The Command (50 page)

“Make another copy of the drive, and try again.” Nimmerich nodded. “Sure, theoretically. But that's not a process we can computerize. At least, not here; National Security Agency might be able to do something like that as a virtual machine … but here, it'd be a physical process. A seven-digit key, twenty-nine letters each, it'd take … centuries.”

“Centuries?”

“Ey-yup. Look, I understand, like you said, this is high priority. But this is solid encryption.”

Yousif muttered to himself. Words she'd never learned at Defense Language School. Then said aloud, “This is a good place to stop.”

“Stop? Why?” Nimmerich's head snapped around. “Isn't this why you wanted me?”

“No. Your job was to recover the data.
We
'll interpret it.”

“Major,” Aisha said warningly

But Nimmerich was still talking, oblivious to the security people eyeing each other. “Well, you're not going to do much interpreting on this. But like I said, somebody back in D.C. might have some magic wand they can wave over it. If I could take this copy with me, fly it back, we might get them to take a look at it…. Want to give it a try?”

“I don't think so,” Yousif said. He got up. “In fact, it's time to wrap this effort up.”

“Why not?” she asked him. “We might find something interesting.”

“I don't think there's anything interesting here.”

Aisha ignored him. “Mr. Nimmerich. You said you needed the key?”

Nimmerich said, still eyeing the screen, still oblivious, “Hey, if you got any brainstorms, now's the time to try 'em.”

“Then get ready to copy what comes up. Because I think I might know the … the god key you need.”

From his right she leaned, eyeing the screen. He was still in the Arabic character set. She began to key in the characters, carefully, one at a time, making absolutely sure she hit the right keys.

Remembering a crushed bicycle, the smells of blood and feces.

How she herself always had to write down her password, so she wouldn't forget it.

A smear of ballpoint on a dead man's wrist.

As she was halfway through entering it, Yousif reached across to block the keyboard. But Nimmerich must have had a brother and grown up playing computer games; he caught the motion from the corner of his eye and blocked it so fast with his shoulder it must have been reflex. She'd never seen him move as fast and sure as that before. “What's that say?” he snapped.

“It says …
Imaamah.
”

“Is that a word? What's it mean?”

From behind them Yousif said, “It means … ruling over someone. We would say, The emir has
imaamah
over Bahrain.”

“What is it? A code name?”

“It doesn't mean anything,” Yousif said. “Shut it down now. That's enough.”

Aisha took a stretch, looking back casually as she did so. The SIS officer returned her glance with an angry scowl.

He'd never forwarded her the autopsy report on the dead man outside the base gate, though he'd promised to. Now the word scrawled on his wrist that had unlocked a secret file didn't mean anything?

When she looked back, the screen had changed. To a list of files and documents and graphics. They were only on the screen for seconds, the three of them staring at them, before Yousif reached again, taking Nimmerich by surprise, and stabbed the power button on the computer. The screen wavered, faded, went to black. “Hey!” Nimmerich yelled.

“Don't turn it back on again.”

“What'd you do that for?”

“Miss Ar-Rahim, Mr. Nimmerich. I'll call a car to take you both back to the base.”

He reached behind them, pulled the plug out of the wall, and left. Hastily, as if, she thought, he had to report to someone. Leaving them alone with the computer, at least for the moment. The hard drive still whined inside the case, slowing, powering down toward silence.

Nimmerich looked astonished. “What's with him? Did I say something wrong?”

“I think we saw something we weren't supposed to see.”

“Like what?”

“Like the plans for the Doctor's next attack.”

He blinked at the blank screen. “Is that what it was? Say, what's going on here?”

“They don't want us to read this drive. The e-mails. The addressees. The messages.”

“Course they didn't. That's why the perp erased them.”

“I mean someone here, Agent Nimmerich,” Aisha told him. “And we're not going to see this data again. It's going to disappear.”

“Uh-huh. Well.” Nimmerich cleared his throat. “Is that right? One of those local sensitivity things. So, I guess that's it, huh?”

Aisha took a deep breath then. Knowing that what she was about to do would go against host country orders. Would make her persona non grata in Bahrain, and maybe other places, too. Might even be seen as betrayal by other Muslims.

But what someone was protecting here wasn't the way. No one had the right to take innocent life, women and children and the aged and ill. The Prophet,
sullallahu alayhe wa-sallam,
had made that plain, no matter how men seduced by Satan twisted God's word to mean something else.

She put her head down next to Nimmerich's. Watched his ears redden as she breathed into them. Whispering, in case the upstairs conference room of the Ministry of Justice and Islamic Affairs happened to be wired: “Pull the hard drive. Right now. No arguments. Hand it to me. Turn around, don't look.”

They hurried down the stairs. The hard corners of the copied drive poked into her belly under the abaya. Her heart was hammering. The main corridor. The door. The big clumsy Suburban seemed to take forever to start, to get backed out of the parking space, to get lined up for the gate.

Yousif burst out of the door, screaming for her to stop, screaming at the sentry to close the gates. By then she was already pulling through, hitting the accelerator. A truck was looming over them, Nimmerich was making strangled noises and flailing for his seat belt, and she was merged, she was in the roundabout, she was gone.

H
ORN
rode alone, yet not alone, beneath a clear blue sky shading
1
I
toward dusk. The wind and seas had kicked up over the last couple of days, with a fresh northeasterly breeze. The ride was still comfortable, but the ship felt alive. The weather-deck doors had been open all day, letting in a welcome coolness after the months in the Red Sea and Gulf.

Dan had his feet up in his captain's chair, on the bridge. He'd just come up from ten straight hours in Combat. Would probably spend the night there, too. But he needed a break from the endless crackle of data. He yawned between the last forkfuls off the tray the mess attendant had brought up. Then filed his cleaned plate against the window and leaned back, listening to the drone from the helm as the helmsman corrected to a course of 090, speed ten knots, the chatter over the VHF as, miles to the northwest, an Italian frigate interrogated the master of an Indian bulk-cargo carrier.

The Camel broke his reverie. He had the draft OPREP-5 feeder report, and Dan went down it quickly, checking only here and there because he'd never caught the Ops boss in a mistake yet. “Lin give you this, about the evaporator?”

“Yes, sir.” Past Camill's skull, no longer shaven—with the onset of cooler weather he was letting his hair grow back—Dan saw Hotchkiss come on the bridge. Once again composed, clipboard under her arm, she met his glance across the pilothouse. He initialed the message and Camill left.

“Evening, sir,” she said. Dan nodded, waited, but the exec didn't seem to have anything more. Just stood by his chair, looking past him at the sea.

“Nice night,” he said at last.

“Yes, sir. Sure is.”

“I know I've been tied down all day. Have you got something for me?”

“I just wanted to say that… last night's not going to happen again.”

“I already told you, ancient history. Okay?”

She nodded, but didn't look convinced. He saw now there were circles under her eyes, as if she hadn't slept. Well, since the flash message sending them east, few aboard had. He started to say something reassuring, but was interrupted by the 21MC calling him back to Combat.

THE screens showed the southeastern Mediterranean off Israel, where
Horn
had moved during the previous night, as a blue field overlaid with yellow squares and circles. The squares marked operating areas. Over the last eighteen hours they'd filled with most of the U.S. destroyer-types in Task Force 60, two British frigates,
Active
and
Scylla,
two more each of French and Italians, and even a Turkish frigate. Closer inshore, smaller rectangles marked a second barrier pattern off Gaza, Ashqelon, Ashdod, Tel Aviv, Netanya, and Haifa. The squares alternated in a slipped checkerboard, so any intruder snaking between two of the first-line defenders would go straight through the center sector of the next.

He settled into his chair, fitting his spine into the familiar indentations like some piece of expensive and delicate equipment into a form-fitting case. The dim blue light haloed profiles at the surface weapons console, the Harpoon engagement planning console, the Tomahawk data console. Beyond that, men and women sat intent at the EW stack, the gunnery control station, the fire control radar consoles. The horizon rolled slowly on a monitor that gave them the output of the mast-mounted sight. Fifteen people shared the icy air with him. Directly before him Casey Schaad had a finger hooked on the transmit lever of the 21MC, ironing out a glitch in the combat direction system with the data processing center. He was keyboarding with the other hand, a phone tucked into the crook of his neck, busy as a fry cook with six short orders going…. He caught Dan out of the corner of his eye. “Sir. Track 2378. Another incoming from the west Vigilant Dragon wants us to check out. Picked up by Tiger One Four.”

Each incoming contact was assigned a track number by the tactical data system that linked the NATO warships. “Vigilant Dragon” was the screen commander, CTG 60.5. As far as Dan could tell, someone had grabbed a group staff and assorted straphangers and commissioned a scratch task group. They were split off from the battle group aboard USS
Mahan
and placed in tactical command of this barrier operation, which did not yet, as far as Dan knew, have a name, despite having
grown hour by hour as more ships joined into what was now one of the largest multinational operations he'd ever been involved in. “Tiger One Four” was the on-station P-3C patrol aircraft, which flew a plodding beat north and south across the western boundary of the checkerboard. It was relieved every eight hours. Over the thirty-some hours the operation had taken shape they'd entered track data on hundreds of crossing contacts to the screen units.

To a disquieting extent, though, he had no clear idea what this immense and unscheduled evolution was intended to accomplish. He could see it was urgent. Every destroyer type in the battle group had been pulled into it, leaving
Roosevelt
operating west of Cyprus with only her escort cruisers, and every NATO navy in the eastern Med except Greece. Another puzzling point was that in contrast to most barrier operations, where warships and large merchant ships were the objects of interest, no one running this operation seemed to care about them. The P-3s were only marking small craft—fishing trawlers, pleasure craft, small coasting vessels. Which were of course far more numerous, leading to a density of data that left the screens looking as if they'd been blasted with birdshot. Some of the tracks were ruler-straight, arrow-passages toward fixed destinations. Others wandered, zagged, even corkscrewed, shadowing schools of fish across the late summer waters. The radios crackled with transmissions on bridge-to-bridge and calling and distress frequencies.
Horn
herself had intercepted and inspected five fishing craft of various nationalities and a large Greek power yacht. They were given a choice: turn back, or submit to boarding and search. The Greek had been drunk and hospitable, Marchetti had reported, but the others had not been happy at being unexpectedly harassed on the high seas.

Dan shifted to see around Schaad. The center screen showed
Horn's
area. All the operating areas began with “Blockbuster.” Blockbuster M was the southernmost, twenty nautical miles by twenty, butted up almost touching against the Egyptian territorial sea off El-Arish. Only about ninety straight-line miles from their previous oparea off Port Said, so they'd been one of the first ships to report on station. Along with Bill Brinegar in
Moosbrugger,
now occupying K to the north, and clearly visible not just on JOTS but on both surface search radars and once during the night past as a distant masthead light.

To the south the radar showed the smoothly curving coast of the Sinai, speckled far inland with the furrowed-looking returns of dunes, till they faded as the earth's curve dropped them below maximum range. The oporder, which gave every evidence of hasty drafting, directed
all units to stay clear of national waters. Yet the southern boundary of his area, specified in the same order, overlapped the Egyptian twenty-mile limit by two miles. So far, this hadn't been a problem. He'd just stayed to the center of the box.

Another interesting point: none of the tasking messages thus far had mentioned what the boarding parties were looking for. They were to examine the ship's papers, ascertain nationality, port of embarkation, destination, and cargo. Within minutes of radioing the results to Vigilant Dragon the response would come back: cleared to proceed.

The only conclusion he could come to was that Higher didn't know what they were looking for, other than that it was being transported in a small craft. Staring at the screens, a second possibility occurred to him. They knew, but they didn't want to tell.