“We got her!” Joey Palumbo blurted out as he barged into Bill Hiccock’s White House office.
“Oh, thank God, where was she?”
Joey handed Bill the communiqué with the confirming data. “Floating on a raft in the South Pacific, about three miles from the sinking.”
“She okay?”
“She’s banged up and bruised but she is alive and we should know more after she gets some rest.”
“We got lucky on this one, Joe.”
“She’s not the best of the best for nothing, Hic,” Joey said as he left to make arrangements for Brooke to be ferried back from Midway on a SAM flight direct to Andrews.
Hiccock sat back, his broad shoulders finding the wings of his too-comfortable desk chair, and breathed a sigh of relief. This, his first “op,” had almost bitten the dust. Joey was right; Brooke Burrell had distinguished herself many times in her illustrious FBI career for Bill or for an operation Bill was involved with. Bill glanced down at the two platinum five-point stars most people wrongly assumed were paperweights. This woman was a star in her own right, which was the reason he had agreed to this cockamamie “ops” idea when Joey came up with it.
The whole affair started out as a miscue by the modern day descendants of the Barbary Coast Pirates that had plagued the world’s shipping lanes two hundred years earlier. Although today they used “Go Fasts,” swift, small boats armed only with AK-47s and rocket grenades, their tactics were the same. Board unsuspecting, unarmed, civilian and commercial ships and rip off whatever they could from the crew’s personal belongings and wallets, to whatever else was on board they could fence on the open market.
Occasionally there was bloodshed or a kidnapping, but that brought unwanted attention and military responses that hurt their operational ability and profit, so for the most part the attacks were generally scaled to below the point where the international community would make an effort to muster a counter-force. Until recently, the world collectively yawned upon news of another pirate attack.
However, not long ago a group of pirates triggered an international incident, when they took on an innocent-looking Maltese freighter trying to navigate the Strait of Gibraltar, and stumbled onto an illegal shipment of nuclear material supposedly from the Uzbekistan arsenal. The world’s intelligence agencies had accumulated enough intelligence over the years to know that a former Russian general, with deep connections to the Moscow black market, had commandeered these nuclear components in the confusion that followed the break-up of the USSR.
Meanwhile, pundits, news agencies, and governments all over the globe speculated in support or denial of the public allegations made by the NATO powers that the barely seaworthy rusting hulk held Russian nuclear contraband destined for some unstable regime with deep pockets and shallow restraint.
The political effect of all this was that American and NATO warships burned millions of gallons of fuel just hanging around the freighter. The most powerful military force on earth was held impotent by the political realities of doing what the U.S. Navy was first commissioned to do by Jefferson in 1801: seek out and kill pirates. Two centuries later, the strongest armada in the world and its allies just lumbered two hundred yards from the rusting, floating violation, while their well-trained SEAL teams were specifically prohibited from donning so much as a bait knife.
The crisis was eventually resolved violently when a Russian destroyer sank the ship after an alleged rocket grenade attack from the pirate-held freighter. Although every intelligence service in the world knew it had been sunk to bury the evidence that Russia couldn’t control its nuclear material, the public swallowed the attack story.
There it would have ended, except for something that came across Hiccock’s top-secret network a week later. Presidential Science Advisor Doctor William Jennings Hiccock created an intranet network of scientists. He dubbed the network Scientific Community Involved America’s Defense, or SCIAD for short. Modeling it on the atom, it had two rings. The closer in Element ring had 92 members. These were top-secret scientists cleared for any sensitive information. The second Compound ring had 300 members with just as prodigious brains but somewhat less-than-squeaky-clean clearances, so they received redacted non-top-secret data. Bill was known as “Nucleus,” and all information — speculation, theory and predictions — came to him.
A compound member of the network was approached to see if the Saudi company he worked for was interested in obtaining barium crucibles.
It was a suspicious request, in that it was an early chunk of nuclear technology, more consistent with the Russian method of creating a bomb, as opposed to the American, Chinese, Indian or Pakistani process. Bill immediately realized that the general, who had remarkably evaded any fallout from the freighter affair, was still at it, trying to sell off even more nuclear hardware. It was then that Joey Palumbo, his trusted head of security and a former FBI agent, came up with the plan to set up a buy for the hardware, ‘drug-deal’ style.
Over the objections of the CIA, which proposed assassinating the general, Hiccock got presidential operational authority to run a mission with the objective of acquiring these crucibles to determine if, in fact, they were from the Uzbekistan stockpile. If they were, it could be a golden chit to play in the international game of poker in which the U.S. and other powers were enmeshed. That was the president’s goal and the basis for his buy-in, but for Hiccock it was all about pure, defensive science: Stop those things from getting into the wrong hands.
For the delicate role of point person in this shady deal, Joey Palumbo, the former FBI special agent, now assigned to Hiccock’s White House Quarterback group, tapped another FBI agent, one who had distinguished herself in many tight spots as an effective operator and one who’s loyalty was beyond reproach. Her command of Farsi didn’t hurt either. He sold Bill on using Brooke Burrell under double-blind deep covers as the purchasing agent for an interested Middle-Eastern party willing to spend heavily to gain a membership in to the world’s nuclear club.
Two very careful and elaborate backgrounds were established for Brooke. One was thin and meant to be discovered; the other, the foundation cover was solid and thick and hid Brooke’s true identity as a U.S. Agent. Her thick cover was Fiona Haran, a high-up arms merchant who was masquerading as her second, thin identity, Roan Perth, an insurance investigator. Brooke had to memorize the details of both identities to cover her real mission of getting the crucibles for America to study while blocking the bad guys from getting their hands on them.
Throughout many meetings in Europe and the Middle East, Brooke, traveling as Roan Perth, was able to arrange a meeting with the general’s men. It did not take long for these intermediaries to pierce the thin cover story and land on the thick one: that Roan was, in fact, Fiona Haran. Oddly, that fact actually gave them confidence. Fiona’s position as a known arms merchant exclusively working for an oil-backed sect ensured that the money would be ample and good. So they let Fiona believe she was successful in hiding her identity. It also gave the general a negotiating edge; he would decide to reveal her deception or continue playing along depending on what strategic or financial advantage either direction afforded him at the time.
It had all been going well until the op center lost her trail last Wednesday in a Maltese coastal town. They had only picked up her beacon again, in the western edge of the Indian Ocean, an hour before whatever happened, happened. Bill looked down at the communiqué. He reread the line, “Rescued one shipwreck survivor, white Caucasian female, from water.” It gave him a momentary chill. It might not be Brooke.