“I’ll pay you the other half when we reach our destination,” Pakravesh said.
“Which is where?” the man asked eagerly as he used his foot to scoot the dolly to the parcel.
“The Royal,” he said, indicating the direction of his hotel. He had already rented a first-floor room and set it up according to his needs. “What is your name?”
“Mustapha.”
“I am Abass,” Pakravesh told him.
They started out. The dolly had a clothesline looped to the front. It threaded through a leather strap that went around the stevedore’s waist. Pakravesh lit a cigarette, offered one to his companion. Huffing with the effort of his labors, he declined.
“What have you got in here?” the youth asked. “It’s heavy!”
“A safe,” Pakravesh said. “I plan to be here for a while and I do not trust hotel security.”
The young man laughed as he grunted.
The Iranian hoped that that was all the young man asked about the parcel. Pakravesh really did want to give him the other half of the dirham note.
It was far more convenient, and less complicated, than a knife in the throat.
MCLEAN, VIRGINIA
From above, the National Intelligence Counterterrorism Center looked like a giant X.
The gleaming white, seven-story structure was set on a plot of land between 287 and Lewinsville Road, nestled between a large parking lot on the northwest and smaller structures on the southeast—the largest of which looked unsettlingly like a big white handgun pointed at the heart of the X.
The Nuclear Threat Assessment division was located in four offices along a corridor on the top floor. One of those offices belonged to Rayhan Jafari.
She arrived early Monday morning to see what was new with the frigate that had brought her to the White House the day before. Researching the vessel at home, she realized this was the same frigate that drove pirates from an American cargo ship in the Gulf of Oman in 2012. It was northeast of Fujairah, where oil tankers refueled. The Jamaran had just passed through the Strait of Hormuz when they picked up the distress call, fired shots at the “fishing vessel” as it tried to attach C-4 to the hull. She suspected, though it was never proved, that Iran had, in fact, paid for the attack in order to show that the military supported peaceful, seafaring activities.
Satellite images and other data revealed that it was traveling at thirty knots—its top speed. She noticed that the helicopter it had been designed to carry was missing.
More interesting than the physical appearance and activities of the ship was the lack of communication between the vessel and its home port on Iran’s southern coast. She suspected it was headed there—but radio silence was virtually unprecedented. She also wondered about the speed being different than Iranian frigates typically used in international waters.
She phoned John Duke, senior analyst in the Maritime Tracking Office on the fourth floor. She asked to superimpose this trip on a history of Iranian naval traffic.
“Any aberrations?” she asked.
“Displacement, for one,” he said. “Even without the weight of her helicopter she’s carrying a great deal of extra weight—fuel, I’m guessing, probably picked up during her stop in Venezuela. I’m sure we’ll be seeing more take-ons like that as the Iranians establish a permanent presence near our coast.”
“Which makes me wonder why she’s making this sudden retreat.”
“Here’s something strange,” Duke said. “When she turned home, she was making sudden midcourse adjustments to avoid other traffic.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah. Every time they picked up another ship, they maneuvered into a non-proximity stance. It’s not like they’re going to collide—they seemed to want to avoid any kind of visual or instrument contact.”
“All past tense,” Rayhan said.
“For the last three hours and change, they’ve been chugging along. Two knots slower, too, according to satellite records.”
Rayhan asked Duke to forward her the data. She was going to put this in front of General Clarke. Whatever was going on out there, the United States needed to have eyeballs on the scene. If it was what she suspected, it needed to be done sooner rather than later.
DAHLGREN, VIRGINIA
“Steamer trunk” turned up exactly once in the OSS archives.
Lt. Jr. Grade Mark Mason found it in a debrief from October 26, 1944. It was conducted in London, England, at the Kingsway Tunnels under the city—where operations were safe from spies and from German bombs. Present were the interrogator, Colonel Tim Maxim, and the stenographer, Second Officer Kathleen O’Neill. The transcriptions had been scanned, so he was looking at the actual document from the files of the OSS. The words he had been told to look for came in the middle of the five-hour-plus conversation. They meant nothing, so Mason scrolled to the beginning.
The narrative was like nothing the young intelligence officer could have imagined. The tale that unfolded was about Captain Largo Kealey of the United States Marine Corps, who had been on the trail of a prototype atom bomb constructed by the Third Reich.
“A prototype,” Mason muttered. He had never seen it reported anywhere that the Germans were close to that level of deployment.
He skimmed through the debrief, which followed the standard procedure: the subject was told to talk, omitting nothing, pausing only when a question was asked. Kealey’s story was precise and detailed. Mason knew, from training, that subjects did not bring crib sheets to these sessions: Kealey was remembering everything. Mason read the account about how the nuclear material was found, tracked, and finally placed on the U-boat at Brest. That was where the steamer trunk came in.
Page 212
M: You said a moment ago that intelligence reports placed the target parcel at about the size of a “valise,” you called it. Were you given any information about what a completed device might look like? Size-wise, I mean.
K: I was told to watch for something as small as a bowling ball and as large as a steamer trunk. My understanding was that the former would be a container for nuclear material only. The latter might be a finished bomb lacking, it was presumed, a functioning detonator.
M: And you believe that only the former, as you called it, was sent.
K: Yes, sir. I couldn’t see anything because of the heavy roofing Doenitz and his boys had laid on. But I’d done some calculations about the turning radius inside the conning tower of a U-boat. The enemy would have had a very tough time maneuvering a large trunk and making the turn into the vessel. And time was something they did not have in abundance.
M: Sorry to interrupt again, Captain—you’re being very thorough—but was there any indication, any at all, that this device was close to being active, or potentially so?
K: Only the haste of the departure, Colonel. Figure the war ends next summer, God willing. If Hitler has a shot winning this, it’s with a single bomb that can wipe out London, Washington, New York. My gut tells me they were close because they rushed that U-boat out like nothing I ever witnessed. And Ike must’ve agreed, because the RAF went after it with the kind of firepower—well, I don’t have to tell you.
M: No. You don’t. And I guess we can all thank bloody heaven they succeeded. So, the U-boat left port. What did you do then?
Mason skimmed the rest and then checked the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association website to see what the sea currents were like in that part of the world. He had no idea what he was looking at when it came to the Coriolis effect and the North Atlantic Gyre. But he could follow arrows and it looked to him—it looked very much to him—as if they pointed from the area that Captain Kealey had described as the U-boat kill zone to the region where the Iranians were giving the vessel its cold-water wings.
The Lt. JG wrote a summary for Lt. Cmdr. Bobbitt that concluded with the following summary:
We should determine whether this object could be what the Iranians discovered and, if so, do something else: find out whether this hero Kealey is
still alive and could possibly ID the object or its signature.
Nakhoda Yekom.
Ebrahim Elham said the word again in his mind. Captain. You are the captain of this vessel. More than that, you are the captain of a vessel of the Islamic Republic of Iran.
What a plateau to have reached! His father worked in a carpet factory and rose to foreman of the loading dock. The Elhams were natural leaders—but who could have imagined this?
He sat on the bridge with a skeleton crew of three seamen, looking out on clear gray skies and a slate-black sea.
Now it was time to lead.
Two-thirds of the crew were incapacitated. The medical staff said it was radiation poisoning. They were not going to recover. Elham himself felt dizzy, nauseous; the men beside him were perspiring.
You are in command of a ghost ship, he finally admitted to himself.
The frigate was not going to make it to port. The crew would not even reach the nearest friendly port in Cabo Bojador, Western Sahara. Even there, without a crew to defend her, the government would look the other way if any international power agreed to support its territorial claims against Morocco in exchange for possession of the frigate. His command, his crew, would become a pawn in a political chess game.
And then there is the radiation, he thought. The harbor would have sensors to check cargo ships. Alarms would surely sound. And that was if the ship could even reach the Atlantic port—
Already, it was becoming increasingly difficult to maneuver away from international traffic. Tehran would not want him to fall within the range of radiation detectors. By law, that would give any nation the right to quarantine the vessel. Unable to mount an effective resistance, the crew would be compelled to watch some NATO-allied ship, or perhaps the Russians, seize and study a jewel of the Republic’s navy.
That must not happen. Perhaps there were no secrets for them to learn; the navy was still new at the production of its own ships and had not yet developed advanced technology. But Iranian pride would suffer as the Jamaran was violated.
That must not be.
The frigate was equipped with a pair of triple-tube 324mm torpedo launchers. There were four torpedoes onboard. Each warhead was packed with forty-five kilograms of high explosives in a shaped charge. Elham radioed below and told all able and available hands to head at once to weapons stowage and dismantle the warheads and stack all the ammunition with it along the hull. The order was repeated for confirmation but not questioned. Elham suspected that in their hearts and minds, every seaman knew what lay ahead.
He heard prayer from the navigation bay. There would be a lot more of that after they finished the task at hand.
Navostavar Dovom Larijani notified the captain when the task was completed. The chief petty officer asked if the captain would be coming below. It was a question Elham had been weighing.
“I will remain on the bridge,” he answered. “Please decide among yourselves who will honor his family name with the task at hand.”
The captain heard the muted shouts of volunteers over the radio. Tears joined the perspiration running along his cheek. Larijani was a good man. He asked if the young man wanted the job.
“Very much, Captain,” was his reply.
“It is yours,” the captain said. “At will, CPO Larijani.”
Elham sat back in his vinyl chair. He looked proudly at the men on either side of the console ahead. They did not look behind them. They continued to guide the ship, though he could hear their gentle prayers.
O Allah, keep me alive so long as it is in my best interest and give me death when it is in my best interest.
The captain began to pray as well.
“Allah-humma ah-yini ma kaanatilhayaatukhairall-lee —”
He got no further. He heard the immense blast, felt himself catapulted from his seat as though it were a bucking bull. He fell hard on the console, which was tilted amidships and rolled onto the floor, the other men piling against him as the wall behind him became the floor and dropped like an elevator. He heard the pounding rush of seawater below, then beside, then above him. It crashed through the double-pane glass, slamming the men where they lay, pushing them into the water that rose quickly from below.
Cold salt water filled his mouth, his throat, and finally his lungs as his arms flailed helplessly against the flow.
And then the captain, the crew, and the rest of the frigate were gone beneath the dark waves.
CHAPTER 5
WASHINGTON, D.C.
It was a beautiful day, and Ryan Kealey had an urge to hunt dinner and cook it on an open fire. Since both of those were frowned upon in the nation’s capital, he settled for gyros on a park bench in Constitution Gardens near the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.
He and Allison had done nothing but walk since breakfast. Though Kealey hadn’t shaken the feeling that something was in the shadows, waiting for him—perhaps explaining his desire to grab a shotgun and shoot something—he managed to push it far enough aside to enjoy the day, the sights, and the company of Allison Dearborn. He didn’t know where, if anywhere, the relationship was going. Or if it even was a relationship, as opposed to a good friendship with sex. But whatever it was, it was easy and relaxed for both of them.
Even so, throughout the day, from Ford’s Theatre to the Lincoln Memorial, Kealey felt phantom vibrations from his cell phone. He enjoyed the downtime and he did not miss carrying the fate of a city or field operatives or even his own survival on his back. Counterterrorism was an unending relay race in which the baton had to be passed to others. The problem he had—and which he was sure his predecessors had with him—was that every generation had its own way of doing things. This younger generation, the late twentysomethings on up, relied so heavily on ELINT, electronic intelligence, that he feared they would lose the intuitive skills necessary for the job. They, in turn, felt that he put too much trust on intangibles like instinct and patterns of human behavior—which had been drummed into them as an evil thing: profiling. The kind of thing that had kept El Al Airlines safe from hijackers for decades.
So they kept circling each other with more suspicion than they applied to the enemy. And, of course, the numbers of youngsters were swelling while the numbers of old-timers decreased.
That’s why the movies keep casting younger and younger James Bonds, he mourned privately. No one would believe that someone even in his forties would have the energy for these kinds of sustained operations. The stakeouts alone tried strong men’s bladders, he had to admit.
A man with an iPod and new wedding ring walked by. The fortysomething looked at Kealey, then did a double take when he saw Allison. Kealey was relieved, then a little perturbed—she had a life outside of him?—when the man half smiled at Allison, tamped down the apparent kneejerk reaction to talk to her, and moved on.
“Friend?” Kealey asked when they were a half block away.
“Patient,” she replied.
“Don’t ask, don’t tell?”
“You know I can’t tell,” Allison said. “But what makes you say that?”
“Checked me out first, I heard a distinct disco beat from the iPod, and he had a new now-it’s-legal wedding ring,” Kealey answered.
“Jesus, Ryan,” she said lightly but with an edge of disapproval in her voice.“Did you ever meet a stereotype you didn’t embrace?”
“Was I wrong?”
She didn’t answer, which was an answer. She had released his arm to protest. He took her hand in his.
“Putting aside the sensitivity training that you got that I missed,” Kealey said, “is that what bothered you? My profiling?”
She walked in silence . . . in thought. He gave her time. He glanced at an alternative press headline in a plastic newspaper kiosk. He remembered when the concerns of those things were about people’s liberty, not pets and the rights of the physical planet.
“It isn’t the profiling,” she said.
“Good, because you know it’s a useful tool.”
“I
don’t want to get into rights issues, Ryan. It’s the fact that I’m trained to do this kind of analysis, and I still have to talk to people to root out what they’re about. You do it in about a second—”
“Less,” he said with a wink.
“And you’re generally close to a bull’s-eye.”
“I have to be, but it ages me,” he said. “My body draws energy on account, and I never really stop to replenish. We’ve talked about that. I’m like a weightlifter who doesn’t eat enough meat.”
“It’s funny,” she said. “It’s your body that reacts—yet we call it intelligence work.”
The oxymoronic assessment was not as sarcastic as it sounded. Kealey had often told his former CIA boss, Jonathan Harper, that the biggest drawback to any bureaucracy was what he called the 3Bs—the Brawny Brain Bank. Good ideas entered any system at the bottom. By the time they reached the top, hoisted on the tops of shoulders, the idea had been replaced by muscle. That was how targeted assassinations became full-scale invasions, how secret ambassadorial missions became declarations of war, how stakeouts became raids. It didn’t matter which level or branch of government it was—that was how it went.
“There, you see?”Allison said.
“What?” Kealey asked. He had already forgotten what they were talking about. His brain didn’t really want to work today.
“You’re looking around, humming. I think about things. You don’t.”
“Actually, I was thinking.”
“You were musing, ruminating—I know the look. It’s free-form, your mind drifting free as a little cloud.”
The Courier: A Ryan Kealey Thriller Page 7