In the Crosshairs

30

Susannah Lai lied. Gibson would repay her for that someday, and he had murder in his heart as he leaned over the starboard railing of the Russian trawler Dalny Atlantica, puking into the Sea of Okhotsk. The Chinese operative in Hong Kong had promised to get him to Canada, but hadn’t said how she would accomplish that.

The day after their meeting at the Foreign Correspondent’s Club, Lai gave him a packet containing a new identity, including a well-used American passport that had been doctored after being stolen by a hotel bellboy. She hadn’t arranged a first-class airline ticket. Luke Gibson was, for the time being, a marine biologist from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution on contract with the Maritime Stewardship Council. She included a book on commercial fishing that he could read during the trip to get some useful details and terminology. His new name was Daniel Cabot McCabe, which carried a hint of New England aristocracy.

An Air China flight got him far north into Russia, where he had been cleared in advance, and then a frightening series of puddle jumpers got him over to the oil boomtown of Sakhalin Island, which bustled with foreigners doing business. Late that night, Daniel Cabot McCabe boarded a 330-foot trawler. The calendar turned to May, and the snow was falling hard as the trawler shoved off. Three days later, it was still snowing as he wretched up his bowl of food.

“Daniel, you should be over this sea sickness by now,” observed Pyotr Koshemyako, the burly first mate, offering a bottle of vodka. “We expect the weather to worsen. Some ice floes are on the radar.”

Gibson gripped the ice-covered rail with thermal gloves and still felt the cold. “Oh, fuck me, Pyotr. I hate this.” He smelled like fish. The whole boat smelled like fish. Gibson swore that he would never eat another fish.

“Drink, anyway, before I do this thing to you,” said the mate. “I don’t understand it, but I will obey.”

“No booze. Go ahead.” Gibson turned toward his new friend, who immediately popped him the in the face with a fist. Every night, the same ritual.

The weather did worsen, and the quick beatings continued, even after he changed to a larger factory ship. When it finally broke to clearer skies and seas, the wide, welcome mouth of the Columbia River loomed off the port bow. America had never looked so good to him.

The bureaucratic folderol required to get a foreign vessel into an American port had reverted to pre-9/11 practices. There was just too much traffic for the border-protection officers to handle on a detail-oriented task. The captain of the ship prepared the manifest and the necessary personnel papers, but the customs agents had no desire to spend all day pawing through holds carrying tons of pollock.

The ship had dropped anchor to allow the inspection team aboard before docking in Astoria to unload. A tight knot of sullen sailors stood near the gangway, as if to block the aft deck.

Suddenly, a man burst out of a forward hatchway and ran to the U.S. customs officer, grabbing him by the arm as the sailors began to move about with unexpected anger. “I’m an American, and I need to get off of this fuckin’ tub before they kill me,” the man shouted to the federal agent. “My named is Daniel Cabot McCabe, and I’m a scientist out of Woods Hole. The captain has all my paperwork.”

“You’re a mess, man,” the officer exclaimed. The face was badly bruised, black and blue. A broken nose was covered with plastic splint taped crossways. His bottom lip was split, and crude stitches closed a gash above his scabbed eyebrow. His clothes were filthy, and he reeked of fish. “What the hell happened to you?”

“I was sent out as a representative of the Maritime Stewardship Council, which has had a lot of complaints about this old bucket. The crew didn’t like my findings, so almost every night they made certain that I stepped on a bar of soap or fell down a ladder or got in a fight. The captain didn’t do anything to stop it. Look, Officer, I’m supposed to stay out here for two more weeks. I can’t take it. They will kill me. Can I get a ride back with you guys?”

The sailors remained nearby, muttering Russian curses. The American stared back. “Not my fault their fishing fleet is obsolete and falling apart and they won’t fix it. They’re taking dangerous shortcuts to keep their catch numbers up. That’s going to be in my report.”

One of the sailors pointed and yelled, “Is not true! He lies!”

“Get down the ladder and into our boat, Mr. McCabe,” the officer said. He didn’t know why, but something about the name Cabot rang a bell. Something about history that commanded respect. “You guys back off.”

Gibson scrambled from the deck into the customs officers’ patrol boat, turned, and shot a middle-finger salute to the milling Russians, then winked.

Willa Kent and Tom Hughes had a couple of problems arranging the transatlantic flight to Germany. The CIA travel office, generally very efficient, had hit a couple of snags, blaming weather on the other end, computer glitches, and housing. Finally, things came together three days after their meeting with Marty Atkins, the director of intelligence. Neither considered it a big deal, since the patient was still in a coma.

The personable regional agent in charge, Marguerite del Coda, met their plane at Ramstein Air Base and took them to a nice hotel to rest up after the long flight. They graciously accepted the offer, then she took them out to dinner.

The following morning, they went to see the patient and knew the trip had been wasted. Kyle Swanson lay in a chilly private room, unconscious beneath light-blue cotton sheets. His head, neck, and upper body were encased in a halo vest — a metal ring that encircled the head and was held in place by screws into the skull. His skin was sallow and slack.

“My God,” whispered Kent upon entering the room. Del Coda introduced an older man and woman, the parents of the patient, and the CIA agents offered their heartfelt sympathies. An Englishman in a tailored suit, eyeglasses dangling from his neck, was at the bedside, checking Swanson’s pulse. His name was Sir Patrick Whyte, and he was now Kyle Swanson’s private physician of record.

Del Coda took Sir Jeff and Lady Pat over to the cafeteria for some food and to give the professionals some time alone with the doctor and his patient.

“Can he hear us?” asked Hughes.

“Very doubtful. He’s been heavily sedated for almost a week.”

“What’s your diagnosis, Dr. Whyte?” Kent moved around the bed and felt Swanson’s cold hand. This guy is dying.

Whyte slapped a couple of X-rays on the light board. Hughes moved close to study it as the British surgeon walked them through the injury. Things were worse than originally thought, he told them. He pointed to the crushed skull at the neck, and the angled bends of the upper vertebrae.

“Imagine a terrific whiplash effect from the trauma inflicted at that exact spot. The brain bounced around like a rubber ball in the skull, then, instead of being immobilized, he made things worse by carrying on with an arduous mission. You see, right there — that’s the only slice of bone connecting the spine to the skull. If that gives way, he’ll be paralyzed.”

Hughes found no fault with that conclusion. Neither did Kent. The pictures proved it. “What happens now?” she asked.

“There is nothing more to be done here in Germany, so at the request of his parents I’m having him transferred to my private clinic in London. We’ll try a single level anterior cervical fusion for the disk herniation in a few weeks to stabilize the spinal injury.” The Englishman spoke with authority.

“So there’s no chance of interviewing him until after that?”

The surgeon lowered his voice. “Quite frankly, I’m not certain he’ll make it that far. We’ll see where we are in two weeks.”

“Damn bad luck,” Hughes said. “Kyle Swanson was quite the warrior.”

“Yes. I will do everything possible for him.” Dr. Whyte took down the X-rays and put them in a thick folder, along with the medical history he’d prepared. “Everything you need is in there.”

“A pleasure to meet you, Dr. Whyte. Good luck.” Hughes led the way out of the room, and they were scooped up by del Coda and put back on a plane to Washington. On the flight, Kent went through the folder. “I know Whyte’s reputation, Willa. He is one of the best in the business, and I have the same conclusion. Kyle’s out of the game,” she declared. “He’ll never see another day of active duty.”

Kent ordered a Bloody Mary. “You mean if he lives.”

The man known to the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers as Daniel Cabot McCabe was taken to the CMH Urgent Care on Exchange Street. They made him take a shower to wash away the fish stink, then put him in a powder-blue set of scrubs and got him on an examination table.

He was in better spirits once he was off the ship, and vowed that his report would probably force the boat out of service when it returned to Russia. He carried on about international-fishing laws and compacts and standards even as the ICE officer questioned him about the rough treatment. Assault on the high seas would be almost impossible to prove, he said. McCabe agreed. “Don’t worry. I’ll put it all in the reports,” he said.

The officer whistled as the doctor fluttered about. With McCabe’s shirt off, the bruising around the ribs was clear, as was a big one across the kidneys, and a yellowing stripe down one shin.

“They did a job on you, Mr. McCabe. You ought to go to a hospital,” the doctor said, and the ICE agent, a friendly guy named Jack Myers, agreed.

Gibson refused. “No broken bones except the nose, and nothing to do for the ribs. They were careful with the violence, attempting to scare me off, which they did very well. I’m not even pissing blood.” He winced when the doctor reset his nose, then gave him some antibiotics before reluctantly pronouncing him fit to leave. “Keep the scrubs,” he said.

“Burn my other clothes.”

“I guarantee that has already been done.”

He had retrieved his notebooks, tablet, and cell phone, wallet and identity papers. “Can you recommend a place where I can rest up for a couple of days?”

“I’ll run you over to the Hampden Inn and Suites. Pretty nice hotel,” Myers said.

“Let’s go,” Gibson replied, stepping gingerly into the paper hospital slippers. “I can order some new clothes from there. Thanks, Doctor. I appreciate it.”

“You’ll be fine. Just take things easy.”

“What are you going to do next, Mr. McCabe?” the ICE man asked as they left the urgent-care facility.

Gibson pulled out his wallet and showed the lawman the small, credit-card size laminated U.S. passport that was good for crossing all borders in North America. “I’m still on the government dime, Jack, just like you. The taxpayer is going to replace my stuff with better stuff, including new fishing tackle. Then I plan to rent a car and fish my way across Canada to the East Coast, thinking up really horrible things to say about that goddamn boat.”

“Sounds like a plan,” Myers said, laughing. “Safe journey. Meanwhile, my boss says we’re going to take a special interest with that boat before letting it into our ports. It will take quite a bit of time and it will be a real shame if those tons of pollock rot in the holds because some forms weren’t filled out properly.”

Sir Geoffrey Cornwell was pleased with the newest version of his yacht, the Vagabond. It was bigger, brighter, and had far more toys than its illustrious predecessors, which had been world-class in their day. What really stood out about the gleaming vessel was its odd shape and pointed edges, closer to the U.S. Navy’s Zumwalt-class stealth destroyer than to a potentate’s plaything, more of a fighter than a lover.

The Vagabond had been a joint operation of Cornwell’s Excalibur Enterprises and the American and Royal navies, with invisible funding siphoned through the Pentagon and the Ministry of Defense. Just as the CIA had its own air arm, the intelligence services occasionally needed secret help at sea. The hull was laid down by the warship builder Vospert Thornycroft at Southampton as the lead yard, then Brooks Marin, in Lowenstaft, installed the military-grade material, and a succession of other yards finished making it look like a white-and-gold luxury vessel ready for the blue water. It stretched almost 512 feet in length and was 77 feet wide, and its power plant could push the 15,906 gross tons of ship at speeds better than 25 miles per hour. It could handle up to thirty passengers and carried a crew of seventy-five, all of them military veterans with a surprising array of skills.

A helicopter with the matching Excalibur corporate color scheme hovered above the landing pad and carefully touched down with hardly a quiver. When the blades finally stopped, a medical team emerged, wrangled a gurney through the open hatch, popped down the wheels, and set off for the aid station. Lashed atop the conveyance was Kyle Swanson, still out like a light and wrapped in his steel cage. There was silence on the vessel when the crew members saw him so still and wan.

Lady Pat and Sir Jeff stepped off the helicopter. They had a beaten air about them.

Elizabeth Ledford was on the bridge of the Vagabond, held in check by Double-Oh Dawkins to keep her from getting in the way on the helo deck. When Swanson was safely in the aid station, he let her go, and she ran down below until she reached the hatch with the red cross painted on white.

Lady Pat gave her a hug. “Stand here by me, dear, until Dr. Whyte can get him out of that contraption. It looks a lot worse than it is, which was the purpose.”

“He’s still unconscious?” Coastie asked.

“All part of the plan, girl,” Dr. Whyte said as he unfastened the straps. Unnoticed by the CIA interrogation team, the small screws that appeared to secure the halo to the skull actually had been tiny bolts with soft rubber tips that didn’t even penetrate the skin. The steel frame had simply been a misdirection play — as had the horrific X-rays, which Whyte had dug up from a terrible motorcycle accident. With a bit of digital legerdemain, those pictures became X-rays of Kyle Swanson’s head.

Whyte tossed the cage aside, and the orderlies transferred Swanson to a fresh bed with a new IV drip. The doctor filled a syringe and pumped in a dose of medicine that would allow Swanson to slowly emerge from the back depths to which he had willingly consigned himself. “He’s fine,” Dr. Whyte said. “He’ll be waking up in a few hours and the orderlies can care for him during that twilight time. Now, let’s have some dinner, shall we — Pat, Jeff?”

Coastie stepped to the bedside and ran her palm along Kyle’s damp forehead, then kissed him on the cheek. “You all go ahead. I’ll just stay here with him for a while.” She took the sniper’s hand in hers and perched on the edge of the bed.