He came over to where McGarvey and Gallegos were waiting. His complexion under the harsh entry lights was pale, and his face was shiny with sweat. He looked as if he was about to be sick.
He said something in Spanish to Gallegos, who shot back a rapid-fire response. The bomb disposal supervisor glanced at McGarvey, nodded, and headed across to his truck.
“I think it was Graham,” Gallegos told McGarvey. “The body of a man, who will probably turn out to be the Russian ship captain, was stuffed into the aluminum trunk.”
The news was more frustrating than surprising to McGarvey. “Was anything else packed with the body?”
“We won’t know until the medical examiner gets here,” Gallegos said. “But you were right all along. I’m sure that my government will ask your navy for help. If some maniac has actually gotten control of one of our tankers there’s no telling what will happen.”
“We’re already on it,” McGarvey told him. “The target’s probably one of our oil refineries in California, which means we have time to do something.”
“How can I help?” Gallegos asked earnestly. He’d been wrong, but he was sharp enough not to hold any grudges.
“I’m probably going to need some fast transportation out of here,” McGarvey said.
“I’ll have Air Force on standby for you. Whatever you need.” McGarvey walked a few feet away and made a sat phone call to Rencke, who was still at Langley. “It’s the Apurto Devlán. Graham probably killed the captain ashore here in Cabimas and took his identity. What can you tell me about the ship?”
“She’s a Panamax oil carrier, nine hundred feet on the waterline, beam of one hundred and ten feet.Twelve separate tanks, carrying fifty-thousand-plus tons of light sweet crude.”
“What about the crew?”
“Normal complement of a master and twenty-three officers and crew, but she’s been running shorthanded. Nineteen and the captain.”
McGarvey put himself in Graham’s shoes. He’d apparently come up with enough information about the ship and her officers to feel confident that he could get away with posing as the captain. Once aboard, and at sea, he would have to eliminate the entire crew and probably stop at some rendezvous point to pick up their replacements.
“Where’s the ship right now?”
“I’m just bringing it up now,” Otto said. He sounded excited.
McGarvey could see him in his pigsty of an office; empty classified files, NRO satellite photos, top secret Company memos, and empty Twinkie wrappers would be scattered all over the floor, on the desk and chairs, while Otto, probably dressed in ragged jeans and a dirty sweatshirt, would be working a half-dozen computer monitors and keyboards like a concert organist manipulating several registers.
“Oh wow, Mac, she’s in the Limón holding basin,” Otto said. “Scheduled to start her transit in a few hours. Midnight.”
“Have the canal authorities already cleared her?” McGarvey asked.
“Yes, but she’ll stay anchored until the pilot comes aboard,” Otto said. “But I just had another thought. What if Graham isn’t targeting the Long Beach refineries? What if he’s after the canal?”
McGarvey had kicked the same idea around in his head all afternoon as they’d worked their way through the shipping and hiring agencies. The only mistakes that Graham had made were telling the whore he was meeting a ship and then making her mad enough to remember him out of all her johns. He was professional enough to have eluded capture for the past several years even though he was a hunted man worldwide, which meant he had a very definite plan, one which he believed would not fail. He would be professional enough to realize that time was against him. The moment he’d killed the Russian captain, the countdown had begun. Sooner or later the body that he’d stuffed in the footlocker would be discovered; sooner or later someone would come looking for him.
Once the Apurto Devlán cleared the Panama Canal it would take nearly ten days to reach California. Too many bad things could happen in such a long time.
“I think you’re right,” he told Rencke. “Where would he blow up the ship to do the most damage?”
“The Gatun locks, on the Caribbean side,” Otto said without hesitation. “I already worked it out. If he could take those out it would be a very long time before the canal could be made operational again. It’s even possible that it’d never get done. The whole thing is way too small for most modern ships. If it were going to be rebuilt, it’d be better to start from scratch. Make it fit the ships out there delivering cargo, not the other way around. But nobody’s got that kind of do-re-me these days.”
“Okay, hang on a minute, Otto,” McGarvey said, and he walked back to where Gallegos was smoking a cigarette and watching the police activity inside the lobby. They’d dragged the aluminum footlocker out of the storage room, and a photographer was taking pictures. The other officers were keeping their distance because of the smell. “Is your offer still open for a quick ride out of here?”
“Sí. Where do you want to go?”
“The Panama Canal,” McGarvey said. “Probably the international airport at Panama City.”
“How soon?”
“Right now,” McGarvey said.
“Give me five minutes,” Gallegos said, and he took out his cell phone.
McGarvey turned back to Otto. “Do we still have an Emergency Response Team in the Canal Zone?”
“Yes. They’re based in Panama City.”
“Alert them to what’s coming their way. But make it damn clear that they wait until I get there, they’ll have to chopper me up to Colón. Graham will have his own crew aboard, and they’ll be willing to go up in flames for the cause if they’re pressed.”
“They might have their own threat-response orders,” Rencke warned.
“If need be call Dennis Berndt at the White House, he’s got muscle.” Berndt was the president’s national security adviser.
“You’re going to have to hustle, Mac,” Rencke said. “We’re running out of time if Gatun is the target.”
“Juan is working on it for me,” McGarvey said, a tight smile on his lips. “I have a couple of things that I’d like to discuss with Mr. Graham tonight. I think he’ll find what I have to say interesting.”
FOURTEEN
It was approaching eleven o’clock. The transit pilot would be coming aboard in a little more than a half hour, yet the job wasn’t finished. Graham hesitated for just a moment on the open deck just forward of the superstructure to catch his breath in the clean air. The night sky was pitch-black, but they were surrounded by the lights of dozens of ships, large and small, most of them at anchor, although in the past two hours, three ships had headed into the narrow cut that led to the Gatun locks.
Spread out along the eastern shore of the bay, the city of Colón’s skyscrapers and business district looked like diamonds, rubies, and emeralds against a black velvet backdrop. The place reminded him in some ways of Singapore’s skyline at night. He’d looked at it through a search periscope from well offshore. But that was another time and place that he didn’t want to remember now.
Hijazi had taken charge of the engine room, along with one of the other operators, and they’d just finished packing enough Semtex around the rudder shaft to permanently disable the ship if something drastic went wrong. In the worst-case scenario they would jam the rudder, set the ship’s engines All Ahead Full, and ram the first lock gate. It wouldn’t do the same damage as exploding the ship inside the middle lock, but it would do enough to close the canal for months, perhaps even years.