McGarvey had laughed. “I never thought of myself quite that way, but you might be right, Doc.” Voltaire had written that he’d “ … never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: ‘O Lord, make my enemies ridiculous.’ And God granted it.”
But the man had simply been doing his job of watching out for the mental health of his flock the best he knew how. Because it was what he did.
And Katy had asked why.
“It’s what I do,” he’d answered, and they’d left it at that.
McGarvey had flown first class, so he was one of the first passengers to get off the airplane. His single B4 bag would be transferred to the Saudi Arabian Airlines flight to Karachi that departed in one hour, so he had no need to leave the international terminal, and therefore go through customs or passport control.
By law, alcohol could not be served in the kingdom, so there were only a few restaurants and cafeterias in the airport. McGarvey crossed the busy arrivals and departures hall to a crowded cafeteria where he ordered a tea and took it to one of the high tables. The Arab specialty had been tea for more than a millennium, so they had gotten very good at it, even better than the Brits.
Very few passengers on this side of the airport wore the traditional Muslim robes, just about everybody was in Western business suits. Saudi Arabia was where the money was, so this is where the international businessmen flocked. When the last barrel of oil was finally gone, the crowds would leave with it.
A young earnest-looking man in a dark suit with a priest’s white collar came over with a glass of tea in hand. “Mind if I share your table, sir?” he asked.
“Not at all, Father,” McGarvey said. “I didn’t know there were any Catholics here.”
“Mr. Rencke thought it was a good idea,” the young man said, taking a seat. “Actually I think there might be a church in one of the burbs.”
McGarvey glanced up at the television set tuned to CNN behind the bar, and let his eyes sweep the concourse without making it obvious that he was looking for someone. But it didn’t seem as if anyone was taking an interest in them.
“I have a message for you, sir,” the kid said. “The cock remains in its roost.” He waited for a reaction. “Would you like me to repeat it?”
McGarvey shook his head. “It’s not necessary.” His sat phone was only good for tracking the GPS signals at short range, within fifteen or twenty miles, and wasn’t encrypted, so Rencke had done the next best to get the message to him.
Before he’d left Langley they’d made sure that the position of the chip implanted in al-Turabi had not made a move toward the northern mountains that bordered Afghanistan. Rencke’s message meant that al-Turabi was still in place. If he’d come to report to bin Laden, it meant the al-Quaida leader was somewhere in the city.
A lot of ifs, McGarvey thought. A lot of assumptions.
The kid looked to be in his mid-twenties at the oldest. He’d probably been trained by Liz and her husband, Todd, at the Farm. For just a moment it made McGarvey feel old. Too old?
“You’re Mr. McGarvey, right sir?”
McGarvey smiled. He drank his tea, and when he was finished, he shook his head. “Nope,” he said. “And I was never here.”
It took a moment for the young CIA field officer to react, but then he laughed. “Yes sir, I understand,” he said. He finished his tea, then slid off his stool, and started to leave. But he hesitated. “I’ve always wanted to use that line myself.”
FIFTY-TWO
Bruce Simonetti had gone down to the Combat Information Center six hours ago when sonar had first detected what might have been air slowly leaking from a newly submerged shipwreck and he hadn’t been back up to the bridge since. The noise was intermittent and very faint, almost impossible to detect even with their gas turbines spinning at dead idle, but whatever was down there was right where Sixth Fleet ops said they’d find a wreck.
“Cap’n, I’ve lost it again,” Senior Sonar Operator CPO Donald Deutsch said.
Simonetti pulled his headset over his ears and listened to the various bottom noises, mostly biologics, that they’d been monitoring ever since they’d stumbled across what might have been a recent wreck. He pressed the expensive earphones closer, but whatever had been shedding the last of its air had gone silent.
The problem was that the Libyans had taken an interest in them the moment they’d arrived on station and started their search grid, so they’d not been able to linger over the position where they thought they’d struck gold. For most of the past six hours they had concentrated their search over a spot nearly four miles to the north, only occasionally coming back to their original find. They were on their outward track, away from the site.
His orders had been specific. Find and identify the wreck, but if possible don’t let the Libyans know you’ve done so. Which made absolutely no sense to him, because the Libyan navy wasn’t about to go up against a U.S. warship. The last time they’d done that, we’d bloodied their noses.
Simonetti took off his headset. “Okay, Donnie, secure your bottom search for now. I think we’ve got enough data to get us back when the coast is clear.”
“Yes, sir,” Deutsch said. He sat back and looked up.
“Good job,” Simonetti said. He went over to Herb McCormick, his nav officer who was hunched over the electronic chart plotter. Rather than showing their position on the surface along with their course and speed, as well as other surface or subsea targets within the range of their radar and sonar, the display was now showing bottom features — those that were charted plus what their side-scan sonar was picking up.
McCormick had plotted all the contacts they’d picked up over the previous six hours. Trouble was they weren’t all bunched in a neat pile as if they were coming from a specific target.
“Not much to go on,” Simonetti said.
McCormick looked up from the chart. “Be my guess that we could be looking at variations in current strength, which is spreading our readings all over the place.”
“Depends on what the Libyans end up doing, but we’re not going to have much time on target to make a positive ID.” It chapped Simonetti’s ass that he couldn’t just muscle his way back, and the hell with how the Libyans reacted. These were international waters. And even if they weren’t, it wouldn’t make much difference to him.
“We can send down a probe on the next pass.”
The ship’s com buzzed. “CIC, bridge.” It was Daniel Lamb, his XO. “Is the captain there?”
Simonetti picked it up. “What is it?”
“Cap’n, the Libyans are starting to get cute. You might want to come up and take a look.”
Simonetti glanced over at the plotting board, which showed surface targets, and he could see exactly what Lamb was talking about. “I’m on my way,” he said, and he replaced the handset in its overhead cradle. “You’ll have to wing it, Herb. I want you to stand by to launch the ROV we loaded at Gaeta, and I’ll need your best guess at what’s down there. I expect we’ll only get one pass. But I want pictures.”
“Give me five minutes, Skipper.”
“You’ve got it,” Simonetti said, and he went through the forward hatch and up the half-flight of stairs to the bridge, steaming. He didn’t give a damn what his orders specified, because he wasn’t about to roll over and play dead, or run away with his tail between his legs.
He came from an Italian neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side, where if you didn’t stand up for yourself you would get slammed. He’d earned a lot of respect as a kid, because not only was he street-tough, he was smart.