The question was, how and when would the President choose to respond to the attacks? Full-scale war with boots on the ground in Iran; precision air strikes; tactical nuclear weapons?
“Where does this leave us?” Fisher asked.
“Same place, just a tighter deadline. If there’s something more to all this, we’re running out ot time to find it. But wherever the evidence leads, we have to have all of it. Grim, are you on?”
“I’m here. Sam, two items of interest: One, the data you pulled from the Duroc’s helm console was heavily encrypted — another Marcus Greenhorn masterpiece, but so far it looks like other than the trip from its home port in Port St. Lucie to the Bahamas, it had been up and down the Atlantic Coast, following the deep-sea fishing lanes with a couple stops in Savannah, Hilton Head, Charleston — places like that.
“The stomping grounds of the yacht-owning rich and famous,” Fisher said.
“You got it. I’m still working on an owner, but whoever the Duroc belongs to, they’re wealthy. Item number two: We’ve traced the serial numbers you took from the Trego’s engines. According to Lloyd’s of London, the engines were installed two years ago aboard a freighter named Sogon at Kolobane Shipyard in Dakar, Senegal.”
“Nassiri claims he boarded the Trego off the coast of Mauritania,” Fisher said. “Dakar’s only a hundred miles from the border.”
“And I’ll give you ten to one the Sogon and Trego are one in the same,” Lambert said.
“Either that, or it was a swap. Do we know where the Sogon is now?”
Grimsdottir said, “I’m looking. As for the shipyard: I’ve tried to hack into their computer system, but it’s rudimentary at best — e-mail and little more. All records are likely kept as hard copies in the shipyard itself.”
Fisher thought for a moment, then said, “Last time I was in Dakar was two years ago.”
“Then I’d say you’re long overdue for another visit,” Lambert said. “Pack your bags.”
24
Fisher pulled his Range Rover off the road onto a dirt tract bordered on each side by jungle, and then doused his headlights and coasted to a stop. He shut off the engine and sat in silence — or what passed for silence here. He was surrounded by a symphony of the jungle’s night sounds: chirping frogs, cawing birds, and, high in the canopy, the shrieking and rustling of monkeys disturbed by his arrival.
Though he was officially within the city limits of Dakar, the jungle refused to be tamed as it tried to encircle and retake the urban areas. Since his arrival that morning, Fisher had seen hundreds of laborers along Senegal’s roads, hacking at the foliage with machetes.
So much the better, he thought. Like water, for him the jungle meant cover, a place for stealthy approach; escape; evasion; ambush. He slapped at a bug buzzing around his ear, and was instantly reminded of the one thing he didn’t like about the jungle.
He’d been to Dakar twice, the first time during his SEAL days when he and a team had been dispatched to track and eliminate a French black market arms dealer who’d been arming both sides of a brush war between Mali and Mauritania. Thousands had died on both sides, many of them child-soldiers, and thousands more would die in the months to come if the Frenchman had his way. He didn’t get his way; he’d never gotten out of jungles along the Senegal-Mali border.
Dakar had been founded as a French colonial outpost by residents of the nearby island of Goree, and had over the last century and a half grown into a major commercial hub on the West African coast, an exotic mixture of French culture and Islamic architeture.
Fisher got out, grabbed his duffel from the backseat, then walked a dozen meters into the jungle. He quickly traded his Bermuda shorts and T-shirt for his tac-suit, web harness, and guns, then tucked the duffel into some foliage and set off at a trot.
One mile and eight minutes later, he saw a clearing appear through the branches. He stopped and crept to the edge of the tree line and crouched down. Ahead of him lay a fifty-foot-wide tract of ground that had been burned clear of jungle; beyond that was Kolobane Shipyard’s eastern fence: twelve feet tall and topped with razor-tipped concertina wire. On the other side of the fence was more open ground, an acre of weeds and grass that gave way to the shipyard’s outer buildings, a double line of low storage huts separated by a dirt road. Over their roofs he could see several cranes. Here and there klieg lights mounted atop telephone poles cast circles of light on the roads below.
While Kolobane was the busiest shipyard on the African coast between Morrocco to the north and Angola to the south, the shipyard had only enough work to keep it busy during the day. At night it was staffed only by security and maintainence crews.
Fisher pulled out his binoculars and scanned the area, first in NV mode, then in IR. According to Grimsdottir’s brief, the shipyard maintained a skeleton staff of roving patrols. Before he moved into the yard he wanted a feeling for their routes and schedules.
Ten minutes later, he had what he needed. The nearest guard was a teenager dressed in shorts, sandals, and a T-shirt, with an AK-47 slung over his shoulder. Fisher knew better than to discount the boy. In Africa, some of the best soldiers and worst killers wouldn’t be old enough for a driver’s permit in the U.S. Nevertheless, they would shoot you dead without a moment’s hesitation, strip your body of clothes, shoes, jewelry — along with fingers, if necessary — then leave you to rot on the side of the road.
Fisher waited until the boy had disappeared around the storage sheds; then he sprinted to the fence and dropped to his belly. From one of his pouches he pulled a miniature spray bottle filled with a special cocktail of enzymatic acids. In this case it was overkilclass="underline" The shipyard’s fence was ungalvanized, so years of humidity had turned it more rust than not. Fisher gave the fence a liberal misting.
Five minutes was all it took. He reached out and pressed his palm against the fence. With a dull twang, a two-foot-by-two-foot oval sprang free and dropped to the grass on the other side. He did a quick scan with the binoculars to locate the guard, then crawled through the hole.
He covered the open ground in two minutes, alternately sprinting and pausing as the teenage guard made his circuitous route around the storage huts, down the dirt road, then back around again. His pace and route didn’t vary, so Fisher had little trouble timing his movments. He slipped between a pair of huts, then across the dirt road and behind the second line of huts.
Before him was a narrow grove of stout-trunked baobab trees. Through them Fisher could see the scaffolding of a crane and the shipyard’s pier. Moored to it was a rusting cargo freighter.
Set among the baobabs were a dozen or so picnic tables — a break area for workers. He heard faint laughter. He flipped his trident goggles into place and switched to NV. At the far edge of the grove, perhaps fifty feet away, a pair of men sat at a table smoking. Scattered on the ground around them were what looked like hairy soccer balls; these were the baobab’s fruit pods, also known as monkey bread. Fisher was only too familiar with them. Tracking down the French arms dealer had taken weeks. After their MREs had run out, he and his team had subsisted on monkey bread and roasted snake.
He settled down to wait, but it took only minutes before the men stubbed out their cigarettes, got up, and started ambling toward the shipyard. Fisher waited until they turned the corner around the crane, then got up and sprinted forward.