SeaGhost

Chapter 7

Chief Petty Officer Devlin McCory’s face was a mottled red, confused between anger and frustration. He did not know where to direct his anger.

The tears streamed unabashedly down his cheeks, streaking the dirt caked on his right jaw. His red hair was messy, a glob of grease caught in it on the left rear side. His eyes stared at the wall opposite the one he leaned against.

He was in uniform, but it was stained with oil and tar and paint splotches. The polish on his left shoe was eradicated by gasoline. He had come right from the docks.

People moving down the bridge corridor gave him plenty of leeway. There seemed to be a lot of people. Back and forth. Going nowhere in a hurry.

At the far end of the corridor, a chrome-plated floor polisher whirled on the linoleum. If it got much closer, McCory was going to kick the damned thing into small pieces.

The odors. Medicinal. Chloroform. Antiseptic. Iodine?

“Chief?”

He looked up, bleary-eyed. 

The man floated in front of him, all furry-edged and green.

“I’m Commander Hartford, Chief. I’m sorry as hell.”

“Jesus.”

“We did our best. It wasn’t enough.”

“Oh, Jesus Christ!”

“You all right, Chief? Maybe I can get you something?”

McCory pushed off the wall, coming to his full six feet. “Where’s the son of a bitch who killed her?”

“He died at the scene of the accident,” the doctor said.

McCory’s shoulders sagged in defeat.

He felt entirely deflated. At Pusan, and earlier, at Guadalcanal and Bougainville and Midway, there had always been someone to strike out at when the ones you liked died.

“Can I see her?”

“You don’t want to, Chief. Believe me.”

He just nodded. The tears continued to stream down his face. McCory had never been beaten before.

He turned away and walked down the hall toward the nurse’s station, leaving Commander Hartford standing by himself.

The nurses who had been tending and playing with his six-month-old son looked up as he approached. Their faces went carefully slack.

McCory leaned over and picked Kevin up from the two chairs that had been shoved together. “Come on, ol’ son. Time to go home.”

The boy’s blue eyes stared back at him, searching his own.

For what?

McCory pulled Kevin close to his chest and pressed his head against his shoulder.

The nurse smiled grimly.

And McCory and his son walked on down the long corridor looking for a door.

Kevin started to cry, too.

“Pretty late in the game for you to get so adventuresome, isn’t it, lady?”

“No one’s going to see us, right? That’s what you told me.” Ginger’s eyes shone in the dim haze of red-blue light from the instrument panel.

“That’s the theory,” McCory said.

She was having a grand old time. Since leaving Ponce de Leon Inlet, Ginger Adams had taken over the helm. The speed seemed to thrill her, and while she managed an almost easterly course, she spent more time playing with the bow and stern cameras and with the computer than with the automatic pilot. The automatic pilot bored her.

For the past hour, McCory had played a little himself. Carrying operating manuals back and forth, he had experimented with the various consoles. He figured out the sonar, wearing the headset that hung on the bulkhead. At their speed of nearly sixty knots, though, he mostly got feedback from the rotary engines. When he rested his forehead against the screen’s hood, he found that the screen was primarily one pale green blip. He estimated that the SeaGhost would have to be below ten knots in order to get a decent interpretation. Even then, it might require an experienced and master sonarman to read the ocean’s sounds. There was a computer link with the sonar set that he hadn’t been able to work out yet. He suspected that the computer could identify and match screw signatures, but he didn’t know how large the database aboard might be. Or perhaps there was a data link through a satellite to a shore-based data center.

He had set the radar on automatic and random scan at thirty miles of range. The alarm had sounded off several times, jolting Ginger the first time, but the marine traffic was miles away from them.

McCory also figured out the range of the SeaGhost. Before leaving Edgewater, he had brought the Kathleen in alongside the dry dock, snaked a hose under the sea door, and used an electric pump to siphon diesel fuel off the cruiser into the SeaGhost’s bladders. Fortunately, the rotaries used diesel.

Based on topping off an empty cell of the four fuel bladders, he determined that the capacity was 880 gallons. His fuel consumption on the trip down from the Chesapeake had varied between 9.8 and 12.6 gallons per hour. Figuring a cruise speed of forty-five knots and a consumption of around eleven gallons per hour, the boat had a 4000 mile range. At sixty knots, while he was teaching Ginger the computer code, the consumption rose to 18.2 gallons per hour, which dropped the range to around 3300 miles.

It was still respectable.

The interior was dimly lit from a single red bulb recessed in the overhead and from the screens and readouts of the helm, radar, and communications panels. The AM radio was locked on a Tampa station, playing Billy Vaughn’s “Blue Tomorrow.” A compromise. McCory liked country and old rock. Ginger Adams liked jazz, classic and new wave.

They had provisioned the galley with peanut butter, bread, orange juice, coffee, and few pieces of china from the Kathleen. McCory got a couple of mugs from the cabinet and poured coffee. The coffeepot was made of some kind of plastic with a ceramic base. It sat in a three-inch-deep recess in the countertop, so it wouldn’t slide around in heavy seas. McCory guessed the Navy paid a couple thousand for it.

He carried Ginger’s mug to her.

“Thanks, Kevin.”

“You tired?”

“How could I be? This is just fantastic.”

“I recall your telling me that you’re not a morning person. Several hundred times. You’re supposed to be asleep now.”

“Are you kidding? And miss this?”

The fingers of her right hand gripped the wheel almost lovingly. Her eyes scanned the panel even as she sipped from her mug. The monitors displayed front and rear views in the night-vision mode, but only a dim, dark green sea and lighter green sky were visible. Through the windscreen, there was only blackness, with an occasional whitecap reflecting the moon’s light. Long swells were running, but the SeaGhost skimmed them, with only a slight up and down motion.

McCory went to the bunk room and found the toolbox he had brought aboard. He got a battery-powered electric drill and loaded it with a quarter-inch bit. Carrying it back to the commander’s desk, he put his coffee on the desk, then sat on the deck. He had to move his head to the side to keep a shadow from the overhead light off the drawer locks. Setting the tip of the bit against the top lock, he squeezed the trigger.

“What are you doing?” Ginger called over her shoulder.

“Breaking and entering.”

It took ten minutes to drill all three locks. There was nothing in the bottom drawer. The middle drawer contained two nine-millimeter Browning automatics and a dozen loaded magazines. The armory. The top drawer contained a ring of keys and several thin books, and McCory rose to sit in the captain’s chair. He turned on a goose-necked reading lamp and leafed through the books.

Uh-oh.

“What’d you find?” Ginger asked.

“Some books I wish I didn’t have.”

“Like what?”

“Like call signs and frequencies. Codes. Instructions for the black boxes back there.”

“Top secret stuff.”

“Very.”

“Maybe we should burn them? Or throw them overboard?”

“You’re quite right,” McCory said, but intrigued, got up and went to sit at the communications console. Flipping the pages of the first book, he found a VHF frequency for CINCLANTFLT operations, along with a series of numbers. He powered up the transceiver and punched the buttons until the digital readout gave him the frequency listed.

The speaker in the panel jabbered in gibberish.

He turned the volume down.

On the scrambler box marked “ONE,” he punched mode two.

Still gibberish, but clearer gibberish.

On the encryption box, he tapped mode four.

“… ask Force Two-Two, CINCLANT authorizes movement to Safari Sector Five.”

“Copy that, Diamond Head. Safari Sector Five. Two-Two out.”

The frequency went silent. McCory didn’t know what he had, but he did know that he ought to hang onto the books for a while. He couldn’t go around throwing away important documents.

He experimented with more frequencies and scrambling modes. When he didn’t get silence, he got what he thought were ships talking to each other or to aircraft. He had been out of the Navy long enough that the radio lingo had lapsed for him, but parts of it came back slowly.

He finally left the set tuned to CINCLANT, turned it down low, and brought Tampa back on another speaker. Chet Atkins doing “Faded Love.” That was better.

Moving over behind Ginger, he rested his hands on her shoulders and asked, “Any idea where we are?”

“Should I know?”

“It’s sometimes helpful. On the computer keypad, on the top row, press the square marked ‘NAV MAP.’”

She found the touch-sensitive pad and pressed it.

“Now, press 3084.”

“What’s that?”

“That’s the latitude and longitude of the top left corner of the map grid you want.”

“Sure it is.”

“Now, press 2575.”

“Bottom right?”

“That’s correct. Now execute.”

She pressed the pad labeled “EXC.”

Ginger scanned the panel. “Nothing happened.”

“The computer’s working on it. Finding the grid coordinates in the data base and checking with the NavStar satellite network. Press the number four pad under the main CRT.”

There were eight numbered pads under each screen. McCory had learned that they selected camera views in normal, night-vision, and infrared modes, navigation maps, radar repeater, and a gunsight for the forward-mounted cannon. The last two buttons always came up blank. Either he had not determined their usage, or they were reserved for future enhancements.

As Ginger pressed the keypad, the screen flickered, then changed to a map. Coordinate lines were shown in light green spaced at every ten minutes. A large orange dot was in the upper left corner. She reached out and tapped it with a clear-polished fingernail. “That’s us?”

“That’s us.”

“Neat.”

“I thought so, too. Watch this.”

McCory stepped to the radar console and switched it to active. Immediately, the interface between the radar and the mapping system put four yellow dots on her screen.

“Those are other boats?”

“Or ships, maybe. I don’t have the antennae aimed up very high, but that one to the far right might be a low-flying airplane, judging by its speed. The closest one is over fifteen miles away from us. And we’re about ninety-seven miles off the coast.”

He flipped to the 220-mile range. Dozens of yellow dots came to life on the monitor.

“That’s at two hundred and twenty miles of range,” he told her.

“I can’t believe there are that many ships out here.”

“Several of them are aircraft. We’re kind of in the track between South America and New York.”

He shut down the radar, just in case some of those yellow dots belonged to Task Force 22, headed for Safari Sector Five. The Navy would be looking for active radar, especially an active radar that appeared where there was no other return.

“Are we far enough out?” Ginger asked.

“I suppose. There isn’t any traffic in the immediate neighborhood, anyway.”

McCory was feeling a little anxious about this, like a kid with a fistful of firecrackers, scanning the alley for a place where the adults wouldn’t hear them go off.

“Well, let’s do it!”

McCory sighed. “The Navy will probably charge me fifty thousand dollars for expended ordnance. Probably more than that.”

“They’re not going to miss just one.”

“They keep careful count,” he insisted.

“You don’t know how to make it work. Is that it?”

He assumed she was pressing his male ego button, but said, “I think I can figure it out. I’m pretty mechanically minded, you know.”

“Sure.”

“Okay. Bring her back to around five knots and maintain headway. There’s a headset hanging under the instrument panel. You might see if it’s fashionable.”

While Ginger slowed the boat, McCory went aft to the cargo bay. Outside the door was a headset on a long coiled cord. He put it on.

“Can you hear me, hon?”

“Aren’t you supposed to use some kind of jargon, like, ‘Missile man reporting in, Captain?’”

“When did you get promoted?” he asked.

It took him ten minutes to load a missile into the sling of the crane, position it over the launcher, and slide it onto the upper left launch rail. The connections were simple. A wire cable and multi-pronged plug hanging from the missile body plugged directly into a receptacle on the launcher.

Forward on the base of the launcher was a small door marked, “POWER.” McCory opened it to find several switches and digital readouts. Knowing the Navy was super-conscious about safety, he thought there would be a disabling system that prevented missiles from being fired while the launcher was in the down position. He hoped that was the case.

He flipped the switch for launcher power. Above it, a green LED came one.

A switch for missile power. He threw it, also, and digital readout promptly came to life with numbers that were meaningless to him.

GUIDANCE LINK. What the hell, he switched it on. Green light-emitting diode there, too.

“Did you see anything happening up there?” McCory asked on the intercom.

“I didn’t know I was supposed to be watching for something. I don’t think so, though.”

McCory closed the small door, left the cargo bay, and closed that door. On the deck of the port cross-corridor was a small bundle. He bent down to open the duffle and pull out an old rubber raft.

“Okay, Ginger, all stop.”

She pulled the throttles back.

McCory opened the hatchway, slid the raft outside, and while holding its line, pulled the CO2 cartridge. The raft inflated quickly, and he dropped it over the side. He leaned back for the duffel bag and dug around in it for the two rolls of aluminum foil he’d brought along. Ripping off long sheets, he wrinkled them and tossed them in the raft. When the bottom of the raft was full of crumpled foil, he let go of the painter.

He thought it looked like a pretty good target.

“All right, full ahead.”

The boat leapt forward before he could get the hatch closed.

Replacing the headset on its hook, McCory went back to the main cabin and sat in the radarman’s seat.

“You think it’s going to work?”

“Of course it’s going to work,” he told her, mentally crossing his fingers.

Between the helm and radar positions on the bulkhead was a small control panel. It was contained in a box about three inches deep, as if it had been added as an afterthought. The face was flat black, translucent plastic except for one red switch. He tried it, but it wouldn’t move.

Leaning forward, he examined the box more closely and discovered a key slot on the side.

Ah, hah.

He went to the captain’s desk, found the key ring, and brought it back. The second key he tried in the slot fit, and he turned it.

Nothing happened.

He tried the red switch button again.

The panel lit up. Blue lettering.

On top, it read: “ARMAMENT: ACTIVE.” Next to the designation “AVAILABLE,” was one green LED.

He had a guidance selection. Radar, infrared, or optical. He pressed the pad for radar.

Missiles were not new to McCory. He had observed firings of several types while aboard naval ships. Personally, he had used the handheld Stingers and Redeyes a number of times.

He had a choice of computer-controlled or manual launch and tracking. He selected the former.

In the middle of the panel was a set of five pads, the center one marked “CNTR” and the others marked with arrows for the four cardinal compass points. It was obviously used for manual control of a missile in flight.

Below the direction controls were four more buttons, and he assumed they were all interlocked with one another. One controlled the opening of the cargo hatch, another the elevation of the launcher. The third armed the missile, and the fourth was ominously named “LAUNCH.”

He went back and selected optical as the guidance system, then pressed the number seven pad under his monitor. He had a sudden view of the front of the cargo bay.

“Try number seven on your CRT, Ginger.”

“All right! That’s a view from the missile?”

“Yes, but we’re not going to use it now. I’m just experimenting. Bring her back to thirty knots.”

There was no way to select one of four missiles that could be mounted on the launcher, so McCory presumed that, due to stresses on the launcher itself and maybe the mounting to the boat, only one could be launched at a time.

As the boat slowed and steadied in the water, McCory went back to the radar mode on the missile, then opened the cargo doors and pressed the button to raise the launcher.

He was rewarded with two green LEDs. Which he didn’t trust, so he got up and went aft to check for himself. Opening the cargo hatch, he found the doors retracted and the launcher fully extended. The missile head was about five feet above the upper deck. It looked menacing as hell. The cool night air poured into the bay.

He went back to the cabin.

“It’s up.”

“Great! Shoot it.”

“Don’t get antsy.”

On the radar panel, he selected the radar mode for the monitor, then found a switch for armaments-to-radar link and activated it.

An orange target circle appeared on the screen. He found that it was controlled by a set of keypads similar to the guidance pads on the armaments panel.

He went active on the thirty-mile scan.

On the screen a dim blip showed him his target about four miles behind them. He moved the orange circle until its cross-hairs were centered on the target, then pressed a pad labeled, “TARGET LOCK.”

The sound of electric motors came through the deck. The launcher was rotating, aiming the missile aft.

Blue letters appeared in the upper right corner of the screen, “LOCK-ON.”

McCory heard something droning, looked under the instrument panel, and saw another headset. He put it on and heard the long-ago sound of a missile’s message to its operator. The low tone sounding in his earphones told him the missile’s brain had locked onto the target selected by the radar.

“Ready?” he asked.

“I’m ready.”

McCory looked to the armaments panel and pressed the launch keypad.

Nothing happened.

For one second.

All he had done was commit the launch. The computer selected the optimum launch time.

WHOOSH!

The ignition and launch could be heard through the skin of the SeaGhost.

But only for an instant. Outside the windows, the night went white for a second, then winked back to black.

The missile was gone, gone, gone.

“Look, look, look!” Ginger shouted.

McCory glanced at her primary CRT, still on the optical view. All he saw were dancing stars.

Back to his own screen. Close in, the radar sweep left two blips behind it. Four miles away was his poor rubber boat. A mile away was a streaking dot.

Two miles away.

Three.

“God! Look!”

McCory flicked his eyes to the helm screen. Out of the night, a yellow blur appeared.

Grew.

And grew into a real yellow rubber boat.

Expanded.

And disappeared into blackness.

On the rearview screen, he saw a momentary blossom of red-yellow light. The image remained on his retina for several seconds.

“We got it!” Ginger said.

“Yeah. Maybe we did.” He had no way of knowing if he’d hit the target. From the optical view delivered by the missile, it seemed certain, however.

It seemed like a puny explosion on the direct rearview screen, but then it was over four miles away.

Ginger sighed. “Now, I’m tired. Us night people have to get our sleep.”

“Did you want to sleep alone?”

“Of course not.”

McCory retracted the launcher and cargo doors, then supervised as Ginger set up a course for the mainland on the automatic pilot. She left the throttle settings for thirty knots of speed.

He set up the radar computer for random search and alarm.

And they went aft to the port bunk cabin to see if they both fit in one bunk.

They did.

At moments like this, making phone calls like this, Ted Daimler remembered going to Harvard Law School. He and McCory were just out of the Navy, and McCory was going back to Fort Walton Beach to work with his father. Daimler had been accepted to several law schools, and he very much wanted Harvard. His accumulated Navy education benefits, however, were insufficient for Harvard. He told McCory about it.

“When my mother died, she left me an insurance policy worth a thousand dollars,” McCory had said. “Devlin put it in a savings account for me. There’s about five thousand in the account now.”

“You haven’t touched it?”

“No. I’ll loan it to you.”

“I can’t do that, Mac.”

“Sure you can. As long as you have a chance at Harvard, take it. I want interest, though.”

“Nine percent?” Daimler had offered.

“Call it seven,” McCory had said.

Daimler had long ago repaid the loan, but the offer itself was just one of the things he owed McCory.

He heard the phone ringing.

“Advanced Marine Development.”

“Justin Malgard, please.”

“May I say who is calling?”

“Weirgard, Amos, Havelock, and Moses,” Daimler made up on the spot.

“Please hold on.”

While he held on, he thought about the information his paralegal had dug up on Malgard. From the time he had taken over AMDI, it was apparent that Malgard wanted to be a big-time defense industry wheeler-dealer. He had drastically expanded his plant facilities located in Baltimore, at the cost of some heavy-duty loans. He and his wife had moved into an upscale house in Glen Burnie and purchased matching Mercedes 550 SECs. He was laying out stiff rentals for the office suite on New Hampshire Avenue. He could have operated out of the factory offices, but Malgard wanted to be in the thick of Washington intrigues.

“Hello. This is Justin Malgard.”

Without offering a name, Daimler said, “Mr. Malgard, I represent a person who has a special and personal interest in the XMC-22.”

“What! What are you talking about?”

“Let’s just say this person is possibly interested in seeing that the boat is returned to your control.”

“You’re saying you know who stole the Sea Spectres?”

“I’m saying that maybe we should discuss the problems.”

“Bullshit! You’re asking a ransom.”

“No. But we’d like to discuss the history of the boat and its design. With proper compensation… ”

Malgard hung up on him.

Which was about what Daimler might have expected.

For almost ten hours, the Prebble had been making flank speed to the south. She had left the Mitscher to keep tabs on the plethora of freighters and tankers working into and out of the northeast sector.

CINCLANT had ordered Barry Norman to join with Task Force 22 coming up from the Caribbean. The order had come twenty minutes after one of America’s AWACS aircraft had spotted what it believed to be a missile launch.

Short-lived, but a missile launch.

Coming out of nowhere.

No source identified.

No target identified.

CINCLANT was convinced the event suggested one of the stealth boats was experimenting with the Mini-Harpoon.

Norman was on the bridge, listening in on Task Force 22’s command net. According to the navigator, they were still eleven hours away from joining the task force. He was urging the clock to go faster.

When they ran down that boat, Norman wanted to be there. In fact, utilizing the gear aboard the Prebble was probably the only way they would corner the Sea Spectre.

His executive officer entered the bridge.

“Commander?”

“We’ve completed the drill, sir. It went very well.”

“Do it again, XO.”

“Sir?”

“I want these guys sharp as hell on that equipment. When we have to use it, there may be lives hanging in the balance.”

“Aye aye sir. We’ll do it again.”

Norman had read the coded cables describing the Warriors of Allah and their leader, Ibrahim Badr. That son of a bitch was someone he would like to get his hands on, personally.

Ibrahim Badr had compromised with Captain Abdul Hakim. The Hormuz had to appear as if it were going somewhere if it were picked up on someone’s radar, or by the Americans’ aerial reconnaissance. Circling about in the western Atlantic would be suspicious, although a breakdown of the vessel’s single steam turbine engine could be faked at some point, if necessary. Judging by the ship’s appearance, in fact, a breakdown could be expected.

At the moment, they were about 300 miles from the Bahamas, after fifty hours of steaming to the west, and were again headed north. They could have been transporting Venezuelan crude to Nova Scotia, creeping along at the Hormuz’s standard twelve knots of speed.

It was hot on the deck, just forward of the tanker’s superstructure, when Badr gathered his Warriors for a short meeting. The heat brought out the worst odors from the deck — acrid oil, spoiling garbage.

Badr leaned against a ventilator and surveyed his men.

Omar Heusseini’s eyes were dark and baggy. He had been studying radar and sonar manuals for four days almost without break. Heusseini was somewhere in his fifties — he had never been certain of his birthdate. There was a great deal of gray in his dark brown hair, and his eyes had a washed appearance. The desert had lined his face heavily and brought a slope to his shoulders, making him stoop a little. Heusseini had learned the trade of radar operation and maintenance as a member of the Shah’s armed forces and had fled Iran a few days after the Shah had been deposed.

“Omar?” Badr asked.

“I am ready, my colonel.”

When he had formed the Warriors of Allah, Badr had promoted himself to colonel. The rank seemed appropriate and not as self-serving as that of general.

The drone of airplane engines could be heard to the west, and Badr turned to look but could not see the aircraft.

“We will lift the boat from the tank again tonight, so that you may practice,” Badr told him. Within the steel hull of the tanker, the Sea Spectre’s electronics performed dismally.

“That is good,” Heusseini agreed. “There are some new computer routines I need to rehearse. It is truly magnificent equipment.”

Badr felt comfortable with Heusseini’s expertise. He was less comfortable with Amin Kadar, who would operate the radios and the sonar system. Kadar was in his early twenties, a very intent and focused young man. His gaze was clear, but as often as not, concentrated on some unknown objective just beyond the bounds of reality. A dreamer.

“Amin?”

Kadar turned away from his study of the sea and said, “Yes, Colonel?”

“The sonar?”

“It is fine. Much better than I have used in the merchant marines.”

“And the radios?”

Kadar shrugged. “Who will we talk to?”

“I am less interested in talking to anyone than I am in listening.”

The young revolutionary smiled. “The manuals in the desk were invaluable. I have given you the locations of the American naval forces, have I not?”

“That is true.”

When the Sea Spectre rested above the deck at night, suspended from the crane, Kadar scanned the naval frequencies, using the encryption and scrambling devices. He estimated that they had intercepted perhaps twenty percent of the Second Fleet’s directives to the task forces searching for the Sea Spectres. The search effort was called Safari, and the search area had been broken up into sectors, but they had not been able to determine where, or what size, the sectors were. Heusseini had charted many of the ships that might belong to one search force or another. He had used active radar with some impunity, since its use could be attributed to the Hormuz.

Badr was still bothered by the missing second boat. From the Navy intercepts and the newscasts, it, too, had disappeared from the face of the earth.

The aircraft engines became louder, and low on the horizon, Badr saw the amphibian approaching. It was a twin-engined Canadair CL-215.

“Ahmed?”

Ahmed Rahman had been a missile specialist in the Iraqi army. He was thirty-four years old and appeared somewhat studious behind thick spectacles and a bushy black mustache. His fundamentalist Sunni beliefs made him a dedicated soldier. Badr had brought him along originally to direct the tanker’s defense, with handheld Stinger missiles, in the event that pursuit led to the tanker. With the acquisition of the Sea Spectre’s missiles, Rahman’s mission had changed. His task was made difficult by the lack of manuals regarding the missiles, their launcher, and their relationship to the other systems on board.

“From the missile that I have disassembled, I suspect that it is a small copy of the McDonnell Douglas RGM-84A Harpoon, Colonel. The electronics are miniaturized beyond belief. There is a solid boost motor for launch and a small turbojet for cruise. The warhead consists of a depleted uranium armor penetrator and approximately two hundred pounds of high explosives.”

“We can make it work?” Badr asked.

“I will know that only after I am able to try it. Target acquisition is accomplished from the boat, but I do not know the effective range or speed. Once airborne, the missile either follows active radar or infrared emissions to the target or may be guided from the boat by way of the electro-optical scanner or radar targeting. It will be interesting,” Rahman concluded.

“Yes. It will be interesting.”

The amphibious airplane had circled the ship, then settled to the sea and was approaching the ship quickly.

Badr signaled el-Ziam, and the two of them crossed the deck to the railing where Hakim’s sailors had attached a transfer basket to the crane.

Ibn el-Ziam was a Bedouin, and looked uncomfortable in his western clothes and newly smooth-shaven face. His discomfort, however was more likely derived from his role as a sailor. El-Ziam was quite at home in the west. He wore Levi’s, running shoes, a plaid shirt, and a heavy cast on his arm. The cast contained the tools he would need on his mission and provided the cover story. Injured at sea, he was being transferred to the Bahamas for medical attention. He carried a small valise.

“Do you have your papers?” Badr asked.

“Yes, Colonel. I am Francisco Cordilla. I have American dollars and Spanish pesetas.”

Badr held the valise while el-Ziam scrambled into the basket.

“You know what you must do?”

“Of course. As soon as I reach Washington, I will seek out this manufacturer, this Advanced Marine Development, Incorporated.”

“You must find the other boat.”

“I will find it, Colonel. Do not fear.”

Of all his men, Badr trusted el-Ziam the most. The man had proven over and over again his ability to slip unnoticed into foreign countries — Germany, France, Britain, Italy, and others — and deliver lethal parcels.

The man enjoyed his tasks, and he smiled at Badr as the crane groaned and the basket lifted from the deck.