“I thought your people were going to watch out for us?” Sterling asked. In the old days this would have been called a cluster fuck, but then as now these kinds of screwups usually started from the top.
“Nelson wouldn’t budge,” Breamer said. “No proof.”
“I have the same problem here.”
“I’ll send you a hard copy,” Breamer offered. “But it might be a moot point. The Brits said the sub was heading southwest. They figured South America. They’ve put their Atlantic Fleet on low alert, though Christ only knows what they think the Libyan navy might want with the Falklands is beyond understanding.”
“You didn’t tell them about Graham?” Sterling said. “He was one of their own, after all.”
“I’ll be in enough shit if it comes out I called you,” Breamer said. “I’ll leave the rest of it to Washington. Anyway, it’ll take your Foxtrot ten days or more to make it across. So at least time is on our side.”
“Okay, Charlie, thanks for the heads-up. I owe you one.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I don’t know, yet,” Sterling said. “But I’m not going to sit on it.”
“Good luck,” Breamer said.
“Yeah thanks, you too.”
Rencke was on the verge of admitting failure. There were only three missing or unaccounted for Kilo submarines, although his preliminary sources were sure that all three boats had been cut up for scrap ten years ago. It was now simply a matter of verification.
Yet he couldn’t understand what he’d done wrong. Something like this had never happened to him. Not even close. And what was so frustrating was that he knew he was right about everything else. Rupert Graham was the star witness in the case for an al-Quaida submarine mission.
He was at his desk in computer country, racking his brains, all of his screens showing pale lavender, when an incoming call on an outside line lit up in the corner of one of his monitors. His caller ID and search program locked onto the number in less than a half second, and he sat up.
He answered on the second ring. “Commander Daniel Monroe, good evening,” he said, careful to keep the excitement out of his voice. “How did the Office of Naval Investigation Middle East get this number?”
Monroe hesitated for just a moment. “It wasn’t easy, Mr. Rencke. But the CIA’s not the only outfit in town with resources.”
“Tell me you’re not calling about Gitmo,” Rencke said.
“Sir?”
“Then it must be Unterseeboot.”
“Sir, I’m not following you—” Monroe said, but then he stopped. “You mean a submarine? Yes, sir.”
“Bingo,” Rencke said softly. “What kind of a submarine? Not a Kilo?”
“No, sir. She’s a Foxtrot. The Libyans reported they’d scuttled one of their boats, but she made it through the Strait of Gibraltar about two hours ago.”
Rencke brought up a search algorithm for the billions of bytes of data that had come into the Building in the past twenty-four hours. Almost immediately he came up with the announcement that the Libyan government had filed with the UN Security Council early this morning.
He had completely blown it.
“Bad dog, bad, bad dog,” he muttered. “Where was she headed, Commander Daniel Monroe, and why did you call me with the glad tidings? What makes you think that I care?”
“Sir, a friend of mine works as the military attaché at our embassy in Tunis. He found out about the boat, but the chief of station there is dragging his feet, and Sixth Fleet wasn’t interested. It was a British warship on patrol in the strait that stumbled across the Libyan sub.”
“Why’d you call me?” Rencke pressed. He brought up Russell Sterling’s file. The man had been a sub driver in a previous life.
“Not you specifically, sir. But he wanted me to pass along this information, plus a name, to someone in the CIA who might be able to do something. And you have the reputation, sir.”
Rencke wanted to laugh, but he couldn’t. He’d missed so friggin’ much. He was so stupid. “Plus a name,” he said. “Let me guess. Rupert Graham?”
The line was silent for a long moment. When Commander Monroe came back, he sounded subdued. “Jesus Christ,” he said softly.
“Nope. He was the guy who walked on the water, ours sails under the water,” Rencke said. “Did the British do a track? Do they know where he was heading?”
“Southwest, sir.”
“Thank you,” Rencke said. “And thank your old Annapolis pal, Russell Sterling.”
He broke the connection, and allowed his mind to go completely blank for a second or two, wiping the slate clean, as if he were rebooting a computer. When he focused again, he began typing, his fingers flying over the keyboard, his frizzy red hair pointing in every direction as if he were a mad prodigy pounding a complex melody on a concert grand piano.
FIFTY-SIX
With a population of ten million and growing, Pakistan’s principal seaport was considered to be one of the most dangerous cities on the planet. More murders, kidnappings, rapes, beatings, thefts, and incidents of street crime and gang violence happened here 24/7 than anywhere else. And only in postwar Baghdad had there been more suicide bombings than in Karachi.
It was bin Laden and al-Quaida. President Musharraf ’s government publicly opposed the terrorists so that it could continue to receive much-needed financial aid from the United States, while an overwhelming majority of the people supported the jihad.
Downtown was bright and modern; tall steel and glass skyscrapers rose from wide boulevards such as M. A. Jinnah Road, named after the father of modern Pakistan, and Raja Ghazanarfar Street, which passed the Saddar Bazaar, the city’s main and most colorful shopping center.
But elsewhere, Karachi was mostly a city of incredibly filthy and dangerous slums that coexisted with mosques of delicacy and beauty and museums of exquisite Islamic antiquity. Along the harbor’s West Wharf with its fishing fleets, textile and carpet manufacturers and exporters, tanneries and leather works, was the worst slum of all, known as Fish Harbor.
From here, in the middle of cardboard and tarpaper shacks, jumbled rows of rusted-out shipping containers, and the occasional compound of hovels protected behind tall razor-wire-topped concrete block walls, the downtown lights cast an eerie otherworldly glow.
McGarvey, driving a small, dark Fiat he’d rented through the hotel concierge, pulled up and parked in the deeper shadows behind a large warehouse, locked up and dark for the night. He was below the rail line and Mauripur Road, which was the main truck thoroughfare for the commercial district. It was past midnight, and from where he sat, wishing for the first time in a long while that he hadn’t quit smoking, he had a clear sightline to a walled compound at the end of the filthy street.
He picked up his sat phone tracker from the seat beside him, and entered three twos and then the pound key. It was the code for the microscopic GPS chip implanted in al-Turabi. Within a second or two the nearest Keyhole satellite picked up the signal and fixed its location within a couple of meters. Overlaid on the sat phone’s screen was an electronic street map covering an area two hundred meters on a side. The red dot showing al-Turabi’s current location was inside the compound at the end of the block.