The Silent Man

by Alex Berenson

  “Nothing, my wife. Now sleep.”

  “Bashir, tell me. And then we’ll both sleep.”

  Bashir wondered if he could tell her. But why not? She was his wife, after all. “Yusuf and Sayyid, you know, this thing we’re making in the stable, it’s a bomb. A special bomb. Did you know that?”

  “Yes.”

  “You did?”

  “Yes, my husband. I know I’m not very smart, but the things you and Sayyid were saying, I figured it out.”

  “A big bomb. It will kill a lot of people.”

  Thalia squeezed his hand. “How many?”

  “I don’t know. But many.”

  “Here? In America?”

  “Yes.”

  “So it would be kaffirs.” Her voice had a girlish excitement that surprised him.

  “Muslims, too. It won’t discriminate. And Nasiji has a plan. He’s hoping to start a big war between the United States and Russia. If it works, there could be hundreds more bombs like this. Even thousands, maybe. Does that bother you?”

  “No.” And Bashir’s surprise became astonishment as his wife slid her hand down his stomach and reached for him, something she’d never done unbidden before. Bashir couldn’t think of anything to say, and so he lay silent as she stroked him hard and then straddled his legs and guided him into her, all the while whispering, “No no no.”

  PART FOUR

  27

  The mission could be explained in three words. Accomplishing it required a lot more effort.

  Find a ship.

  A ship that had departed Hamburg on New Year’s Eve, supposedly bound for West Africa, but had never arrived. A ship that was somewhere in the North Atlantic, unless it was in the Caribbean, or the Pacific, or docked, or even scuttled. A ship that was thoroughly anonymous, not a supertanker or a yacht but a midsize freighter like tens of thousands of others around the world. A ship that was called the Juno, unless its name had been changed. A ship that carried no visible weapons but still needed to be approached cautiously. Most of all, a ship that had to be found quickly, so its hold could be searched with Geiger counters, its crew questioned, and its captain put in a rubber room and subjected to every interrogation technique that the dark wizards of the CIA had ever invented.

  The task was formidable, even with the National Security Agency and the navy making it their highest priority. Nonetheless, this was the kind of problem the United States knew how to solve, a technical puzzle that could be cracked with pure effort and brainpower. For once, no need to win hearts and minds in Baghdad or Kabul. Just find that damn freighter. Around NSA headquarters at Fort Meade, through the Atlantic Fleet command in Norfolk, the order went out. By yesterday, if possible.

  Photographs of the Juno, along with its engineering specifications—height, length, displacement, and the shape of its superstructure—were sent to every American and British naval vessel in the Atlantic. Within twelve hours, the Atlantic Fleet had posted frigates outside the major East Coast harbors, from Miami to Portland, Maine. Meanwhile, Coast Guard cutters visited every ship that had docked in the last two weeks and that matched, or almost matched, the Juno’s specs.

  At the same time, the Atlantic Fleet command ordered destroyers and cruisers to run alongside the main sea lanes that crossed the North Atlantic, in case the Juno was still somewhere en route or sailing back to Europe. The Royal Navy sent its own flotilla west. In three days, the vessels identified every ship that fit the Juno’s profile. Impressive work, especially considering the winter weather and the fact that the sun shone for barely eight hours a day on the main route between London and New York.

  Impressive, but fruitless. The navy’s efforts came up empty. The Juno wasn’t on the sea lanes between Europe and the United States. And it wasn’t docked in any port anywhere in the United States, Canada, Britain, or Western Europe.

  MEANWHILE, the NSA’s Advanced Keyhole satellites were searching the rest of the Atlantic. The satellites could capture ships in great detail, down to their names and the foot-square patches of rust on their hulls. They could also take photographs that covered several square miles and captured dozens of boats at once.

  But they had a problem. They couldn’t do both, not at the same time. The camera capable of both super-wide and super-fine resolution hadn’t been invented yet. And from Greenland to South America, the Atlantic covered more than forty million square miles. Even if the satellites photographed it in one-square-mile chunks, they would need forty million images to cover it.

  To work around the problem, two dozen software engineers spent a long night at Fort Meade writing code. By morning, they’d created an application that turned the agency’s face-recognition software into a crude boat-recognition program. The software couldn’t find the Juno. But it could rule out in real time ninety-five percent of the boats spotted by the satellites as too big, too small, or the wrong shape.

  The other five percent were classified as possibles and photographed again at one-meter resolution. Those images were then reviewed by the NSA’s analysts, who eliminated any ship that appeared significantly different from the original photographs of the Juno, on the theory that the Juno could not have had time to undergo major structural work since leaving Hamburg.

  The analysts were able to rule out another ninety percent of the boats that had gotten through the first pass. Even so, not every satellite shot was definitive. Many of the ships had gray hulls and decks that didn’t stand out against the dark water of the Atlantic. They could only be ruled in or out after being seen and photographed at sea level, by helicopters, drones, or naval aircraft. Their names and locations were passed to the navy for a final inspection.

  AT LANGLEY, Exley and Shafer tracked the search in the annex of the operations center in the basement of New Headquarters Building. The annex and the entire center were classified as Blue Zones, restricted to employees with Top Secret/SCI/NO FORN clearances. Originally, contractors had been excluded, too, but after the operations center went dark twice in six months, the agency gave in and hired a team from Lockheed to fix the electronics that supported it.

  The annex was a high-ceilinged room, about thirty feet square, with concrete floors and a distractingly loud ventilation system. On two walls, oversized monitors projected digital maps of the Atlantic, cut up into 400,000 patches of ten square miles each. The maps divided the ocean into three colors. Green represented areas that had been searched and cleared. Red stood for areas where suspect ships had been found and needed to be checked. And yellow symbolized areas that hadn’t yet been searched. An unfortunate choice. When the hunt for the Juno started, the Atlantic appeared to be filled with urine.

  As hours and then days passed, patches of green appeared on the maps, spreading out from the East Coast along the major shipping routes like a shipborne virus. Tiny blips of red appeared, then vanished. A third monitor contained the names and photographs of suspect ships. As suspect boats were cleared, they disappeared from the screen, replaced with new targets.

  On the second morning, the satellites picked up a boat off the coast of Nicaragua that looked to be almost a perfect match. But when a helicopter buzzed it, it turned out to be a freighter that had been built by the same Korean shipyard as the Juno.

  By then, Exley was thoroughly sick of staring at the monitors.

  “Ellis. We’re useless here. Let’s find something else to do.”

  “Last week you were ready to quit,” Shafer said. “Now you’re looking for work.”

  “This is it. One last job and then I’m done.”

  “If you say so.”

  “I told my kids and I’m keeping my word. I’m serious.” But was she? If an interrogator had shot her full of sodium thiopental at that moment, she didn’t know what she would have said.

  “Uh-huh,” Shafer said. “Meanwhile, let’s go figure out where Bernard Kygeli gets his money. If anything happens here, they can call us.”

  NO ONE HAD OFFICIALLY told Henry Williams that his career was over. But he
knew, as surely as if the secretary of the navy had sent him a card congratulating him for thirty years of able service and welcoming him to retirement. He imagined the card would have a golfer on the cover and say something like “You’ve Knocked the Ball out of the Park—Now It’s Time to Hit That Hole in One” in big block letters that his middle-aged eyes would have no problem reading. Like he was a lawyer who’d spent his career behind a desk instead of a man who’d given up his marriage and everything else on land for a life at sea. Instead of a destroyer captain, for Pete’s sake.

  But the navy didn’t tolerate failure. And Williams had failed the summer before. Just outside Shanghai, his ship, the USS Decatur, had rammed a fishing trawler filled with Chinese college students. The ramming had killed twenty-two Chinese and pushed the United States and China to the brink of war. In retaliation, a Chinese submarine had torpedoed the Decatur, killing seventeen of Williams’s sailors.

  An internal inquiry by the navy found that Williams had committed no wrongdoing in either incident. But Williams knew he would never escape the stigma of what had happened. During the months the Decatur was in dry dock, Williams had been persona non grata at the meetings in Honolulu and Annapolis, where senior officers discussed the future of the service. After the Decatur was recommissioned, it had lost its place in the Ronald Reagan carrier battle group and been shipped back to the East Coast to do laps in the Atlantic. And his superior officers no longer asked him what vessel he hoped to command next. No, his hopes to move further up the ranks, to earn an admiral’s gold braids, had ended in the East China Sea. In two months, when the Decatur was done with this tour, he’d retire. Honorably, with a full pension.

  He had no idea what he’d do next. The Decatur’s namesake, Stephen Decatur, had gone out with his spurs on, dying in a duel in 1820—a story Williams loved telling. But duels were no longer politically correct. Williams supposed he’d wind up going home to Dallas, burning his afternoons playing golf. Or maybe he’d start consulting with some defense contractor. Either way he’d secretly be hoping for a quick heart attack.

  Was Williams bitter about what had happened? His commanding officers had put him in a damn-near-impossible position, then punished him for failing to find a way out of it. In return for a career of loyal service, he’d been ditched like a rusted-out propeller. Though he could see the other side, too. The navy had plenty of commanders with spotless records. It didn’t have to take a chance by promoting one with a blemish as big as his. And pissing off the Chinese wasn’t in anyone’s interest. Especially since America and China were both pretending that the festivities the previous summer had never happened.

  In the meantime, Williams still ran the Decatur, and he wasn’t coasting into retirement. He’d always run a clean ship. Now he was pushing his officers and crew harder than ever. He knew his sailors weren’t happy, but he didn’t care. He wasn’t asking for anything beyond the navy’s own regulations. He simply wanted them followed, to the letter. And if regulations said that officers weren’t to eat until the captain arrived at meals, or that sailors were forbidden to keep pornography even in their own personal footlockers, well, rules were rules. What are they gonna do, fire me?

  So, yeah, he was bitter. He didn’t think anyone could blame him.

  THE ORDERS CAME near midnight local time, as they were about to cross the equator on a hot dry night in the central Atlantic, slightly closer to West Africa than Brazil. The Decatur was to move east and north, off the coast of Sierra Leone and Liberia, just outside the sea lanes that ran between Europe and West Africa.

  There, Williams and his crew would watch for a freighter that had gone missing on a run from Hamburg to Lagos. Somebody thought this ship, the Juno, was carrying more than a couple tablespoons of capital-S, capital-N, capital-M Special Nuclear Material. The whole Atlantic Fleet was looking for it, as well as every satellite the NSA had.

  As soon as the orders arrived, Williams lightened up some, took his foot off the crew’s collective neck. Didn’t take a head-shrinker to figure out why. For the first time since Shanghai, the Decatur had a mission. The navy still trusted him a little. And so Williams ordered the Decatur ’s four massive gas turbines to full throttle and turned his ship east at twenty-five knots. By noon the next day, they reached their new position, the sun fierce overhead, the sea quiet, not even the hint of a breeze. Except during hurricane season, weather hardly existed in this part of the Atlantic. Fall and winter and spring were the same, an eternity of hot dry days.

  Further orders weren’t long in coming. Twice in two days, Williams was ordered to check on ships that the NSA’s satellites deemed worthy of a closer look. Each time he’d put up the SH-60B Seahawk helicopter the Decatur carried, though each time he’d been sure they were wrong. In one case, the target looked too wide to him to be the Juno, and in the other too tall.

  When the helo came back empty-handed the second time, Williams decided that he wasn’t going to wait to be told what to do next. The NSA might have the satellites, but it didn’t know squat about ships. He was going with his gut now, and his gut told him that the Juno was nowhere near West Africa. Why would it be? If it had followed the route on its original manifest, it would have reached Lagos weeks before. On the other hand, if it had made a drop off the American coast, it probably would have turned away, sailed southeast at full speed to get into the open Atlantic as quickly as possible. In that case, it would be west of him, and possibly south as well, depending on its speed. Williams decided to head southwest, back where he’d been when his orders arrived. He knew the risk he was taking, ignoring a direct order from the Atlantic Fleet command, and he didn’t care.

  “You sure you want to do this,” the Decatur’s executive officer said.

  “Until they take my ship from me, I’m running it as I see fit.”

  OVERNIGHT THEY RAN southwest at twenty-five knots into the open ocean. By morning, Norfolk was asking where they were. “Better fishing in deep waters,” Williams messaged back. Let them chew on that for a while.

  He put the Seahawk in the air and ordered it to push south to the limits of its fuel tanks and to notify him of any ship that remotely resembled the Juno. Three hours later, it came back, dry and empty. He ordered it refueled and sent out again, this time to the southwest. The mission was a waste of fuel, a 10,000-to-1 shot. The helicopter faced the same problem as the satellites. It had to fly close to the waves so it could see the details of the boats below, but staying low limited its field of vision.

  But somehow Williams wasn’t surprised when the call came in an hour later. Eighty nautical miles to the southwest of the Decatur, the SH-60’s pilot had spotted a freighter that matched the Juno’s basic design. “Wants to know if they should take a look,” Stan Umsle, the Decatur’s tactical information officer, said.

  “Go for it,” Williams said.

  Two minutes later, the radio buzzed again. Umsle listened. “You’re not going to believe this, sir. The boat, it’s headed southeast, 165 degrees, fourteen knots. And they’re certain it’s the Juno.”

  “How do they know?”

  “They say it’s got Juno painted on the side in big white letters.”

  “Good enough for me.” Somehow Williams kept his tone steady, though he wanted to howl in joy. Finding this boat might not save his career, but at least he could retire now with his head up, as something more than the captain who’d nearly started a war between America and China. “Take us to thirty knots, heading two hundred,” he said to Umsle. “Now.”

  Then he called Rear Admiral Josh Rogers, who was overseeing the western half of the search from Norfolk, with the good news. Rogers listened in silence, then said, “I don’t suppose I should ask why you were three hundred nautical miles from where you were told to be.”

  “No, sir,” Williams said. “You shouldn’t.”

  Williams half-expected Rogers to tell him to wait so the navy could bring in the SEALs. Instead, Rogers ordered him to make the interdiction as soon as possible. “As
k nicely first. But if they don’t stop, you are authorized to disable their engines.”

  “I don’t mean to be a stickler, but under what authority, sir? This is open ocean and they’ve got as much right to be on it as we do. They’re not even headed for an American port.”

  “If that ship is carrying nuclear material, it’s violating who knows how many United States laws and UN resolutions. Tell them whatever you want, but stop them. If they’re clean, we’ll offer a thousand apologies for wasting their precious time.”

  “Yes, sir, Admiral. We’ll get it done.”

  “Roger that.” Rogers hung up.

  Williams looked at Umsle. “Lieutenant, get a tac team ready to board the Juno. I’m not sure what law or UN resolution or intergalactic ordinance we’re going to use as an excuse, but we’re going in.”

  “Intergalactic ordinance, sir?”

  “Just get a team together. Make sure they know what they’re looking for.” Williams went up to the Decatur’s bridge and sent his executive officer down to manage the combat information center. He wanted to see this ship for himself.

  Intercepting the Juno, which was traveling in a straight line at a piddling eleven knots, was almost embarrassingly easy for the Decatur. Within two hours, the freighter was visible from the destroyer’s bridge, a speck on the ocean to the southwest. A half-hour after that, the two ships were less than five nautical miles apart, and the Juno was clearly outlined against the sea.

  In another fifteen minutes, the Decatur and the freighter were sailing parallel. The destroyer towered over the Juno, twice as long and almost three times as high. Even if the freighter had been larger, the missile launchers and guns that sprouted from the deck of the Decatur left no doubt which vessel was in charge.