Sea of Fire

Chapter Nineteen

Once in a very rare while life surprised Bob Herbert.

Mike Rodgers was able to get the intelligence chief on a TR-1 long-range strategic reconnaissance aircraft. The plane was headed from Langley Air Force Base in Virginia to Taiwan with a stopover at the Australian Defence Force Basic Flying Training School in Tamworth, New South Wales. There, the USAF was going to pick up three officers for hands-on experience in surveillance upgrades. The RAAF would give Herbert a lift to Darwin. The TR-1 was leaving at one-thirty A.M., which meant the intelligence chief had to hustle. Herbert drove himself from his waterside home in Quantico, Virginia. There was literally no traffic at that time of the morning. He made the eighty-mile trip in one hour.

There was a small officers' station on board the sixty-two-foot-long aircraft. It was located near the cockpit. The crew removed the seat, and Herbert was able to tuck his wheelchair into the area. There was a power source for the chair batteries and a wireless Internet jack for his computer. Herbert felt oddly like a cyborg, a part of the big, sleek spy ship. Happily, the aircraft was not as noisy as transports he had been on. In fact, it was as quiet as a commercial jetliner.

Life was good, at least for the moment. And since a moment was all anyone could count on, Herbert tried to enjoy it. He did, for a while.

Herbert submerged himself in research and coffee. The coffee was provided by a very considerate navigator. The black coffee did more good than the research. The moment of contentment passed.

Using the plane's secure communications link, Herbert donned his WASTEM screen name. The profile he had created was for a thirty-year-old white female, one who advocated militia uprisings and a suspension of rights for everyone who was not a "pure-blooded American." Herbert had made her a female to attract male sociopaths, men who were looking for someone to share their mental illness with. Through WASTEM, the intelligence officer had been able to break up a supremacist group that arranged tours to Libya. There, for 50,000 dollars, group members could watch prisoners being tortured. For 75,000 dollars they could participate in the torture using whatever means they wished. For 150,000 dollars they could carry out an execution.

Herbert had his wife's picture attached to the profile. Not only was Yvonne a fox, but she would have appreciated having a posthumous hand in destroying cults of hate. A cult like the one that had claimed her life.

As usual, WASTEM had dozens of E-mail messages. Most were from men and women who wanted to go shooting with her or sponsor her at their training camp in this wilderness or that mountain range. Though WASTEM's interests included the acquisition of "red rain," a euphemism for radioactive materials, none of the E-mails offered to sell her any. He spent some time in the Anarkiss chat room, where sickos went for romance. As one of the few "women" in the room, WASTEM was always extremely popular. If anyone seemed to have information he might want, he offered to go private with them. People with something to hide spoke more freely in a chat room for two.

Unfortunately, no one had any leads on nuclear material being trafficked through the Far East or the South Pacific.

Herbert's next stop were charts of the shipping lanes in that region. He got a list of tankers, fishing vessels, ocean liners, and pleasure boats that had been through the area in the past seventy-two hours. When he got the names, he switched to his generic BOB4HIRE screen name. Claiming to be an insurance investigator, he E-mailed the various shipping companies and charterhouses. He asked if any of them had received a report of an explosion in the Celebes Sea. While he waited for the answers, he contacted the National Reconnaissance Office. He asked for an ID listing of all the ships that had accessed global positioning data around the time of the explosion. That information was supposed to be confidential, stored in coded files known only to the vessels and the satellites. However, the NRO had access to the satellite databases, thanks to the Confidential Reconnaissance and Code Satellite. CRACS was one of a new generation of satellites that spied on other satellites. Using sophisticated background radiation detectors, it read incoming and outgoing satellite pulses that momentarily blotted out the cosmic radiation. CRACS ended up with a silhouette of the communication from earth. The satellite was able to translate the pulses into numbers. That, in turn, gave the NRO the code words used by the earth-based planes or ships to contact the satellite.

What Herbert was looking for was an inconsistency. He was hoping to find a vessel that might have been close enough to hear the sampan explosion but did not report it. If he found that, chances were good it was the ship the pirates had tried to waylay.

The data came in slowly over the next several hours. During that time Herbert reveled in the relative comfort and privacy of his little section of the airplane. He was facing the starboard side of the aircraft, and there was a small window to his right. He leaned forward and looked down. The view inspired him. Not because it was a big, beautiful ocean but because it reminded him how people had fought and suffered and perished to explore it. Nothing came without hard work and sacrifice. That fact kept Bob Herbert from slipping into bitterness for what his own public service had cost him.

He received replies from twelve of the twenty-two E-mails he had sent out. No one had reported any explosions in the region. He also learned that there had been at least one vessel in the region at the time of the explosion. It was named the Hosannah and was apparently owned by a gentleman named Arvids March. There was a reference to a court case that Herbert could not access. The vessel sailed under a Tasmanian flag and listed six ports of registry. Herbert searched the Tasmanian phone directory on-line. He could not find an entry for Arvids March. That did not surprise him. Ships from one country were often registered in another for tax reasons. Mr. March could be from anywhere. Or it could be a fake name for a fake enterprise. Herbert did a full Internet search for him and came up empty. He searched under A. March and found over ten thousand references, from "I love a March" to a hip-hop group Ides a March. He sent an E-mail to Op-Center asking them to see what they could find out about the man. A quick check turned up nothing. Obviously not a publicity-seeker or public figure.

Then Herbert took a break. A think break. He had spent hours on this search and had very little to show for it. That was frustrating. Worse, it was dangerous. Herbert knew too well what could happen when people went into a situation with zero intelligence. That was how the embassy in Beirut was hit.

Herbert went back to his computer. The rogue boat was out there.

He wanted to find it.