Countdown to Midnight

Twenty-Six

Tired and sore, Nick Flynn limped slowly out through the sliding doors of Terminal B. The backpack slung over one shoulder was the only piece of luggage he’d brought on the succession of flights home from Israel. He joined a knot of other arriving travelers, most of them in T-shirts and shorts, who were waiting for taxis or Uber and Lyft drivers to pick them up.

A dark blue late-model Jeep Grand Cherokee pulled up to the curb and flashed its lights four times. “Excuse me, folks. That’s my ride,” he said politely, as he edged past a couple of parents with three very excited children wearing matching Disney shirts. Carefully, favoring his right leg, he climbed into the back seat of the waiting SUV next to Fox.

The older man greeted him with noncommittal nod and leaned forward. “We’ll go straight back to Avalon House,” he told the man behind the wheel, Mark Stadler. The tough-looking former Marine was now one of Four’s security personnel. “We shouldn’t have picked up a tail anywhere, but keep your eyes peeled just in case.”

“Yes, sir,” Stadler agreed. “I’m on it.” After checking his mirrors, he pulled out into the airport’s slow-moving traffic.

Fox sat back with a sigh and turned to Flynn. He raised a single, questioning eyebrow. “Well?”

“I’m a little battered and bruised, but I’m not seriously hurt,” Flynn assured him. “My Israeli hosts had me checked out at one of their military hospitals during the mission debrief.” He pointed to the bandage slanting from one corner of his mouth to the middle of his chin. “Took a couple of stiches here, but the docs say I won’t even get much of a scar out of it.”

Fox nodded. “Good.”

“My pride’s taken a hell of beating, though,” Flynn admitted. His jaw tightened. Whoever’d said that any crash landing you could walk away from — or in his case, swim away from — was a good one must not have spent much time around those who hadn’t been as lucky. “I took those poor Shayatet 13 guys right into a goddamned trap. Some of them may never get out of the hospital.”

Fox shook his head. “There’s no point in kicking yourself too hard about this, Nick. I’ve talked to Gideon. No one in the IDF is blaming you. We all knew trying to board that tanker from the air would be extremely difficult and dangerous. What none of us anticipated was the actual strength of those concealed defenses.” He frowned. “I saw some of the gun camera footage from the second Panther helicopter. The amount of antiaircraft fire coming your way looked a bit… hairy.”

“Hairy is an understatement,” Flynn said grimly. “That ship is a floating fortress. No boarding party could have made it past that level of firepower.” He frowned. “Hell, from what I could make out, it’ll take a heavily armed warship to knock out those gun mounts and missile launchers before anyone could hope to make it to the deck alive.”

Fox smiled dryly. “Sadly, Four’s original organizers neglected to provide us with a navy of our own. Or the resources to acquire one now.” Pensively, he looked out his window as they merged onto a highway that would take them north toward Winter Park. “Nor, unfortunately, do I see any hope of persuading our government to take any action in this case.”

“Washington’s still not taking this threat seriously?” Flynn asked in disbelief. “Even after seeing how heavily the Iranians and Russians have armed the Gulf Venture? Those 35mm guns and SAMs sure as hell aren’t on that ship just to protect it from Somali or Malay pirates.”

“My sources tell me the overall mood in the higher echelons of the CIA and its counterparts is one of smug satisfaction that they’ve avoided being caught in what’s considered the usual crossfire between hardliners in Jerusalem and radical Islamists in Tehran,” Fox said quietly.

Flynn gritted his teeth. “Then they’re idiots.”

“Politicians,” Fox corrected him sardonically. “Which I suppose amounts to much the same thing.”

“So we’re basically screwed,” Flynn snapped. “Being able to say ‘I told you so’ isn’t going to be much comfort if a nuke goes off over a city somewhere.”

Fox eyed him coldly. “Personally, I have no intention of sitting idly by waiting for that to happen. Do you?”

“No, I don’t,” Flynn shot back, slightly nettled by the suggestion that he might have been thinking about giving up. Yes, he was incredibly jetlagged and very short on sleep. Truth be told, right now he was essentially running on fumes — a mix of adrenaline and endless cups of crummy airline coffee. To make matters worse, the assortment of bruises and strained muscles he’d collected when his helicopter ditched in the sea made even this SUV’s comfortable seats feel akin to a medieval instrument of torture, something like a rack or a spike-lined iron maiden. But he’d be damned if he’d quit that easily.

He offered the older man a rueful smile. “Sorry, Br’er Fox. It’s just that I haven’t been able to figure out yet how in God’s name we’re going to put a helicopter- or ship-borne boarding party onto that oil tanker without getting cut to pieces. And I admit that’s pissing me off some.”

“So I gathered,” Fox said with a hint of mild amusement. His expression darkened a bit. “For what it’s worth, Nick, I’m drawing a blank there, too. So far, at least.” He shrugged. “Which is why I want you and Laura Van Horn and a few others with equally devious and violent minds to begin formulating alternate plans. I know it’s a difficult nut to crack, but I have a great deal of confidence in your tactical skills. And in your respective talents for thinking well outside the box.” He took off his glasses, stared through them for a moment, and then put them back on with a frown. “In the meantime, however, I’m afraid there are still more challenges we need to address.”

Flynn settled back to listen while they continued on toward Avalon House. If nothing else, being asked to focus on different problems would help him ignore his fatigue and aches and pains for a little while longer. At some point soon, he knew, he was going to come crashing down. When the time came, he was going to need some strong painkillers and a lot of sleep, in that order. For now, he’d be happy just to stave off that inevitable collapse until he could get a little more privacy.

First, Fox pointed out somberly, even finding the converted Iranian oil tanker again was going to be enormously tricky. In the days since the failed Shayatet 13 assault, the Gulf Venture had disappeared into the enormous expanses of the open ocean. Already, their potential search area had expanded to cover several million square miles of sea. Every new day that passed without anyone picking up the ship’s trail would add hundreds of thousands more square miles to that already daunting total.

Flynn saw what the other man meant. Even if the Quartet Directorate could afford to spend huge sums chartering civilian aircraft to patrol the most likely sea routes, it would still take incredible luck to spot the missing ship somewhere in all that vastness. And Four’s luck had been in awfully short supply lately. Of course, even assuming they did come up with some way to orchestrate such a massive air search effort, it would be virtually impossible to hide what was going on from the authorities. Or from their enemies.

“So we’re playing a game of hide-and-seek, except we’ve got to do it while stumbling around in the dark with only a tiny pinhole to look through,” he commented. “And if we bump into anybody else, even by accident, the game’s over.”

Fox nodded. “A colorful but reasonably accurate summary of our current situation,” he agreed.

“Just terrific,” Flynn said wryly. He looked at the older man. “Put simply, we need to find a ship that’s armed to the teeth and probably can’t be found… and then somehow figure out how to capture it. Sounds like a walk in the park.” He grinned crookedly. “Do I even want to know what else you think we’ve got on our plate at the moment?”

“The other issue might seem more abstract,” Fox told him quietly. “But I believe it’s just as critical. We need to work out what the Iranians — and through them, Voronin and Zhdanov — are really planning.”

“It doesn’t seem like much of a mystery to me,” Flynn said carefully. “Not since we know that tanker is carrying a missile armed with a nuclear warhead. A nuke may not exactly be a subtle or elegant weapon, but it’s sure as hell likely to blow the crap out of whatever it hits.”

Fox shook his head. “Somehow, somewhere, we’re missing something,” he insisted. “There’s no doubt that this missile being smuggled aboard the Gulf Venture can be used to destroy a city. Or to wipe out an important military installation, I guess. But how would that really advance Iran’s strategic goals, let alone those of Russia? Hitting a single strategic target, no matter how vital it may be, won’t inflict irreversible damage on any of Tehran or Moscow’s different enemies. Even Israel, as small as it is, can withstand a single nuclear strike and still be in a position to hit back hard. Our own country is even more resilient — as are our other, larger allies in Europe and Asia.”

Flynn saw what he was driving at. While on some grim level the Russians might be satisfied to see an American or European city wiped out, as long as Iran took the heat and bore all the damage from any resulting counterstrike, what could Tehran’s own motivation possibly be? Not even the most radical mullah could see any real value in killing a million Americans, if, at the end of the day, the result would be the destruction of their Islamic state — with the United States, the Great Satan, left largely intact. Nor did he really believe Zhdanov and his inner circle would want to take that sort of gamble… not without something more to gain. For more than seventy years, the cold, brutal calculus of deterrence had kept ICBMs in their silos, strategic bombers on the ground, and submarine-launched missiles in their tubes. Why would Moscow risk crossing the nuclear threshold for so small a prospective victory? And, after all, what guarantee did the Russians have that the Iranians would stay silent about their involvement once an angry and vengeful America unleashed its fury?

No, Flynn thought darkly, Fox was right. There had to be some key element of their enemies’ plans that they did not yet understand. He sat back, wrapped in worried silence through the rest of the short drive to Avalon House. It was becoming increasingly clear that what had already seemed to be an extraordinarily dangerous situation might actually be something even more catastrophic.

This was beginning to resemble a stereotypical nightmare, he realized — the one where you were the only person who saw a great danger and tried desperately to alert everyone around you… to no avail. No one in the U.S. government could even acknowledge the existence of the Quartet Directorate — let alone pay any attention to its warnings.

They were entirely on their own. And racing to make sure this particular nightmare didn’t come true.