The Last Line

by Anthony Shaffer

  “Do they know we’re on their trail?” Dominique asked. “That might make a difference.”

  “Hard to know for sure, but … oh, Christ.”

  “What?”

  “I just thought of something. Why would the two Tangos off the sub ditch their phones after they came ashore?”

  “Someone waiting for them on the shore told them to? Otherwise they would have tossed them into the water.”

  “That’s the only explanation that makes sense. And that means that either the Tango on the beach is super cautious … but not cautious enough to get rid of the phones earlier on—”

  “Or that he knew the cell phones have been compromised,” Dominique said. “Okay. We’ll assume they know about the phones.”

  “Not only that. There’s another giveaway.”

  “What?”

  “Just a second.” He pulled out his cell phone and thumbed the speed dial for Procario’s number. “Frank?”

  “Right here,” Procario’s voice said.

  “When you alerted people—did that include the navy?”

  “MacDonald called her contacts at Norfolk, yeah. And we just had word an hour and a half ago that one of our subs spotted a submerged contact off Indian River.”

  “Okay. Before they put that Zodiac ashore? Or after?”

  “Can’t say for sure, but it’s a good bet that it was before.”

  “And we can’t rule out the possibility of ship-to-shore communications,” Teller said. “Okay, that tells me what I need to know.”

  “You have an idea, Chris?”

  “I think so. If this Reyshahri character knows we spotted that sub offshore, he knows we must be looking for him.”

  “Okay…”

  “Which means he’s not going to walk into a box-trap like the Bay Bridge. I suggest you concentrate your search to the Baltimore–D.C. Corridor.”

  “I’ll pass that along. We have NEST assets deploying there already.”

  “Good. One more thing?”

  “Shoot.”

  “Think one of the ZBAs out of Edwards could swing by and pick us up?”

  “I’ll see what they can do. Where are you?”

  “Westbound on Route 50—ten miles outside of Ocean City. Maybe twenty miles east of Salisbury.”

  “Okay. I’ll get back to you.”

  “What,” Dominique asked as he switched off the phone, “is a ZBA?”

  “Z Backscatter Aircraft. Goes along with Z Backscatter Van, a ZBV. A mobile screening system. Uses backscatter X-ray imaging to see inside cars and trucks, and all it needs to do is drive past—or fly past in the case of a helicopter.”

  “Backscatter X-rays. Like the X-ray units at airports now? Instant voyeur?”

  “Yup. It’s a way to unobtrusively find all sorts of contraband—illegal immigrants inside a van, say, or plastic explosives, or drugs. And the NEST units are outfitted with something called RTD—Radioactive Threat Detection. Picks up low-level gamma radiation or neutrons at a distance, so it can detect nuclear weapons.”

  “I had no idea they could do that. I thought you couldn’t separate radiation from a man-made source from natural background noise.”

  “Actually, we’ve been able to distinguish the two since, oh, the late seventies or so. We haven’t advertised it, because we don’t want the bad guys to know what’s possible. On the other hand, letting them know means they’re not as likely to try smuggling WMDs into the country. So lots of it’s not classified—but we don’t talk much about it, either.”

  “If that technology means driving down a city street and performing strip searches on people who don’t even know it’s happening—maybe you don’t want to talk about it.”

  Teller grinned. “There is that. Like the show you put on for me and Frank down in Mexico. Really nice, by the way.”

  “Thank you. Bastard.”

  “Hey, most espionage is surveillance, right? Some surveils are just a little more personal than others.”

  “What kind of range are we talking about?”

  “Something like fifteen hundred feet. Used to be you had to be pretty close—say a hundred yards—to detect low-level radiation. The real problem is time. It takes fifteen seconds, more or less, to scan one vehicle. Four a minute—two hundred and forty an hour. But we’re going to have thousands of cars to examine.”

  “So … where has it gone?” Dominique asked after a moment. She sounded sad.

  “Where’s what gone?”

  “The Fourth Amendment, of course. The one that says you need a warrant to conduct a search, and that people have a right to be secure against unreasonable searches of their homes, papers, their personal stuff—and their own persons.”

  “I’ve been wondering about that for a long time,” Teller admitted. He was thinking again about the damnable NDAA of 2012. That American lawmakers would even think about trampling on the rights of citizens so completely showed how seriously broken the system was.

  Teller had always considered himself to be a firm constitutionalist. His oath was to the Constitution, and the ideals behind it. Against all enemies, foreign and domestic …

  Then again, if protecting the citizens’ right to privacy meant accepting wholesale death and devastation …

  “Damn it, Jackie, what’s worse?” he continued. “Using high-tech to peek inside of people’s cars and trucks, or into their homes or through their clothing? Or watching a mininuke vaporize downtown Washington?”

  “I know, I know. But do you remember what Ben Franklin had to say about that?”

  “‘Those who sacrifice liberty for safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.’ That one?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s not what Franklin actually said—but it sounds like him. I don’t know, though.”

  “What?”

  “Franklin was a notorious dirty old man. Maybe he would have enjoyed cruising down the streets of downtown Philadelphia in a ZBV, looking through all those layers of clothing women wore back then.”

  “I think you’ve been hanging out with too many exotic dancers,” Dominique said, angry. “Some of us prefer to keep a little mystery in our lives. Or maybe a bit of dignity.”

  “And some of us,” Teller added, “don’t want to see our cities destroyed, even if it means conducting illegal strip searches.”

  “I know. I’d just be happier if I knew the Peeping Tom bit is strictly line of duty, for emergencies only, and not just one more facet of bureaucratic thuggery, bullying, or nanny-state tyranny.”

  “If you figure out how to guarantee all of that,” Teller said, “you let the rest of us mortals know how to do it, okay?”

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  REYSHAHRI

  EAST OF NEWARK, NEW JERSEY

  0055 HOURS, EDT

  22 APRIL

  “No,” Reyshahri said, studying a roadmap with the help of a penlight. “We do not want the turnpike.”

  “But that’s Route 95 South,” Moslehi protested. He was at the wheel. “It will take us straight into Washington!”

  “It will also take us through toll booths,” Reyshahri replied. “Places where they might be checking every vehicle, looking for us.”

  “We don’t know that,” Hector Gallardo, the Mexican, said from the backseat. He spoke English, since he didn’t speak either Arabic or Farsi, and Reyshahri didn’t speak Spanish. “You are too cautious, Captain.”

  “We will not take unnecessary risks,” Reyshahri replied. “We are also going to avoid the toll bridges across the Susquehanna River—and for the same reason.”

  “How do we get across, then?” Hamadi asked.

  “The Conowingo Dam,” Reyshahri said, still studying the map. “We’ll take the exit for Route 7, then Route 2. Once we’re through Newark, we’ll take 273 West … something called Telegraph Road. That will put us on Route 1 and take us across the river at Conowingo.”

  “And that will be … what? Another forty, fifty kilometers to Baltimore?” Hamadi asked. />
  “I agree that we are being too cautious,” Moslehi said. “Small, winding country roads through the middle of nowhere! This will take us all night!”

  “Patience,” Reyshahri said, looking out the window. They were passing one of the enormous shopping malls so beloved by the Americans, and deserted at this late hour. “The Americans must suspect we are here—and they likely know why. We will not make it so easy for them to find us.”

  “The Americans are not going to stop every vehicle to look for us,” Moslehi said.

  “I agree,” Gallardo said. “You act as though the American intelligence agencies possess magic.”

  “We don’t know what American intelligence can do,” Reyshahri said. “It’s best not to be surprised, yes?”

  “You are in command,” Moslehi replied. He did not sound happy about it, however.

  “Yes,” Reyshahri said. “I am in command.”

  Although he wished otherwise.

  USS PITTSBURGH

  OFF CAPE MAY

  0115 HOURS, EDT

  “Bridge! Sonar! Contact, Sierra One, bearing three-zero-four, range ten thousand yards!”

  “Sonar, this is the captain. Keep banging him! I don’t want him to twitch without us knowing about it!”

  “Aye, Captain. He appears to be on a heading of zero-eight-zero, eight knots. Looks like he’s trying to reach deep water.”

  “Where is he relative to the line?”

  “Contact is still inside the twelve-mile limit, Captain. I would guess three miles.”

  Garret exchanged a glance with Commander Malone, his exec. “I think the son of a bitch has run out of running room.” He raised the intercom handset again. “Radio shack, bridge. Get off a message to COMSUBLANT. ‘Submerged contact, probable Kilo, confirmed and in range. Please advise.’ And give them our position.”

  “Aye, aye, sir.”

  It had taken several hours to run the bastard down. The Pittsburgh had made several quick dashes toward the coast, punctuated by sudden stops while the sub’s active sonar had blasted through the water ahead, “banging” in submariner’s slang. Finally, they’d closed the range until they were no longer hearing echoes coming back from convergence zones thirty-five or seventy miles ahead. The contact was just under five nautical miles away now—and Cape May was at his back. He wasn’t going to be able to reach deep water without running past Pittsburgh.

  Normally in this sort of situation, Pittsburgh would have moved over to the attack, but this was not exactly a normal situation. Either the Kilo was Russian or it belonged to a Latin American country—Mexico or Venezuela—but no one seemed certain of the details. In either case, the contact was not overtly hostile, the United States was not at war with the submarine’s owner, and it seemed unlikely that Norfolk would tell him to blow the contact out of the water, even if he was well inside the twelve-mile limit.

  On the other hand, intelligence believed that the submarine’s operators were a major Latino drug cartel, and the last word he’d received from Norfolk had recommended that he use caution in his approach—that the contact might well be carrying nuclear weapons.

  That tidbit alone had given Garret reason to hesitate. Kilos were attack boats; they didn’t carry ballistic missiles. A Kilo class submarine running under the Russian flag might carry torpedoes with nuclear warheads, but if this boat was working for Venezuela or for a drug cartel, any onboard weapons would be strictly conventional.

  That suggested that if this Kilo was carrying a nuke, the weapon was something else—a suitcase nuke, perhaps, or a wired-in-the-basement do-it-yourself job.

  Which meant there were no guarantees if one of Pittsburgh’s torpedoes detonated on the target. Atlantic City was just thirty miles to the northeast. An underwater detonation here could drop radioactive rain across parts of the New Jersey coast and kill thousands.

  “Bridge, radio shack,” a voice said from the overhead speaker. “Message from COMSUBLANT.”

  “Let’s hear it.”

  “Message reads ‘Use best judgment to force contact to surface.’ Signed Kellerman, vice admiral, COMSUBLANT.”

  “Very well.” Garret considered the order. Use best judgment was tossing the ball squarely back into his court, meaning that if he screwed up, it was his career on the line.

  Assuming, of course, that Pittsburgh and those aboard her survived the encounter.

  “Weps, this is the captain,” he said. “Status on tubes two and four.”

  “Captain, weapons officer. Tubes two and four have warshots loaded—Mark 48 ADCAP.”

  “Sonar, bridge. Range to target.”

  “Bridge, sonar. Target Sierra One now at ninety-five hundred yards.”

  “Fire control. Power on, tubes two and four.”

  “Power on, tubes two and four, aye, aye, Captain.”

  “Weps, I want a wire-guided detonation one hundred yards in front of the target. Do not, repeat, do not hit him. This is a warning shot only.”

  “Warning shot only, aye, aye, Captain.” A pause. “Weapons warm and ready to fire, Captain.”

  “Tube two. Make tube ready in all respects.” From this moment on, things would get noisy. The target certainly knew Pittsburgh was out here, thanks to the now constant sonar pinging.

  “Tube two is flooded, Captain. Outer door open.”

  “Firing point procedures.” Garret waited a beat. If he was wrong … “Match bearings and shoot!”

  Garret felt the lurch through the deck plating as the torpedo, weighing more than a ton and a half, slid from Tube Two.

  “Two fired electrically, Captain.” A pause. “Torpedo running hot and normal.”

  The Mark 48 ADCAP torpedo—the standard antiship weapon for all U.S. submarines—was wire guided, a crewman at the weapons station guiding the warshot by sending command signals down a slender wire unspooling behind the torpedo as it traveled through the water. Though the publicly stated speed of a Mark 48 was “in excess” of twenty-eight knots, the weapon’s actual top speed was closer to fifty-five knots.

  At a range of 9,500 yards, the warhead would reach the target in just under six minutes.

  KILO CLASS SUBMARINE

  OFF CAPE MAY

  0121 HOURS, EDT

  “Captain! Torpedo in the water!”

  “Where?”

  “Bearing two-six-four!”

  “Conn! Hard right rudder!”

  “Hard right rudder, Captain!”

  “Thirty degrees down planes! Put us on the bottom!”

  “Thirty degrees down plane, Captain!”

  Basargin felt the deck tilt sharply beneath his feet. They were still in relatively shallow water here—less than forty meters. The Americans set their torpedoes to detonate beneath the keel of a target vessel. It was just possible that the Russian submarine could slip deeply enough quickly enough that the incoming torpedo would strike the bottom.

  “Torpedo now passing in front of us, Captain! Range … about—”

  The detonation thundered through the submarine, slamming Basargin against the periscope housing and rocking the vessel savagely to starboard. A second shock followed as they kissed the bottom.

  “Are we still in one piece?”

  “That appears to have been a warning shot, Captain. A shot across our bows.”

  Basargin’s first loyalty was not to the men who’d hired the services of the boat, himself, and his crew. So far as he was concerned, this accursed mission had ended when he’d sent the Mexican and the Persian ashore.

  “Captain, radio room. We are receiving a message by transponder.”

  “What is it?”

  “Two words, sir, in Russian. ‘Surface now.’”

  “Mr. Shuvalov! Are we in international waters yet?”

  “It’s close, Captain. But probably another four … perhaps five kilometers.”

  He nodded. “They have us. Blow ballast, Mr. Khristenko. Take us up, if you please.”

  “Aye, Captain,” the diving officer replied. “
Surface the boat!”

  For an anxious moment, he feared the submarine was damaged, that it might not rise. Then the deck tilted, bow going up, and he heard the roar of ballast tanks being blown.

  TELLER

  EASTON, MARYLAND

  0135 HOURS, EDT

  The traffic had been backing up for an hour, becoming a sea of red brake lights stretching forward into the night. Outside of Easton, Maryland, Teller and Dominique finally had pulled off the road next to an open field. Minutes later, a CH-53E Super Stallion, the largest and heaviest helicopter in the U.S. military, had dropped out of the sky, spotlights glaring out of the darkness in a display that must have had other motorists thinking of UFOs and alien abductions.

  The huge aircraft touched down in the field, its seven-blade rotors still turning. Together, Teller and Dominique had left the car, running bent forward to avoid the still-turning blades. If not a UFO, Teller thought, it was at least a black helicopter—all black save for a serial number stenciled on the tail boom in gray. Pounding up the lowered rear ramp, the two entered the aircraft’s cavernous cargo deck, and in another moment they were airborne, flying north across that river of slowly moving vehicles.

  “Welcome aboard!” a marine crew chief greeted them, bellowing to be heard above the Super Stallion’s thunder. “You Dominique and Teller?”

  “Yeah!”

  “Good! If you weren’t I’d have to kill you and kick you out! Here, put these on!”

  He handed them helmets with built-in communications gear and noise-suppression headsets. Once hooked up to the intercom, it was easier to hear and talk.

  A second man greeted them forward. “I’m Major Walthers,” he said. “Welcome aboard NEST Two/Two. They said you had an idea for finding our target.”

  “I think so,” Teller told him. “We need to get up to the Baltimore–D.C. Corridor. And I need to access this.” He patted his laptop case.

  “We can do that. Or you can use our network.”

  Much of the huge cargo bay on the helicopter transport was walled off, providing space for computer workstations for two technicians and for the massive backscatter X-ray equipment. Walthers led them forward and into the control center, giving them what he called the fifty-cent tour.