The Command (43 page)

A basement of riprap, a verdant icing of foliage; then, soaring, what looked like spaceships impaled on bayonets. The artificial island lay midway between the two countries. He'd have to go through immigration. That didn't worry him. His new papers weren't forgeries. They were real, with the proper stamps and clearances. He was a reporter with a new Internet news agency.

But before that, before his next identity and the long-awaited and long-prepared mission to the north, one thing remained. A treat, of a sort, that he allowed himself with each outing.

He pulled off into a pleasantly landscaped parking area that overlooked an artificial beach. Families had spread cloths on picnic tables. Children ran shrieking through friendly waves. He pulled the car around until he was looking back in the direction he'd come from.

He glanced at his watch. Then turned on the radio, got out, and climbed up to sit on the hood and light a cigarette.

He sat there for a long time in the sunlight and sea wind, watching the children and listening to the radio. His fingertips stroked the gleaming surface of the hood. Waiting for the distant plume of smoke—yes, he should be able to see it from here—listening for the terrified, shocked words announcing another disaster.

But they didn't come. A traffic reporter said flow was interrupted on Avenue 40, on the way to Juffair, due to a police barricade. At that he turned the volume up. But the announcer said nothing more, until some time later he said the delays were now lifted and morning traffic was flowing normally.

Something had gone wrong. It hadn't come off. Even now the local talent might be undergoing interrogation.

He took out his new passport and flicked the lighter beneath it. Held it away from his suit as it writhed, blackened, became a wisp of char that he carried, still burning, to a trash container and rubbed into powder between his palms. He took a third set of documents from a slit cut into the leather of the rear seat, cunningly concealed by the seam. Now he could not be stopped, searched, photographed, or fingerprinted. This was a diplomatic passport. On its cover gold gleamed: a deeply embossed seal of crossed swords beneath a palm tree.

The official seal of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Holding it up, he'd be waved past the businessmen and tourists waiting for access to the Land of the Two Holy Places.

He looked again, hoping still to see smoke. But still the sky hovered clear, pale, innocent of the sign and evidence of destruction. Behind the sunglasses his eyes narrowed. He did not like to fail.

Then his chin lifted again. The road which makes our feet bleed is the path which leads upward. To topple the colossus would take many blows. Much sacrifice and pain.

Or perhaps—his mind moved ahead—one great blow. Greater than any that had ever been struck before.

The heavy car accelerated again, heading west.

IV
 
THE MED

T
HE darkened bridge was quiet, but not relaxed. It was the calm of those who didn't need to cover uncertainty with talk. Who in months at sea together had worn through idle conversation. So that words were scarce now, consisting of the chanted antiphon of the phone talker, the helm's terse reports, the murmur of the conning officer keeping them on station a thousand yards astern of the deck-edge lights of USS
Theodore Roosevelt,
CVN-71.

Dan sat with legs crossed and shoes kicked off in the dark. He'd started chewing gum. It seemed to help. Working out helped, too. Running was out, at least temporarily; Blade Slinger 191 had operated practically round the clock since they'd rejoined the battle group. Even during down time, hauled inside with the maintenance crews working her over, the deck had to stay clear in case another aircraft needed a dry spot. He tried to get to the weight room every day. Around 0400 seemed to work best. A hard hour on the machines, then a shower before his self-imposed date with the rising sun.

Around him the Battle Force Sixth Fleet, carrier, cruisers, destroyers, frigates, combat support, drove massively through the night. It had been here since 1949. Nearly every sailor who'd served in the navy since had been part of it at one time or another. Along with its associated amphibious ready group, two hundred miles to the south at the moment, it could react to anything from a humanitarian crisis to all-out war. It could move seven hundred miles in a day, refuel, rearm, and strike without the permission of tacit enemies, doubtful neutrals, or reluctant allies.

They'd departed the island emirate two weeks ago, three days after the dhow incident. But not for the upper Gulf. Instead, with no explanation, they'd been traded to the Med. Out Hormuz and through the Red Sea again, the passage familiar now. Past the low coast where navy men had died aboard a sinking tanker. They'd never laid hands on
the smugglers, never heard another word about them. Like they'd never found out who was behind the dhow attack. Boxing with shadows … Through the Canal again, the usual frenzy when they couldn't find the certificate.
Horn
dogged
Roosevelt
tonight at the triple crossing of lines drawn south from Turkey, west from Cyprus, and north from Egypt. Where the stars arched over the sea like diamonds set in the roof of an immense cave. Waiting for whatever came next. He scratched between his stockinged toes, remembering Riyadh.

THEY'D crossed the causeway under heightened security in the wake of the attack on
Horn.
Dan had ridden with a four-striper from CO-MIDEASTFOR in the second unmarked white Suburban. A convoy of SUVs didn't seem the least conspicuous way to travel, nor was the requirement they wear body armor exactly reassuring. It weighed on him like the lead aprons they give you before the X-ray.

They sped at seventy miles an hour toward the capital of Saudi Arabia, four hundred kilometers to the west. The highway was perfectly flat, perfectly new. Once they left Al-Khubar behind, a city that looked like it had been built the night before, the broad, exquisitely planed lanes were empty. All there was to look at was rock, sand, and, set well back from the highway, new, huge, seemingly deserted mosques. Or at least the buildings had minarets. The heat penetrated the glass and steel around them despite the roaring air conditioner, made the Americans suck on their plastic bottles of water. It made everything shimmer and run together, as if shape were only a fleeting attribute of reality. He was beginning to suspect that nothing he saw in this quarter of the world was what it seemed. A gaunt hunted-looking dog shied as they sped past.

Today's meeting was with Admiral Curtis D. Kornack, Commander, U.S. Naval Forces, Central Command. Kornack's flag was in Bahrain, but the admiral himself was in Riyadh. Dan's disciplinary mast had been postponed. Or maybe OBE—overtaken by events—more accurately described what had happened to the accusation of excessive force while boarding, in the aftermath of the attempted bombing of the
Horn.
He'd stayed aboard, of course, through the day. No one knew if the dhow was the main event or a diversion. Hotchkiss drafted an OPREP-3, a terrorist incident report. They stood to into the night, with
Fear
and
Faith
circling, manned and armed. At any rate, no one had mentioned that investigation since. And he wasn't about to bring it up.

They reached Riyadh as the sun hit zenith. The roundabouts and flyovers
were deserted, as if scanned by some futuristic ray that destroyed everything but architecture. The Ministry of Defence was, no surprise, white, modern, and brand-new. They parked in an underground garage, left the armor in the vehicles, and checked in with a sergeant in battle dress. He led them down concrete stairs as the air grew colder and took on a subterranean smell. A large room with acoustic tile ceilings and many Americans at terminals. Past that, more corridors terminated at a windowless briefing room where carafes of coffee and bottles of mineral water and soggy date pastries on plastic plates waited. He saw a face he thought he remembered. As he focused the other, large, rumpled, stepped forward and stuck out a hand. “Been a while, Commander.”

“The NIS officer. From Gitmo.”

“That's right. Bob Diehl. Only it's NCIS now.” The agent winked and raised his paper cup. “Yeah, awhile since we had our last chat. And this is better coffee than you gave me then.”

“You on this, too? I thought Ms. Rahim was the agent in charge.” He smiled at her; she nodded back, but without smiling, her dark face giving him nothing but wariness and distance.

“
Ar
-Rahim. She works for me. But you know you'll always get a fair hearing from me.”

“Like the one I got last time?”

Years before, a seaman from his department had gone overboard one night off Cuba. Dan had helped inventory the dead man's personal effects. After reading Sanderling's diary, he'd wrapped it in copper cable and deep-sixed it over the stern. Which had led to Diehl's accusing him of being Sanderling's lover, if not his murderer.

The agent laughed soundlessly as the admiral came in.

Karnack had an air force colonel with him, and a civilian in a sport coat and dark slacks whom he introduced as his “political advisor”— which Dan figured was spelled CIA. They sat on one side of the table, leaving the delegation from Bahrain to take the other. Dan added that up: the intelligence-side captain who'd accompanied him from CO-MIDEASTFOR; a Commander Hooker, the base security guy; Diehl, Ar-Rahim, and himself.

Karnack opened a file folder the colonel gave him. “You're Lenson?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I respect any man who wears the Congressional, but I'm not happy about what happened in Manama. It took too long to get your security force in the water, and you weren't ready to repel a waterborne attack. Nor were you maintaining proper lookouts.”

“I don't know who gave you that information, sir, but none of those assertions are correct,” Dan told him. “Did you read our OPREP?”

“And the other reports. You were lucky the Bahrainis took out that dhow before it got close enough to do some serious damage.”

Dan controlled himself. Karnack was still listening; if Dan got emotional he wouldn't be. “I'd like to respond to those points, sir?”

“You'll have your chance. The CINC told me this incident's going to be the subject of a congressional investigation.”

“Congressional,” the captain from COMIDEASTFOR repeated. “I can see a JAG Manual investigation. But bleeding Christ, sir, why
congressional?
There was no loss of life, no property damage—”

The civilian said, “Same reason we investigated the Khobar Towers bombing. To find our security holes and fix them.”

Dan said the major security hole was that he hadn't been permitted to be ready to defend himself. The colonel started to interrupt, but Karnack gestured for him to speak.

Dan recounted his initial arming of his patrols and the subsequent orders to pull the weapons off the boats. He'd also requested more security on the pier, but had been told that was a national, meaning local, responsibility. Finally, he recounted how when he got the call warning him a situation was developing, he'd requested permission to respond preemptively but couldn't get it through the chain of command. “I called away my security teams, armed the boats, and stationed one off my beam as a sanitizer. I sent the other one into the inner harbor under my inherent right of self-defense. As for the Bahrainis stopping the dhow—it was my men who identified it, neutralized it with fire, boarded, and prevented the last of the terrorists left alive from triggering it in the middle of the fishing fleet. And so far I haven't heard any objection. If there hadn't been a bomb aboard, though, I'd be hanging by my thumbs. Right?”

“We're guests in Bahrain,” the colonel said. “We're guests here in Saudi, too. Arabs are very sensitive about their sovereignty. Don't ever forget that.”

“Even guests have the right to defend themselves. Especially if we're here to protect the regimes hosting us.”

“This is a bigger issue than you and your ship, Commander.”

“I understand that, sir,” Dan said. “And I agree, I acted wrongly. What I should have done, in retrospect, was to refuse to stay in a port where the authorities knew a possibility of attack existed, without being permitted reasonable means of protecting my men and women.”

The unspoken point being that Karnack had been responsible for
those rules of engagement. From their expressions, he saw they understood, and didn't like, what he was saying, spoken aloud or not.

Karnack drew an invisible triangle on the tabletop with his fingernail. “Okay, we've cleared the air on that issue. Let's move on. What I want to know is, is there anything new on the dhow's crew, the weapons, who built the bomb? Who's behind it, and who they're linked to?”

Hooker started to outline what they had, but Karnack cut him off with a shake of his head. “What I'm really interested in is this doctor figure. He sounds like the traveling mastermind, the outside expertise.”