Pinnacle Event

14

Because of the direction of the wind and the helicopters’ low altitude, the crew of the MV Indira had not heard the motor of the Customs and Border Protection Black Hawk until about the same time that its xenon light cut the dark and lit the conning tower of the freighter brighter than a tropical sun ever had. Simultaneously, Law Enforcement Detachment fast-roped down from a Coast Guard Black Hawk onto the darkened stern of the ship.

The Law Enforcement Detachment of Coasties, carrying M4 automatic weapons, moved quickly past the containers stacked on the deck and up to the helmsman. They arrived before the ship’s captain managed to come up from his state room. There was no resistance.

Twenty minutes later the Fast Response Cutter Margaret Norvell bounced through the waves at twenty-eight knots, flashing red-and-blue lights like a police cruiser. A second LEDAT and ship handlers from Norvell boarded the Indira and turned the freighter east, toward the Bahamas.

By late morning, the freighter was being off loaded in the state-of-the-art container terminal at Freeport, where thousands of containers were switched from ship to ship every day. The immense crane towering over the Indira took the containers off the deck and piled them three high in an open area in the dockyard.

Dugout landed at Freeport just after noon, aboard Coast Guard One, a Gulfstream executive jet that he was surprised to learn was based in a hangar at National Airport fifteen minutes from his office in Foggy Bottom. He was accompanied by a Coast Guard Admiral and a senior uniformed officer from Customs and Border Protection. They had pressed him on the flight down, trying to find out why the White House had been so concerned about the MV Indira. He said only that there had been a tip that it might have radioactive materials on board.

As they pulled into the huge dockyard, they were met by another U.S. CBP officer, George Martinez, one who was stationed in Freeport. “We got your suspect cargo all quarantined off over there and Blue Man is standing by to scan it. We put your cargo ahead of everything else we plan to scan today. Just need your go ahead.”

Blue Man looked like a robot from Star Wars. On eight wheels, each taller than a person, the device towered 120 feet above the dock. On top, a driver sat in a small compartment, looking down at them. Unlike the even larger cranes throughout the port area, Blue Man did not lift containers, it rode over stacks of them. The space between its two towers was slightly wider than a container and as it slowly straddled the steel shipping boxes, Blue Man shot X-ray, gamma ray, and neutron flux beams from its right tower, through the containers, to receivers on the left tower.

“What if the material in the container is shielded, like with lead?” Dugout asked the CBP man, Martinez.

“Doesn’t matter,” Martinez replied proudly. “We can still usually detect. If not, at least we will know there is shielding and that is a tip to open the container. With Blue Man we can do hundreds of containers a day, without ever having to open them, swab them, or use our Geiger counters.”

It took twenty minutes for Blue Man to creep over the long row of containers, three high. When the wheeled tower reached the end of the line of containers, Martinez checked with Blue Man’s operator on a walkie-talkie. “Got a hit on one container. The one from Maputo. Naturally it’s the one on the bottom. We’ll pull it out and pop it open, once we get our guys into their space suits, just as a precaution.”

The one from Maputo was the container that the Minerva program had flagged. Now, Blue Man was also flagging it. Dug felt his pulse accelerate. As they waited, Dugout asked Martinez what he had wanted to know for the preceding hour. “Isn’t the Bahamas like a country of its own now? How is it you guys run around in uniform with guns and badges, and giant robots like this was the U.S.?”

“Our Coast Guard protects their waters. We in CBP do preclearance of cargoes here so when they show up in the States they don’t have to wait around. It’s a lot faster for shippers. This port is all automated. It goes quick here. It makes money for Freeport and it creates a lot of jobs here.”

“And they let us divert cargoes here that might have like nuclear bombs in them so that our giant robot detector thingee can find them here rather than in Miami? What if it goes off here?” Dugout asked. “Doesn’t the Bahamas mind being our nuclear detonation area?”

“If we ever find a nuclear weapon or an improvised nuclear device, a dirty bomb, we secure the area and call in Delta Force from North Carolina. They can be here in under three hours. They’re trained in what to do to render the weapon safe. We aren’t,” Martinez explained. “So far, hasn’t happened. Maybe we’ll get lucky with your tip today.”

Dugout watched through binoculars as a team of four CBP agents in chem-bio-radiation suits with oxygen masks, broke the seal and the lock on the suspect container and swung the door open. Two of the agents, carrying lights and handheld detection gear went inside the container. Almost immediately there was chatter on the walkie-talkie, but Dugout couldn’t understand what was being said.

“Red granite, pretty rare,” Martinez said to the three men from Washington.

“Huh?” Dugout asked.

“It’s a container of red granite from Africa. Granite almost always sends off the alarms. Most people don’t know their countertops are slightly radioactive. Anyway, false alarm. We get them a lot.”

The Coast Guard Admiral and the CBP man from Washington both looked at Dugout, silently. They could have been golfing or doing a dozen other things on a Sunday.

Dugout didn’t want to give up. “You do hundreds of containers a day with this Blue Man. What percent of containers entering the U.S. are scanned with Blue Men before they arrive?”

Martinez smiled with pride, “This is the only operational Blue Man in the world. We get less than one percent of the containers going in to the U.S. to scan here in the Bahamas. Most just sail right in to Newark or Norfolk, Miami, Seattle, LA Long Beach. Scary, huh? You guys want to hit the casino for lunch before you fly back?”

Danny Avidar walked into the little gym carrying a bouquet of flowers. Mbali Hlanganani stopped running on the treadmill in astonishment. “For me?” she asked.

“I didn’t feel that we welcomed you appropriately on your first trip to the Holy Land,” he said. “The girl at the front desk said you were down here, working out.”

“That’s so nice of you. I must say your hospitality has been superb,” she said, stepping off the machine and grabbing a towel and water bottle. “I look forward to working with you.”

“Well, that’s the thing. We haven’t worked closely with your service before,” he shrugged. “I guess because we had been close to the anciene regime, but that was when I was a young man, when I was just a recruit in the paratroopers.”

“And when I was still in school,” she added. “I don’t blame you, I don’t blame Israel, for all of this. It was, after all, South Africans who made these bombs and, I am pretty sure, South Africans who just sold them.”

“True, but Israel helped the Apartheid government with its defense and intelligence needs. In some ways they helped Israel. It is not something we are proud of,” he said and opened a water bottle for himself. “Of all peoples, we should not have supported Apartheid and we didn’t, but we did support the government, against the Communists, but nonetheless.”

“Danny, may I call you Danny?” she asked. “Let us put it behind us. We face a common challenge. These people, whoever they are, who have the warheads now, they could use them against either of our countries, we don’t know which one is the target. We have to work together.”

“The Americans think it’s al Qaeda and they are going to bomb New York and Washington again,” Danny Avidar observed.

“The Americans always think it’s about them,” Mbali said.

“And they always think they can solve the problem with money and technology,” Avidar added.

“This time it’s going to take more than that, and less,” she agreed. “It’s about people, getting to the right people, and getting them to reveal what they know.”

“I promise you, Miss Mbali, I will tell you everything I learn about this case as we develop it, if you will do the same with me,” Avidar said, offering his hand to shake.

“Then, Danny, we have an intelligence partnership of our own.”