“Can you prove this?”
“I wish to speak with your military attaché.”
“He’s out of the country—”
“So the young lady downstairs said. Nevertheless, I wish to speak to him. And to a representative of your CIA.” Subandrio handed over his temporary passport. “My papers were lost when my crew was killed and my ship sunk from beneath me. You may check to see who I am, but with care because I believe that the owner of my ship made a deal with the Libyan government. At this moment I am supposed to be dead.”
Hopper studied the passport for a long moment or two, then glanced up at a blank wall and shrugged. A few seconds later the door opened and a very tall man, with a narrow, craggy face and deep-set dark eyes under bushy eyebrows, walked in. He wore civilian clothes but his bearing was very direct.
“Captain Subandrio,” the man said, coming around the table to take the passport from Hopper. He glanced at it.
“You may check my background—”
“That won’t be necessary,” the man said. “We know all about you. You’re a smuggler, heroin sometimes, almost certainly a pirate, and therefore probably a murderer. Therefore a piece of untrustworthy shit.” He tossed Subandrio’s passport across the table.
“As you wish,” Subandrio said, gathering his papers while hiding a little smile of triumph. He had them. He could see the excitement in their eyes, and he started to rise.
“Who is this submarine captain?” the man asked.
“Who are you?” Subandrio countered.
“Captain Russell Sterling. I’m the military attaché here.”
Subandrio sat back. “I am a marked man. I will need to disappear, and that costs money.”
“How much?” Hopper demanded.
Subandrio smiled. “I’ll leave that to your good offices,” he replied. “And those of the CIA who I think will find my story most interesting.”
“The name,” Sterling prompted.
“Rupert Graham, sometime captain in the British Royal Navy.”
Sterling swore softly under his breath and sat down, never taking his eyes off Subandrio.
“Do you know who he is?” Hooper asked.
“Yeah,” Sterling said.
“Do we have a deal?” Subandrio asked quietly.
“You’re playing with fire here,” Sterling said. “Al-Quaida is a hot topic for us just now. If you’re lying I’m fairly certain that you’ll have an accident. We might even arrange to send you to northern Pakistan. It’d be easy for you to disappear up there.”
“There’s no reason for me to make up such a dangerous story,” Subandrio replied. “But you gentlemen must ask yourself what is a man such as Rupert Graham going to do with a submarine?”
FIFTY
“Well, the man’s story has merit,” Sterling told CIA Chief of Tunis Station Anthony Ransom.
“He’s a piece of shit, Russ,” Walt Hopper observed. “You said so yourself. So why would we waste resources chasing down some cock-and-bull story?” Hopper was a CIA field officer, and worked directly for Ransom. He’d been in the Middle East for nearly five years and he was on burn-out status. Ready to go back to the CONUS.
“Because if by some odd quirk of fate he’s telling the truth, even a partial truth, we could be facing a serious situation,” the military attaché said. “Rupert Graham was one hell of a sub driver until he went off the deep end. Something about his wife dying in the hospital while he was out on patrol.” Sterling, whose last command had been boss of a Los Angeles Class attack submarine, had a great deal of respect for men of Graham’s capabilities. One submarine with a full load of nuclear warshots could start and finish a world war all by itself. Even an antiquated sub, such as the Foxtrot, could do a lot of damage with the right weapons and the right skipper.
“And that’s another thing, a Westerner working for al-Quaida. I just don’t see it.”
“It’s happened before,” Sterling shot back, a little angry by what he saw as a waste of time. They didn’t have enough solid information at this point to argue.
“Yeah, some pissed-off kid from Chicago who thinks he’s Muhammad’s son reincarnated or something.”
Ransom, who had been seated quietly behind his desk, absently playing with a rubber band, looked up. “Where is the gentleman at this moment?” he asked mildly. He was in his fifties, with a nearly bald, shiny head and a red complexion. But he had deceptively warm eyes.
“I put him in the secure conference room,” Hopper said.
“Is he staying in a hotel?”
“Apparently.”
“Send someone to fetch his things, and then get him set up in quarters here,” Ransom said. “With a babysitter, if you please, we may have him for a few days.”
Hopper shifted in his chair. “You can’t believe this guy. He’s trying to shake us down.” Ever since 9/11, selling al-Quaida stories to the CIA had practically become a cottage industry.
“We can’t afford not to believe him, Walter,” Ransom said.
“He’s given us the position he says that he rendezvoused with the sub and his ship was sunk. We can check at least that much,” Sterling said. “I’ll talk to Charlie Breamer and see what his people have in the vicinity.” Captain Breamer was operations officer for the Sixth Fleet based at Gaeta, Italy, which was composed of one-half a carrier battle group with about forty ships. At any given time a significant number of those ships were on maneuvers in the Mediterranean.
“It has to appear routine,” the COS said. “If the Libyans are involved, as your Indonesian captain maintains, they’ll be keen to keep us at arm’s length. Anyway if al-Quaida has gotten their hands on a submarine, I think it’s safe to assume that they’ll stay in the Med. Probably hit Israel. I think I’ll give Moshe the heads-up.” Moshe Begin, a cousin of the former Israeli prime minister, was chief of Mossad operations in Tunisia.
“I’ll give Charlie a call,” Sterling said, getting up. “But you might want to consider that the Foxtrot is capable of crossing the Atlantic. Could play hell along our East Coast.”
“They’d have to get past Gibraltar first,” Hopper pointed out. “That’s a tough nut to crack.”
“Yes, it is,” Sterling agreed. But not impossible for the right sub driver, he thought. It had been done before.
He walked across the hall to his own second-floor office, which looked down on one of the neatly groomed olive groves that were watered from rain catchment systems on the roofs of all the buildings, and placed an encrypted call to Sixth Fleet headquarters in Gaeta.
“Captain Breamer,” the ops officer said when the circuit was secure.
“Hi, Charlie, it’s Russ Sterling.”
“How’s the weather in Tunis?”
“Dry,” Sterling said. “I have a little job for you. Might be tricky, but it could be important.”
Breamer chuckled. “I didn’t think you’d call on this circuit to chat about the Yankees, who, by the way, are doing shit.” They were old friends with a baseball rivalry between the Yankees and the Red Sox going back to the Academy where they’d been classmates. “What do you have?”
“I want you to find and identify a shipwreck for me, off the coast of Libya. I have the approximate position, but it might not be there, the Libyans might object to our poking around, and this is pretty important but totally unofficial for the moment.”
This time Breamer laughed out loud. “Why don’t you give me something tough?” he asked. He said something away from the phone that Sterling did not catch, then he was back. “Okay, I can send the Simpson to take a look. She’s down around the south tip of Sardinia, could be on station in about twenty-four hours.” The Simpson was an Oliver Hazard Perry frigate. She carried a pair of Seahawk 60B LAMPS Mark III helicopters, and had been used for just about every mission, including drug interdiction, boardings and searches, and escort duties. She also carried underwater camera gear for sea bottom search-and-rescue missions.