Sleeping Dogs

by Tony Vanderwarker

  Warren just gave him the opening he was looking for. Though Warren is textbook military, all spit and polish and by the book, Howie’s going to find out just how quick he is. “Commander Warren, may I stop you for a second?”

  “By all means.”

  “Just a clarification. You just said, If the object is there, we’ll find it.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “So you don’t believe there’s a bomb?”

  Sharon’s eyes are bouncing back and forth between the two men. Warren strikes her as slightly irritated, like he’s being backed into a corner.

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “But the implication was there.”

  “You are putting words in my mouth.”

  “I’m only repeating what you said.”

  “This is semantics, Mr. Collyer.”

  “Not really, I’m curious about your personal opinion, Commander Warren. Do you really believe our armed forces could have dropped a nuke in the Chesapeake Bay and left it for almost fifty years?” Sharon’s seeing a side of Howie not evident before, confrontational and brusque. As if he’s a trial lawyer trying to rattle a witness.

  “I believe Secretary Jimmick is sufficiently alarmed about the prospect to have ordered a search of the area.”

  “But you don’t believe it yourself?”

  “My personal opinion is not relevant, Mr. Collyer. I am under orders to conduct a search of the designated sections.”

  Howie has all he needs to know. He looks directly at Warren for a couple more seconds, then waves his hand and says, “Okay, please continue.”

  38

  Solo, Indonesia, Saturday night, EST+12

  In the cavernous, dimly lit back room of the call center the activity level is intense. The relentless buzz of conversation combined with the steady clicking of computer keys, the hum of the servers, screens and hard drives and the steady shush of air-conditioning raises the sound level in the control room to a booming drone.

  El-Khadr circulates from station to station, leaning down to glance at the screens and up to check on the plasmas above, overseeing the overall operation while his people monitor all individual aspects—movements of Chrysanthemum cell members, positioning of the salvage tug, getting all the support for Dahlia into place as well as constantly updating Collyer’s activity.

  Again, coding is becoming the bottleneck. When events are happening rapidly, painstakingly translating each and every message out of flower lingo is a time-consuming drag. As Naguib scrambles to keep up with the torrent of information flying back and forth between the United States and Indonesia, he finds himself falling further and further behind. Whether they are tersely worded commands or elaborate explanations, every word and sentence of each email and web posting has to be encrypted into the project’s language. Before he became so snowed under he’d never be able to catch up, Naguib begged El-Khadr to give him a hand, despite his boss’s position and his poor typing skills.

  In ten minutes Naguib’s back with a new computer. In a half hour, it’s connected and El-Khadr is sitting alongside Naguib’s desk helping him handle the incoming traffic.

  “How do I tell the network Collyer has taken up a position on the upper Chesapeake Bay?” El-Khadr quizzes, leaning across to consult Naguib.

  “Use the vacation terminology,” Naguib ad libs. “Tell them Cindy will be on holiday there.”

  “But I need to let Dahlia and Chrysanthemum know the specific location.”

  “Here’s what you do,” Naguib counsels. “Let them know Cindy plans to tour gardens in the Herring Bay area.”

  “Of course!” El-Khadr quickly follows through on his suggestion. “As long as they know the general area, once we learn it we will be easily able to give them a precise location.” El-Khadr’s fingers hurriedly hunt and peck through the keys to relay the information updating the website on Collyer’s whereabouts. The people assigned to him have tracked Collyer to a boatyard the military has secured on the shore.

  But El-Khadr is not concerned. At some point they will have to begin their search. And though the Americans may suspect Collyer is being watched, they have no idea the Chrysanthemum or Dahlia operation exists. Either one will take them by surprise.

  He glances up at the three-by-five-foot nautical chart on the wall. In pastel tones of pale blue and yellow, it displays detailed soundings of the bay. El-Khadr has thoroughly studied the Chesapeake. In the center sections, the bay is white, indicating deeper water that would require the tug, barge and deep-sea diving crew. A night recovery has been planned and practiced.

  But much of the water is light blue, showing shallow depths accessible to an expert diver like Mehran. So El-Khadr has put his money on him, much neater and cleaner. His preparations have been intensive and hurried. Over the past two days, his teams have been scrambling to provision three boathouses along the length of the bay, quickly moving equipment into place. If Collyer commences his search in the Herring Bay area and finds the bomb in shallow water, the northernmost boathouse will be ideally situated. He quickly does the calculations in his head. Once the door is opened, it would take Mehran no longer than ten minutes to reach any spot in the upper part of the bay.

  Though he does not believe in Western superstitions, El-Khadr has his fingers crossed. He struggles to keep his composure. Patience, above all I need to be patient, he keeps telling himself. I must not make rash decisions but I cannot let the opportunity slip away. He quickly comes to a decision. Though it is prudent to stay with timetables that have been worked out in the past, it is also necessary to stay flexible. But he is going to test drive his reasoning with Naguib, just to make sure.

  “In the event this becomes a Dahlia operation, I am considering activating Mehran,” El-Khadr says.

  Naguib glances at his boss. He seems resolute. Naguib wishes he would wait but he has learned that El-Khadr does not like to be argued with.

  El-Khadr makes his case, “It’s over four hours from New Brunswick. He has to go around Philadelphia and through the center of Baltimore. Holiday traffic can be brutal. I have seen it myself. And when he gets into Maryland, the roads along the shore are all narrow, two lanes at best. One accident can result in a three-hour bottleneck. I can’t allow Mehran to be caught in traffic.”

  “At the risk of offending you, I would like to point out that until everything is set it is not prudent to expose him.”

  “Why shouldn’t we at least move him closer?”

  “You disrupt his routine. Moving him before the planned time could make people suspicious. His girlfriend, for instance, who knows? It’s injecting a factor into the equation we haven’t considered.”

  “But the girlfriend would have no idea where Mehran is headed or what he is about to do. And anyway, before they could react, Mehran will already be in place and his trail will have gone cold. I have made up my mind. He must be there the minute Collyer starts his search.”

  Naguib shows his palms, “It is your decision.”

  El-Khadr’s hands move to the keyboard. He composes the message carefully and deliberately. From earlier posts, Mehran will know the location. All that is required is the signal to commence the mission. El-Khadr’s fingers move slowly over the keys, typing out the message that will change the course of history:

  Meet with Cindy as soon as possible. She has a prize dahlia she wants to dig up.

  He sensed something was amiss the minute he set foot on campus. The quad was quiet. No rowdy groups of students stumbling from one pre-Christmas party to another. No carols blaring out windows. He backed into the entryway of a dorm and stood silently.

  After forty-five minutes, Mehran’s patience paid off. Though dressed like a student, his shoes were a giveaway. Even engineering nerds wouldn’t wear gumshoes. And undergrads don’t stand around with their hands in their pockets looking like they are waiting for a bus. A half hour later he saw the second one—again too old for a student and too casually dressed for a professor—amble into the quad. Also we
aring telltale shoes.

  When the man lifted his arm and spoke into his wrist, Mehran knew he was in trouble. Melanie must have ratted on him, or maybe it was the swim coach. Who cares? I’ve been trained for every eventuality.

  He moves fast. Staying in the shadows, he quietly slips around the side of the building and heads toward a busy downtown street where he can lose himself in a crowd of shoppers.

  His pace quickens, he turns up his collar against the blowing rain. He doesn’t need anything from his room. He will go to an ATM and get money. Check his email at an espresso bar that’s off campus, find a hotel room somewhere using a fake ID and keep his head down. All he needs now is a hideout, an Internet connection and patience.

  It’s a ten-minute walk. At the ATM he takes out five hundred, turning his head so the camera can’t catch his face. The money will keep him going for the time being. Two blocks down, he stops. Peers in the window of the espresso shop. Only a few people are in the store. Plenty of desktops available.

  He peels off a twenty and hands it to the girl behind the register. Skinny, anemic-looking, red hair done in cornrows. Her ears, nose and lips are pierced and a faraway look fogs her eyes. She’s stoned. His luck. She won’t remember him. He sits down at a machine and logs onto the first website. Locates the link and goes to the second. Clicks on the button concealed in the flowerbed taking him to Jeffri’s Garden. Checks over his shoulder and hurriedly types in his password.

  A string of posts scrolls out onto the screen. His eyes quickly scan through the decoys until he finds the dahlia posts. Mehran’s eyes flare as he opens the first, then a second and a third. His heart is ready to leap out of his chest as he reads: Meet with Cindy as soon as possible. She has a prize dahlia she wants to dig up.

  It is my time, the words ripple across his brain. They have chosen me, it is my time.

  Knowing exactly what he has to do, he quickly commits the information in the three posts to memory.

  A voice inside the shop interrupts him. It’s the girl at the register. “Would anyone like have a problem, like, if I put on some carols?” she whines. “After all, it is Christmas.”

  He glances around the store. The other three customers are shrugging their shoulders.

  He pushes the strains of “Oh Come, All Ye Faithful” to the back of his mind as he commits the email instructions to memory, one at a time, over and over until he knows them as well as the opening verses of the Koran.

  39

  I-95, south of the District of Columbia, Saturday evening

  Winn Straub is speeding down the Interstate listening to Dvorak in a rented Mercury. Picking a car at random out of a lot reduced the risk that someone has left a gift, a bomb or transponder attached to the undercarriage. Straub knows Vector Eleven will go to any lengths to stop them.

  The second he picks up the phone and Jimmick delivers the news, his finger jabs the button to douse the volume. He listens, and then asks—trying not to sound as aggravated as he is—“A terrorist has been in training for three goddamn years right in our own backyard and no one picked up on it?”

  “That’s what I’m getting from my contact at the FBI,” Jimmick answers. “A swimming coach at Rutgers tried to alert them but it wasn’t until the student’s girlfriend ratted on him that they put two and two together.”

  “Who else knows about this?”

  “It’s just getting into the loop. As far as I know, no one in the intelligence community is connecting it with the events in Front Royal, so the Collyer tie-in is still under wraps. As for Vector Eleven, who the hell knows?”

  “Has the FBI had any luck finding this character?”

  “He never returned to campus but they’ve got his hard drive in the lab.”

  “Stay on their good side in case anything turns up on the computer.”

  “The special agent in charge is my new best buddy.”

  “Is the girlfriend involved?”

  “They don’t think so.”

  “Any point in talking to her?”

  “They think she’s given them everything. Guy kept her at arm’s length for the most part. There is one interesting piece they are running down. A secret location in Philadelphia. The swimmer wouldn’t let his girlfriend go near it. Who knows what’s there?”

  “Let me know the second they find something out. In the meantime, I need to talk to that coach. Can you get him for me?”

  “It might take a couple minutes.”

  “Hurry. Things are going down fast.”

  Straub punches the END button and tosses his cell on the seat. It’s the worst news he could have imagined. The terrorists have taken their planning and preparation to a level he hadn’t anticipated. He grabs the phone and speed dials Howie.

  “What would you say if I told you that an Iranian student has been practicing in the main pool at Rutgers University?” he asks him. “Swimming laps underwater and bringing up heavy steel plates from the bottom?”

  He expects an immediate response. Instead he hears silence.

  “Howie? You there? Howie?”

  Howie’s walking down the steps to the boatyard as he absorbs the information. “I had to go outside,” he tells Straub. “I couldn’t risk anyone overhearing us. Jesus, Winn, when did you find this out?”

  “A couple minutes ago. Hang on, Jimmick is patching in the Rutgers swim coach now. You can hear it from him.”

  “This is Coach Johanson.”

  “Yes, Coach. Winston Straub here. I’m from the CIA. Need to ask you some questions about this young man that was training in your pool.”

  “I took notes on him. I can tell you everything you need to know.” Johanson is standing by the side of the pool holding his clipboard. With FBI agents swarming all over the place, things have been pretty exciting at the Werblin Center.

  “Do you have any idea what he was practicing for?” Straub asks.

  “Like I told the FBI, underwater recovery, as best as I can figure—treasure, wrecks, scuba-type stuff—he had all the gear.”

  “Why do you say treasure?”

  “What else could he be diving for?”

  As pointed as the coach’s question is, Howie and Straub both choose to take a pass on responding.

  “Tell me about his practicing,” Straub asks.

  “Never seen anything like it. Kid swam like a shark. Had a double dolphin kick that ripped him through the water. Like I said, never seen anything like it. Plow down the pool with his head up doing a choppy crawl and then he’d suddenly dive down, straighten out his arms and literally fly. I’d sit there watching this shadow zip up and down the pool. I mean, he had an unbelievable lung capacity. Go four laps straight without surfacing. And two weeks ago, he started bringing a monofin to the pool. Know what that is?”

  “No idea.”

  “A single flipper with holes for both feet. Used in free-diving, the sport where people see how far they can swim underwater on one breath of air, how deep they can go, that kind of thing. Get this—with his monofin on I timed him at close to ten miles an hour—now that’s flying. From the very first time I saw this kid I was dying to recruit him for the varsity.”

  “Was he interested?”

  “No way. He was antisocial, standoffish. Like he had a chip on his shoulder.”

  “So he never talked about what he was doing?”

  “On the contrary, kid wouldn’t say a damn word about anything.”

  “What about the weights?”

  “That’s how I decided he had to be after sunken treasure. Why else would he practice bringing barbell plates up from eighteen feet deep?”

  “You’ve been a great help, Coach, appreciate you taking the time to talk with us.”

  “Hope you can keep him from doing whatever he’s trying to do.”

  “So do we,” Winn says, listening as the coach clicks off the line.

  Straub pulls over to the slow lane, drops down to fifty-five before he asks Howie, “What do you make of this weight business?”


  “Bringing weights up from the bottom doesn’t make sense if he’s been training to recover a nuke. The bombs weigh as much as five tons, no way he’s going to surface something like that. And it’s impossible to take a nuke apart in the water and bring it up piecemeal.”

  Straub remembers the counsel of one of his mentors, a founder of the CIA. Turn it around and look at the other side, Alfred Minor used to say, the reality is often in the mirror. Every time he had taken his advice to heart, it had paid off. “So flip it around,” he challenges Howie. “Maybe he’s not bringing the weights up.”

  “You mean bringing something down?”

  “Yeah, like explosives.”

  “Jesus, I don’t know why I didn’t think of that—Semtex, C-4, all that plastic stuff is waterproof. It’s the explosive of choice for underwater demolition teams.”

  Straub knows Semtex is also a favorite of terrorists. Used to blow Pan Am 103 out of the sky over Lockerbie, they packed a wad no bigger than a baseball into a cassette recorder. Easily molded into any shape and composed of rubber and plastic, it’s perfect for underwater operations. “Blow the bomb to bits in the water—it would make a helluva mess,” he tells Howie.

  “He’d be like a suicide bomber, take himself out with the nuke.”

  “No, Howie. Not a suicide bomber—suicide diver.” From the pause on the other end of the line, Straub can tell the phrase has hit Howie right between the eyes.

  “Suicide diver. That never occurred to me,” he finally says. For the first time, Winn detects a tone in his friend’s voice he hasn’t heard before— not quite fear, but very close.

  “I’m sure it hasn’t occurred to anyone else either.”

  “It’s scary as shit but it’s absolutely brilliant. They get this swimmer who’s like a guided missile in the water. He dives down and sticks a C-4 charge on it quick as hell, detonates the damn thing and before we know it we’ve got a major calamity on our hands.”

  “Even if it only detonates the TNT, it would send a cloud of radiation into the air. Imagine seeing that on CNN.”