The Honorable Knight

by Patrick John Donahoe

  He entered his bedroom, closed the door, and lay down on the quilted bedspread fully clothed. What was he going to tell Leora? She had proposed to him. She wanted to marry right away and live together while he completed his internship and specialty training. If she had to, she would complete her education after Kurt graduated. Kurt was in love with Leora, but knew his father and grandfather wouldn’t approve of an Indian girl, even if Leora was beautiful, intelligent and wonderful. Kurt wished he was capable of taking a stronger stance against his father. He agonized over his situation until he dropped off to sleep.

  Thirty-Three

  Serena rushed back to the NSA when she received an urgent call from Alicia. Alicia had made some terrorist matches with the photos Jacques had taken in Mauritania. Alicia escorted Serena to the well-guarded photo ID laboratory SCIF in the well-guarded corridor within NSA Building Number One at Fort George Meade. Once the pleasantries were completed, Alicia cleared her office of her assistants and seated Serena in front of her computer monitor.

  Alicia said, “Jacques should be complemented on the report and the photos he snapped with our special eyeglasses. He managed to capture not only good face and back of the head views of each one, but also sides views of each of the terrorists we ID’d. It appears they both attempted to avoid Jacques seeing their faces. These are guys who don’t want exposure.” Alicia displayed a photo set of one of the two terrorists showing his face, his profile and the back of the head. “I couldn’t have done much better if I had posed them at the DMV for these key views.”

  Serena nodded impatiently. “So who is this guy?”

  Alicia pulled up a second set of photos and moved the face, profile, and back of the head photos with her fingertip next to the corresponding photos Jacques had taken. It was obvious the photos in the second set were of the same man a few years earlier.

  Without comment Alicia pulled up a digital dossier on a man named Qadir. “NSA’s job is to tap communication lines and break codes, and not develop terrorist dossiers, but I can easily pull data files from our friends at the CIA, Interpol, and other sources,” Alicia said with a wink. “I wanted you to have all the Intel I could find on your terrorists. Kind of like ‘one stop shopping.’”

  “Thank you.” Serena read the dossier in silence, absorbing all the pertinent facts. Qadir had been orphaned as a child and taken in by Al-Qaeda militia. He’d been trained as a fighter from his childhood. His specialty was kidnapping for Intel and ransom, mostly kidnapping foreign government personnel unfortunate enough to labor in remote areas of Afghanistan. Few of the hostages were ever returned even after the required ransom was paid.”

  “Who is the second one?” Serena asked, her ire rising upon reading about this new adversary.

  Alicia performed the same visual photo comparison of the second terrorist, except the facial photo of the second terrorist was slightly blurred. Alicia ran an app on the blurred photo and obtained a clearer, but smoothed image. Even with this handicap, the comparison of Jacques’ photos with those of another known terrorist from the Intel data base provided a high correlation confidence.

  Alicia said, “This is your second terrorist,” and pulled up a second dossier.

  Serena felt a rush of purpose, the same rush she’d felt countless numbers of times in the past over 900 years. Serena studied the second terrorist’s dossier. His name was Abdul-qahaar, which meant ‘servant of the subduer’ in Afghan. His father was an Al-Qaeda terrorist from the time of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Abdul-qahaar was raised in terrorist training facilities his whole life. His father was killed while attacking Soviet troops overseeing the Afghani gas fields.

  The Soviets had spent their occupational years stealing oil and gas and other natural resources from the Afghans until the freedom fighters armed with Stinger missiles supplied by the American CIA had made occupying Afghanistan not cost effective by shooting down every Soviet helicopter they could.

  Abdul-qahaar’s specialty was training ‘volunteers’ to blow themselves up with vest bombs, along with strategic targets of interest, and to attack tourists, military personnel, technical consultants and contractors, and create havoc. He was a suspect in the shooting down of an American Blackhawk helicopter with a MANPADS.”

  Serena leaned back in her chair and turned to Alicia. “A couple of charmers.”

  “The CIA terrorist alerts have placed these two in the top twenty several times in the past few years. I can pull up those files if you’ d like,” Alicia replied.

  “That won’t be necessary. Can you provide me with a printout and a Blu Ray disc of all of the quality photos, the photo matches of the two terrorists, and their dossiers? I’m going to develop a presentation to ask for assets to thwart their next moves.”

  “Of course.”

  Alicia and Serena went back through the files, and Alicia sent each page Serena selected to the printer and to an external Blu Ray burner.

  “What about the database we developed on your Karl Brandt? Do you want a package on him also?”

  “Yes, please.”

  Alicia pulled up the video captures with time tags of Brandt in the airport, on the subway, in Notting Hill spraying fruits and vegetables, back on the subway, and back in the airport, plus copies of his flight agenda from Sao Paulo, with his stopover in London, then on to Munich. She also included a two-page dossier of Intel findings on Brandt.

  When Alicia and Serena had documented all the material, Alicia asked, “Do you have your courier card with you? Since you want to take material with you, I have to do it by the numbers. Rules, you know.”

  Serena pulled her wallet from her purse and handed the courier card to Alicia.

  “I’ll have the printouts and disc wrapped and ready to go in half an hour. You can study the rest of the data until I return with your courier package.”

  “Thanks.” Serena scrolled through the photos of the two known terrorists and the other ship’s personnel Jacques had photographed. She thought of Jacques and what a great job he had done, putting himself in great danger to gather this data. She only wished he would be more attentive to her. She planned on praising him for his accomplishment and hoped her praise would endear her more to him.

  Thirty-Four

  Kurt let the sail out full, catching all the wind and propelling the yacht forward at a brisk 24 knots. At this speed they would reach Havana in twelve hours. The press of the salt-laden sea air blowing on Kurt’s face as he held the course steady at 352 degrees refreshed him as it had done each time he had cruised the Caribbean on his father’s yacht. If he thought of only the sea and sailing he felt relaxed; otherwise, misery welled inside him to the point of throwing himself overboard. He didn’t have the conviction to tell his father about Leora. Perhaps he would just let things lie and return to Germany, marry Leora, and let his father find out in due time.

  After all, his father didn’t intend for him to marry Aloisia until he completed his medical training. What Aloisia was planning for her future he didn’t know and didn’t care. He knew she was close to finishing her internship at LMU, was an excellent tennis player, and was beautiful in the tall blonde, blued eyed Teutonic way. Kurt felt he could live with her as man and wife if need be, but didn’t want to live in a loveless marriage, bringing genetically bred progeny into the world. Hopefully, she had her own life, too, and wouldn’t be bullied into a loveless marriage.

  If his father hadn’t dumped the Select plan on him he could have been happier than he’d been since going off to college in Germany to study engineering. Crewing side by side with his father and grandfather in the summers was the only quality time he had been able to spend with them in the past nearly fifteen years. He’d returned home for holidays when he was younger, but the visits had become less and less as the years passed by. Since the summer cruises were action-oriented, not introspective, he’d not been able to gain insight into the workings of their minds and ambitions until now.

  All his father had divulged to him about this
trip was that they would be able to visit several islands along the way and snorkel and scuba dive as opportunities presented themselves. Kurt loved to scuba dive. He had obtained his PADI Open Water Certification when he was fourteen years old. Since then he had earned his Wreck Diving and Night Diving certifications. The yacht had its own scuba tank filling compressor, and Kurt and his father had the finest scuba equipment available; custom fit wet suits, fins and masks, air tanks, computerized regulators, and jacket style buoyancy compensators. They also had personal underwater tow motors and expensive underwater cameras.

  Kurt had several scrapbooks full of underwater photographs of turtles, manta rays, sharks, dolphins, seals, and almost every variety of fish in the Caribbean.

  The wind exerted a more northerly force than the desired course required. Kurt compensated with eight degrees west course correction, and the sails responded with increased tug on the mast and an additional knot over ground. Kurt’s father had often said he was proud of Kurt’s natural sailing acumen, sensing the currents’ and winds directions and extracting the maximum advantage of the winds’ force.

  The warm pink sands of Barbuda behind them, Cuba ahead, Kurt wondered what Karl intended to accomplish in Havana. He’d observed his father carry two metal coolers configured like aircraft pilot’s style briefcases onboard the yacht and conceal them in a secret compartment built into the paneling in the galley of the yacht. The secret compartment had electrical power and was configured like a freezer customized to hold the two coolers. Even though they were on a sailboat, the freezer needed a kilowatt of constant electrical power to maintain a low temperature in the warm Caribbean climate.

  What was so valuable and secret about the coolers and their contents? He couldn’t ask his father, and it didn’t seem that Karl was going to volunteer the information. Hopefully, whatever they were up to, they would keep to themselves. What was he to do?

  He had read the Select book from cover to cover more than once and was struck dumb by the audaciousness of the plan. It was difficult enough to read his father’s and grandfather’s plans for the Select and their desires for his role in the Select. He didn’t want to be party to a terrorist attack on any innocent people.

  Kurt missed Leora. What would she think about Karl’s plans for him and the arranged marriage? She would be heartbroken, as he was. Arranging a Select marriage for himself and Aloisia was ludicrous at best. He knew who she was and had met her on more than one occasion, but never felt drawn to her or her to him. They were both privileged, intelligent, athletic, attractive, and motivated, but the spark ‘I can’t go through life without you’ feeling was not there. They could be professional associates, and even friends sharing experiences that only the privileged have, but not the intimacies of love.

  Love was not a calculable quantity, a feeling to develop in a forced union based on mathematics. Did his father love his arranged wife, Kurt’s mother, or did they go through the motions to please those who needed to be pleased and served others for the privilege of being privileged? He may have to confront his father someday, but for today he would enjoy the salty sea wind on his face and try not to dwell on his uncertain future.

  Thirty-Five

  Serena handed her iPad to the CIA agent who admitted her into the sophisticated audio-visual equipped SCIF. “Have your technician connect this device via Wi-Fi to your monitor system. I’ll use the Power Point presentation titled ‘Storm Warning’ for the brief.” She then took one of the soft leather chairs next to the head of the table and waited. From her Navy blue suit jacket pocket she pulled out a pen-sized laser pointer. The dark suited and uniformed men and women around the table waited patiently for the AV tech to connect Serena’s iPad to their system.

  When her Power Point file was opened, Serena, without hesitation or preamble, began. “Ladies and gentlemen, the Iranian Peace Tour, as many of you have suspected, is hostile.” Observing the mild to not so mild reactions she expected from the council, she continued, “The Moudge Class Frigate, Jamaran, and the Kilo submarine are going to launch rockets into a storm and spread a deadly virus over the eastern seaboard of the United States.” She hesitated for effect, and then continued, in an ominous tone, “Unless we stop them.”

  John Davis, the Secretary of Defense, asked, “Are you absolutely positive about this?”

  “Yes sir, I am.”

  “We can’t, without provocation, destroy an Iranian frigate and submarine. We’ve boarded these vessels surreptitiously at each port of call and found no evidence that they have the capability much less the resolve to perpetrate such a crime.”

  “I’m confident they have both,” Serena paged forward to the acoustic images of the MANPADS she’d taken onboard the Jamaran. “The frigate was hiding these devices in plain sight in boxes they had freshly stenciled as ‘Engine Parts.’ These boxes contained two dismantled MANPADS surface-to-air missile launchers and several missiles.”

  The Secretary of State held up a hand. “Can you describe the MANPADS?”

  “Yes, sir. MANPADS stands for Man-Portable Air Defense System.” Serena forwarded the slide presentation to a photo of a man shoulder launching a MANPADS missile. “Back in 2003, our then Secretary of State, Colin Powell, warned of the MANPADS’ threat for shooting down helicopters and commercial aircraft, and had thousands of them destroyed.

  When Saddam Hussein’s regime was toppled, hundreds of MANPADS were looted from their arsenals and dispersed to terrorists throughout the Middle East. The Soviets developed a similar weapon, the Strela-3, SA-14s. Many of these weapons disappeared in Afghanistan when the Soviets were ousted. They had a 1.8kg warhead and could engage targets up to 3000 meters in altitude. Also, their thermal batteries have years’ long shelf-lives, so most of them are still viable.”

  “They look too small to be able to do much damage,” the Secretary of State replied.

  “Unless the payload is small. This next slide is a drawing of a possible dispersal container which could carry the payload.” The drawing depicted a bullet-shaped device opened like a flower at the pointed end, revealing a flask inside.

  “And the payload?” asked the head of the CIA, John Myers.

  “We believe the payload is an experimental water-borne virus created by a pharmaceutical company in Brazil.”

  “Has the payload been delivered?”

  “If the payload has already been delivered to the frigate, it was prior to the vessels leaving Bandar-e-Abbas over a month ago, but we don’t think delivery has been made yet. I need to travel to Mariel, Cuba and continue to observe. Hurricane season will begin soon, and it will only take a day out of port to disperse the virus given suitable storm conditions. A storm like the Sandy hurricane of 2012 would prove even more devastating with the inclusion of a deadly virus. We have to stop them.”

  “Keep us informed on a daily basis. Your team will be provided with a fast attack submarine and a powerful submarine tracking capability. A diesel-electric submarine lost at sea during a hurricane wouldn’t be our fault,” the Secretary of Defense said with a grimace.

  “Thank you, sir.” Serena retrieved her iPad mini from the SCIF technician and left without polite company courtesies or handshakes.

  The Secretary of State turned to the head of the CIA and asked, “Who was that woman?”

  “Only a handful of people even have a clue. Even the Mossad know little about her, and my understanding is it’s supposed to remain that way.”

  “Can we trust her?

  “We can’t not trust her.”

  Thirty-Six

  Jacques walked up the gang plank to the deck of the High Power Sonar platform, the USNS Valiant, and wondered what was so secret about this ship. The Swath, or catamaran-like two hull construction, intrigued him. Chief Warrant Officer Dave Cantrell, wearing a .45-caliber pistol on his belt, greeted him at the top of the gangplank. Jacques had informed the CWO of his imminent arrival while on his way through the front gate to the pier.

  “May I see your ID, sir
?”

  Jacques handed his Navy civilian ID to CWO Cantrell. Jacques scanned the deck, but didn’t spot anything out of the ordinary from any other ship. The equipment must be all below deck, he decided.

  “Mister Jacques LeFriant, we’ve been expecting you. Welcome aboard. We’re preparing to depart after your briefing, so let’s go to my office in the Ops Center.”

  Jacques followed Cantrell through a hatch into a large work space. Fifteen Smart Fortwo automobile size sound projectors sat on metal tracks waiting to be lowered into the water through the moon pool opening in the center of the ship. “So these are the sources. I read the System Operating Concept on my way here, but seeing the system in person is impressive.”

  CWO Cantrell nodded and continued on to the opposite side of the work space to another bulkhead and passed through another hatch into a corridor that ran the length of the hull. Ducking his way beneath pipes and through more hatches, he stopped at a door with a combination lock. Cantrell keyed in the combination, opened the door, and invited Jacques inside.

  The Ops Center had three large high definition computer monitor screens mounted in commercial computer racks with office desk style chairs bolted to the deck in front of them. A duty roster and a white bulletin board were mounted on the side of one rack. One end of the room was curtained off with a sign that read ‘Communications Center, Authorized Personnel Only.’ There were several other racks of computers next to the operating consoles, their lights blinking in random fashion.