He suddenly wished that he had not taken the gun. If it were still in Soheil’s place, the police might think there had only been the three dead men involved in whatever had happened. Not now. Any thought that he had of making the noon Dubai flight from Imam Khomeini Airport was gone. They would be watching the airport once the police realized the three dead men worked for the Foreign Ministry. And that there had been a fourth man. He turned the car away from Tehran.
And then he heard more sirens behind him.
“Do you want another Kingfisher, mister?” the Indian waiter asked. He was anxious to have Rusty either order something more or leave. There were few people left in the restaurant. “Do you have decaffeinated coffee?” Rusty asked. The waiter looked as though MacIntyre had ordered pork. “Well, a Scotch whiskey then, a…what was it… Balvenie, neat?” The waiter smiled and went away.
Russell MacIntyre stared out at the dhows and tourist boats on the Creek. This was old Dubai. With narrow streets, low-rise buildings, a rabbit warren of walkways through the old Gold Souk. Beyond the Creek he could see the spire of the Burj Dubai, the tallest building in the world, having inched past the last Chinese towering edifice. He felt suddenly alone, powerless. He had been reading The World at Night.
Brian Douglas had not shown up. Nor had he sent him any message. It seemed uncharacteristic. He began to wonder whether it had been foolish for Douglas, a senior SIS officer, to go undercover into Tehran. And unrealistic for him to have thought that he could somehow learn one of Iran’s biggest secrets by wandering around a place he had not been in several years. Maybe Iran’s forces were just exercising, like ours do all the time. Maybe Ahmed bin Rashid’s source had not really penetrated an Iranian operation, or the source had just made something up to please Rashid. Maybe…
As the Scotch came, he felt the BlackBerry vibrate inside his jacket pocket. Maybe it was a message from Sarah, from Somaliland. He clicked open the file. It was from Susan Connor, back at his office, and it was encrypted.
Rusty, the Boss asked me to send this to you. He still can’t make this BlackBerry thing work. He said to tell you that the FBI came by today. Asking about you and your relationship with Senator Robinson. Wanted to know if you had been authorized to brief him on some special compartment. Something about China. Then they asked if you were authorized to meet with terrorists. Was that part of your mission. Rubenstein put them off, but he thinks your friend Secretary Conrad quote has you in his sights unquote. I am not sure what all of that means. I hope you do. It doesn’t sound good. Nothing new here, except the anti-Islamyah propaganda machine is in high gear. Congressional hearings. Ads in the papers. Interviews on certain TV networks. The latest is speculation that there are nuclear warheads for the missiles we found. I have gone over every bit of intel that I have access to and there is no repeat no indication that any nuclear warheads have shown up in Islamyah. But Senator Gundersohn says it’s reason to “go in there and find them and take them out.” Scary stuff if anyone took Gundersohn seriously. Got to go. Be careful out there, Susan.
MacIntyre finished the Scotch in one swig. How could anyone know that he had briefed Senator Robinson about the DIA source in China? It was only a technical violation. Robinson might not have been cleared by DOD to get the information, but he was the Chairman of the Intelligence Committee. Meeting with terrorists? Ahmed. Jesus, he thought, how the hell do they know I met with Ahmed? He signaled to the waiter for a refill.
The BlackBerry vibrated again. This time it was the phone function. He clicked to accept the call.
“Did you hear the news?” It was Kate Delmarco.
“No, I’ve been sitting here waiting for Brian and he’s a no-show. What news?” Rusty stood up and looked north toward Delmarco’s office in new Dubai.
“A Navy plane is down. They’re saying maybe Islamyah shot it down.” Delmarco sounded breathless. “Russell, they say it was Admiral Brad Adams. He was flying back to Bahrain from some NATO meeting in Turkey. They don’t think anyone survived. They’re searching off Kuwait.”
MacIntyre swallowed hard. He felt the world closing in on him.
“Rusty, we’ll bomb Islamyah if they did this, you know that. We need to get together.”
He thought of what Ahmed bin Rashid had said in that little store in Manama. If the Shura felt pressured, it would reach out for nuclear weapons. And if it did that…
“I’m too…I need to think clearly,” MacIntyre mumbled. “How about I see you for breakfast tomorrow? Where’s good?”
She paused. “Okay, my office, Media City, eight-thirty.”
“Thanks.” He clicked off the phone function. He pulled a wad of dirham notes out of his wallet and threw them on the table. He moved off the porch over the Creek, inside the restaurant, toward the exit.
The Indian waiter chased after him. “Keep the change,” Rusty yelled over his shoulder.
“Yes, sir, but the whiskey?”
MacIntyre took a card from a jacket pocket and gave it to the waiter. “If anyone comes looking for me, give them this telephone number.” Then he took the glass of Scotch and downed it, thinking about the man who had introduced him to Balvenie in a club in London.
11
“Open the Ocean Interface, aye.” The seaman repeated the order and then moved the lever on his control panel. Outside, behind the conning tower, the submarine’s hull began to move and the ocean water rushed in. The 12,000-ton ship continued to move ahead at 14 knots, 100 meters below the sea.
“Captain Hiang, Tony, this is where it gets interesting. You might want to sit up here so you can see the display on this screen,” Captain Tom Witkovski urged his Singaporean guest.
“So you don’t have to come to full stop to launch the ASIPs?”
Hiang asked, propping himself up on the observer’s chair. “No, we don’t. The advanced submersible intelligence platforms should be called the ABEAUT, because they are beautiful. Beyond my wildest dreams just a few years ago. They swim out of our hull with just their guidance engine running. Then the propulsion kicks in once they are well clear of the Carter.”
The lieutenant commander standing next to the control panels looked at his skipper. Captain Witkovski nodded at him to begin. “Prepare to launch ASIP-1,” he said to the seaman.
Five minutes later, he gave the seaman the last order in the sequence. “Launch ASIP-3.”
“Launch ASIP-3, aye,” the seaman repeated. “ASIP-3 away.”
The two captains watched as three green icons moved away from the blue icon for the Carter on the screen. They spread out, three abreast, and accelerated.
“Because they have a very small acoustic and sonar signature, there is no chance that the Chinese will think that there are torpedoes coming their way,” Witkovski explained. “They’re fully autonomous. Communicate only in an emergency. They know their missions and they just carry them out. When they get to their designated collection points, the ASIPs will switch over to the guidance propulsion to do place-keeping. And they will wait for their targets and then swim up to meet them and swim along their hulls, port, starboard, and right down the keel. Then back to place-keeping until the Chinese move on. Finally, we will swing around from the side and call them to come home. The Chinese will never know they were swept.”