For just an instant he felt a twinge of regret for how he’d thrown away his life, but then the constant image of Jillian’s face, contorted in pain, brought his hate back to the surface.
The ship’s com buzzed. “Captain, engineering.”
Graham pulled the growler phone from its overhead bracket. “This is the captain.”
“I think you’d better come back here, sir,” Lieutenant Mahdi Chamran, the Iranian chief engineer, said.
“What is it?”
“You need to see this for yourself, sir,” Chamran insisted.
Graham’s anger spiked, but he brought himself under control. “Very well.” He hung up. “Captain, you have the con,” he told Ziyax. “Maintain your course and speed. I’ll be in engineering.”
The Libyan captain looked at him sharply, almost as if he were suddenly afraid of something. But he nodded. “Aye, Captain.”
Graham turned, ducked through the open hatch, and headed aft to engineering, which took up nearly one-fourth of the volume of the boat. The three diesel engines, three electric propulsion motors for underwater maneuvering, the huge battery bank, electrical generators, pumps, parts storage, and a complete machine shop were all the responsibility of the chief engineer, who in some ways was even more important than the captain. The control room crew fought the boat, but the chief engineer made sure they had a warship to fight with.
No one was in the crew’s mess, or in the passageway. With only a skeleton crew even such a small boat seemed very large and very empty.
Lieutenant Commander Mahdi Chamran, the Iranian chief engineer bin Laden had supplied, was waiting in the electric motor room with Lieutenant Rasal Sayyaf, the chief torpedo man who’d also come from the Distal Volente.
The chi-eng was a short dark Arab with four days’ growth on his face, and black grease permanently etching his hands. He wasn’t a traditionalist so he didn’t wash five times each day before prayers. He’d been kicked out of the Iranian navy because of it; his superiors valued religious practices over good engineering.
Sayyaf, on the other hand, was tall and lanky, with a permanent smirk on his face because he knew that once his military service was completed he would take over from his father as imam at their mosque in Isfahan south of Tehran. He’d gone over to al-Quaida with the blessings of his superiors who thought he was too devout a Muslim. But like Chamran he was good at what he did.
They were all fucking misfits, Graham thought, coming through the hatch. A section of the deck grating had been pulled up and the two men were standing over the opening, looking down at something. No one else was in the compartment and the hatch to the aft torpedo room was closed and dogged.
“What is it?” Graham demanded, approaching them.
Chamran seemed excited, as did Sayyaf, but his voice was oddly subdued. “We’ve found two new toys for you, Captain,” the chi-eng said.
Graham reached the opening, but then pulled up short. Nestled in makeshift wooden cradles between banks of batteries were two metal cylinders, each about twenty inches in diameter and about three feet long. The DANGER: RADIATION symbol was painted on both of them. They were nuclear weapons.
“Are they leaking?” Graham asked.
Sayyaf held up a small Geiger counter. “Not much. But whoever has to handle them, and especially the poor bastard who has to open the packages and arm them, will take a hit.”
“They’re not Libyan,” Graham said. “Russian?”
“Iraqi, but the Russians probably helped get them to Libya,” Chamran said. He shook his head in wonderment. “The Americans were right after all. Uncle Saddam actually did it.” He laughed. “Quaddafi must have been shitting in his pants all this time. You were Allah-sent, Captain, to take these things off his hands.”
“Will they mate to the two Russian cruise missiles we found?” Graham asked, his breath quickening despite his iron will to remain calm in front of these men.
“With some jury-rigging, yes,” Sayyaf said.
“They probably won’t go critical,” Chamran warned.
“What makes you say that?” Graham demanded sharply. This was too good to be true. It was the opportunity that bin Laden had talked about in Karachi and again in Syria, but had refused to give specifics.
You will understand when the time comes, he’d promised. And your eyes will be opened to the wondrous light.
Graham understood now. It was Oppenheimer, he thought, in 1945 at Trinity in New Mexico when the Americans exploded the first atomic bomb. He’d called it the “wondrous light.”
“I don’t think they had the time or the materials to develop the initiator technology,” the chi-eng explained. He held up his hand before Graham could object. “But these toys will explode, Captain, if that’s what you want. It won’t be a nuclear explosion, but when they go off — wherever that might be — they will spread a lot of radioactive dust over a very large area.” He nodded solemnly. “More people than the Manhattan attack could die. It will not be another 9/11. It will be much worse.”
Graham’s soul was singing. He was going to strike back at the bastards in a way that they would never forget.
“That is if you have the stomach for it, Englishman,” Chamran said.
Graham smiled again inwardly. Oh, he had the stomach all right. “Disable all the Geiger counters.”
Although Assistant Secretary of State Fields and most of the people in her small entourage recognized McGarvey from his days as DCI, no one questioned why he and Gloria had boarded in the middle of the night in Karachi. Or why they had remained aboard in Ramstein when the aircraft was being refueled.
“Glad to have been of some assistance,” she said, shaking his hand after they’d touched down at Andrews.
“Thanks for the lift,” he’d said. “But it might be best if you never mentioned this to anyone.”
She wanted to say something, he’d seen it in her eyes. But she nodded and left. Afterwards the aircraft was towed from the VIP ramp to an air force hangar where two men from security were waiting with a van to take them directly down to Langley.
McGarvey had slept for only a few hours on the flight over, and he was tired. But it was more than lack of sleep. Fish Harbor had been a trap. He’d been lured to the compound step-by-step all the way from Camp Delta and he hadn’t figured out how. The only bit of good fortune to come out of it had been Gloria. If it hadn’t been for her he might have bought it.
Yet there was still a nagging thought at the back of his head that he was missing something about her. Lawrence Danielle, his mentor from the early days, had warned that to every spy would eventually come paranoia. For some, the doubts and suspicions became so overwhelming that they were destroyed by their fears. Suicide was an occupational hazard. But the good field officer learned to listen to his or her instincts; they were often the difference between success or failure.
It was morning and rush-hour traffic was in full swing, people going about their business as usual. But McGarvey felt disconnected, as he always did when he returned from the field, and especially from an operation that had fallen apart on him. He would have to go back to finish the job, but for that he would need a new strategy, which at the moment completely eluded him.
“You’re going back, aren’t you,” Gloria said, as if she had read his mind.
They had crossed the Potomac on the Beltway and skirted Alexandria before heading north through Fairfax and Falls Church, the city in the near distance, a jet taking off from Reagan National. “I don’t know,” McGarvey replied absently as he stared out the window.