The guards were not highly educated men. Selected from the Commander’s personal retinue of followers, each was the veteran of many years of combat operations. Perversely, their fighting had been more against fellow Arabs than their putative Zionist enemies. There was a plethora of terrorist groups, and since each drew its support from the Palestinian community, there was competition for the limited pool of followers. Competition among men with guns not infrequently led to confrontation and death. In the case of the guards, it also proved their loyalty. Each of the men on duty was an expert shot, about good enough to be on a par with the new American addition to the organization, the infidel Russell.
One of the guards, Achmed, lit up a cigarette and leaned against the wall. He faced yet another boring night. Walking guard on the outside, or patrolling the block on which Qati slept, at least gave them a variety of things to observe. One might imagine that there was an Israeli agent behind every parked car or behind every window, and such thoughts kept one awake and alert. Not here. Here they guarded machines that sat dumbly still. For diversion, and also in keeping with their duties, the guards kept an eye on the machinists, following them around the room, to and from their eating and sleeping spaces, and even on some of their less complicated jobs. Though not well educated, Achmed was a bright man, quick to learn, and he fancied that he could have done any of these machinist jobs, given a few months to learn the trade properly. He was very good with weapons, able to diagnose a problem or fix an improper sight as quickly and well as a master gunsmith.
As he walked around, he listened to the drone of the blowers for the various air systems, and on each circuit he looked at the instrument panels that reported their status. The panels also monitored the backup generators, making sure each night that there was sufficient fuel in the tanks.
“They are awfully worried about the schedule, aren’t they?” Achmed mused. He continued his walk around, hoping the indicator light would blink off. He and his companion stopped to look at the same metallic bar that had so interested Fromm and Ghosn.
“What do you suppose that is?”
“Something wondrous,” Achmed said. “Certainly they are keeping it as secret as they can.”
“I think it’s part of an atomic bomb.”
Achmed turned. “Why do you say that?”
“One of the machinists said it could be nothing else.”
“Wouldn’t that be something to give to our Israeli friends?”
“After all the Arabs who’ve died in the last few years—the Israelis, the Americans, all the rest.... Yes, it would be a fine gift.” They continued their walk past the idle machines. “I wonder what the rush is?”
“Whatever it is, they want it finished on time.” Achmed paused again, looking at the plethora of metal and plastic parts on the assembly table. An atomic bomb? he asked himself. But some of these things looked like ... like soda straws, long, thin ones, wrapped in tight bundles and twisted slightly.... Soda straws—in an atomic bomb? That was not possible. An atomic bomb had to be ... what? He admitted to himself that he had no idea at all. Well, he was able to read the Koran, and the newspapers, and weapons manuals. It wasn’t his fault he hadn’t had the chance to have proper schooling like Ghosn, whom he liked in a distant and slightly jealous way. Such a fine thing, an education. If only his own father had been something more than a displaced peasant, a shopowner, perhaps, someone able to save a little money....
On his next circuit, he saw the—paint can? That’s what it looked like. The metal shavings from the lathe were collected from the Freon sump. Achmed had seen the process often enough. The scrap—it looked mainly like very fine metallic thread—was collected mechanically and loaded into the container, which did look very much like a paint can, using a window and thick rubber gloves. The can was then placed into a double-door chamber and removed, taken to the next room, and opened in another similar chamber and put into one of those odd crucibles.
“I’m going outside for a piss,” his companion said.
“Enjoy the fresh air,” Achmed observed.
Achmed slung his weapon and watched his friend go out the double doors. He’d take a stroll soon himself, when it was time to check the perimeter security. He was the senior man, and was responsible for the outside guards, in addition to the security of the shop itself. It was worth it just to get out of the controlled environment of the machine shop. This was no way for a man to live, Achmed thought, stuck inside a sealed enclosure like a space station or submarine. He craved an education, but not to be an office worker, sitting down all the time and staring at papers. No, to be an engineer, the sort who built roads and bridges, that was an ambition he might once have held. Perhaps his son would be one, if he ever had the chance to marry and have a son. Something to dream for. His dreams were more limited now. For this to end, to be able to set his gun down, to have a real life, that was his primary dream.
But the Zionists had to die first.
Achmed stood alone in the room, bored to death. At least the outside guards could look at the stars. Something to do, something to do....
The paint can sat there, inside the enclosure. It appeared to be ready for the transfer. He’d watched the machinists do it often enough. What the hell. Achmed removed the can from the air lock and walked it into the furnace room. They put it inside the electric furnace, and ... it was simple enough, and he was glad to be able to do something different, maybe something helpful to whatever project this was.
The can was light, might have held only air for all he could tell. Was it empty? The top was held on with clamps, and ... no, he decided. He’d just do what the machinists did. Achmed walked to the furnace, opened the door, checked to see that the power was off—this thing got hot, he knew. It melted metal! Next he put on the thick rubber gloves they used and, forgetting to switch on the argon-flooding system, loosened the clamps on the can. He rotated the can backwards so that he could see what it looked like. He saw.
As he removed the top, the oxygen-laden air entered the can and attacked the plutonium filaments, some of which reacted at once, essentially exploding in his face. There was a flash, as though from a rifle primer, just a tiny puff of heat and light, certainly nothing to endanger a man, he knew at once. Not even any smoke that he noticed immediately, though he did sneeze once.
Despite that, Achmed was seized with terror. He’d done something he ought not to have done. What would the Commander think of him? What might the Commander do to him? He listened to the air-conditioning system, and thought he saw a puff of thin smoke rising into the exhaust vent. That was good. The electric dust-collector plates would take care of that. All he had to do ...
Yes. He resealed the can and carried it back into the machine shop. His fellow guard hadn’t returned yet. Good. Achmed slid the can back where it had been and made sure that things looked as they had looked a few minutes earlier. He lit another cigarette to relax himself, vexed with himself that he was as yet unable to quit the habit. It was starting to impede his running.
Achmed didn’t know that he was already a corpse whose death had not yet been registered, and that his cigarette might as easily have been the breath of life itself.
“I can do it,” Clark announced, striding through the door like John Wayne into the Alamo.
“Tell me about it,” Jack said, waving to a chair.
“I just got back from Dulles, talked to a few people. The JAL 747s set up for Trans-Pac flights are arranged very conveniently for us. The upstairs lounge is set up with beds, like an old Pullman car. It helps us. The room is very lively acoustically, and that makes for easy pickup.” He laid out a diagram. “There’s a table here and here. We use two wireless bugs and four broadcast channels.”
“Explain,” Jack said.
“The wireless bugs are omnidirectional. Okay, they transmit to the SHF transmitter, and that one gets it out of the airplane.”
“Why four channels?”
“The big problem is canceling out the airplane n
oise, the engine whine, the air, all that stuff. Two channels are interior sound. The other two are for background noise only. We use that to cancel out the crap. We have people down in S&T who have been working on that for quite a while. You use the recorded background noise to establish what the interference is, then just change its phase to cancel it out. Pretty simple stuff if you have the right computer backup equipment. We do. Okay? The transmitter goes in a bottle. We aim it out a window. Easy to do, I checked. Now, we will need a chase plane.”
“Like what?”
“With the right equipment, a business jet like a Gulfstream, better yet an EC-135. I’d recommend more than one, have them form up and break off.”
“How far away?”
“As long as it’s line of sight ... up to thirty miles, and doesn’t have to be the same altitude. Not like we have to fly formation on the guy.”
“How hard to build it?”
“Simple. The hardest part is the battery, and that’ll fit in a liquor bottle, like I said. We’ll make it a brand that you usually find in a duty-free store—I have a guy checking that—one with a ceramic bottle ’stead of a glass one. Like an expensive bottle of Chivas, maybe. The Japanese like their scotch.”
“Detection?” Ryan asked.
Clark grinned like a teenager who’d just snookered a teacher. “We build the system exclusively from Japanese components, and we place a receiver tuned to the right freqs in the aircraft. He’ll be traveling with the usual mob of newsies. I’ll set a receiver in the wastebin of one of the downstairs heads. If the op gets burned, they’ll think it was one of their own. It’ll even look like a journalist did it.”
Ryan nodded. “Nice touch, John.”
“I thought you’d like that. When the bird lands, we have a guy recover the bottle. We’ll fix it—I mean, we’ll see to it that you can’t get the cork out. Superglue, maybe.”
“Getting aboard in Mexico City?”
“I have Ding looking at that. Time he got a taste for planning operations, and this is the soft side. My Spanish is good enough to fool a Mexican national.”
“Back to the bugging equipment. We won’t be reading this in real-time?”
“No way.” Clark shook his head. “What’ll come across will be garbled, but we’ll use high-speed tape machines to record, then we can wash it through the ’puters downstairs to get clean copy. It’s an additional operational safeguard. The guys in the chase birds won’t know what they’re listening to, and only the drivers need to know who they’re shadowing ... maybe not even that, as a matter of fact. I have to check on that.”
“How long to produce clean copy?”
“Have to do it at this end ... say a couple of hours. That’s what the S&T guys say, anyway. You know the real beauty of this?”
“Tell me.”
“Airplanes are about the last place you can’t bug. Our S&T guys have been playing with it for a long time. What made the breakthrough came from the Navy—very black project. Nobody knows we can do this. The computer codes are very complex. Lots of people are playing with it, but the actual breakthrough is on the theoretical side of the math. Came from a guy at NSA. I repeat, Sir John, nobody knows this is possible. Their security guys will be asleep. If they find the bug, they’ll think it’s an amateur attempt to do something. The receiver I put aboard won’t actually recover anything usable to anyone but us—”
“And we’ll have a guy recover that also, to back up the aerial transmissions.”
“That’s right. So we have double-redundancy—or triple, I never have figured what the right terminology is. Three separate channels for the information, one in the plane and two being beamed out from it.”
Ryan raised his coffee mug in salute. “Okay, now that the technical side looks possible, I want an operational feasibility evaluation.”
“You got it, Jack. Goddamn! It’s good to be a real spy again. With all due respect, watching out for your ass does not test my abilities all that much.”
“I love you, too, John.” Ryan laughed. It was his first in too long a time. If they could pull this one off, maybe that Elliot bitch would get off his back for once. Maybe the President would understand that field operations with real live field officers were still useful. It would be a small victory.
25
RESOLUTION
“So what’s the story on the things?” the Second Officer asked, looking down at the cargo deck.
“Supposed to be the roof beams for a temple. Small one, I guess,” the First Officer noted. “How much more will these seas build ... ?”
“I wish we could slow down, Pete.”
“I’ve talked to him twice about it. Captain says he has a schedule to meet.”
“Tell that to the fuckin’ ocean.”
“Haven’t tried that. Who do you call?”
The Second Officer, who had the watch, snorted. The First Officer—the ship’s second in command—was on the bridge to keep an eye on things. That was actually the Captain’s job, but the ship’s Master was asleep in his bed.
MV George McReady was pounding through thirty-foot waves, trying to maintain twenty knots, but failing despite full cruising power on her engines. The sky was overcast, with occasional breaks in the clouds for the full moon to peek through. The storm was actually breaking up, but the wind was holding steady at sixty knots and the seas were still increasing somewhat. It was a typical North Pacific storm, both officers had already decided. Nothing about it made any sense. The air temperature was a balmy 10 degrees Fahrenheit, and the flying spray was freezing to ice that impacted the bridge windows like birdshot in duck season. The only good news was that the seas were right on the bow. George M was a freighter, not a cruise liner, and lacked antiroll stabilizers. In fact, the ride wasn’t bad at all. The superstructure was set on the after portion of the ship, and that damped out most of the pitching motion associated with heavy seas. It also had the effect of reducing the officers’ awareness of events at the forward end of the ship, a fact further accentuated by the reduced visibility from flying spray.
The ride also had a few interesting characteristics. When the bow plowed into an especially high wave, the ship slowed down. But the size of the ship meant that the bow slowed quicker than the stern, and as the deceleration forces fought to reduce ship’s speed, the hull rebelled by shuddering. In fact, the hull actually bent a few inches, something difficult to believe until it was seen.
“I served on a carrier once. They flex more than a foot in the middle. Once we were—”
“Look dead ahead, sir!” the helmsman called.
“Oh, shit!” the Second Officer shouted. “Rogue wave!”
Suddenly there it was, a fifty-footer just a hundred yards from the George M’s blunt bow. The event was not unexpected. Two waves would meet and add their heights for a few moments, then diverge.... The bow rose on one medium-sized crest, then dropped before the onrushing green wall.
“Here we go!”
There wasn’t time for the bow to climb over this one. The green water simply stepped over the bow as though it had never been there and kept rolling aft the five hundred feet to the superstructure. Both officers watched in detached fascination. There was no real danger to the ship—at least, they both told themselves, no immediate danger. The solid green mass came past the heavy cargo-handling masts and equipment, advancing at a speed of thirty miles per hour. The ship was already shuddering again, the bow having hit the lower portion of the wave, slowing the ship. In fact, the bow was still underwater, since this wave was far broader than it was high, but the top portion was about to hit a white-painted steel cliff that was perpendicular to its axis of advance.
“Brace!” the Second Officer told the helmsman.
The crest of the wave didn’t quite make the level of the bridge, but it did hit the windows for the senior officers’ cabins. Instantly there was a white vertical curtain of spray that blotted out the entire world. The single second it lasted seemed to stretch into a minute, then
it cleared, and the ship’s deck was exactly where it was supposed to be, though covered with seawater that was struggling to drain out the scuppers. George M took a 15-degree roll, then settled back down.
“Drop speed to sixteen knots, my authority,” the First Officer said.
“Aye,” the helmsman acknowledged.
“We’re not going to break this ship while I’m on the bridge,” the senior officer announced.
“Makes sense to me, Pete.” The Second Officer was on his way to the trouble board, looking for an indicator light for flooding or other problems. The board was clear. The ship was designed to handle seas far worse than this, but safety at sea demanded vigilance. “Okay here, Pete.”
The growler phone rang. “Bridge, First Officer here.”
“What the hell was that?” the Chief Engineer demanded.
“Well, it was sorta a big wave, ChEng,” Pete answered laconically. “Any problems?”
“No kidding. It really clobbered the forward bulkhead. I thought I was gonna eat my window—looks like a porthole is cracked. I really think we might want to slow down some. I hate getting wet in bed, y’know?”
“I already ordered that.”
“Good.” The line clicked off.
“What gives?” It was the Captain, in pajamas and bathrobe. He managed to see the last of the seawater draining off the main deck.
“Fifty-sixty-footer. I’ve dropped speed to sixteen. Twenty’s too much for the conditions.”
“Guess you’re right,” the Captain grumbled. Every extra hour alongside the dock meant fifteen thousand dollars, and the owners did not like extra expenses. “Build it back up soon as you can.” The Captain withdrew before his bare feet got too cold.
“Will do,” Pete told the empty doorway.
“Speed fifteen point eight,” the helmsman reported.
“Very well.” Both officers settled back down and sipped at their coffee. It wasn’t really frightening, just somewhat exciting, and the moonlit spray flying off the bow was actually rather beautiful to see. The First Officer looked down at the deck. It took a moment for him to realize.