Joshua's Hammer

by David Hagberg

  “I’m nervous, but I was thinking about something,” she replied.

  “What’s that?”

  “Just about everybody else is going to be just as nervous as me. Mom says all I can do is my best and don’t worry about anyone else, ’cause they’ll be trying to do their best. I hope. But I’m still nervous. Is it okay?”

  Haynes glanced up as his chief of staff Tony Lang came around the corner. He looked nervous. Everybody aboard did. Haynes gave his daughter a peck on the cheek. “It’s okay to be nervous, but not scared.”

  She thought about it for a moment, then nodded, her pretty blue eyes lighting up and a smile brightening an already impossibly bright face. “Gotcha.” She looked like a cross between a blond, blue-eyed Scandinavian beauty and a mysterious, almond-eyed Siberian.

  Haynes studied his daughter’s round face for a moment, and his heart suddenly hardened. God help the sorry sonof abitch who ever tried to harm so much as a hair on her head. He felt a genuine sorrow and guilt for what had happened to bin Laden’s daughter. He wished that he could somehow make it right, or at least explain to bin Laden how it had happened. But he could not. What he could do was protect his own child, while at the same time protect the freedom of the United States.

  “Gotta go,” he said, but his daughter was already looking out the window again. She could grasp some fairly complex ideas, but usually not more than one of them at a time. She was in some ways lucky, he thought.

  He joined Lang and they went forward into the corridor separating the family’s space with the President’s private study and conference room.

  “Henry would like to go over a few things with you, Mr. President, and Sterling wants to know if you’ll agree to an off-the-record chat with the media sometime this afternoon before we touch down.”

  “Tell Henry to come up, and I want you to sit in on it too, because I have a few ideas—assuming he’s talking about security for the games in San Francisco.”

  Lang nodded. “He’s running into some brick walls, and he’s probably going to ask you to pull your daughter out of the ISO.”

  Haynes’s jaw tightened. “Not a chance. And you can tell Sterling that I’ll talk to the media, but the issues will be limited.”

  “Anything but the games?” Lang asked.

  “That’s right,” Haynes said angrily. He went forward, pausing at the open curtain to his wife’s office. She was in conference with her press secretary and they looked up and smiled.

  “Did you talk to Deb?” his wife asked.

  “Just now. She’s a little nervous, but she’ll be okay.”

  “Would you like me to come back later, Mrs. Haynes?” the First Lady’s secretary asked, starting to rise.

  The President waved her back. “No. Henry wants to go over the arrangements for San Francisco, so I’ve just got a minute.”

  “Are we going to be okay up there?” The President’s wife asked.

  “We’re going to make it okay, Linda, by covering all the bases, not by hiding,” the President told her firmly. He held her eye for a moment, and a silent message of reassurance passed from him to her. She visibly relaxed. “I wouldn’t take the games away from her for anything.”

  “It’s been two months and nothing has happened,” she said. “Do you want me to touch on it in my talks?”

  Haynes thought about it and nodded. “It might not be a bad idea. But use a light touch, and maybe you’d better run it past Marty.” Martin Schoenberg was the President’s chief speech writer.

  “Sure.”

  The President went to his conference room. He pressed the button for his steward, who appeared instantly. “How about some coffee, Alex?”

  “Coming right up, sir.”

  Haynes was in shirtsleeves; not as informal as Clinton had been, but a lot less tense than Nixon. He set a hardworking but relaxed tone in his administration, and the people he’d gathered around him thrived in the atmosphere.

  His coffee came in a large mug bearing the presidential seal, and a moment later Lang showed up with Kolesnik.

  “Good morning, Mr. President,” the chief of the Secret Service Protective Division said.

  “Morning, Henry. Tony said you had something for me.”

  “Yes, sir, but I’m afraid that it’s not very good news. San Francisco is a mess. There’s just no way that we can guarantee your safety or that of your daughter in the games. It’s as simple as that. We’d like you to pull your daughter out and cancel your part in the opening ceremonies.”

  “We’ve gone over this a hundred times.”

  “Sir, a lot of those athletes are coming from Muslim countries. Their families are coming with them; moms, dads, brothers, uncles. At least men who claim to be brothers and uncles. And there’s just no way we can check all of them. If bin Laden wanted to send an army to San Francisco, he could do it easily.”

  “But he’s not going to do that.”

  “I’m sorry, Mr. President, but we can’t be sure,” Kolesnik countered. He handed the President a list of all the Special Olympians expected for the games. “There’re nearly three thousand of them, plus relatives or guardians and coaches. At least four hundred are Muslims. But that’s not the worst of it. Bin Laden has supporters just about everywhere, which means that the assassin or assassins could be German or Italian, or Japanese, even American.”

  The President flipped through the lengthy list, knowing exactly who these people were. Down syndrome runners, paraplegic swimmers, blind discus throwers, palsied high jumpers; athletes with dozens of afflictions doing the best they could. “That’s exactly why bin Laden won’t make his strike in San Francisco. He’d be killing Muslims. His own people. He’d never survive such an attack.”

  “In a strange way, Mr. President, you may be wrong for all the right reasons,” Kolesnik said. “By killing his own people he would be sending a very clear message that absolutely no one is safe from him. It could dramatically increase his stature and that of the NIF, if anyone can follow such logic.”

  “Well, I for one cannot.”

  “The psychologists on our staff brought it up as a possibility, sir.” Kolesnik was frustrated; but it was clear that he’d expected to run into a brick wall. “If it came to that, Mr. President, the Secret Service could supersede your orders.” Under certain circumstances in which the President’s life was clearly in danger, the Secret Service did have the power to override a President’s wishes, even by gentle force if necessary, and take him out of harm’s way.

  “Don’t even try to go there, Henry,” Haynes warned.

  Kolesnik straightened up. “Until you fire me, Mr. President, I’ll do my job the best way I know how even if it means disagreeing with you.”

  The President handed the list back. “Is there any evidence that bin Laden is planning to hit us in San Francisco?”

  “No, sir.” Kolesnik replaced the list in his file folder. “But the bomb is already here in the States.”

  “Anything on that from the FBI or CIA that I haven’t seen?”

  “No, sir.”

  “They tried to get McGarvey’s wife and daughter and they failed. Maybe that’s it,” the President said. “Bring me some hard information and I’ll cancel the entire ISO. Until then do what you can.” Haynes softened. “I want you to know, Henry, that I’m not trying to be a bastard here. I appreciate the extraordinary efforts that your people take every day to keep me and my family safe. But you have to understand what I’m faced with. Whoever sits in this chair still has to go out and press the flesh on occasion, even if it means putting his life on the line. And that’s just the way it is.”

  “Yes, Mr. President, we do understand,” Kolesnik replied. “We’ll do the best we can.”

  “That’s all I can ask from anybody.”

  TWENTY-FIVE

  M/V Margo Off Cabo San Lazaro, Baja California

  There’s something damned funny going on, if you ask me,” Captain Panagiotopolous told his deck officer. It was after breakfast a
nd they were steaming north at seventeen knots about two hundred miles off the Baja California peninsula. They were slightly ahead of schedule and if the weather held they’d be in San Francisco at least eight hours early.

  The entire trip starting in Karachi three months ago had been a cocked-up affair, in the captain’s estimation, although nothing terribly untoward had happened to them other than the brief but intense storm in the Arabian Sea. But there’d been an odd flavor to the home office communiques from Paris, a vagueness that the captain had never noticed before in his twenty-five years at sea. It was the new executives probably; kids who’d never been to sea themselves and yet felt competent to run a shipping company with a fleet of thirty-eight vessels that stopped at just about every port in the world. But the snotnoses did know computers.

  For two months while the Margo was in dry dock at the Tampa Marine Yards in Florida, Panagiotopolous had gone home to visit his family in Athens. But after just a few days he remembered why he had left in the first place. He took a small boat out to Delos where he worked up a sweat helping prune olive trees. Honest labor. Appreciated labor. When he got back to his ship he was refreshed, ready to go. But after a brief inspection he saw that none of the repairs done to the ship had been necessary. Some painting, a new reefer in the galley, a few new pieces of navigation equipment on the bridge; nothing essential.

  He got to wondering what the hell was really going on. For instance, why had the Margo been yanked from service at that particular moment for unnecessary repairs. Instead of earning money, the company had lost a bundle. And, why had the deck cargo bound for San Francisco been unloaded and stored at the shipyard instead of being transferred to another ship?

  Or what the hell were they doing with a helicopter tied down on the rear deck?

  Panagiotopolous wasn’t surprised by taking on last-minute cargo. It happened all the time. But it was the way in which it had been handled in Colon at the eastern terminus of the Panama Canal that was odd. They were ordered to drop anchor in the holding basin, and within the hour the self-loading cargo vessel Antilles Trader out of Havana came alongside. A company representative came aboard with a bill of lading. The helicopter was to be loaded on the Margo’s afterdeck for delivery to M. L. Murty, Ltd., in San Francisco. The documents were in order, but since it was Cuban equipment bound for a U.S. port a special clearance was needed, something the representative didn’t have. When the captain called the company on SSB he was told in no uncertain terms that the Margo was his ship and his responsibility. He would either have to sail without the papers, or a new captain would be found to replace him. The clearance papers, he was promised, would be delivered to the ship with the harbor pilot in San Francisco Bay. If he was stopped in U.S. waters by the Coast Guard he would have to talk his way out of his problem.

  “It makes no sense,” he said.

  “I agree,” Schumatz replied. They stood on the port wing looking aft. “I could fray the cables and let the sonofabitch fall overboard. Nobody would be any the wiser. The insurance company would bitch, that’s if the company even made a claim. Without the proper papers we shouldn’t be carrying it, so if it simply disappeared they might say nothing.”

  “Why are they taking the risk? That’s what I don’t get. The ship and our cargo could be impounded.”

  “Obviously the company thinks it’s worth it. Hell, even if we deliver the chopper the new owners will never get it registered with the FAA. Not without the proper documents. Does that make any sense to you?”

  “I hadn’t thought of that,” Panagiotopolous said. He stared at the machine. It was a small helicopter, capable of carrying only the pilot and three passengers. But it was apparently in serviceable condition. According to Schumatz, who had supervised its loading, there was even fuel in the tank. Another thought struck him. “There’s plenty of clearance for the rotors. Someone could pull the lines free and take off, couldn’t they?”

  Schumatz’s eyes narrowed. “What are you getting at?”

  “Does anybody aboard know how to fly one of those things?”

  “I don’t. Do you?”

  Panagiotopolous shook his head thoughtfully. Something wasn’t right. It wasn’t adding up. There was some element that he was missing.

  First Officer Green came from the bridge with a message flimsy. “We just received this,” he said, handing it to the captain.

  “Thank you,” Panagiotopolous said. “Do you know how to fly a helicopter, by any chance, Mr. Green?”

  Green’s face brightened. “As a matter of fact I do, sir. The company has a couple of Bell Rangers, which I’ve used.”

  “Could you fly that one?” the captain asked, indicating the Cuban helicopter on the aft deck.

  “They all fly pretty much the same, so I suppose so. But I took a look at it when it came aboard, and it’s a piece of junk. Doesn’t have much of a range, either, so I wouldn’t get very far.”

  “Anyone else aboard know how to fly one of those things?”

  Green shook his head. “I don’t think so, Captain. They cost a ton of money to maintain, let alone fly, and I don’t think we have any millionaires in disguise on our crew list. Why did you ask?”

  “We were just wondering why the company ordered us to take it to San Francisco at the last minute.”

  “I haven’t a clue. I could call my dad and ask him, I suppose. But like I said, it’s a piece of junk. I don’t know anybody who’d want it except as a museum piece.”

  “That’s probably it,” Pangiotopolous said. “Thank you.”

  “Yes, sir.” Green started to leave, but then turned back. “Oh, that’s a U.S. Coast Guard traffic advisory that we just got. There’s going to be a shipping restriction under the Golden Gate Bridge Saturday morning from ten hundred hours until fourteen hundred. I’ve already done the navigation. If we can keep our present SOG we’ll be under the bridge at least six hours early.” SOG was the actual speed over the ground that the ship made good, which included the effects of ship’s speed through the water, the ocean currents, the wave action and the effect of the wind on the bulk of the vessel.

  “Thank you, good work,” the captain said, and Green went back inside.

  “What’s that all about?” Schumatz asked.

  Panagiotopolous quickly read the brief U.S.C.G. advisory. “Something’s going on, probably bridge repairs, so they’re closing down all shipping traffic inbound as well as outbound.” He pocketed the message. “It won’t effect us though.” He glanced again at the helicopter. “Ask around, would you Lazlo? Find out if anyone else can fly one of those things.”

  Schumatz nodded. “What about Green?”

  “I’ll keep an eye on him.”

  CIA Headquarters

  It was coming up on noon at the headquarters gym. McGarvey had had a particularly bad bout of depression this morning, so intense that he’d had difficulty concentrating on getting through the morning, let alone doing any real work. He’d fought depression most of his adult life and extreme physical exercise not only kept him in shape for field work, but it somehow combated his dark moods. If he could get through one or two hours of hard work, anything for him was possible afterward.

  Murphy had ordered him to take an extra week off, but that was impossible. He’d had the operation to fix the bleeder in his head and relieve the pressure on his brain, and he’d recovered fully. But bin Laden and Ali Bahmad were still at large, and the bomb was still out there somewhere. His wife and daughter had almost been assassinated. The President, who steadfastly refused to back down, was putting his own daughter in harm’s way. And the Arabic languages expert Otto had found had translated the rest of the one and only phone conversation between bin Laden and Bahmad that they’d managed to record.

  The daughters of the infidels will die like the pigs they are.

  Bin Laden had used the plural—daughters—not the singular. It meant that McGarvey’s and the President’s daughters were targets.

  According to the timetable, Bahma
d had told his master. The package is on its way.

  But that was two months ago, and since then the only piece of information they knew with reasonable certainty was that bin Laden was holed up in his compound in Khartoum. Possibly even under a loose house arrest by Sudan’s National Islamic Front.

  It was this last bit of information that was so puzzling. The analysts in the Directorate of Intelligence were telling him that if bin Laden were under house arrest it could mean that the bomb project was being delayed or canceled. McGarvey wasn’t so sure. Bin Laden was an independent man, and he was dying. He certainly wouldn’t delay the project, because he might not live long enough to see it done. Nor would he cancel it. No, Bahmad was still here in the U.S., with the bomb, and he meant to use it. The question was where and when.

  If you get close enough to bin Laden, kill him, Dennis Berndt had suggested. It wasn’t that easy, McGarvey thought. It never was. But he was finally beginning to realize that killing bin Laden might just be their only way out. But it was hard, when he was depressed, to keep his mind on track. Hard not to just walk away from the problem, something that he’d never done in his life.

  He wiped his face with his sweat towel at the side of the fencing strip and took a drink of Gatorade as he tried to figure out a strategy. Todd Van Buren, his opponent, was not only twenty-five years younger, his reflexes were supersharp because he worked as a hand-to-hand combat instructor at the Farm. The fact that he was sleeping with the boss’s daughter didn’t seem to have any effect on his enthusiasm for the touch. But he did have one weakness. He was primarily a foilest, and that’s how he was trying to fight épée this morning.

  McGarvey walked back to the en garde line, his mask under his left arm. “One more touch?”

  Van Buren nodded. “Getting a little tired, Mr. McGarvey?” he asked, grinning.