“I want a cross bearing so we can tell exactly where he is, and a filter wash on the message. It was broken up. Sounded like heavy interference of some kind.”
Wickum raised his hand. He’d found it.
“I’m transfering to a headset,” Ensign Rowley said. He put the call on hold, grabbed a headset, went out to Wickum’s console and plugged in. “Ma’am?”
“I’m here.” She sounded strung out.
The message came up on Wickum’s screen. “We have it,” Ensign Rowley said. “It’s weak. Relative bearing two one-five. Stand by.” Wickum entered the bearing Susan Ziegler had given them and the computer instantly crossed the two and came up with a map position. “That’s ninety seven nautical miles southwest of your position, ma’am. We’re bringing up the audio now.”
Wickum played the very garbled message through once. It lasted only five seconds and was extremely broken up,
as if the antenna were bad or blocked. He put the message on a loop so that it would repeat itself over an dover again, and began dialing in circuits that would filter out some of the interference and allow the computer to help reconstruct some of the words. It was like fine-tuning a radio to get the best reception. The machine could do it on its own, but human operators still did a better job. Very slowly a few recognizable words began to emerge from the mush. “… home plate… we’ve… trouble.” There were three seconds of nothing useable. “… going down, but… Stand by! Stand by!” The message ended after that.
They played the message several more times, but nothing else became recognizable.
“Okay, that’s our agent and it sounds like he’s in trouble.”
“We’ll start the precoms and excoms tonight, but we can’t send a chopper up until morning. If you’re declaring an emergency we can get a cutter headed that way within the hour though.” Precoms, short for preliminary communications, was a quick search by radio for any and all ships in the vicinity of the last known position of the vessel in distress. Excoms, or extended communications, expanded the search pattern to a much broader area including marinas, lighthouses and other facilities on shore. A lot of the time vessels calling Mayday were found hours later safe in some harbor, not bothering to call anybody to say they were safe.
“I’m declaring a Mayday, Ensign. But if he’s aboard the Aphrodite and he’s in trouble you can expect armed resistance. Pass that along to your people.”
“We’re on it, ma’am,” Ensign Rowley said. “If you come up with anything new shoot it up to us, would you?”
“Right,” Susan Ziegler said, and she rang off. Ensign Rowley went back into his office to start calling in people. It was going to be an interesting night after all.
M/V Margo
The wind whipped around the corner and Bahmad had to brace himself against a piece of angled steel in order to accomplish his task without making a mistake.
They were heading directly west at their best speed of nineteen knots in order to put the most distance between them and where Aphrodite sunk before dawn. Something about Morales and the setup aboard the drug boat had continued to bother him until they had gotten underway, and it finally came to him.
The SSB radio in the Aphrodite’s main saloon was set to the Margo’s frequency. The one Bahmad had used to make contact. But he finally remembered that before they had left Rosario the captain had switched the set to a different frequency. Morales had been up on deck at the time and had not seen it.
It was a small discrepancy. But paying attention to such seemingly minor details had saved Bahmad’s life before. It was possible that Morales had radioed somebody and when he heard Bahmad coming back aboard he had switched frequencies.
When it got light they would turn north again, on a parallel course to their previous one, but more than seventy nautical miles to the west of the Aphrodite.
The last of the inner latches clicked up, and Bahmad raised the lid of the bogus life raft canister to expose the control panel.
Green was in the chart room re plotting their course to San Francisco, and Schumatz was below tending to the engines. There was no one to see him. He was alone and he could feel the power emanating from the device. The Americans had invented nuclear weapons, the other nuclear powers simply stole the secrets from them. And now that might was coming home to roost. Live by the sword, die by the sword. That was the adage Westerners foolishly liked to bandy about. But none of them really understood what they were saying.
That would change in less than thirty-six hours.
Shining the narrow beam of a penlight on the keypad Bahmad entered the ten-digit activation code, and the panel suddenly came to life.
He hesitated for several seconds, his fingers poised above the buttons. Even flow he could walk away from this insanity. He could kill the other two, rig the ship to sink and fly the helicopter to a deserted stretch of beach and make his way to Mexico City from where he could disappear. He had learned to fly helicopters courtesy of the British SIS, a fact he’d concealed from the others.
But he would go ahead with this for the same reason he had come up with the plan in the first place. The infidels had killed his parents. It was a fact that no act on earth or in heaven could erase. His parents would never return from their graves. What he had done in the name of Islam, and what he was doing now, was not his fault He’d been made to do this thing by the one senseless act the Americanbacked Israelis had carried out on innocent civilians. Now they would pay.
He sat back on his heels in the darkness for a few moments longer, contemplating exactly how long it would take him to get to the helicopter, start the engine, lift off and fly to a safe distance before the weapon exploded.
The hills would help. He could duck down behind one of them on the Sausalito side of the bridge.
He entered sixty minutes and five seconds on the keypad, and entered the start code. The panel beeped softly and the LED counter switched from 00:60:05 to 00:60:04, then 00: 60:03, 00:60:02, 00:60:01.
Bahmad pressed the interrupt button and the counter stopped at 00:60:00. He entered another series of codes that removed the nuclear weapon’s failsafes and entered in their places a series of counter-measures that would make it next to impossible to shut the bomb down.
Now simply pressing the start button would begin the countdown at sixty minutes, and nothing could stop it from happening.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Chevy Chase
The headaches were back. McGarvey got out of bed at six, quietly so as not to awaken Kathleen, and went into the bathroom. He softly closed the door, switched on the light and looked at his haggard image in the mirror. The hair on the side of his head where the surgeon had gone in with a tiny laser cauterizing tool had grown back. There was a ninety percent cure rate. But if the headaches returned it meant they’d missed a bleeder and would have to go back in. It’d mean another six weeks of convalescence.
He hadn’t had any choice in the matter the last time, but he was going to have to hang on now. Whatever was going down was going to happen very soon. All the evidence pointed to it, and his gut bunched up in knots as it did before every major mission. The biggest problem they still faced was not knowing where the attack would come. So far they hadn’t come up with a single clue.
Bin Laden and his staff were hunkered in Khartoum. There had been no definitive word on where his wives and children had gotten to, but since none of the CIA’s assets in the region had made any positive sightings, they were guessing that bin Laden’s family was with him in the compound. In some way that had been the most ominous bit of news all afternoon. Bin Laden had lost one daughter, he didn’t want to lose another child. He had brought them to his side, to the one place that he considered was safe, unassailable. They couldn’t stay there forever, of course. The situation in Khartoum was far too unstable. But for now it was where they were staying; waiting.
Bin Laden would have made plans though. He knew that he could be dead before the year was out, so he would have worked out w
hat would happen to his family afterward. After not only his death, but after the nuclear attack on the United States. Maybe the CIA could guarantee the safety of his family in exchange for the bomb. They could try.
“Yeah, right,” he told his image in the mirror. It’d be the same kind of a deal that we’d offered him just before we’d killed his daughter.
He took a couple of Extra Strength Tylenols with-a glass of water, then rinsed his face, switched off the light and went back into the bedroom. Kathleen was up and she was putting on a robe.
“Sorry, Katy, I didn’t mean to wake you,” he said, coming around the bed to her.
“It’s time to get up anyway,” she said. They kissed, and she looked at him critically. “Did you sleep all right?”
“I’ve had better nights, how about you?”
She touched his face. “Fine,” she said. “But you look tired.”
“When we get past this one, you and I are going to take a vacation. A cruise.”
She smiled warmly. “I’d like that. Why don’t you take the bathroom first, and I’ll get breakfast started.”
“Nothing heavy, Katy, this is going to be a tough one.” Kathleen gave him another smile, as if he’d just stated the obvious. He grinned sheepishly. “If I knew how to golf, I’d retire right now.”
“You could learn,” she said, and she went downstairs.
McGarvey lit a cigarette and went to the window that overlooked the golf course. The sprinklers were still on, but the first golfers would be on the course within a half hour. The windows in the house were bulletproof Lexan plastic. Eight weeks ago the doors and locks had been seriously beefed up and the CIA had installed a state-of-the-art security system around the entire property. But somebody on the fifteenth fairway could pull an RPG out of his bag and punch a hole in here like a knife through Swiss cheese.
A cheery thought to start off the day, he told himself. But he was back for the duration this time. He wasn’t going to run out in a stupid attempt to draw off the bad guys. This time when they came looking for someone to hurt, they were going to find him. His jaw tightened. One-on one That’s what he really wanted. Sorry that your daughter was killed, but you put her in harm’s way. Killing hundreds, probably thousands of innocent people would not bring her back.
His anger, which had percolated all night, spiked and he savagely ground out his cigarette in the ash tray. One-on one he told himself again, going into the bathroom. Him and Ali Bahmad on any field of play with any weapons he wanted. Soldier against soldier. Not soldier against women and children; especially not handicapped women and children.
When he came out of the bathroom Kathleen had laid out gray slacks, a white shirt, club tie and the blue blazer for him. Rencke had made the comment a few weeks ago that since Mrs. M. had taken over, McGarvey was starting to look pretty sharp. “Watch it,” he’d warned Rencke. “She’d love to get her hands on you.”
Rencke hopped from one foot to the other. It was a tiny moment of lightness in an otherwise bleak few months, and it made him smile now, but just for a moment because he had another big hurdle to get over this morning. Something he had put off last night. He had to finally tell Kathleen exactly what Liz was facing. He had a pretty good idea how she was going to take it because this wasn’t the first time Liz had been put in harm’s way, but at least he was no longer afraid that Katy would turn her back on him like she had done before. “We’re in this together, darling,” she was telling him now. “You and me, no matter what.”
He stopped in the middle of getting dressed. For the first time since Paris he couldn’t say that he missed working on his book about Voltaire. He’d worked on it for a long time. But at this stage of his writing he needed to be in the libraries of Europe pouring over the philosopher’s letters, reading his notes and manuscripts in their original drafts; talking with scholars. Work, he decided, that was just as real as what he was doing now; in fact possibly even more genuine than what he was doing for the CIA, and in some ways more satisfying because it was like playing detective; but work that was not as necessary as controlling evil. In that, at least, Voltaire would have agreed wholeheartedly.
Kathleen had used the spare bathroom and she looked fresh and bright, but she was troubled. She poured McGarvey a cup of coffee at the kitchen counter. “You look nice,” she said distantly.
“What’s the matter?”
“Otto called. He wants you to call him right back. And your car is here.”
“Sorry, Katy,” McGarvey said. He phoned Rencke’s direct line. “What have you got?”
“There was a murder aboard a yacht in New York City less than forty-eight hours ago,” Rencke said excitedly. “It looks like the work of Bahmad.”
“Call Fred Rudolph, and then let the President’s Secret Service detail know about it. I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”
“The FBI is already on it. I’ll talk to Villiard. We’re close, Mac.” McGarvey went back to the counter and got his coffee. “Gotta go, Katy. This could be the break we’ve been waiting for.”
Kathleen was on the other side of the counter, a funny look on her face. “I figured as much, that’s why I didn’t make breakfast. Where’s Elizabeth?”
It was the hurdle. McGarvey girded himself. “She’s working.”
“There’s no answer at Todd’s and the locator wouldn’t even take a message.”
“I sent them to San Francisco.”
She assimilated that information for a moment. “The President’s daughter is running in the Special Olympics. Do you think that bin Laden will try to harm her?”
“We thought so, Katy, but we might have been wrong.”
“But you sent our daughter there.”
“To be with the President’s daughter.”
She held herself very still, very erect, until finally she nodded. “Okay,” she said. She came around to him and straightened his tie. “I’m having a hard time with this, Kirk. But I swear to God that I’m trying.”
“It’s never easy, Katy.”
“Whose idea was it to send Todd with her?”
“Mine.”
“Good,” Kathleen said. She patted his lapels. “Be careful, Kirk.”
“Will do,” he promised and kissed her. Dick Yemm was waiting in the driveway with his car, the morning absolutely beautiful.
CIA Headquarters
“Could somebody else have come aboard the yacht and killed the captain?” McGarvey asked Rencke.
Adkins came over and he looked almost as strung out as Rencke. They’d both been pulling a lot of overnighters.
“Not likely, if you’re thinking robbery,” Rencke said. “The only thing missing is an aluminum case that the girl said had been delivered to the yacht here in Washington two months ago.” “Looks as if the captain came to the yacht searching for it when he was interrupted,” Adkins said. “That’s what the police are saying. It could have been the bomb.”
“That doesn’t make any sense,” McGarvey said. “They took a big risk by just bringing it into the States. Why would they take it out to Bermuda and then back again? Why triple their risk?”
“There are lots of hiding places on a yacht that size,” Adkins pointed out. “Fred Rudolph has sent a Bureau counterespionage team up there. If there’s anything to be found they’ll find it. But for now it looks as if Bahmad came back to the yacht to pick up the case, walked in on the captain who was searching his cabin and killed the man. He’s somewhere in New York. Wall Street maybe. Or maybe the top of the Empire State Building right in the middle of midtown. If it were to blow at noon, let’s say on a Monday, it’d kill a lot of people.”
McGarvey turned away and walked to the end of the row of computer racks. Rencke had all but taken over the DO’s main computer center as his personal domain. It was large, the equivalent of a halfdozen supercomputers, fanning out from a central area that contained a dozen monitor consoles. The morning shift computer operators were starting to drift in, but they stayed respectfully out o
f the way.
After Washington, Papa’s Fancy had sailed off to Bermuda where Bahmad and the crew partied. To kill time. Not just to wait for the dust from the Chevy Chase attack to settle, but to wait for a specific date. Back to New York Bahmad dismisses the crew and disappears for ten days. To wait a little longer? Why not in Bermuda? Because the plans may have changed and he needed new instructions. Then he shows up at the yacht at the very same moment the captain is there. Perhaps the captain searched the yacht on the owner’s instructions. But there were way too many coincidences for McGarvey, all of them starting with the failed attack in Chevy Chase, and ending presumably at any moment with the detonation of the nuclear weapon.
He walked back. “How do we know it was Bahmad?”
“All the descriptions the Bureau has gotten so far are a match,” Rencke said. “They’ve talked to three of the crew from the yacht and the staff here in Washington at the Cor inithian Yacht Club. Everything adds up, and it’ll be the same in Bermuda.”
“What about the owner?”
“Alois Richter, Jersey City. Until a couple of years ago he was involved with a company called Tele/ Resources which — surprise, surprise — is an agent for the bin Laden family. He left the day before yesterday on business in Europe. No one knows where he is at the moment.”
“How about the marina in New York?”
“No one noticed him,” Rencke said. “But all the better hotels in the city are being checked. No one thinks they’ll come up with anything, but they’re trying.”
“Airlines?”
“Those are being checked too. But the hairs that were found in Bahmad’s bathroom had been dyed gray. He’s changed his appearance.”
Rencke was an absolute mess; his clothing was filthy, his long red hair totally out of control, and his complexion sallow from spending almost no time out of doors. But his eyes were bright and an electric current seemed to surround him. He had the bit in his teeth.
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