to hear something like carnival music in the background, mingled with crowd sounds and ocean surf. Were such deals really that public? Apparently so. He’d always imagined such goings-on taking place in dark alleys or deserted buildings, not in the middle of a crowd. Damn it, where were the cops?

  He knew the answer to that one, though. Local police forces were stretched to the breaking point. That street dealer probably had some friends spotting for him, to let him know when a cop was approaching.

  The flood of drugs coming north into the States and the lure of quick and easy money would only put more stress on the system.

  Where, Teller wondered, was the breaking point?

  Briefly, he considered giving the Bethany Beach police department a call—but they wouldn’t be able to act on w
hat he said, not on an illegal wiretap.

  His cell phone buzzed. It was Procario.

  “Yo,” he said.

  “You have Cellmap running?”

  “Yup.”

  “Take a look off the beach just south of Indian River.”

  “Off the beach?”

  “Just do it.”

  Teller thumbed the map view on his laptop, moving to the north. At first, he didn’t see anything, but when he zoomed back out a bit, two blue dots appeared out in the ocean, tucked in close alongside each other perhaps half a nautical mile offshore. The Indian River Inlet was just under ten miles north of where they were parked now.

  Curious. There were no blue dots anywhere along that stretch of beach. What the hell were two people with Cellmapped phones doing half a mile out in the water? It was possible, he thought, that there was a party boat out there—but his first thought had been that someone might be coming ashore.

  They needed to get up there now.

  “I see them,” he said, gesturing to Dominique to start the car, to get going, and fast. “Did you get in touch with the McDee earlier?”

  “I did.”

  “Better let her know about this contact. And … it might be a good idea to have the Activity in on this.”

  “Way ahead of you, buddy.”

  “We’re headed for the beach south of Indian River Inlet now.”

  “Right. I’ll let you know if I hear anything new.”

  “The McDee?” Dominique asked, one eyebrow arched.

  “Colonel Audrey MacDonald,” Teller replied. “A woman whose career is devoted to making my life a living hell. Fortunately, like me, she doesn’t care for Klingons.”

  “Whoa there, cowboy. You’re going way over my head.”

  He sighed. “Colonel MacDonald is my boss at INSCOM. I report to her—at least I do when I’m not playing with your friends at the Company.”

  “Klingons?”

  “The CIA isn’t real popular with most of the other intelligence agencies, okay? We call it the ‘evil empire.’ Or the ‘Klingon Empire.’”

  “Ah.”

  “No offense.”

  “I may forgive you. And why is it a good thing that Colonel MacDonald doesn’t like us?”

  “Larson, Wentworth, Vanderkamp—they seem to have convinced themselves that there’s no danger of those nukes coming ashore from the sub.”

  “Yes…”

  “So I told Frank to give MacDonald a call. She likes him, I think. If I’d called her, she wouldn’t have listened. But Frank told her that the CIA was screwing the pooch on this one, and that it gave INSCOM a clear field.”

  “For what?”

  “To try to find that sub.”

  “I see. Did it occur to you that the Agency might still be on top of it? They just wanted us to stand down, so we were out of the way?”

  “That’s stupid.”

  “No more stupid than having different agencies competing with each other, like it’s some kind of game. What will you do next—drag in the FBI? Homeland Security? How about the NSA?”

  “If I have to, yeah. It is a game. It just happens to have some extremely serious consequences if we lose.”

  “It doesn’t work that way, Chris. INSCOM is supposed to provide military intelligence to the army and DoD. The CIA provides foreign civilian and political intelligence to the president. The FBI handles domestic security. You’re going to have different agencies tripping over one another, and why? Because you want INSCOM to get the credit?”

  “Fuck the credit. You know as well as I do that things aren’t all clean and nice and neat in the real world. We have a direct threat to the United States here, and I really don’t give a damn how we stop it, okay? U.S. intelligence—and by that I mean all of the intelligence services, all sixteen of them—they … we are this country’s last line of defense before someone, the military or the president or Congress, has to take direct action.”

  “Ouch,” Dominique said, reacting to Teller’s anger. “I think I hit a hot button, didn’t I?”

  “I dunno. Maybe.” Teller hesitated, wondering how much to share. “I had a good friend, a mentor. DIA, army intelligence. Back in 2000, he was part of a secret data-mining project called Able Danger, looking at intelligence intercepts right here in the United States. He actually uncovered two of the three terrorist cells operating in Virginia—the very same cells that went on to launch the 9/11 attacks, and he did so a whole year before the government will admit that those tangos were in the country, even now. But the DIA refused to share that intel with the FBI because of … legal issues. What was the army doing eavesdropping on people inside America’s borders? He also briefed the DCI personally three times. Nothing was done, nothing—and three thousand Americans died.”

  “My God.”

  “When the finger pointing started afterward, U.S. intelligence was blamed. It wasn’t intelligence. It was the sheer glacial stupidity of bureaucratic turf-holding and empire-building and ass-covering. That last line of defense I mentioned just doesn’t work when the people who put it there don’t pay attention.”

  “And your friend?”

  “Forced to take early retirement. He was … inconvenient.” Teller laughed, a bitter sound. “They called him a cowboy.”

  “So … you really don’t care who catches the bad guys.”

  “Of course not. If the Klingons want the glory, they’re welcome. If they want to pretend everything is fine so they can blame someone else, that’s fine, too. Just so someone stops the Tangos from setting off those nukes.”

  “Which explains why you’re freelancing.” The term meant that Teller was working for himself now, not for one of the agencies.

  “Hah. I wouldn’t have put it that way, but hey, if no one else will, someone has to do it.”

  “And you could go to prison for it.”

  Teller had given that a lot of thought. When he’d walked out on Wentworth and the others back at CIA headquarters, he was no longer on loan to the CIA, nor was he working again under the aegis of INSCOM. He was on his own, a captain in the U.S. Army, with no particular authority of his own.

  Even as just an army captain, though, he was still under oath. To support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic …

  There was his personal credo as well. What’s the next right thing to do?

  “Then I go to prison,” he said. “But I figure that won’t happen.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because we’re going to catch those bastards. I just hope MacDonald was able to redeploy some subs offshore.”

  “Subs?”

  “The absolute best way to catch a sub is with another sub,” Teller told her. “I figured MacDonald would talk directly to either COMSUBLANT or the Joint Chiefs and scramble some L.A. boats to the area.” He gave Dominique a sidelong look. “So how about you?”

  “What about me?”

  “I asked you to drive out here with me. You were taken off the op, too. Why’d you say yes?”

  “Oh, Jesus, Chris, someone has to look out for you.”

  REYSHAHRI

  INDIAN RIVER INLET, DELAWARE

  2246 HOURS, EDT

  Reyshahri stepped out of the car and walked down to the high-tide line. A strong offshore breeze whipped at the jacket he was wearing and tasted of salt.

  He turned his binoculars toward the bonfire down the beach. From here, he could make out eight or ten people—probably teenagers—huddled around the fire. The breeze brought snatches of shouts and laughter across the sand.

  All of them were turned inward, facing the fire—and that meant their night vision was ruined. They would not be able to see a raft approaching the beach through the surf.

  Swinging the binoculars back out to sea, he studied the night, the pounding surf. There were no more signals from the submarine now. The plan had called for them to submerge right out from under the raft once it was loaded. Mohamed Hamadi would bring
the first package ashore. The second, with the Mexican, Hector Gallardo, would head for a second rendezvous on a beach along the southern coast of Long Island.

  At least … that was the plan. Reyshahri knew better, though, than to expect any given plan to go right. There was always something …

  He heard the drone of a small motor above the hiss and crash of the half-meter surf. Reaching into a jacket pocket, he pulled out a flashlight, aimed it out to sea, and flicked the switch on … off … on … off …

  Moslehi joined him. “I see them.” He pointed. “There.”

  He handed Reyshahri the NVDs. He put them on, and the black ocean shifted to lighter shades of gray beneath a silver-gray sky. Yes … there. He could see the raft a hundred meters out, moving toward the shore with the gentle but irresistible movement of the swell.

  With two figures aboard.

  Minutes passed, and the raft drew closer, guided in by Reyshahri’s flashlight. The craft was a commercial Zodiac, a rigid-hull rubber boat with a 90-horsepower outboard motor for propulsion. As the boat lifted and surged toward the beach with the tumble of a final wave, Reyshahri and Moslehi splashed out into the water a few meters, grabbed hold of the safety line around the boat’s gunwales, and helped haul it up onto the beach.

  “Welcome to the United States,” Reyshahri said in Farsi as the two men aboard clambered out and helped drag the boat across the sand.

  “The Great Satan, you mean,” one replied in the same language. “Sunrise.”

  “Eagle,” Reyshahri said. Sign and countersign.

  “I am Hamadi.”

  “Sarvan Reyshahri. This is Moslehi.” He looked into the Zodiac. “I take it our plans have changed.”

  Hamadi nodded. “They have. An American submarine picked us up an hour or so ago. The submarine’s captain did not want to be trapped against the coast.”

  “We follow the backup plan, then,” Reyshahri said, nodding. “Let’s get these into the vehicle.”

  An American submarine just off the coast. What did that mean? A chance encounter? That was possible. The American navy had major port and base facilities at Norfolk and Portsmouth, less than 250 kilometers to the southwest of this beach.