Sea of Terror (23 page)

"From the photograph, it appears that the Queen has taken the Sandpiper under tow. We have received no distress call from either ship .. . save for the original traffic about the Ishikari blowing up. Under normal circumstances, other ships are not permitted to come within a mile of the Sandpiper Admittedly, the Queen might have come alongside to transfer injured personnel, but we don't understand why the two should be moving together now, at a fairly high rate of speed.

"And finally, there's this."

Rubens reached into his jacket pocket and produced a flat silver MP3 player. "GCHQ picked this up as a signals intercept at ten-eighteen hours GMT. It's impossible to determine the precise origin of the signal without triangulation, but we know it was from the general vicinity of these ships shortly after the sinking of the Ishikari." Holding the player high so everyone at the table could hear, he pressed the play button.

A burst of static sounded, followed by a harsh voice saying, "Hallak... hallak... hallak." There was a pause filled by the hiss of static, and then the words repeated. "Hallak... hallak... hallak."

"Hallak, ladies and gentlemen," Rubens said, "is the Arabic word for now\"

That caused a stir in the audience. "A signal of some sort," Debra Collins said. "After the sinking of the escort."

"It's difficult to see what else it might have been," Rubens replied. "It's possible that the destruction of the Ishikari was deliberate sabotage, designed both to take the Sandpiper's military escort out of the picture and to draw the cruise ship in close to assist with SAR efforts. The helicopter was over the Channel at the time, and immediately radioed Brest that it was proceeding to the disaster site to assist... despite the fact that its fuel would have been critically low if it had flown to the Ishikari and then back to Brest, even without spending any time at the scene of the disaster."

"Obviously," Wehrum pointed out, "they were able to land on the Sandpiper's deck."

"Indeed," Rubens replied. "But how would a civilian helicopter have known that a ship of the Sandpiper's design was going to be available for a landing at sea? We picked up nothing on radio frequencies between ship and aircraft, other than the fact that the aircraft was on its way. And the fact that that helicopter was masquerading as a military aircraft is . . . disturbing. It suggests that after the Ishikari explosion, which quite possibly was intended as a diversion, people on board either the Sandpiper or the Queen carried out a hijacking, probably in concert with armed attackers off that helicopter. If so, then unknown hostile forces are now in control of both vessels, and taking them to an unknown destination."

"And just who is the enemy?" Admiral Prendergast asked. "Al-Qaeda?"

"We don't know, sir. Not yet. However, this operation has the flash and high profile we've come to associate with them."

"Al-Qaeda is a spent force, Mr. Rubens," General Barton pointed out. "Broken. They haven't been able to mount a single effective operation since nine-eleven."

"Not for lack of trying, sir," Rubens replied. "And perhaps they're not as broken as we've come to believe. Or this may be a new group with a similar signature. There's no way to tell. Yet."

"We can assume al-Qaeda until we learn differently," Collins pointed out. "Do you have any intelligence leads, Mr. Rubens?"

"A few. We're working them."

"So where are those ships headed now?"

"At last report, they were on a heading of two-four-zero. That's roughly the correct course for the Sandpiper-- toward the Caribbean and the Panama Canal. At this point, the Atlantis Queen is considerably off-course. She's supposed to be headed due south, toward Gibraltar and the Mediterranean."

"I assume attempts have been made to contact both vessels," Barton said.

"Of course, sir. There's been no response so far."

"Then we need to intercept those ships at sea," Collins said.

Rubens nodded. Collins was not his favorite person. They'd actually once been lovers, a bit of ancient history on which he did his best not to dwell. As Deputy Director of Operations for the CIA, Collins had often targeted the NSA's Desk Three as an asset that properly should have fallen under her jurisdiction. So far, Rubens had managed to fend off her ambitious attempts to gain control of his department, but he remained cautious in his dealings with her.

At the moment, though, she seemed to be siding with him, making him wonder what she was up to. He was glad to have her support, though.

"One of the vessels that responded to the Ishikari SOS," Rubens continued, "is the Ark Royal, a Royal Navy aircraft carrier. She's still about eighty miles from the sinking, but her skipper has agreed to deploy a couple of Harriers to check on the Sandpiper They may at least establish visual contact, even if the ships' radios are out." He checked his watch. "They should be over the Sandpiper and the Adantis Queen within the next hour.

"It also seems we have a possible agent in place on board the Queen. Quite serendipitous, actually. We're making attempts now to get in electronic contact with her."

"An agent?" Collins asked. "One of yours?"

"Indirectly. She's GCHQ, which means--"

"Which means she works for one of the NSA's subsidiaries," Collins said with a throaty chuckle. "Yes, we know."

Not quite true, Rubens thought, but close enough to the truth that he let the barb pass. "She happens to be aboard the cruise ship as part of another operation," Rubens continued. "If we can make contact with her, we may be able to get some direct intelligence on what's happening on those ships.

"If the Atlantis Queen or the Sandpiper or, as seems probable at this juncture, both ships have been hijacked," Rubens continued, "her intelligence may be invaluable. We do need to begin making contingency plans."

"Meaning a military response?" Wehrum asked. "Both of these ships are British. It seems to me the responsibility for any type of response should lie with them."

"Maybe so," Rubens said. "The NSA gathers intelligence. It does not set foreign policy, nor does it carry it out. However" he added forcefully as Wehrum began to reply, "half of the passengers on board the Atlantis Queen are American citizens, and it is our responsibility to protect them from hostile forces no matter where they are. We also have a treaty obligation to do whatever is necessary to safeguard the cargoes of those plutonium transport ships. At the very least, we're going to need to work closely with the British government on this one, making our military response assets available."

"If we're the ones to go in," Prendergast said, "it means the SEALs."

"Either the SEALs," Rubens said, "or Black Cat."

"Black Cat?" Prendergast said, white eyebrows arching. "What's that?"

v "Combat Assault Team--'CAT.' A counterterrorist unit operating out of Desk Three and the NSA," Rubens said. "It's new."

Very new. More than once in the past couple of years, U. S. Navy SEAL units had assisted NSA operators in covert military missions in remote areas, including a recent one on the Arctic ice cap. The SEALs were unparalleled at getting into hard-to-reach places without being seen, carrying out their mission, and extracting again, often before the enemy knew they'd even been there. Not long after the op against the Russians in the far Arctic, Rubens had pushed through a Deep Black program called Black Cat--the "Cat" portion of the name suggested by the counterterrorism, or "CT," nature of their mission as well as by the term "combat assault team." A highly classified number of active-duty SEALs and Army Delta operators had been seconded to the NSA, still drawing military pay but serving with and under Agency personnel. For the past six months they'd been training with combat-experienced NSA operators, including Charlie Dean and Lia DeFrancesca. Black Cat Bravo was based at Pawtuxet River, Virginia, and was under the command of Lieutenant Richard Taylor, the SEAL officer with whom Dean had deployed in the Arctic. Black Cat Alpha was based at the 'phib base in San Diego.

While the budgetary battles over Black Cat continued both within the Pentagon and at NCTC headquarters in northern Virginia--critics of the program insisted it wastefully duplicated already existent combat units such as the SEAL teams themselves--the unit promised to provide Desk Three with a tremendously valuable and powerful tool. The NSA gathers intelligence, he'd told them. It does not set foreign policy, nor does it carry it out. Right.. . .

Sometimes, though, to carry out its more dangerous or complex missions the NSA needed something a bit more specialized and a bit more hard-hitting than a com-wired agent with a handgun. The important point was that with its own paramilitary force on tap, there would be fewer problems getting a clean interface between Desk Three and the pointy end of the stick. Clear communications were vital in any covert operation, and more than one major op--Eagle Claw, the failed mission to rescue American hostages in Iran in 1980, was a rather obvious example--had ended in disaster in part when communications broke down between rival services.

Rubens completed his presentation and took a few more questions from the group, ending the briefing with the suggestion that Desk Three begin exploring plans for inserting a covert team onto both the Pacific Sandpiper and the Atlantis Queen. Two Black Cat teams of about six men each might be able to gather intelligence about what was actually happening on those vessels and, if the decision was made to take them down, would already be in place.

"Your suggestion is noted, Mr. Rubens," Wehrum said, leaning back in his leather chair. "Thank you for the presentation."

And Rubens was dismissed.

He was gathering up his notes and replacing them in his briefcase when he sensed movement beside him. "Oh, hello, Debra," he said as Collins drew near. "Bill."

"So . .. why were you being nice to me this morning?"

"What do you mean?"

"You were actually supporting me there on a couple of points."

She made a face. "Despite what you seem to believe, Bill, we are on the same side."

"Sometimes it's a bit hard to keep that in mind," he replied. He was surprised at the strength, even now, of his anger at this woman. It had been years, but once she'd betrayed their relationship, their friendship, to advance her own agenda ...

The memory still burned.

It was necessary to keep up the facade, at least, of professionalism. But he would also keep watching his back.

"I just thought you should know, Bill," she told him, "that there will be no Black Cat op on this one."

"Indeed? So the Agency is employing psychics now, to read the future?"

"No, but I can read the weather vane. The Sandpiper situation was included in this morning's pickle. The President is inclined to allow the Brits to handle this one."

The "pickle" was the old name for the President's Intelligence Check List, or PICL, a ten-page newsletter prepared by the CIA each night listing the top five or six intelligence developments of interest to the President and a few other high-level personnel, including DIRNSA, Rubens' boss. The system had changed oyer the years and was now an internal Web page supposedly routed through the NCTC, but insiders still referred to the Agency's intelligence briefs as "pickles" and to the CIA itself as "the pickle factory."

"The British?" Rubens said. "Why?"

"They're closer, for one thing. They have an aircraft carrier less than a hundred miles from those ships. Our closest carrier battle groups are in Norfolk and in the Med, four days away, at best. The ships are both British-flagged. And, frankly, if those ships have been hijacked, the President would rather someone else fell on his face right now."

"I see."

"A word to the wise, Bill. Don't make waves."

Rubens considered this as he checked out past the various security checkpoints on his way to the underground White House garage. The current administration was coming under a lot of fire in the news media, lately. The energy crisis, the banking and global monetary crises, the unbearably slow ongoing extraction from Iraq and Afghanistan all had carried over from the last administration into this one, leaving scars and, worse, a bureaucratic tendency at every level of government not to do anything that might be construed as yet another failure in either foreign or domestic policy.

A hostage rescue was always a high-risk proposition, with a terrible possibility of innocents being killed, if not by their terrorist captors, then by so-called friendly fire as the hostage rescue team stormed in. The more hostages there were, the likelier it was that casualty figures would be unacceptably high. Even a successful rescue might expect a 5 percent casualty rate among the hostages. With something like 3,400 civilians at risk, 5 percent was 170 people dead and wounded.

And if the rescue turned into a clusterfuck like Eagle Claw ...

Yeah. No wonder the President wanted someone else on point this time.

But Desk Three, Rubens decided, would begin preparing for a hostage rescue anyway. The one thing they could not afford now was to be caught unprepared.

Deck Twelve Terrace, Atlantis Queen 48deg 25' N, 9deg 28' W Saturday, 1528 hours GMT

"Yeah, now this is more like it!" James Petrovich said, his eye pressed up close to the LED screen of his camera. "I think I love my job."

"Feeling warmer, yet?" Fred Doherty asked with a sour smile.

"Oh, yeah! Big-time."

"Unfortunately, we won't be able to use the footage. Damn her!"

The two of them were again on the Deck Twelve Terrace overlooking the Atlantean Grotto Pool area. An hour earlier, Terry Carter had text-messaged Doherty on his cell phone--the Queen had her own cell network on board, since they were well out of range of shore-based systems when they were at sea--with the news that Gillian Harper would be sunbathing at the pool.

Once again, Doherty and Petrovich had trekked up to the terrace area overlooking the Grotto Pool. The sun was shining now, though there were still banks of clouds visible to the south, and the air was considerably warmer now. Gillian Harper had arrived right on cue, wearing an almost nonexistent bikini... then promptly removed the top and stretched out on her back on a deck chair, fully and magnificently displayed for the camera looking down on her from above as she began rubbing herself down with suntan lotion.