A small white speedboat, with a blue U.S. Coast Guard banner down it side, red and blue lights flashing on its flying bridge, appeared over the horizon forty minutes later. It crossed toward them and slowly drifted up to the boathouse. He could see several yellow-suited individuals jump from the boat onto the boathouse deck. Then after temporarily mooring it, they disappeared into the single-story structure. Keller keyed his radio, “Everyone all right down there?”
“10-4. There’s nobody here. No boat either. We brought our San Onofre special with us and this place is blazing with radioactivity. Thanks for the heads up on the hazmat suits. Other than that it’s all clear down here.”
“Hey, thanks guys. The elevator is stuck at the bottom and we left our parachutes back at the office.”
He could hear the laughter echoing, rising from the beach, before they radioed back, “No problem. Should have called for a helicopter, but those guys were having lunch. We’re glad we could help. That’s what we’re here for.”
Watching them untie and head back north, he sighed, turned to Stilson and slapped him on the back. “We’re done here. Good effort from your men. Let’s go home.”
Stilson nodded thanks and motioned for his team to head back to the BEAR and load up for the trip home. They disappeared within seconds.
As he stepped into the BEAR, moments after the last SWAT member loaded, Stilson poked his head out, looked at Keller and asked, “What?”
“What do you mean, ‘What?’?”
Stilson cocked his head, “I thought I heard you laughing.”
“No, not me,” he said, “must have been from that Coast Guard boat. Sound carries really far on the ocean.”
He slid into the side bench beside Stilson and pulled the doors closed behind him. “Ready.”
Motor roaring, the BEAR backed from the driveway and headed toward home.
They were gone, but the laughter echoed on through the dense sea air. High atop his perch on the widow’s walk, Fogner looked down cackling wickedly as he watched them leave. He had escaped their grasp once again. His vengeance was in full swing.
SEARCH AREA
The taskforce meeting had lasted much of the day, yet the end was not in sight. Lieutenant Poole had endured peaks and valleys of emotion throughout the day, but the best was still to come.
With Adam’s suspected identity revealed, a W-88 thermonuclear warhead no larger than an elongated 55-gallon oil drum, the three military officers from the nearby Navy and Coast Guard stations balked. There was too little information to start a search. They needed more: defined search parameters, geographic boundaries, restrained public visibility of their forces, hours of search operation, potential release areas, probable depth of release, and so on. Also, many of their subs were on sensitive peacekeeping missions around the world; pulling them back could seriously endanger world peace.
They reminded Poole that if they were to call them in, there would be submarine conning towers popping up all over the waters off the L.A. coast, that she should have cover stories for them if they were sighted.
The subject of narrowing the search area eventually arose. Citing the continuing search for the crashed Malaysian Airlines Flight MH-370, still missing after two years, as an example, the Naval spokesman, Commander Norton, said that a similar search would be just as futile without more details.
The conversation continued, irritating her. She knew she could provide information to narrow the search, but she had trouble putting it into words. She decided to try anyway, attempting to move off dead center. Carefully measuring her words, she started, “Well, we know that Fogner lives in Dana Point. He probably stores his boat there, too. Let’s assume that. Our SWAT team should confirm that information shortly.”
She stood, moved to a whiteboard on the side wall, and, with a black marker, drew a coarse outline of the coastline near Dana Point, placing an X over it. She then took another marker and scribed a large blue arc around the X, from shoreline to shoreline, out into the imagined ocean west of the city. “Now let’s say this is a map of the area surrounding Fogner’s location. I’ve drawn a search radius from there of, say, ten miles; a distance he would probably stay within for maximum impact, unless he went further up the coast. I doubt he would do that with a Sea Ray; it’s a rough trip even with a much larger vessel.”
Out to the side of her primitive map, she wrote the equation:
A = ½ * pi * R2
R=10 miles.
pi=3.14…
“That equation approximates our search area. Its area, A, is one-half the search radius squared times pi. Ten times ten times 3.14 yields 314 square miles. Half of that is 157 square miles. That’s your search area, gentlemen.”
Under her breath, Gibbs muttered, “There’s that damn pi again.” Nobody laughed.
Understanding the math, and finally grasping her assumed variables, Norton sighed, relenting to her persistence. He penciled a few numbers on a pad and replied, “According to my figures, if we search a five-square-mile area each day, which is really humping it for something that small, we’ll have the entire area mapped in 31.4 days. It will be akin to searching for a toothpick in a national forest.”
“Not acceptable, Commander. In nineteen days, we’ll all be dust.”
“Okay, then,” Norton said, pulling his phone from his pocket. “We have a crack civilian-contractor, ocean-survey team that we use on occasion when our forces are occupied elsewhere. It’s up the coast a ways, just north of Monterey. They have an Alvin-class mini-sub and a pilot that can find anything. He’s honestly as good as they get.” Chuckling, he admitted, “He received his training with us but we let him get away, four years later. He was the best the Navy had. Now we pay his company ten times more to use his services. His name’s Matt Cross.”
He paged through his cell phone contacts and found him. “There he is. Works at the Mid-Bay Ocean Research Corporation, just outside of Moss Landing. I’ll get our people to notify him and bring him down. Of course, we’ll have to bring his sub, the Canyon Glider, down too. For some reason he’ll only use that submersible, like it’s an extension of his body. Maybe it is. They’re quite a team.”
He cocked his head and said, “There’s only one small problem; his wife’s a newshound reporter for a local TV station up there. If she gets word of our operation it’ll be all over the news.”
Gibbs asked, “Can he be trusted to keep it quiet?” She knew that before she left D.C., the DHS had admonished her that, under no circumstances should she allow the gravity of the threat to leak to the press. They feared a country-wide panic, possibly worse than the threat itself.
Norton nodded. “Yes I believe he can. We’ve put him in similar situations before, where outing an exercise or operative could have very deadly consequences, and he sailed through them with flying colors. Remember he’s ex-Navy.”
He had the team’s attention now; they were taking notes. “He won’t have to survey the entire area; he has ways, known only to him, of sniffing things out like an underwater bloodhound. God only knows how he does it, but he can perform miracles… and we need that here.” He paused and continued, “We’ll still need to shrink the search area, though. Asking him to search an area that size is almost planning for failure. Hell, my Navy can’t do it in nineteen-days time; it would take almost that long to redirect and reposition our forces,”
“I’ve got an idea,” said Dover, interrupting the seemingly hopeless interchange. “Can we revisit the salvaged Sea Ray? Is it still in your marina? I saw a waterlogged GPS on the helm’s dash. It could hold waypoints of Fogner’s trip.” It was a long shot, knowing that electronics and salt water don’t mix, but it was better than anything they had so far.