"Only one, fortunately, and even that feels like one too many. They restricted it to three pool reporters, one from the Miami Herald, one from NPR, and one from CNN. And they all want to talk to Nick and Doreen."
"How they holding up?"
"Pretty well. That little prep course NASA runs the friends and relatives through must be pretty effective. They both smile right into the camera like it's their new best friend, and they'll talk the ear off of any reporter about how their little girl started reading Robert Heinlein by the time she was in the second grade. Oh, and I didn't know you did bead-work?"
"I do what?"
"Make bead jewelry."
"I do?"
"Yeah. Doreen seemed to feel it necessary to establish your feminine side."
Kenai snorted. "I cook. Isn't that enough?"
"You cook?"
"I make one hell of a spaghetti sauce, smartass."
"I'll let you try it out on me when you get back."
Another silence fell. "I'm not loving this," he said.
She didn't pretend to misunderstand him. "Don't worry. We'll all come back alive."
He thought of the virtual bomb she would be riding into orbit that evening, and said, "Bet your ass. Hey."
"Hey, what?"
"What if I love you?"
"What if I love you back?"
They considered this in startled silence for a moment. "Probably just the situation," she said finally. "You've never had a girlfriend before who rides rockets. I've never had a boyfriend who didn't come unglued at the thought."
"Yeah," he said, "you're probably right. Take care up there."
"I will."
"We've got a date the instant you're out of debrief and Munro's in dry dock."
"You going to kill me if I say I'm not anxious for my first time on orbit to be over?"
He laughed. "No. I think the right thing for me to say right now is, have fun."
"It'll do. See you in a week."
"See you," he said, but she had already hung up.
SOUTH OF ABACO, ON BOARD FREIGHTER MOKAME
There was a hatch that led up to the bow of the sailboat, and before their first dawn Akil had it propped open so they could get some fresh air. They took turns sitting beneath it, letting the elusive breeze tease their faces. By afternoon the sun turned the cabin into an oven, and the combination of the heat and the oily swell passing beneath the hull that pushed the sailboat into a long, continuous roll put half of them on their knees in front of the toilet in the tiny bathroom. The smell of vomit spread the malady to all of them.
The moaning of the migrants was another constant irritant and through the walls they could hear others vomiting, sounds of protest ruthlessly subdued by crew members. Screams were quickly muffled during what sounded like an attempted rape, cut short by a meaty thud of wood on skull, a subsequent dip of the sailboat to port, and a heavy splash. After that, the moans and cries of the other passengers died to the occasional whimper.
"Why do they want to go to America so badly?" Yussuf said in wonder.
"Because they believe the lies," Akil said. " America, the promised land, where all your dreams come true." He looked around the room, meeting everyone's eyes in turn, willing them to believe. "They don't understand that America is a nation of unbelievers, crusaders who are determined to destroy Islam so they can remake the world in their own image. They will wipe us out, if we don't wipe them out first."
"What we are doing won't stop them."
"No," Akil said, surprising the engineer who had spoken words he thought wouldn't carry, "it won't. Not alone. But we are not alone. We are many, and our numbers are growing. They make the West fear us. Look how we have disrupted their lives. They fear to board an airplane. They fear what their own ships may be bringing into their own seaports. They can't defend themselves from us, and they know it. Each and every day, one of their newspapers has a story about how we could poison their water supply or explode a nuclear weapon in the center of one of their cities. They fear us, because they don't know where we will strike next." He paused for effect. "After tonight, they will fear us more."
"I still don't understand how we are to do this thing," the engineer said, apologetically but nevertheless insisting on an answer. "We have had training with the small arms, yes, but none of us knows how to fire the big gun."
Akil refrained from damning the engineer with a glare. This was how these things started, one man voicing doubts. It was good that he had come. He kept his tone instructive, almost pedantic. "Did I not say that Allah would provide? Trust in him, Hatim." He smiled. "And in me."
They needed more, though, he could tell from their bent heads and sidelong looks. He shrugged mentally. There were none coming back from this mission, and no opportunity for them to betray it, not with him at hand. "I have a confession to make, my brothers. I have been guilty of practicing a deception."
Their heads came up at that. "You knew you had become a part of al Qaeda."
There were nods all around. ~
"And you are all familiar with that martyr to our glorious cause, al-Zarqawi, most foully murdered by the infidel in a cowardly attack from the air."
More nods.
"Have you heard of Isa?" They exchanged wondering glances. "Isa sat at the right hand of Zarqawi. Trained by Zarqawi, he set up al Qaeda's online communications and banking systems so that the agents of the West would never be able to track them. He-"
"You are Isa," Yussuf said.
Akil, put off his stride, took a moment to regroup. "I am."
Most of them knew the name, and expressions varied from awe to fright to exhilaration, but Yussuf's face seemed lit from within. "Then we are truly members of the glorious al Qaeda."
Akil knew a momentary annoyance. Had he but known it, Akil's feelings exactly mirrored Ansar's when the old man told him to find Isa. "We always have been."
Yussuf was apologetic. "Forgive me, Ta-Isa. It is not that I doubted, and I understand that the utmost security is called for so that we may accomplish our mission in this great cause."
In a hushed voice Jabir said, "Are we under the hand of bin Laden himself?"
Akil gritted his teeth. "We are," he said. "He wishes me to tell you that Allah blesses our purpose."
The doubter who had spoken first said, still apologetically, "I still don't completely understand, Tabari-Isa. There are only ten of us. How are ten, against so many, able to accomplish our mission?"
"There is someone on board the ship who will help us," he said.
"A believer among the infidels?"
"Yes," Akil said. As well as someone who would be well paid. Or thought he would be. "I must speak to the captain," he said, and escaped the stateroom.
He stepped over and around numerous bodies down the passageway and up the stairs to the deck before he found the captain at the wheel in the tiny pilothouse. It was perched on top of the cabin, and was the one place on the whole of, to Akil's mind, this nauseatingly odiferous, dangerously overloaded craft where there was a semblance of order and solitude.
The captain raised an eyebrow at him and drew on his cigar. The smell hit Akil's nostrils and his sinuses ached in immediate response. He coughed, cupping his mouth and nose in his hand, trying in vain to block the smell. The captain took another drag and expelled another cloud of smoke. It drifted across the pilothouse, lit by the eerie green glow of various instrumentation screens. "I thought you didn't want anyone else to know you were on board."
"I didn't," Akil said.
"Then you shouldn't have come out of your cabin until I told you to." The captain blew a smoke ring, waited, and then blew a second inside the first.
Coughing again, Akil said, "Why is this trip taking so long?"
The captain raised his eyebrow again. "It took forty hours to get to Caicos Passage, and another fifty to get here."
"Where is here?" Akil said, mostly because the captain seemed to expect it.
The other man stepped back from
the wheel, and smiled when he saw Akil's expression. "Don't worry, I've got her on the iron mike. The autopilot," he added, when he saw that Akil still didn't understand. He turned to a slanted table mounted against the rear wall and tapped the chart with the two fingers holding his cigar, now burned down to a squat, glowing stub. "Look here. We came through Caicos Passage fifty hours ago. There's no wind to speak of, and no seas, so I'm estimating that we'll be south of Abaco a couple of hours after dawn. Then we go up the inside, south of Grand Bahama -"
"I don't understand," Akil said, eyes watering from the cigar smoke as he tried to follow the captain's explanation. "Why don't we just stay outside the islands? Surely all this maneuvering will slow us down."
The captain regarded Akil with a quizzical expression. "For one thing," he said levelly, "we'll pick up the Gulf Stream if we go inside, which is good for another two or three knots of speed. For another, we can lose ourselves in the traffic."
"Traffic?"
"Yes, traffic, other ships, as in cruise liners, fishing boats, pleasure boats, sailboats, freighters, tankers. There is a great deal of traffic up and down the Straits of Florida, Mr. Mallah. We will hardly be noticed."
"How can you be sure of that?" Akil said, studying the map through streaming eyes. "Wouldn't it be safer to go up the outside of all these islands and then move in closer to the coast?"
"This ain't my first rodeo, Mr. Mallah," the captain said. His tone was placid but nonetheless conveyed a distinct warning.
Akil changed the subject. "Where do you plan to let us off?" He didn't ask because he wanted to know, he asked because the captain would think it odd if he didn't. Akil already knew where they were getting off.
The glowing tip of the cigar moved north. "I have a few favorite spots here, in the barrier islands off Georgia and North Carolina." He smiled, the gold-capped molar flashing. "Don't worry, Mr. Mallah. America will swallow you whole where I put you ashore. No one will be able to find you." Another draw, another exhalation of smoke. "Unless of course you wish to be found."
Akil's hand closed over the comforting shape of the little GPS unit in his pocket. "No," he said. "We only want to begin a new life in America."
He left the pilothouse, and the captain returned to the wheel.
He didn't know what the group of men in the forward cabin were up to, but the price of their passage doubled the total amount all the other migrants on board had paid. He was in the transportation business, his job was to get his paying passengers where they were going, nothing more, and nothing less. His curiosity extended to the color of their money, and stopped after they had counted it into his hand.
He took another long, satisfying draft of his cigar, and placidly blew another cloud of smoke.
MIAMI
"Patrick?"
"Hugh, thanks for calling. What if I told you that Isa was Pakistani?"
"How would you know?"
"Somebody ID'd his accent." Patrick wanted to cut to the chase. "Never mind that. What does that knowledge do for us?"
Hugh was silent for a moment. "I'm not sure," he said slowly.
"Can you backtrack, run the profile through your database and see if any matches pop up out of Pakistan?"
"Can't hurt," Hugh said. "But it's a long shot, Patrick. We've already been through the database a hundred times looking for Isa before he was Isa."
"Ever go looking for him in Pakistan?"
"When he got to be big news, we looked for him everywhere. Especially when he surfaced in al Qaeda, with Zarqawi. Back then, though, you'll remember that al Qaeda leadership was all Saudi and Egyptian."
"So?" Patrick was impatient. "Nowadays it's increasingly Libyan, or at least North African. He hated Zarqawi, that is well known, but bin Laden's never been shy about rewarding initiative, wherever it comes from."
"And bin Laden's looking for Isa, too."
"Yeah, I remember. Hugh, Isa's a Pakistani. I'm sure of it. I've already talked to the ops guys in Islamabad. Get the word out to your people. This guy just spent six months in Miami, living like a monk-well, mostly-in somebody's spare room. Then he left for Mexico City, where we lost his trail. He's up to something, and he's not a small player like-oh, like the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat, or the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group. He's the real deal. He'll be the guy to dream up another 9/11.1 want to get to him before he does."
"So do I, Patrick," Hugh said, although he sounded much more placid in talking about Isa than he did when he'd found out about Sara and Isa in the elevator in Istanbul. It helped when someone you thought might quite like to kill your wife removed himself to another hemisphere. "I just don't think going back to Pakistan gets the job done."
"Humor me. It's my dime."
"It's the American taxpayer's dime. How long do you think Kallendorf is going to let you get away with this?"
"As long as I continue to produce results."
Patrick hung up and stared at the television, still set to NTV, which was running an old interview of Sally Ride and her husband and fellow astronaut Steve Hawley by Jane Pauley. Jane wanted to know if they planned on having children, and Sally told Jane it was none of her business. A charm school dropout, Sally Ride. He thought of his own close encounters of the media kind and wished she worked for him.
The phone rang. It was Bob. "Yaqub says he thinks Isa is in America."
"Not news. Anything else?"
"Well… He told Mary that he thinks Isa is a virgin."
"Really."
"Really. He waited until I was out of the room to tell her, and he whispered it like he didn't want Isa to hear."
"Why? Isa taken a vow of celibacy to the cause?"
"He doesn't know why, but he says Isa-who he knew as Dandin Gandhi, by the way-never went anywhere near women while he knew him."
Patrick thought of Zahirah's body, skirt rearranged carefully over her recently deflowered body. "So he thinks Isa hated women?"
"You'd expect that from an avowed Islamist, wouldn't you? No, Yaqub says in fact the opposite. He was very critical of Yaqub's womanizing, thought it was demeaning to both Yaqub and the women. He used to quote at him from the Koran, something about if you be kind toward women and fear to wrong them, Allah smiles on you."
"Really," Patrick said again. "Interesting."
As soon as he hung up the phone rang again. It was the agent in Mexico City. They'd finally caught a break. Isa had been spotted boarding a flight for Haiti. Not without difficulty, Patrick managed to restrain himself until he hung up and then he leapt to his feet, pumped his fist once, and shouted, "Awright!"
He got immediately back on the phone to call his office. "Melanie? I need a seat on the next plane to Port-au-Prince."
There was a brief, startled silence. Miami was one thing. Haiti, especially given the current political climate there, was quite another. He was a bureau chief, not a field agent. "Are you quite sure about this, Mr. Chisum?" Melanie said.
"I'm sure, Melanie," Patrick said firmly. "And don't you think it's time you started calling me Patrick?"
OFF CAPE CANAVERAL, ON BOARD USCG CUTTER MUNRO
"We'll be hanging offshore about two miles out," Cal told the Munros. "But it'll feel like you've got a front-row seat. The best place to watch will be from the bridge. I'll put us port side to, and I'll have some chairs brought up for you if you'd like."
"Oh please," Doreen said, "you don't have to go to all that trouble."
"It's no trouble, Doreen."
Nick cocked an eyebrow. "You'll be providing seating for all your guests, Cal?"
Cal grinned. "The admirals and the press can stand."
They were in Cal 's stateroom, with the table set for dinner for six. There was a knock at the door and the two aforesaid admirals entered. One was of medium height with a barrel chest, the left half of which was covered clavicle to sternum with service ribbons. He had stern gray eyes and a thick, bristly flattop to match. "Admiral Matson," Cal said.
The second admiral was so
tall he had to duck coming through the door, with a haircut so short he looked like he was wearing a silver skullcap. Admiral Barkley had an intelligent eye, a charming smile, and an easy manner, and he was a veteran of multiple patrols in the Caribbean, EPAC, and the Bering Sea, so he knew his way around operations and had an instant frame of reference with the skipper of a 378. He at once endeared himself to Nick by casting aspersions on aviators of every stripe. There followed a spirited debate on the relative merits of sea and air, which was accompanied by a lot of laughter and ended in an amicable draw.
In the meantime, Doreen tried to draw out Admiral Matson, who was determined not to be drawn, and other than asking Cal -twice-if the CNN reporter had made it on board, addressed himself exclusively to his prime rib. It was excellent, Cal was relieved to note, as the admiral was a noted trencherman. In Admiral Matson's defense, it had to be said that he spent all his time wrangling money out of Congress for the Coast Guard. If he regarded Munro working launch security with a Munro a member of the shuttle's crew solely as a heaven-sent opportunity to remind Congress of the Coast Guard's worthiness come appropriations time, there was some validity in that viewpoint. After a few minutes, Doreen, with an air of having done her best, handed Matson off to Taffy, who was seated at the foot of the table with his best attentive and respectful expression fastened firmly on his face.
The phone rang. "Excuse me," Cal said, and took the receiver from Seaman Roberts, who was doing her best not to hurry dinner along even though she wanted to take a nap when she got off duty so she'd be bright-eyed and bushy-tailed for the launch. Cal hoped fervently that no fires or other emergencies broke out at T minus ten, because most of his already skeleton crew would be on deck at that time, cameras at the ready, to watch the shuttle hurl itself skyward. "Captain," he said into the phone.
"Captain, this is the OOD. We've got a request to launch our helo to go pick up someone at the Cape."
"What?" Cal said. "Is there an emergency?" He sat up, napkin sliding from his lap. "Morgan, is this a SAR?"
The OOD, a sanguine and capable woman five years out of the Academy, said cheerfully, "No, Captain. Someone just wants a ride."
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