Sea of Fire (15 page)

“How will we be able to tell them apart?” Coffey asked.

“They each have a specific drop point,” Jelbart replied. “The coordinates Loh sent us represent the Chinese site.”

“I see,” Coffey said. “I’m still unclear about one thing, though. What does she hope to find? If one of these ships were damaged, wouldn’t someone have been notified?”

“Possibly,” Jelbart said. “What concerns us is that one of the vessels may have transferred their cargo to another ship. That other ship may have been the one the pirates attacked.”

“What do you do if that scenario pans out? Go after the vessel?”

“I don’t know,” Jelbart replied.

“You don’t know? Wouldn’t that be a logical step?” Coffey asked.

“Perhaps,” Jelbart told him. “It could also tip off whoever has the nuclear material. It might be more prudent to try to find that material, then go back and clean up the relay team itself.”

“Doesn’t the MIC have simulations and playbooks for this sort of thing?” Coffey asked.

“We have search patterns and seizure protocols, yes,” Jelbart replied. “When it comes to tracking radioactive cargo, we’re in unfamiliar territory. Just as America has been. The only nuclear materials we’ve actually hunted were two warheads missing from the Soviet Union’s Strategic Rocket Forces. One was from a facility in Kazakhstan, the other from Belarus.”

“Did you find them?” Coffey asked.

“The Russians eventually did,” Jelbart replied. “There were indications that the warheads had been purchased by Indonesian rebels. Perhaps they were, but delivery was never made. The weapons had actually been moved to a cave in the Ukraine. Russian engineers and physicists hired by a retired general were in the process of dismantling them.”

“Lovely,” Coffey said.

“We try to rebuild Eden, but the snakes are always there, more persistent than ever,” Jelbart said.

“They’ve had a lot of time to study us from the underbrush,” Coffey observed.

“Too true,” Jelbart said. “The other thing about this mission, Mr. Coffey, is that we have a partner.” He nodded toward the Singaporean vessel. “We don’t know how porous their command center might be. We don’t know how many secrets we’ll be comfortable sharing.”

“I wonder if she feels the same,” Coffey said.

“Almost certainly,” Jelbart said. “Though with her it’s as much a cultural issue as a political one. The Singaporeans are aggressively private.”

“That’s an oxymoron. I’ll have to think about it,” Coffey remarked.

“You’ll see what I mean when you spend more time with FNO Loh,” Jelbart promised.

It also sounded racist. Coffey hated even benign generalizations like that. He would try not to hold that against Jelbart.

Ten minutes after the search had begun, Loh radioed that the Chinese site was registering the anticipated levels of ambient radiation. She provided the coordinates for the next site. The patrol boat moved on.

So did the corvette.

And so, once again, did Coffey’s stomach.

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.

It was the largest privately owned collection of prehistoric fossils in the world.

Jervis Darling had developed a love and deep appreciation for prehistoric animals forty years before. When in his early twenties he read an article on the Australian Museum in one of his first magazines,
Australian Insider
, he had not realized what a successful reign the dinosaurs had on earth. Each new generation evolved into a more refined version of the last. The carnivores became perfect pack hunters as well as individual predators. The herbivores bonded in family units with complex forms of child care. They had survived over 100 million years. That was 100 times longer than humankind and its ancestors had walked the earth. It was probably 100 times longer than humans would continue to walk the earth.

Unless he had his way.

Darling began buying fossils, from the smallest, oldest marine trilobites to a complete land-ranging allosaurus to a soaring pteranodon. He did not settle for plaster casts, as so many museums did. Only the real thing. He had them displayed in two large rooms on his estate, along with murals showing the animals and their world. It was ironic, he thought. The Australian media had nicknamed him Salty after the northwest crocodile. That was an insult, though not for the reasons they thought. Darling did not mind being compared to a carnivore. But he aspired to be one of the all-time great ones, like tyrannosaurus or gorgosaurus. Not a relatively small contemporary offshoot.

The moon shone through the large, arching skylight. Small lights illuminated the mounted skeletons, murals, and exhibit cases. Dressed in jeans and a flannel shirt, the six-foot-four-inch Darling stood in the middle of the cathedral-like structure. The bald-headed media titan did not end each day with a stroll through his collection. He did so today, however. He reminded himself that sometimes creatures perished due to things outside their control. The dinosaurs were a perfect example. Apparently they all died out slowly after an asteroid struck the earth. The collision threw incalculable tons of dust into the atmosphere, blotted out the sunlight for years, and created a worldwide ecological disaster. The equivalent of a prehistoric nuclear winter. According to the geological record, these impacts and global extinctions occurred with some regularity.

Portions of the earth were overdue for a similar cleansing,
he reflected. It was a concept Darwin would never have imagined. A mixture of natural selection and mass extinction.

Footsteps echoed along an adjoining corridor. A few seconds later, Andrew stepped through the door connecting the mansion with the wing that housed Darling’s collection of Ice Age fossils.

“Mr. Darling, Captain Kannaday is coming up the walk,” the executive secretary informed him.

“Bring him to the kitchen,” Darling said.

“Yes, sir,” Andrew replied.

There was no hesitation in Andrew’s voice. If Darling had instructed his aide to escort Kannaday to his private observatory, to the garage, or to a guest-room closet, Andrew would have done so without question. Descended from people who lived here during the Ice Age, Andrew Juta Graham was one of the few people whom Darling trusted absolutely.

Darling followed his secretary into the hallway of the 30,000-square-foot estate. This was the east wing, which held the public area of Darling’s home. The museum, the dining hall, the ballroom, the screening room, the gym, the indoor and outdoor swimming pools. He made his way through the dining area to the kitchen. He asked the cook and her assistant if they would mind waiting in their quarters for a few minutes. They left at once. Darling went to one of the three refrigerators and removed a large bottle of sparkling water. He leaned against a butcher-block counter and faced the picture window. He opened the water and took a swallow as he stared off at rolling grounds. He wondered suddenly if the dinosaurs ever drank from sparkling springs. They probably did. And did they notice a difference?

Of course,
he decided. But it would not have meant anything to them. They did not have the brainpower to look past the initial stimulation. In that respect the dinosaurs were like the terrorists Darling was dealing with now. Locked into narrow patterns of information processing. Impulsive instead of reflective. What made them dangerous also made them easy to manipulate.