Sharon’s on her fourth cup of coffee, the caffeine and lack of sleep has made her jumpy, but it was Collyer’s pacing around the boatyard talking on his cell in the middle of the night that really unnerved her.
“You want to tell me what the hell you were discussing until one in the morning,” she whispers to Howie as she nudges him in the side with her elbow. “C’mon, ’fess up. I watched you trudging around the yard looking like you had the weight of the world on your shoulders.”
“Everything’s okay.”
“Bullshit.”
“Ssssh. Sound carries in the fog.”
Sharon grabs Howie by the elbow and whirls him around so they are face to face. “C’mon, Collyer,” she hisses into his ear, “what the hell’s going on?”
Howie points toward the water, shakes his head and lifts his index finger up to his lips.
Sharon pushes, “It’s Warren—you and Straub don’t trust him. In that meeting yesterday it was written all over your face.”
Sharon can read his mind faster than Sylvie. “We’re going to watch what we say around him, that’s all.”
“He’s working for the other side, isn’t he?”
“Let’s go for a boat ride,” Howie says, taking her arm firmly and steering her toward the dock.
Sharon’s not giving up. “Goddammit, Howie, you’ve got to level with me.”
Fortunately, his cell rings just at that second. He fumbles around for it. “Hang on a minute, it’s Winn.”
On the cell, “We’re just about to get on board now,” he says to Straub.
“Let me talk to him,” Sharon snatches the phone out of Howie’s hand.
“Sharon, how are you?” Straub asks.
He gets an earful. Straub wishes Howie had found a way to leave her on shore.
“I can understand you’re upset,” Straub tells her. “Let me just say I’m in the master operations center at Camp Peary and I’m watching you on a monitor, big as life,” he says, swinging around in his chair to face the ten-foot rear projection screen displaying the satellite image of the Chesapeake feeding down to the array of forty-foot diameter dishes at the CIA installation outside of Williamsburg.
Straub toggles the joystick to zoom in on Herring Bay. “I can see everything you’re doing. I’m going to be keeping an eye on you every minute you’re out there. And we have people ready to jump into action in case anything happens.”
“Not good enough, Winn, I’m not buying that.” She’s still fuming. Straub shakes his head. The woman sure doesn’t like being left out of the loop.
“Then how about if we debrief you when you finish your search?” Straub offers.
No dice, she still isn’t on board. It’s time for hardball. “Look, Sharon. We don’t have time to jaw this to death. Unless you want to screw this whole operation up, get your butt on the boat and keep your trap shut. Okay?”
No answer. She’s thinking about it. “Time to be on your best behavior, young lady. Take your lead from Howie.”
Straub nods and smiles, She’s backed down. “Good. Now let me talk to him.”
“I’m looking at the boat now,” Howie says when he gets back on the line. “It’s pretty tight quarters in there. I don’t know how I’m going to contact you without Warren overhearing.”
“It has a cabin, doesn’t it?”
“I think so.”
“Either go below or send me a text message.”
“Of course, why didn’t I think of that?”
“The CIA is a full-service wireless provider.”
His remark gets a chuckle from Howie. He sounds more composed than he did six hours ago. Straub was on the phone to him half the night. The suicide diver freaked him out and Howie endlessly ran disaster scenarios Straub did his best to bat down.
What if the nuke happens to be in one of those areas? If we stop to check, don’t you have to assume the terrorists are watching? Won’t they know?
So don’t stop, Straub told him.
Just keep going? Act like it’s not there?
Right. Get the GPS reading and keep going.
So how do we flush them out?
Let me deal with that.
Should I tell Sharon?
No point in alarming her. I’d leave her on shore if I were you.
You know how far I’ll get with that. What if Vector Eleven is watching?
Leave that up to me, okay?
At one in the morning, Howie finally ran out of questions. Said goodnight and turned in. Straub told him he’d call him first thing.
“So I guess we’re all set,” Howie says.
“Ready as we’ll ever be.” The red light on Straub’s stew is blinking. “A call’s coming in, Howie. Gotta go. Good luck out there.”
Straub touches the OFF button on his cell and picks up the stew.
“You sitting down?” Jimmick asks. Straub winces, Jimmick can get hokey at times.
“What do you have?”
“They just ID’d the two sets of prints from the bomb factory. As we thought, the first’s from the swimmer, the Iranian student.”
“The other?”
“A Saudi national who worked in our weapons program—”
“When?”
“Mid-sixties—”
“That’s when Mk-15s were being produced.”
“Wait until you hear this. His name’s Jamal Abdullah, he’s a nuclear engineer with a doctorate in physics.”
“He’d know the Mk-15 inside and out. For all we know it could be his baby.”
“Alqaeda found someone familiar with the bomb and had him design some device the suicide diver could attach to it.”
“Something filled with C-4.”
“Yeah, and at a point where the bomb is most vulnerable.”
“We have to find out exactly what they were making in that warehouse.”
“The FBI is flying a mechanical engineering guru in from Carnegie Mellon.”
“Couldn’t we have found someone locally? Howie’s out there now,” Straub says, looking up at the monitor. The fog’s burning off and as he zooms in, he can see the boat chugging out of the harbor into Herring Bay.
“We struck out with two local guys. Scratched their heads for a couple hours but couldn’t put it together.”
“Where is the Saudi now?”
“Flew yesterday afternoon to London from Philly on his way back to Saudi Arabia.”
“The FBI must have just missed him.”
“It was close. His flight landed in Jeddah four hours ago.”
“Jeddah—shit.”
“What about it? This Jamal guy grew up there.”
“I was afraid you’d say that.” Now Straub knows he has no choice but to hedge his bets. “Now it’s time to clue Dickson in. It’s time for him to play Paul Revere.”
“You’re changing the plan.”
“You’re damn right.”
“Why?”
“Jeddah’s where bin Laden’s from,” Straub says as he quickly zooms back out so Howie’s boat is a speck on the bay, wondering whether Dickson will step up to alerting the president. And if he does, how will the president of the United States react to the news that there is a fully armed four-megaton hydrogen bomb mere miles from the White House and chances are Osama bin Laden knows more about it than he does?
Winn Straub isn’t the only one watching a sat feed on the boat’s progress. From forty miles above, another eye in the sky is following the small boat as it motors out into the bay with three crew members, a captain and two civilians aboard.
Watt and Hatkin have been at the screen since dawn. Just after 0740 they saw the boat sail out of the yard in Fairhaven heading toward the green areas outlined on the chart, pause a half mile offshore to lower the radiation sled and the metal detector, then continue its course toward the first section, its sensitive gear electronically trolling the bottom. Commander Warren had scanned and sent the map to them the minute Jimmick emailed it. The three rectangles tell them all they nee
d to know about Collyer’s operation. Limited to discrete areas—a tiny part of the Chesapeake—if the bomb is there, they can easily prevent Collyer from recovering it.
If it isn’t, they have nothing to worry about.
“The unit is standing by at Belvoir, sir,” Lieutenant Williams reports, leaning in to inform his commanding officer. “Give the order and they will be in the air inside of two minutes.” A Special Ops unit is at the ready, three Apache attack helicopters armed with laser-guided Hellfire missiles and .30-caliber machine guns and two Black Hawks each with a squad of commandos aboard.
“Thank you, Lieutenant.”
On the screen in front of them, the tiny object crisscrosses the section on the chart, cruising back and forth on parallel courses a hundred yards apart. Hatkin checks his watch. 1152. They’ve been sitting at the console for four hours. Feeling less pressured with someone on the inside, they had both been able to grab a decent night’s sleep for the first time in a week.
The only nagging question is the terrorists. Yet since they haven’t had any red flags since last Tuesday when the flier with Collyer’s picture appeared and they have never been able to definitively link the terrorists to Front Royal, they had no reason to be overly concerned.
Until last night when a notice was posted on the National Counterterrorism website informing the intelligence community that the FBI was looking for an Iranian student who had a suspicious workout routine at a Rutgers aquatic center.
Neither Watt nor Hatkin knew what to make of the information, but the fact that the report involved scuba training was alarming. Hatkin ordered Watt to scour his sources at the Hoover Building but everyone he knew was on vacation or hadn’t the slightest idea what he was talking about. So he told Watt to keep an eye out in case further information appeared on the NCTC. Four hours later the information vanished from the website.
“The Feebies must have come up empty-handed,” Watt conjectured about the disappearance. “They pulled the post because they ran into a dead end.” It was common knowledge in the intel community that the FBI was a fish out of water when it came to pursuing terrorists. Accustomed to nabbing criminals after crimes were committed, it wasn’t in the FBI’s genes to deal with offenses that hadn’t yet occurred.
“I hope that’s all it is,” Hatkin said. And they tabled the issue for the time being.
So as they sit watching the boat weave its pattern back and forth over the water—with Warren on board and a Special Ops unit at Fort Belvoir ready to strike—for the first time in over a week they feel like they have a leg up. They are cautiously optimistic the crisis will be resolved with Howard Collyer exposed as a fraud.
The door clicks open. Both men look up at the same time. It’s Williams and he didn’t bother to knock. His expression hikes Watt’s heart rate.
“Sir, a message just came in from the NSA. You should both take a look.”
Watt’s fingers instantly open the secure link from the National Security Agency. “Holy shit—” he says in a small voice as he reads the communication, quickly swiveling the screen so Hatkin can see it.
The intercept of an FBI email from the fingerprint ID section at the Hoover Building to the Newark office confirms a match to the sets of prints lifted in Philadelphia and submitted earlier—the first belonging to Mehran Zarif, an Iranian engineering student at Rutgers, the second to Jamal Abdullah, born in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, in 1929. His resume is impressive, nuclear science degrees from universities in the United States followed by five years working at Oak Ridge and Los Alamos—1964 to 1969—before returning to work on the Saudi nuclear program.
“That’s the same time period they were designing and building the Mk-15 nukes,” Watt says.
“And the Iranian kid, the scuba diver, had recent contact with him.”
“Let me see what the NSA can find out about this Jamal character.”
Watt grabs his stew and calls his contact at the National Security Agency. Twenty minutes later, they have the details.
“He landed at Heathrow last night. On a direct flight from Philadelphia. Then he flew on to Jeddah through Bahrain.”
“Saudi nuclear engineer from Philadelphia, Iranian foreign student spending hours practicing in a pool—their prints in the same place. It’s too hot, I can’t sit on this any longer.” Hatkin grabs his STU, “I need to speak to the boss,” he says to the aide answering the phone in the office of the secretary of Defense.
After a pause, Hatkin growls, “I don’t care if he’s in the crapper. I’ve got to see him immediately.”
El-Khadr wishes he’d worn his sneaker, the sandal is giving him blisters as he shuttles back and forth from one room to another monitoring Collyer’s progress, all the while keeping Mehran on his toes in the boathouse with new information. This is the most demanding time for Mehran. Though he’s had lots of practice, in training they had isolated him for days at a time with nothing but the Koran.
Naguib can sense El-Khadr leaning over his shoulder checking his work. His fingers dart across the keyboard as he composes the message to the young jihadist on whose shoulders the success of their operation rests. “Digging up dahlias takes patience,” he types. “Often they are not where you remember you planted them. So gently and carefully digging up the entire area is necessary to find the missing dahlias. Time and forbearance are critical qualities to dahlia seekers. Once your dahlias are secured in a safe place, they will provide you with lasting delight in the upcoming season.”
Mehran will quickly understand the meaning of the message. A search for the bomb is underway. Self-control and perseverance are necessary for your success is almost at hand. In Philadelphia, Jamal had seen the posts narrowing down the location of the search so he had time to choose the correct collar and send it to the boathouse. By now Mehran will have walked up to the wall, carefully taken down the Mk-15 collar and placed it in the special rack constructed behind the cockpit. He is now a loaded gun, cocked and ready to fire.
“Perfect, send it to Mehran,” El-Khadr instructs, turning and clomping back into the control room.
All eyes are on the master monitor. Arms folded, El-Khadr stands gazing up at the giant plasma screen.
Monitoring Collyer since he sailed out onto the bay, the satellite data from the Saudi media consortium refreshes every fifteen seconds, drawing a clear image of the boat and its wake as the craft crosshatches a section of the bay.
By layering images from different times, they know Collyer is searching a defined area, towing the equipment back and forth in one direction, then again in a perpendicular course so it is completely covered before moving on.
Two hours ago, Collyer’s boat shifted to another section and from their progress, they appear to be a third of the way through. Though the boat is tiny on the immense screen, its size doesn’t matter. When there is any indication they have found the bomb, a buoy dropped in the water, the boat pausing or doubling back to a location, GPS readings will automatically be recorded.
If weather conditions are right, El-Khadr will order the GPS coordinates relayed to Mehran in his boathouse. Mehran will enter the location into his finder so the autopilot can navigate the Donzi to the exact spot where the bomb lies, give or take four or five feet.
The rest is up to Mehran.
“Let me get this straight,” the secretary of Defense says to General Hatkin as he tosses his sweater onto a side table and starts for his desk. Still sweaty from the squash game, a damp V darkens his polo. “The director of Homeland Security scrambled that Coast Guard unit himself?”
Despite the fact that he was called out of a Sunday afternoon match, Secretary Kessel’s seen his share of crises so he isn’t rattled yet. But Hatkin knows it won’t be long.
“Correct, Mr. Secretary, as soon as I found out he was involved I wanted to follow up with you.”
“Go right ahead,” he says, dropping into his desk chair. Tall, trim and dignified-looking even in his workout garb—once described as looking like John Lindsay
in his heyday—Charlie Kessel is the consummate Pentagon insider, with ties to major military suppliers and a million connections on the Hill. Muckraking journalists have been taking potshots at Kessel for years but no one’s gotten anything to stick. Of course he’s a hero inside the Pentagon since he keeps the funds flowing for all the admirals’ and generals’ pet projects.
Fortunately he was enjoying a late afternoon match in the POAC when he took Hatkin’s call and forgoing a shower, hustled over to his outside office in the E ring and now sits behind a desk that once belonged to General John J. Pershing, a towel draped around his neck, wearing matching Adidas shorts and shirt, listening as Hatkin updates him.
“So someone’s trying to fabricate something out of that lost nukes business and pin it on us?” Kessel asks.
“It started out as amateur hour. A flake named Howard Collyer who used to work here abducted a former B-52 pilot we had interned in a VA hospital hoping he might know where his plane dropped a nuke.”
“When? Almost forty years ago?”
“Thirty-nine to be exact. But then someone from the CIA gets involved and starts helping Collyer, pulling strings for him behind the scenes. That’s when we started taking the matter seriously.”
“The CIA sees the opportunity to pile on, take advantage of the situation to knock us down a couple rungs.”
“Exactly. Then we start seeing indications that a terrorist group might be involved.”
“Terrorists? Why? I don’t get it.” Kessel stands and walks to one of the windows, the ends of the towel grasped in his hands.
“They picked up the scent of a lost nuke.”
“But the damn things are forty years old, rusting away in the muck somewhere. Anyone who thinks they could take advantage of one of those nukes has his head up his ass.” Kessel wheels around and heads for his desk chair, flops down into it and kicks up his feet. “Whitey, if you weren’t sitting here in my office on a Sunday afternoon looking white as a sheet, I’d say you’ve been smoking something.”
“Today we received two new pieces of information. An Iranian student doing peculiar swimming exercises at the aquatic center at Rutgers had contact with a former nuclear engineer who worked on the design of that first generation of nukes.”
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