Corsair of-6

by Clive Cussler

  A man sat cross-legged in the middle of the room. He wore crisp white robes and a black-and-white kaffiyeh around his head. He was studying a book by the dim light—the Koran, she suspected. He didn’t look up or acknowledge their presence.

  If ever there was a posed scene, this was it, Fiona thought. Had this been her office, she would have been at her desk, bent over an important-looking document with a pen in hand. She’d kept people waiting for up to thirty seconds, but this man didn’t look up for a full minute. His tactic of dominance was wasted on her.

  “Do you know who I am?” he asked, closing the Koran with reverence.

  “Ali Baba?” she said to goad him.

  “Are you to be my Scheherazade?”

  “Over my dead body.”

  “That isn’t my particular predilection, but I’m sure it can be arranged.”

  Fiona had no desire to let him pretend to be anything other than the monster he was. “No one knows your real name, but you go by Suleiman Al-Jama. Your stated goals are the destruction of Israel and the United States and the formation of an Islamic State stretching from Afghanistan to Morocco, with you as . . . Sultan?”

  “I’m not sure what title I’ll take,” Al-Jama said. “Sultan works, but it has decadent connotations, don’t you think? Harems, palace intrigues, and all that.”

  He rose to his feet in a quick fluid motion and got tea from a brass urn placed near the brazier. His motions were graceful but predatory in their swiftness. He poured himself a glass but didn’t offer any to Fiona.

  Now that he was standing, she could see he was nearly six feet tall, with broad shoulders and, judging by the thickness of his bare wrists, strongly built. She couldn’t see his features, and in the wavering light and through the burqa’s lace she could discern little of his eyes, other than the impression that they were deep-set and dark.

  “Your Jesus said, ‘Blessed are the peacemakers.’ Did you know he is a prophet in Islam? Not the last one, of course. That is Muhammad, peace be upon Him. But your ‘Savior’ is recognized as a great teacher.”

  “We both worship the God of Isaac and Abraham,” Fiona said.

  “But you do not believe in His final pronouncements to His last chosen Prophet, the holy words written through Muhammad and laid into the Koran.”

  “My faith begins and ends with a death and resurrection.”

  Al-Jama said nothing, but she could tell he had a stinging retort. He finally uttered, “Back to the quote. Do you think you are blessed?”

  “If I can bring about the end of violence, I think the work itself is what is blessed, not those who participate.”

  He nodded. “Well said. But why? Why do you desire peace?”

  “How can you ask that?” Despite her earlier reservations, she felt herself drawn into the conversation. She had expected a tirade on the evils of the West, not an intellectual Q-and-A session. It was obvious the self-styled Suleiman Al-Jama was well educated, so she was curious how he would justify his brand of mass murder. She’d listened to tapes of Bin Laden’s ramblings, read transcripts of detainees at Guantánamo, and watched dozens of martyrdom videos. She wanted to know how he differed, although she already knew that the difference, if any, had no meaning at all.

  Al-Jama said, “Peace equals stagnation, my esteemed Secretary. When man is at peace, his soul atrophies and his creative spirit is snuffed. It is only through conflict that we are truly the beings that Allah intended. War brings out bravery and sacrifice. What does peace bring us? Nothing.”

  “Peace brings us prosperity and happiness.”

  “Those are things of the flesh, not of the spirit. Your peace is about owning a better television set and fancier car.”

  “While your war brings suffering and despair,” Fiona countered.

  “Then you do understand. For these are things of the spirit, not the body. These are the things we are meant to feel. Not the comfort of a grand home but the experience of shared hardship. This is what brings us closer to Allah. Not your democracy, not your rock music, not your pornographic movies. They distract us from our true reason for existence. We serve no other purpose on earth than to subjugate ourselves to Allah’s will.”

  “Who knows what His will is?” she asked. “Who decided you know His intentions more than anyone else? The Koran forbids suicide and yet you sent a young man to intentionally crash a planeload of people into a mountainside.”

  “He died a martyr.”

  “No,” she said sharply. “You convinced some poor boy that he was dying a martyr and he would have his seventy-seven virgins in heaven, but don’t tell me for one instant you believe it. You are nothing more than a cheap thug trying to wrest power from others and exploiting the blind faith of a few to obtain your goals.”

  Suleiman Al-Jama clapped his hands together and gave a delighted laugh. He switched to English. “Bravo, Secretary Katamora. Bravo.”

  Though he couldn’t see it because of the burqa, a surprised look crossed Fiona’s face. The sudden shift in language and the conversation’s intensity momentarily confused her.

  “You seem to recognize that this has always been about power on the world stage. Centuries ago, England gained it using her superior Navy. The United States has it now because of her wealth and nuclear arsenal. What do the nations of the Middle East have but the willingness of some of their citizens to blow themselves up? A crude weapon, yes. But let me ask how much your country has spent on Homeland Security since a handful of men with hardware-store knives took down two of your largest buildings? A hundred billion? Five hundred billion?”

  The number was closer to a trillion, but Fiona said nothing. This wasn’t going as she had expected at all. She had thought Al-Jama would spout a bunch of corrupted passages from the Koran to explain why he’d done what he had, not expose himself as a man bent on dominance.

  “Before the attacks on the World Trade Center, one in five hundred thousand Muslims was willing to martyr himself. Since then, the number has doubled. That’s ten thousand men and women ready to blow themselves up in the jihad against the West. Do you really think you can stop ten thousand attacks once they are unleashed? People like that boy who flew the plane and Bin Laden in his cave in Pakistan may believe in the cause of jihad, Madame Secretary, but they are mere pawns, tools to be exploited and discarded. We have a near-unlimited pool of willing martyrs now, and soon we will begin to use them in coordinated attacks that will see the world’s boundaries redrawn in the way I have always envisioned.”

  He spoke not as a zealot but almost like a corporate president outlining growth projections for his company.

  “You don’t need to do this.” Fiona found herself pleading.

  “It’s too late to stop.” He pulled the kaffiyeh from down below his chin. Fiona had to will herself not to faint when she saw his face. “And your death will be the first strike.”

  FOURTEEN

  NO SOONER HAD LINC GOTTEN BEHIND THE WHEEL OF THE Pig and fired the engine than Mark Murphy opened the truck’s voice-activated communications system.

  “Call Max.”

  The ringing of a telephone sounded inside the off-road vehicle. The Pig was so well built, they could barely hear the engine as Linc guided the truck out of its hiding place and pointed its blunt snout toward the Tunisian border.

  A voice no one recognized answered the call. “Max’s Pizza. Is this for pickup or delivery?”

  “Be something if they would deliver,” Linc said. “I could go for a slice.”

  “Sorry. Wrong number.” Mark cut the connection and tried again. “Call Max Hanley.”

  This time Max’s voice muttered hello when the phone was answered.

  “Max, it’s Mark Murphy. I’m in the Pig with Linda and Linc.”

  “Glad you finally called,” Max said. “The stuff ’s hit the fan since you went dark.”

  “I can imagine. Are you in the op center?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Have someone pull up the screen for the bi
o tracking chips.”

  “Just a second.” There was a moment’s pause. While they waited, Mark used the Pig’s computer to jack into the Oregon’s closed-circuit television system so the image of the futuristic control room popped up on his screen. Max was standing next to the communications station, watching over the duty officer’s shoulder.

  “That’s interesting,” Hanley muttered. “I have the three of you heading west at forty miles per hour, presumably in the Powered Investigator Ground, while the Chairman is going northeast at a hundred miles an hour. What happened, you guys get into an argument?”

  “Funny. Make sure you stay on him. We’re on our way to the Tunisian border. Juan’s with the people we’re certain brought down the Secretary’s plane. We don’t believe she’s dead.”

  “Did you say the plane was brought down?”

  “I did, and I don’t think Fiona Katamora was on it when it crashed.”

  “How the hell did they pull that off? Tell me in a second. You’d better hightail it out of there. Twenty minutes ago, the Libyans announced that they’ve located the wreckage, and their government has given permission for a team from our NTSB to examine it. They had been prestaged in Cairo and will be in Tripoli by noon, but I’m sure the Libyans will be swarming that area sooner.”

  “They’re not going to find anything,” Mark told him. “A team of men came in on a chopper to demolish the site and ruin any chance of a reconstruction. They moved wreckage around, took some away, and smashed up just about everything they could lay their hands on. They even brought a lame camel to lay tracks all over the place.”

  “A lame camel?”

  “To make it look like nomads had done the damage,” Mark explained.

  “Someone’s thinking a couple of steps ahead,” Max grunted.

  “Is the NTSB coming to Libya general knowledge?” Linda asked.

  “No. Langston told me it was cleared at the highest levels and kept under wraps.”

  “That means the tangos have a source in the government if they knew to come back and mess with the wreckage.”

  “Or they’re government sponsored,” Max countered. “Mark, you said you don’t think Secretary Katamora was on the plane.”

  “There’s pretty convincing evidence that the plane landed in the desert before the crash.”

  “You think they took her off?”

  “Why else would they land it, take off again, and slam it into a mountaintop? They want the world to think she’s dead.”

  “What do they gain by that?”

  “Come on, Max,” Linda said. “She’s the damned Secretary of State. She’s either an intelligence coup for these people or the best bargaining chip in history. Remember, she was the last President’s National Security Advisor. If we think she’s dead, we aren’t going to be looking for her. They could extract information from now until doomsday and we’d never be the wiser.”

  There was a pause in the conversation as all of them digested the implications of Linda’s theory. The terrorists getting their hands on Fiona Katamora was probably more damaging than if they had kidnapped the President. As a politician only in his first year of office, he was kept away from the operational minutia that went into fighting the war on terror. Because of the positions she’d held over the years, and the insatiable ability of her mind to absorb details, Fiona knew more about America’s ongoing operations and the nation’s plans for the future than the Chief Executive.

  “We have to get her back,” Max said.

  There was no need to respond to such an obvious statement.

  “Is there anything else going on that we need to be aware of?” Mark asked.

  “Yeah. Langston forwarded information about a mission on behalf of the State Department being carried out in Tunisia very close to the Libyan border.”

  “State’s running ops now?” Linc asked.

  “It was cleared through Langley, and they sent a minder along with the team. It was given medium priority because there wasn’t much of a chance for success.”

  “What are they doing in Tunisia?”

  Max explained about the letter that first came to light through St. Julian Perlmutter and how it related to the historic pirate Suleiman Al-Jama during the Barbary Wars. He told them of the belief that the old corsair might have left writings in a hidden cave someplace along a dried-up river course that expounded on ways Islam and Christendom could coexist peacefully.

  “Does sound like a long shot,” Linda said when he finished. “Is this connected to the plane crash?”

  “It’s kind of coincidental that these two events happened around the same time and near the same place, but there’s no hard evidence of a link. The Secretary wasn’t even aware of the expedition. It was handled by an Undersecretary named Christie Valero. Apparently, she thought it was worth trying for. And for whatever it’s worth, so do I. Pronouncements from influential clerics carry a tremendous amount of weight in the region. It was the Ayatollah Khomeini who declared that anyone who—”

  “ ‘—commits an act of suicide while engaged with the enemy shall be considered a martyr,’ ” Linda finished for him. “We know our history, Max. And I’m willing to bet you just learned that little factoid when you spoke with Overholt.”

  Hanley didn’t deny it. “Anyway, three of the four people State sent to Tunisia are now considered missing. They had been given permission by the local government chaperone to stay away from the camp for seventy-two hours, but their truck’s overdue.”

  “The supposition at Langley is that this is connected to Fiona’s abduction, right?” Mark asked doubtfully.

  “They’re not supposing anything,” Max replied with a tone that said he didn’t give a whit for Mark’s skepticism. “But Lang wants us to check it out anyway.”

  Linda said, “I don’t think that’s a good idea. We just saw Juan fly off with either a group of terrorists or members of Libya’s Special Forces, but either way they’re involved in the crash. We shouldn’t be traipsing across the desert searching for lost archaeologists when he could need us at a moment’s notice.”

  “Hold on a second,” Murph interrupted, a hint of excitement in his voice. “Where’s Stoney?”

  “He’s not on duty right now so he’s probably in his cabin.”

  “Max, pipe this call down to him, and we’ll be right back.” Max made the switch. Eric Stone came up on a webcam a moment later, slurping from an energy drink. “Hey, how is it playing Lawrence of Arabia?” he said in greeting.

  “Are you bogarting my Red Bull?” Murph accused.

  Eric quickly pulled the can out of camera range. “Nope.”

  “Jerk. Listen, when we were checking the satellite pictures we spotted an abandoned truck out in the open desert not too far from our flight path estimates.”

  “I remember.”

  “Flash me a close-up and give me the GPS coordinates.”

  “Hold on.” Eric glanced down from the webcam and started typing at his computer. Over his shoulder, an online gaming avatar that looked like a toad in medieval armor had been set by a macro-program to grind out points by repeatedly arranging a basket of flowers.

  “Looks like a real badass game you’re playing, Eric,” Linc remarked when he glanced over at the computer screen in front of Murph. “Let me guess, Sir Ribbet and the Bouquet of Death?”

  Stone looked over his shoulder, saw that he could never explain what he was doing to a warrior like Linc, and killed that computer screen with a remote control. “Okay, I’ve e-mailed the GPS numbers and a zoom shot of the truck. I’m now looking at your tracking information. You’re only about a hundred miles from it. Shouldn’t take more than a couple of hours.”

  “As the crow flies, Stoney, not as the Pig crawls, but thanks. Would you also send that picture to the main screen in the op center and route this call back to Max?”

  “On its way.”

  “Talk to you later.”

  “Is that their truck?” Mark asked Hanley as soon as he�
��d reestablished contact.

  “Overholt said it had some kind of drill rig on the back, so I’d say it is. How did you know where to find a picture of it?”

  “I’m a genius, Max,” Murph replied without a trace of irony. “You know that.”

  “Okay, genius, you just bought yourself a detour. I want you guys to check out the truck, and then I need you to interview the fourth member of the search team, a Dr. Emile Bumford. He’s still at the Roman archaeological site that the State Department team was using as cover. He’s already spoken with the Undersecretary at State, who set this up. From what Lang told me Bumford’s useless, but a face-to-face might get us something.”

  “What about the Chairman?” Linda persisted. “I feel like we’re abandoning him.”

  “Sweetie,” Max soothed, “this is Juan Cabrillo we’re talking about. With his luck that chopper’s headed to some five-star seaside resort, and ten minutes after they land he’ll have a drink in one hand and a woman in the other.”

  It took THE BETTER part of eight hard hours to cross the desert to where Eric and Mark had spotted the abandoned drill truck on the satellite pictures. The landscape was a fractured plane of endless hillocks and riverbeds that rattled their organs until they felt their bodies were nothing more than liquid held in check by their skin.

  Mark and Linda had switched places so she rode shotgun next to Linc. He drove in a loose-armed, relaxed pose, as if the rough terrain were no more bothersome than an occasional pothole on an interstate highway. As the sun hovered over the distant horizon, they were approaching the GPS coordinates Eric Stone had provided. The Pig was still performing as advertised, and their remaining fuel was just enough to get them across the border into Tunisia. There they would need to find diesel. Linc was hoping they could buy a supply at the archaeological site, but most likely it would need to be choppered in from the Oregon. He would have to call Max about making the arrangements so they could sling a bladder of diesel under the Corporation’s new McDonnell Douglas MD-520N. With its hook-lifting capacity of a ton, George Adams, their pilot, could more than handle the fuel needed to fill the Pig’s many tanks.