For the first minute he wasn’t sure where he was or how he had gotten there, or even the true nature of his predicament, or what had brought him back to consciousness. He was almost entirely focused on his thirst, which was monumental. And he couldn’t understand how he could be hot and cold at the same time.
Slowly he became aware of a low rumble that he could feel in his left side in contact with the table, and heard something behind him. He thought that he could smell the exhaust from a diesel engine, and perhaps someone shouting something.
Taking great care with his movements lest he unbalance the tabletop and plunge back into the water, Subandrio turned his head toward the sound, and the shock of what he saw caused his heart to skip a beat.
A ship was at idle less than twenty-five meters away. It was painted gray and for a moment or two it seemed to Subandrio that it was carrying two very large barrels, tipped on their sides aft of a low coach house. Forward, toward the bow, was a large cannon.
It came to him all at once that it was a warship. He looked toward the stern where a plain green flag fluttered in the breeze and his spirits sagged. He was in the middle of being rescued by a Libyan navy fast-attack missile boat.
If they had come to find their submarine it could mean that his ship had been spotted by a Libyan air force patrol plane. For the first time in his life, Subandrio was truly frightened. The Libyan intelligence service was said to have learned its interrogation techniques in the seventies and eighties from the Soviets, and he was getting too old to endure such pain.
An inflatable boat was launched over the side, and two men in uniform climbed aboard, started the outboard motor, and headed across the nearly flat sea.
Subandrio tried to clear his mind so that he could work out his options before he was taken aboard the Libyan warship.
When he’d been shot he’d been enraged by Graham’s betrayal, and he’d sworn to get revenge by putting a bullet in his old friend’s head. But when he’d been forced to abandon his ship, and watch her sink with all of his crew, plus a dozen or more men from the submarine, his anger had deepened to something more vivid than simple rage. He vowed to remain alive so that he could be rescued, and once he was ashore he would find a way to take away the only thing that Graham ever seemed to cherish: his freedom.
But it was the Libyans with whom Graham had made a deal for the submarine, though what could have been given in exchange must have been very important to Quaddafi.
Considering the nationalities of the crew that had been brought aboard the Distal Volente hidden in the cargo container, Subandrio had a fair idea who was behind the exchange, if not what was exchanged other than money.
And he had more than a fair idea who would be willing to pay for such information.
First he would have to convince his rescuers that he was an innocent victim of piracy, in which his crew was murdered, his cargo stolen, and his ship sunk, and further convince them to allow him to leave the country.
The only fly in that ointment, so far as he could figure, would be if the Libyans knew what ship Graham used to transfer the crew and what its captain’s name was. If that were the case, then the game might be over even before it began.
At this point there were no choices. If God so willed it, he would survive to exact his revenge and perhaps collect enough money to either retire on an island somewhere in the Java Sea, or perhaps even purchase a cargo vessel of his own.
He raised his right hand and waved as the Libyan crewmen reached his raft. “Please,” he cried weakly in Bahasa, his native Indonesian language. “Help me!”
FORTY-EIGHT
McGarvey’s biggest challenge after he’d returned from Guantanamo Bay five days ago was facing Kathleen. She’d come up from Florida to stay at the same CIA safe house as before, over Adkins’s objections. She wanted to be as close to the center of operations as possible so that when her husband returned from the field she would be there for him.
He knew that she deserved the truth about why he was going back into the field, and what he would try to do, but she’d asked no questions, offered no objections. She would stick it out in Washington until he finished whatever it was he’d set himself to do, and he felt like a heel, like he was cheating on her.
Which in a way he was, he told himself as he crossed the river and took the George Washington Parkway south. It was four in the morning and the highways were practically deserted. Otto had telephoned a half hour ago from the Building that all the pieces were en route. What they had been waiting for was finally ready to pay off.
“This is the big one!” Rencke had shouted. “The whole enchilada.”
“I’m on my way,” McGarvey had said, and when he’d hung up Kathleen turned on the lamp on her side of the bed and sat up, an owlish expression on her face.
“Are you leaving now?” she asked.
“No, but soon, Katy,” he told her.
“Will I at least be told where you’re going?”
He nodded. “As soon as I find out.” He reached over and kissed her. “Go back to sleep. I’ll be back later this morning.”
“Shall I pack something?”
“Something dark,” he’d told her, and when he’d driven off he’d glanced back at the house in his rearview mirror. The lights were on upstairs.
The riot at Guantanamo Bay three days ago had made all the newspapers and television networks, even though the military had tried to put a lid on the story. Amnesty International was saying it had been warning about just such an event because of the inhumane way in which Taliban and al-Quaida prisoners were being treated. Congress was calling for a full investigation, but the president was standing fast with the position that the White House had maintained all along. The detainees at Camp Delta, as well as at Abu Ghraib and other facilities in Iraq and Afghanistan, were combatants and therefore came under the jurisdiction of the Unified Code of Military Justice. They did not have the same rights as civilians.
What had begun in the late afternoon as a scuffle between several Delta POWs in one of the exercise yards had rapidly escalated into a full-scale riot. Windows had been broken, doors ripped off their hinges, and bedding and anything else that could burn had been piled outside the barracks and set on fire. Eight prisoners had been shot to death, twenty-seven others injured, and nine American personnel had been hurt, two seriously, before the riot had finally been put down.
So far the media had not found out how close the situation had come to being a major disaster. Before General Maddox had finally given the order for the guards to use deadly force, sections of the inner and outer fences had been torn down by the mob, and all the POWs who’d been killed had been shot to death outside the facility. On Cuban soil.
Nor had the media learned that four POWs were still unaccounted for. ONI’s top-secret Preliminary Incident Report presumed they had drowned trying to swim out to sea. But their names had not been included, nor did the PIR mention that the four had been the same men questioned by the CIA two days before the riot.
“Curiouser and curiouser.” Rencke had laughed when he’d hacked into the ONI’s computer and brought the PIR up on one of his monitors.
McGarvey had been there, monitoring the four GPS signals that had moved, apparently by boat, down the coast to Santiago de Cuba, the city not far from the famous San Juan Hill. They’d remained there together until yesterday when they’d been flown up to Havana.