Pinnacle Event

by Richard A. Clarke

  The rear wheels spun, trying to gain purchase on the gravel. He knew if he took his foot off the accelerator, the Cherokee would quickly slip backward and go over the side to crash on the rocks by the sea.

  Then suddenly the Jeep lurched forward and he pressed down harder on the pedal. As happened when he was nervous, Dugout began narrating his life in real time to himself, his mind racing. He thought of the story that would have run in his hometown paper: “Douglas Carter III, known to his friends as Dugout, was killed in a Caribbean car crash.” If that happened, his mother would be surprised and upset when she learned he was to be cremated. He had never shown her his will.

  Then the road shifted left at almost 90 degrees and the grade shot up farther. And he was on the left-hand side of the road. Why the shit, he wondered, did they drive on the wrong side when this was part of America? We had bought it or stolen it years ago, from the Danes or the Brits or Spanish or somebody, probably before there even were cars.

  Surely there were rules, he thought, regulations, about how ridiculous a hairpin turn could be. Sweet Jesus. And then the road switched right and climbed some more, just as one of those absurd Jeepney things came crashing down hill. Stretched, open-air buslike Jeeps, he had only ever seen them before in the Philippines and some places in Central America. But America was not supposed to be a third world country. Right now was the exception. This Jeepney looked like it had been painted in Haight-Ashbury in the 1960s by Peter Max. “Ayyyah,” a passenger cried as the thing missed him by inches and went on cascading down the road.

  What was this road like when it rained, which the guy at the car rental place had told him it does every day? What if you had popped a few before driving? He made a mental note to find out the fatality figures.

  Then, finally, the road, if you could call it that, began to descend gradually and flatten out. He felt himself exhaling, loosening his grip on the wheel. It will be just as bad going back, his interior voice said to him in that maddening way it had of providing a running commentary on his life.

  Now, there was civilization up ahead. Or, at least, there were buildings, small colorful houses, and a little town. He passed a concrete schoolhouse, painted in pastels, on the left. On the right was a tiny firehouse, too tiny for what sat outside it. What looked like a Book-Mobile truck, but with lots of antennae, was on the side of the road, its Day-Glo yellowy green paint job shining in the sun. USVI MOBILE COMMAND POST were the words painted in large letters on its side. It proved his theory that everyone but him had been given a mobile command post by the Department of Homeland Security. And he was probably one of the few people who would know what to do with one.

  This mobile command post could never make it on those roads. It must have arrived by barge to sit here until discovered by archaeologists in some future era. Whatever would they think of it, he wondered. Then he spotted what he assumed was his destination.

  The parking lot had a half dozen or more cars scattered in it, indicating, no doubt, that this shack was the bar, Skinny Legs. The online guide had said it was “seedy but charming.” The first descriptor was self-evidently true. A chicken walked in front of him through the dusty lot and he found himself wondering what they served here for lunch. He realized that it was after eleven in the morning and all he had eaten so far was a donut he had grabbed in Red Hook on St. Thomas before getting on the water taxi.

  The low ceiling in the shack would have been oppressive if there had been walls, but Skinny Legs was a kind of open-air sports bar. Red Sox, Bruins, Celtics, and Patriots banners and memorabilia hung from the ceiling and covered the walls. Boston in the tropics.

  He sat on a barstool and waved at the woman behind the bar. “What’ll yah have, hun?” she asked in a voice that indicated to him either Dorchester or Southie.

  “Margarita.” Then he had to ask. “Dorchester or Southie?”

  “Dot. You?”

  “Belmont.”

  She screwed up her face. “Rich kid, huh? Belmont Day School or BBN?”

  “Belmont High, actually,” he said and smiled in the way that usually worked, that made him seem sweet and innocent, or so he had been repeatedly told by now ex-boyfriends.

  “That was before he went to MIT, Joannie,” Ray Bowman’s voice said from behind Dugout. “I’ll serve this one. We don’t actually do margaritas here, ’cuz we don’t have a blender. So how ’bout a Painkilla?” Bowman moved behind the bar.

  Bowman looked smaller, Dug thought. Maybe it was the flip-flops. Or maybe it was the Hawaiian shirt. And there was a surprising amount of gray speckling his three-day beard.

  “As long as it’s not too sweet,” Dug replied.

  “I knew it would be you. No one else could have found the trail,” Ray said, handing him the plastic-covered menu. “Want food?”

  “You know what Vela is?” Dug asked.

  “Some sort of cheese you squirt? Don’t have any. Get the fish tacos.”

  “What kind of fish is it?”

  Ray smiled, “No one knows. It’s white. Not bony. Probably cod, but, no one knows really.”

  “Okay, but hold the fries. Is there a fruit cup instead?”

  “You serious?” Ray laughed. “You bring me any Havanas as an inducement?”

  “I did,” Dug said reaching into his backpack. “Inducement to do what?”

  “Whatever stupid shit task they sent you here to get me to take on for them,” Ray said reaching for the Cohiba.

  “So, once again, did you ever hear of Vela?”

  Ray lit the cigar and took a drag, letting a large cloud of smoke flow over the bar. “Coits?” he said, walking out from behind the counter.

  “As in interruptus?” Dug asked.

  “No, that’s coitus,” Ray said, pushing Dug off the bar stool. “Let’s go outside. Come on.” Dug looked at him oddly, but followed Ray out into a sandy backyard and the noonday sun.

  Ray Bowman grabbed four heavy, iron horseshoes and handed two to Dugout. “Best three outa five. Let’s start at the end under the tree.”

  “Whooah. This can’t be regulation length. It’s like a mile to that little post,” Dug said.

  “Its regulation, all right. I’ll give you a break, though, I’ll go first.” Ray’s first toss landed eight inches to the right of the post. Dug had been watching Ray’s style of motion and imitated it perfectly, landing his iron standing up, two inches to the right of the target. Then, it slowly fell backward, leaning against the post. “Leaner,” he announced.

  Ray Bowman scowled and then stepped into his toss with determination, his horseshoe knocking the leaner off and then bouncing and landing three feet behind.

  “Mutually assured defeat, huh?” Dug asked as he stood in. He paused, stared at the target, moved his arm back, stepped forward, and launched. “Ringer,” he said as the cling rang out from the horseshoe hitting the post. He pushed his Maui Jim’s up on his head and said. “Vela was a constellation of satellites launched in the 1970s. Simple birds with one purpose, to detect nuclear explosions aboveground.”

  “Okay,” Ray said as he relit the Cohiba.

  “In September 1979, Vela detected an explosion off South Africa,” Dug continued.

  “So?”

  “South Africa later admitted having made nuclear weapons,” Dug explained.

  “Didn’t know that.”

  “And, before ending apartheid and handing control over to Nelson Mandela, the white government reported to the UN that it destroyed six nuclear weapons. End of inventory,” Dug said.

  “Ancient history then,” Ray said and waved at the waitress inside Skinny Legs. “Two Red Stripes, please Joannie.”

  Dug looked Bowman in the eyes. “We have reason to believe that white South Africans just sold nuclear weapons.”

  “To who?”

  “To whom,” Dug corrected. “That’s what they want you to find out.”

  “Christ, I’d forgotten how pedantic you could be,” Ray Bowman said as he took the two beers from Joannie. “
Come on, Dugster. Let’s walk down to the water.”

  They passed a dozen or more boats that had been brought up on the land, apparently a while ago, their paint faded, tropical vines gradually covering them. The beached boats gave the little harbor town a sense of insouciance, of the pressure to “do something” having lifted and drifted off. “Up there,” Ray said pointing to one of the steep, verdant hills behind the town. “That’s where my cottage is. But then you know that, I assume.”

  Dug took a swig of the Red Stripe. “Let’s just say I haven’t been looking in every sleazy bar in the Caribbean.”

  The two men walked up on to a brightly painted, little restaurant on the water’s edge. They helped themselves to an outside table under the sign SERAFINI’S CARIBBEAN-ITALIAN. A grandmotherly woman quickly appeared from inside.

  “Hi, Robbie. Need a menu?” Mrs. Serafini asked.

  “Robbie?” Dug asked when she’d left them.

  “Well, I did take some measures to cover my tracks, but, since you’re here, obviously not sufficient ones.”

  Dug buried his face in the menu. “I always knew where you were. Never lost track. Don’t ask how.”

  “Well, I guess in a way that’s comforting,” Ray replied, scanning the boats on the water. “Although it was nice to pretend to myself that I was free.”

  “You are free. They can’t make you come back. It’s just that they’re stumped. And scared. When Dr. Burrell tells the President he has his best people on it, he knows it isn’t true. His best guy is bartending on St. John.”

  “And painting. Watercolors initially, but I’m experimenting now with oils and acrylics.”

  “Who are you, George W. Bush? Nuclear bombs could ruin the country in a way that we could not ever fully recover from,” Dug said putting down the menu.

  Mrs. Serafini reappeared and interrupted. “Here’s a pitcher of the sangria you love, Robbie. The special today is the grilled grouper.” They both ordered the special.

  “The special every day is the grouper, but she does change the sauces. Tell Winston Burrell to cool his jets. Bombs made over thirty years ago are not going to work,” Ray insisted.

  “These ones will.”

  “How do you know that, Einstein?”

  Dug leaned forward across the table. “They tested one of them in the middle of nowhere, in the southern Indian Ocean. The replacement for Vela, a package on the new Milstar, picked it up, the telltale double flash of a nuke going off. Radiation detectors on Diego Garcia confirmed. Later, Australia did, too.”

  Ray put down his glass of sangria. He pulled on his stubbled chin with his right hand, a mannerism Dugout knew well. It meant Raymond Bowman was pausing, processing.

  “We think the explosion was required by the buyers before they paid up for the rest of the lot. Proof that what they were buying worked.”

  “‘We’?” Ray asked.

  “PEG still exists. It didn’t go away just because you quit. Grace Scanlon is running it. The Policy Evaluation Group still sits up on Navy Hill and still answers the National Security Advisor’s questions, does his special tasks.”

  “And what’s this special task?” he asked.

  Before Ray’s question could be answered, Mrs. Serafini brought out two plates of fish. “Careful, boys, the plates are hot.”

  “Simple,” Dugout replied. “Find out who bought the nukes. Find the bombs before they get them into the U.S. Grab the bombs. Oh, and, make sure there aren’t any other bombs left over somewhere else.”

  “That all?”

  “Easy for you to do. You’ll be back bartending at Skinny Legs for their New Year’s party. I hear it’s a hoot,” Dug said with his mouth full of grouper.

  “It’s better than the scene at Jost Van Dyke’s,” Ray said.

  “Who’s he?” Dugout asked.

  “Eat your fish. Then we’ll go somewhere private and talk. You need to tell me a lot more.”

  “So you’ll help?”

  “No, I didn’t say that,” Bowman replied. “You came all the way down here. You might as well tell me your whole story. I like to hear stories.” He refilled their glasses with the fruity red wine.

  After lunch, having consumed two beers each and a pitcher of sangria between them in two hours, Ray led Dugout down the road and through some high grass to a small cove. On the little beach in a boat cradle, sat what appeared to be a wreck, a twenty-four-foot wooden sailboat, paint peeling, sections of the hull missing.

  Ray pointed to the boat, proudly. “She’s mine.”

  “What happened to it, a hurricane sometime in the last century?”

  “It’s only been out of the water two years,” Ray replied. “It’s a project. Everyone needs a project. Besides, when I am here, I am alone. Nobody ever comes down here.”

  “Did you ever stop to wonder why?”

  “When did this supposed nuclear explosion take place?” Ray began, as he lowered himself to the sand under a palm tree on the shore of the cove.

  “Nine weeks ago.”

  “Well, then, it probably wasn’t what you think it was, because by now any terrorist group worth its salt would have turned some city somewhere to radioactive ash,” Ray said.

  Dugout has assumed a yoga position on the sand. “Maybe, but the bomb experts at Oak Ridge and Los Alamos are pretty certain that the double flash was a nuke going off. The air samples they got later were a ninety-six percent positive match. And besides, then there were the murders.”

  “Ah, murders. This gets better. Do tell.”

  “Six days after the double flash, several expat, white South Africans either murdered or died in suspicious circumstances. Tel Aviv, Vienna, Dubai, Singapore, Sydney. Turns out they all had connections back to the South African bomb program, either themselves or their fathers.”

  “Who killed them?” Bowman asked.

  “Dunno, but just before they died they each got about a half billion U.S. dollars deposited into accounts they controlled. Thousands of money transfers, from a rat’s nest of hawalas, Bitcoins, anonymous offshore accounts, stolen credit cards, stock sales, you name it.”

  “So, you of all people ought to be able to trace through that and find out the origin,” Bowman said.

  “Tried. Still trying. No joy. It was very well done. Dead ends everywhere.”

  Bowman squinted and shook his head. “Doesn’t make sense to pay a guy and then kill him. Why pay him? How’d you get on to all this anyway?”

  “Minerva, the big data analytics package you bought me, was running a scan looking for interesting money laundering and found the thread. When I pulled on it, I found almost two and a half billion bucks had run around the world and then ended up in these accounts.” Dugout was getting excited telling the story, his words coming increasingly faster. “Checked the owners and found dead guys, all of whom had died within hours of each other, spread out all over the world. Asked what did they have in common and, bingo, they all go back to the Apartheid nuke program. And when I check the database on that program, I find that there is an open investigation about a double flash in the Indian Ocean just days before these guys got popped.”

  “The flash Velveeta detected?” Bowman asked.

  “Vela, but yeah. So I tell Winston Burrell over at the White House and he goes all sorts of ballistic and says it’s an al Qaeda plot to blow up American cities just before the presidential election and he thinks these guys are slowly smuggling the bombs in and getting them in place.”

  “What guys?”

  Dugout came out of the cross-legged lotus position and stood up. “That’s just it. I have no clue. Al Qaeda, Muslim Brotherhood, ISIS, North Korea? I struck out. So did everybody else. So Burrell sends me here, to get you on a secure video link with him.”

  Bowman got up off the sand so he could look Dugout in the eye. “No way. There is no secure video at Skinny Legs or anywhere else on this rock and I am not going off island to talk to Winston.”

  Dugout smiled back at him, then bent over
and unzipped his backpack. He removed what looked like an iPad. Then he extended a black tube that looked like a Pringles can. Ray guessed it was a satellite antenna. Dugout plugged it into the iPad and tapped at an on-screen keyboard. Quickly a face appeared on screen.

  “Situation Room. How can I help you, Dr. Carter?”

  “Dr. Carter?” Bowman repeated, laughing.

  “I need to speak to the National Security Advisor. He’s expecting my call,” Dugout said to the screen.

  “Yes, sir, let me patch you through to Dr. Burrell,” the man on the screen said.

  “He’s expecting your call, is he?” Bowman frowned at Dugout. “You working directly for Winston these days?”

  “Grace doesn’t mind. Grace, the person who took your job when you disappeared? Anyways, Winston gives me special projects. I usually meet him at the Cosmos Club, in a private room, for dinner,” Dugout admitted.

  “How nice for you.”

  Dugout then plugged red Beats earphones into the iPad.

  The image that then appeared on the screen looked like it came from a camera behind Winston Burrell’s desk on the first floor of the West Wing. The National Security Advisor could be seen sitting down and adjusting the lens, zooming in on his own face. Dugout passed the modified iPad to Bowman, who put on the earphones and sat back down on the sand, looking at the screen.

  “I would have thought the beard and hair would be longer,” Burrell began.

  “And a happy Monday to you, too, Winston,” Bowman shot back.

  “Long time no talk and all that. Look, Ray, what Dug Carter has told you is all true and then some. The Agency has been on to the government in Pretoria and they know these dead guys as the Trustees, the heads of an expat network of South Africans who all had connections to the Apartheid government’s defense industry and their nukes.

  “The Intel Community is all agreed that these South Africans must have kept some bombs, tested one to prove to a buyer that they worked, then sold the buyer the others. Problem is that the Intel Community has no idea who bought the bombs or where they were, let alone where they are now. My assumption is al Qaeda and that some of them are already here, probably got one a few blocks from the White House.”