“I sure was hoping it was one of them,” Herbert said.
Hood did not have to ask why. Absent an accident, that left the probability of illegal nuclear activity, possibly the transportation of weapons or raw nuclear material.
“Lowell, are there any nuclear power plants in the Darwin region?” Rodgers asked.
“I already asked my host,” Coffey told him. “She said she does not believe there are.”
“I’m with you, Lowell,” Herbert said. “Nothing personal, but I’m bothered by the fact that they asked for you instead of an official representative of the federal government.”
“I am, too,” Coffey said.
“Do we know that they didn’t do that as well?” Hood asked.
“I was told that I was their one-and-only,” Coffey said.
“Jelbert’s aide may not have been in possession of that information,” Hood pointed out. “For all we know, the American embassy has been notified. We’re going to have to let this play out until we know more.”
“There obviously has to be a legal issue involved,” Herbert said. “Something that requires Lowell’s expertise in international affairs.”
“That does seem to make sense,” Hood said. “Lowell, how long until you reach the airport?”
“About fifteen minutes,” Coffey replied.
“Maybe we’ll know more by then,” Hood said. “Lowell, let us know what you find out as soon as you can.”
“Of course,” he said.
Hood wished him well and hung up. He looked at the others. “Bob, is there any history of nuclear trafficking in that region?”
“The answer is, ‘possibly,’ ” Herbert said.
“Jeez, I remember when intelligence agencies used to deal in probablies,” Rodgers said.
“When you were a greenhorn in ’Nam, they did,” Herbert said. “We still had human intelligence resources in every backwater den you could imagine. Then the electronic intelligence guys came in and said there was no reason to risk lives anymore. They were wrong. Satellites can’t do belowdecks imaging in a freighter or oil tanker.”
“What about those possibilities, Bob?” Hood asked, getting them back on subject.
“We suspect that terrorists and rogue states in the Pacific Rim have used commercial ships and private vessels to transport nuclear weapons or components,” Herbert told him. “But we have no evidence of that. For the last few years a bunch of navies and air defense forces around the world, including Australia, have been placing radiation-detection equipment on their vessels. These gizmos measure gamma radiation or neutron fields, depending on whether they’re looking for raw radioactive material or weapons, respectively. But they haven’t found anything.”
“Which doesn’t mean much,” Rodgers said. “Adequate lead shielding will hide that.”
Herbert nodded. “That’s why we need more people watching potential traffickers on the shipping and receiving ends. The CIA and the FBI are working on that, but we’re nowhere near up to speed yet.”
“All right,” Hood said. “The system has a lot of holes. But you’re saying the Aussies have the capacity to pick up hot cargo?”
“That’s right,” Herbert said. “And if that’s what happened, there are a lot of reasons they might want someone like Lowell to have a look.”
Hood suggested that Herbert and Rodgers return to their offices to see if there was any other intelligence they could dig up. He would notify them as soon as Coffey called.
As they left, Hood looked at the photo of Harleigh and Alexander on his desk. He wished he could roll back the clock ten minutes. The responsibility of fighting nuclear terrorism was an unimaginable burden. The price of failure would be appalling.
Still, whether Hood wanted it or not, that responsibility might be his. Hopefully, this would prove to be something far less dire than he could imagine.
SEVEN
Sydney, Australia Thursday, 10:01 A.M.
It was like talking to stone.
When Lowell Coffey did not get the service, respect, or answers he was looking for, his inclination was to stand and fight. Quietly, but with unshakable determination. Jaguar dealers or presidents, it did not matter.
This was a rare exception.
Coffey and Penny arrived at the domestic cargo terminal. It was a vast, low-lying building that looked as if it had been built in the 1960s. It was situated away from the main terminal area. Penny parked the pickup among rows of semis with container rigs. They walked to the front office, which sat just inside the main hangar. There they were met by a petty officer from the MIC. He was a fresh-faced kid whose name tag said Lady. That name must have got him teased a lot more than Date. Coffey judged him to be about twenty-five. The petty officer checked Coffey’s passport, thanked him for coming, and said he would show the attorney to the aircraft. He removed a small point-to-point radio from his belt. Lady was pleasant, efficient, and uninformative. Unacceptably so. Coffey refused to follow the young man into the hangar.
“Petty Officer Lady, before I board the aircraft, I would appreciate some information,” Coffey said. “Specifically, I’d like to know why I’m going with you.” He had to speak loudly to be heard over the forklifts that were moving barrels and containers.
“I’m sorry, sir,” the young man replied. “I can’t tell you that.”
“Then I can’t go with you,” Coffey insisted.
“No, sir. I mean I can’t tell you because I don’t know,” Lady said. “What I can do, sir, is put you in touch with my CO if you’d like. But I can assure you that he doesn’t know anything more than I do. This is a Level Alpha operation. Information is on a need-to-know basis.”
“Well, I need to know, and so do my superiors,” Coffey said. He held up his cell phone and wiggled it back and forth. “What do I tell them?”
“Sir, I wish I could help you. But that information is at the other end of a two-hour flight,” Lady said. He held up his own radio. “What shall I tell the pilot, sir? He is waiting to take off.”
If the kid had wiggled the radio, the attorney would have turned around and left. But he did not. He was respectful. And he had effectively called Coffey’s bluff.
The American turned to Penny.
“It looks like I’ll be taking a two-hour flight,” he said. “I’ll let you know as soon as I have some idea what’s going on.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Penny said.
“I do,” Coffey said. “I just hope this isn’t an elaborate Ellsworth plot to keep me from giving a speech.”
“He’s a duck-shover,” she said, “but if that turns out to be the case, just E-mail me the speech. I’ll read it for you.”
Coffey thanked her and indicated for Petty Officer Lady to lead him to the plane.
“Duck-shover?” he said, turning back to Penny.
“My dad drove a taxi,” the woman shouted ahead. “That’s what they used to call drivers who cut other taxis off or muscled them out of the way.”
“I love it!” Coffey called back, waving as he headed toward the back of the hangar and the door that led to the field.
The Lockheed P-3C was a big, gray, cigar-shaped four-engine prop plane. It was 116 feet in length with a wing-span of nearly 100 feet. Coffey had only been in a prop plane once before, when he traveled with the regional Op-Center mobile office to the Middle East. He had not liked the noise and vibration then. He did not think he would like it now.
Because this was a transport mission, not travel to a combat zone, the P-3C had gone out without a tactical coordinator. The TACCO’s station was located in the rear of the aircraft. After Petty Officer Lady turned Coffey over to the crew, the captain gave him the coordinator’s seat. According to the pilot, it was the warmest, most comfortable place in the plane. The plane was taxiing before Coffey had even buckled himself in to the threadbare red seat.
The attorney faced the port side as the aircraft rumbled its way into the air. He was sitting in a cubicle shaped like half a pentagon. Th
e sun-faded blue metal walls were covered with displays, buttons, and old-fashioned switches and dials. Coffey sat with his back to the open window as the sun burned across his neck and the equipment. An hour ago, if Coffey had to guess all the places he could conceivably have found himself this morning, the rear end of a Royal Australian Navy patrol craft would have been nowhere on the list.
The strangeness of it all was outweighed by Coffey’s curiosity as to what he would find on the other end. The attorney was thrilled by the fact that he was in the right place to do something about whatever this was. He relished the opportunity and the challenge. It reinforced one of his strongest convictions: that an individual did not have to be in the big, bulging belly of politics to have a positive impact on society.
For the duration of the 116-minute flight, no one came back to check on the attorney or offer him coffee. Or a pillow. Nor was the flight all that comfortable. Coffey wondered if they had stuck him back there just so he would not bug anyone for answers. Sitting there, he found himself thinking about Paul Hood’s managerial style.
Hood did not always have information that people wanted to hear. But he never kept them out of the loop. Sometimes he was not at liberty to say what he did know. But he always told people that. Stonewalling was dehumanizing. Hood had his flaws, but he always treated people like people.
The plane landed at Darwin International Airport. The airport consisted of one large central structure that looked like a shopping mall in Anytown, U.S.A. The building was all white. Coffey wondered if everything in Australia was white. Located less than four miles outside the city, DIA was both a commercial airport and a Department of Defence airfield. It was used primarily by the Royal Australian Air Force. However, the MIC also flew reconnaissance missions from here.
Coffey was not taken to the terminal. The plane pulled off onto an apron where several F-18s were parked. The pilot walked him down the aft staircase to a waiting black sedan.
“Tell me, Captain,” Coffey said as they crossed the short, windy stretch of tarmac. “Did you folks strand me back there on purpose? An unadorned yes or no will suffice.”
“Yes, sir, we did,” the captain replied.
“Follow-up question,” Coffey said. “Why did you leave me alone?”
“Because we were told to, sir,” the pilot said.
Okay, Coffey thought. At least that was honest.
The pilot turned him over to the petty officer who stood beside the car. The men exchanged salutes, and then the pilot left. The petty officer opened the door, and Coffey got in. There was a glass partition between the front and back of the car. Obviously, they did not want him talking to the driver, either.
The car sped off, carrying Coffey past a forest of tall, colorful stone poles that stood in a small, green plot beside the building. Coffey recognized these from the tour book he had read during the flight to Australia. They were Tiwi Pukumani burial poles—a tribute to the Aboriginal peoples who dwelt in the Northern Territory. They were used as mourning totems during funeral ceremonies. Afterward, they remained standing above the grave as a memorial to the dead. These particular poles were carved to honor all native dead. Coffey thought about how moving it must be for a sculptor to work on interpretive likenesses of deceased individuals from his tribe or village. The process made more sense to Coffey than a marble worker impersonally hacking names into stone.
Also, the burial poles were not white. They were brightly painted, a celebration of life.
As the sedan headed toward downtown Darwin, Coffey looked out at the gleaming waters of the Timor Sea. He found it ironic that since leaving Sydney he had encountered a pilot, a driver, and a series of totems. All of them were mute, but only one of them had any eloquence.
The one that was made of stone.
EIGHT
The Celebes Sea Thursday, 12:12 P.M.
If anyone had been watching the two vessels, it would have seemed like a chance encounter. A passing ship or plane, even a spy satellite, would see it as an offer by a decommissioned cutter to lend assistance to a yacht. The two ships stayed together briefly, less than fifteen minutes. Then the cutter pulled away, its captain waving grandly to a fellow seafarer.
In fact, the encounter was anything but innocent. Or accidental.
Forty-seven-year-old Peter Kannaday, owner and skipper of the Hosannah, was supposed to have made the rendezvous with the privately owned cutter when night was upon the sea, and no one could have seen them together. But the explosion on the sampan had opened a crack in his hull. Actually, it had blown an oar, pieces of hull, and the body of a pirate against the bulkhead of the yacht. They were what had caused the breach. The crack was less than a meter long and was well above the waterline. But where it had hit was very inconvenient for the captain. Inconvenient and extremely dangerous. They had to stop and repair it. Fortunately, there had been no other ships in the area. That was one of the reasons Kannaday had selected this route in the first place.
The Australian sea captain watched as the red-hulled cutter moved away slowly. The diesel-electric motors growled loudly as the 200-foot-long ship crawled forward under a perfect blue sky. The cutter was formerly owned by the Republic of Korea Navy, bought from the United States in 1950. Now it was the property of Mahathir bin Dahman of Malaysia, who used it as part of his global waste-disposal operation. The ship’s captain, Jaafar, had said that Dahman had been very concerned about the risks of a daylight pickup. Jaafar had assured him that it would be all right. Dahman decided to trust his man on the scene. Jaafar was right. Everything went well.
Kannaday did not think that his own boss would be as understanding. It bothered Kannaday that he had to worry about that. The ship had a security officer for this. One who had been appointed by the boss himself.
Kannaday turned from the deck and went below. He pulled a hand-rolled cigarette from his shirt pocket. He lit it and took a few quick drags. The five security officers had gone down ahead of him. They were in the process of returning their automatic weapons to the gun racks. They were always on high alert during a transfer.
The rest of the crew was going about their business of sailing the yacht back to Australia.
The yacht belonged to Kannaday, and some members of the crew had been with him for nearly seven years. They were loyal, though not necessarily to him. They liked the untaxed money they made and the job was easy. Most of the time the Hosannah pretended to be conducting coastline tours or fishing runs. They wanted to be seen in as many places as possible. Crew members posed as paying customers. Between those essentially idle cruises, the crew were veterans of countless independent smuggling operations. They had transported people and goods all across the southern hemisphere, from Australia to South America.
The security people did not work for him. They worked for John Hawke, who worked for Jervis Darling. A thick mist of distrust circulated between them and Kannaday’s veteran crew. Kannaday’s men had never had to defend their vessel and their cargo. But they could and would, if necessary. Hawke’s team had never sailed a yacht. Yet each team believed they could do the other’s job better. Seamen always felt that way. Unfortunately, what had happened the night before stoked the frustration in both camps. The seamen felt the security team should have seen the sampan coming before dark. They had radar and sonar, installed in the radio room by Darling’s technicians. Unfortunately, the sampan was so small it literally slipped under the radar. Kannaday’s crew felt that once the threat was identified, the security people should have anticipated that there might be explosives on board. They could have changed course to avoid the threat, as they always did before going to work exclusively for Darling. Unfortunately, the schedules of Darling and his partners did not allow time for flight. They were to load and off-load the materials as soon as possible.
The miserable irony was that except for the explosion, everything had gone perfectly. The security system and defensive response had worked. An hour before they were supposed to meet Jaafar, the sophisticated ma
rine radar had picked up a blip. Darling’s nephew Marcus had reported it to Kannaday, who had watched the seven-inch color monitor in the communications room. They had observed the sampan’s approach on the night-vision security camera attached to the mainmast. They decided that the crew were pirates preparing to board. A security team went on deck and took them out. So as not to hit fuel supplies or stockpiled ammunition, they aimed at the men, not at the sampan. Though they took precautions, a replay of the security video showed what had happened. Bullets struck explosives one of the pirates had been carrying. Perhaps the pirates had intended to try to cripple the yacht and forestall pursuit. In any case, the handheld explosive had blown up and damaged the yacht. There was no way to have seen that. No way to have anticipated it. And, unfortunately, no way to protect against it.
The yacht was divided into ten rooms. Six of those were for the crew, one was for munitions, one was for Kannaday, and one was for communications. The tenth room, the room that was damaged, was for their cargo. Kannaday walked down the carpeted central corridor to the room where repairs were still ongoing. Fortunately, all of the internal walls had held secure. Kannaday stopped beside thirty-one-year-old John Hawke, his security officer.
Hawke was a contrast to the tall, prematurely silver-haired Kannaday. The sinewy, five-foot-nine-inch Hawke was what the people of his native Cootamundra, South Australia, used to call a Mong—a mongrel, the son of a Canadian father and an Aborigine mother. However, no one who knew Hawke used the disparaging term. The taciturn sailor wore a wommera tucked in his sash belt. The traditional Dharuk weapon was a hooked wooden stick used for hurling darts with force and accuracy. The dart was placed in a hollowed end and then flung, like a jai alai ball. Kannaday had seen Hawke use the weapon on sea birds for practice. Their eyes were his favorite target. Their squawks were like sylvan music to him, producing the only smile Kannaday ever saw.
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