Sea of Fire (11 page)

“Did you leave me any?” Hawke demanded. “How does it feel?”

The blood was running thicker now. Kannaday thought about trying to grab the shaft.

Hawke seemed to read the captain’s mind.

“Think this through,” Hawke warned. “No one needs to know about our exchange,” Hawke told the captain. “When you see the chief, you can tell him you were injured in battle. He may even respect you more for it. I will tell my men that you never threatened me. I will say that we simply agreed on what you would tell the chief. You can wear a turtleneck to conceal the wound.”

“I see. And we just go on as we were,” Kannaday said.

“We do,” Hawke replied. “You don’t have to like me or our arrangement. But this is what necessity demands. You will live with it.”

Hawke backed away. He relaxed the blade slightly. A moment later he removed it entirely. That was intended, no doubt, to be a show of trust. Or perhaps of confidence. The two were often related.

Kannaday removed a handkerchief from his pocket. He dabbed it against the shallow wound. He stepped away from the rolltop desk. The captain could reach the .45 now. Hawke had attacked him. Kannaday had the wound to prove it. And the weapon.

The sheath of the wommera was attached by a slender leather thong. Hawke replaced the cap and returned the weapon to his belt. Then he turned away and walked slowly toward the door.

Kannaday could easily reach the gun. Hawke obviously knew that, too. He had to suspect that the captain kept a weapon in his quarters. But to stop Hawke now would mean shooting him from behind. To kill him that way would probably cause even his own sailors to turn on him. They would understand discipline and self-defense but not cowardice.

Hawke paused by the door. He turned back and faced the captain full. “Is there anything further you wanted?”

“No,” Kannaday replied.

Hawke lingered a moment longer. Then he reached behind him, twisted the knob, and left the room.

Kannaday’s shoulders dropped. He had not realized how tense he was until they did. He checked the handkerchief and saw that it was thickly stained with blood. He pressed it back in place and went to get a first-aid kit. He kept one in the locker at the foot of his bed, along with his private store of scotch. As soon as he patched the cut, he would open the bottle.

Kannaday was shaken. The captain was also angry at himself for underestimating Hawke. The man had poise. And courage. And a purpose: To end this encounter leaving Kannaday feeling something less than a captain. And a man.

Kannaday sat on the bed to clean and bandage the wound. He gazed into the mirror on the inside of the lid. The gash was a quarter inch long and bleeding slower now. But it went deep. Right down to his dignity.

As Kannaday uncapped the antiseptic cream, he reasoned that he had not come from this empty-handed. If he had not confronted Hawke, there was no guarantee the man would have stood by him. Still, Kannaday promised himself this much. If John Hawke failed to back him up with Jervis Darling, honor and pride would not save him. Kannaday would take him down anywhere and any way he could.

Even if that meant shooting him in the back.

“I feel like I’m in Oz,” Coffey said into his cell phone.

“You are,” Hood reminded him.

“I mean the other one, the Emerald City one,” Coffey replied. “The one where an out-of-towner walks around with a strange collection of personalities, looking for something that’s really tough to find.”

Hood was alone in his office. Bob Herbert and Mike Rodgers had just gone home, but their teams were still looking for intelligence. They were seeking any leads about radioactive materials missing or currently being trafficked through the region. They had not yet turned up anything new or relevant. As Herbert had reported before leaving, governments or components thereof were often involved in this trade. Unlike individuals, nations like China and the Ukraine were very good at covering their activities.

“I’m standing down the hall from the pirate’s hospital room,” Coffey went on. “Three people just went inside. One was Brian Ellsworth. You can read about him in my files. The other two are Warrant Officer George Jelbart of the MIC and Female Naval Defence Technical Officer Monica Loh of the Singaporean Coastal Command.”

Hood entered the names on his computer as Coffey spelled them. He forwarded the information to Bob Herbert. Hood knew that the designation
female
had been part of the title in Singapore for decades. The military services were fully integrated, and discrimination was not permitted. Nonetheless, high command liked to keep their combat unit leaders weighted toward men. This was an easy way to keep track of the balance.

“Is the patient conscious?” Hood asked.

“No, which is why I didn’t go in with them,” Coffey said. “Ellsworth said they’d notify me if he came around. Meanwhile, I’m using the secure phone I borrowed from Jelbart. Switch to code DPR1P.”

“Hold on,” Hood said.

He entered the code for AMIC into his desk unit. Op-Center telephones were preprogrammed to decrypt calls from over two hundred allied intelligence services around the world. The Australian Maritime Intelligence Centre was one of these. The only thing required to secure the line was an access code for the individual AMIC phone.

“Done,” Hood said. “So what do you make of all this?”

“I honestly don’t know yet,” Coffey admitted. “The wreckage is definitely that of a sampan, and it is definitely radioactive. It was probably destroyed by explosions that occurred on the sampan itself. Apparently, pirates have been working the Celebes Sea sporadically for years. They use explosives to hold crews hostage while the vessels are robbed.”

“So this could have been a premature detonation,” Hood said.

“It’s possible,” Coffey agreed.

“But that doesn’t explain the radioactivity,” Hood added.

“Exactly. As far as anyone knows, these pirates have never dealt in nuclear material. That’s making everyone around here pretty jumpy.”

“Why?” Hood asked. “Nuclear trafficking has been going on for years in the region. The MIC knows that.”

“They also know that there isn’t much they can do about it,” Coffey said quietly. “If word gets out about this, there will be pressure to do something. Only no one knows what, exactly. It’s the same problem the United States has faced for years. How do you monitor every point of access? It’s tough enough catching drug shipments. Radioactive materials are even more difficult.”

Coffey was right. There was not much that anyone could do about it. A terrorist could use a lead-lined fountain pen or pocket watch or even a rabbit’s foot on a key chain to slip plutonium into a country. Just a few grams of weapons-grade material would be enough to kill thousands of people or contaminate tens of thousands of gallons of water.

“Has the press been all over this?” Hood asked.

“Not yet. The government is trying to keep this as quiet as possible,” Coffey said. “Patients and visitors are being kept away from the man’s room, but this is a big hospital. Someone is certain to hear that something unusual happened. The game plan is to deny that anything hot was involved.”

“Is there anything else we can do?” Hood asked.

“I’ll let you know,” Coffey replied. “Right now it looks as though someone’s motioning for me. I think they want me in the room. Paul, I’ll call you back when I can.”

“I’ll be here another hour or so,” Hood said. “Then you can get me on the cell or at the apartment.”

“Very good,” Coffey said and hung up.

Hood placed the phone in the cradle. He sat back and thought about what was happening on the other side of the world. It was strange how events like this caused the globe to shrink. Conceivably, what Coffey and the others were dealing with could impact the United States within hours. Nuclear material could be transported clandestinely by sea and then loaded onto an aircraft anywhere in the region. The plane could be flown to a small airfield in Washington or New York or Los Angeles. A small amount of nuclear material could be walked into the terminal and left in a waste can. Or dropped on the floor under a bench. The human toll would be extraordinary. A larger amount of nuclear matter could be attached to a makeshift explosive. Perhaps homemade plastique or cans of spray paint triggered by a car flare. The human toll of the dirty bomb would be unthinkable.

All of that could be in progress right now,
Hood thought. The realization came with a keen sense of helplessness.

There were always crises. That was why Op-Center had been chartered. They were the National Crisis Management Center. But the personality of these disasters had changed over the years. The speed, the scope, and the frequency of them were terrifying. And though more resources were being applied to combat them, those resources targeted existing patterns and likely perpetrators. A methodology had not yet been created to anticipate what Bob Herbert called “kamikaze genocide”—the piecemeal extermination of Westerners by suicide attacks.

Several years ago, when Op-Center was combating neo-Nazis, Herbert said something that had stayed with Hood.

“When the brain doesn’t have enough information, only your gut can tell you what to do,” the intelligence chief said. “Fortunately, since some depraved sons of bitches blew up my wife and my legs, my gut has been able to digest some pretty sick thoughts.”

Hood suddenly felt energized. He and his team would figure this out. They would figure out everything that came along. Every deviant variation, every monster. They had to. It was necessity but also something more.

It was stubborn, blessed American pride.

“Madam, we are not going to inject the patient with anything!”

The speaker was a man in a white tunic. Probably the attending physician. He was standing in a tight circle with Ellsworth, Loh, and Jelbart. Ellsworth was the one who had motioned Coffey over. The man’s strident voice was the first thing Lowell Coffey heard as he approached the closed door.

“Doctor,” said Loh, “we have a situation that needs to be resolved as swiftly as possible—”

“And I have a patient who needs rest,” he interrupted.

“You have one patient now,” she said. “How will you feel when this ward, including the hallways, is lined with beds?”

The doctor looked at Ellsworth. “Is she right about that? Is it possible?”

“Such a scenario does not appear imminent,” Ellsworth replied crossly. He was looking at Loh.

“There is radioactive material abroad,” Loh persisted. “We have to know whether this man was transporting it, receiving it, or merely stumbled upon it. We have to find out if there is radioactive material still at sea, poisoning the fish that may feed some of your patients. Or poisoning some of your future patients. Doctor, we need to know what happened.”

“If I do as you ask, you may kill him,” the doctor said, shaking his head. “Then you will never get your answer. And there is no guarantee that he will say much, or even anything, if we wake him.”

“That is a risk worth taking,” she replied.

“Easy for you to say,” the doctor said.

“Before we even consider whether to take this rather extreme step, let’s find out if we’re free to do so,” Ellsworth said. He turned to Coffey. Ellsworth was visibly upset. Coffey could not decide which was worse for the Australian official: the responsibility of having to make a controversial decision, or the fear of what they might discover. “Lowell, this is your bailiwick. What do you say, keeping in mind that we are not entirely certain of our guest’s nationality? Have we the right to do anything to him?”

“Apart from administering medical care,” the doctor added.

Coffey glanced at the physician’s name tag. “Dr. Lansing, if this man is a Christian Scientist or a Buddhist, even that could be considered a violation of his rights.”

“You’ve got bronze for brains!” the doctor exclaimed. “The patient was shot twice and had third-degree burns! He would have bled to death if we didn’t patch him up!”

“That may be,” Coffey said. “However, the International Resolution on Oceans and the Law of the Sea says that absent a victim’s ability to choose, the dispensation of care is a decision to be made by his family or by the ranking representative of his nation, in that order.”

“And if we don’t have those?” Jelbart asked.

“In that case, the host nation calls the shots, isn’t that true?” Ellsworth said.

Coffey nodded.

“That would be us,” Ellsworth said.

“Correct,” Coffey said. “But the host nation is also liable for citation in any civil-rights violations that may arise from the execution of that decision. And the host nation is required to exercise what is called ‘humanitarian caution’ in administering curative drugs or techniques.”

“Which means we don’t give him norepinephrine cocktails to try to wake him,” Dr. Lansing said with finality.

“Not necessarily,” Coffey said. “If this man is suspected of what is classified as a ‘high crime’ involving the international transport of drugs or other contraband, the questioning of him by responsible authorities is permitted.”

“Go question him!” Dr. Lansing said. “It appears I can’t stop that. Just don’t ask me to wake him!”

“I cannot believe you are debating this when there may be radioactive waste spilling into the sea,” Officer Loh said.

“And I can’t believe your nation canes people nearly to death for spray-painting graffiti, but there we have it,” Dr. Lansing charged.

“Doctor, the IROLS is rather specific on the question of interrogation,” Coffey said. “It doesn’t say ‘ask,’ it says ‘question.’ The regulations presume that the individual is awake.”

“If he is not?” Dr. Lansing asked.