McGarvey glanced around the half full dining room. Their table had been picked so that they would be out of earshot of any other diner. “Al-Quaida has gotten itself a Foxtrot submarine, a Perisher captain, a mixed Iranian-Libyan crew, and an unknown number of weapons, with which I think they mean to strike Washington.”
“I see,” Dillon said, his eyes widening slightly. “What kind of weapons?”
“We don’t know, but it’s possible they might have cruise missiles, maybe anthrax, possibly even a nuke. The thing is, I want to stop them before they can launch.”
“That’s the problem,” Dillon said. “If we know when they were coming we could lay a screen and try to intercept them. But they could go silent a couple of hundred miles off and we’d be lucky to stumble across them before they launched.”
“What about afterward?” McGarvey asked.
“We’d nail them for sure. The Foxtrot makes a fair amount of noise, especially when the skipper puts the pedal to the metal. They’d have no chance of getting away.”
“That’s the problem,”McGarvey said. “This guy’s not interested in suicide, which means he has a plan to fire his weapons and then get out of there.”
“How sure of this are you, sir?” Dillon asked.
“The name’s Kirk. And I’m not sure. It’s just a hunch. I think he’d like to get up into the Chesapeake somewhere, if that’s possible, fire his weapons, and then set his boat to self-destruct while he locks out and disappears ashore. He’s done something similar before.”
“I did a classified paper for Homeland Security last year outlining just that possibility,” Dillon said.
“I know, I read it a couple days ago,” McGarvey said. “I need your help to stop them, if you want the job, Captain.”
“Name’s Frank,” Dillon said. “We’ll need a SEAL team. Do we have a timetable?”
“Puckett said that the sub was in the mid-Atlantic a couple of hours ago. If he submerges and changes course right now, he could be off the bay in what, five or six days?”
“About that,” Dillon said.
“Then let’s get on with it,” McGarvey said. “How soon can you get a SEAL team together without attracting any notice?”
“Now what are you trying to tell me?”
“There might be a spy in the ONI feeding information to al-Quaida.”
Dillon’s jaw tightened. “That’s just great.The son of a bitch.” He took a business card out of his pocket, wrote an address in Alexandria on the back, and handed it to McGarvey. “This is a friend of mine. I stay with him and his wife whenever I’m in Washington. Come over about six tomorrow. We’ll have a backyard barbecue.”
“No specifics to anybody.”
“I’ll leave that up to you tomorrow night,” Dillon said.
Something woke Graham from a sound sleep in his cabin. The only light came from what spilled in around the curtain covering his door, and the dim green illumination of the dials on the clock and compass on the bulkhead above his pull-down desk.
He’d been having the sex dream about Jillian again, but although he could see her naked body lying next to his, her face had faded over the past month or so and it frightened him. He’d known that he’d gone a little crazy after her death, but he was worried now that he might be losing his mind, losing his ability to think clearly, to reason, to act with purpose.
It was a few minutes after 0200 Greenwich mean time, and the boat was quiet, even the deep-throated hum of the electric motors putting out enough power now to run at All Ahead Full were muted, barely discernible. The crew had been given the rig-for-silent-running order when they’d submerged, and so far there’d been no mistakes.
Each time the batteries got below twenty percent, they would rise to snorkel depth and run on diesel long enough for the recharge and then return to four hundred meters in their push for the U.S. East Coast. They’d done that throughout most of the day, and they’d be good now for hours, even at this speed.
Graham had pushed the boat and the crew hard so that none of them would have the time to stop and think about what was going on. If they had, they’d realize that this was going to be a one-way trip for them. Once the missiles were launched, the U.S. Navy would zero in on their position within minutes. There would barely be enough time for one or two men to escape, not the entire crew.
He drifted back to sleep, trying to recapture the same dream about his wife, and it seemed like only seconds had passed when someone came into the cabin.
“Wake up, English,” al-Abbas said.
Graham opened his eyes. The Libyan officer stood above him, a 9mm Beretta pistol in his hand. He was out of breath and red in the face as if he had just gotten off a treadmill. Ziyax was behind him at the door, holding the curtain aside. He too looked winded, and angry.
“What is this, a mutiny?” Graham asked calmly. Ziyax was also holding a pistol. The two men had evidently been arguing about just this.
“An execution,” al-Abbas said.
“Put the gun down, Assam,” Ziyax said.
“It’s time to end this here and now. I will kill him, and then we can turn around and go home.”
“Think about what his crew will do to us when they find out what you’ve done. They have more weapons than we do. It would be a bloodbath.”
“I would rather die out here like that, than send nuclear missiles raining down on Washington,” al-Abbas said. “We’re not al-Quaida. It’s not our fight now.”
“Colonel Quaddafi offered this boat to us, and it was he who ordered the nuclear weapons to be brought aboard,” Graham said. He’d reached the Steyr 9mm pistol at his side under the blanket and he eased the safety catch to the off position and slowly began to slide it up over his hip so that he would have a clear shot at the Libyan.
“Two of my men who armed the weapons are sick,” al-Abbas said.
“You have Geiger counters. The weapons don’t leak,” Graham lied smoothly. He had the pistol above his hip, his finger on the trigger.
“But they’re sick, and none of your men had the nerve to go anywhere near the missiles,” al-Abbas argued. He was getting agitated and he started to wave the pistol around.
Graham began to put pressure on the trigger.
“I’m sorry, Assam, but I’ll do whatever it takes to get back to my wife and children,” Ziyax said, and he raised his pistol.
“You’ll never get home. None of us will unless we stop this madman.”
“If I can’t go home, then I will do whatever it takes to please Colonel Quaddafi, who will see to it that my family is well cared for.”
“Tariq?” al-Abbas said, half-turning.
“Put your gun down,” Ziyax said.
Al-Abbas said something in Arabic and started to turn back, but before he could bring his pistol to bear, and before Graham could fire, Ziyax shot the man in the side of the head at point-blank range, blood flying everywhere.
SIXTY-THREE
Liz and Todd had come into town to take Kathleen to dinner, which was one less concern on McGarvey’s mind when he showed up at the address Dillon had given him. The house was a small two-story Colonial in a pleasant middle-class neighborhood of shade trees, people washing cars or mowing lawns, kids shooting hoops above the garage doors, and bikes or trikes parked in just about every driveway. It was this kind of a life that had never been possible for McGarvey and Katy, because of his job, but there was nothing he could do now to bring any of it back.
The driveway was full with a BMW convertible, a Corvette, an older Porsche, and a plain gray Taurus with government plates, so McGarvey parked on the street and walked around the side of the house to the backyard.
A man in a chef ’s hat was tending to a built-in barbecue at the edge of a small brick patio while Dillon, seated at a picnic table, was engaged in conversation with two muscular men and an attractive young woman. All of them were in blue jeans and sweatshirts, and all of them, including the woman, were drinking beer from bottles. One of them said something, and they all laughed.
The man at the barbecue turned and spotted McGarvey. “Frank, the cavalry’s arrived.”
Dillon looked up and got to his feet. “Glad you could make it,” he said, coming across to McGarvey. They shook hands. “Let me introduce you to everyone.”
“Holy shit,” the woman said. “You’re Kirk McGarvey. You used to run the CIA.”
McGarvey chuckled. “I must be getting old. I never got that reaction from a woman before.”
“Don’t mind my wife,” the man in the chef ’s hat said, smiling. “Her handle is Lips, for more than one reason.” He came over and shook hands.
“Lieutenant Commander Bill Jackson,” Dillon said. “This is his house. “And Lips, Terri, is his wife. She’s a lieutenant.”
Terri laughed. “Half of it’s my house,” she said, shaking McGarvey’s hand. “I have a feeling this is going to be a real interesting party tonight.”
Her grip was firm and her eyes direct. McGarvey got the impression that she was in every bit as good physical shape as the men here. “Nice to meet you.”
“The other two are the chiefs, Bob Ercoli and Dale MacKeever,” Dillon introduced them.
All four of them appeared to be in outstanding physical condition, and like most of the instructors out at the Farm they exuded self-confidence. “You’re Navy SEALs,” McGarvey said.
“Does it show?” Jackson asked.
“I wouldn’t want to go up against any of you.”
“Then no hanky-panky with the boss’s wife,” Ercoli quipped. “Even we can’t get away with it.”
Terri leaned over and got McGarvey a beer from a cooler on the patio bricks beside her and tossed it to him. “Frank sure pulled a rabbit out of the hat this time,” she said. “You have our attention, Mr. McGarvey, what do you want with us that couldn’t have gone through channels?”
McGarvey opened the beer, took a deep drink, and sat down at the table. “Al-Quaida is on its way to the Chesapeake with a Libyan Foxtrot submarine and I think there’s a good chance they mean to hit Washington.”
“Holy shit,” Ercoli said softly.
“Because they didn’t hit the White House with the fourth plane like they wanted on 9/11?” Jackson asked.
“Something like that,” McGarvey said.
“How soon?”
“Five days, maybe less.”
“Send a couple of sub hunters out to look for them,” MacKeever suggested.
Dillon shook his head. “Their captain is a Brit, graduated from Perisher. The second he got wind that we were on to him, he’d launch and we couldn’t stop it.”
“He’s got missiles?” Jackson asked.
“We don’t know for sure,” McGarvey said. “But there’s a good chance he could have Russian short-range tube-launched missiles. And possibly even a small nuclear weapon or two.”
“That’s just peachy,” Terri said, and McGarvey shot her a startled look. It was the same expression Katy used sometimes. “What?” she asked.
“Another time,” McGarvey said. “This won’t be an official mission, and you won’t be getting any orders, so the shit could hit the fan.”
“But if we pull it off we’ll be heroes,” Terri said. She turned to her husband. “Gee, dear, looks like we might get our honeymoon after all.”
“This is serious,” McGarvey warned.
“We wouldn’t be much interested if it wasn’t,” she said, her smile gone. “I assume you have a plan.”
“They’re going to try to sneak into the bay and get as close to Washington as they can before they launch their missiles, if that’s what they have,” McGarvey said. “I want to be there, waiting for them.”
“Why not offshore?” Jackson asked.
“Because the sub driver wants to escape. Once they launch he can lock out of the boat, come ashore, and disappear,” McGarvey said.
“His crew won’t have time to get out,” Jackson pointed out.
“No,” McGarvey agreed. “We need to find the sub before they launch and stop them before they know we’re on to them.”
“We’d have to know where they’re headed,” Ercoli suggested.
“The York River,” Dillon said. “It’s less than one hundred miles from the White House so there’d be almost no warning time, it’s deep enough to hide a submarine, and it’s well out of Second Fleet’s way at Norfolk.”
“They’d have to get there first,” Jackson said.
“They will if we don’t warn anybody,” McGarvey said.
“You’re taking an awfully big chance.”
“I don’t want to react to an attack,” McGarvey said. “I want to stop it.” Jackson looked at his wife and the other two SEAL team members, then back at McGarvey. “I can get the equipment, including a boat, but we’ll need a non-navy staging area.”
“The Farm,” McGarvey said. “It’s on the York River and no questions that I can’t answer will be asked.”
“How soon do you want us there?” Jackson asked.
“The sooner the better. By this time tomorrow?”
Jackson nodded. He turned to Dillon. “You coming along on this one, Frank?”
“Wouldn’t miss it.”