Allah's Scorpion

by David Hagberg

  This trip had been exactly what the doctor had ordered. Or at least it had been until the incidents at Faro Blanco and yesterday in the Intracoastal Waterway with the helicopter. Like so many times before in his connection with the U.S. intelligence establishment he had to tell himself that the business was not finished for him. Perhaps it would never be over until he was dead, because there were a lot of people still very interested in what he knew, and any number of others who wanted to pay him back for what he’d done.

  They made the broad turn south around Quick Point and the one-design sailing squadron toward the new John Ringling High Bridge. Sarasota’s downtown with its glass-faced office buildings, sixteen-story condos, and the Ritz-Carlton intermingling with palms, bougainvillea, and flowering trees, looked subtropical, laid-back, even peaceful.

  Kathleen was rigging the dock lines on the bow cleats. McGarvey locked the wheel, and went below for a moment to get his pistol. He stuffed it in the waistband of his trunks, then pulled on a T-shirt, and went back up to the cockpit.

  Kathleen turned around as he got back behind the wheel and gave him the resigned look of hers that she knew he was carrying. She didn’t like it, but she never complained now like she had in the early days, when their marriage had gone on the rocks. His abilities combined with his instincts had saved their lives more than once. She’d come to understand that when he armed himself it was almost always for a good reason.

  They passed under the John Ringling High Bridge, and less than one hundred yards south, picked up the channel markers into Marina Jack where they’d chartered the boat. More than two hundred sail- and powerboats were docked on either side of the modern glass and steel restaurant that was located in its own quiet cove right on Tamiami Trail, which was much like the Quai d’Anglais along Nice’s chic waterfront.

  McGarvey picked up the microphone and called the dockmaster on VHF channel 16. “Marina Jack, this is Sunday Morning.”

  “Sunday Morning, switch and answer seven-one.”

  McGarvey switched to the working channel. “Marina Jack, Sunday Morning. We’ve just passed marker eight A. Where do you want us?”

  “Tie up at the fuel dock,” the dockmaster radioed. “Welcome back. Have a good trip?”

  “We’re sorry to be back.”

  “I hear you,” the dockmaster said. “You’ve got someone to see you. He’s been here most of the morning.”

  A tall figure with frizzy red hair came out onto the dock. “Yeah, I know,” McGarvey said. Even from one hundred yards out he could recognize Otto Rencke. “Sunday Morning out.” He returned to channel 16.

  “It’s Otto,” Katy called from the bow. She was relieved for the moment. She waved, and Rencke waved back.

  A couple of dock boys came out as McGarvey throttled back and eased the sloop starboard side too at the fuel pumps, their speed bleeding to nothing. Kathleen tossed one of the boys the forward line, and McGarvey tossed the other a stern line.

  “Hi, Otto,” Kathleen said.

  Rencke, dressed in tattered blue jeans and a raggedy old CIA sweatshirt with the sleeves cut off, leaned against the building, in the shade of the second-floor overhang. “Hi, Mrs. M,” he said. He didn’t look happy.

  Lavender, McGarvey guessed, or something close to it.

  They didn’t have to return the boat until tomorrow morning. They’d planned on spending the afternoon packing and cleaning up. This evening they would have dinner, and tomorrow they would fly back to Washington for the closing on their Chevy Chase house on Tuesday. Later in the week they would drive back here to get their new house on Casey Key up and running.

  Shutting down the engine, McGarvey had a feeling that there might be a change of plans. Or at least that Otto had come down here to make an offer.

  Katy came aft. “You didn’t know it would be Otto, did you?”

  “No.”

  “He’s got the look, darling. You’re going to turn him down, right?”

  “You need your holding tank pumped out, Mr. McGarvey?” one of the dock boys asked.

  “Please, and when you’ve filled the diesel run her over to the slip for us, would you?”

  “Sure thing, sir.”

  “Right?” Kathleen asked.

  “He’s a friend, I’m going to listen to him, Katy,” McGarvey said. He went below, put his pistol away, and slipped into a pair of Topsiders.

  Kathleen joined him. “What about me?” she asked.

  “Otto and I are going for a walk. Why don’t you get dressed and meet us at the bar? We’ll have some lunch.”

  “I meant us, goddammit,” Katy said, keeping her voice low.

  “I don’t know,” McGarvey said. He tried to kiss her cheek, but she pulled away.

  “We’ll just be a few minutes,” he promised. “It’ll be okay.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  McGarvey went topside, opened the lifeline gate, and stepped up onto the dock. Rencke came across to him and they shook hands.

  “Oh wow, Mac, Mrs. M didn’t look very happy to see me,” Rencke said. “Is she okay?”

  “Depends on why you’re here,” McGarvey said. “Was it you looking over our shoulders the past few days?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You could have called.”

  “Your cell phone was out of service, and I didn’t want to use the radio.”

  McGarvey nodded. “Let’s take a walk.”

  They headed around the restaurant to the parking lot and the sidewalk that followed Tamiami Trail over to City Park a couple of blocks away. There were a lot of people out and about, walking, roller-blading, biking, working on their boats, having picnics, flying kites, fishing. White noise. He and Otto were anonymous here and now.

  “This is about Osama bin Laden again, isn’t it?” McGarvey said.

  Rencke nodded. “Ultimately,” he said. “We’re on the hunt for him, just like you suggested, but we’ve stumbled on something else. Maybe even bigger than 9/11 or the suicide bombers you stopped last year.”

  It felt odd to McGarvey to be back on solid land after two weeks, but not odd to be talking to an old friend about the business. Katy understood him better than he did.

  “Who sent you, or did you come down here on your own?”

  “Adkins. But no one was sure that you’d come back, or even agree to listen to me. He thought it was worth a shot, and so did I.”

  They got off the path and walked down to an empty picnic table at the water’s edge.

  “It’s nice here,” McGarvey said. He looked at his friend. “I’ve got a job teaching Voltaire at New College, starting this fall. Did you know that?”

  Rencke nodded glumly. “Good school,” he said. “But you know that they’d like you to take over at the Farm. You could make a lot of difference for the kids coming in.”

  “I’ve heard the offer,” McGarvey said. “Now get on with it, Otto. What’d you bring for me?”

  “Nine months ago NSA began picking up references to something called Allah’s Scorpion, buried in a couple of Islamic Internet sites. Nobody knew what it meant, but we started to get the idea that it might refer to another al-Quaida strike. Possibly here in the United States, possibly elsewhere.”

  “We’ve been getting those kinds of signals for a long time,” McGarvey said. “But there’s been no way of quantifying any of them; telling which one is real and which one is pure fantasy.”

  “But the chatter has been pretty consistent, Mac,” Otto said. He was starting to vibrate. “Over the past few months the talk has spread to just about every Islamic Web site, sat phone, and courier network that we’ve got handles on. Allah’s Scorpion is al-Quaida, we’re pretty sure of that. And we think it’ll be another sea operation. They might try to hijack a ship, take on a cargo and hit us, or our interests, somewhere in the world.”

  “Come on, Otto, you guys know that the real key is bin Laden,” McGarvey said. When he’d been DCI he’d gone over the same argument with the White House almost on a daily b
asis. The president had agreed, in principle, but the Company had never been given real marching orders. Find bin Laden, but don’t make waves; we have enough on our plate in the Arab world as it is.

  Otto’s head bobbed up and down. “We’re looking for him, Mac. Big-time. Honest injun. But right now we’ve got this problem to deal with, and we think it’s become immediate.”

  “They’d need a crew.”

  “Two days ago an al-Quaida strike force broke into Camp Delta down at Gitmo, and tried to spring five Iranian prisoners,” Otto said. “They didn’t get out of there, in fact when they knew they were cornered, the al-Quaida guys killed the Iranians, and then blew themselves up.”

  “Navy?”

  “Bingo,” Otto said. “But they would need a captain. Someone who really knew what he was doing. And the good news is that there just ain’t that many guys out there, on the loose, or buyable, who’d go to work for bin Laden.”

  “Have you come up with a short list?”

  “As of yesterday morning, six guys,” Otto said. He was excited. “But on the way down I narrowed it to one strong possibility. Guy by the name of Rupert Graham, ex–British Royal Navy, till he got kicked out over some issues stemming from his wife’s death. Abuse of power. Excessive use of force. Poor judgment, leading to several international incidents that were embarrassing to the government.”

  “Continue.”

  “Until eighteen months ago we think he was pirating in the South China Sea,” Otto said. “And doing a bang-up job of it. Of course that’s mostly speculation, nothing could ever be proved against him.” Otto got up on the tabletop and sat on his legs, something he did when he was superexcited. “He dropped almost totally out of sight, but the Brits, who’ve got him on a watch list, may have spotted him in Karachi eight months ago, and Islamabad two months after that.”

  “Bin Laden?”

  “It’s a thought, Mac,” Otto said. “But best of all Graham might have been seen in Mexico City last week. One of our guys, spotting flights to and from Havana, shared the pictures with Gordon Guthrie, the MI6 chief of station there. Looked like a match.”

  “So Mr. Graham gets around,” McGarvey said.

  “You don’t get it, Mac,” Otto said. “He flew down to Maracaibo three days ago.”

  “Oil tankers,” McGarvey said.

  “Security is pretty tight in the lake. It’d be tough for an imposter to talk his way aboard a ship, and then convince the crew to sail it out of there for him. But the Venezuelan currency has taken a dump. Could be he’s shopping for a crew.”

  “Has Venezuelan intelligence been notified?” McGarvey asked.

  “On the back burner,” Otto said. “They’ve tightened security, but that’s about it. Al-Quaida isn’t their fight.”

  How many times had he been called to arms like this? Dozens, and yet he could remember each and every incident as if it was the only one.

  “You’d have limited cooperation down there from their Central Intelligence Division,” Otto went on. “They made it very clear to me that they didn’t want to get involved, but they won’t get in your way. In fact, your passport won’t even be stamped. You’ll never have been there.”

  No coastal city on the planet would be safe. And it came down to one man—as it almost always had.

  “Find him for us, Mac,” Otto said. “Take him out. We’ve got no one else who can do the job. If a guy like Graham gets his hands on a ship, even with a minimum crew, he could get to within spitting distance of New York, Washington, Miami, anywhere, and set off a dirty nuclear weapon, or even lob a missile into the heart of downtown.” Otto shrugged. “Could be done, ya know.”

  The difficult part would be explaining to Katy why he had to do it. Only this time he was going to finish the job once and for all. He would stop Graham, but afterwards he would find bin Laden and put a bullet in the man’s brain.

  EIGHT

  APURTO DEVLÁN, WESTERN CARIBBEAN

  Alone in his quarters Rupert Graham replaced the slide on his Steyr GB, clicking it home, and pressing the muzzle cap against its spring until it latched in place. With the pistol cleaned and reassembled, he methodically reloaded three magazines of ammunition, slid one into the handle of the gun, and the other two into the pocket of his dark jacket hanging in the closet.

  “There must never be mercy for the infidel until our jihad is finished,” bin Laden said to him in the beginning. “It is something you might not understand.”

  “But I’m an infidel,” Graham had responded. Eighteen months ago he did not care if he lived or died. “Does that mean I shall be killed?”

  “We all die when Allah wants us,” bin Laden said indulgently. “For now you are an instrument of His Messenger.”

  It was a lot of bleeding bullshit, only now that he was in the middle of a mission, he didn’t want to die. He wanted to continue with the fight; stick it to the bastards, and keep sticking it to them. He lowered his head and closed his eyes for a moment.

  It was shortly after one in the afternoon. He had disassembled his weapons, spreading the parts out on his bed; cleaned them, reassembled them, and reloaded them, getting ready for tonight’s killing.

  He’d risen early, before dawn, after only a couple hours of sleep, to be on the bridge when the first morning watch under Third Officer George Novak came on duty. He had stayed up there until an hour ago, when he’d returned to his cabin, and ordered a lunch tray to be brought up from the galley.

  In the past few days he had started to get worried. He could bring up a picture of bin Laden in full detail in his mind’s eye. That was easy. But he was losing the details of Jillian’s face. His wife had been a small woman; her features round, her dark hair usually cut short, bangs across her forehead; she’d looked like a pixie.

  He knew all that intellectually, but he couldn’t see her, and he was afraid that he might be losing his mind.

  He opened his eyes when someone knocked at the door. He got up, flipped the bedcover over his Steyr, the .22 caliber pistol he’d used to kill Slavin, and the Heckler & Koch M8 baseline carbine, and went out to the sitting room, closing the door to his bedroom before he answered the outer door.

  The Russian steward, Irina Karpov, was there with a tray. “Your lunch, Captain,” she said, smiling. She was a small girl, with narrow shoulders, dark eyes, and short dark hair that framed a round, pixie face. She was dressed in dark trousers and a crisp white jacket.

  For just an instant Graham was struck dumb by the similarity between this girl and his wife. He hadn’t noticed the resemblance when he’d seen her for the first time yesterday. But her face was the same.

  He stepped aside for her and she came in and set the tray on the small table. She took the covers off the dishes. “Cook has made borscht just for you, and some smoked salmon with creamed cheese, onions, capers, and corchinons, and toasted bagels.”

  “It looks good,” Graham said. “Please thank Mr. Rassmussen for me.”

  “We didn’t know if you wanted wine, beer, or mineral water, so I brought all three,” Irina said. It seemed as if she were stalling, for some reason, a sly look in her wide eyes.

  “Very thoughtful of you, Ms. Karpov.”

  “Spassibo bolshoyeh,” she said. Thanks very much.

  Graham suddenly understood what she was trying to do. She was suspicious of him. He let his expression darken. “I hope that I do not have to continually remind you that the language aboard this vessel is English.”

  She lowered her eyes. “I’m sorry, sir.”

  “If it happens again, I’ll leave you ashore at Long Beach and hire another steward.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Do you understand this perfectly?”

  She nodded. “I just wanted to thank you for your compliment, sir.”

  And test my Russian. “I know,” Graham said. “Now return to your duties.”

  “Sir,” she said, and she went past him to the door.

  “Ms. Karpov,” Graham said, before she
went out.

  She turned back. “Sir?”

  “Pazhaluystah,” he told her. You’re welcome.

  She was startled. It wasn’t what she’d expected. She said something else in rapid-fire Russian that Graham didn’t catch, then nodded. “Yes, sir,” she said. She gave him a final, searching look and left.

  Graham’s jaw tightened. It’d been a mistake to speak Russian to her. Even one word. He’d seen the immediate understanding on her face that she knew he was an imposter. He turned away from the door, his mind in a dark turmoil. He wanted to lash out; strike something; destroy someone; shatter them, drive them to their knees, kill the bastards who were responsible.

  He slowly came back from the brink, unclenching his fists, willing his muscles to relax.

  The stupid bitch had no proof. And in twelve hours she and the others would be dead.

  No one was using the officers’ mess this noon, but Irina stopped by to make sure that the coffee and tea service was clean and filled. She busied herself loading the few dirty cups, glasses, spoons, and tea bags and wrappers onto a tray, and replacing the stale lemon wedges with fresh ones from the small refrigerator under the counter.

  She didn’t want to think too hard about the captain, because that would lead her into places she did not want to go. But for the life of her she couldn’t understand why Captain Slavin was pretending to be a Russian, when clearly he was not.

  Ever since she was a child in Moscow, her father, who had been a brilliant physicist, encouraged her to be an independent thinker. “Do not be shy,” he would say. Her mother, on the other hand, was a typical Russian who loved to quote proverbs to get her messages across. Her favorite for Irina was that once a word was out of your mouth, you couldn’t swallow it again. And another was, all the brave men and women were in prison. Her father wanted her to speak up, while her mother wanted her to keep her mouth shut. She’d been torn between the two all her life.