Allah's Scorpion

FORTY

There was virtually no traffic at four in the morning, though the nine ships in port were ablaze in lights, from aboard as well as from along the north quay where most of the cargo vessels were unloaded. The night shift had left one hour ago, and the port would not be open for business again until seven. A man dressed in dark slacks and a pullover, carrying an ordinary seaman’s duffel bag, walked along the quay, stopping at the gangway of a tramp steamer.

Rupert Graham looked up at the bridge windows, but only a dim red light was showing, and there didn’t seem to been anyone aboard, though he could hear the distant sound of machinery running inside the hull. He knew this ship and her master almost as well as the men and pirate ships he’d commanded. Neither were much to look at, but both man and vessel were trustworthy.

She was the MV Distal Volente, owned by a small Greek shipping company, and registered in Liberia. Built in 1959 in the United Kingdom by Sunderland Shipbuilders, she had seen better days. Now she was considered a scrapper, which was a boat so battered, so eaten with rust that she was fit for little else other than a breaking yard where she would be cut up and sold for scrap.

At 150 meters on deck, her superstructure was amidships, leaving cargo spaces in her holds as well as on deck forward and aft. Four cargo containers were lashed to the afterdeck, and two others were secured forward. She rode low in the water, ready to leave as soon as the Tunisian pilot arrived sometime this morning.

A short, slightly built man, wearing an open-collar white shirt, stepped out of the shadows and came to the rail. “It is good to see you again, my old friend,” he called down softly, his singsong Indonesian accent distinctive.

“I thought that you would be dead or in jail by now,” Graham said.

“Dead someday, jail never,” Captain Halim Subandrio said, chuckling. “Did anybody spot you coming here?”

“I don’t think so,” Graham said. He’d taken a great deal of care with his movements. Finally he was going to hit the bastards hard, and he didn’t want to screw up his chances.

“Come aboard then, we need to talk before we put you in hiding.”

Graham started up the gangway, aware that Subandrio was looking down the quay back toward the road. He was a tough old bastard who’d been working the South China Sea pirate trade for years before Graham had shown up. He’d survived that long because he was a cautious man.

“Never forget to always look over your shoulder, my friend,” he’d told Graham early on. “In that way you will minimize nasty surprises, and live another day to share the bed of a good woman.”

Graham had almost killed the man on the spot; his grief over Jillian’s death was still fresh in his mind, and his hate was a bright pool of molten metal in his gut.

Subandrio had picked up a little of that from Graham’s eyes. He smiled gently and laid a hand on Graham’s shoulder as a father might with a son. “Also remember that the past can never be lived again. No matter how terrible or joyous, we must go on.”

Graham and his crew had learned to time their hijackings to coincide with the Distal Volente’s sailing schedules. Within hours of boarding a hapless vessel, killing its crew and stealing its cargo, they would meet Subandrio and transfer the stolen goods. Graham’s ships had been boarded three times, but always after they’d gotten rid of their cargo, so no charges had ever been brought against him.

At the top, Graham shook hands with the man. “Is my crew here?” Subandrio nodded toward the containers lashed to the afterdeck. It was clear he wasn’t happy. “They came aboard in one of those yesterday afternoon. As soon as it got dark they let themselves out and came belowdecks.” He shook his head. “It’s bad business, Rupert, between them and my crew. You will have to do something before the situation gets completely out of hand.”

Bin Laden had arranged for eighteen crewmen, most of them Iranians, for the tough mission. But although they had a great religious zeal for the jihad, they were misfits who would have been better as suicide bombers in Baghdad, or mujahideen doing battle with the Americans in Afghanistan, than as a crew aboard a submarine. Graham had never met any of them, he’d only seen their dossiers, but he was convinced that by the time they got across the Atlantic they would be molded into an acceptable crew. He would kill any man who didn’t cooperate, and the sooner he got that message across the sooner their training could begin.

They would have only one shot at what he planned to do, and those plans did not include committing suicide for the cause. He would let his crew have that honor.

“What exactly is the trouble?” Graham asked.

“Let’s get off the deck first,” Subandrio said, and led Graham across to a hatch into the superstructure.

The passageway was dimly lit in red. Now Graham could more clearly hear the sound of machinery running somewhere below. And he could hear the murmur of several voices. Whoever was talking sounded angry.

“I want them to return to the container, but they refuse my orders,” Subandrio said. “You can hear them. They’ve been at it all night; arguing, fighting; making a very big mess of my galley and stores. My crew refuses to have anything to do with them.”

“I’ll take care of it,” Graham promised. It was better that he established a clear understanding between them right from the start.

“The pilot is scheduled to be here in less than three hours,” Subandrio said. “He sometimes comes early. If you or your crew are spotted the game will be up.”

“Is there food and water in the container?”

“Yes, and light. It will only be until we clear the breakwaters and the pilot leaves,” Subandrio said. “Maybe one hour longer, depending on traffic, and you may leave your little box.”

Graham put down his duffel bag. He took his pistol, a 9mm Steyr GB, out of his pocket, and screwed a Vaime silencer on the end of the barrel. “Wait here, Halim, I’ll go fetch them.”

Subandrio nodded. “How long will you be needing my ship?”

“We’ll be gone by midnight tomorrow.”

“Who are these guys? What’s the mission?”

“You don’t want to know,” Graham said. “Do you have any rolls of plastic?”

“Should be some in the dry-stores locker,” Subandrio said, puzzled.

“I’ll be back in a couple of minutes,” Graham said, and he headed aft to the galley and crew’s mess.

Subandrio ran his ship with a crew of only nine, including a cook, but all of them were out of sight this morning, keeping out of the way of the Iranians, who were holed up in the mess waiting for their own captain to arrive.

As Graham came around a corner, he heard someone say something in Arabic from an open door at the end of the narrow corridor, and several men laughed harshly. He stuffed the pistol in his belt at the small of his back, and walked to the end of the corridor, where he held up at the open door.

The strong smell of marijuana and something else pungent wafted out of the small dining area. His eighteen crewmen, all of them dressed in blue jeans or khakis and T-shirts, several days’ stubble on their faces, were crowded around two long, narrow tables littered with the remains of canned fish and beef, crackers, Coca-Cola, and other items they’d raided from the ship’s stores. A serving counter and service door at the back of the room opened to the galley that looked to be in a mess.

A couple of them spotted Graham in the doorway, but they just looked at him dumbly.

“Good morning,” Graham said in English.

All of them turned and looked at him with some curiosity, but very little else. One of them said something in Arabic and a few of the men chuckled.

“We’ll speak English from now on, if you please,” Graham said. “Who is Muhamed al-Hari?”

“I am,” a tall, slender man, drinking from a handleless mug, said. According to the dossier bin Laden had supplied, al-Hari had been a navigation officer aboard one of Iran’s Kilo submarines, and had even attended the Prospective Officers Special Course, at Frunze Military Academy in Leningrad.

“You will be my executive officer,” Graham said.

Al-Hari’s eyes lit up. “Then it’s true, we have a submarine?”

“We will if we can get out of Tunisia without being arrested, which will surely happen if the authorities discover your presence aboard this ship.”

“I’m not going back inside that stinking box,” one of them grumbled. “We’ll hide in the crew’s quarters. No pilot will bother looking there.”

“Very well,” Graham replied pleasantly. “Mr. al-Hari, there is a roll of plastic sheeting in the dry-stores locker. Bring me a piece of it, if you would, about two meters on a side, I should think. And see if you can find some tape.”

Al-Hari nodded uncertainly, but he got up and went into the galley.

“What is your name and rank, please?” Graham asked the crewman who’d complained.

“I am Syed Asif,” the crewman answered as if his name meant something. “I was an ordinary seaman. But I’m not going back in that box.”

“You are from Pakistan?” Graham asked.

The others were paying rapt attention to the exchange. One of them said something in Arabic, and a few of them laughed again.

Al-Hari came back with the sheet of plastic, and a roll of duct tape.

“Lay it out on the deck behind Seaman Asif, please,” Graham instructed.

The Pakistani was clearly nervous now, not quite comprehending what was about to happen, but beginning to realize that whatever it was might not be so good.

Al-Hari spread the plastic out behind the seaman, then stepped aside.

Graham pulled out his pistol, and, before anyone could move, fired one shot in the middle of Asif ’s forehead, killing him instantly, his body falling backwards off his stool and landing on the plastic sheet.

“Wrap Seaman Asif ’s body in the plastic and secure it with the tape,” Graham told the stunned crewmen. “When you are finished with that, you will clean the mess you have made here, and meet me topside — with the body — in ten minutes. I will be joining you in our luxurious on-deck stateroom. There is much I have to tell you.”

No one uttered a sound, but their eyes were locked on his. He’d gotten their attention.

“Is that clear?”

“Aye, aye, Captain,” al-Hari responded crisply.

“Very well, you may carry on,” Graham said, and he turned and left.

FORTY-ONE

McGarvey, dressed only in swimming trunks, a towel around his neck, slowed to a walk, and looked out across the Gulf of Mexico as a V formation of brown pelicans skimmed just above the water, seemingly without effort. His left shoulder, where he’d taken a bullet two weeks ago, was still sore and stiff, but each day of strenuous exercise was bringing him back to the peak of physical fitness.

He’d only spent the one night at the hospital in Bethesda, before he checked himself out and Liz had driven him and Kathleen to their new house on one of the barrier islands just south of Sarasota. The day after they’d arrived, he’d started his exercise regime, pushing his body to its limits. He was now swimming in the Gulf for a solid hour every morning at dawn, and then running five miles barefoot on the beach.

Last week he’d started shooting again at an indoor pistol range off University Parkway up in Sarasota. One of the instructors had tried to convince him to take shooting lessons and to retire the Walther in favor of something with greater stopping power, but after watching McGarvey empty one clip at rapid fire, all the shots hitting within a one-inch circle, he’d walked away, shaking his head.

His physical wounds were healing, but to this point he’d been unable to get the vision of Toni Talarico’s face out of his head, when she and her children came face-to-face with the terrorist McGarvey had pulled out of the van.

He had regained consciousness and was sitting in the backseat of a police cruiser, his hands cuffed behind him.

McGarvey was being given first aid by an EMT ten feet away, when Toni and the kids had been escorted up the hill by Adkins. She’d broken away and walked over to the police cruiser to get a closer look at the man. The expression on her tiny face was of pure hatred: raw, intense, and very personal. There was no doubt in McGarvey’s mind that if someone had handed her a gun at that moment she would have emptied it into the man’s head.

Her children were watching her, and when she turned back to them, they both stepped away and burst into tears. They’d been frightened not by the terrorist, but by the look in their mother’s eyes.

The island was very narrow here, the single road less than one hundred feet from the beach. Across the road, houses were nestled in lush tropical growth: palms, bougainvillea, sea grapes, and dozens of different flowering trees and bushes. The McGarveys’ was a two-story Florida-style, with tall ceilings, large overhangs, and a veranda that wrapped completely around the second floor. When the weather was right the house could be completely opened to catch the slightest breeze off the gulf or off the Intracoastal Waterway.

Kathleen loved the place, and that was enough for him, though they had paid what he considered an obscene price.

Reaching the path up to the road, McGarvey headed to his house, his thoughts still on the attack at Arlington. There was no doubt that he had been the target, but the only reason he could come up with was that bin Laden was afraid that McGarvey might interfere with the submarine mission.

Six of the terrorists had managed to escape clean; the one driving the van McGarvey had attacked, two in the second van, and apparently the drivers of three cars they’d managed to use as escape vehicles out the south gate. The FBI forensics people had come up with plenty of physical evidence from the abandoned vans, as well as from the bodies of the seven dead terrorists and the only survivor.

So far they’d identified nine of the attackers, all of whom were on Homeland Security watch lists. No one had any idea how they’d gotten into the United States, but according to the media, which had given the attack a lot of play, the lapse was just another example of how poor a job Washington was doing to protect the country.

McGarvey had taken only one call from Adkins last week with that information, but he had stayed out of it, for Kathleen’s sake, certain that if and when something important came up, Otto would let him know.

The house was set twenty yards from the entrance, and in the back, a lawn sloped gently down to a boat dock and screened gazebo that overlooked the waterway. In the evenings they sometimes sat in the gazebo, listening to the quiet.

Inside, McGarvey passed through the large, airy entrance hall and went directly back to the huge open kitchen that looked directly out on the swimming pool and beyond to the Intracoastal Waterway.

Kathleen, barefoot in a colorful sarong and white bikini top, was at the counter slicing fruit for their breakfast. She looked up, a radiant smile on her face. “How’d it go this morning?”

“Every day it’s better,” he said, flexing his shoulder. He came over and kissed her lightly on the cheek. “What’s on the schedule for today?”

“How would you feel about driving up to Largo this morning?” Katy asked, pouring him a cup of coffee.

The business wasn’t over with, not until they found Graham and the submarine, and until bin Laden was dead. But for now there was nothing for him to do. For now it was in Otto’s hands. “Sure. What’ve you got in mind?”

“The Island Packet boatyard is up there. I was thinking we might buy a sailboat. Or at least talk to somebody about it.”

McGarvey had to smile. “You’ve got our retirement all planned, have you?”

Kathleen shrugged. “This fall you’re going back to teaching, and probably working on your Voltaire book, and I’ve been talking to some of the charities about going on their boards. We’re going to be busy, and we’ll be needing some sort of a diversion. What’s wrong with sailing? We both like it. The weather here is great.”

“Do I have time to take a shower and have some breakfast?”

“We have all the time in the world,” she replied brightly.

McGarvey’s mood instantly darkened. “For now,” he said, and her face fell, but for just a moment.

“Then we’ll make the best of it while we can,” she told him.

“It won’t last forever, Katy,” he said.

She managed a weak smile. “That’s what you said last time.”

“It has to be done.”

“I know,” she said.

McGarvey went upstairs and took a shower, the water drumming against the back of his neck soothing. Since Arlington he’d concentrated on healing his body as quickly as he could because he knew that his call to action could come at any moment, and when it did he wanted to be ready. He desperately wanted the semiretirement that Katy had planned for them, but he just as desperately wanted to see an end to bin Laden’s reign of terror. The United States certainly couldn’t depend on the Pakistanis to do the job; they were beset with so many internal problems that President Musharraf ’s hands were tied. Much of his military and a significant portion of his intelligence service personnel were sympathetic to al-Quaida’s cause. There’d even been attempts on his life by bin Laden’s supporters.

Taking the man out had always been a one-on-one mission.

When he was drying off, the telephone in the bedroom rang. Kathleen answered it in the kitchen on the first ring. He was dressing when she came to the door.

“It’s Otto,” she said, and she looked resigned.

McGarvey wanted to tell her that everything would be okay, but she’d always been able to see through that particular lie of his. He picked up the phone. “Good morning. Have you found the Kilo?”

“Oh wow, not yet, Mac,” Rencke gushed. “How are ya feeling? Okay? Louise wants to know.”

“I’ll live,” McGarvey said. He glanced up, but Kathleen was gone. “What about the sub?”

“There’s none missing. Honest injun, if he had grabbed a boat we’d know about it by now.”

“Then he’s got help from somebody,” McGarvey said crossly. “Goddammit, Otto, bin Laden didn’t hire a submarine captain for no reason.”

“I know, and we haven’t stopped looking.”

McGarvey closed his eyes for a moment. He had some serious visions about nuclear weapons being lobbed at the United States from a few miles offshore, giving absolutely no response time. “Sorry,” he said.

“No sweat, Mac. If he gets his hands on a Kilo boat — from no matter where — we’ll bag him.”

“That’s not why you called.”

“No. We got lucky with the guy you pulled out of the van at Arlington. The Bureau finally figured out who he is. Kamal al-Turabi, one of bin Laden’s top enforcers. They lost track of him last year, but it looks as if he was right here under their noses for at least eleven months. He was posing as a dentist up in Laurel. Neighbors said he was a great guy, about as American as they come.”

“Where is he right now?”

“They’ve got him tucked away over at Andrews.”

“Has he talked to anyone, maybe an attorney?” McGarvey asked. “Are there any leaks to the media that we’ve got him and why?”

“I don’t think so,” Rencke said.

“I’m flying up there today, but in the meantime I want you to do a couple of things for me,” McGarvey said. “Tell Adkins I’m on my way. I’m going to need some help, but I’ll explain when I get there. Then I want al-Turabi transferred to Gitmo tonight, but with no ID. I want him classified as John Doe, an American combatant working for al-Quaida.”

“Adkins will have to pull some serious strings,” Rencke said.

“Tell him to make it happen, with as few people in the loop as possible, except for Commander Weiss.”

Rencke was silent for just a second, but then he chuckled. “Weiss isn’t going to be a happy camper, especially if you show up down there again with Gloria.”

“If we get lucky I think I know how to find bin Laden,” McGarvey said. “But I also need you to ask Jared Kraus for an assist.” Kraus was chief of the Company’s Technical Services Division. They were the people who came up with the gadgets that field officers used.

“What do you need?” Rencke asked.

McGarvey explained what he wanted from Kraus and how he was going to use it, but there would have to be limitations.

“No sweat, kimo sabe,” Rencke said. “I’ve already seen the technical specs, so we’ll be up and running by the time you get up here.”

“Oh, and send someone down here to keep an eye on Katy, would you?” McGarvey said.

“Will do.”

FORTY-TWO

Cabbing it out to Langley from Dulles, McGarvey felt detached. Already he was beginning to leave his home and his family, putting his love for his wife and daughter and granddaughter in a special compartment in his mind; one in which he could forget about them while he was in the field. The bane of any assassin were attachments to places, to things, and especially, to people.

Lawrence Danielle, a mentor during his early days in the CIA, had cautioned that the field officers who lasted the longest were the ones who either carried no baggage, or those who knew when to forget home and hearth. “Completely forget, Kirk, as if there was no one in your life.”

It had been one of the hardest lessons for him to learn; and one that had cost him his marriage when Katy had faced him point-blank with the choice of her or the CIA.

He had been an arrogant bastard in those days, with his own set of demons, and he had just returned from a particularly nasty assignment in Santiago, Chile, in which he had assassinated an army general and the man’s wife. His emotions were all over the place, so he’d turned around and walked out the door.

He’d run to Switzerland then, to hide, and it had been a very long time before he and Kathleen got back together; lost years not only for him and his wife, but for their daughter Elizabeth.

But that was then and here he was now, ready to go back into the field.

Kathleen had stoically packed for him, saying nothing as she watched him gather his weapon, a couple of spare magazines of ammunition, and his escape kit of several passports, matching, untraceable credit cards, and ten thousand dollars in various currencies to be sent ahead as a bonded Homeland Security package.

When he was done, she handed him his tan sport coat. “Any odd idea how long you’ll be gone, in case I want to make dinner reservations or something for us?” she’d asked.

“Maybe ten days, not long this time.”

She wanted to say something that would make him change his mind; he could see it in her eyes. “Should I circle the wagons or something?”

“Someone’s coming down to ride shotgun for you. Otto will let you know.”

She’d come into his arms and shivered as he held her tight. “Take care of yourself, Kirk,” she said in his ear. “Come back to me.”

“Count on it.”

Receiving a visitor’s pass at the gate, McGarvey could remember Katy’s body in his arms as they kissed goodbye at the airport, but when he signed in he’d already forgotten her scent and how badly he’d missed her even before he left.

Adkins had been advised of McGarvey’s arrival and was waiting at the door to his office. “Hold my calls,” he told his secretary.

“Yes, sir,” Dahlia Swanson said. She’d been McGarvey’s private secretary when he’d been the DCI. “How are you feeling, Mr. McGarvey?” she asked.

“Much better, thank you.”

She was an older woman with white hair and old-school reserved manners, but she gave him a warm smile. “I am glad.”

He winked at her, then followed Adkins into the seventh-floor office.

“I managed to push through al-Turabi’s transfer to Guantanamo Bay, in fact he’s probably already on his way,” Adkins said, going behind his desk. He motioned for McGarvey to take a seat. “But Otto didn’t give me any of the details. Would you like to fill me in?”

“Al-Turabi is one of bin Laden’s top executioners. Important to the cause.”

“All right, I understand the reason for sending him down as a John Doe. But then what?”

“That navy commander Gloria Ibenez roughed up could be on the take. Otto is working the money trail back to the source now, but it’s possible that Weiss is on al-Quaida’s payroll.”

Understanding began to glimmer in Adkins’s eyes, and he shook his head. “Please don’t tell me that you’re going back down there.”

“Yes, I am,” McGarvey said. “And I’m taking Gloria with me, so you’ll have to pull a few more strings.”

Adkins sat back in his chair. “I didn’t want your job, you know. So if you’re doing this to get back at me, you can stop it.”

“The minute al-Turabi shows up at Camp Delta someone is going to recognize him, and Weiss will get the word.”

“Continue.”

“Gloria and I are going to lean on him, hard, and my guess is that Weiss will arrange for him to escape.”

“I don’t buy it, Mac,” Adkins said. “Even if Weiss is connected with al-Quaida, which would make him a traitor, why would he risk his neck with you and Gloria right there?”

“We’re only going to stay for a couple hours, just long enough to put some heat on him.”

“And?”

“When al-Turabi gets out of there, I’m going to follow him.”

Adkins said nothing for several long moments, obviously trying to put what he was being told into some kind of perspective. “You think he’ll lead you to bin Laden?”

“I think it’s a possibility, Dick,” McGarvey said.

“Why do you want Ms. Ibenez to go with you?”

“I want her to keep Weiss busy.”

“And pissed off,” Adkins said. “Because pissed-off people make mistakes.”

“Yes, and this one will cost him more than a couple of bruises,” McGarvey said. “But we don’t want to blow the whistle until I find bin Laden.”

“And finish the job,” Adkins said delicately.

“Yes,” McGarvey replied just as delicately. He’d come face-to-face with bin Laden in a cave in the mountains of Afghanistan. It was before 9/11, and he’d not been able to get the man’s image out of his head since then. “There are no innocents in this struggle,” bin Laden had said. He had proved his point in New York.

“He knows you’re coming. That’s why they tried to hit you at Arlington.”

“God bless the media,” McGarvey quipped. The attack had hit the front page of just about every newspaper in the world.

“He won’t stop, you know,” Adkins said.

“I hope he doesn’t,” McGarvey said. “Arlington was a mistake. Who knows, maybe he’ll make another.”

“When do you leave?”

“Soon as I can round up Gloria.”

“She’s down at the Farm, finishing her debriefing,” Adkins said. “Did you know?”

“No,” McGarvey said. “Sounds like Howard McCann’s doing.”

“She’ll be glad to be rescued.”

McGarvey’s visitor’s pass would not allow him to access Technical Services’ Research and Development corridor, so Jared Kraus had to come out and personally escort him inside. Kraus was a portly man in his late thirties, with a serious demeanor. Nothing was ever a joke to him. His staff claimed he had no sense of humor whatsoever.

“Good afternoon, Mr. Director,” he said. “Mr. Rencke is waiting for us in the conference room.”

“Were you able to come up with what I need?” McGarvey asked. Kraus’s left eyebrow rose a notch, as if the question was a personal insult. “Of course.”

The doors to most of the R & D labs and testing facilities were secured with retinal print identification devices that would open only into safe boxes that acted like air locks aboard a spaceship. The inner door to the facility itself could not be opened unless the outer door was closed and locked.

The wing was a beehive of activity, but no one spoke above a whisper. This place and the people who worked here, dreaming up toys for field operations officers, had always struck McGarvey as science fiction, something out of the old Mission Impossible.

“Just in here, sir,” Kraus said at the conference room next to his office at the end of the corridor.

Rencke was sitting cross-legged on top of a long table, fiddling with what appeared to be an ordinary satellite telephone. Beside him was a small leather case, about the size of a thick notebook.

He looked up, his eyes bright like a kid with a new toy. “Oh, wow, I just finished programming the third Keyhole, and nobody will be able to detect what I’ve done.”

“You know that we have a serious limitation in size,” McGarvey said.

“We’ve taken care of that for you, Mr. Director,” Kraus said. “Actually we’ve been working on the technology for a few years now, even before you left the Company.”

“What have you come up with?”

Kraus zippered open the leather case and took out one of four hypodermic syringes, each about a quarter-filled with a milky solution, and handed it to McGarvey. “It’s nanotechnology.”

The opening at the business end of the syringe was larger than most needles, and was covered by a plastic sheath. “What is it?”

“That’s the good part. The liquid is actually a derivative of sodium thiopental — truth serum. But also contained in each syringe is the GPS transmitter you wanted, no bigger than a grain of sand.”

McGarvey held the syringe up to the light, but he could not make out the device. “It can’t have much range.”

“That’s why I programmed three satellites,” Rencke said. “The Keyhole will be able to pick up the signal only if the transmitter is almost directly beneath it. It’ll show up on the sat phone, but the signal will be intermittent, depending on a satellite pass.”

“How do I activate the phone?” McGarvey asked.

“Four syringes, four GPS transmitters. Enter three ones and pound, and the phone will display the latitude and longitude of the first transmitter. Three twos and pound, gets you the second unit, et cetera.”

“There’s another downside,” Kraus said. “Battery life. Best we can do is seven days, so you’ll have to be quick about it. The good news is that the batteries won’t go active until they’ve been exposed to the subject’s body heat for sixty to ninety minutes.”

“We’re giving you four of them so Weiss won’t be sure if you and Gloria came back just because of al-Turabi,” Rencke said. “It’s all going to depend on how quickly he can get them out of there and into the hands of Cuban intelligence. Since the last break, Gitmo has been locked up tight.”

“He’ll manage,” McGarvey said. “Al-Turabi is just too big a catch.”

It was about two in the afternoon when McGarvey got down to the CIA’s training facility off I-64 outside Williamsburg. Located in a remote section of Camp Peary Naval Reservation on the York River, it was where recruits were taught basic tradecraft that field operations officers needed, and it was also where old hands went to hone their skills or to pass along things they’d learned, usually the hard way.

McGarvey’s daughter Elizabeth and her husband, Todd Van Buren, had taken over as camp commandants shortly after 9/11 when recruitment levels were at an all-time high. They were young enough that the recruits could relate to them, but experienced enough that the recruits had respect for them.

“Welcome back, Mr. Director,” the guard at the gate said. “Mrs. Van Buren is expecting you up at the office.”

“Thanks,” McGarvey said, and he followed the long drive through the woods to the collection of rustic buildings that housed the camp’s headquarters, classrooms, and the POW center where recruits were subjected to rigorous, sometimes even brutal, interrogations as if they were spies captured by a foreign power. The mess hall, dayrooms, and housing units were also located in the administration area.

Several cars were parked in front of the main office, and across in the parking lot a blue bus with U.S. Air Force markings had pulled up and fifteen or sixteen new recruits were piling out, to be greeted by several instructors dressed in BDUs.

Elizabeth, who was slender, with a pretty round face and short blond hair, practically a twin of her mother at that age, came out of the administration building as McGarvey pulled up. Like the instructors she was dressed in army camouflage, her boots bloused. In addition to running the camp she and Todd also taught many of the classes, including hand-to-hand combat, night field exercises in the swamp, and demolitions. She liked to blow up things as much as her husband did.

“Hi, Daddy,” she said, and she and her father embraced.

“How are you, sweetheart?” McGarvey asked.

“Just peachy,” she said. She linked her arm in his. “Let’s go for a walk.” She seemed brittle, on edge.

They headed down a dirt track behind the administration building that led eventually to the outdoor firing range, and beyond that the demolition training bunkers and urban warfare village.

“Everyone can pretty well guess why Dick Adkins called you back,” she said. “We’ve had no luck at all finding bin Laden. You’re the only one who’s come face-to-face with him and lived. And the fact that they tried to hit you at Arlington pretty well proves he knows that you’re gunning for him.”

“That could work to my advantage, when the time comes,” McGarvey said.

Elizabeth suddenly stopped and looked up into her father’s eyes. “Were you aware that Gloria Ibenez is in love with you?”

It took him completely by surprise. “No.”

“Well, she’s been telling anyone who’ll listen that she is,” Elizabeth said. “So if you’ve come here to ask her to help you, just be careful, Daddy. She’s an intelligent, beautiful woman, and I think she’d do just about anything to seduce you.”

McGarvey had to smile, despite the seriousness of the situation. “Is this a subject that a daughter should be talking to her father about?”

Elizabeth wanted to argue, but after a moment she lowered her eyes and nodded. “I’m sorry.”

“I’m going back to Guantanamo Bay, and I want Gloria along to put pressure on the ONI guy she’s already had a run-in with,” McGarvey said. “When I find out where bin Laden is hiding, I’m going after him alone. I’ve always worked that way.”

Elizabeth looked up. “That’s another part I don’t like,” she said. “You’re getting too old for this kind of stuff.”

McGarvey shook his head ruefully. “Too old for fieldwork and too old to turn the head of a pretty woman. Good thing I’m going back to teaching when this is over. And it’s even better that I’m in love with your mother.” He smiled. “She’s practically ancient too, you know.”

Elizabeth laughed lightly. “You make a good pair,” she said. “A dotty old bastard and the only woman on earth who can tell him what to do.”

FORTY-THREE

Captain Tariq Ziyax leaned against the chart table in the control room of the aging Foxtrot diesel-electric submarine, studying the medium-scale chart of the Mediterranean Sea from the Libyan coast across to the island of Sicily. It was coming up on 2200 Greenwich mean time, which put it at midnight local, eighty-five meters above on the surface.

The Shehab had left her base at Ra’s al Hilal three days ago on what the crew had been told was a routine patrol mission, but no other Libyan ship had accompanied them, nor since reaching their patrol station two hundred kilometers off Benghazi had they participated in any torpedo or missile drills, and the crew was getting restless. Only Ziyax and a dozen of his officers knew the real orders.

He was a small man with narrow shoulders, and a sad face that was all planes and angles, like someone out of a Goya painting. His eyes were puffed and red because he’d not slept well since he’d been handed this troubling assignment by Colonel Quaddafi himself four days ago, and his nerves were jumping all over the place, especially now that they were at their rendezvous point.

He wanted nothing more at this moment than to be home with his wife and three children, rather than here in the middle of the Mediterranean, carrying four anthrax-tipped torpedo-tube-launched cruise missiles.

To be caught out here in international waters with such weapons of mass destruction, which actually had belonged to Saddam Hussein before the war, would mean certain arrest and imprisonment. It would also go very badly for Libya if it were discovered that Quaddafi had hidden Hussein’s weapons in the weeks before the Allied forces had attacked.

The secret to leading men was never to allow a subordinate to see your inner fears. Remain calm in all circumstances. Be a man of iron. It was what he had been taught by the Russians at the Frunze Military Academy.

This is especially true aboard a submarine where a man’s worst fears always hovered just a few meters away at the pressure hull.

The Shehab was one of the last Foxtrot Class submarines that the Soviets had built in the early eighties, eight of which had been delivered to Libya. Because of shoddy maintenance practices by the Libyan navy, and because of a scarcity of spare parts since the collapse of the Soviet Union, only three of those boats were still serviceable, and the Shehab was most definitely on her last legs.

But, Ziyax reflected, in an effort to steady his nerves, she was still a potent warship. Under the right command, with the right crew, she was capable of dealing a sharp blow whether to a sea or land target.

At 91.5 meters on deck, Shehab displaced 2,600 tons submerged, and at cruising speed had a range of twenty thousand miles. She was fitted out with ten 533mm torpedo tubes; six forward and four aft. And she had been modified five years ago, two of her forward tubes modernized so that they could handle the ZM-54E1 missiles that had a range of three hundred kilometers, and could carry a variety of payloads, including normal high-explosive warheads, or air-burst canisters of anthrax. Even a small nuclear warshot with a yield of a few kilotons could be mounted to attack a ship or even a shore installation.

Ziyax shuddered to think what the outcome would be if a Libyan submarine ever made such an attack. It would be the end of their nation, and certainly the same fate that Hussein had suffered would befall Colonel Quaddafi. It was why this assignment was so vitally important.

“You will kill three birds with one stone for me, my dear Captain,” Quaddafi had told him. It was early evening, and they were walking in the desert, a half-dozen bodyguards trailing twenty meters behind.

“I and my crew will do our best for you,” Ziyax had promised. He had graduated with a degree in electronic engineering, with honors, from King Farouk University in Cairo, and after two years working for Libya Telecommunications Corporation, helping build an all-new telephone system for the country, he’d been drafted into the navy. He was smart, he was dedicated to his nation, and knew how to follow orders as well as give them. After four years of intensive training in Libya and in Russia, aboard a variety of submarines including Kilos and Foxtrots, he’d been appointed as executive officer aboard a sister submarine of Shehab’s.

He’d also gotten married and started his family, which made him want to finally quit the sea and return to his first love, electronic engineering.

“When you have completed this assignment for me, I will release you from the navy, if that’s what you still want,” Colonel Quaddafi promised.

Ziyax had felt a sudden flush of pleasure. “Yes, sir, but only to return to my old position.”

“You’re needed there as well as here,” Quaddafi said.

They walked in silence for a while, Ziyax thinking about regaining his old life. But then it occurred to ask what task he was being assigned to do. “The three birds with one stone, sir?” he prompted.

“You have read the newspapers, seen the international television broadcasts, so you know that I have promised the West to reduce our military forces in exchange for new trade agreements. The boycott against our people has been lifted.”

“Yes, sir.” Life in Libya, especially in the capital, Tripoli, had markedly improved over the past few years. The nearly universal sentiment held Quaddafi in high regard, even though it had been his arrogance in the first place that had landed them in so much trouble with the West.

“You are to take your submarine into the Mediterranean, and so far as the world is concerned, scuttle her.”

Ziyax’s breath had caught in his throat when he understood exactly what Quaddafi was telling him, and the reason for telling him out here in isolation where there was no possibility of prying ears. “If I’m not to scuttle my boat, what am I to do?”

“You will make rendezvous with a civilian vessel so that your crew can be taken off and replaced by a scuttling crew, to whom you will turn over the boat.”

Ziyax knew exactly whom the scuttling crew worked for, and his blood ran cold, but he didn’t give voice to his thought.

“Since we have made an appeasement with the West, certain of our brothers in prayer have criticized us. This gesture will spread oil on the waters. The second bird.”

Al-Quaida, the thought crystallized in Ziyax’s mind. Still he held his silence.

“You may tell your officers the truth,” Quaddafi instructed. “It may be that you will have to remain aboard for a few days to familiarize the new crew, though I’m told their captain is English. A graduate of their Perisher school.”

Ziyax could not have been more astounded at that moment. “I’m to turn over my submarine to an infidel?”

“Precisely,” Quaddafi said. “Although the West, as well as your crew, will believe that your boat was destroyed and sunk.”

“We will be asked why we didn’t simply dry-dock her and cut her apart for the steel.”

“Because there was a dreadful, unforeseen accident,” Quaddafi shot back, somewhat irritated. “But that is diplomacy, my concern. Yours is to do as you are ordered.”

“Yes, sir,” Ziyax replied.

“Which brings us to the third bird, what has been an anchor around the neck of Libya since oh-four. Certain weapons will be loaded aboard Shehab. The exact nature of those weapons will be kept from your crew.”

“Am I and my officers to know?” Ziyax asked.

“There is no need, my dear Captain,” Quaddafi said. “And when you return home, your reward will be greater than you can imagine.”

Ziyax had replayed his surreal conversation with Quaddafi over and over in his head, each time running up against the one flaw in the plan. The crew might be kept ignorant of what had actually become of Shehab, but he and his officers would know. Quite possibly that could mean their death sentence, no matter how it turned out. That fact alone he had kept from his officers.

The sonar operator ducked his head around the corner. “Captain, I have a slow-moving target on the surface at our station, keeping position,” he said.

Ziyax looked up out of his thoughts, catching the eye of his executive officer, Lieutenant Commander Assam al-Abbas. In addition to being a fine officer and a friend, al-Abbas served as the Purity of Islam officer aboard. Most of the men feared him.

“What is his bearing and range, Ensign Isomil?” Ziyax asked.

“Bearing two-six-five, range one hundred meters.”

“What is he doing? Is he a warship? Are we being pinged?”

“No, sir, it’s not a warship. I think it’s a freighter. He’s making less than five knots.”

“Are there any other targets? Anything we should be worried about?”

“No, sir, my display is clear to ten thousand meters.”

“Very well,” Ziyax said. He turned back to his XO. “Turn right to two-six-five, make your speed five knots, and bring us to periscope depth. Five-degree angle on the planes. I want this to go very slowly.”

“Aye, Captain,” al-Abbas responded crisply and he gave the orders to the diving officer, who relayed them to the helmsman, and then turned to a series of controls at the ballast panel that blew air into a series of tanks. Immediately the submarine began rising to a depth of twenty meters.

There was nothing about this assignment that didn’t worry Ziyax. At the very least he would do everything possible to prolong his life and the lives of his officers. Whatever it took. “Assam, if this is the wrong ship, I want to get out of here as quickly as possible.”

“Aywa,” al-Abbas replied. Yes.

“Prepare for an emergency dive to two hundred meters on my order, All Ahead Flank.”

Al-Abbas repeated the order and the other crew in the control room glanced at their captain, but just for a moment, before they went back to their duties.

Ziyax stepped over to the periscope platform and, as he waited the few minutes for his boat to reach the proper depth, he examined his feelings for the untold time since they’d left base. He trained his entire career in the navy to fire warshots. But so far he’d not done so. Praise Allah. But tonight he was expected to deliver this boat and her weapons to a group he thought were madmen, little better than savages, religious zealots who had done more harm to Islam with their stupid jihad than all the holy wars through history.

“Two-zero meters,” al-Abbas called out softly.

Ziyax raised the search periscope, and turned it to a bearing just forward of Shehab’s starboard beam. They were slightly behind the freighter and on a parallel course.

For several long seconds he could make out little or nothing but the empty sea. Panning the periscope a few degrees left, the ship was suddenly there, very close. It showed no lights, but he could identify the silhouettes of several containers on deck, which was what he was told he would see.

He stepped up the scope’s magnification and turned to the stern of the freighter. She was the Distal Volente, out of Monrovia, Liberia.

Ziyax stepped back, his heart suddenly racing. It was the ship he was to rendezvous with. He looked through the eyepiece again, but there was no movement on deck that he could discern. For all appearances, the Distal Volente could be a ghost ship.

“Rig for night operations,” he said. He folded the handles and lowered the periscope as the lights through the ship turned red. “Surface the boat.”

FORTY-FOUR

First Officer Takeo Itasaka looked up from the radar screen and shook his head. “We have arrived at the rendezvous point but there is nothing inside the ten-kilometer ring, and nothing heading in our direction.”

Only he, Captain Subandrio, and Graham were on the bridge. The other three of the ship’s crew plus Graham’s people were out of sight belowdecks. The navigation lights had been doused sixty minutes ago, and the only lights on the bridge came from the radar screen and the few instruments clustered above the wheel. Graham had ordered even the red light over the chart table switched off.

“Stop the ship,” Graham ordered, not bothering to raise his voice.

“But there’s nobody here, Rupert,” Subandrio replied. He had taken the helm, which he’d always done when the situation became tense. He was a wise old bird who could smell trouble even before it developed.

“There will be,” Graham said. “Stop the ship, please.” Graham had developed an understanding and a certain respect for the captain in the several years he’d worked with the man. It was obvious that Subandrio suspected that he and his ship might be sailing into some kind of danger.

“We’re not early.”

“No, we’re here spot-on,” Graham said. “Please stop the ship now.”

Subandrio exchanged a look with his first officer, but then shrugged and rang for All Stop. Moments later, they could feel the change in the diesel’s pitch through the deck plating, and the Distal Volente began to lose speed.

Graham walked to the window and looked out at the black sea, but there was nothing to see except for the stars above; even the horizon was lost to the darkness.

He took a walkie-talkie out of his pocket and keyed the Push-to-Talk button. “We’re here,” he said.

“Have they arrived?” al-Hari asked. He and eight of the Iranian crew were crouched in the passageway one deck below the crew’s quarters. The remainder of Graham’s submariners were dispersed throughout the ship.

“Not yet,” Graham radioed. “Stand by.”

“Stand by for what?” Subandrio asked.

“You’ll see, old friend,” Graham replied mildly. He needed the captain and crew in case the submarine never showed up. If that happened they would pay Subandrio for his trouble, and he could take them to Syria, where they could safely wait until another submarine could be enlisted.

There’d been other delays before, and Graham had learned patience very early on. Bin Laden had once called Graham a scorpion because of his stealth and because of his lethal sting. “You will be as Allah’s scorpion for me.” It was the only mumbo jumbo from any of the Muslims that Graham had ever found amusing. He smiled now. Once he took control of the Foxtrot more people than bin Laden would think of him as a scorpion. A lot more people.

Itasaka suddenly hunched over the radar screen. “Son of a bitch,” he swore. He looked up.

“Where?” Graham asked.

“To port,” he said excitedly. “It just showed up next to us.”

Graham stepped out to the port-wing lookout, Subandrio right behind him, as the distinctively stubby fairwater and long, narrow hull of a Foxtrot Class submarine rose out of the sea one hundred meters away.

Subandrio was clearly impressed. “Who does it belong to, Rupert?”

“Me,” Graham said. He took a small red-lensed flashlight out of his pocket and flashed QRV in Morse code, which meant, Are you ready?

Moments later the QRV flashed from a red light atop the periscope; I am ready. It was the agreed-upon signal and response.

“What have you gotten yourself into?” Subandrio asked. He was staring at the submarine. “This is a very bad business. That’s not a machine for hijacking ships. It’s meant only to kill.”

“Indeed it is,” Graham said. He brushed past the captain and went back inside. He keyed his walkie-talkie. “Now,” he said. “When you’re finished meet me on deck, we’ll take the gig across.”

“Roger,” al-Hari replied crisply.

Graham pocketed the flashlight and walkie-talkie, at the same moment gunfire erupted from the crew’s quarters, and elsewhere throughout the ship. He pulled out his pistol and turned around, but the port-wing lookout was empty. Subandrio had jumped overboard.

“Son of a bitch,” the first officer swore behind him.

He spun around in time to see Itasaka desperately trying to get the gun locker open. Graham raised his pistol and fired three shots at the man, the second and third hitting the Japanese officer in the back of the neck and base of his skull, killing him.

The firing belowdecks intensified fivefold; then, as suddenly as it had begun, it stopped. A second later one lone pistol shot came from directly below, and then the ship was silent.

Graham went back out onto the port-wing lookout and searched the water below, but in the darkness spotting someone would be impossible. He slapped his hand against his leg in frustration. Everything had gone exactly as planned to this point, except for Subandrio jumping ship. Something at the back of his head had told him to be wary of the wily old Indonesian. The man had survived in a very risky business for a very long time because his instincts were good.

Al-Hari called on the walkie-talkie. “We’re clear down here.”

Graham pulled his walkie-talkie out of his pocket. “Clear up here. I’ll meet you on deck.”

“Roger.”

Graham lingered for a few moments on the port-wing lookout, holding his breath to listen for any sounds; someone splashing in the water, perhaps. But it was a long way down, so it was possible that Subandrio had been knocked unconscious when he’d hit the water, and he’d drowned. But even if he survived the fall they were two hundred kilometers offshore, and that was a very long swim.

The captain would certainly not survive. Nonetheless, the lack of precision bothered Graham. He did not like loose ends.

Approaching the Libyan submarine in Subandrio’s gig, Graham almost ordered al-Hari to return to the Distal Volente, and immediately get under way for Syria. The warship was a piece of junk. Even in worse shape than the rust-bucket freighter they’d just left. Large off-color patches in the hull, where repairs had been made, dotted the side of the boat like a patchwork quilt. Two of the hydrophone panels on the forward edge of the fairwater were missing, and it appeared as if something — a piling or perhaps another ship — had scraped a large gouge nearly the entire length of the boat just above the waterline.

“We’re submerging in this piece of shit?” al-Hari asked.

“At least it’s not a nuke boat with a leaking reactor,” Graham said, his hopes momentarily sinking. He had originally wanted a Kilo Class submarine, something more modern and certainly much quieter. And yet if this boat could be repaired once they got under way, it would give them the advantage of range. The Kilo would not make it across the Atlantic without refueling. It was a problem that Graham had been working on, but without a solution so far.

“We’re looking at a death trap,” al-Hari insisted.

“A Libyan crew brought her this far,” Graham replied as they approached the submarine’s starboard side just below the fairwater. Two men were waiting on deck.

“Aywa,” al-Hari said. Yes. “But those bastards are fanatics.”

Graham could scarcely believe what the man had just said, and with a straight face. He almost laughed. “We’ll make do. When we transfer crews bring anything you can think of to make repairs. And bring all the stores that your people haven’t already eaten.”

“Some of that garbage isn’t fit for humans.”

“I think ten days from now you’ll feel differently,” Graham said. He was beginning to wonder if he had picked the wrong man to be his XO. But there wasn’t much to choose from.

“Are you going to tell me where we’re taking this piece of dung?”

“In due time, Mr. al-Hari,” Graham said. “In the meantime we have work to do.”

He stood up and tossed a line to the men on deck as al-Hari throttled back and came up alongside nicely.

The shorter of the two Libyans caught the line, and Graham clambered aboard.

“I am Captain Tariq Ziyax,” the taller of two men said. “And this is my executive officer, Lieutenant Commander Assam al-Abbas.” He held out his hand, but Graham ignored it.

“My name is Rupert Graham, but you may call me Captain. I’m taking command as of this moment.”

Al-Abbas made as if to say something, but Ziyax held him back. “This vessel is a gift to the jihad. We wish for you to use him well.” The Foxtrot was a Russian-built boat, and Russians called their ships by the masculine pronoun.

“Insh’allah,” al-Hari called up from the gig, meaning it as a sarcasm that both Libyans caught.

“I will require you and your officers to remain aboard,” Graham said before either of them could reply to al-Hari. “How many of your crew will need to be transferred?”

“Twenty-eight,” Ziyax answered without hesitation. He’d obviously been expecting it. “There will be myself and seventeen others at your disposal for as long as need be.”

“Very well, I’ll let your XO see to their immediate transfer,” Graham said. “I want to be under way within the hour.” He turned back to al-Hari. “Get our people and supplies over here on the double. I want the Libyans in the crew’s mess for their debriefing. Do you understand everything?”

Al-Hari gave him a wicked smile. “Yes, sir. Everything.”

Al-Abbas tossed the painter to al-Hari, who immediately gunned the gig’s engine, and headed back to the Distal Volente.

“Now, Captain, I would like to inspect my boat, and meet my officers and crew,” Graham said.

Al-Abbas shot him an evil look, but hurried forward and disappeared down the loading hatch in the deck.

“Can you tell me your plans for my … for this boat?” Ziyax asked.

“Colonel Quaddafi wasn’t clear, except that I was ordered to assist you and the jihad in any way I could. But that does not include an attack on any target. Before that happens we must be allowed to leave.”

“I have been led to understand that the struggle belongs to all Muslims,” Graham said indifferently.

“The struggle has many forms,” Ziyax responded.

Graham laughed disparagingly. “This is a warship, and that’s exactly how I intend to use her.”

FORTY-FIVE

Standing on the bridge of the submarine with Captain Ziyax, Graham was nearly consumed with anger and impatience, though he let none of that show. It had been nearly two hours since al-Hari had returned to the Distal Volente to get their crew squared away, secure the transferring crew of the Shehab, and ferry over the repair supplies and consumables. And still the forward-loading hatch had not been closed.

Every minute they remained out here increased their risk of discovery, though the sonar and radar officers reported no targets within twenty kilometers. But there was always the risk of a chance discovery by an American or British satellite.

The interior spaces, machinery, and electrical and electronics systems aboard were only marginally better than the hull. But nearly everything worked or seemed to be repairable. The officers seemed competent; at least they appeared to know their jobs, although their resentment had become palpable the moment they’d been informed that their captain was being replaced by an infidel.

But anger was a useful tool to mold a ragged mob into a cohesive crew, Graham thought. It was a tool he’d used often.

Though not for himself. He needed to remain calm, in control, superior, the leader of men, no matter how badly he wanted to lash out at all of them; bastards who had allowed his wife to die utterly alone.

Graham keyed his walkie-talkie. “What’s your situation?” he radioed tersely.

“Five minutes, Captain,” al-Hari responded. He was still aboard the Distal Volente with two other Iranian submariners.

“Trouble?”

“La,” al-Hari came back. No.

Graham pocketed the walkie-talkie and picked up the boat’s communicator handphone. “Sonar, bridge, has anyone taken notice of us?”

“Bridge, sonar. My display is still clear, sir.”

He switched to the radar-electronic support measures officer. “ESM, bridge. What’s it look like?”

“Nothing hot within one hundred kilometers,” the young Iranian officer responded. He was one of Graham’s. “Three minutes ago, I picked up something very briefly, but it was way east, and high. Probably Egyptian air force, and it turned away from us toward Israel.”

“Keep your eyes open, Ahmad, we’ll be running on the surface for most of the night,” Graham ordered, then he switched to the control room which for the moment was being manned by Ziyax’s XO. “Conn, bridge.”

It took several moments for al-Abbas to answer, and he sounded surly. “Aywa.”

Graham’s anger spiked, but he held himself in check. For now he wanted to get under way. He would deal with the lieutenant commander later, though not much later. “Prepare to get under way.”

“Submerged?”

“Negative,” Graham said. “We’ll run on the surface for as long as we can. But I want the boat prepared for sea in all respects, including emergency-dive procedures.”

“Aywa.”

Graham replaced the growler phone in its cradle beneath the coaming. Ziyax had been watching him closely.

“Assam is a good officer,” he said.

“We’ll see,” Graham replied. Al-Hari and the last two Iranian submariners appeared out of the darkness in one of the rubber boats from the Shehab. The Distal Volente’s gig had been winched back aboard the freighter and would remain there.

He looked up. The sky had gone cloudy and the night had become even darker than it had been at midnight. But there wasn’t much time until dawn, when they would have to submerge, and he was seething because of the unexpected delay. He wanted to be as far away from here as possible before daybreak.

Graham turned to Ziyax and fixed the man with a hard stare. “I suggest that you counsel him. If he or any of your officers decide they’d rather not cooperate, there will be a solution that will not be much to their liking.”

“Does that include me?” Ziyax asked.

“Especially you, Captain,” Graham responded.

The Libyan watched the rubber raft approaching. He nodded toward the Distal Volente. “What about the rest of my crew? Are they to be returned to Ra’s al Hilal? It wasn’t in my orders, nor was it made clear to me. I was told that you would explain where they were to be taken.”

“They cannot be allowed to fall into the hands of any Western intelligence agency, or Mossad.”

“Yes, I understand this,” Ziyax said. It was obvious that he was beginning to suspect that something drastic might be about to happen. “Of course they can be held on base until your mission develops.”

Graham said nothing, watching as al-Hari and the two crewmen reached the submarine, scrambled aboard, and deflated the rubber raft.

Al-Hari looked up and nodded before he went forward to the loading hatch, and disappeared below, closing the hatch behind him.

“They can be taken to one of your training camps in Syria,” Ziyax argued. “They would be safe from capture there.”

“We can’t take the chance, Captain,” Graham said, taking the walkie-talkie out again. “I’m told this was Colonel Quaddafi’s suggestion, actually.”

“Place them under arrest,” Ziyax implored. “Give them a chance. They could join the jihad.”

Graham switched channels, and glanced with supreme indifference at the Libyan captain. He held out the walkie-talkie. “They were your crewmen. Would you like to do it?”

“This is monstrous,” Ziyax said, backing away.

Graham depressed the Push-to-Talk switch, his eyes never leaving the Libyan officer’s.

The sound of a muffled bang came across the water to them, and then three others in rapid succession. The first explosive device had been placed directly beneath the mess where the Shehab’s crew had been locked up. It was a bit of common decency that al-Hari had insisted upon.

“They’re not our enemy.”

“But they could betray us,” Graham had explained, though it had been unnecessary for him to do so. Al-Hari would cooperate now, no matter the task. But sometimes it was interesting to see how far a man would go for his petty little feelings of squeamishness.

“Yes, they must die, Captain. But not by drowning,” al-Hari argued. “Every submariner hates the thought of drowning more than anything else.”

“As you wish,” Graham had magnanimously agreed.

Now everyone aboard the Distal Volente was dead, and the ship immediately began to settle, bow down, her bottom ripped open by three explosive charges that had been placed very low in the bilges.

The growler phone squawked. “Bridge, sonar.”

Graham picked it up as he watched the freighter sinking. “Bridge, aye.”

“There were four small explosions close aboard, sir,” the Libyan sonar operator reported excitedly.

“Insh’allah,” Graham replied, and he couldn’t help but chuckle as the Distal Volente disappeared.

A large gray object popped to the surface a few meters from where Captain Subandrio was treading water. Other bits and pieces, the remains of his ship, appeared farther away in a widening trail of oil slick.

He could just make out the humpbacked form of the submarine one hundred meters away, and although he had been raised in a Buddhist home to have tolerance and forbearance for his enemy, he swore he would have his revenge. For that he needed to survive, and to remember exactly what he’d witnessed out here tonight, and for the past days since Tunisia.

There’d been four explosions, which he’d felt in his chest through the waterborne shock waves, and his ship had sunk in a remarkably short time.

But Graham was an expert demolitions man; as ruthless as he was handy with all forms of weapons and things that went bang. His first act on coming aboard the Distal Volente was to kill one of his own men, to prove a point from the beginning, Subandrio supposed, that Graham was a serious man whose orders were to be obeyed without question.

From what he’d been able to piece together over the past days, and from the sudden appearance of the submarine, Subandrio realized that the rumors about Graham working for al-Quaida were probably true. Now the fanatics had a terrible machine of war at their disposal with a highly trained submarine commander; a man who knew how to use such a warship to its greatest advantage.

The water was reasonably warm, so Subandrio did not think he would have much trouble surviving this night, and possibly all day tomorrow. But after that his life would be in the hands of the capricious gods.

He swam slowly over to the large gray object, conserving his strength, and keeping a wary eye toward the submarine in case someone came back in a rubber raft to search for him.

As he approached he could see that it was a table from the crew’s mess. One end of it was blackened and twisted, while along one side was a broad streak of blood.

The cold-hearted bastards had killed his crew, and for that, if for nothing else, there would be retribution. Rupert had been a man such as others, possessed by his own devils, but he had been like a son. This now was a betrayal of trust.

There would be fishing boats out here during the day. Or, if he was lucky, perhaps a pleasure boat from Crete, maybe even a sailing vessel. He did not want to be picked up by anyone’s navy, especially the Libyans. He wanted to get ashore without entanglements and, as quickly and as anonymously as possible, call the nearest U.S. Embassy or Consulate and report what had happened. Perhaps even a reward could somehow be arranged.

Subandrio gingerly pulled himself onto the table, but the balance was precarious and it tipped over, dumping him into the sea. He took a mouthful of contaminated water, and came up sputtering and coughing.

In the very dim light he could see that a man’s limbs from the hips down had been snagged by a ragged edge. The man’s clothing had been blown away by the force of the blast, his skin horribly blackened.

Subandrio vomited as he backed away, unable to take his eyes from the gruesome sight that he knew would stay with him for the rest of his life.

“Bridge, ESMs, I have an inbound target, designated Romeo One,” Ahmad Khalia reported excitedly.

Graham had been about to order them to get under way. He snatched the growler phone. “ESMs, bridge, what do you have?”

“Captain, it’s low and slow, bearing one-two-five, range ninety-five miles, and closing at a rate of two-hundred-ten knots. I think it might be a Libyan patrol aircraft.”

“That’s exactly what it is,” Ziyax said. “Someone wants to know if we’re still out here.”

Graham switched channels. “Conn, bridge. Prepare to dive the boat.”

“Conn, aye,” al-Hari responded crisply.

“Clear the bridge, Captain,” Graham told Ziyax, who immediately scrambled down the hatch into the boat.

For just a moment, Graham remained on the bridge, searching the dark sea where the Distal Volente had gone down. There was some debris, as he expected there would be, but not as much as he had feared. His men had done a fairly good job of securing anything loose on deck, and making sure all the hatches were dogged shut before they blew the bottom out of her.

Subandrio was out there somewhere, or maybe it was his body floating in the sea. Whatever the case, there was no time to search for him.

Graham slipped through the hatch, closing and dogging it behind him, and then descended into the control room.

The boat stank of diesel oil, unwashed bodies, and what was probably a defective head that no one had bothered to repair. That, among other things, would change very quickly.

“There is pressure in the boat,” al-Hari announced from his control panel near the helm station. “My board is green. We are ready in all respects to dive.”

Graham went over to stand next to Captain Ziyax at the periscope pedestal. In addition to al-Hari, as the COB or Chief of Boat, the Libyan executive officer al-Abbas was temporarily acting as dive officer. Although he still had a major attitude, he seemed ready at the ballast control panel to execute Graham’s orders. One of the Libyan junior officers was seated at the helm, and two of Graham’s people were manning the navigation and weapons consoles. Just forward of the control room, one of his people and one of the Libyans manned the sonar displays, and just aft, Khalia manned the bank of ESMs instruments.

“Very well, dive the boat,” Graham ordered.

“Dive the boat,” al-Hari repeated the command.

“All Ahead Flank,” Graham ordered. “Fifteen degrees down angle on the planes, make your depth—”

Al-Hari repeated the orders, and the boat accelerated as it started its dive.

Graham turned to Ziyax. “How much water do we have under our keel?”

“Thirty-five hundred meters.”

“Make your depth three hundred meters,” Graham ordered. He walked over to the navigation station where a chart of the Mediterranean Sea was spread out. He quickly plotted a course that would take them west, missing the island of Malta, while keeping well clear of Crete to the north and the African coast to the south.

“Come left to course two-eight-five,” he ordered, and al-Hari repeated the command.

Ziyax was at Graham’s elbow. “Where are you taking us?” he asked softly enough so that no one else in the control room could hear.

“Gibraltar,” Graham replied indifferently. Running that bottleneck, which was more than 1,500 miles away, would be their first serious test. It gave him approximately 100 hours to mold his crew into a cohesive fighting force.

For that he would need an incident.

FORTY-SIX

Lieutenant Colonel Daniel Higgins was getting set to go over to the O Club for lunch when the phone on his desk rang. It was General Maddox’s secretary.

“The general would like to have a word with you before you go to lunch.”

“I’ll be right up.”

Higgins grabbed his cap, and on the way out told his ops officer in the Watch that he was seeing the general, and afterwards was going to the club. “If the Cubans come over the fence, ring me on my cell so I can go home and pack a bag,” he said. It was a standing joke at Gitmo that any time the Cubans wanted to take the base back, there wouldn’t be much that could be done to stop them.

Upstairs, the general’s secretary told him to go straight in. Maddox was studying something out his window with a pair of binoculars. When he turned around, Higgins got the impression he was on the verge of a famous Icewater explosion.

“You wanted to see me, sir?” Higgins prompted when it seemed as if Maddox was too angry to talk.

“They just landed across the bay,” the general said, his tone surprisingly mild.

“Who would that be?” Higgins asked. A little alarm bell began to jingle softly at the back of his head.

“The CIA. Same pair as last time, including the crazy bitch who beat the shit out of Tom Weiss. And we’ve got to cooperate one hundred percent this time.” Maddox shook his head as if he’d just said something that was utterly unbelievable. “I got that personally from Newt Peyton, who got it direct from LePlante.” Marine Major General Newton Peyton was boss of Gitmo, and Bob LePlante was the secretary of defense.

“What do they want this time, did they say?” Higgins asked, though he had a fair idea why the CIA was back. They’d probably gotten a positive ID on the John Doe they’d sent down here after the Arlington Cemetery attack, and they were coming to lean on him.

“They’ve got the names of four prisoners they want to interrogate,” Maddox said. “But apparently they’ve promised to make it real short this time.”

“Do we have the list?”

“It came in about an hour ago, but there’s a potential for trouble heading our way that I want you to personally handle,” Maddox said. “Whatever the hell happens, I want Tom Weiss out of sight until they’re gone. The crazy bastards would probably kill him if he opened his big mouth again.” Maddox handed him a message flimsy that had come from the CIA.

Higgins smiled briefly. “From what I heard he might have deserved it.” The four men on the list included the John Doe, as he thought would be the case. No surprises yet.

“I don’t care, Dan. I just want them in and out asap. I want you to give them anything they ask for, and I mean anything. And I want you to stick with them no matter what. I don’t want them back again because they didn’t get what they came for.”

“I’ll handle it,” Higgins said. “You said something about trouble?”

“I personally don’t give a flying shit how it’s done, as long as Weiss and his people get results, and as long as Amnesty International keeps out of it. I won’t have another Abu Ghraib. Not on my watch.”

“I’m not following you, General,” Higgins said, mystified.

“Drugs.”

Higgins’s heart skipped a beat, but he nodded. “I’ll get Richardson over to do it, and we’ll need a translator.” Melvin Richardson was the chief medic for Delta, and had been the lead man on the Biscuit teams until they were discontinued on orders from the White House last year. If Amnesty International got wind of such a thing happening again, it would immediately go public, and a lot of heads would roll.

“You have to keep a serious lid on this, Dan,” Maddox cautioned. “It could blow up and bite us all on the ass.”

“Don’t worry, I’ll take care of it.”

“Worrying is what they pay me to do,” Maddox said. “Just get the job done, and get them the hell out of here.”

“I hear you, General,” Higgins said, and he went back down to his office, lunch forgotten for the moment. If McGarvey and the woman had just touched down, they would be at Delta within fifteen or twenty minutes.

He reached Dr. Richardson just as the doctor was leaving the hospital. One of the nurses caught up with him and told him he had a phone call.

“This is Richardson.”

“Mel, I’m glad I caught you. This is Dan Higgins. I’ve got a rush job for you at Delta, and it’s the big leagues.”

“What do you need?” the M.D. asked, obviously interested.

“I’ll tell you when you get over here, but I need you right now.”

“Okay.”

“And Mel? Bring your Biscuit bag.”

There was a momentary silence on the line. “I see,” Richardson said cautiously. “I’ll be up in ten.”

“No word to anyone.”

“What, do you think I’m crazy?”

Higgins was waiting for McGarvey and Gloria in the Delta interrogation center, where one of the MPs from the main gate had escorted them the moment they’d shown up. This time there seemed to be no animosity whatsoever, and in fact McGarvey thought they were being treated too well.

Someone had passed the word down, and although he was hoping to see Lieutenant Commander Weiss, he wasn’t surprised to see the chief intelligence officer instead, and a tall, slender full commander wearing medical insignia.

“Welcome to Delta, Mr. McGarvey, Ms. Ibenez,” Higgins said. “Though I’m surprised you’re back so soon.”

“We have a job to do,” McGarvey said. “If we can get to it, we’ll be out of here within a couple hours.”

“Where’s Commander Weiss?” Gloria asked sweetly. “I hope he’s okay.” Higgins studied her for a moment as if he couldn’t quite figure out who or what she was. “He’s on the mend. I’ll tell him that you asked.”

“Please do,” Gloria said.

They were alone in the dayroom, and the television set was turned up high enough that it was unlikely their conversation could be picked up on tape. Nevertheless Higgins lowered his voice.

“Your four people are here, in individual rooms. We didn’t know if you wanted them separated.”

“That’s fine,” McGarvey said. “We’re going to give them sodium thiopental. We just have a couple of questions for them. So like I said, Commander, we can be out of your hair within two hours.”

Higgins nodded toward Richardson. “This is Mel Richardson, he used to be head of our Biscuit teams. He’ll be your doc.”

Richardson eyed McGarvey with obvious distaste. “I want to go on record right now that I’m dead set against this. Sodium thiopental is an anesthetic, which means it can be fatal. And it has the capability of scrambling brains. It’s happened before, and it’s permanent.”

“About as permanent as 9/11 at the Trade Center?” Gloria asked.

“Look, Doc, I understand,” McGarvey said. “Leave us some alcohol pads and we’ll do it ourselves. Our Agency people said the dosage is very low, so the risks will be minimal. Contrary to what you may have been told, we don’t want to screw up things here for you guys. But something very big is on the wind, and we don’t have a lot of time to fool around.”

“You didn’t do so good preventing 9/11,” Richardson shot back.

“No, we didn’t,” McGarvey admitted. “But we’ve learned a lot since then. Enough that we think we can stop them this time. Will you help?”

Richardson looked to Higgins for backup, but the intel officer merely shrugged.

McGarvey handed Richardson the small leather case. “You can give this to them now.”

The doctor took out one of the needles. “This is a fucking veterinary syringe that they use on large animals. I’m not going to do this.”

“Fine, we’ll do it ourselves, with or without the alcohol pads, because frankly I don’t give a shit what happens to the four son of a bitches we came to talk to. They’re the enemy.”

“They’re combatants who’re protected by the Geneva Convention,” Richardson shot back.

“No, Doctor. They’re terrorists who target innocent women and children. And whatever they’re up to this time has the potential of being worse than 9/11.”

“I’ve heard that before—”

“And you’ll keep hearing it until we beat the bastards,” McGarvey said, overriding him.

“Mel, nobody likes this, so the sooner we get it done the sooner our guests will leave,” Higgins prompted.

Richardson looked like a man who was trapped. “I’ll need some help, they’re likely to object.”

“I’ll do it,” Gloria said, and she followed the doctor into the first interrogation room, leaving the door open. Ali bin Ramdi, one of the prisoners that McGarvey had leaned on the last time, was shackled to a bench. When he saw Gloria, and then McGarvey out in the dayroom, his eyes went wide.

Chief Petty Officer Sayyid Deyhim came down the corridor in a rush, but pulled up short when he saw who was there. “Shit.”

Higgins turned to him. “You will do your job, and keep your opinions to yourself. Clear on that, sailor?”

“Yes, sir,” Deyhim replied. He avoided eye contact with McGarvey.

Bin Ramdi grunted something, and a few moments later Richardson and Gloria came out of the cell.

“How long before it takes effect?” McGarvey asked.

The doctor looked at him with distaste. “Just a few seconds for the drug to get to his brain. But if this is a low dose, the effect won’t last long.”

McGarvey entered the cell and Deyhim took up a position next to him. Higgins came to the door, but remained outside.

“Misae el kher,” McGarvey said in reasonably passable Egyptian Arabic. Good afternoon. He only knew a few phrases.

Bin Ramdi mumbled something that McGarvey didn’t catch.

“I didn’t understand that,” Deyhim said. “Do you want me to have him repeat it?”

“No,” McGarvey said. “Ask him if he is a member of al-Quaida.”

“Sir, we’ve already established—”

“Just ask the question,” McGarvey said.

Deyhim asked the question in Arabic, but he had to repeat it several times before bin Ramdi gave a slurred response.

“Aywa.” Yes.

“I got it,” McGarvey said. “Tell him that we know Osama bin Laden is hiding in the mountains near Drosh.”

Deyhim made the translation.

“Tell him that we know this for a fact.”

Deyhim translated.

“All I want is a confirmation.”

Deyhim translated, but bin Ramdi was shaking his head drunkenly, and muttering something about Allah.

“Repeat all of it,” McGarvey told Deyhim. “I want to make sure he understands.”

Deyhim translated, but bin Ramdi only shook his head.

It was the response that McGarvey had been told to expect. Sodium thiopental reduced the subject’s inhibitions, but it wasn’t the truth serum of fiction. Used in conjunction with a skillful interrogator, some useful information could be gained from some subjects some of the time. But whatever was said to them would definitely place a deep-seated suggestion in their brains, one they would not soon forget.

“Sir, I think this guy is fried,” Deyhim said.

“You’re right,” McGarvey agreed. “Let’s try the next one.”

As Higgins stepped away from the door, he gave McGarvey an odd, pensive look, and then glanced in at the doped-up prisoner.

Richardson and Gloria were coming out of the third cell when McGarvey and Deyhim entered the second where Kamal al-Turabi was seated, shackled to the bench. He was dressed in an orange jumpsuit, with white paper slippers on his feet. His eyes widened slightly when he saw who it was, but then it was as if a cobra’s hood descended over his face.

“Good afternoon,” McGarvey said in English, and Deyhim translated.

Al-Turabi was having some trouble focusing, but he did not seem as heavily sedated as bin Ramdi.

“Ask him if he works for al-Quaida,” McGarvey instructed Deyhim, who translated.

An answer seemed to form on the prisoner’s lips, but then he smiled and shook his head. “I am a simple dentist from Maryland,” he said in English. His voice was somewhat slurred, as if he’d had several cocktails. “I’ve never seen you before.”

Of course not, McGarvey thought. But you just made one hell of a mistake.

“We know that Uncle Osama has gone back to Somalia, where he has many friends. We would like you merely to confirm this for us.”

Deyhim translated.

Al-Turabi sniggered. “Aywa, that’s what I heard too,” he replied in English. He leaned forward on the bench. “Do you know what little bird told me?”

“No, who?” McGarvey said, and he nodded for Deyhim to translate.

“It was a flock of birds,” al-Turabi said. “Right here. All the hawks know. And so do the scorpions.” He laughed, and his eyes drooped. “Insh’allah,” he muttered.

“Shukran,” McGarvey said. Thank you.

He and Deyhim left the cell as Richardson and Gloria were coming out of number four. “I’m finished with the first two,” McGarvey said.

“Are we getting anything?” Gloria asked.

“About what we expected,” McGarvey replied, and she nodded.

He and Deyhim went into the third cell where Assa al-Haq was shackled to the bench. “Ask if he works for al-Quaida.”

Deyhim translated.

The prisoner looked up sleepily and nodded. He was drooling from the corners of his mouth.

“Tell him that we know that bin Laden has run to Iran and is hiding there now.”

Deyhim gave McGarvey a sharp look, but then translated.

“Tell him we merely want a confirmation,” McGarvey said, and Deyhim translated. But it was obvious that al-Haq had no idea what he was being asked.

“That’s enough,” McGarvey said and he led Deyhim into cell four, where the Pakistani prisoner Zia Warrag was all but unconscious on the bench. “Ask the son of a bitch if he works for al-Quaida.”

“Sir, I think this guy’s out of it,” Deyhim said.

“Ask him, goddammit!” McGarvey shouted. He felt dirty, like a voyeur peeking in a bathroom window at someone sitting on a toilet.

The prisoner looked up at the sound of McGarvey’s voice, and Deyhim made the translation, but there was no response.

Higgins came to the door, but said nothing.

“Tell him that we know bin Laden is hiding in Karachi,” McGarvey said. He wanted to get this over with right now, and get the hell out. “Tell him all I want is a confirmation. Yes or no.”

Deyhim translated, but the prisoner just stared at him.

“Fuck it,” McGarvey said. He turned and brushed past Higgins. “We’re out of here.”

“Did you find what you wanted, Mr. McGarvey?” the intel officer asked.

McGarvey stopped to look at the marine officer. “Yes, I did.” He glanced back at the prisoner in cell four. “The poor bastards don’t have a clue what they’re fighting for or why. They’re just killing people because some imam told them it was what Allah wanted them to do.”

“Are you okay?” Gloria asked after they’d taken off from Guantanamo Bay and headed up toward cruising altitude.

As soon as they’d boarded the Gulfstream III business jet, the steward had handed McGarvey a stiff bourbon, which he’d knocked back. He held his glass up for another, and looked at Gloria. “I’ll live.”

The steward came and replenished McGarvey’s drink.

“It’s like poking through someone’s dirty laundry,” Gloria said. “And I have a feeling that Weiss likes that kind of shit.”

McGarvey held the cool glass against his forehead.

Gloria watched him for a long time. “Now what?” she finally asked.

“We go back to Langley and wait,” he said. “Weiss will find a way to spring those four, and Otto will track them.”

“To bin Laden?”

“Hopefully,” McGarvey said. He wanted to take a very long, very hot shower. If this didn’t work he was going to have to try all over again with a different batch of prisoners. Maybe some of them being held in Afghanistan. But no matter how long it took he wasn’t going to quit.

He looked up. Gloria was staring at him, waiting for him to explain.

“Within twenty-four hours after they get out of Gitmo, they’ll be leaving Cuba. Probably to Mexico City first. And unless I missed with all four guesses I suspect at least one of them will try to warn bin Laden.”

Gloria understood. “When we find out which one of them is not running for a place to hide, we’ll have the bastard.”

“Something like that.”

FORTY-SEVEN

Everyone aboard the Libyan submarine was tired. It had been eighteen hours since they had been forced to submerge north of Benghazi, and for the entire time Graham had run the crew ragged with repeated battle stations missile and battle stations torpedo.

Fifty miles from their original position he had dove the boat steep and deep; full-down angle on the planes, at flank speed in a maneuver called angles and dangles, which was meant to shake out any loose gear or problems that might crop up under actual battle conditions.

The boat, though thirty-five years old, and just about due for the breaker yards, had done its job reasonably well.

And so had the crew, Graham thought, studying the chart in the control room. He glanced up at the bulkhead-mounted clock above the nav station. It was 2200 Greenwich mean time, which put it at ten in the evening on the surface. It was fully dark topside.

The same mix of Iranian and Libyan crew was still at their duty stations in the con, and throughout the entire boat. He’d allowed no one to leave his post. Not even to eat. The cook and his assistant had distributed tea and sandwiches throughout the long day and into this evening.

The entire crew resented him, but most of all the Libyans because their captain had been forced to act as Graham’s XO. But even his Iranian crew resented him because he’d demoted al-Hari to COB, which meant he and the others had to take orders from a Libyan.

Graham was doing two things: looking for weaknesses in the boat and his crew, and forcing the men to meld into a crew by giving them something to hold on to in common — hating him.

It was something that he’d learned in the Royal Navy after his wife had died, and his method, although it worked, was one of the reasons he was ultimately cashiered. There was no room aboard a warship for friendships and he’d made sure that everyone abided by that one rule.

But it always took an incident with each new crew for the men to fully understand him. An incident that he instigated.

Graham stepped around the corner to the sonar room, where one of his men plus a Libyan officer had been on duty the entire time. The compartment smelled like sweat, but there was no longer the unpleasant odor from the defective head, or of diesel fuel from the bilges. Both problems had been corrected within ninety minutes after they’d submerged.

“How’s it look out there?” he asked.

Both men looked up. “Many targets,” the Libyan officer said. He was a young ensign and his name was Salman Isomil. “It’s busy up there tonight.”

“What kind of targets?” Graham asked, holding his temper in check for the moment.

“Boats—” Isomil said with a sneer.

Graham backhanded him in the face, knocking the man’s earphones off his head, and bloodying his nose. “Shall we try again?”

Al-Abbas had come around the corner. “We do not treat our officers like this,” he said.

Graham looked over his shoulder at the Libyan first officer. “This is a warship, and we are on a mission. It’s my intention to run on the surface for as long as possible so that we can recharge the batteries and ventilate the boat. In order to do this I need to know what’s out there.” Graham turned away. “That’s the last time I’ll explain anything to anyone aboard this stinking pile of shit that smells like unwashed rag heads, an odor that I find offensive.”

The sonar operator picked his headphones off the deck and put them back on. He was no longer sneering, but his eyes were still filled with hate.

“What does it look like on the surface?” Graham asked, his voice calm.

“Sir, there are numerous surface targets, mostly cargo vessels, though earlier this evening we tracked something that was very large, and moving quite fast. Probably a cruise ship.”

“Range and bearings?”

“All over the place, sir,” the Libyan sonar operator said. He studied the display on the screen in front of him. “The nearest target is a small ship, bearing zero seven zero, approximately on the same course as us, range at least fifteen thousand meters.”

“Are there any underwater targets?” Graham asked.

The Libyan was momentarily startled. “None that I have been able to detect, sir.”

“Very well, keep alert, and let me know if anything heads our way.”

Graham brushed past al-Abbas and went back into the control room.

Everyone on duty couldn’t help but hear the confrontation, and some of them were looking to Ziyax to do something at last. But the Libyan captain said nothing.

Graham snatched a growler phone from its overhead cradle. “ESMs, con.”

“ESMs, aye.”

“We’re heading up. Soon as your sensors clear the surface, I want an all-band passive search, military emissions included, especially from aircraft search radars.”

“Can you tell me how long we’ll be running on the surface, sir?”

“Until I order us to submerge, which may depend on you,” Graham replied. “Look sharp.”

“Aye, sir.”

Graham replaced the growler phone. “Captain, bring us to periscope depth,” he told Ziyax. He started for the periscope platform, but stopped and turned back.

Ziyax had not given the order.

“Is there a problem?” Graham demanded.

“We’re too close to Malta to risk surfacing now, if that’s your intention,” Ziyax said. “We need to pass Isole Pelagie and Pantelleria before we’re in the clear. And the men are tired. I say we let them rest.”

“The batteries are low.”

“Then we stop and drift to conserve power,” Ziyax argued. “Or go to snorkel depth so that we can run the diesels.”

This was exactly the kind of incident Graham wanted. “What are you afraid of on the surface, Captain?”

Ziyax stiffened, but did not respond to the gross insult.

“I asked a question, Captain,” Graham said. “Are you a coward?”

The helmsman looked away from his instruments, his mouth open.

“Bring us to periscope depth, or I will relieve you of duty and place you under arrest,” Graham ordered harshly. “Now.”

Al-Abbas was suddenly right there, a compact 5.45mm PSM pistol in his hand. He placed the muzzle against the back of Graham’s head. “We will be returning to base now,” he said. “I am relieving you of command.”

Ziyax said something in Arabic, and al-Abbas replied, but did not remove the pistol.

“You will be shot by your government as a traitor,” Graham said conversationally.

“You won’t be alive to see it.”

“Oh?” Graham replied.

Ziyax said something again in Arabic.

Al-Abbas started to answer, when Graham suddenly stepped to the left, grabbed the officer’s gun hand, and shoved the man up against the bulkhead. He pulled out his stiletto and raised it to the man’s throat.

Ziyax came across the control room. “Don’t do it, Captain,” he said. “We need every capable man to run this boat.”

“I don’t want to be constantly looking over my shoulder,” Graham said, looking into al-Abbas’s eyes. There was nothing there now, only resignation.

“That will not be needed,” Ziyax promised. He reached around Graham and took the pistol from al-Abbas’s hand. “If Lieutenant Commander al-Abbas even looks as if he might try again I’ll kill him myself.”

The scenario had played out exactly as Graham had wanted it to do. He backed off. “Very well,” he said. He sheathed his knife. “Give me his pistol.”

Ziyax handed over the weapon, butt first.

Graham examined it for a moment. “Nice little gun. But I didn’t know the Sovs ever exported them.” He handed it to a startled al-Abbas. “Next time you’ll want to release the safety if you mean to fire it.” He turned his back on the Libyan. “Now, Captain, if you please, take us to periscope depth.”

“Yes, Captain,” Ziyax said.

The sun was very high in the sky when Halim Subandrio, clinging to the precariously balanced tabletop, came out of his daze. It was hot, but he was shivering from being half-immersed in the sea for a full day and a night and now half of a second day. He was sick to his stomach from swallowing diesel-fouled seawater and his legs were cramping painfully.

For the first minute he wasn’t sure where he was or how he had gotten there, or even the true nature of his predicament, or what had brought him back to consciousness. He was almost entirely focused on his thirst, which was monumental. And he couldn’t understand how he could be hot and cold at the same time.

Slowly he became aware of a low rumble that he could feel in his left side in contact with the table, and heard something behind him. He thought that he could smell the exhaust from a diesel engine, and perhaps someone shouting something.

Taking great care with his movements lest he unbalance the tabletop and plunge back into the water, Subandrio turned his head toward the sound, and the shock of what he saw caused his heart to skip a beat.

A ship was at idle less than twenty-five meters away. It was painted gray and for a moment or two it seemed to Subandrio that it was carrying two very large barrels, tipped on their sides aft of a low coach house. Forward, toward the bow, was a large cannon.

It came to him all at once that it was a warship. He looked toward the stern where a plain green flag fluttered in the breeze and his spirits sagged. He was in the middle of being rescued by a Libyan navy fast-attack missile boat.

If they had come to find their submarine it could mean that his ship had been spotted by a Libyan air force patrol plane. For the first time in his life, Subandrio was truly frightened. The Libyan intelligence service was said to have learned its interrogation techniques in the seventies and eighties from the Soviets, and he was getting too old to endure such pain.

An inflatable boat was launched over the side, and two men in uniform climbed aboard, started the outboard motor, and headed across the nearly flat sea.

Subandrio tried to clear his mind so that he could work out his options before he was taken aboard the Libyan warship.

When he’d been shot he’d been enraged by Graham’s betrayal, and he’d sworn to get revenge by putting a bullet in his old friend’s head. But when he’d been forced to abandon his ship, and watch her sink with all of his crew, plus a dozen or more men from the submarine, his anger had deepened to something more vivid than simple rage. He vowed to remain alive so that he could be rescued, and once he was ashore he would find a way to take away the only thing that Graham ever seemed to cherish: his freedom.

But it was the Libyans with whom Graham had made a deal for the submarine, though what could have been given in exchange must have been very important to Quaddafi.

Considering the nationalities of the crew that had been brought aboard the Distal Volente hidden in the cargo container, Subandrio had a fair idea who was behind the exchange, if not what was exchanged other than money.

And he had more than a fair idea who would be willing to pay for such information.

First he would have to convince his rescuers that he was an innocent victim of piracy, in which his crew was murdered, his cargo stolen, and his ship sunk, and further convince them to allow him to leave the country.

The only fly in that ointment, so far as he could figure, would be if the Libyans knew what ship Graham used to transfer the crew and what its captain’s name was. If that were the case, then the game might be over even before it began.

At this point there were no choices. If God so willed it, he would survive to exact his revenge and perhaps collect enough money to either retire on an island somewhere in the Java Sea, or perhaps even purchase a cargo vessel of his own.

He raised his right hand and waved as the Libyan crewmen reached his raft. “Please,” he cried weakly in Bahasa, his native Indonesian language. “Help me!”

FORTY-EIGHT

McGarvey’s biggest challenge after he’d returned from Guantanamo Bay five days ago was facing Kathleen. She’d come up from Florida to stay at the same CIA safe house as before, over Adkins’s objections. She wanted to be as close to the center of operations as possible so that when her husband returned from the field she would be there for him.

He knew that she deserved the truth about why he was going back into the field, and what he would try to do, but she’d asked no questions, offered no objections. She would stick it out in Washington until he finished whatever it was he’d set himself to do, and he felt like a heel, like he was cheating on her.

Which in a way he was, he told himself as he crossed the river and took the George Washington Parkway south. It was four in the morning and the highways were practically deserted. Otto had telephoned a half hour ago from the Building that all the pieces were en route. What they had been waiting for was finally ready to pay off.

“This is the big one!” Rencke had shouted. “The whole enchilada.”

“I’m on my way,” McGarvey had said, and when he’d hung up Kathleen turned on the lamp on her side of the bed and sat up, an owlish expression on her face.

“Are you leaving now?” she asked.

“No, but soon, Katy,” he told her.

“Will I at least be told where you’re going?”

He nodded. “As soon as I find out.” He reached over and kissed her. “Go back to sleep. I’ll be back later this morning.”

“Shall I pack something?”

“Something dark,” he’d told her, and when he’d driven off he’d glanced back at the house in his rearview mirror. The lights were on upstairs.

The riot at Guantanamo Bay three days ago had made all the newspapers and television networks, even though the military had tried to put a lid on the story. Amnesty International was saying it had been warning about just such an event because of the inhumane way in which Taliban and al-Quaida prisoners were being treated. Congress was calling for a full investigation, but the president was standing fast with the position that the White House had maintained all along. The detainees at Camp Delta, as well as at Abu Ghraib and other facilities in Iraq and Afghanistan, were combatants and therefore came under the jurisdiction of the Unified Code of Military Justice. They did not have the same rights as civilians.

What had begun in the late afternoon as a scuffle between several Delta POWs in one of the exercise yards had rapidly escalated into a full-scale riot. Windows had been broken, doors ripped off their hinges, and bedding and anything else that could burn had been piled outside the barracks and set on fire. Eight prisoners had been shot to death, twenty-seven others injured, and nine American personnel had been hurt, two seriously, before the riot had finally been put down.

So far the media had not found out how close the situation had come to being a major disaster. Before General Maddox had finally given the order for the guards to use deadly force, sections of the inner and outer fences had been torn down by the mob, and all the POWs who’d been killed had been shot to death outside the facility. On Cuban soil.

Nor had the media learned that four POWs were still unaccounted for. ONI’s top-secret Preliminary Incident Report presumed they had drowned trying to swim out to sea. But their names had not been included, nor did the PIR mention that the four had been the same men questioned by the CIA two days before the riot.

“Curiouser and curiouser.” Rencke had laughed when he’d hacked into the ONI’s computer and brought the PIR up on one of his monitors.

McGarvey had been there, monitoring the four GPS signals that had moved, apparently by boat, down the coast to Santiago de Cuba, the city not far from the famous San Juan Hill. They’d remained there together until yesterday when they’d been flown up to Havana.

Now they were on the move again, and it was nearly time, he thought, for him to go back into the field and do his thing. Already his thoughts were narrowing to the mission. He was already in the process of leaving Washington and his wife and friends, placing all of that life in a safe corner of his head, so that he would be traveling without the baggage that could slow him down. More than one field officer had gotten into serious trouble because his mind had wandered back home at the wrong moment.

Rencke had called the main gate, so the guards there were expecting him. But even though they recognized him, they didn’t let him pass until they’d checked his ID. Security had become very tight at the Company.

The parking lot was a third full with the night shifts in the directorates of operations and intelligence, which had gone into high gear because of the increased threat level.

The OD sent an intern down to sign McGarvey in and escort him back upstairs to the Directorate of Operations Ops Center, which was called the Watch. It was a large, windowless room in the center of the building on the third floor that was electronically and mechanically scanned 24/7 for bugs. Operators manned dozens of computer stations, most of them in cubicles, filled not only with one or more large monitors and keyboards, but desks and file cabinets piled high with files, and maps, and reference books. The worldview was on display here, in one form or another. Political situations in dozens of problem nations around the globe, current hot spots where fighting was going on or was expected to start soon, and especially ongoing or developing CIA missions were kept track of. From the information gathered in real time here, and from written reports by our assets on the ground, called Humint, for human intelligence, and by electronic and satellite information-gathering techniques, called by the broader term Elint for electronic intelligence, National Intelligence Estimates and Watch Reports were produced for the National Command Authority.

Activity in this room was never at a lull, and when McGarvey walked in most of the operators didn’t bother to look up, they were too absorbed in their tasks.

Tony Mackie, the officer of the day, was waiting for him with Rencke and Gloria at a long conference table in a glass-enclosed office at the front of the room. Mackie was an ex — New York City detective who’d gone to work for the CIA after an early retirement because he had become so accustomed to being on the inside that it drove him nuts to be a mere civilian. Although he would never get to work in the field he was in his glory here, he was the perfect deskman.

McGarvey thanked the young man who’d escorted him upstairs, then went into the conference room.

“Here he is,” Mackie said, looking up.

Gloria turned around and gave him a dazzling smile of triumph. “You were right, Mac,” she said.

Rencke was at the head of the table, hopping from one foot to the other, and clapping his hands. “Oh boy, Mac, you hit the jackpot,” he cried. He turned the large-screen laptop they’d been watching so that McGarvey could see it. “We got them all,” he said. “All four.”

The laptop’s screen was divided into four quadrants, each of which was overlaid with a fairly small-scale map on which a small red dot moved slowly. Several lines of data scrolled across the bottom of each quadrant.

“Is this in real time?” McGarvey asked.

“Real time minus a thirty-second delay for the data from our satellites and a whole bunch of international air traffic control radars and computer systems to get here and be collated,” Rencke said.

Three of the quadrants showed the same map of the eastern Mediterranean Sea from just west of Cyprus to the coasts of Syria, Lebanon, and Israel. The red dots, which were the uploaded signals from the nano-GPS units that had been injected into the four men at Guantanamo Bay, showed those three bunched on top of each other and moving directly toward Syria.

“Those three are aboard an Air Mexico jet. Once they clear Israel’s northern border they’ll hang a hard right, which will take them south to Damascus,” Rencke said. “They’re not running home to papa, they’re heading to safe pastures. All-ee, all-ee, in free.”

The fourth map, however, was of south-central Iran, heading eastward to Pakistan.

The data scrolling at the bottom of that quadrant showed latitude, longitude, heading, and speed. The one target was aboard a Pakistan International Airlines jet inbound to Karachi.

“Do we know which one it is?” McGarvey asked.

Rencke was grinning like a kid with a new toy. “Al-Turabi, the guy who masterminded the hit on you at Arlington.”

“It could mean that bin Laden is hiding somewhere in southern Pakistan, probably Karachi,” Gloria suggested. “If he was hiding up in the mountains, like ISI is telling us, al-Turabi would have flown directly up to Peshawar rather than taking a chance of being spotted switching planes.”

“If he’s trying to get to bin Laden,” McGarvey pointed out, staring at the monitor. “He might simply be running to one of his own hideouts.”

“I don’t think so, and neither do you,” Gloria said. “He’s running home to Uncle Osama.” She was grinning. “What do we do now?”

McGarvey shook his head. “We don’t do a thing. You’re staying here to help Otto backstop me.”

Gloria flared. “Not a chance,” she said. “I’ve had a partner killed and some serious guys shooting at me — including the one on his way to Karachi. I have to see this through.”

McGarvey had been too distracted earlier to consider what her reaction might be. “I’m sorry, but I work alone.”

“Sorry my ass!” Gloria shouted.

“If need be I’ll talk to your boss, and have you pulled from the field,” McGarvey told her coolly.

“I’ve got plenty for you to do here,” Rencke said. “This op will have no official status. So far as the Watch goes, it doesn’t exist. What we’re doing here with Tom is nothing more than an exercise.”

Gloria turned away, but not before McGarvey saw a sudden glistening in her eyes. “Goddammit,” she said softly.

McGarvey could understand her frustration, but he was going up against bin Laden alone, and for more than one reason. And he wasn’t going to stop to explain it to her now.

“I can get you an Aurora by the time you get home and pack,” Rencke offered. The Aurora was air force. It flew nearly to the edge of space at speeds of more than mach six. Officially it did not exist. “You can be in Ramstein in a couple hours.”

“I’ll fly commercial,” McGarvey told him.

“I can do that,” Rencke said. “Which one of your work names do you want to use?”

McGarvey had given that bit of tradecraft a lot of thought. “I’ll go in under my own name,” he said.

Gloria had turned back. “He’ll know that you’re coming, and why,” she said.

“That’s right,” McGarvey said. He was counting on just that.

At that moment Gloria very much reminded him of his daughter. They were both bright women, but both of them were impetuous. They didn’t have the field experience they thought they had. Spying was a funny business. By the time you got it down to a fine art you were getting too old to work in the field, and too well known by the opposition. They were lessons the women had yet to learn well enough to manipulate them to their own uses.

FORTY-NINE

Noon traffic was heavy as the cab worked its way from the Hotel Cirta near the train station and post office out to the grounds of the new U.S. Embassy on Liason Nord-Sud, the Marasa Highway. The driver, spotting a break in traffic, recklessly shot around a bus that was starting to pull over to pick up several passengers, nearly hitting one of them, and just made the green light at the corner.

Halim Subandrio, seated in the back, didn’t notice any of that. He was lost in thought on how best to approach the Americans. He needed to convince them of the truth of his story so that he could negotiate for a reward, while at the same time keep himself out of trouble.

It had taken him three days to convince the Libyans that he’d been hijacked and his ship sunk out from under him, but it hadn’t seemed to him that they really cared very much. They were more interested in the exact spot where his ship went down than a description of the hijackers, or how he’d been stopped and boarded, and why he’d not had a chance to send a Mayday.

The Libyan doctor had treated him for a mild case of hypothermia and dehydration, and the police had even allowed him to telephone Athens to speak to Hristos Lapides, the owner of the Distal Volente, who had not been the least surprised by the news.

“Well, we made good profits from her!” he’d shouted over the phone. “I’ll contact our insurance agents, so we’ll make even more, eh?”

“I need a temporary passport and some money,” Subandrio had told the Greek.

“Yes, of course. I’ll send that by FedEx this morning. You should have it by tomorrow. But how about another ship? Will you be staying in Tripoli?”

“No, as soon as they release me I’m going back to Tunis,” Subandrio said. “But listen to me, Mr. Lapides, I don’t know who the hijackers were, they all wore balaclavas. They murdered my crew.”

“Bastards,” Lapides said, but without much feeling. “How is it that you managed to escape?”

“I saw what was happening and I jumped overboard.”

“And the Libyan navy rescued you?” Lapides asked, but Subandrio had never mentioned who’d rescued him.

It suddenly came to him that he had been manipulated. The deal to use the Distal Volente to bring Graham and his crew out to meet the Libyan submarine had only been one part of an arrangement with Lapides and Macedonia Shipping. The entire deal had been to hijack the ship, kill him and his crew, as well as the Libyan crew, and sink it.

Lapides knew everything. Now Subandrio was a loose end that would have to be taken care of. But away from Libya, so that no blame could be attached to them. It wasn’t a ship that would be waiting for him on the waterfront in Tunis. It would be a bullet.

“Yes, and now they’re interested in the exact position where my ship went to the bottom.”

“Did you tell them?” Lapides asked, his voice guarded.

“Yes, of course,” Subandrio lied. “I cooperated completely.”

“That was the correct decision, Captain,” Lapides said. “When you get to Tunis, telephone me, and I will make arrangements for another ship for you.” He laughed. “We are not finished doing business, my old friend. You’ll see.”

Subandrio looked up from his thoughts as they approached the sprawling twenty-one-acre complex of buildings, gardens, and fountains that had been built a few years ago, reputedly at a cost of more than forty-two million U.S. dollars. He’d gotten to Tunis by bus late last night, and checked into his hotel, but he had not telephoned Lapides, nor would he.

So far as he could figure, he had two options. He could retire right now with the money he had salted away in a Swiss bank account. It was enough to live well, though not in luxury. Or he could go to the Americans and try to sell his story.

And exact his revenge.

The cabbie turned down a side street that connected with La Goulette Road and pulled up at the main entrance. A pair of U.S. Marines stood just inside the front gate, which was guarded from the street by four concrete dolphins meant to protect the compound from a car bombing. The American flag flew from a staff above the main entrance of the embassy building that was fronted by a large fountain in the middle of well-tended gardens and olive groves. The place managed to look very modern and yet somehow traditionally Arabic.

Subandrio paid off the driver and made his way across the broad sidewalk, between the squat concrete posts. He’d purchased a Western-style business suit and shoes this morning, so that he would look presentable here, but the jacket and especially the silly tie were uncomfortable in this hot climate.

“Good morning,” he said to the marine. “I’m here to see the military attaché, on a matter of some importance.”

The very tall marine gave him the once-over. “May I see your identification, sir?”

Subandrio handed over his temporary passport. “My ship went down four days ago, so my papers are new.”

A second marine came over and searched Subandrio’s body with an electronic wand as the other marine stepped back to a call box just inside the gate and telephoned someone.

A few moments later he hung up, returned, and handed Subandrio’s passport back. “The receptionist at the counter will help you, sir.”

Subandrio felt the eyes of the two young soldiers on him as he passed through the gate and walked down a broad path between the trees to the main building. He had passed his first, and possibly most important, hurdle. They could just as well have denied him entry to the building.

The embassy was busy this morning, with many people coming and going. A youngish female receptionist was seated behind a low counter in the middle of a soaring atrium entrance, a computer monitor and a multiline telephone set in front of her. Two dozen people were queued down a corridor to the left, obviously applying for visas to travel to the United States.

“May I help you, sir?” the receptionist asked.

“I wish to speak to your military attaché.”

“I’m terribly sorry, sir. He is currently out of the country.” She smiled. “In any event, you would need to first set up an appointment, in writing.”

Subandrio returned her smile. “I understand,” he said pleasantly. He leaned closer so that she would be certain to hear his next words. “But you see, al-Quaida has gotten its hands on a submarine. Just four days ago. And I have the details.”

The woman didn’t blink. “Yes, sir. May I have your name?”

“I am Merchant Marine Captain Halim Subandrio. A citizen of Indonesia.”

She picked up a telephone with an odd-looking handset and began talking. Although Subandrio was only one meter away from her he could not hear her voice. It was oddly disconcerting. He’d just stepped from one age into another, and he was no longer very sure of his decision to come here.

The receptionist hung up the phone. “It will be just a moment, sir.”

A man in his mid-thirties, short, slender, mild-looking, came down the stairs from the second floor. “I’m Walt Hopper, the assistant military attaché,” he said, shaking Subandrio’s hand. “Why don’t you come with me, and we can talk.”

“Very well,” Subandrio said. He followed the American back upstairs, down a short corridor, and into a room with no windows. It was furnished only with a small conference table on which was a telephone.

“You say that you have some information about an al-Quaida plot to steal a submarine, or something like that,” Hopper said nonchalantly, but it was obvious that he was interested.

“I’ve come to sell you the information,” Subandrio corrected the man. “And they’re not trying to steal a submarine, they already have it. A Russian Foxtrot, I think, and crew. But what might be most interesting to you is the captain.”

Hopper’s eyes narrowed. “How do you know this?”

“Because I delivered the captain and some of the crew to a rendezvous with the submarine aboard my ship the Distal Volente four days ago.”

“Can you prove this?”

“I wish to speak with your military attaché.”

“He’s out of the country—”

“So the young lady downstairs said. Nevertheless, I wish to speak to him. And to a representative of your CIA.” Subandrio handed over his temporary passport. “My papers were lost when my crew was killed and my ship sunk from beneath me. You may check to see who I am, but with care because I believe that the owner of my ship made a deal with the Libyan government. At this moment I am supposed to be dead.”

Hopper studied the passport for a long moment or two, then glanced up at a blank wall and shrugged. A few seconds later the door opened and a very tall man, with a narrow, craggy face and deep-set dark eyes under bushy eyebrows, walked in. He wore civilian clothes but his bearing was very direct.

“Captain Subandrio,” the man said, coming around the table to take the passport from Hopper. He glanced at it.

“You may check my background—”

“That won’t be necessary,” the man said. “We know all about you. You’re a smuggler, heroin sometimes, almost certainly a pirate, and therefore probably a murderer. Therefore a piece of untrustworthy shit.” He tossed Subandrio’s passport across the table.

“As you wish,” Subandrio said, gathering his papers while hiding a little smile of triumph. He had them. He could see the excitement in their eyes, and he started to rise.

“Who is this submarine captain?” the man asked.

“Who are you?” Subandrio countered.

“Captain Russell Sterling. I’m the military attaché here.”

Subandrio sat back. “I am a marked man. I will need to disappear, and that costs money.”

“How much?” Hopper demanded.

Subandrio smiled. “I’ll leave that to your good offices,” he replied. “And those of the CIA who I think will find my story most interesting.”

“The name,” Sterling prompted.

“Rupert Graham, sometime captain in the British Royal Navy.”

Sterling swore softly under his breath and sat down, never taking his eyes off Subandrio.

“Do you know who he is?” Hooper asked.

“Yeah,” Sterling said.

“Do we have a deal?” Subandrio asked quietly.

“You’re playing with fire here,” Sterling said. “Al-Quaida is a hot topic for us just now. If you’re lying I’m fairly certain that you’ll have an accident. We might even arrange to send you to northern Pakistan. It’d be easy for you to disappear up there.”

“There’s no reason for me to make up such a dangerous story,” Subandrio replied. “But you gentlemen must ask yourself what is a man such as Rupert Graham going to do with a submarine?”

FIFTY

“Well, the man’s story has merit,” Sterling told CIA Chief of Tunis Station Anthony Ransom.

“He’s a piece of shit, Russ,” Walt Hopper observed. “You said so yourself. So why would we waste resources chasing down some cock-and-bull story?” Hopper was a CIA field officer, and worked directly for Ransom. He’d been in the Middle East for nearly five years and he was on burn-out status. Ready to go back to the CONUS.

“Because if by some odd quirk of fate he’s telling the truth, even a partial truth, we could be facing a serious situation,” the military attaché said. “Rupert Graham was one hell of a sub driver until he went off the deep end. Something about his wife dying in the hospital while he was out on patrol.” Sterling, whose last command had been boss of a Los Angeles Class attack submarine, had a great deal of respect for men of Graham’s capabilities. One submarine with a full load of nuclear warshots could start and finish a world war all by itself. Even an antiquated sub, such as the Foxtrot, could do a lot of damage with the right weapons and the right skipper.

“And that’s another thing, a Westerner working for al-Quaida. I just don’t see it.”

“It’s happened before,” Sterling shot back, a little angry by what he saw as a waste of time. They didn’t have enough solid information at this point to argue.

“Yeah, some pissed-off kid from Chicago who thinks he’s Muhammad’s son reincarnated or something.”

Ransom, who had been seated quietly behind his desk, absently playing with a rubber band, looked up. “Where is the gentleman at this moment?” he asked mildly. He was in his fifties, with a nearly bald, shiny head and a red complexion. But he had deceptively warm eyes.

“I put him in the secure conference room,” Hopper said.

“Is he staying in a hotel?”

“Apparently.”

“Send someone to fetch his things, and then get him set up in quarters here,” Ransom said. “With a babysitter, if you please, we may have him for a few days.”

Hopper shifted in his chair. “You can’t believe this guy. He’s trying to shake us down.” Ever since 9/11, selling al-Quaida stories to the CIA had practically become a cottage industry.

“We can’t afford not to believe him, Walter,” Ransom said.

“He’s given us the position he says that he rendezvoused with the sub and his ship was sunk. We can check at least that much,” Sterling said. “I’ll talk to Charlie Breamer and see what his people have in the vicinity.” Captain Breamer was operations officer for the Sixth Fleet based at Gaeta, Italy, which was composed of one-half a carrier battle group with about forty ships. At any given time a significant number of those ships were on maneuvers in the Mediterranean.

“It has to appear routine,” the COS said. “If the Libyans are involved, as your Indonesian captain maintains, they’ll be keen to keep us at arm’s length. Anyway if al-Quaida has gotten their hands on a submarine, I think it’s safe to assume that they’ll stay in the Med. Probably hit Israel. I think I’ll give Moshe the heads-up.” Moshe Begin, a cousin of the former Israeli prime minister, was chief of Mossad operations in Tunisia.

“I’ll give Charlie a call,” Sterling said, getting up. “But you might want to consider that the Foxtrot is capable of crossing the Atlantic. Could play hell along our East Coast.”

“They’d have to get past Gibraltar first,” Hopper pointed out. “That’s a tough nut to crack.”

“Yes, it is,” Sterling agreed. But not impossible for the right sub driver, he thought. It had been done before.

He walked across the hall to his own second-floor office, which looked down on one of the neatly groomed olive groves that were watered from rain catchment systems on the roofs of all the buildings, and placed an encrypted call to Sixth Fleet headquarters in Gaeta.

“Captain Breamer,” the ops officer said when the circuit was secure.

“Hi, Charlie, it’s Russ Sterling.”

“How’s the weather in Tunis?”

“Dry,” Sterling said. “I have a little job for you. Might be tricky, but it could be important.”

Breamer chuckled. “I didn’t think you’d call on this circuit to chat about the Yankees, who, by the way, are doing shit.” They were old friends with a baseball rivalry between the Yankees and the Red Sox going back to the Academy where they’d been classmates. “What do you have?”

“I want you to find and identify a shipwreck for me, off the coast of Libya. I have the approximate position, but it might not be there, the Libyans might object to our poking around, and this is pretty important but totally unofficial for the moment.”

This time Breamer laughed out loud. “Why don’t you give me something tough?” he asked. He said something away from the phone that Sterling did not catch, then he was back. “Okay, I can send the Simpson to take a look. She’s down around the south tip of Sardinia, could be on station in about twenty-four hours.” The Simpson was an Oliver Hazard Perry frigate. She carried a pair of Seahawk 60B LAMPS Mark III helicopters, and had been used for just about every mission, including drug interdiction, boardings and searches, and escort duties. She also carried underwater camera gear for sea bottom search-and-rescue missions.

“I’m not one hundred percent on my source,” Sterling said.

“I can get an Orion AIP out there in under three hours to make a quick pass.” The Orion P-3C land-based maritime ASW and patrol aircraft had been in service with the navy since 1969. In its latest AIP, or Aircraft Improvement Program, version delivered in l998, the airplane had fifty-eight separate improvements, mostly electronic sensors and communications equipment. “If they find something we’ll know where to direct the Simpson. If not, it’ll be your call.”

“Fair enough,” Sterling said.

“Do you want to tell me what this is all about?”

Sterling had thought his old friend would ask that very question. Any ops officer asked to deploy resources would demand to know what they were hunting. And rightly so.

“Keep a lid on this, Charlie. But it looks as if al-Quaida might have gotten their hands on a Libyan sub.”

“Son of a bitch. Is that what we’re looking for?”

“We’re looking for a tramp freighter sitting on the bottom. The Distal Volente, which we think the Libyans will probably try to pawn off as their sub. I need to know for sure if anything is down there, and what it is.”

Breamer was silent for several moments. “I think I’ll convince Nelson that it’s time to run an ASW exercise in the Strait. Wouldn’t do to let something like that out into the open Atlantic.” Vice Admiral Kenneth Nelson was Sixth Fleet’s CINC.

“No, it wouldn’t,” Sterling said. He liked his job at the embassy, but right now he would give his left nut to be waiting off Gibraltar to bag a Foxtrot.

It was a few minutes after three when the four-engine turboprop ASW aircraft reached its patrol station two hundred kilometers off the Libyan coast, north of Benghazi. Their radar and Elint equipment was painting a strong picture of three Libyan warships seventy kilometers to the south, banging away as if they were in a great rush to find something.

Lieutenant Daniel Martin pulled back on the throttle controls, as he turned the ship left and dropped to five hundred feet above the placid Mediterranean on the first leg of their search-and-identify mission.

Their preflight briefing at Gaeta had been short and to the point, exactly the way Martin liked them. A tramp freighter had apparently gone down in thirty-five hundred meters of water, and they were supposed to find it, or at least pinpoint any ferrous mass they could find at or near the latitude and longitude they had been given.

The only part Martin didn’t like was the rush job. Lieutenant Commander Jerry Garcia, the squadron ops officer, wanted it done yesterday. It wasn’t Martin’s laid-back style to rush into things. If he’d been of that mindset he would have opted for jets out of the Academy, instead of a lumbering eighteen-wheeler prop job so slow it couldn’t get out of its own way.

“We’re starting our first run, Marsha,” he radioed to his chief sensor operator at her ASW console in back. They were treating this as an antisubmarine-warfare mission and CPO Marsha Littlejohn had the best instincts in the fleet.

“Roger that, Skipper,” she replied tersely. It was another thing Martin liked about her, she always came to the point and she never cried.

Besides the updated ASQ-1 14 computer system that crunched data from the ship’s radar systems, the AIP Orion was equipped with infrared sensors and magnetic anomaly detectors, MAD, that could detect a mass of ferrous metal, but only along a very narrow path one thousand feet out, so it was generally ineffective for anything but pinpoint searches. She was also equipped with the blue-green laser detector, which when conditions were right, could peer down through as much as four thousand meters of seawater.

“ESMs, I want to know the minute the Libyans take an interest in us,” Martin radioed.

“Aye, aye, Skipper,” Petty Officer Bill Kowalski responded. “We’ve been briefly illuminated by at least three low-power search radars on the way in, so they know we’re here. But it looks as if they’re more interested in what’s on the bottom than they are in us.”

“That’ll change once they realize we’re doing the same thing.”

“Roger.”

“If they’re looking for the same ship, one of us is in the wrong part of the pond,” Lieutenant J. G Stuart Kaminski said from the right seat.

Martin glanced over at his copilot. “Let’s hope our intel is better than theirs, and we find what we’re looking for before they start asking questions.” He keyed his helmet radio. “Talk to me, Marsha.”

“All sensors are clean.”

“Okay, I’m turning on our next leg,” Martin said. He hauled the big airplane a hard one-eighty to the right on a new course parallel and approximately one thousand feet from their first track. Once they completed ten such legs, covering an area approximately two miles wide and five miles long, they would start a new set of tracks at ninety degrees, to form a grid. If there were anything on the bottom big enough for their sensors to detect they would find it.

All they needed was some patience and a bit of luck.

Charles Breamer looked up from the display on his console as Sixth Fleet CINC Vice Admiral Kenneth Nelson came through the door, and he girded himself for trouble. The admiral did not look happy to be called off the golf course on his only day off in the week. He hadn’t even taken the time to change into a uniform.

The P-3C that Breamer had sent out had found a large ferrous object sitting on the floor of the Mediterranean just where Sterling had said it would be. It would be up to the Simpson to find out exactly what was down there, but that wouldn’t happen for another twenty hours or so.

The problem in Breamer’s mind was that the Orion and the frigate were the only resources that the admiral had agreed to commit for the moment on what he thought would probably be nothing more than a “goddamn wild-goose chase.” Nelson had been burned twice by what he had considered faulty CIA intel; once several years ago when he was chief of surface ops for the Seventh Fleet out of Yokosuka when the Agency had warned that the North Koreans had threatened to test a nuclear weapon. The CINC and vice commander were both back in the States, where it was the middle of the night. Nelson had diverted a complete carrier group from a routine training mission to make best speed possible to a point one hundred miles off the North Korean coast. The sudden rapid deployment had scared hell out of the Japanese, and although the shit had hit the fan, Nelson had ultimately been found blameless. Based on the intelligence he’d been given, his action to send a clear message to the North Koreans had been the correct one. But he’d been put through the wringer, an experience he hadn’t enjoyed.

The second incident had happened just a couple of years ago, when he’d been in command of a carrier group on a mission to rescue a CIA team caught spying on Pakistan’s desert nuclear testing facility. The Agency had not only convinced the White House to send an independent SEAL team — not under Nelson’s command — to do the rescue, it had neglected to inform him that one of the captured CIA officers was the president’s brother. He had been taken out of the loop on a mission that had had the potential to place his command in harm’s way.

Nelson came directly across to Breamer’s console. “I’m here, what have you got?” The admiral was a short, slightly built man, with thinning gray hair and pale, sometimes watery eyes. He looked more like a banker than a professional warrior, but he was as tough as bar steel, and his booming voice was that of a man twice his size.

Breamer got to his feet. “Sorry to bother you, sir, but the Orion found something at the position we were given,” he said. He’d played football for three years at the Academy, and he towered over Nelson.

“Did they manage to find out exactly what’s there?”

“No, sir. We’ll have to wait for the Simpson, but whatever’s on the bottom is approximately the same size as the tramp steamer or a Foxtrot.”

“What about the Libyans?”

“We got lucky,” Breamer said. “They spotted us, of course, but before they could send anyone to check us out, our guys found what they were looking for and managed to bug out.”

“They’re going to take a real interest when Simonetti shows up.” Captain Bruce Simonetti was skipper of the Simpson.

Breamer risked a slight smile. “Not much they’ll do about it, Admiral.” Nelson’s eyes narrowed. “Don’t be so sure of yourself,” he warned. “It’s a bad habit. Especially when you’re dealing with the CIA.”

“Yes, sir,” Breamer said, his mood sagging. He knew what was coming next, and there wasn’t a damn thing he could do about it. This was one admiral who could not be argued with, even under the best of circumstances.

“I suppose you want to deploy assets to screen the strait,” Nelson said.

“I think it’s wise, sir,” Breamer said.

“I expect you do,” Nelson replied. He was like a cobra ready to strike.

Breamer silently cursed himself for mentioning his intel for the mission had come from the CIA, but the damage had been done, and he’d be damned if he was going to roll over and play dead. “Admiral, I get paid to be your operations officer. Means I give you my best recommendations.”

Nelson’s mood was suddenly unreadable, but he nodded. “And they pay me to make decisions, Charlie,” he said mildly. “Give me a positive ID on the wreck, and if it’s not a Foxtrot, we’ll seal off the strait tighter than a gnat’s ass.”

If it’s not already too late, Breamer thought. “Yes, sir.”

The admiral stepped a little closer so that no one else could hear. “You’re doing a good job, I have no complaints. But you want to guard against unreliable intelligence.”

FIFTY-ONE

As the Air France Airbus from Paris turned on final for landing at Riyadh’s King Khalid International Airport, McGarvey was finally able to put the last of his personal life into a safe compartment of his mind.

Actually his leavetaking from Katy hadn’t been as difficult as he had feared it would be. In a large measure, he supposed, because he had told her the truth about his mission; the entire truth without hiding any of the details or the risks.

He’d always avoided such full disclosures with her, partly because what he was doing was usually classified top secret, and partly because he wanted to protect her from worry.

Although Katy hadn’t demanded to know the details this time, he felt that she deserved to be told what her husband was going up against.

She had finished packing for him, and they had a few minutes for coffee in the kitchen before his cab came to take him to the airport.

“I could have driven you,” she said.

McGarvey had shaken his head. “They probably know or suspect that I’m coming, and I don’t want to take the chance that someone might spot you.”

“They?” she said quietly, her left eyebrow rising. But then she held up her hand. “I understand.”

“I’m going to assassinate Osama bin Laden.”

Her breath caught in her throat and she brought a hand to her mouth, her nostrils flared, her eyes wide as if she were a wild animal caught in a hunter’s crosshairs.

“We think he’s hiding somewhere in Karachi, so first I’ll fly to Paris, and from there to Riyadh and finally Pakistan.”

“If they know you’re coming, won’t they set a trap for you?” Katy asked.

“I’m hoping they’ll do just that,” he said, his eyes never leaving his wife’s. “It’s the only way I’ll know for sure if he’s there.”

She suddenly turned away. “Christ,” she said softly. “And then what?” she asked. “When you find him?”

“I’ll put a bullet in his brain and then get out. Depending on the circumstances I’ll either run for the Indian border a hundred miles down the coast, or somehow get aboard a ship leaving the port of Karachi, or in a worst-case scenario head toward Afghanistan.”

She looked back at him. “Just like that?”

He shook his head. “No, Katy, it’s never just like that.”

“Why not just put on a disguise or something and fly back home?”

“Security will be too tight,” he told her. “Nor can I go to our consulate in Karachi or our embassy in Islamabad, I have to get out of the country on my own.”

“Why?”

And that was the crux of the entire mission, he had thought then, talking to his wife, and now as he came in for a landing in Saudi Arabia. Plausible deniability. His mission wasn’t officially sanctioned, which meant that though everyone might know the Americans had killed bin Laden, there would be no proof. Or at least none that the mission had been directed by the White House.

If he was caught by Pakistani intelligence trying to escape, he could make a convincing argument that he no longer worked for the CIA, and that he’d done this thing on his own because of the grief that bin Laden had caused him and his family over the past several years.

It was one of the reasons that he had chosen to fly commercial, out in the open, something no spook going into badland would ever do, especially one on a black mission.

“I’m on my own again,” he told her.

This time she didn’t look away. Her eyes filled with tears. “How much more, Kirk?” she asked. “You’re going to get yourself killed one of these days, you know.”

“That’s always a possibility.”

“Why, goddammit?”

And that was the one question that he didn’t think he could answer, for the simple reason he’d never really known. Or at least he’d never been able to put it into any words that made sense, why he’d killed people for the United States over a twenty-five-year-plus career. The argument that he was a soldier simply doing his duty, striking back at his country’s enemies, wouldn’t wash, because on several occasions, including this one, he had no direct orders. In fact, there had been times where he’d gone directly against his orders, operating not only on his own, but illegally. There were times when he didn’t give a damn about the civil rights of the men he’d gone after. He’d inflicted pain. He’d caused grief and heartache. He’d even killed a number of women.

There was seldom a night that went by when he was free of the faces of every person he’d assassinated.

A Company shrink had once glibly suggested that McGarvey had a death wish: A Hemingway complex, with the constant need to prove yourself. A constant need to gain the admiration and therefore acceptance of the people around you. And, perhaps, a latent homosexuality.

Howard Ryan had been deputy director of operations at the time, and although he and McGarvey had never gotten along, even he had sat up and taken notice, expecting that at any moment McGarvey was going to take the guy apart. Ryan’s take had always been that McGarvey had become an anachronism in a world that had become too sophisticated for the blunt instrument of assassination. But of course that had been long before 9/11.

McGarvey had laughed. “I never thought of myself quite that way, but you might be right, Doc.” Voltaire had written that he’d “ … never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: ‘O Lord, make my enemies ridiculous.’ And God granted it.”

But the man had simply been doing his job of watching out for the mental health of his flock the best he knew how. Because it was what he did.

And Katy had asked why.

“It’s what I do,” he’d answered, and they’d left it at that.

McGarvey had flown first class, so he was one of the first passengers to get off the airplane. His single B4 bag would be transferred to the Saudi Arabian Airlines flight to Karachi that departed in one hour, so he had no need to leave the international terminal, and therefore go through customs or passport control.

By law, alcohol could not be served in the kingdom, so there were only a few restaurants and cafeterias in the airport. McGarvey crossed the busy arrivals and departures hall to a crowded cafeteria where he ordered a tea and took it to one of the high tables. The Arab specialty had been tea for more than a millennium, so they had gotten very good at it, even better than the Brits.

Very few passengers on this side of the airport wore the traditional Muslim robes, just about everybody was in Western business suits. Saudi Arabia was where the money was, so this is where the international businessmen flocked. When the last barrel of oil was finally gone, the crowds would leave with it.

A young earnest-looking man in a dark suit with a priest’s white collar came over with a glass of tea in hand. “Mind if I share your table, sir?” he asked.

“Not at all, Father,” McGarvey said. “I didn’t know there were any Catholics here.”

“Mr. Rencke thought it was a good idea,” the young man said, taking a seat. “Actually I think there might be a church in one of the burbs.”

McGarvey glanced up at the television set tuned to CNN behind the bar, and let his eyes sweep the concourse without making it obvious that he was looking for someone. But it didn’t seem as if anyone was taking an interest in them.

“I have a message for you, sir,” the kid said. “The cock remains in its roost.” He waited for a reaction. “Would you like me to repeat it?”

McGarvey shook his head. “It’s not necessary.” His sat phone was only good for tracking the GPS signals at short range, within fifteen or twenty miles, and wasn’t encrypted, so Rencke had done the next best to get the message to him.

Before he’d left Langley they’d made sure that the position of the chip implanted in al-Turabi had not made a move toward the northern mountains that bordered Afghanistan. Rencke’s message meant that al-Turabi was still in place. If he’d come to report to bin Laden, it meant the al-Quaida leader was somewhere in the city.

A lot of ifs, McGarvey thought. A lot of assumptions.

The kid looked to be in his mid-twenties at the oldest. He’d probably been trained by Liz and her husband, Todd, at the Farm. For just a moment it made McGarvey feel old. Too old?

“You’re Mr. McGarvey, right sir?”

McGarvey smiled. He drank his tea, and when he was finished, he shook his head. “Nope,” he said. “And I was never here.”

It took a moment for the young CIA field officer to react, but then he laughed. “Yes sir, I understand,” he said. He finished his tea, then slid off his stool, and started to leave. But he hesitated. “I’ve always wanted to use that line myself.”

FIFTY-TWO

Bruce Simonetti had gone down to the Combat Information Center six hours ago when sonar had first detected what might have been air slowly leaking from a newly submerged shipwreck and he hadn’t been back up to the bridge since. The noise was intermittent and very faint, almost impossible to detect even with their gas turbines spinning at dead idle, but whatever was down there was right where Sixth Fleet ops said they’d find a wreck.

“Cap’n, I’ve lost it again,” Senior Sonar Operator CPO Donald Deutsch said.

Simonetti pulled his headset over his ears and listened to the various bottom noises, mostly biologics, that they’d been monitoring ever since they’d stumbled across what might have been a recent wreck. He pressed the expensive earphones closer, but whatever had been shedding the last of its air had gone silent.

The problem was that the Libyans had taken an interest in them the moment they’d arrived on station and started their search grid, so they’d not been able to linger over the position where they thought they’d struck gold. For most of the past six hours they had concentrated their search over a spot nearly four miles to the north, only occasionally coming back to their original find. They were on their outward track, away from the site.

His orders had been specific. Find and identify the wreck, but if possible don’t let the Libyans know you’ve done so. Which made absolutely no sense to him, because the Libyan navy wasn’t about to go up against a U.S. warship. The last time they’d done that, we’d bloodied their noses.

Simonetti took off his headset. “Okay, Donnie, secure your bottom search for now. I think we’ve got enough data to get us back when the coast is clear.”

“Yes, sir,” Deutsch said. He sat back and looked up.

“Good job,” Simonetti said. He went over to Herb McCormick, his nav officer who was hunched over the electronic chart plotter. Rather than showing their position on the surface along with their course and speed, as well as other surface or subsea targets within the range of their radar and sonar, the display was now showing bottom features — those that were charted plus what their side-scan sonar was picking up.

McCormick had plotted all the contacts they’d picked up over the previous six hours. Trouble was they weren’t all bunched in a neat pile as if they were coming from a specific target.

“Not much to go on,” Simonetti said.

McCormick looked up from the chart. “Be my guess that we could be looking at variations in current strength, which is spreading our readings all over the place.”

“Depends on what the Libyans end up doing, but we’re not going to have much time on target to make a positive ID.” It chapped Simonetti’s ass that he couldn’t just muscle his way back, and the hell with how the Libyans reacted. These were international waters. And even if they weren’t, it wouldn’t make much difference to him.

“We can send down a probe on the next pass.”

The ship’s com buzzed. “CIC, bridge.” It was Daniel Lamb, his XO. “Is the captain there?”

Simonetti picked it up. “What is it?”

“Cap’n, the Libyans are starting to get cute. You might want to come up and take a look.”

Simonetti glanced over at the plotting board, which showed surface targets, and he could see exactly what Lamb was talking about. “I’m on my way,” he said, and he replaced the handset in its overhead cradle. “You’ll have to wing it, Herb. I want you to stand by to launch the ROV we loaded at Gaeta, and I’ll need your best guess at what’s down there. I expect we’ll only get one pass. But I want pictures.”

“Give me five minutes, Skipper.”

“You’ve got it,” Simonetti said, and he went through the forward hatch and up the half-flight of stairs to the bridge, steaming. He didn’t give a damn what his orders specified, because he wasn’t about to roll over and play dead, or run away with his tail between his legs.

He came from an Italian neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side, where if you didn’t stand up for yourself you would get slammed. He’d earned a lot of respect as a kid, because not only was he street-tough, he was smart.

The late-afternoon sun, sparkling on the nearly flat calm sea, streamed through the bridge windows on the port side. They had been bracketed on both sides by a pair of fast-attack missile boats, the Russian-built Nanuchka Class that were normally used for coastal operations. Both boats had come in very close, to less than fifty yards off, and although they were small, under two hundred feet, they carried SSM and SAM antiship missiles that could inflict severe damage on the Simpson, even sink her.

“Have they tried to make contact with us?” Simonetti asked.

Lamb was studying the bridge of the Libyan warship to starboard. “Not yet, Cap’n. But if they get much closer we’ll be able to talk to them over the rail.”

“Okay, I want them out of here now,” Simonetti said.

Lamb lowered his binoculars. “We’re in international waters, Bruce. They’ve got just as much a right to be out here as we do.”

“Sound Battle Stations,” Simonetti said calmly. His XO was right, but he was damned if he was going to let anyone crowd him. He grabbed a handset from the overhead as the Battle Stations Klaxon sounded throughout the ship.

“Weps, this is the captain. Spin up torpedoes one and three. I want firing point procedures as quickly as you can manage it. Targets Romeo one and two.”

“This a drill, Skipper?”

“Negative, this is not a drill,” Simonetti shot back. “And I want the bastard to starboard illuminated with our Phalanx radar right now.”

“That’ll get their attention,” Lamb observed. He raised his binoculars again to study the Libyan warship to starboard.

The Simpson carried one Mark-15 Phalanx Close-in Weapons System (CIWS) gun-mounted amidships well aft. The 20mm weapon, controlled by its own targeting radar system, could fire three thousand rounds per minute. It was normally used as a last line of defense against incoming aircraft or missiles, but against smaller ships, such as the Libyan missile corvettes, it would be nothing short of devastating.

Simonetti waited a full ten seconds to make certain that the captains of both missile boats understood what was happening before he pulled the VHF mike from its bracket. “Libyan warships off my beams, turn away now, or you will be fired upon.”

“Skipper,” Lamb warned urgently.

Simonetti ignored his XO. “Fire one cannon shot across their bow,” he ordered. He glared at his executive officer. “Now.”

Lamb gave the order, and seconds later the Melara 76mm dual-purpose gun, high amidships just forward of the squat funnel, swiveled into position, and one shot was fired, splashing into the water twenty yards in front of the Libyan warship.

The effect was immediate. Both ships suddenly peeled off and accelerated as if they were scalded cats.

Simonetti grabbed the ship’s phone, and called his nav officer in the CIC. “Herb, this is the captain. What’s your best guess for a course and distance to the wreck?”

“One-eight-six degrees, let’s say two miles to the middle of the plotted positions,” McCormick replied.

“Soon as we make the turn, launch the ROV.”

“Cap’n, if we make anything over five knots, the cable will break. It wasn’t meant for that kind of a strain.”

“Understood,” Simonetti said. “Look sharp.”

“Shall we stand down from battle stations?” Lamb asked when Simonetti hung up the phone.

“Negative,” the captain said. “Helm, come right to new course one-eight-six, make your speed All Ahead Slow.”

“Aye, sir. New course one-eight-six, All Ahead Slow.”

The Simpson came hard right, and immediately began to slow down as her turbines were spooled back. The Perry Class ships, which were introduced to the fleet in ’75, were capable of making around thirty knots, but what was impressive was the acceleration her twin gas turbines provided. If need be, she could get to where she wanted to go in a big hurry.

While they headed slowly back to the south, Simonetti took his XO aside so that the others on the bridge could not hear. “Our orders came directly from Nelson, who wants answers, not bullshit. If that means going head-to-head with the Libyans then so be it.”

“Jesus, Bruce, would you have shot at them if they hadn’t backed off?” Lamb asked.

“Damn straight,” Simonetti said. “I want to keep a close eye on those bastards. I don’t want them within ten miles of us.”

“Aye, Captain,” Lamb said, and he went over to the radar set to take a look at what the Libyan missile boats, already hull down on the horizon, were doing.

It took more than twenty minutes for the ROV to approach the bottom, and for the Simpson to reach the outermost plots for the wreck. Within three minutes McCormick was on the coms.

“Cap’n, we have a positive ID,” he said.

“Go ahead.”

“She’s a freighter, looks fairly well intact. Name on the stern is the Distal Volente, Monrovia, Liberia.”

“Bingo,” Simonetti said. “Take some pictures and then retrieve the ROV. When she’s aboard let me know and we’ll get out of here.”

“Will do, Skipper.”

“Good job, Herb.”

Sterling walked across the corridor to Tony Ransom’s office. The CIA chief of station was getting set to leave for the day, and it didn’t look as if he were in a very good mood. His number two, Walt Hopper, had been drinking a lot lately, and three nights ago he had made an ass of himself with a local cop who’d stopped him for DUI. Word had got back to Langley, and Ransom had been told point-blank to control his field personnel.

It was a reprimand on a so-far-spotless record that Ransom had hoped would carry him at least as far as DDO.

“I got a call from Charlie Breamer.”

Ransom was in the act of putting on his jacket. He hesitated for a moment, then pulled it on. “Oh?” he said. “His people find something already?”

“The Orion they sent out yesterday picked up a mass of metal sitting on the bottom just where Captain Subandrio said his ship was sunk. One of Charlie’s boats put down an ROV on the site. That was about an hour ago. They got a positive ID. The wreck is the Distal Volente.”

Ransom shook his head. He looked almost bemused, as if he were having some difficulty in digesting what he’d just been told. “He was telling the truth after all.”

“Looks like it,” Sterling said. “I think we have to consider the possibility that he told the truth about the other thing. Al-Quaida has got a Foxtrot submarine and a first-rate captain.”

“Moshe didn’t seem too worried,” Ransom said. “But that could have been an act.”

“This should be sent to Langley,” Sterling suggested.

“You’re right, of course,” the COS said. “First thing in the morning.”

“I think you should call it in right now, Tony,” Sterling said.

“Okay, assuming that the ROV took pictures, I want to see them before I do anything. This thing, if it pans out, is going to get a whole bunch of people real excited. I want to be absolutely certain that we’re all on the same page.” Ransom gathered his cell phone and put it in his pocket. “I’ll be at home. Get me the pictures and I’ll call Dave Whittaker and give him the heads-up tonight.”

Sterling figured it was the best he was going to do, although he would stop by to see the ambassador. Maybe they could make an end run around the CIA. “What about Subandrio?”

“Get the pictures and we’ll take care of him in the morning,” Ransom said. “What’s the going rate now? A hundred thousand?”

“Something like that.”

“I’ll talk to Dave about that as well,” Ransom said.

Sterling turned and was about to leave when the COS stopped him.

“This is a CIA issue now, Russ. We’ll keep it that way. If and when the ambassador needs to be told, I will be the one doing the telling. Clear?”

FIFTY-THREE

The GPS tracker, disguised as a nonencrypted sat phone, raised no eyebrows at the customs counter in the Jinnah International terminal, for the simple reason that so many businessmen carried the phones these days they’d become commonplace. But security was tight as it had been for a long time. McGarvey’s luggage was X-rayed, then hand-searched by customs officers, as was his body after he’d taken off his shoes and his jacket and turned out his pockets. His hefty Philippe Patek chronometer was examined by two different officials before he was allowed to put it back on his wrist.

It was early evening when he shouldered his bag and headed across the busy concourse to the taxi ranks out front. Ostensibly he was here, under his own name, to do freelance research for the State Department’s upgrade of its Pakistan country guide blue book. He wasn’t carrying a diplomatic passport, nor did he have the credentials of a journalist, so he’d been given no preferential treatment. On the other hand he’d not become the center of anyone’s attention. So far.

Although he thought he could feel eyes on him, people watching his every move, he’d spotted no one obvious. But if bin Laden’s people didn’t know that he had arrived in the country yet, they would certainly get the heads-up when he checked into the Pearl Continental downtown where Rencke had booked him an executive suite for ten days.

For now he was a man apparently in no hurry, here in Pakistan to spend some of his government’s money. Islamabad might buy the fiction, though al-Quaida would certainly not.

Bin Laden would know for certain that there was only one reason McGarvey had come back. The question was how arrogant the man had become; how much of the fiction he and his people had created about his powers had he begun to believe. Enough so that he thought he was invincible? A spider that was willing to let its prey come into the web?

Just outside the automatic doors, McGarvey stepped to one side and held up well out of the steady stream of passengers who had just gotten off three flights that had arrived within minutes of one another, and from the mob of cabbies who descended upon them.

The night was warm and humid, with a mélange of smells unique to this port city; burned kerojet, the sea, diesel fumes, rotting fish and garbage, and some indefinable combination of spices and unpleasant human odors.

An older-looking, ragtag, stoop-shouldered man, wearing a dark suit coat over a dirty white shirt, baggy trousers, and flip-flops, approached from the end of the cab ranks, a green baseball cap in his left hand. “Good evening, sir. May I offer my cab into the city?” His heavily accented English was barely understandable.

“I’ll wait until the crowd thins, thank you,” McGarvey said.

“Yes, but my cab is clean and my rates are reasonable.”

Rencke had arranged an initial contact, but this was Karachi and the messenger could have been compromised, though the man’s encounter key words were correct.

“Very well,” McGarvey said, and he followed the cabbie to the far end of the cab ranks and then across four lanes of the very busy departure road.

Police were directing traffic, but nobody seemed to be paying any attention to McGarvey, though the feeling that he was being watched continued to grow; as if someone were sighting a rifle on the back of his head.

He tossed his bag in the backseat of the cab, and climbed in as the driver got behind the wheel. “The Pearl Continental on Club Road.”

“Yes, sir,” the driver said and they headed into Karachi, merging smoothly with the rushing traffic that consisted not only of cabs and buses, but of horse-drawn carriages, human-powered rickshaws, and bicycles.

A small leather case lay on the floor behind McGarvey’s feet. He picked it up and opened it. His pistol, two extra magazines of ammunition, a bulky encrypted satellite phone, an envelope containing ten thousand dollars cash, and another containing three passports — one U.S., one British, and a third French — had been sent over in a diplomatic pouch earlier today. The cabbie was a contract worker for the U.S. Consulate here.

“Good flight over, sir?” the driver asked, all traces of his Pakistani accent gone, replaced by what sounded like California to McGarvey.

“Bumpy,” McGarvey said. “Thanks for my things. Do I know you?”

“I don’t think so, Mr. McGarvey, but I know Todd Van Buren, your son-in-law from the Farm.” The driver looked in the rearview mirror. “Name’s Joe Bernstein.”

“Pleasure,” McGarvey said. “Anyone behind us?”

“Thought I might have spotted the same motorbike that was parked down the block from the consulate this afternoon. But it’s gone now.”

“How about at the airport?”

“You came in clean, unless someone was on the same flight.”

“It was vetted in Riyadh,” McGarvey said absently, his mind elsewhere. There should have been someone at the airport. The motorbike was a possibility, but according to Bernstein it was no longer behind them.

“Any idea how long you’ll be here, sir?” Bernstein was asking.

“Couple days,” McGarvey replied. They had to know he was coming.

Bernstein handed a business card over the back of the seat. “If you need anything at arm’s length from the consulate, call me at the cab company. It’s an answering service.”

McGarvey focused on the driver. “What’s your job here?”

“Just a driver with big ears,” Bernstein said. “You’d be surprised what people will say in the back of a taxi. They think they’re invisible.”

“You speak the language?”

“Fluently. My grandmother was a Pakistani. Didn’t move to the States until she was twenty-five.”

“Then keep your ears open for me, Joe. I want to know if my name comes up.”

“Will do, Mr. M. I’ll leave a message at the hotel for you. A chalk mark on the FedEx box in the lobby.”

They rode the rest of the way into the city in silence. Once they passed the Chaukhandi Tombs and got off Hospital Road into the center of downtown, traffic seemed to increase tenfold, and everyone seemed to be moving at a frantic pace, as if they needed to get off the streets as quickly as possible lest something catch up with them. Pakistan had been a nation in turmoil from its beginning in 1947.

Twenty minutes later, they pulled into the driveway of the Pearl, where a bellman came over to open the cab door for McGarvey.

“Need anything, give me a call,” Bernstein said.

“Could be I’ll need to get out of Dodge in a hurry.”

“When?”

“I don’t know yet, but if the need arises it’ll be all of a sudden.”

“I’ll work on it,” Bernstein said as the bellman opened the door.

McGarvey got out of the cab, handed the bellman his B4 bag, and carrying the small leather case with his weapon, phone, cash, and passports, entered the hotel. The lobby was moderately busy with people checking in, and others at the hotel for dinner.

He checked in at the desk with his own American Express card, but the clerk refused it.

“It’s not necessary, Mr. McGarvey.Your wife has already checked in, two hours ago.”

McGarvey was taken aback. He simply couldn’t imagine Katy being here. It made no sense. But a sudden understanding dawned on him, and his anger spiked. “Did she leave a message?”

“Yes, sir. Mrs. McGarvey said that she would be waiting for you in the coffee shop,” the clerk said. “It’s just across the lobby to your left.” He glanced at his computer screen. “Your dinner reservations are for eight.”

“Anything else?” McGarvey asked, holding his anger in check.

“No, sir,” the clerk said. “Shall I have your bag taken up?”

“Yes, please do,” McGarvey said tightly, and he took the room key card from the clerk.

He handed the bellman ten dollars and made his way across the lobby past the piano player, and down two stairs to the nearly empty coffee shop. He spotted Gloria seated in a corner booth, and it was all he could do not to turn on his heel, retrieve his bag, and check into another hotel before he got her killed. She had no idea of the magnitude of her foolishness following him here. And he was disappointed in Otto for allowing this to happen, because without him he didn’t think she would have made it this far.

She looked up as he approached, a big smile on her face that faded almost immediately when she saw his mood.

He didn’t sit down. “Let’s go, dear,” he said.

The waiter came over. “May I bring you something, sir?”

“No,” McGarvey said. “We’re leaving.” He stepped aside for Gloria to get up, then took her elbow and propelled her out of the coffee shop and across the lobby to the elevators. He knew that he was hurting her arm, but she didn’t say anything, or try to pull away. They didn’t speak on the way up to the tenth floor, nor did he release his grip.

No one was in the corridor when they got off the elevator. McGarvey let them into the suite, and secured the safety chain. All the lights were on, and the only sound was from a slowly moving ceiling fan, but before Gloria could say anything he motioned for her to hold her silence.

He took his pistol out of the leather case, checked to make sure that it was ready to fire, then laid the case on the hall table before he hurriedly checked out the large sitting room, huge bedroom, two palatial bathrooms, and closets. His B4 bag was laid out on the king-size bed, and Gloria’s bag was hanging in one of the closets.

It was possible that since Gloria’s arrival had probably been unexpected there’d been no time to plant bugs in the suite, something he’d hoped might happen. He’d planned on giving some disinformation to whoever was listening, which wasn’t likely now.

He walked slowly back into the sitting room, where Gloria had remained in the entry hall. “What are you doing here?” he asked. He laid his pistol on the coffee table, and pulled off his jacket and tossed it over the back of the big sectional.

“I’m your backup in case something goes wrong,” she said, coming into the sitting room. “There’s beer in the minibar.”

“You’re leaving first thing in the morning,” he said, going to the floor-to-ceiling windows that looked toward the parliament building and courthouse complex. From this vantage point it could have been any large city at night; anonymous and therefore safe.

“Otto thought me coming over was a good idea.”

McGarvey looked at her reflection in the dark glass. “Otto’s smart but naïve and you’re a beautiful woman, you could have convinced him of anything.”

“I resent that,” she flared. “I’m a damned good field officer, and I don’t need to use sex to get what I want.”

“Perhaps not, but you do try,” McGarvey said. He turned back to her. “What exactly do you think you can do for me by being here? You’re not my wife, and the opposition knows that, so they’ll have to guess that you’re a CIA agent.”

“That’s right. If I can get them to watch me, you can make an end run.”

“Is that what you were taught at the Farm?”

“Sleight of hand? Yes. It works.”

“Not in the real world,” McGarvey told her. He was tired already, and he had the rest of the night ahead of him. “I want you to stay here in the room tonight, and first thing in the morning you can take a cab out to the airport, catch the first flight out. But I don’t want you to say anything to anyone here in the hotel. As far as anyone here is concerned, you’re Mrs. McGarvey heading out to do some shopping.”

Gloria’s eyes were suddenly bright. “Are you going out tonight?”

McGarvey was having a hard time believing she wasn’t a complete fool. “Yes, but you’re staying put.”

“I can help—”

“You’d get us both killed.”

“¡Hijo de puta!” she shouted. “I want to help you.”

McGarvey was across the room to her in three steps. He shoved her down on the couch, his knee between her legs, and he held her there against her struggles, his face inches from hers. “I work alone,” he said harshly.

She tried to push him away, but he was too strong.

“You have no idea what I’m capable of doing. How easy it is for me to kill.”

“You’re a soldier—”

“No, goddammit. I’m an assassin. A thing that my own country can’t acknowledge. Something my wife despises. Something that if my neighbors knew would send them running away from me in absolute terror. Something that each time I recite the Pledge of Allegiance I have to skip the words ‘under God,’ because I’m not a hypocrite, too. Because of me my wife has been kidnapped, beaten, tortured, and nearly killed. My daughter was nearly killed when she was pregnant. She lost that baby and can’t have others. All because of me.”

Gloria was looking up at him, her rage gone as quickly as it had come. “Kirk,” she said softly. “I’m in love with you.”

McGarvey released his hold on her and got up. “Go home.”

“I love you.”

“Before you get me killed like you did your partner.”

FIFTY-FOUR

It was shortly after ten in the evening on the surface when the Russian-built Foxtrot Class diesel-electric submarine, drifting slowly at a depth of one hundred meters, began to pick up a sharp increase in traffic. They had passed Europa Point, most commonly known as the Rock of Gibraltar, four hours ago and from their present position it was less than fifteen kilometers farther to the west before they would clear Cape Spartel on the African continent and finally be out into the open Atlantic.

Graham stood in the passageway around the corner from the control room from where he could look over the shoulders of his two sonar operators, and still issue orders to his fire control crew.

“Are you picking up any military traffic?” he asked the Libyan operator who was even better than the Iranian officer who’d come off the DistalVolente.

“It’s hard to tell, sir, with all the clutter up there,” Ensign Isomil answered respectfully. Ever since the incident yesterday when Graham had punished the young operator for insubordination, and had sidestepped al-Abbas’s attempt at mutiny, everyone aboard the boat had sharpened up. The transformation had occurred even sooner than Graham had hoped it would. For the first time he was beginning to think that they had more than an even chance to succeed.

“I’m less interested in the ship types than I am if you’re hearing any active sonar. Especially at the western end of the strait.”

The Libyan officer looked up, and shook his head. “Nothing so far, Captain. Do you think they are looking for us?”

“It’s a possibility,” Graham said. “But once we clear Spartel we should be home free. So I want you to pay special attention to any target that might even hint at being military.”

“That would mean they knew we didn’t scuttle our boat, and that we’re still alive,” the sonar operator said.

Graham’s Iranian sonar man looked up as if to say that the Libyan had no idea what they were facing, and Graham nodded.

He had his crew and now he meant to keep them sharp through the strait and all the way across the Atlantic. His Iranians knew that their chances for survival were slim, but they were fanatics for the cause, unlike the Libyans who were merely following orders. It was one of the reasons he had promoted Captain Ziyax to work as his XO rather than kill the man. It did his arrogant Iranian crew good to take orders from a Libyan, whom they considered inferior, as well as an infidel who scarcely rated any consideration.

It was Graham’s intention to maintain the tension between them. Besides being a useful means to keep them on their toes, the mix would be interesting over the next ten days or so, before he was gone and they were all dead.

“The first one to find and identify a warship will become senior sonar man,” Graham said.

A dark expression came over the Iranian’s face, but Graham turned and stepped back around the corner into the control room.

Ziyax, who’d been studying their plot at the chart table, looked up. Like everyone else aboard he was tired. None of them had gotten any sleep in at least thirty-six hours. “We’re nearing the cape. How’s it look topside?”

“Busy,” Graham said. “I want tubes one and two loaded with Mark fifty-sevens.”

Ziyax straightened up, and al-Abbas at the ballast panel looked over his shoulder.

“What is our target?” the Libyan sub captain asked.

Graham leaned around the corner. “Are there any large civilian contacts on the way through the strait just ahead of us?”

“Yes, sir. Could be a luxury liner, I’m not sure. But she’s very large. Four props. Bearing dead on our bow, on the same heading, but making twenty knots. Designate target as Sierra one-seven.”

“All Ahead Flank,” Graham ordered.

“Aye, Captain. All Ahead Flank,” Chief of Boat al-Hari repeated the order.

“I want a firing solution on Sierra one-seven,” Graham told Ziyax. “Look smartly now, if you please.”

Ziyax wanted to argue, it was plain on his face, but he hesitated for only a moment. He keyed the ship’s intercom. “Torpedo room, con. Load one and two with Mark five-sevens. Weapons will have the presets momentarily.”

The Russian-made MK-57s were very old, free-running HE antiship warshots that under the best of circumstances couldn’t possibly sink a very large modern ship, which Graham figured Sierra 17 to be. But they could inflict enough damage to create a great deal of confusion on the surface, because no one in their right mind would possibly suspect that a civilian ship had been attacked by a submarine.

“You’re not trying to sink her, are you?” Ziyax asked.

“If I had the proper weapons I would,” Graham replied sharply. “Hit her in the stern. I want to take out her steering pods.”

Ziyax gave Graham a blank look of incomprehension.

“Unless I miss my guess she’ll be the Queen Mary II,” Graham explained. “No rudders, two of her four propellers are mounted on moveable pods for steering. Quite ingenious, actually. She was preparing to leave the eastern Med last week. Just our luck.”

“If we miss, and put a hole in her stern, she could sink.”

“More’s the pity if we don’t miss,” Graham said sharply. The Queen was American-owned but British registry, and therefore in his mind more than fair game.

In broad strokes it was the same discussion he’d had with bin Laden two months ago. Al-Quaida had all but languished since 9/11. Western intelligence agencies were doing too good a job of rounding up or killing some key lieutenants and advisers, so that recruiting for the organization was way down. And most of the new freedom fighters were little better than ignorant thugs, in it for the glory and not for the jihad.

“The infidels have been beset by contentious elections, ongoing battles in their Congress, one scandal after the other, and best of all a plague of natural disasters,” bin Laden said.

“The Old Testament in living color,” Graham replied dryly. They were alone, walking on the Syrian Desert northeast of Damascus, during one of bin Laden’s highly orchestrated visits to their training camps.

“I tolerate your blasphemy only because you are a good soldier for the struggle,” bin Laden said conversationally.

“And I tolerate your religious mumbo jumbo only because you provide me with the means to strike back at the bloody bastards,” Graham retorted. He had no fear of the al-Quaida leader, because he had no fear of dying.

“Then we are in symbiosis,” bin Laden said, stopping and turning to face Graham. “For the moment.”

“So long as I continue to kill the infidel for you.”

“Not for me,” bin Laden corrected. “But yes, so long as you continue to kill the infidel — men, women, children, there are no innocents — anywhere at any time, especially when they least suspect that death is coming for them, you will have my support and my blessing.”

“Fail, and I die?”

Bin Laden shrugged, but said nothing.

Bloody well have to catch me first, Graham thought. And that would not be such an easy task.

“If you please, Captain,” Graham told Ziyax. “We’ll shoot on sonar bearings. She’s too big a target even for an inept crew to miss.”

Ziyax bridled at the new insult, but went over to the weapons console to see about the firing solution: the bearing, angle of elevation, and speed numbers to be dialed into the two torpedoes.

“Captain,” the Libyan sonar operator called out.

Graham stepped around the corner from the control room. “What is it?” “Distant contact, relative bearing three-five-zero, maybe fifteen kilometers, designate it Sierra one-eight.” Ensign Isomil was pressing his earphones close. He looked up. “There. It’s definitely a warship, sir, her sonar went active again.”

Graham snatched a spare headset and plugged it in the console. At first all he could make out was the tremendous whoosh-whoosh of the QM 2’s four big props, which drowned our everything around them. He was about to ask the young Libyan to filter out as much background noise as possible, when he heard the distinctive ping of a distant warship.

It was British. He was sure of it. Everyone’s sonar signals were distinctive. “I’ve got it,” Graham said. The ship had only pinged once and then had stopped. “How often does he do that?”

“Every fifteen seconds or so,” Shihabi said.

“Can you tell if his range or bearing are changing?”

“Stand by, Captain,” the Libyan sonar man said.

“Captain, your weapons are preset and warm,” Ziyax called from the con.

“Make the tubes ready in all respects,” Graham called out. This consisted of flooding the torpedo tubes and opening the outer doors, which made a lot of noise. But with the QM 2 churning up sea, a noise like four 747s at takeoff, there was no chance that the British warship would hear a thing.

“Yes, sir,” Ziyax responded crisply.

Another ping radiated from somewhere ahead, but this time it sounded much louder to Graham. “Closer?”

“Yes, sir,” Isomil said. “She’s heading directly for us.”

Ziyax was suddenly in the corridor at Graham’s shoulder. “Shall we rig for silent running?” he asked.

Graham held his temper in check. “We shall not,” he said. “Are my weapons ready to fire?”

“I thought it best that we hold off,” Ziyax said. He’d heard the sonar man’s report.

“Why is that, Captain?” Graham asked loudly enough so that everyone in sonar and in the control room could hear him.

“There is an ASW warship out there, obviously looking for us.”

“That’s correct,” Graham said. “What do you suppose their sonar operators are picking up?”

Ziyax opened his mouth to speak, but then glanced at the waterfall display on the Feniks sonar set tracking the QM 2. The signal was overwhelmingly solid. He turned back to Graham. “Sorry,” he mumbled.

“Sorry about what, Captain?” Graham asked tightly. “Speak up, so everyone can hear you.”

“I was wrong, and you were right. We are invisible behind the big passenger liner.”

“You are relieved of duty, Captain,” Graham ordered. “Wait for me in the wardroom, I’ll be with you shortly.”

Ziyax turned without another word and went aft.

“Assam!” Graham shouted.

“Yes, Captain,” Assam al-Abbas replied.

“Take the con.”

“Yes, sir,” al-Abbas said.

Graham turned back to Isomil. “You’re chief sonar man as of this moment. Don’t let me down.”

“No, sir,” the young Libyan ensign answered crisply.

FIFTY-FIVE

Fifteen kilometers due west, the Broadsword Class British ASW frigate Cumberland was heading into the Strait of Gibraltar. She was on the alpha leg of her patrol station, which was meant to ensure a heads-up for anything emerging from the Mediterranean that might pose a possible threat to the United Kingdom or NATO. Her area of patrol took her endlessly back and forth through the strait fifty kilometers east of Gibraltar, then back out into the Atlantic fifty kilometers beyond Cape Spartel.

It was, the Cumberland’s skipper, Lieutenant Commander Willie Townsend thought, nearly as boring an assignment as he imagined being the captain of a nuclear missile submarine would be. Lying on the bottom of the ocean for weeks on end with nothing to do but play missile drills for a war that would never happen, and with no chance of getting out on deck for an occasional breath of fresh air, had to be nothing short of frustrating.

The one advantage of surface operations was the occasional sight of something really spectacular, such as the magnificent QM 2, which they had passed port-to-port with whistles a half hour ago. The luxury liner, which was two and a half times Cumberland’s 430 feet on deck, had been all ablaze with lights, and although it was well after 2200 hours, Townsend had been certain he’d heard music and laughter coming from the grand lady. She had finished her Mediterranean cruise and was heading back to Liverpool to take on passengers for her Atlantic crossing to New York.

“Bridge, sonar.”

Townsend answered the ship’s intercom. “This is the captain.”

“I’m picking up a definite bogey, sir. Computer says it’s probably a Foxtrot.”

Earlier this evening when they’d first started their inbound track, sonar thought it may have picked up a very weak target on passive coming out of the strait, and Townsend had authorized an active sonar search. By then however the Queen was making so much racket that finding anything was impossible, and they’d secured the search. Once they were past and in clean water, they’d deployed their very sensitive Plessy COMTASS towed array.

“Who the hell is patrolling Foxtrots these days?” Townsend asked his XO, Lieutenant Howard Granger.

“The Libyans, I’d suspect,” Granger replied. He was the intellectual among the officers. The crew wanted him to try out for the American television show Jeopardy! “They still have four of the boats in service.”

“What’s he doing?” Townsend asked the sonar officer.

“He’s turned southwest, Captain, and it sounds as if he’s putting his foot in it.”

“Very well, he’s not our problem. But I want you to keep track of him for as long as possible. If he turns north, I want to know.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Should we call this one in?” Granger asked.

“We’d best do it,” Townsend said. “Heaven’s only knows what the Libyans are doing so far from home. But it’s probably not good.”

Charlie Breamer was just getting set to turn in for the night after a long, contentious day, when his bedside telephone rang. He’d gotten the ROV pictures of the Distal Volente lying on the bottom where the Foxtrot should have been from Bruce Simonetti before dinner, but he’d had to sit on them. The admiral had left for the day, and his instructions had been explicit: He was not to be disturbed for anything other than an all-out emergency. And God help the son of a bitch whose idea of what constituted an emergency was different than the admiral’s.

“Breamer,” he answered, and his wife stirred but didn’t awaken. He glanced at the nightstand clock. It was one minute after midnight.

“Tony Parker, here. Sorry to disturb you at such a filthy hour.” Commander Parker was chief of operations for the British arm of NATO’s STANAVFORLANT — Standing Naval Forces Atlantic. He and Breamer were old friends, having participated in numerous NATO exercises all through the Cold War years.

“Good evening, Tony, what’s keeping you up so late?” Breamer asked. He was sure that whatever the reason for Parker’s call, it wasn’t social.

“I think we’ve found that wreck your people were banging around north of Benghazi looking for.”

“What boat’s that?”

“The Foxtrot that the Libyans are claiming they scuttled.”

“I hadn’t heard that one,” Breamer said. In fact, he’d gotten that bit of information from Russell Sterling in Tunis who’d gotten it from the CIA a full hour before the same message had arrived on his desk.

“I understand that you have to protect your sources and all that, especially the way your boss thinks about Langley. But listen, Charlie, one of our frigates spotted a submerged Foxtrot sneaking out of the strait into the open Atlantic not more than an hour ago.”

Breamer’s grip on the phone tightened. “Are you guys tracking her?”

“Out of our AO. Once she cleared the cape, she headed southwest apparently in a big hurry.” Parker hesitated. “We have no idea what the Libyans are doing out of the Med, but since they’re heading to your side of the pond we thought you’d like the heads-up.”

“You say she’s headed southwest?” Breamer asked.

“Yes, maybe South America,” Parker confirmed. “But that boat does have rudder.”

It was a few minutes after one in the morning local when Sterling took the call from Gaeta in his office, where he had been looking at the grainy photographs of the DistalVolente he’d received earlier this evening. He’d not been able to sleep worrying about Graham breaking out into the Atlantic with a submarine, and his boss’s refusal to pass a threat assessment along to Langley.

In fact, Ransom had even refused to send the message even after they’d received a twixt from Langley informing all relevant stations that the Libyans had announced they’d scuttled a surplus Foxtrot. Unless it could be conclusively proven otherwise, he wasn’t going out on a limb.

“Good heavens, Russell, do you have any notion what sort of a fright that would cause? Homeland Security would be over the moon.” Ransom had shaken his head. “Before we raise the red flag we will make dead certain we have the facts. All the facts.”

Hopper had been no help, either, and had left early for a party at the Russian embassy where he was working an FSO he suspected was a junior intelligence officer.

“Your Foxtrot’s in the Atlantic,” Breamer said.

“What happened?”

“We got it from a British ASW frigate patrolling the strait. Your Captain Graham followed the QM 2 out, and it wasn’t until the last minute that she was detected. But by then the boat was out of the Brit’s area of operations, so her skipper logged the contact. Fortunately he called it home, and the word was passed along to us a few minutes ago.”

“I thought your people were going to watch out for us?” Sterling asked. In the old days this would have been called a cluster fuck, but then as now these kinds of screwups usually started from the top.

“Nelson wouldn’t budge,” Breamer said. “No proof.”

“I have the same problem here.”

“I’ll send you a hard copy,” Breamer offered. “But it might be a moot point. The Brits said the sub was heading southwest. They figured South America. They’ve put their Atlantic Fleet on low alert, though Christ only knows what they think the Libyan navy might want with the Falklands is beyond understanding.”

“You didn’t tell them about Graham?” Sterling said. “He was one of their own, after all.”

“I’ll be in enough shit if it comes out I called you,” Breamer said. “I’ll leave the rest of it to Washington. Anyway, it’ll take your Foxtrot ten days or more to make it across. So at least time is on our side.”

“Okay, Charlie, thanks for the heads-up. I owe you one.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I don’t know, yet,” Sterling said. “But I’m not going to sit on it.”

“Good luck,” Breamer said.

“Yeah thanks, you too.”

Rencke was on the verge of admitting failure. There were only three missing or unaccounted for Kilo submarines, although his preliminary sources were sure that all three boats had been cut up for scrap ten years ago. It was now simply a matter of verification.

Yet he couldn’t understand what he’d done wrong. Something like this had never happened to him. Not even close. And what was so frustrating was that he knew he was right about everything else. Rupert Graham was the star witness in the case for an al-Quaida submarine mission.

He was at his desk in computer country, racking his brains, all of his screens showing pale lavender, when an incoming call on an outside line lit up in the corner of one of his monitors. His caller ID and search program locked onto the number in less than a half second, and he sat up.

He answered on the second ring. “Commander Daniel Monroe, good evening,” he said, careful to keep the excitement out of his voice. “How did the Office of Naval Investigation Middle East get this number?”

Monroe hesitated for just a moment. “It wasn’t easy, Mr. Rencke. But the CIA’s not the only outfit in town with resources.”

“Tell me you’re not calling about Gitmo,” Rencke said.

“Sir?”

“Then it must be Unterseeboot.”

“Sir, I’m not following you—” Monroe said, but then he stopped. “You mean a submarine? Yes, sir.”

“Bingo,” Rencke said softly. “What kind of a submarine? Not a Kilo?”

“No, sir. She’s a Foxtrot. The Libyans reported they’d scuttled one of their boats, but she made it through the Strait of Gibraltar about two hours ago.”

Rencke brought up a search algorithm for the billions of bytes of data that had come into the Building in the past twenty-four hours. Almost immediately he came up with the announcement that the Libyan government had filed with the UN Security Council early this morning.

He had completely blown it.

“Bad dog, bad, bad dog,” he muttered. “Where was she headed, Commander Daniel Monroe, and why did you call me with the glad tidings? What makes you think that I care?”

“Sir, a friend of mine works as the military attaché at our embassy in Tunis. He found out about the boat, but the chief of station there is dragging his feet, and Sixth Fleet wasn’t interested. It was a British warship on patrol in the strait that stumbled across the Libyan sub.”

“Why’d you call me?” Rencke pressed. He brought up Russell Sterling’s file. The man had been a sub driver in a previous life.

“Not you specifically, sir. But he wanted me to pass along this information, plus a name, to someone in the CIA who might be able to do something. And you have the reputation, sir.”

Rencke wanted to laugh, but he couldn’t. He’d missed so friggin’ much. He was so stupid. “Plus a name,” he said. “Let me guess. Rupert Graham?”

The line was silent for a long moment. When Commander Monroe came back, he sounded subdued. “Jesus Christ,” he said softly.

“Nope. He was the guy who walked on the water, ours sails under the water,” Rencke said. “Did the British do a track? Do they know where he was heading?”

“Southwest, sir.”

“Thank you,” Rencke said. “And thank your old Annapolis pal, Russell Sterling.”

He broke the connection, and allowed his mind to go completely blank for a second or two, wiping the slate clean, as if he were rebooting a computer. When he focused again, he began typing, his fingers flying over the keyboard, his frizzy red hair pointing in every direction as if he were a mad prodigy pounding a complex melody on a concert grand piano.

FIFTY-SIX

With a population of ten million and growing, Pakistan’s principal seaport was considered to be one of the most dangerous cities on the planet. More murders, kidnappings, rapes, beatings, thefts, and incidents of street crime and gang violence happened here 24/7 than anywhere else. And only in postwar Baghdad had there been more suicide bombings than in Karachi.

It was bin Laden and al-Quaida. President Musharraf ’s government publicly opposed the terrorists so that it could continue to receive much-needed financial aid from the United States, while an overwhelming majority of the people supported the jihad.

Downtown was bright and modern; tall steel and glass skyscrapers rose from wide boulevards such as M. A. Jinnah Road, named after the father of modern Pakistan, and Raja Ghazanarfar Street, which passed the Saddar Bazaar, the city’s main and most colorful shopping center.

But elsewhere, Karachi was mostly a city of incredibly filthy and dangerous slums that coexisted with mosques of delicacy and beauty and museums of exquisite Islamic antiquity. Along the harbor’s West Wharf with its fishing fleets, textile and carpet manufacturers and exporters, tanneries and leather works, was the worst slum of all, known as Fish Harbor.

From here, in the middle of cardboard and tarpaper shacks, jumbled rows of rusted-out shipping containers, and the occasional compound of hovels protected behind tall razor-wire-topped concrete block walls, the downtown lights cast an eerie otherworldly glow.

McGarvey, driving a small, dark Fiat he’d rented through the hotel concierge, pulled up and parked in the deeper shadows behind a large warehouse, locked up and dark for the night. He was below the rail line and Mauripur Road, which was the main truck thoroughfare for the commercial district. It was past midnight, and from where he sat, wishing for the first time in a long while that he hadn’t quit smoking, he had a clear sightline to a walled compound at the end of the filthy street.

He picked up his sat phone tracker from the seat beside him, and entered three twos and then the pound key. It was the code for the microscopic GPS chip implanted in al-Turabi. Within a second or two the nearest Keyhole satellite picked up the signal and fixed its location within a couple of meters. Overlaid on the sat phone’s screen was an electronic street map covering an area two hundred meters on a side. The red dot showing al-Turabi’s current location was inside the compound at the end of the block.

It was difficult to believe that bin Laden would actually take refuge in a place like this. But then the man had lived in caves in Afghanistan that were nothing from the outside, while inside they were reasonably well heated and ventilated and more or less comfortable. If this compound were a semipermanent home for the Saudi billionaire, it could very well be fitted out in luxury.

He rolled down the window and held his breath for a long moment to listen. In the far distance there was a siren, but here except for the muffled sound of an electric motor running — perhaps a generator or an air conditioner — the night was almost perfectly still.

Something was wrong.

Just beyond the compound, an open field sloped up to a reinforced embankment on which was one of the railroad spurs that serviced a long line of sprawling brick warehouses. The field was jammed with shacks and shipping containers, home to at least five hundred families, possibly more. A ditch serving as an open sewer ran down the slope and emptied onto the paved road in front of the compound. A thin stream of sewage trickled to a wide iron grate and disappeared, probably to end up emptying directly into the harbor about three blocks away.

There was the stench of a squatters’ slum, but there were no lights, no sounds, no movement. It was as if the entire village within the city had been deserted.

Or as if the people were cowering in their hovels, afraid of something. McGarvey switched off the Fiat’s engine, but before he got out he removed the lens from the dome light and took out the bulb. He pocketed the car keys and the GPS tracker, then screwed the silencer on the threaded muzzle of his Walther PPK.

He had changed to dark sneakers, black jeans, and a lightweight dark pullover before he’d left the hotel, and now, keeping to the shadows as he worked his way down the street, he was nearly invisible.

Gloria showing up in Karachi had come as an unpleasant surprise that nagged at him like a dull toothache. She had no idea how badly she had jeopardized the mission. The moment he’d seen her at the hotel, he’d almost decided on the spot to back away, return to Washington, and start the search for bin Laden all over again.

Damned near every woman who’d ever been involved with him had gotten herself killed sooner or later. They’d all thought that they were in love with him, while none of them had the faintest idea what that might mean in terms of their own safety.

Even Gloria, who was a trained field officer, had no idea what she had gotten herself into, or the danger she posed. McGarvey no longer had an absolute freedom of movement. No matter what happened now he was bound to look out for her; he was handicapped because of her and he didn’t like it.

But the prize he’d come for was worth everything. If he could get next to bin Laden for even one moment it would be enough. The man would die. And with him would die the one question for which McGarvey had never gotten a satisfactory answer. Why?

He’d come face-to-face with the man several years ago in Afghanistan, and although they’d spoken the same language, spoken about the same issues, McGarvey had not been able to get a real handle on the man.

Bin Laden wasn’t some West Bank fanatic, or a religious zealot, or a man with a grudge against the West, which made understanding him all but impossible. The CIA had supported him and his mujahideen in the Afghan war against the Russians. But near the end of that struggle, it was as if a switch had flipped inside bin Laden’s head. One day he was America’s ally and the next we had become Satan, and he had declared a jihad not only against the West, but against Israel and anyone who supported her, and against the members of the Saudi royal family who had sold their people and Islam to the West for the sake of oil without sharing the money with al-Quaida.

There are no innocents in this struggle, he’d told McGarvey. Infidels, men, women, children, it did not matter. They would all die.

At the end of the warehouse, McGarvey held up for a moment. Across from an open area that led back to the loading docks, the burned-out wrecks of two cars had been pushed off the side of the road, and were piled in a tangled heap. Twenty meters farther, the wall of the compound rose five meters from the street, the coils of razor wire at the top glinting in the stray light. A set of sturdy-looking double doors, wide enough to admit a car or even a small truck, seemed to be the only way into the compound from this side. From where he stood, he could just make out the roofs of three buildings behind the wall, on one of which was a small satellite dish. Electric wires snaked down from a power pole at the corner.

He looked back the way he had come, and then searched the slum village that covered the sloping field. The stench of human waste was nearly overpowering, but there was no noise, and the silence raised the hairs on the back of his neck.

Taking the GPS tracker out of his pocket, he keyed the three twos and the pound symbol. Within a couple of seconds the display showed al-Turabi’s signal still inside the compound.

It did not necessarily mean that bin Laden was here. But al-Turabi was a top lieutenant, and this is where he had come as soon as he had escaped from Camp Delta.

If bin Laden wasn’t here, he was probably very close, and al-Turabi was the key to finding him.

McGarvey pocketed the GPS tracker, checked his pistol, and then leaned up against the brick wall to wait for an opportunity to get inside the compound to present itself to him.

Gloria Ibenez was beside herself with worry. She stood at the window of the tenth-floor suite, looking down at the modern city, its skyscrapers lit in mosaic patterns. Somewhere below a siren was wailing, and twenty minutes ago she’d thought she’d heard gunfire somewhere in the distance.

She had promised Kirk that she would not leave the room until morning. If he hadn’t returned by then she was to go immediately to the U.S. Consulate General on Abdullah Haroon Road, which was just a few blocks from the hotel. Dave Coddington, the CIA chief of station there, would be able to help her. If McGarvey had been successful in killing bin Laden, the backlash would be immediate and very big. No American in Pakistan would be safe.

Under no circumstances was she to use the telephone. The opposition would almost certainly be monitoring calls from the hotel, and if they found out that she was alone and vulnerable she would become a target.

“You’re here, and there’s nothing I can do about it now,” he’d told her, his tone harsh. “If we’re to have a chance of surviving, you need to keep a low profile.”

She nodded her understanding, loving, his eyes and the set of his mouth even when he was angry.

And here and now, more than five thousand miles from home, she could put the notion of McGarvey’s wife in a back compartment of her head. She didn’t have to think about the other woman in Kirk’s life; it was only her waiting for him in his hotel room, only her who had come to Pakistan to help him, only her who cared enough to be at his side, and only her who truly understood what he was, and loved him all the more for it.

A telephone burred softly, bringing Gloria out of her thoughts. She turned away from the window as the phone rang again. It was McGarvey’s satellite phone in his overnight bag in the closet.

She got to it on the fourth ring. “Yes?”

“Oh wow, Gloria,” Rencke gushed. “Where’s Mac?”

“He’s going after the man, but I don’t know where that is. He told me to stay here.”

“Why are you in Karachi? How’d you get there?”

“I booked a flight with my own money,” she said defiantly. “I wanted to help.”

There was no telling how Kirk would react when he found out that she lied about Otto’s help. But she would cross that bridge when she came to it. “Is there something wrong?”

Rencke didn’t answer at first.

“Otto?” she prompted. She was becoming alarmed.

“He shoulda taken the phone with him,” Rencke said distantly, as if he were doing something else while thinking out loud. “But I shoulda seen it before. Bad dog, bad dog.”

“For God’s sake, tell me what’s wrong.”

“He’s running into a trap,” Rencke told her breathlessly. “The GPS chip hasn’t moved in thirty-six hours. Not one meter. Al-Turabi is probably dead, and they might know about the chip somehow.”

“Where is he?” Gloria demanded.

“Fish Harbor. I’ll send the map to your sat phone display. But you gotta stop him.”

Gloria was putting on her sneakers, the phone cradled under her chin. “We’ll have to get out of Karachi,” she told Rencke. “If they’ve set a trap for him, it means they know why he’s here. Even if I can get to him before he tries to make the hit there’s no place he’d be safe in Pakistan.”

“I’m working on it,” Rencke said. “But keep this phone with you.” He had another thought. “Are you armed? Do you have a weapon?”

“No,” Gloria said tightly.

“Just get him outta there,” Rencke said.

The map came up on the sat phone’s display. She saved it, broke the connection, then picked up the hotel phone and called the front desk.

“Good evening, Mrs. McGarvey,” the clerk answered pleasantly.

“I need a car out front right now,” Gloria said.

“Madam, at this hour that will be difficult—”

“Now!” Gloria shrilled, and she slammed the phone down.

She hurriedly went through McGarvey’s luggage, finding his kit of money and passports, but no weapons, or anything else that couldn’t be left behind. If she could get to him in time, and pull him out of Fish Harbor, they would not be returning to the hotel, and she didn’t want to leave anything incriminating behind.

The lobby was practically deserted at this hour. Two women in maid’s uniforms were emptying ashtrays, cleaning tables, and polishing furniture and accessories, while an old man vacuumed the large Persian carpets. There were no hotel guests except for Gloria, who went directly across to the registration counter, where a young man in a smart blue blazer was just getting off the phone.

“Did you get me a car?” Gloria demanded.

“Yes, of course, Mrs. McGarvey. It will be delivered in front very soon. It is coming from the airport.”

“Fine,” Gloria said. She turned on her heel and stormed across the lobby to the broad automatic doors. There was no bellman on duty this late, and very little traffic on the street. The night air was warm and humid with a mix of unusual odors. Maybe frying fish, she thought, but rancid.

She had been stupid to let him go on his own without backup. It was one of the lessons they’d drummed into her head at the Farm. In these types of operations rely on your partner, and make sure that he can rely on you. Be there.

At the very least she should have arranged for another car and followed him. She’d lost a husband, and then a partner because she hadn’t kept her eye on the ball. She had failed both of them. She wasn’t about to fail again.

A dark blue battered Toyota van came up the street at a high rate of speed and at the last minute swerved into the hotel’s driveway. For an insane second Gloria thought that it was what the stupid hotel clerk had rented for her, but then she realized that she was probably in trouble and she stepped back.

The driver screeched to a halt, the side door crashed open, and three men, balaclavas covering their faces, leaped out and rushed her.

She had a split instant to see that only one of the three was armed, a Kalashnikov held tightly against his chest, and make a decision. They were here to kidnap her, not kill her, which gave her the momentary advantage.

She moved away from the man on her right, and stepped directly toward the armed kidnapper, who’d expected her to try to run away, not attack.

He started to bring his rifle around, but Gloria stiff-armed him to the throat with her fist, driving him backwards, nearly off his feet, and crushing his windpipe.

The man on her left spun around and grabbed her by the neck, pulling her back. But she snatched the rifle and swung the butt stock under her arm, connecting solidly with the kidnapper’s ribs. He released his hold and fell to his knees.

The third man had pulled up short and was reaching in his jacket, when Gloria brought the rifle around, switched the safety catch off, and brought her finger to the trigger.

“Don’t,” she warned.

He yanked what might have been a boxy Glock pistol out of his jacket and started to aim it at Gloria, when she pulled off a single round, hitting him in the middle of the chest, the rifle bucking strongly in her arms, the noise shockingly loud under the hotel driveway canopy.

The kidnapper was slammed backwards off his feet, and even before he hit the pavement Gloria turned toward the van. She reached the open door in a couple of steps at the same time the driver realized that the kidnapping had failed, and he turned back to the wheel to drive away.

“Get out of the van!” Gloria screeched.

The driver looked over his shoulder, directly into the muzzle of the AK-47 Gloria was pointing at him.

“Get out of the van!” Gloria shouted again. “Now!”

The driver shoved open his door, leaped out of the van, and headed down the long driveway in a dead run.

Before he reached the street, Gloria had climbed inside the van, scrambled up to the driver’s seat, and laid the Kalashnikov on the hump between the seats. She slammed the Toyota in gear and burned rubber down the driveway and out to the street, passing the frightened driver who looked over his shoulder as she raced by.

I’m on my way, darling, Gloria thought, as she turned the corner at the end of the block and headed toward Fish Harbor.

FIFTY-SEVEN

It was after two in the afternoon in Washington when Dick Adkins arrived at the White House. After he signed in, and his attaché case was scanned, he was escorted back to the Oval Office by the president’s chief of staff, Cal Beckett.

“Has Joe Puckett gotten here yet?” Adkins asked. Four-star Admiral Joseph Puckett, Jr., was the new chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

“Five minutes ago, and he wants to know what in damnation — his words — the CIA is playing at now, or something to that effect,” Beckett said. He was a serious no-nonsense businessman who, before President Haynes had tapped him for White House duty, had been the CEO of IBM.

“Puckett’s always damning something, but he’s going to be even less happy when he and the president hear what I have to say.”

“Have you guys found the submarine?”

“Yes,” Adkins said. “And it gets worse.”

“Bad timing,” Beckett remarked sourly. “Looks like his energy bill is going down in flames.”

“Not a good day to be president,” Adkins said.

The president, his suit coat off, was perched against his desk talking to his national security adviser, Dennis Berndt, and the admiral, who was a narrow-faced pale man with thinning white hair whose chest was practically covered with ribbons, including the Medal of Honor. None of the three men seemed happy or comfortable.

“Here he is, Mr. President,” Beckett said.

“Leave us,” Haynes told his chief of staff, who withdrew and closed the door.

The topic on the table had nothing to do with White House staffing or politics, which were Beckett’s purview. Adkins had argued from the start to keep the need-to-know list at the absolute minimum, which had been McGarvey’s suggestion, to guard against the media stumbling across the story. What Americans didn’t need right now was something else to panic them. But he was surprised that the president had excluded his chief of staff, who was a friend and trusted adviser.

“You’ve found the submarine?” Haynes asked.

“Yes, sir.”

“Good,” the president said. “Now explain it to the admiral, because the ball’s going to be in his court.”

“Yes, sir,” Adkins said. He set his attaché case down, opened it, and withdrew a moderately thick briefing book, which he handed to the president. “This is everything as of noon. As you’ll see, the situation has become somewhat more complex and urgent in the past twenty-four hours.”

The president laid the briefing book behind him on the desk. “I’ll look over the details later. For now bring us up to date, Dick. What’s the CIA found out?”

“Al-Quaida has managed to get its hands on a submarine, a crew of Iranian ex-navy, we think, and an experienced captain,” Adkins said, directing his remarks to Admiral Puckett.

“It’s the goddamned Russians and their Kilo boats,” Puckett said. “And I suppose the sub driver is a Russkie too.”

“It’s a Libyan boat, actually,” Adkins said. “A Foxtrot. And the captain is a Perisher-trained Brit by the name of Rupert Graham.”

The president, who had been contemplative, was angry all of a sudden. “That lying bastard Quaddafi,” he said. “Are you sure about this, Dick?”

“Yes, sir,” Adkins replied. He quickly brought them up to date on the Indonesian captain’s story about Graham, the sinking of the Distal Volente, and the Sixth Fleet’s confirmation that the freighter was at the bottom of the Mediterranean. “A British NATO frigate tracked a Foxtrot through the Strait of Gibraltar and out into the open Atlantic a few hours ago, then lost her.”

“Why the hell didn’t they follow her?” Haynes demanded.

“Not their area of operations, Mr. President,” Puckett responded. “Did they get a course?”

“Southwest,” Adkins said. “South America, perhaps.”

“The Panama Canal again,” Berndt spoke up for the first time. “They’re persistent. But it won’t be so easy for them this time to get into the locks to do any damage. They’ll have to run on the surface.”

“What about weapons?” Puckett asked.

“At this point we have no idea,” Adkins admitted. “We have some assets on the ground in Tripoli and at Ra’s al Hilal, one of their major naval installations, but it’s not easy to recruit the right people.”

“Your vetting standards for Arab speakers are too tough,” Puckett said. “You’re tossing out the baby with the bathwater.”

“We’ve been burned before, Admiral,” Adkins observed dryly. “But for now the situation is what it is.”

Puckett shook his head. “At least time is on our side. It’ll take them ten days, maybe longer, to get within striking range of the canal, or”—he glanced at the president—“our eastern seaboard.”

“What can we do in the meantime?” Haynes asked.

“Look for him in the open Atlantic, but that’ll be worse than finding a bug on a gnat’s ass. In the meantime we’ll set up a blockade off Limón Bay in case he’s trying for the canal again.”

“What about our coast?” Berndt asked.

Puckett shrugged, a bleak expression crossing his narrow features. “We can cover a few likely targets, but that’s about it,” he said. “The big problem will be his weapons load. If his boat has been retrofitted he could stand off a couple hundred klicks and fire the Russian Novator Club cruise missile. The weapon was designed as an antiship load, but it could do an appreciable amount of damage to the locks, or anything else, for that matter.”

“How about nukes?” Adkins asked. It had been one of Rencke’s chief concerns.

“There’re all sorts of nasty weapons that can be fired from a standard five-hundred-thirty-three-millimeter torpedo tube,” Puckett answered. “The Novator carries a four-hundred-fifty-kilogram payload. Usually high explosives. But that weapon can carry four hundred fifty kilos of just about anything.” He turned back to the president. “That’s up to the CIA, to find out what weapons the Libyans have got their hands on.”

Haynes looked to Adkins.

“We’re working on it, Mr. President,” Adkins said.

“What’s your best guess?”

Three days ago Rencke had voiced a vague concern that if Saddam Hussein had in actuality come up with nuclear weapons, either by Iraqi design and construction, or from the Russians, he might have spirited them out of the country before the U.S.-led invasion. If they had been Russian, then Putin would definitely have arranged for help getting them out of Iraq, and Libya was a possible destination.

But Adkins was not ready to stick his neck out that far. Not for this or any other president.

He shook his head. “We’re working on it,” he said.

“Where’s McGarvey?” the president asked.

Adkins glanced over at Puckett. This was one bit of information that no one in this room needed to know. “I’d rather not say, Mr. President,” Adkins replied. It was a matter of plausible deniability for the White House no matter what happened in Pakistan. The president and Berndt understood this.

“If he can be recalled, do it,” the president instructed Adkins. He turned to Puckett. “I want our armed forces to find and kill that submarine before it reaches this side of the Atlantic, if that’s at all possible. In the meantime I’m giving Kirk McGarvey carte blanche for the possibilities we can’t foresee or handle. If he comes to you I want him given whatever he asks for.”

It was obvious that Puckett wanted to object, but he nodded. “Of course, Mr. President.”

Crossing the Key Bridge to the Parkway, Adkins got on his encrypted phone to Otto Rencke. “Any word from Mac?”

“None. But Gloria Ibenez followed him to Karachi.”

“What?” Adkins demanded, coming half off his seat in the back of the armored Cadillac limousine.

“She’s on her own, and it’s just as well she’s over there, because Mac could be heading into a trap.”

“Tell me,” Adkins said, a tight knot forming in his stomach. He could think of any number of ways for this entire operation to go south in a heartbeat. No one would come out of it clean, and worst of all al-Quaida’s attack would have a much better-than-even chance of succeeding if Mac were to go down. A lot of Americans would lose their lives, and he wasn’t at all sure if the nation could handle another massive blow.

Rencke hurriedly explained what was happening in Karachi, especially the part about al-Turabi’s GPS chip that hadn’t moved in a day and a half. “Gloria’s on her way to Fish Harbor to pull him out.”

“What then?”

“We’ll get them out of Pakistan,” Rencke said. “I’m working on that part now. But afterwards, I don’t know.”

“The president wants him back to help stop Graham,” Adkins said. “The navy’s agreed to blockade Limón Bay, but I’ve got a very bad feeling that we’re missing something.”

“Me too,” Rencke said, and he abruptly broke the connection.

FIFTY-EIGHT

In the half hour that McGarvey had been watching from the shadows he’d learned that the compound was not deserted and that it was being seriously guarded. Whoever was inside had taken an extreme interest in security that went beyond the locked gate, and the razor-wire-topped wall.

The front of the enclave ran for fifty or sixty meters along the paved street before it disappeared around the corner at the end of the block to the west, and around back halfway up the hill toward the railroad embankment to the east. Every fifteen or twenty meters a closed-circuit television camera was perched in front of the coils of razor wire. At the nearest corner, a pair of insulators, each the size of a liter bottle, led thick electrical wires to a steel mesh that covered the stuccoed wall. And at each corner, powerful spotlights, dark at the moment, were perched well above the wall on aluminum stanchions.

Ten minutes ago, a pair of guards dressed in camos had appeared at the top of the wall, only their heads and shoulders visible as they headed away from each other to the opposite sides of the compound. When they reached the corners they turned and came back to meet at the gate. One of them said something, and the other one laughed.

McGarvey raised his pistol and steadied his hand against the corner of the brick warehouse to lead the guard to the left. “Bang,” he said softly in the darkness. He switched aim to the other roof guard. “Bang.”

The shots were at the extreme range for his pistol, but not impossible.

The guards turned and marched away, but this time they disappeared around the corners, apparently to check the rear of the compound.

A few minutes later they were back above the main gate, where they exchanged a few words, though McGarvey couldn’t make out what they were saying, and headed away again.

After they were gone the main gate opened and a guard, also dressed in camos, a Kalashnikov slung muzzle-down over his shoulder, stepped out into the street and lit a cigarette.

McGarvey had found a way inside, but only if the man at the gate didn’t go back inside before the two wall guards returned. If he could take out all three of them, he could get inside and find al-Turabi.

After that it was anyone’s guess what might go down. But if bin Laden’s people didn’t know that the enemy had penetrated the wall and was inside the compound — even if it was for only a few minutes — the advantage would be McGarvey’s. He could do a lot of damage in that span of time.

Almost as if on cue the two wall guards appeared at the corners and started toward the gate.

McGarvey switched the safety catch to the off position and, steadying his arm against the corner of the building, took aim on the man to the east who would get to the gate first. But suddenly it all felt wrong. Some inner instinct of his was sending an insistent, nagging alarm bell at the back of his head.

He looked up from his gun sight, and studied the situation at the end of the block — the entire situation, his attention lingering on the three men who would be in firing range in a few seconds.

In a near perfect firing situation for one man coming to breach the walls.

Too perfect.

McGarvey held perfectly still, not moving a muscle as the wall guards approached the gate. Then he had it. The closed-circuit television cameras had all turned toward the street in front of the gate. Someone inside the compound was watching, waiting to send an army pouring out to spring the trap. A lone attacker wouldn’t have a chance of survival. It would be over in a matter of seconds.

He eased back behind the building. Bin Laden’s people had known that he’d come to Karachi. And they must have guessed why he’d come. But they had no way of knowing that he would be here this evening, unless they’d discovered the GPS tracker in al-Turabi’s body.

Rencke had warned that it was possible, though extremely unlikely, that bin Laden’s people would have a receiver sensitive enough to pick up the signal, or even have a suspicion that such a thing was possible.

But it was even less likely in McGarvey’s estimation that there was a leak inside the CIA; a direct link somehow to bin Laden. There just weren’t that many people in the Building who knew that McGarvey had taken the nanotechnology to Camp Delta, and no reason for any of them to become traitors.

There was no one with a grudge against the United States.

Except for one possibility that McGarvey wanted to reject the instant it came into his head.

He peered around the corner of the warehouse again. The wall guards had reached the gate, and they were evidently talking to the man on the street, because he was looking up at them.

They should have turned by now and started their round along the wall. Unless they were waiting for the attack to come. Unless they’d been telephoned from the hotel that someone was coming.

For a crazy instant in time Gloria Ibenez’s face flashed into his mind’s eye. He did not want to think that she had betrayed him, yet he found it next to impossible to believe that she could have fallen in love with him so soon and so completely unless it was a setup. She was from a completely different world, and he was old enough to be her father. It made no sense to him.

He thought of Marta and Liese and Jacqueline, three women who had no business falling in love with him. Yet they had. Two of them had lost their lives because of their involvement with him, and the third — Liese Fuelm — had very nearly been killed in Switzerland just last year.

All of them had been traitors to their countries, in one way or another, but none of them had betrayed him.

Headlights flashed in the darkness at the end of the block. The guards on the wall and at the gate turned around, bringing their weapons up.

Seconds later a dark van came around the corner and raced directly toward where McGarvey was crouched against the warehouse wall. He moved farther back into the shadows, and brought his pistol to bear on the rapidly approaching van.

If bin Laden’s people had already spotted him, they might just as well have sent an attack to his rear, hoping to catch him in a cross fire. He had no place to go. His only option at this point was to take the van out of play and make it back to his car.

He would go for the driver first, and then the engine.

The van’s headlights briefly illuminated the corner where McGarvey was hiding. He slipped the Walther’s safety catch to the off position and started to pull the trigger, when the headlights suddenly went out, plunging the street back into darkness.

For just a second McGarvey couldn’t make out who was behind the wheel, even though the van was less than ten meters away. But then the interior light came on for just a second, long enough for him to recognize that it was Gloria.

She locked up the brakes and with squealing tires the van slid at an angle down the street.

McGarvey stepped around the corner as the wall guards and the man on the street were taking aim at the van.

“Kirk, it’s me!” Gloria shouted at him.

Once again steadying his arm against the building, McGarvey began firing, first toward the wall guards, knocking one of them down with his second shot, and sending the second ducking out of sight.

The guard on the street opened fire with his AK-47, the bullets ricocheting off the pavement as he walked his aim toward McGarvey’s position.

Switching targets, McGarvey methodically fired three shots, the second and third catching the guard in the torso and sending him staggering back against the wall.

He raised his sights in time to spot the second wall guard appear behind the razor wire, and he fired three more shots, sending the guard diving for safety again.

The van was sideways in the street where it had screeched to a halt. He ran across to it and Gloria handed the Kalashnikov out the window to him. “I have to turn around,” she told him.

McGarvey stuffed his pistol in his belt, stepped clear of the van, and sprayed the open gate and the wall above it, as Gloria did a rapid U-turn, smoke pouring off the tires.

“Come on, Kirk!” Gloria shouted. “It’s a trap! They knew you were coming!”

For a moment McGarvey didn’t want to believe it. If Gloria hadn’t betrayed him, who else in the Building had? Unless it was that pissant Weiss in Gitmo. But the ONI officer had no way of knowing about the nano-GPS tracker.

The only other explanation was that they had once again underestimated the technical abilities of bin Laden as they had in September of 2001. The architects of the World Trade Center towers had never imagined the buildings collapsing because of a strike by airplanes. But al-Quaida’s engineers had.

McGarvey emptied the AK-47’s magazine, tossed the weapon aside, and leaped into the back of the van. Gloria immediately floored the accelerator and they careened down the darkened street, sliding nearly out of control around the corner before anyone inside the compound could react.

“Are we clear?” Gloria demanded.

“We’re clear,” McGarvey told her. He shoved the service door shut, and climbed up front into the passenger seat.

They crossed the main railroad line, and headed to the city’s center away from the slums. “Are you okay?” Gloria asked, glancing at McGarvey. Traffic was still very light, only the occasional delivery truck and odd car.

“What are you doing down here?” McGarvey demanded.

“Otto called your sat phone to warn you that you were probably walking into a trap. Al-Turabi’s GPS chip hasn’t moved in the last thirty-six hours. Not one meter. The bastard’s probably dead.”

“If he’s dead they’d have cremated him before the next sunrise,” McGarvey said. “It’s the Muslim custom.”

“Unless they somehow found out about the chip,” Gloria said. “But I don’t see how that’s possible.”

“Where’d you get this van?”

Gloria quickly explained what had happened from the moment she’d hung up from talking with Rencke. “Otto’s working on getting us out of Karachi.”

“Someone inside the hotel must have monitored your call to the front desk,” McGarvey said.

Gloria took the sat phone from her jacket pocket and handed it to McGarvey. “I got your money and passports too,” she said. “But whatever Otto’s planning better happen pretty soon. I don’t think it’s such a hot idea driving around in this van much longer.”

McGarvey powered up the phone, and when it had acquired a satellite he speed-dialed Rencke’s number. His old friend answered on the first ring.

“Oh wow, Gloria?”

“It’s me,” McGarvey said. “What do you have for us?”

“There’s a diplomatic flight that was scheduled to leave at six this morning,” Rencke said. “Assistant Secretary of State Joyce Fields. She’s on the way out to the airport now, and crew is already there prepping the plane. It’s a 737, coming back here via Ramstein. They’ll take off as soon as you get there.”

“What does she know about us?”

“That you’re CIA and that you’re in a bit of a hurry,” Rencke said. “Are you okay, kimo sabe?”

“I’ll live,” McGarvey said. “I want you to find out what happened to al-Turabi’s GPS chip. Could be that Commander Weiss knows something. Soon as Gloria gets home, figure out an excuse for her to get back down to Gitmo and lean on him again. I’m going to hole up here today, and go back in tomorrow. They won’t be expecting me a second time.”

“Wrong answer, recruit, the prez wants you back ASAP.”

McGarvey’s gut tightened. “Did you find the submarine?”

“Yeah, but it’s not a Kilo boat, it’s a Libyan Foxtrot, and it’s already on its way across the Atlantic.”

“Where’s it headed?”

“Apparently back to the canal for Graham to finish the job,” Rencke said.

“I don’t believe it,” McGarvey said. He’d done a lot of thinking about the Brit since their encounter aboard the oil tanker in the Gatun locks. That operation had been important, but it was never meant to be the big strike against us that al-Quaida had been promising since 9/11. In any event, a submarine would not be as effective as a tanker in damaging the canal in a decisive way.

Graham was a highly trained, highly experienced submarine commander, who now had a boat and crew, and presumably weapons. A man like him would not squander such a resource hitting the same target twice. Whatever he was planning would be up close and personal.

Every American remembered the events of 9/11 as if they were etched with acid. This time would be as bad or worse. And after everything that had happened to us since the Trade towers had come down — the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the near success of the suicide bombers trying to hit four of our small-town schools, and the terrible seasons of hurricanes and floods — another strike against us, any strike, would be nothing less than devastating.

“How do we get through security?” McGarvey asked.

“Someone will be waiting for you at the air freight entrance,” a relieved Rencke said. “It’s off Shahrah-e-Faisal Road. There’ll be highway signs.”

“We’re on our way,” McGarvey said. He broke the connection and turned to Gloria. “Take us to the airport. We’re going home.”

“What’s happened, Kirk?” she asked.

“Graham’s got his hands on a submarine and he’s on his way across the Atlantic with it.”

“The navy can stop him.”

“If they know where to look,” McGarvey answered absently. Once again he had the feeling that he was missing something. That all of them were underestimating al-Quaida’s ingenuity.

“What are we going to do?” Gloria asked.

“I don’t know.”

FIFTY-NINE

It was 2000 GMT when the twenty-four-hundred-ton submarine came to a depth of twenty meters and extended her snorkel above the surface to take in air to run the diesels and recharge their badly depleted batteries. She was well out into the Atlantic now, running at fifteen knots, and by this time tomorrow evening she would be approaching the broad passage between the Maderia Islands to the north and the Canaries to the south.

“The snorkel is clear,” Captain Ziyax called from behind al-Abbas at the ballast board.

Graham ducked his head around the corner. “Are we still clear on the surface?” he asked his Libyan chief sonar man.

“The same targets well out ahead, designate them as probable commercial traffic, and the same aft.” Ensign Isomil looked up. “Sir, there’s nothing closer than ten thousand meters. Nothing that I think might be a warship.”

“Well done,” Graham said. He went back into the control room and raised the search periscope. The view in the lens was very dim by the standards of the British Trafalgar boats he had skippered, but adequate for him to make sure they were alone. It was a very dark night, no moon.

“You may open the snorkel and start the engines, number two,” he said.

“Yes, sir,” Ziyax responded immediately and crisply. Graham had spoken with him after the incident coming out of the Strait of Gibraltar, and the Libyan naval officer had come to see the error of his ways. It was Graham’s intimate knowledge of the captain’s wife and children, supplied by al-Quaida, that had finally convinced the man to cooperate fully.

The three diesels rumbled into life one at a time.

Graham took one last three-sixty, then slapped the handles up and lowered the scope. He turned and looked at his crew. They were well rested now after the long and stressful crossing and emergence from the Mediterranean. But those thirty-six-plus hours of adversity had melded them into something of a unit. Each of them, Iranian and Libyan, had one common fear, which was retribution by al-Quaida, and one common hate, which was Graham.

He smiled inwardly. They were children, unlike the English crews he’d commanded. Those men had been highly trained and motivated professionals, their equipment state-of-the-art, their weapons as accurate and lethal as those of any nation on earth.

For just an instant he felt a twinge of regret for how he’d thrown away his life, but then the constant image of Jillian’s face, contorted in pain, brought his hate back to the surface.

The ship’s com buzzed. “Captain, engineering.”

Graham pulled the growler phone from its overhead bracket. “This is the captain.”

“I think you’d better come back here, sir,” Lieutenant Mahdi Chamran, the Iranian chief engineer, said.

“What is it?”

“You need to see this for yourself, sir,” Chamran insisted.

Graham’s anger spiked, but he brought himself under control. “Very well.” He hung up. “Captain, you have the con,” he told Ziyax. “Maintain your course and speed. I’ll be in engineering.”

The Libyan captain looked at him sharply, almost as if he were suddenly afraid of something. But he nodded. “Aye, Captain.”

Graham turned, ducked through the open hatch, and headed aft to engineering, which took up nearly one-fourth of the volume of the boat. The three diesel engines, three electric propulsion motors for underwater maneuvering, the huge battery bank, electrical generators, pumps, parts storage, and a complete machine shop were all the responsibility of the chief engineer, who in some ways was even more important than the captain. The control room crew fought the boat, but the chief engineer made sure they had a warship to fight with.

No one was in the crew’s mess, or in the passageway. With only a skeleton crew even such a small boat seemed very large and very empty.

Lieutenant Commander Mahdi Chamran, the Iranian chief engineer bin Laden had supplied, was waiting in the electric motor room with Lieutenant Rasal Sayyaf, the chief torpedo man who’d also come from the Distal Volente.

The chi-eng was a short dark Arab with four days’ growth on his face, and black grease permanently etching his hands. He wasn’t a traditionalist so he didn’t wash five times each day before prayers. He’d been kicked out of the Iranian navy because of it; his superiors valued religious practices over good engineering.

Sayyaf, on the other hand, was tall and lanky, with a permanent smirk on his face because he knew that once his military service was completed he would take over from his father as imam at their mosque in Isfahan south of Tehran. He’d gone over to al-Quaida with the blessings of his superiors who thought he was too devout a Muslim. But like Chamran he was good at what he did.

They were all fucking misfits, Graham thought, coming through the hatch. A section of the deck grating had been pulled up and the two men were standing over the opening, looking down at something. No one else was in the compartment and the hatch to the aft torpedo room was closed and dogged.

“What is it?” Graham demanded, approaching them.

Chamran seemed excited, as did Sayyaf, but his voice was oddly subdued. “We’ve found two new toys for you, Captain,” the chi-eng said.

Graham reached the opening, but then pulled up short. Nestled in makeshift wooden cradles between banks of batteries were two metal cylinders, each about twenty inches in diameter and about three feet long. The DANGER: RADIATION symbol was painted on both of them. They were nuclear weapons.

“Are they leaking?” Graham asked.

Sayyaf held up a small Geiger counter. “Not much. But whoever has to handle them, and especially the poor bastard who has to open the packages and arm them, will take a hit.”

“They’re not Libyan,” Graham said. “Russian?”

“Iraqi, but the Russians probably helped get them to Libya,” Chamran said. He shook his head in wonderment. “The Americans were right after all. Uncle Saddam actually did it.” He laughed. “Quaddafi must have been shitting in his pants all this time. You were Allah-sent, Captain, to take these things off his hands.”

“Will they mate to the two Russian cruise missiles we found?” Graham asked, his breath quickening despite his iron will to remain calm in front of these men.

“With some jury-rigging, yes,” Sayyaf said.

“They probably won’t go critical,” Chamran warned.

“What makes you say that?” Graham demanded sharply. This was too good to be true. It was the opportunity that bin Laden had talked about in Karachi and again in Syria, but had refused to give specifics.

You will understand when the time comes, he’d promised. And your eyes will be opened to the wondrous light.

Graham understood now. It was Oppenheimer, he thought, in 1945 at Trinity in New Mexico when the Americans exploded the first atomic bomb. He’d called it the “wondrous light.”

“I don’t think they had the time or the materials to develop the initiator technology,” the chi-eng explained. He held up his hand before Graham could object. “But these toys will explode, Captain, if that’s what you want. It won’t be a nuclear explosion, but when they go off — wherever that might be — they will spread a lot of radioactive dust over a very large area.” He nodded solemnly. “More people than the Manhattan attack could die. It will not be another 9/11. It will be much worse.”

Graham’s soul was singing. He was going to strike back at the bastards in a way that they would never forget.

“That is if you have the stomach for it, Englishman,” Chamran said.

Graham smiled again inwardly. Oh, he had the stomach all right. “Disable all the Geiger counters.”

Although Assistant Secretary of State Fields and most of the people in her small entourage recognized McGarvey from his days as DCI, no one questioned why he and Gloria had boarded in the middle of the night in Karachi. Or why they had remained aboard in Ramstein when the aircraft was being refueled.

“Glad to have been of some assistance,” she said, shaking his hand after they’d touched down at Andrews.

“Thanks for the lift,” he’d said. “But it might be best if you never mentioned this to anyone.”

She wanted to say something, he’d seen it in her eyes. But she nodded and left. Afterwards the aircraft was towed from the VIP ramp to an air force hangar where two men from security were waiting with a van to take them directly down to Langley.

McGarvey had slept for only a few hours on the flight over, and he was tired. But it was more than lack of sleep. Fish Harbor had been a trap. He’d been lured to the compound step-by-step all the way from Camp Delta and he hadn’t figured out how. The only bit of good fortune to come out of it had been Gloria. If it hadn’t been for her he might have bought it.

Yet there was still a nagging thought at the back of his head that he was missing something about her. Lawrence Danielle, his mentor from the early days, had warned that to every spy would eventually come paranoia. For some, the doubts and suspicions became so overwhelming that they were destroyed by their fears. Suicide was an occupational hazard. But the good field officer learned to listen to his or her instincts; they were often the difference between success or failure.

It was morning and rush-hour traffic was in full swing, people going about their business as usual. But McGarvey felt disconnected, as he always did when he returned from the field, and especially from an operation that had fallen apart on him. He would have to go back to finish the job, but for that he would need a new strategy, which at the moment completely eluded him.

“You’re going back, aren’t you,” Gloria said, as if she had read his mind.

They had crossed the Potomac on the Beltway and skirted Alexandria before heading north through Fairfax and Falls Church, the city in the near distance, a jet taking off from Reagan National. “I don’t know,” McGarvey replied absently as he stared out the window.

“I want to help you.”

“I know,” he said, turning to her. “Thanks for Karachi. It could have been messy.”

She smiled. “I was just doing my job.”

From the Beltway they took the George Washington Parkway down to the Building. One of the security officers escorted them up to the seventh floor using the director’s private elevator. Dhalia Swanson, Adkins’s secretary, passed them straight in.

“Good to see you back, Mr. McGarvey,” she said warmly.

“Thanks, but I’m not back,” McGarvey told her. She’d been his secretary when he’d served as DCI.

“Yes, sir,” she said, smiling.

Dick Adkins was waiting with his number two David Whittaker, Howard McCann, and Otto Rencke.

“Sorry to have to pull you out like that, but from what I understand you may have been walking into a situation,” Adkins said. “The president asked that we get you back here pronto.”

McCann had a scowl permanently etched on his square features, but Adkins looked like a man who’d gotten some very bad news and was flailing around trying to figure out what he should do about it. Americans had been rubbed raw by the events — natural and manmade — of the last few years, and they were increasingly looking to Washington to do something, or heads would continue to roll.

Counterterrorism had become the political hot potato of the decade. “It’ll take at least ten days for Graham to get across the Atlantic,” McGarvey said. “What do you need me for? The navy should be able to handle it.”

“A Second Fleet carrier battle group is already on the way to Panama to set up a blockade,” Adkins said. “There’ll be some tough questions when the media finds out, but that’s not our concern for the moment.”

“Do we have any idea what weapons are aboard?” Gloria asked. McCann shot her a furious look, but she ignored him.

“Quaddafi won’t even admit it’s his submarine,” Adkins said. “The president talked to him two hours ago. According to the good colonel, his submarine was scuttled in the Bay of Sidra. It’s anybody’s guess what’s aboard.”

“Graham’s not heading for the canal again,” McGarvey said. He’d had time to think about what he would do if he were in Graham’s shoes, with a boat and crew, presumably weapons, possibly even some very nasty weapons, and a deep-seated grudge against a system that he figured killed his wife. Graham had become a renegade of the worse kind; intelligent, highly trained, and well motivated.

“Where then?” Adkins asked. “New York? The president wants your best guess.”

“Washington,” McGarvey said. “They managed to do a number on the World Trade Center in New York, but except for a relatively small amount of damage to the Pentagon, their plans for Washington were a bust. They’ll try again.”

“They wouldn’t even have to get close if they had a couple of cruise missiles,” Rencke spoke up. “They could lay a couple hundred miles off and launch from there. We wouldn’t have much warning time.” He was sitting cross-legged on a chair, his red hair flying everywhere. “Better than even chance he’s got ’em, and maybe more bad shit.”

“Like what?” McCann asked.

“Anthrax at least. Maybe even a small dirty nuke or two.”

“Where the hell would Libya get anything like that?”

Rencke gave McCann an amused, condescending look. “Don’t you read the newspapers, Howie? The deserts over there are gushing with oil. And that spells m-o-n-e-y, with which an enterprising soul can buy just about anything.”

“The Foxtrot was on a southwest heading,” Adkins reiterated.

“Then why did you pull me out of Karachi?” McGarvey asked. Adkins shook his head. “Maybe we’re wrong about Panama. Or, maybe you’re wrong about Washington. We could probably come up with a dozen different scenarios that a man like Graham might come up with. But it’s the plan that we haven’t dreamed up is why we wanted you here. You know bin Laden better than anyone else on our side. And right now Panama is our most likely bet, and you are our insurance.”

McGarvey turned to Rencke. “Keep me in the loop.”

“Will do, kimo sabe,” Rencke said.

“I’m going home,” he told the others. “We’re probably missing something that’s important. Let’s just hope we can figure out what it is before it’s too late.” He turned to McCann. “By the way, Ms. Ibenez was working for me. I asked her to backstop me in Karachi, and she did a hell of a job, so if I were you I’d take it easy on her.” He smiled. “I’d take it as a personal favor, Howard.”

SIXTY

Graham stepped into the officer’s wardroom a few minutes after midnight Greenwich mean time. The three Iranians and two Libyans seated around the cramped table looked up with various degrees of expectation and hate in their eyes. He’d called the meeting, but had not told them why.

He locked the door, and spread a large-scale chart on the table, holding the rolled edges down with teacups, and a couple of ashtrays.

Ziyax was the first to recognize what it was, and he looked up in surprise. “That’s the American coast. The Chesapeake Bay.”

“Exactly,” Graham said. “We’ll be there nine days from now.”

“Insanity,” Ziyax said softly, and he looked at the others around the table. Only al-Abbas, his former XO, nodded, but al-Hari, Chamran, and Sayyaf, all Graham’s people, shot him a dark look.

“Why do you say that?” Graham asked mildly. He’d made his final plan the instant his chief engineer had shown him the two nuclear weapons. Bin Laden had kept that part from him in case he was captured by the Western authorities before he could board the sub and make it out into the open Atlantic. But he needed these men to carry out the attack. If there was going to be trouble, which he expected there would be, he wanted it out in the open and dealt with well ahead of time.

“In the first place the water there is too shallow for a submarine, and the entire area is crawling with American military. Especially the navy. Their Second Fleet is based at Norfolk.”

“Actually you’re wrong about the depth of water, the York River is deep enough to hide us, but you are definitely correct about the military presence, which is exactly why we’ll get in without trouble.” Graham smiled. “They won’t be expecting us.”

“For good reason,” Ziyax argued. “If we get bottled up in the bay we’d never get out. A few rusty Russian torpedoes are no match for a good ASW warship. Even for a captain with your training and experience.”

“You are right again,” Graham said. “At least as it concerns us getting out of the bay once we’re inside. But the fact of the matter is I have absolutely no intention of trying to escape.”

Ziyax opened his mouth, but said nothing.

Al-Abbas leaned forward, his eyes narrow. “You arrogant ass, you’re planning on committing suicide with us.”

It was exactly how Graham had foreseen this meeting. Not only were they all fools, but they were idiots as well. In fact, in his estimation most of the Arabs he’d dealt, with were scarcely one generation away from being ignorant desert-wandering nomads. Bedouins. Even some of the Saudi royal family he’d met were no different, despite their expensive university educations in the West, and their wealth. Bin Laden himself had once admitted that living the tribal life in the mountains of Afghanistan had been a time of joy and cleansing for his soul. Which was a crock of horseshit.

“I have no intention of committing suicide,” Graham said. “Although when we have finished our mission if you would like to die for the glorious cause I won’t stand in your way, Lieutenant Commander. In fact, I could probably be persuaded to help.”

Chamran chuckled.

“I don’t trust you.”

Graham laughed out loud. “I don’t trust anyone. But for the moment I require your assistance and your loyalty.” He leaned forward for emphasis. “If I can’t count you, I will kill you.”

“You might find that difficult,” al-Abbas shot back, despite the warning glance from Ziyax.

“It would be much easier for me than you could possibly imagine,” Graham said casually.

The wardroom fell silent for a beat.

“Assuming we make it past Norfolk without detection, and into the York River, what then?” Ziyax asked.

Graham didn’t answer at first, his eyes locked on al-Abbas. Finally the Libyan officer blinked and looked away.

“We found the physics packages for two nuclear weapons in the battery room,” Graham said. “We’re going to mate them with the two cruise missiles and fire them on Washington.”

Ziyax turned ashen. He shook his head. “I won’t be a party to this insanity. Colonel Quaddafi would never have authorized the transfer of this boat if he’d known your purpose.”

“I said that we found the nuclear weapons. We didn’t bring them with us, they were already aboard for us to find.”

Ziyax was struck dumb.

“It will be up to you to keep your crew in line,” Graham warned. “If need be we’ll kill them all, and operate the boat ourselves. It would be difficult, but not impossible for us to reach the Chesapeake and launch the missiles.”

“What about afterwards?” a subdued Ziyax asked. “Even in the confusion there’ll be a more than keen interest by the Americans to find out who launched against them.”

“We’ll lock out through the escape trunk. A shrimper will be waiting on the surface to pick us up, and take us out to sea where we’ll rendezvous with a Syrian freighter.” Graham shrugged. “Then it’s a very slow boat back to Tripoli where you will be home and I will take my leave.”

Ziyax passed a hand across his forehead as if he were trying to ease a headache. “You’re living in a world of fantasy,” he said tiredly. “We’ll all die, and I don’t know if I can convince my crew to do this thing. Perhaps they would rather die here fighting you than later in some American river.”

“Together we’ll convince the crew,” al-Hari said, speaking for the first time.

Ziyax turned to him. “How?”

“We’ve brought a message from Osama bin Laden,” al-Hari said.

“They may not care—”

“And from Colonel Quaddafi.”

No one said anything for a moment, especially the Libyans, who were struck dumb by the enormity of what they were facing.

“I would like you to pick two volunteers from among your men to mate the nuclear packages to the pair of cruise missiles, and load them into tubes one and two,” Graham said. “After all, they are Iraqi weapons, and until recently your Colonel Quaddafi professed an admiration for Saddam Hussein.”

No one had warned Kathleen that her husband was back. When he walked in the front door of the CIA safe house she came to the head of the stairs, a pistol in her hand, her eyes wide.

“My God,” she said, swallowing her words. “Kirk.” She was in blue jeans and a T-shirt, her feet bare, no makeup yet, her hair not done.

She looked beautiful to McGarvey. He wanted to leave with her right now this morning and return to their new life in Sarasota without ever looking back, never having to look over his shoulder for fear that someone out of his past was gaining on them. Some monster intent on doing them harm, as had happened so many times in the past. He and the people who loved him had endured their own personal tragedies as devastating as 9/11 had been for all Americans. He wanted it to finally end, even though he knew with every fiber of his being that it could never be over for him.

“Hi, Katy, I’m home,” he said, and smiled.

She laid the gun on the hall table and raced down the stairs to him, flying into his arms. “Are you all right? Are you all right?”

“Just a little tired. We didn’t get much sleep on the flight back. Where’d you get the gun?”

“Elizabeth got it for me, and showed me how to use it.” She parted and looked closely at him. “Did you do it?” she asked, her voice soft.

“No.”

She digested his answer for a moment then nodded. “Are you hungry?”

“I could eat something,” McGarvey said, content for now to let her lead the discussion. But sooner or later they would get around to his next move.

He took off his jacket, hung it on the coat tree, and followed her into the pleasant kitchen where he sat down at the center island. The safe house that the CIA had provided them was not as large as their old house here, or the one in Casey Key, but it was well laid out and furnished. The Company used it to house VIP visitors whom they wanted to keep away from the opposition or out of the public eye. Sometimes a live-in staff was provided, but whenever anyone was in residence, like now, a security detail watched from a second-floor apartment across the street. The house was wired with sophisticated monitoring equipment.

“Where are your things?” Katy asked, pouring him a cup of coffee.

“I had to leave most of it behind,” he said. “We were in a hurry.”

“We?” Katy asked, setting his cup down in front of him.

“Gloria Ibenez came over to backstop me. Wasn’t for her I might have been in some trouble.”

Katy arched her left eyebrow. “Handy woman to have around in a pinch. I’ll have to thank her.” She smiled. “Bacon and eggs?”

“Sounds good,” McGarvey told her. His wife had never been much of a cook, but since they had gotten remarried after a long separation she had improved, although she tended to overcook everything. But he wasn’t complaining.

She busied herself with the food from the fridge and the pans and dishes, her back to her husband. “How much time do we have until you go back to finish the job?” she asked brightly. She turned to him and smiled. “Or would you have to kill me if you told me?”

“Only if you burned my eggs,” he said. “Anyway I won’t be going far for the next week or so. Maybe we’ll do something with the kids over the weekend. We could rent a boat and take Audrey for her first sailing lesson on the river.”

Katy started the bacon, and got out the bread for toast. “You have a timetable, which usually means something nasty is coming our way. Elizabeth refuses to tell me anything.”

“We’re working on it, Katy.”

“And I’ve never been able to get anything out of Todd,” Katy continued. Todd Van Buren was their son-in-law. “Of course Otto’s been in his own world lately and Louise claims she doesn’t know what’s going on.” Louise Horn was Rencke’s wife. She was working these days for the National Security Agency as director of its Satellite Photo Interpretation shop.

“They can’t tell you anything, mostly because, except for Otto, they’re not on the list,” McGarvey said.

Katy was suddenly brittle. She took a second frying pan out of the cupboard and slammed it on the stove. “I’m in the dark here, darling, and I goddamn well don’t like it!” She turned to him. “Toni Talarico’s husband came back to her in a body bag. Sorry sweetie, but your hubby died a hero, serving his country. Then they tried to kill her and the children at the funeral. Now what kind of shit is that?” Katy was practically screeching now.

McGarvey got up and went around to her, taking her in his arms. “Bob did die serving his country, and nobody was trying to kill Toni and the kids at Arlington.”

“You’re right,” Katy said, her eyes wild. “They were gunning for you. Why?”

“Because I’m trying to stop them.”

“From doing what?” Katy demanded. “For God’s sake, if there’s a possibility that you’re coming back to me in a body bag, I want to know why. What’s so fucking important?”

“They’re going to attack us again. Maybe here in Washington, in about a week.” McGarvey brushed her hair away from her eyes. She was on the verge of crying, but she was no longer spinning out of control. “How about going back to Florida and—”

“Not a chance,” she said.

“This time when it’s over, it’ll really be over for me. I’ll stay retired. Promise.”

Kathleen managed a small, tight smile. “I’ve heard that one before, more times than I care to count.”

“We’ll see,” McGarvey said. “Are you okay now?”

“Just peachy,” she replied. “Now sit down and have your coffee while I try not to burn your eggs.”

SIXTY-ONE

The attitude that they were all going to die had seeped through the boat like a flu virus. No one spoke above a whisper, and for the past few days everyone had gone about their duties like mindless robots. Even al-Abbas had become docile.

Graham rose from a light sleep around local apparent noon, five days out from Gibraltar, got a glass of tea from the galley, and went forward to the control room.

“Captain on the con,” al-Hari called out.

Ziyax, who was leaning over the chart table, looked up, but no one else bothered to respond. For now Graham preferred it that way. A tractable crew was an easily led crew, so long as there was no action. “As you were,” he said.

They were running on diesel power at snorkel depth, and the entire boat stank of fuel oil. He stepped back to sonar. “Mr. Isomil, how does it look above?”

The Libyan chief sonar operator looked up, his narrow face drooping, his eyes dull as if he were half-asleep. “We’re quite alone out here, Captain,” he said.

Graham could see for himself that all three sonar scopes were blank. “Check again,” he said. “And if you still detect nothing, run a diagnostic. I want to make absolutely sure there are no targets within range.”

“Yes, sir,” Isomil said, rousing himself.

Graham went back to the control room, raised the search periscope, and did a slow three-sixty. It was a blustery day, with whitecaps in all directions to the horizon under a partly cloudy sky. But the waves hadn’t built up yet, so the motion aboard was still minimal. The conditions on the surface were perfect for what he wanted to do.

A minute later Isomil called from sonar. “Captain, my machines are in good working order, and there are no surface or subsurface targets painting.”

“Very well,” Graham said. “Keep a sharp eye for the next few hours.”

“Aye, sir.”

Graham called the ESMs. “Ahmad, we’re going to run on the surface all afternoon. I want you to keep a very close eye on all frequencies, but especially on the military radar bands, both surface and air.”

“Yes, sir. Cap’n, request permission to raise the Snoop Tray to take a look before we surface.”

“Very well, but be smart about it.” Graham released the Push-to-Talk button on the intercom phone.

Ziyax and the other officers were looking expectantly at him. He’d gotten their attention.

“Prepare to surface the boat,” Graham ordered.

“It’s still broad daylight,” Ziyax countered.

Graham gave the Libyan captain a bland look. “This will be your last chance,” he said. “When I give an order I expect it to be carried out without hesitation or discussion. Is that clear?”

“Yes, but—”

“The next time you question an order of mine I will shoot you, and dump your body overboard. Is that also quite clear?”

Ziyax glanced at al-Abbas at the ballast board.

“Yes, Captain, quite clear,” Ziyax said. “Diving Officer, prepare to surface the boat.”

“Aye, prepare to surface,” al-Abbas repeated the order, with no hesitation.

Graham keyed the phone. “ESMs, are we clear?”

“Yes, we are, Cap’n,” Lieutenant Khalia answered.

“Very well, keep a sharp eye,” Graham said. He hung up the phone. “Surface the boat, we need some fresh air in here. We stink like a pigsty.”

Ziyax stiffened at the insult, but this time he did not delay. “Diving Officer, blow positive.”

“Aye, sir, blowing positive,” al-Abbas repeated the order, and he began transferring compressed air from a pair of storage tanks into several ballast tanks and they started to slowly rise toward the surface.

“Are we changing course now, sir?” Ziyax asked.

They didn’t have a current ephemeris of the American spy satellites over this piece of the ocean, but Graham figured it was a safe bet that if the Shehab remained on the surface for the rest of the afternoon, at least one would fly overhead and spot them.

“Negative,” he said. “Maintain your present heading, Captain.”

McGarvey and Katy were on their way out the door to catch an early movie and a pizza and beer afterwards, something they hadn’t done for a very long time, when the secure telephone rang. The last few days had been quiet, with nothing to do but enjoy their granddaughter and a little taste of their retirement. But McGarvey had been expecting the call. It was Rencke.

“Oh wow, NRO spotted the sub in mid-Atlantic about an hour ago,” Rencke gushed excitedly.

“Are we sure it’s the right one?” McGarvey asked.

“Louise repositioned a Marvel-two and got a reasonable angle. Unless there’s a pair of Foxtrots crossing the big pond, she’s our boat.” The supersecret Marvel series of spy satellites had been put in high-earth orbit to watch all of Europe in response to the emergence of Germany as a new world power.

“What’s her heading?”

“Southwest, same as before,” Rencke said. “He’s heading for the ditch after all.”

“I don’t think so,” McGarvey said. Last week he had pulled Graham’s jacket from the Directorate of Intelligence’s current People of Interest file, and spent a few hours studying the man’s background. Included were two psych evaluations that Rencke had managed to purloin from British Royal Navy records; the first just prior to Graham’s graduation from Perisher, and the second just prior to his discharge under other-than-honorable conditions.

He had learned enough to understand that Graham was driven not only by a strong need for revenge against the people he felt were responsible for his wife’s death, but by a deep sense of pride. The man’s ego was like a rocket engine on his back with no cut-off switch.

“Where then?” Rencke asked.

“Washington,” McGarvey said. Katy was watching him from the doorway, a sad, resigned expression on her pretty face.

“Okay, kimo sabe, what do you want to do? We still have a few days.”

“If he’s going to try what I think he will, I’ll need to borrow a sub driver and a SEAL team from the navy.”

“How much can we tell them out of the chute?” Rencke asked.

“Nothing. Not even my name, just that it’s a CIA op. We have to keep it away from the ONI in case the leak is at the Pentagon and not down at Gitmo.”

“How soon?”

“It’ll take at least a couple of days to set it up, so yesterday would be good.”

“Keep your cell phone turned on,” Rencke said.

“Right.”

The sun was setting a couple of points off the submarine’s starboard bow and Graham, standing on the cramped bridge, shielded his eyes against the glare. They’d been running on the surface for a little more than six hours and he was certain that they’d been spotted by at least one American satellite.

Ziyax was on the bridge with him, scanning the horizon with binoculars. The late afternoon was chilly, even invigorating after the stuffiness below.

Graham took one last deep breath, then keyed the ship’s intercom. “Con, bridge. Prepare to dive the boat.”

“Aye, sir, prepare to dive the boat,” al-Abbas replied after only a slight hesitation. The crew had not understood his orders to run on the surface, but now that the boat was well ventilated, and all of them, by fours, had been allowed briefly on deck, they didn’t want to submerge.

“What has this afternoon been about?” Ziyax asked respectfully.

Graham glanced at him. The man wasn’t a bad officer, limited by his lack of good training. But he wanted to be home with his family, not out here for any cause. Especially not for the Islamic jihad. “Insurance.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I wanted to be spotted running on the surface, on this course, by an American satellite.”

Ziyax was startled. “They know about us?”

“It’s possible.”

“Then they’ll be waiting for us,” Ziyax said. “For the sake of reason, for the sake of Allah we must turn back before we’re all killed.”

Graham had no real idea why he was bothering to explain anything to the Libyan, especially something so obvious. But he wanted someone to know and appreciate the ruse.

“You’re right about one thing, Captain. The Americans will be waiting for us. But we’ve been on the same heading since we cleared Gibraltar. Southwest, toward Central America. Toward the Panama Canal, which I … probed last month. They’ll believe that we’re trying to hit the canal again.” He looked into the Libyan’s eyes to see if the man understood the logic. But there was no one home.

Ziyax merely stared at him.

“Insurance,” Graham said. He keyed the phone again. “Bridge, con. Dive the boat.”

“Aye, Cap’n, dive the boat.”

Graham let Ziyax clear the bridge first, then, after one last look at the setting sun, dropped through the hatch, securing it above his head, and descended into the control room.

“I have an all-green board,” Ziyax reported.

“All compartments ready in all respects,” al-Abbas said.

“Very well, dive the boat,” Graham said. “Make your depth four hundred meters.”

Everyone in the control room looked up from their duty stations. That depth was well below the safety limits for a boat this age, and everyone knew it.

Graham waited for just a moment. “Captain, if you please.”

“Aye, Captain,” Ziyax said. “Diving Officer, make your depth four hundred meters.”

Al-Abbas repeated the order, and went about the task of submerging the boat.

Graham walked over to the chart table, on which a small-scale chart of the western Atlantic from twenty degrees north to forty degrees north was laid out. As the bow of the submarine began to cant downward, he plotted a great circle course to the mouth of the Chesapeake still two thousand miles away. Five days.

He looked up. “I’m going to the wardroom to have my dinner,” he told his crew conversationally. “When we level off — but not before we level off — come right to new course three-zero-five, and make your speed All Ahead Flank.”

Graham waited until Ziyax had repeated the order then headed aft to the wardroom. “Mr. Ziyax, you have the con,” he called nonchalantly over his shoulder.

SIXTY-TWO

Noon traffic was in full swing along Embassy Row when McGarvey pulled up in front of the Cosmos Club on Massachusetts Avenue and let the valet take his Range Rover. Only a few people in the entire city knew about the threat they were facing, and he figured that they were the lucky ones. At least for now.

He had given a lot of thought to how a missile attack on Washington might unfold, and what could be done to stop it. But although he had what he thought was a fair understanding of Graham, he was going to need a sub driver to lay out the tactics of a strike using a Foxtrot, and he was going to have to keep his ideas outside official military channels.

Graham would know U.S. Navy tactics, and how to sidestep them, so they needed to throw him a curveball. Something he would not expect.

The club, which was housed in an elegant three-story Victorian brownstone, had been in existence since the late 1800s, and was the gathering place for movers and shakers; the Nobel prizewinners, the presidents and CEOs of major corporations, the most powerful lawyers and politicians. Merely being wealthy didn’t guarantee acceptance, its members had to be people who were doing significant things.

Just inside the elegant entrance, McGarvey gave his name to the receptionist and was directed to the lavishly decorated Smith Dining Room. The tuxedoed maître d’ brought him to a corner table where two men, both dressed in civilian clothes, were seated.

McGarvey recognized the older, slightly built man with thinning white hair and pale blue eyes. “Admiral, thanks for agreeing to meet with me on such short notice.”

Admiral Joseph Puckett, Jr., glanced up, but didn’t offer his hand. “The president said I was to cooperate with you, McGarvey. Sit down.”

Puckett had the reputation of being one of the toughest officers ever to chair the Joint Chiefs. McGarvey had never dealt with the man before, but the admiral was also widely known as being a fair, if no-nonsense, man, which meant he was a military officer first and a politician a distant second.

“Fair enough,” McGarvey said, taking a seat.

Their waiter came immediately and when he’d left with McGarvey’s drink order, Puckett introduced the other man as Navy Captain Frank Dillon, a former Seawolf submarine commander, and now boss of his own squadron in Honolulu. He was a lean, well-muscled man with sandy hair, a thick mustache, and a pleasant, almost handsome face.

He and McGarvey shook hands. “Weren’t you the director of the CIA a couple years ago?” he asked.

McGarvey nodded. “I didn’t like dealing with politicians so I got out while I still had my hide intact.”

Puckett nodded, then put his napkin on the table and pushed away. “I’ll leave you gentlemen to it,” he said. “Whatever Mr. McGarvey wants, within reason, you’re to comply, Captain,” he told Dillon.

“Yes, sir,” Dillon said, obviously not at all sure what he was getting into.

Puckett turned back to McGarvey. “You may know that I’ve sent a carrier battle group to screen the canal. Should get down there within the next forty-eight hours. What you might not know is that a couple hours ago a satellite spotted your boy on the surface in the mid-Atlantic, still heading southwest.”

“Isn’t that unusual?” McGarvey asked. “Running on the surface in broad daylight. He’d have to know he’d be spotted.”

“May have had trouble with his snorkel,” Puckett said. He gave McGarvey a hard stare. “I know enough about you to know that you’re a good man to have around in a pinch. But I also know enough about you to know that whenever you get involved in something, a lot of people, some of them ours, get hurt.”

“I don’t invent the bad guys, Admiral.”

Puckett nodded, turned on his heel, and stalked off.

“I probably could have handled that a little better,” McGarvey said wryly. He turned to Dillon. “Captain, have you been told why you’re here today?”

“No, sir. Just that you’re working on an assignment for the CIA, with the blessing of the White House, and you need someone who knows submarine tactics.”

McGarvey glanced around the half full dining room. Their table had been picked so that they would be out of earshot of any other diner. “Al-Quaida has gotten itself a Foxtrot submarine, a Perisher captain, a mixed Iranian-Libyan crew, and an unknown number of weapons, with which I think they mean to strike Washington.”

“I see,” Dillon said, his eyes widening slightly. “What kind of weapons?”

“We don’t know, but it’s possible they might have cruise missiles, maybe anthrax, possibly even a nuke. The thing is, I want to stop them before they can launch.”

“That’s the problem,” Dillon said. “If we know when they were coming we could lay a screen and try to intercept them. But they could go silent a couple of hundred miles off and we’d be lucky to stumble across them before they launched.”

“What about afterward?” McGarvey asked.

“We’d nail them for sure. The Foxtrot makes a fair amount of noise, especially when the skipper puts the pedal to the metal. They’d have no chance of getting away.”

“That’s the problem,”McGarvey said. “This guy’s not interested in suicide, which means he has a plan to fire his weapons and then get out of there.”

“How sure of this are you, sir?” Dillon asked.

“The name’s Kirk. And I’m not sure. It’s just a hunch. I think he’d like to get up into the Chesapeake somewhere, if that’s possible, fire his weapons, and then set his boat to self-destruct while he locks out and disappears ashore. He’s done something similar before.”

“I did a classified paper for Homeland Security last year outlining just that possibility,” Dillon said.

“I know, I read it a couple days ago,” McGarvey said. “I need your help to stop them, if you want the job, Captain.”

“Name’s Frank,” Dillon said. “We’ll need a SEAL team. Do we have a timetable?”

“Puckett said that the sub was in the mid-Atlantic a couple of hours ago. If he submerges and changes course right now, he could be off the bay in what, five or six days?”

“About that,” Dillon said.

“Then let’s get on with it,” McGarvey said. “How soon can you get a SEAL team together without attracting any notice?”

“Now what are you trying to tell me?”

“There might be a spy in the ONI feeding information to al-Quaida.”

Dillon’s jaw tightened. “That’s just great.The son of a bitch.” He took a business card out of his pocket, wrote an address in Alexandria on the back, and handed it to McGarvey. “This is a friend of mine. I stay with him and his wife whenever I’m in Washington. Come over about six tomorrow. We’ll have a backyard barbecue.”

“No specifics to anybody.”

“I’ll leave that up to you tomorrow night,” Dillon said.

Something woke Graham from a sound sleep in his cabin. The only light came from what spilled in around the curtain covering his door, and the dim green illumination of the dials on the clock and compass on the bulkhead above his pull-down desk.

He’d been having the sex dream about Jillian again, but although he could see her naked body lying next to his, her face had faded over the past month or so and it frightened him. He’d known that he’d gone a little crazy after her death, but he was worried now that he might be losing his mind, losing his ability to think clearly, to reason, to act with purpose.

It was a few minutes after 0200 Greenwich mean time, and the boat was quiet, even the deep-throated hum of the electric motors putting out enough power now to run at All Ahead Full were muted, barely discernible. The crew had been given the rig-for-silent-running order when they’d submerged, and so far there’d been no mistakes.

Each time the batteries got below twenty percent, they would rise to snorkel depth and run on diesel long enough for the recharge and then return to four hundred meters in their push for the U.S. East Coast. They’d done that throughout most of the day, and they’d be good now for hours, even at this speed.

Graham had pushed the boat and the crew hard so that none of them would have the time to stop and think about what was going on. If they had, they’d realize that this was going to be a one-way trip for them. Once the missiles were launched, the U.S. Navy would zero in on their position within minutes. There would barely be enough time for one or two men to escape, not the entire crew.

He drifted back to sleep, trying to recapture the same dream about his wife, and it seemed like only seconds had passed when someone came into the cabin.

“Wake up, English,” al-Abbas said.

Graham opened his eyes. The Libyan officer stood above him, a 9mm Beretta pistol in his hand. He was out of breath and red in the face as if he had just gotten off a treadmill. Ziyax was behind him at the door, holding the curtain aside. He too looked winded, and angry.

“What is this, a mutiny?” Graham asked calmly. Ziyax was also holding a pistol. The two men had evidently been arguing about just this.

“An execution,” al-Abbas said.

“Put the gun down, Assam,” Ziyax said.

“It’s time to end this here and now. I will kill him, and then we can turn around and go home.”

“Think about what his crew will do to us when they find out what you’ve done. They have more weapons than we do. It would be a bloodbath.”

“I would rather die out here like that, than send nuclear missiles raining down on Washington,” al-Abbas said. “We’re not al-Quaida. It’s not our fight now.”

“Colonel Quaddafi offered this boat to us, and it was he who ordered the nuclear weapons to be brought aboard,” Graham said. He’d reached the Steyr 9mm pistol at his side under the blanket and he eased the safety catch to the off position and slowly began to slide it up over his hip so that he would have a clear shot at the Libyan.

“Two of my men who armed the weapons are sick,” al-Abbas said.

“You have Geiger counters. The weapons don’t leak,” Graham lied smoothly. He had the pistol above his hip, his finger on the trigger.

“But they’re sick, and none of your men had the nerve to go anywhere near the missiles,” al-Abbas argued. He was getting agitated and he started to wave the pistol around.

Graham began to put pressure on the trigger.

“I’m sorry, Assam, but I’ll do whatever it takes to get back to my wife and children,” Ziyax said, and he raised his pistol.

“You’ll never get home. None of us will unless we stop this madman.”

“If I can’t go home, then I will do whatever it takes to please Colonel Quaddafi, who will see to it that my family is well cared for.”

“Tariq?” al-Abbas said, half-turning.

“Put your gun down,” Ziyax said.

Al-Abbas said something in Arabic and started to turn back, but before he could bring his pistol to bear, and before Graham could fire, Ziyax shot the man in the side of the head at point-blank range, blood flying everywhere.

SIXTY-THREE

Liz and Todd had come into town to take Kathleen to dinner, which was one less concern on McGarvey’s mind when he showed up at the address Dillon had given him. The house was a small two-story Colonial in a pleasant middle-class neighborhood of shade trees, people washing cars or mowing lawns, kids shooting hoops above the garage doors, and bikes or trikes parked in just about every driveway. It was this kind of a life that had never been possible for McGarvey and Katy, because of his job, but there was nothing he could do now to bring any of it back.

The driveway was full with a BMW convertible, a Corvette, an older Porsche, and a plain gray Taurus with government plates, so McGarvey parked on the street and walked around the side of the house to the backyard.

A man in a chef ’s hat was tending to a built-in barbecue at the edge of a small brick patio while Dillon, seated at a picnic table, was engaged in conversation with two muscular men and an attractive young woman. All of them were in blue jeans and sweatshirts, and all of them, including the woman, were drinking beer from bottles. One of them said something, and they all laughed.

The man at the barbecue turned and spotted McGarvey. “Frank, the cavalry’s arrived.”

Dillon looked up and got to his feet. “Glad you could make it,” he said, coming across to McGarvey. They shook hands. “Let me introduce you to everyone.”

“Holy shit,” the woman said. “You’re Kirk McGarvey. You used to run the CIA.”

McGarvey chuckled. “I must be getting old. I never got that reaction from a woman before.”

“Don’t mind my wife,” the man in the chef ’s hat said, smiling. “Her handle is Lips, for more than one reason.” He came over and shook hands.

“Lieutenant Commander Bill Jackson,” Dillon said. “This is his house. “And Lips, Terri, is his wife. She’s a lieutenant.”

Terri laughed. “Half of it’s my house,” she said, shaking McGarvey’s hand. “I have a feeling this is going to be a real interesting party tonight.”

Her grip was firm and her eyes direct. McGarvey got the impression that she was in every bit as good physical shape as the men here. “Nice to meet you.”

“The other two are the chiefs, Bob Ercoli and Dale MacKeever,” Dillon introduced them.

All four of them appeared to be in outstanding physical condition, and like most of the instructors out at the Farm they exuded self-confidence. “You’re Navy SEALs,” McGarvey said.

“Does it show?” Jackson asked.

“I wouldn’t want to go up against any of you.”

“Then no hanky-panky with the boss’s wife,” Ercoli quipped. “Even we can’t get away with it.”

Terri leaned over and got McGarvey a beer from a cooler on the patio bricks beside her and tossed it to him. “Frank sure pulled a rabbit out of the hat this time,” she said. “You have our attention, Mr. McGarvey, what do you want with us that couldn’t have gone through channels?”

McGarvey opened the beer, took a deep drink, and sat down at the table. “Al-Quaida is on its way to the Chesapeake with a Libyan Foxtrot submarine and I think there’s a good chance they mean to hit Washington.”

“Holy shit,” Ercoli said softly.

“Because they didn’t hit the White House with the fourth plane like they wanted on 9/11?” Jackson asked.

“Something like that,” McGarvey said.

“How soon?”

“Five days, maybe less.”

“Send a couple of sub hunters out to look for them,” MacKeever suggested.

Dillon shook his head. “Their captain is a Brit, graduated from Perisher. The second he got wind that we were on to him, he’d launch and we couldn’t stop it.”

“He’s got missiles?” Jackson asked.

“We don’t know for sure,” McGarvey said. “But there’s a good chance he could have Russian short-range tube-launched missiles. And possibly even a small nuclear weapon or two.”

“That’s just peachy,” Terri said, and McGarvey shot her a startled look. It was the same expression Katy used sometimes. “What?” she asked.

“Another time,” McGarvey said. “This won’t be an official mission, and you won’t be getting any orders, so the shit could hit the fan.”

“But if we pull it off we’ll be heroes,” Terri said. She turned to her husband. “Gee, dear, looks like we might get our honeymoon after all.”

“This is serious,” McGarvey warned.

“We wouldn’t be much interested if it wasn’t,” she said, her smile gone. “I assume you have a plan.”

“They’re going to try to sneak into the bay and get as close to Washington as they can before they launch their missiles, if that’s what they have,” McGarvey said. “I want to be there, waiting for them.”

“Why not offshore?” Jackson asked.

“Because the sub driver wants to escape. Once they launch he can lock out of the boat, come ashore, and disappear,” McGarvey said.

“His crew won’t have time to get out,” Jackson pointed out.

“No,” McGarvey agreed. “We need to find the sub before they launch and stop them before they know we’re on to them.”

“We’d have to know where they’re headed,” Ercoli suggested.

“The York River,” Dillon said. “It’s less than one hundred miles from the White House so there’d be almost no warning time, it’s deep enough to hide a submarine, and it’s well out of Second Fleet’s way at Norfolk.”

“They’d have to get there first,” Jackson said.

“They will if we don’t warn anybody,” McGarvey said.

“You’re taking an awfully big chance.”

“I don’t want to react to an attack,” McGarvey said. “I want to stop it.” Jackson looked at his wife and the other two SEAL team members, then back at McGarvey. “I can get the equipment, including a boat, but we’ll need a non-navy staging area.”

“The Farm,” McGarvey said. “It’s on the York River and no questions that I can’t answer will be asked.”

“How soon do you want us there?” Jackson asked.

“The sooner the better. By this time tomorrow?”

Jackson nodded. He turned to Dillon. “You coming along on this one, Frank?”

“Wouldn’t miss it.”

It was morning topside when Chamran called Graham aft to the engineering spaces.

They had just finished running on diesel to recharge the batteries and were once again surging west-northwest at four hundred meters.

All the crew, the Iranians included, had become docile after Ziyax had shot his own first officer to death for challenging Graham. They’d not been told the details, except that the shot had been fired by the Libyan captain. It was enough for the time being to make them forget about the two sick crewmen who’d handled the nuclear packages.

Chamran and al-Hari, who’d been Graham’s original choice as exec, were waiting in the battery room, one of the floor grates open. Graham stopped a few feet away.

“More nuclear weapons?” he asked. He wasn’t about to get close enough to see for himself.

“No, these are the anthrax loads,” al-Hari replied. He was grinning. “We’re finding all sorts of little toys aboard. The good colonel must have been shitting in his robes to get rid of this stuff before somebody blew the whistle on him.”

“What do you want?” Graham asked.

He’d picked al-Hari to be his exec based on the file bin Laden had provided. The man had been born in Syria, but raised by grandparents in London where he’d joined the Royal Navy Submarine Service to earn his U.K. citizenship. He quickly rose in rank to warrant officer, but was finally kicked out of the service for “activities inconsistent with the status as a resident alien.”

He’d spent the next few years fighting the jihad against the Zionists for no other reason than the thrill of the hunt. He had developed a taste for killing people. When al-Quaida went looking for submarine crewmen, al-Hari’s name was near the top of a fairly short list.

“We’re seventy-two hours out,” al-Hari said. “When do you want to load the missiles into the torpedo tubes and get them ready to fire? I only ask now because the two guys who handled the nuclear packages will be too sick to work by tomorrow, and I don’t want to waste anyone else.”

“Do it now,” Graham said, perfectly understanding al-Hari’s cold logic.

“Very well. What about these canisters? We can load them aboard a couple of torpedoes set to explode a thousand meters out. Wouldn’t do any damage but the germs might rise to the surface. At the very least they’d contaminate the bay.”

Graham shook his head. “I want them to explode inside the boat without breaching the hull as soon as we lock out,” he said. “It will be a little surprise for the navy salvage crew.”

Chamran nodded. “You’re a hard man for an English.”

“It’s a hard world.”

“Insh’allah,” al-Hari said. God willing.

SIXTY-FOUR

Driving up the tree-lined road back to the CIA training facility from I-64 the next afternoon, McGarvey had the strong feeling that whatever happened in the next few days would be nothing more than a prelude to his real mission.

Whether or not they stopped Graham from unleashing whatever weapons he was bringing across the Atlantic, al-Quaida would continue the jihad against the West because it was a holy war that had been going on for more than one thousand years.

This submarine attack was only one battle. And even if it succeeded, it would be no more of a decisive blow against the West than the attacks of 9/11 had been.

Only two actions would end the war. The first would be eliminating Osama bin Laden as the quasi-holy figure he’d become across Dar al Islam. Capturing him and bringing him to trial would do no good. He would have a worldwide pulpit from which he could spread his message. Sending the U.S. military to kill him, either by ground forces, or by cruise missiles as Clinton had tried, would only make him a martyr. And Muslims loved martyrs. He would have to be assassinated, quietly and with no fanfare, inside his own lair.

It was what McGarvey did, and he knew that killing bin Laden would be the most satisfying hit he’d ever made, because the terrorist’s face in death would never haunt his dreams.

The second thing that had to be done in order to stop the jihad was to interrupt the money. Iran, Syria, and Pakistan were high on the list of prime suspects. But McGarvey was still convinced that ultimately the United States would have to deal with the Saudis, where the bulk of the money to fund thousands of Islamic terrorist organizations around the world — including al-Quaida — was being supplied. Ironically, most of that money came from oil purchases that the United States made.

Before World War II we had sold scrap metal to Japan that had been turned into bullets to kill our soldiers. Now we were sending our money to Saudi Arabia to buy oil that was being turned against us. History had repeated itself.

Last night, after he had come back from meeting with Dillon and the SEAL team, Liz and Todd were still at the house. They’d brought the baby over and it had been a wonderful respite after the tension of the past week or so.

No one asked where he’d been for dinner, but around ten when Liz and Todd bundled the baby into the car seat, McGarvey told them that he would be coming out to the Farm sometime today. But even then no questions had been asked.

Nor had Katy questioned him in bed. She was just happy about their granddaughter. “We’ll see her grow up, and maybe get married and have children of her own,” Katy said. She looked at her husband, searching for a reaction. “Won’t we?”

“We might be a little long of tooth by then,” he told her. “But if we don’t fall off our sailboat and drown, we should make it.” He smiled. “We’ll take turns pushing each other’s wheelchair. Deal?”

“Deal,” she said, and they made love, slowly and gently.

This morning McGarvey took Katy shopping and they had an early lunch in Georgetown before he dropped her back at the safe house and headed down to the Farm.

“Come back to me as soon as you can, darling,” was all she’d said to him before he left.

On the way out of town he’d telephoned Rencke at the Building for any updates on the Foxtrot’s position, but the submarine had not been spotted since the mid-Atlantic and it was still presumed that she was headed to the canal.

“Dennis Berndt called Dick this morning wanting to know what you were up to,” Rencke had said. “The prez is getting worried and he’s circling the wagons.”

“I got some navy help and they’re going to meet me at the Farm this afternoon, but for now I want the White House and Adkins kept out of the loop in case this op goes south. There’ll be plenty of blame to go around, no matter what happens.”

“I don’t think Dick wants to know, anyway he’s not been asking any questions,” Rencke said. “But Peter has got his hands full.” Peter Franza was the CIA’s chief press officer. “The Washington Post is storming the gates, wanting to know what’s going on at Gitmo. Apparently there was another leak, and the Post found out about the riot.”

“Was my name mentioned?”

“Not so far,” Rencke said. “Peter’s stonewalling them, but that won’t last much longer.”

“I’ll tell you what. Make a blind call to the managing editor at the Post and put a word in his ear about Weiss. Hint that maybe he’s under investigation for prisoner abuse.”

“Won’t Weiss come after you in the press?”

“Only if he’s innocent,” McGarvey said. “But if he’s helping al-Quaida he’ll deny the story, and then hunker down until the storm passes. Who knows, he might even try to run.”

“I’ll get on it,” Rencke had promised.

The gate guards at the entrance to the Farm were dressed in BDUs, Heckler & Koch M8s slung over their shoulders. They were expecting him, and after he showed his ID, they raised the barrier, and passed him through.

His daughter came out of the administration building when he pulled up and got out of the SUV. “Hi, Daddy,” she said, giving him a peck on the cheek. “Todd’s down at the hand-to-hand barn. We didn’t know what time you’d get here.”

“Let’s take a walk, sweetheart. I’ve got to ask you to put your neck on the chopping block for the next day or two.”

She had to laugh. “That’s our thing, isn’t it?”

They headed down one of the paths through the woods toward the river. “You’re going to have some company this evening, but I don’t want anything said about it by anyone. And I mean by anyone.”

“What’s up, Dad?”

“We’re going to try to catch a submarine that might just show up downriver in the next day or two.”

Elizabeth’s eyes widened slightly. “We’ll lock the camp down for the duration,” she said. “What can you tell me?”

There was a lot of traffic on the surface. Sonar had forty-seven tracks in its tape recorder in the past twenty-four hours, most of which was commercial traffic inbound or outbound from New York well to the north. But they had detected no U.S. Navy warships.

“Doesn’t make sense, unless they’re laying a trap for us,” al-Hari said. It was dusk on the surface. They were running the diesel engines on snorkel to recharge the batteries. Graham called back to sonar.

“What’s the range and bearing to our nearest target?”

“Fifteen thousand meters, zero-three-zero,” Shihabi reported. “She’s a large tanker, I think, or maybe a car carrier, heading northwest.”

“Very well,” Graham said. He glanced at al-Hari. “They think we’re heading to the Panama Canal. They probably sent a carrier battle group down there to intercept us.”

The Iranian officer shrugged and glanced up at the overhead. “The Coast Guard should be up there somewhere.”

“They probably are, but closer in,” Graham said.

The ship’s com buzzed. “Con, this is the forward torpedo room. Let me talk to the captain.” It was Ziyax.

Graham took the phone from its bracket. “This is Graham. You’re supposed to be off duty.”

“We have a problem up here, Captain. A serious one.”

“What is it?”

“It would be better if you saw for yourself,” Ziyax said.

Graham was irritated. The next twenty-four hours approaching the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay would be the most crucial. If the Americans had somehow guessed that the Shehab was not headed south, and was instead heading toward Washington or New York, the U.S. Navy or Coast Guard could indeed have laid a trap for them. Last night he had ordered Russian conventional free-running HE torpedoes loaded in the remaining four bow tubes, as well as the four stern tubes, in case they got backed into a corner and had to fight their way out.

Winning such a fight one-on-one against an American ASW ship was not likely unless they got lucky, so he meant to avoid a confrontation whatever it took.

That was the major issue facing them, not some glitch in the forward torpedo room.

But if they were cornered he would immediately launch the missiles.

“Go up there and find out what’s going on,” Graham told al-Hari. “Whatever it is, get it fixed.”

“Yes, sir,” al-Hari said, and he left the con.

Graham was about to call sonar again, but he stayed his hand from flipping the switch on the com. Something was spooking him; something niggling at the back of his mind. Like al-Hari had done, he glanced up at the overhead as if he could peer through the maze of plumbing and wiring and the inner and outer hulls to the surface, to see what was waiting for them.

He walked over to the periscope pedestal, raised the search scope, and did a quick three-sixty in the fading light. The nearest sonar target was fifteen kilometers away, well over the horizon. They were utterly alone for the moment out here, the skies clear, the seas two meters or less.

He looked away from the eyepieces. The men were docile. They were obeying their orders without question now.

But something was playing with him, as if he were forgetting something important.

He took a second look, then lowered the periscope. The ship’s com buzzed.

“Con, this is the torpedo room.” It was al-Hari.

Graham answered. “Yes, what’s the problem up there, Muhamed?”

“Tube two’s inner door will not seal properly. The gasket is shot.”

“Do we have a spare?” Graham asked.

“Yes, Cap’n, but that’s not the problem. No one wants to open the door, not even at gunpoint, because of the radiation. And without the fix we will not be able to fire that missile.”

“Transfer the missile to another tube,” Graham ordered. His nerves were beginning to jump all over the place.

“As I said, no one will touch the missile,” al-Hari replied. His tone was maddeningly calm. “Do you want me to start shooting people? I can begin with Captain Ziyax.”

“No, we need every man aboard,” Graham said. He desperately wanted to visualize Jillian’s face. It was important to him. She’d known the right words, the right gestures to calm him down whenever he got like this. “You’re in charge up there. We need that missile, otherwise this entire exercise was for nothing. If you can’t get someone else to work the problem, do it yourself.”

Graham slammed the growler phone back in its cradle.

The bastards weren’t going to get away with it.They could have broken radio silence to call him home. They hadn’t been at war. No big secrets would have been revealed.

They would pay. All the sons of bitches would pay.

SIXTY-FIVE

McGarvey stood at the dock waiting for Jackson and his SEAL team to show up with the boat they’d promised for this time yesterday. It was late afternoon, nearly forty-eight hours since the backyard barbecue, and he was acutely conscious that time was not on their side.

There was a light chop on the river, and tonight it was supposed to be overcast with light rain likely. Nearly perfect conditions for a submarine to sneak past Norfolk and make it into the York River. And terrible conditions for a search-and-seize mission.

“Not their fault,” Dillon said at McGarvey’s shoulder. “NSW Group Three didn’t want to part with a boat unless they knew what the mission was.” Special Operations boats belonged to Naval Special Warfare Groups Three and Four, and always came complete with their own highly trained crews. They weren’t items of military equipment that were usually loaned out.

It had taken a call from Admiral Puckett himself to make the CO of Group Three see things in the proper light. That was last night, and still it had taken until now to find the proper boat in Norfolk, get it fueled and prepped, and bring it across the mouth of the bay and up into the York River.

Jackson had telephoned a couple hours ago that they would be under way within minutes; their estimated time of arrival at the Farm’s dock was 1800. It was that time now.

The sharp crack of a small explosion somewhere in the distance behind them was followed by the rattle of small-arms fire. It sounded like M8s to McGarvey’s ear. Liz and Todd had kept the batch of new recruits going through the course super-busy and out of the way, and even Gloria Ibenez, who’d come down for a second debriefing, had left for Langley this morning without knowing that McGarvey was here.

He and Dillon were dressed in SEAL night camos, their faces blackened, their weapons and other equipment in satchels at their feet. Their plan was to stay on the river near the only area deep enough to hide a submarine and wait for the Foxtrot to show up.

The approaches to the Panama Canal were being covered in case he was wrong about Graham. And if a missile launch was made from offshore up here, there was little or nothing that could be done about it, other than mount an all-out search along our entire coast. The risk, of course, was that the first whiff Graham got that they were on to him, he’d launch anyway. He had put them in a catch-22.

Adkins had somehow managed to convince the president and his staff to go up to Camp David for a few days. Rencke had called this morning with the news. Most of the key Cabinet members, along with a good portion of Congress, had quietly filtered out of town, not knowing exactly why, except that Don Hamel had quietly spread the word that now might be a good time to visit their constituencies. The media had started to sit up and take notice, but so far they’d come up with little more than speculation.

“It’s getting like a ghost town around here, and it’s driving them nuts, ya know,” Rencke said. “What about Mrs. M?”

“She’s far enough from downtown that she’ll be able to get out of the way if something happens,” McGarvey said. It was the best-case scenario because she had dug in her heels, and nothing he could say would convince her to go to their house in Florida.

He had considered trying to convince the president to order the evacuation of the city, but that would have done no good either. The panic would kill people, and if the attack did not occur, the government’s already dismal ratings would fall even lower.

“Good luck,” Rencke had said.

“They’re here,” Dillon said at his side.

McGarvey looked up from his thoughts as a low-slung, dark-hulled boat appeared in the dusk around the bend in the river. It was a Mark V Special Operations Craft used to insert and extract SEAL teams from operational areas where stealth was more important than heavy-duty armament. At eighty-two feet on deck, she displaced fifty-seven tons, and could do fifty knots through the water while making very little noise.

She ran without lights and even as she closed on the dock, it was hard to hear her engines, or make out many details. The delay, Jackson had explained to them, had been needed to fit the boat out with the passive side scan sonar McGarvey had requested, along with a lot of ammunition for the two deck-mounted 7.62mm machine guns, six Dräger closed-circuit rebreathers, enough underwater demolitions material to crack the submarine’s hull like an eggshell, and some basic salvage gear.

Terri Jackson was at the helm as the sleek boat eased alongside the dock, the softly grumbling engines at idle. Bill Jackson was on the bridge with her, while MacKeever and Ercoli were on the open stern deck. They did not bother with dock lines.

McGarvey and Dillon tossed their equipment bags across and then scrambled aboard.

The instant they were on deck, Terri gunned the engines and they headed away, making a long looping turn to take them back downriver toward the bay.

“Welcome aboard, gentlemen,” Ercoli said. “Soon as you stow your gear below, FX wants to have a word.” FX was Jackson’s handle, which he’d earned early on in his SEAL career because of the special effects he was fond of using in the field.

“What’s up?” Dillon asked.

“We might have pulled some luck,” Ercoli said. “An Orion patrol about a hundred klicks off the mouth of the bay thought they picked up a MAD target, but when they went back it was gone.” MAD was a Magnetic Anomaly Detector, a device that was able to detect masses of ferrous metal submerged as deep as one thousand feet. “Lots of traffic in the area, so your boy might have detected the overflight, and ducked under one of the surface ships that was in the vicinity.”

“When was this?” Dillon asked.

“Two hours ago,” Ercoli said. “A friend of FX’s gave us a call from Second’s ops center just before we shoved off. They’re classifying it as a stray hit, but the word was out that we wanted anything that came up no matter how thin it was.”

“That’s him,” McGarvey said.

“That’s what we figured,” MacKeever said. He was grinning ear to ear. “Tonight’s the night, and it’s going to be a good one.”

The Foxtrot eased her way to the west toward the center channel into Chesapeake Bay, her keel occasionally scraping the bottom. It was after ten in the evening and there was no shipping traffic for the moment.

The water was very shallow here, even in the middle of the inbound fairway, so that the submarine was only partially submerged. It would be somewhat deeper once they passed the Bay Bridge-Tunnel, but there would not be enough water to completely submerge until they reached the York River.

Graham and Ziyax stood topside on the bridge, the lapping water less than two meters below them, the boat’s hull invisible underwater.

Both missiles were ready to fire now that the gasket on tube two had been replaced. Al-Hari was already beginning to feel the effects of the heavy dose of radiation he’d taken, but he’d been fatalistic about it this morning after he’d vomited for the first time.

“Your story about the shrimper coming to pick us up is a lie,” he’d told Graham in the companionway outside the officer’s head. No one else had been within earshot at the moment.

“The others don’t suspect?”

“No one else cares,” al-Hari said. “Like me they’re willing to die for the jihad.” He coughed up some blood into a rag. “Except for you and Captain Ziyax. You’re the only two aboard who think they have anything to live for other than Paradise.”

“You’ll get your wish,” Graham had replied indifferently.

Al-Hari had nodded. “Once the missiles are away, I will set the explosives on the anthrax canisters, so you had best be gone by then.” Al-Hari grabbed Graham by the arm. “I ask only two favors. Take Ziyax with you, he’s a good man. And leave me a pistol, I’ll need time to disable the escape trunk, and then sabotage the engines in case anyone has a change of heart.”

Religious mumbo jumbo had always been a puzzlement to Graham. And working closely with the al-Quaida, many of their mujahideen willing to martyr themselves for the cause, had brought him no closer to an understanding. “Why are you so willing to die?” he asked.

Al-Hari had smiled. “You wouldn’t understand, English.”

“Try me.”

“It’s simple, my friend. You only have to know God and love Him. The rest is easy.”

Graham raised his binoculars and studied the bridge two miles ahead. There didn’t seem to be any traffic up there either, though it was difficult to tell with much certainty because of the jumble of multicolored lights ashore and on the channel markers in the water.

One of the Libyan technicians had managed to rig red, green, and white lights on the exposed sail and one of the masts so that from a distance the submarine would appear to be a small fishing boat returning from sea. The fiction would hold for anything but a close inspection, and so far in that regard their luck was holding.

“Al-Hari is sick with radiation poisoning now,” Ziyax said. “When it is time to leave what are we going to do with him and my two crewmen who handled the missiles? We cannot take them with us.”

“No, we can’t,” Graham said, continuing to study the bridge. It had been conceived in the brain of a man, not a god. And it had been built by the hand of man, not god. There was proof of man’s design everywhere, but so far as Graham had ever been able to detect, there’d never been any concrete sign of the existence of any god, neither the god of the Muslims, nor the gods of the Jews or Christians.

Yet they were willing to die for something they could not see, feel, hear, touch, or smell. All on faith. It was utterly amazing to him.

“What do you suggest?” Ziyax asked.

Graham lowered his binoculars. “Nothing, actually. They’ll get their wishes before the others.”

“What’s that?”

“To die martyrs for the glorious cause, of course,” Graham said. He picked up the phone. “Come right five degrees.”

“Aye, turning right five degrees to new course three-three-zero,” the new COB replied in a subdued voice.

SIXTY-SIX

The SEAL Special Operations Craft was drifting well out of the channel outside the mouth of the York River, about five miles east of Yorktown and the Highway 17 Bridge.

McGarvey was on the afterdeck with Ercoli and MacKeever, while Dillon had joined Jackson and Terri on the bridge to operate the side-scan sonar.

The water here was still too shallow for a submarine to completely submerge, but they’d hoped that the passive sonar set would pick up the signature sounds of the Foxtrot’s diesel engines.

It was three in the morning. The rain that had threatened had never materialized, but a damp fog had settled in on top of them, making everything wet and reducing visibility to less than fifty yards. Lights ashore were nothing more than very dim halos in the distance, and even the channel markers off the SOC’s starboard side were only vague green and red pastels, some of them blinking.

The door to the bridge was open. Dillon was hunched over the sonar display. “I have engine noises,” he called softly.

Since they’d arrived on station southeast of Gloucester Point just after dark, they’d tracked nine targets coming upriver, all but one of them noncommercial pleasure boats.

“Where?” McGarvey asked, keeping his voice low.

“Bearing zero-eight-zero about nine miles out,” Dillon replied. “Heading upbound, making maybe ten knots.” He looked up from the screen and in the dim red light illuminating his face it was obvious he was impressed. “It’s our boy.”

“You sure?” McGarvey asked.

“Three screws, big diesels. Not one of ours.”

MacKeever and Ercoli were looking toward the east through light-intensifying binoculars.

“Anything?” McGarvey asked.

“Still too far,” Ercoli said. “But maybe they sent a chase boat ahead to make sure the channel is clear.”

“Is there any deep water farther up into the bay?” McGarvey asked.

“Nothing,” Dillon called back. “This is the only place.” He turned back to the sonar.

“Do you want us to light up the radar?” Jackson asked.

“Negative,” Dillon said. “His ESM’s gear would recognize it as military.” He made an adjustment to the controls. “Hang on.”

The night was utterly still for several long moments.

“His aspect ratio is changing,” Dillon said. “Stand by.”

It seemed for the moment as if the entire world were asleep, yet McGarvey could almost feel an evil presence somewhere in the darkness to the east. Bad people were coming with a dark intent, like monsters stalking in the night, getting set to pounce.

Dillon looked up. “It’s turned directly toward us,” he said. “It’s the Foxtrot heading to where it can submerge.”

Jackson came to the open door. “Okay, McGarvey, we’ve bagged him. Now what? Do you want to call for backup?”

“Will his radar be on?” McGarvey asked.

“I don’t think he’ll risk it,” Dillon answered.

“We’ll let him pass and then come in behind him out of visual range,” McGarvey said. “As soon as he submerges we’ll dive down and knock on the escape trunk hatch.”

Jackson’s wife laughed. “That’ll get their attention,” she said. “Won’t they fire whatever weapons they have?”

“I’m hoping they’ll try,” McGarvey said. “If they have missiles what tubes would they load them in?” he asked Dillon.

“They’d probably start with tube one, and go from there depending on how many weapons they have. Wouldn’t make any sense to fire them from the stern tubes.”

McGarvey’s plan suddenly dawned on Ercoli. “Holy shit, the salvage equipment you wanted,” he said. “I thought you were going to use it to cut through the hull into the escape trunk. But that’s not it.” He turned to look up at Jackson on the bridge. “FX, this crazy bastard wants us to weld the torpedo tube outer doors shut.”

“Can it be done?” Jackson asked Dillon.

“I don’t see why not.”

Terri raised an eyebrow. “I thought you and your English captain were either very brave or very crazy,” she said. “But I was wrong.”

“Which is it?” McGarvey asked.

She laughed. “Both,” she said, and she immediately raised a hand. “But I love it. One guy is bringing a Russian submarine up a shallow bay past a major enemy navy base, and the other guy wants to do hand-to-hand combat with the boat.” She turned to her husband. “Honey, this sounds like fun. Why didn’t we think of it first?”

The bottom dropped away once they passed under the Highway 17 Bridge into the York River.

Graham keyed the bridge telephone. “Con, bridge. What’s our depth?” “Bridge, we have fifteen meters under our keel, but it doesn’t look like it’ll get much deeper,” al-Hari responded. He was obviously very sick.

The boat was already partially submerged. Only the top couple of meters plus the masts were above water. Another fifteen meters would do nicely. “Very well, prepare to dive the boat.”

“Aye, Cap’n, prepare to dive the boat.”

Graham replaced the phone in its bracket under the coaming, and looked at Ziyax, who was studying something to the stern through light-intensifying binoculars. “What do you see?”

“I thought I heard something,” Ziyax replied softly. “Engines, but very quiet.”

Ziyax might be a Libyan, but he’d been trained by Russians. Graham had developed a grudging respect for the man’s abilities, if not his judgment, on the long trip across the Atlantic. He called the control room again.

“Secure the diesel engines and switch to electric power, All Ahead Slow.”

Al-Hari hesitated for a second. “Aye, sir. Switching to electric motors.”

Within a few seconds the soft rumbling of the three diesels died away, and the night became totally silent except for the delicate sounds of the leading edge of the sail cutting slowly through the water.

Ziyax continued to study the thickening fog behind them.

Graham cocked an ear and held his breath. Their sonar was blind aft, but if a U.S. Navy vessel had spotted them coming into the bay, or turning up into the York River, they would have charged in, radar sets hot, searchlights blazing, the guard frequencies alive with demands to stop and identify, and warning shots fired across their bows. They wouldn’t be sneaking around without lights. It made no sense to him.

There was the man on the bridge of the Apurto Devlán with the gray-green eyes. Bin Laden was certain it had been Kirk McGarvey. He is the one man above all others who you must respect and fear.

But there was absolutely no reason to expect that McGarvey were here in this time and place. No reason whatsoever.

Graham held his breath and strained to pick up a sound, any sound, no matter how faint or unlikely, that might indicate someone was behind them.

But he heard nothing.

Ziyax lowered his binoculars. “I must have been mistaken,” he said. He shrugged. “Nerves.”

They were about four miles upriver from Yorktown here, and there was a certain delicious irony to their position in Graham’s mind, because they were only five miles downriver from the CIA’s training base.

For a moment he thought about the man on the bridge of the Apurto Devlán, but then he called the control room. “Put the boat on the bottom,” he ordered.

“Aye, Cap’n,” al-Hari responded.

Ziyax was first down the ladder.

Graham cocked an ear to listen one last time, then dropped down into the sail, secured the hatch, and descended the rest of the way into the control room. He took the 1MC mike down from its bracket near the periscope pedestal. “Battle stations, missile,” he ordered calmly, his voice transmitted to every compartment aboard the submarine.

Al-Hari was at the ballast control panel, releasing air from the tanks in a carefully controlled sequence, and they started down, cautiously because they had no real idea what was on the bottom.

Ziyax went to the weapons control station and began the process of spinning up the cruise missile guidance systems, making the engines ready to fire once the missiles were ejected from the torpedo tubes and rose to the surface, and arming the nuclear weapons, which would fire at five thousand feet over the capital city.

“All Ahead Stop,” al-Hari ordered, as the boat settled.

The angle on the bow was very shallow, and they drifted another two hundred meters, their speed slowly bleeding off until their keel scraped the bottom. The boat lurched forward then came to a complete stop, easing a few degrees over on her port side.

“Secure the motors,” Graham said softly. Shehab had reached her final resting place. He casually glanced at the men gathered at their stations around him in the control room. This was to be their mausoleum, he thought indifferently. They wanted martyrdom, they would have it.

“Missile one and two are ready in all respects to fire, Captain,” Ziyax reported. “Shall I flood the tubes and open the outer doors?”

“Flood the tubes and open the outer doors, but do not fire the missiles,” Graham ordered.

“Aye, Captain,” Ziyax responded mechanically. He reached up to a control panel and flipped two switches. A few seconds later, two lights blinked green. “The tubes are flooded and the outer doors are open.”

Something was wrong. Flooding a torpedo tube and opening its door to the sea was a fairly noisy operation. “I didn’t hear a thing,” Graham said.

“Captain, my indicators show open doors.”

Graham snatched the growler phone. “Forward torpedo room, this is the captain. I want a visual on tubes one and two.”

A few seconds later one of Ziyax’s people came back. “Captain, tubes one and two are flooded and the outer doors appear to be open.”

“Very well,” Graham said, and he hung up the phone.

“When will we fire the missiles?” Ziyax asked.

“Soon,” Graham said. “First I need to see if our ride is topside and in a safe position. Wouldn’t do to hit them with our missiles.”

“Isomil, are there any contacts on the surface?” Ziyax called to his sonar man.

“There might have been one briefly off our port stern quarter, but it’s gone now, sir,” the Libyan junior officer responded.

“Get your crew ready to abandon the boat as soon as I return,” Graham said. “We’ll set the missiles to launch on a countdown clock. Thirty minutes should give us plenty of time.”

“It’s already been done, Captain,” Ziyax said. He stepped aside from the weapons panel so that they could all see the launch controls for tubes one and two. They were in countdown mode at twenty-nine minutes and eighteen seconds.

Graham shrugged. “Very inventive of you, Captain.”

Ziyax pulled out a pistol. “This won’t be another Distal Volente in which my entire crew is killed,” he said. “This time it will be you and your men who die.”

Al-Hari fired two shots from Graham’s left, both catching Ziyax in the chest and shoving him backwards, his pistol firing once into the chart table.

Graham pulled his Steyr and shot the young Libyan at the diving planes and steering yoke, at the same time al-Hari stepped forward and put bullets into the heads of both sonar operators.

“Best you leave now, Captain,” he told Graham. “I fixed the firing circuits so that the timer cannot be shut off.”

“I don’t think the outer doors are open. You’ll have to find a way to get to them.”

“I’ll do it,” al-Hari promised. He was weak, but still able to function.

Graham looked into his eyes. “I don’t understand.”

“No, and you never will,” al-Hari said. “Not until you have come to know God, which I think is too great a leap for you to make.”

Someone from forward fired a pistol shot that ricocheted off the deck between them. He and Graham fell back out of the line of fire.

“Get out of here while you still can,” al-Hari said. “And may Allah go with you.”

Graham shrugged indifferently, and ducked through the aft hatch, to get his things from his cabin and make his way to the escape trunk. “I need three men to lock out with me!” he shouted. It was the only way he figured he’d get off this boat now. He couldn’t shoot his way out, so he needed the cooperation of three crewmen who were not so willing to die for the cause after all. He would take care of them once they reached the surface.

“Holy shit, it’s gunfire,” Dillon said, looking up from the side-scan sonar.

“Sounds like the bad guys are getting cranky,” Terri said.

She and the others were donning their black wet suits, equipment packs, and rebreather units. They’d lowered an anchor just aft of the submarine, which was sitting on the bottom in about seventy feet of water, its sail just a few feet beneath the surface.

The two welding sets were on the afterdeck, ready to go into the water. The job of making sure that as many of the forward torpedo tubes as possible would not open had fallen to them.

McGarvey was going to stay topside with the boat in case the others needed help, but the sounds of gunfire changed everything. “You’re going to need all the help you can get,” he said, pulling on a black wet suit and the rebreather that Terri had to help him with.

“You ever do this before?” she asked.

“Shoot bad guys, or go for a swim in the middle of the night?”

“Both at the same time.”

“Once, a long time ago,” McGarvey said, thinking about the flooded tunnel beneath a castle in Portugal where he had very nearly lost his life. He shuddered inwardly. It wasn’t his most pleasant memory.

His pistol and spare magazine of ammunition went into a waterproof pocket in his suit. Terri handed him an underwater pistol that used CO₂ to fire five-inch steel bolts that were tipped with spring-loaded razor-sharp arrowheads. On impact four blades opened and could do a considerable amount of damage to a human body. Spring-loaded racks held five bolts. He was given two racks, plus the one loaded into the triangular frame of the eighteen-inch-long weapon.

“We dive the buddy system, Kirk,” she said. “For this dive my husband pairs with Frank, and you’re mine.” She grinned. “Just don’t think it means we’re going steady or anything.”

“Treat him nice, honey,” FX said from the stern rail. “He’s a VIP.”

“I’ll keep that in mind, dear,” she said. “Ready?” she asked McGarvey, who’d pulled on his dive mask.

“Let’s do it,” he told her.

“Right,” she said. MacKeever and Ercoli went down first with the welding equipment, followed by FX and Dillon, and finally Terri and McGarvey.

The water was pitch-black, though within a few feet the massive sail loomed below and ahead of them like a gigantic black beast. Two small pinpricks of light moved forward toward the bow of the submarine that was completely lost in the darkness, while Jackson and Dillon headed aft toward the escape trunk hatch. McGarvey and Terri followed the lights moving aft.

McGarvey liked diving on the reefs in the Florida Keys, in crystal-clear water, but this was different. The darkness was disorienting, and already a chill was seeping into his bones, though he was sweating with the exertion of fighting the river current.

All of a sudden the bulk of the submarine loomed out of the darkness directly below them. Dillon and Jackson had just reached the aft deck, when a huge stream of air bubbles suddenly escaped from the escape trunk hatch.

Someone was locking out.

McGarvey and the others switched off their dive lights, plunging them into nearly absolute darkness. He pulled out his CO₂ pistol, making sure by feel that the safety catch was in the off position, and swam down a few more feet to a position he thought should be just above and just aft of the hatch, with Dillon and Jackson out of his line of fire.

Terri was behind him. She touched his ankle, and then swam down to him so that their face masks were inches apart. She held up her weapon so that he could see it, and he did the same. She nodded and gave him the thumbs-up, then turned in the direction of the escape hatch.

A very large bubble of air rose past McGarvey and Terri, the current carrying it right over them. All of a sudden he saw a circle of dull red light where he thought the hatch should be. Moments later three ghostly figures, wearing what appeared to be emergency escape hoods, rose one by one from inside the submarine.

Dillon and Jackson switched on their dive lights, illuminating the three figures in harsh white light, and fired their CO₂ guns, taking out the first two men, who flopped backwards, dark, black blood streaming from the massive wounds in their chests where the razor-sharp arrowheads had punctured lungs and severed major arteries.

Terri fired at the third figure who was desperately trying to swim forward, catching him in his left thigh. Jackson was right there, firing a second shot, hitting the man in the middle of the back, severing his spine and causing his body to go completely limp.

McGarvey had been watching the open hatch for a fourth man who’d briefly appeared, but then had ducked back inside the escape trunk when the firing had begun.

He pushed off as fast as he could swim down to the aft deck as the hatch swung shut, getting a brief impression of a pair of eyes behind the clear faceplate of the Steinke hood.

Terri reached him moments later, but the hatch had already been dogged, and they could hear high-pressure air clearing water from the trunk.

McGarvey turned and held up three fingers in front of Terri’s faceplate, and pointed toward one of the bodies drifting slowly upwards and downstream.

She got his meaning and together they swam to the first body. McGarvey pulled the Steinke hood off, and shined his light on the face. The man’s dark eyes were open in death, his face screwed up in a grimace of pain and terror. He was not Rupert Graham.

Dillon and Jackson understood what McGarvey was doing, and they retrieved the other two bodies, pulling off the Steinke hoods as McGarvey and Terri swam over to take a look. Neither of the dead men was Graham either.

Jackson pulled out a plastic tablet and grease pen. “Graham?” he wrote.

McGarvey shook his head.

Dillon got their attention, and pointed the beam of his dive light back down toward the escape trunk hatch, where bubbles were streaming out.

They switched off their dive lights, and moments later the hatch opened to reveal a dim circle of red light.

No one swam up from inside the submarine.

McGarvey took the tablet and pen from Jackson. “Looks like an invitation to me.”

Jackson looked toward the bow of the boat. Just visible, nearly three hundred feet away, were the otherworldly twin glows of the two welding torches. He turned back to McGarvey and nodded, then took the tablet and pen.

“This is our show,” he wrote.

McGarvey took the tablet. “I’m coming too. Your wife needs a dive buddy.”

Graham was beside himself with rage, crouching in the doorway of the passageway just aft of the escape trunk. Two more of his crew were crouched forward of the hatch that they’d recycled once he’d gotten back aboard.

It was quiet, except for the gentle hush of the scrubbers and fans circulating air that had been recycled and cleaned of its excess CO₂. Earlier he thought he’d heard strange buzzing sounds from somewhere well forward in the boat, but most of his attention had been directed toward escaping before the missiles fired. Now he couldn’t hear the sounds.

When the escape trunk hatch had opened and the three crewmen had emerged into the river, Graham had counted three, perhaps four small lights hanging in the water just outside.

Seeing them, and instantly understanding that he had led his boat into a trap, had been the biggest shock of his life. Every detail had been planned. His crew had done exactly what he wanted it to do. They had evaded detection through the Strait of Gilbraltar, had crossed the Atlantic, allowing satellites to spot them heading south, and had sailed into the Chesapeake with not so much as a close call.

But it had been for nothing if he couldn’t escape.

The missiles would launch and contaminate Washington if al-Hari had gotten the outer doors open, or fire and destroy the submarine if the doors remained shut. At this point it did not matter to him.

He wanted his life, not merely for the pleasure of it, but to continue striking back at the bastards. Over and over because they … because … what? He didn’t know if he knew the answer now.

But it wasn’t going to end here. Not like this.

“There are at least three of them,” he called out to his men hiding in the darkness. “Wait until all of them come aboard, and then fire and keep firing.”

“We could surrender,” someone suggested.

“They’ll kill us first so that they can get to the missiles. We have to stop them before we can get out of here.”

With the three men presumably dead or captured outside the submarine, plus the four he and al-Hari had killed in the control room and sonar space, the twelve they had shot in their bunks, and the two Libyans who were deathly sick with radiation poisoning, there weren’t many men left aboard. What few remained were holed up in various compartments throughout the boat, trying to stay out of the firefight.

But that wouldn’t last. Sooner or later some of them would try to reach the escape trunk with whatever weapons they’d managed to find. It was going to get unhealthy back here in a matter of minutes.

He looked up toward the escape trunk hatch, willing himself to get a grip, to remain calm. “Come on,” he muttered under his breath. One shot was all he needed and the bastards would be caught in a cross fire. Once his two crewmen had finished the job he would kill them and make his escape.

It all would depend on timing, and on their attackers being lured down into the passageway.

Someone closed the outer hatch, and immediately high-pressure air began to hiss into the escape trunk. They had accepted the bait.

Graham tightened the grip on his 9mm Steyr and eased a little farther back into the shadows, using the bulkhead and edge of the doorway as a shield. “Wait until they all come down the ladder,” he called softly.

But he was forgetting something. He could feel it.

The air stopped, and the inner hatch was undogged and pulled up into the escape trunk.

For several seconds nothing happened, but then something small dropped through the hatch and clattered heavily on the deck.

Graham had time enough to realize that it was a flash-bang grenade, the very possibility he had forgotten to consider, and fall the rest of the way back into the generator room, before a tremendous flash of light followed instantly by an ear-shattering boom hammered off the bulkheads.

He caught a glimpse of two black-clad figures dropping through the hatch and immediately spraying the compartment and passageway with automatic weapons fire, before he raced aft, ducked through the hatch into the tiny machine shop and electrical parts storage bins. He had his pistol at the ready, half-expecting to see some of his crew waiting to gun him down.

But he was alone back here for the moment.

The firing stopped, but then started again, farther forward.

He figured that they were U.S. Navy SEALs and that they would make a lightning-fast sweep through the boat, killing anything that moved.

Graham stuffed the pistol in his belt, pulled up a section of floor grating beneath a metal lathe, eased the waterproof bag with his civilian clothing and papers into the bilge, and climbed down into the cold, stinking filthy water.

Someone was coming aft.

He had just enough time to ease the grating back into place, when a black-suited figure appeared at the open hatch.

McGarvey hesitated for a moment just inside a cramped compartment that was equipped with a workbench, a vice, a metal lathe, and other tools, plus bins and bulkhead-mounted cabinets filled with parts.

Terri was right behind him, her Beretta 9mm pistol in hand, her dive mask pushed up on top of her head. “What?” she asked.

He thought that he’d heard a noise. Faint. Metal-on-metal just before he’d come through the hatch, but then Dillon and Jackson, who had headed forward, had opened fire again. “Someone’s back here,” he said softly.

“Watch yourself,” she cautioned.

McGarvey continued aft through the next hatch into the engine room and pulled up short again. The hairs at the nape of his neck were standing up. A slightly built man was sprawled on his face on the deck, a pistol in his hands. He was obviously dead, but there was something wrong with the skin on his hands and neck. He was covered in suppurating wounds or sores.

“That’s radiation sickness,” he said. “There are nukes aboard and they’re leaking badly. You better tell Frank and your husband.”

Terri found a growler phone on the bulkhead. She dialed up the 1MC. “FX pick up.”

A second later Jackson came on. “Go.”

“Trouble. We got a bad guy down in engineering. Already dead when we got here. Mac thinks it’s radiation sickness.”

“Stay away from the body.”

“Have they found Graham?” McGarvey asked Terri, and she relayed the question.

“Negative,” Jackson came back. “We’ve bagged a dozen bad guys, but there are more than that dead in their bunks. Tapped in the heads at close range. Two down in the con, two in sonar.”

“Have you reached the forward torpedo room yet?” Terri asked.

“I’m at the hatch, but it’s dogged from the inside. How about you?”

“There may be someone else back here. We’re going to finish—”

Dillon broke in over the 1MC. “We’ve got big problems, people,” he said. “We need to get off this boat right now.”

“Where are you, Frank?” Jackson demanded.

“In the con,” Dillon came back. “But you better hurry, we’ve got less than six minutes.”

McGarvey stared at the dead man for a moment longer, then looked up. All the hatches back to the aft torpedo room were open. Nothing moved back here. There were no sounds except for the air circulation fans.

“Mac?” Terri asked.

He had definitely heard something. Someone was hiding back here, but it could take hours to dig him, or them, out. “Right,” he said, and he turned and followed Terri forward to the control room.

Jackson got there at the same time they did. Dillon was hunched over the weapons control panel, on which two lights were flashing. A clock was on countdown mode, with five minutes and twenty-eight seconds showing.

“Whatever’s in tubes one and two is going to fire in about five minutes unless we do something,” Dillon said. “The timing circuits have been sabotaged, so we can’t do it from here.”

“Did they open the outer doors?” Jackson demanded.

“The indicators on the panel show the tubes flooded and the doors open. They must have opened them before Dale and Bob could reach the bow.”

“They were welding something,” Jackson said. “The timer was sabotaged, could they have done the same with the indicators for those two tubes?”

“Yes, but I don’t know why, unless there was a mutiny.”

“We did hear gunfire,” Terri said.

“I need two blocks of Semtex, one with a short fuse for the torpedo room hatch, and the other with a longer fuse to destroy the compartment,” McGarvey said. “We can’t let those missiles fire. If they explode even inside the tubes they’d spread radiation through the river and all of the lower bay.”

“That compartment will be hot,” Jackson said.

“I’ll blow the door, shoot anything that moves, and toss the second block inside.”

Terri had taken a brick of plastic explosive from her pack and was hurriedly molding a small block of it for the torpedo room hatch. “What do we have to wreck inside to make sure the missiles won’t fire?”

“Take out the inner doors,” Dillon said. “Should break the firing circuitry between there and here.”

“You can’t go inside,” Jackson cautioned.

“Neither of us are, honey,” Terri said. “I’ll toss a big enough block to take out the door and the entire compartment. Stand by at the escape trunk, we’re probably going to be in a big hurry.” She gave McGarvey a grin. “For a first date, you’re not half-bad.”

“Terri,” Jackson said softly.

She turned to her husband and a look of complete understanding passed between them. “Be back in a flash,” she said.

McGarvey. The single thought crystallized in Graham’s head as he noiselessly climbed up into the escape trunk. His sneakers were slippery with oil from the bilge, and he nearly fell.

The son of a bitch was aboard. But no matter how the man had gotten this far, he was going to die down here in just a few minutes. Graham only wished that he could somehow see the look on McGarvey’s face when the escape trunk was blown apart and the wall of black water came rushing through the boat.

There would only be a brief moment between the time McGarvey knew he was going to die and the instant when his consciousness was blotted out. But Graham wished he could see it.

He closed the inner hatch, dogged it, and opened the seawater valve to flood the compartment. As the water rose, he donned his Steinke hood.

Within ninety seconds the chamber was filled with water. He undogged the outer hatch and swung it open. He waited for a few seconds, to make sure that no one was waiting outside, then cautiously eased out of the escape trunk.

Somewhere forward, possibly at the bows, two very dim violet lights flickered in the pitch-black water.

It came to him all at once that he knew what the buzzing sounds he’d heard earlier were. Someone was up there welding the torpedo doors shut.

The missiles would fire inside the tubes and when they did, the entire bow section of the submarine would be destroyed.

It was another failed operation, and he was bitter about it. But this time McGarvey would die for certain.

Graham jammed the ten-kilo brick of plastic explosive against the inner hull just inside the escape trunk, set the timer for four minutes, and, holding his waterproof satchel against his chest, kicked off for the surface.

“Fifteen-second fuse,” McGarvey said.

Terri had molded the small block of Semtex around the dogging wheel at the center of the forward torpedo room door. She nodded, inserted the acid fuse into the plastique, and she and McGarvey ducked back around a bulkhead.

“Get the big charge ready to toss,” he told her. He switched his Walther’s safety catch to the off position.

Someone fired a pistol from behind them, the first shot ricocheting off the deck, a piece of the shrapnel catching McGarvey in the left foot. He turned in time to see a tall, slender man waving a large pistol stagger up the passageway from where he had apparently been hiding. He was ravaged by radiation sickness, open, running sores distorting his face so badly that he looked like something out of a horror movie.

McGarvey started to bring his pistol to bear when the dying man fired a second shot, this one caching Terri in her forehead just above her left eye, and she fell back.

“No!” McGarvey shouted, and fired three shots in rapid succession, all of them striking the Arab in the middle of his chest, sending him backwards, dead before he hit the deck.

The Semtex Terri had set blew with a sharp bang, and the torpedo room hatch locks came loose, the door swinging open a few inches.

McGarvey ducked across the passageway to Terri, who was crumpled against the bulkhead. Her blood-filled left eye was open in surprise but she was dead, and there was no power on earth that could bring her back.

He looked up toward the torpedo room, his heart like granite, willing with everything in his soul for someone to come charging out of there. But no one came.

Terri Jackson, whose handle was Lips, was a pretty young woman, who McGarvey thought looked a little like the movie actress Kim Basinger. He shook his head. So goddamned senseless. All of it. All the killing. All the suicide bombers. All the attacks.

And for what? Religion? He sincerely hoped not, because that would mean the entire world would be at war with itself forever.

McGarvey picked up the heavy charge, darted down the passageway, and shoved the torpedo room hatch open with a foot. The body of one man dangled half out of his bunk. He too had advanced radiation poisoning.

There was no one else inside the narrow, very cramped compartment. Six torpedo doors, three to the right of the boat’s centerline and three to the left, were arrayed in the forward bulkhead about thirty feet from the hatch. There were at least six torpedoes still in their racks.

McGarvey only took a split second to look before he set the acid fuse to three minutes, and tossed the heavy package into the compartment with all of his might.

He did not bother to see where the package landed before he pulled the hatch shut, went back to Terri’s body, picked it up, and headed in a run back to the control room.

Dillon had gone aft to get the escape trunk ready. Jackson was the only one there, waiting for his wife and McGarvey. He didn’t say a word, nor did he look at McGarvey as he took his wife’s body in his arms. He studied her face for several long moments, his expression completely unreadable.

“I’m sorry,” McGarvey said. “We missed one.”

Jackson looked up. “Did you kill him?” he asked, his voice soft as if he were whispering a secret.

“Yes,” McGarvey said. “But we need to hustle. I set the fuse for three minutes.” He glanced over at the weapons control board, which showed the missiles were set to launch in three minutes and ten seconds.

“Time to go,” Jackson said. He turned and headed aft in a run, McGarvey right behind him.

When they reached the escape trunk, Dillon was there, wrestling with the controls. “Somebody locked out and left the outer hatch open,” he said, as he turned around. When he spotted Terri’s body in her husband’s arms, his face fell. “My God,” he said.

McGarvey was looking up at the escape hatch. “It was Graham,” he said. The noise he’d heard in the workshop aft. The bastard had been hiding back there after all.

“Dale and Bob are out there, they might have spotted him,” Dillon said, not able to take his eyes off of Terri’s body.

“Not unless they came aft,” Jackson replied mechanically. There was no animation in his face.

“As it stands there’s no way we’re going to get out from here,” Dillon cautioned.

“We’ve got to get away from this compartment,” McGarvey said, suddenly realizing that Graham wouldn’t have simply jumped ship without first making sure that no one else could follow him. “The forward torpedo room is going to blow in less than two minutes, and I think this hatch is going to blow too.”

“Son of a bitch, you’re right,” Jackson said.

McGarvey hustled them aft into the generator room, and tried to close the waterproof door, but it wouldn’t budge.

“What’s wrong?” Dillon demanded.

“It’s been welded open,” McGarvey said. “All the doors to the aft torpedo room have been welded open.”

“It’s going to get real hairy here in about one minute,” Jackson said.

“It’s worse than that,” Dillon told them. “I took off my rebreather and left it in the control room—”

A very large explosion in the forward torpedo room shook the entire boat as if she were a child’s toy.

McGarvey and the others ducked back behind the bulkhead on either side of the open hatch, the sounds of water rushing forward as loud as a 747 coming in for a landing, bringing with it every piece of loose debris or equipment or bodies like deadly shrapnel from a powerful bomb.

All the lights aboard the submarine went out, plunging them into absolute darkness.

A second explosion, this one practically on top of them, opened up the hull at the escape trunk. Water immediately came pouring into the boat as if from a hundred fire hoses, acting as a temporary cushion against the water and debris racing forward from the wrecked torpedo room.

Water had already risen to their waists and would flood the entire boat within seconds.

Jackson saw their chance at the same time McGarvey did. “We’re going out the hole where the escape trunk was!” he shouted.

“Go!” Dillon shouted over the tremendous din. “I’ll be right behind you!”

“You’re coming with me and Terri!” Jackson shouted. “You need to use her rebreather.”

McGarvey switched on his dive light, pulled his mask over his face, and took a deep breath from the rebreather as the water rose up over their heads.

Jackson had his own mask on, and moments later Dillon had donned Terri’s mask. He and Jackson had to hold her body between them because there had been no time to take the dive equipment from her body.

Within a couple more seconds the entire boat was flooded and the in-rushing water stopped.

McGarvey swam out of the generator room first to survey the damage and see if they could get out of the boat. The entire escape trunk had been obliterated, as had a fifteen-foot-wide section of the hull. Except for some dangling wires and piping the boat was open to the river here.

McGarvey helped Jackson and Dillon maneuver Terri’s body out of the generator room, and up through the debris and out into the open water.

MacKeever and Ercoli appeared out of the gloom from forward and above, but they moved slowly, their bodies battered by the massive concussion of the explosion in the forward torpedo room.

Together the five of them rose slowly to the surface, Terri’s body cradled in her husband’s and Dillon’s arms until they reached the surface.

“Son of a bitch,” MacKeever said. “Someone stole our boat.”