“No attack last night, Admiral?” he asked.
“No. Have a seat, Mr. Malgard.”
Clay went around his gargantuan desk and sat in a swivel chair. Malgard and Andrews took seats on the sofa.
Both Clay and Andrews looked haggard, and Malgard understood why. He had spent the night on the sofa in his den with the TV on, sleeping fitfully, waiting for a news alert. His thinking was muddied by tendrils of fatigue.
His internal conviction that McCory had taken the Sea Spectres had been shaken by the events at Camp Lejeune and Kings Bay. At first, he could not imagine McCory having either the guts or the emotional drive to attack naval defense installations with the boats. The Navy must be right, this Badr was behind it.
Then, the longer it took Chambers to run McCory down, he drifted back to his original theory. McCory had the boats, and out of some revenge-driven scenario, he was telling the Navy what he thought of it. Malgard kept thinking back to that phone call he had received from the pseudo attorney. If he had been willing to deal, maybe a couple hundred Marines would still be alive.
It was a heavy load to carry. He had to keep telling himself that he was not at fault. He had not made the fatal decisions.
Besides, he did not have the cash necessary to make deals with anyone. AMDI was up to its neck in loans.
Clay was waiting expectantly.
Malgard said, “I’m here to help in any way I can, Admiral. I’d like to be brought up-to-date on what you know, and perhaps I’ll think of something that will assist in capturing the boats.”
“Right now,” Clay said, “we’re worried less about regaining the boats than we are about blowing them out of the water.”
“You are certain that the Sea Spectre is involved?”
Clay nodded toward Andrews. “Matt.”
The intelligence chief leaned forward on the couch, his elbows resting on his knees. “The damage analysis is consistent with the use of the Mini-Harpoon missile. Those are available only at the testing ground, the Ship R&D Center, and aboard the Sea Spectres. Except for the missiles aboard the stealth boats, the rest are accounted for. At Kings Bay, we had a sonar contact with the attack boat. It was making fifty knots. It was the Sea Spectre.”
“There haven’t been any radar contacts?” Malgard asked.
“Should there be?”
“I mean, was the boat’s radar radiating?”
“Yes. A couple minimal contacts. At Kings Bay, the missiles were radar guided.”
“Suggesting that someone who knows both radar and missiles was operating it.”
“Badr has those specialties available to him,” Andrews said.
“No one saw the boat?”
“Not as far as we know. We had two boats pursuing, but lost them and the ten men aboard them.”
“You don’t think the boat was being operated by one person, Admiral?”
Andrews shook his head. “There were at least two, one tending the helm and radar, and one manning the missile launcher. The speed with which the missiles were reloaded suggests a third man assisting. There may be a fourth man on the radar.”
That was about what Malgard had thought. McCory had friends. Maybe he had hired Arabs. That would certainly account for the dead man at Pier Nine.
Where was Chambers?
“How about communications from the terrorists, Admiral? They usually have to brag.”
Clay intervened. “That point has bothered us to some extent, Mr. Malgard. We suspect, however, that they’re waiting until they’re done.”
“In a way,” Andrews said, “we’d like to get the message, to feel like there’s an end to it. Unfortunately, they have another seventy missiles.”
The papers and TV had not mentioned the number of missiles fired. “Where’s the Prebble?” Malgard asked. “She has the counterstrike systems.”
“She’s in the area,” Clay said. Malgard thought he could have been more specific.
“So,” Andrews said, “any ideas, Mr. Malgard?”
“There are two vulnerabilities. Sonar and highly sensitive infrared detectors can pick up the Sea Spectre when she’s at speed. If, during the next attack, we can concentrate enough sea and air power to force a high-speed escape, we can follow her.”
“You’re not telling us anything we don’t already know,” Andrews told him.
“We know the advantages and the limitations of the technology,” Clay said. “What’s more important here are the people involved. We’ve got fifty people from the CIA, the FBI, and the Navy examining the way Ibrahim Badr thinks. If we can pin down a pattern in his strategy or tactics, we can be waiting for him the next time.”
Malgard felt a twinge of guilt race down his spine. He almost told them about McCory.
“We were damned certain,” Clay went on, “that he was going to attack an installation early this morning, perhaps further south on the coast. But he didn’t.”
“Why were you so certain?”
“Badr likes symbolism, and this is the Fourth of July.”
Monahan stood at the dock head and watched the activity aboard the two salvage barges that had been maneuvered alongside the slip where Pogy had gone down. The upper four feet and antenna heads of her conning tower were above the water. The rubber-clad heads of divers emerged from the oily waters, then disappeared as they worked at getting temporary patches over the six-foot hole in her side. Air hoses snaked across the water, up the conning tower, then disappeared inside the submarine. They were already pumping air into some of her ballast tanks and sealed compartments.
Except for the clatter of machinery aboard the barges, it was a morguelike atmosphere. People seemed to whisper, careful of disturbing the dead.
Monahan turned and walked along the quay, back toward the operations building.
He was feeling morose. He had called Mona earlier to apologize for missing the picnic. Being a Navy wife, she had understood, but Geoffrey and Mark, aged nine and ten, had been less forgiving.
His khakis were rumpled from sleeping on a borrowed cot the night before. He had only taken his shoes off, expecting to be called at any moment, when Badr hit some base in Florida.
The absence of an attack was almost frustrating, because it seemed like the only way he would be able to find an enemy he couldn’t see.
Inside the operations center, he checked the plotting board. Bingham Clay was apparently giving some consideration to Monahan’s suggestion. Ships that had been further at sea were drawing closer to the coast. TF22 was moving south now, a cluster of blue symbols off the northern Florida coast. The Prebble was also continuing southward.
The men at the communications consoles all had blue-covered code books on the desks in front of them, flipping through them as they conversed. With Badr in control of a radio scrambler, and possibly scanning all the naval frequencies, they had been forced to encode messages manually.
He picked up a phone and dialed the FBI headquarters in Washington, asking for a deputy director named Bulwark, the man who had been assigned to Clay’s request.
After identifying himself, he asked, “Have you located Kevin McCory?”
“Well, no, not just yet.”
How hard can it be to find a responsible citizen? “What seems to be the problem?”
“The address that Admiral Clay gave us was that of a marina in Fort Walton Beach. At one time, it was owned by Devlin McCory.”
Barry Norman had told him all of that. “And?”
“Back in January of ’87, something happened, and it was taken over by an insurance company. Kevin McCory left the area at about that time.”