Bin Laden looked at him for a long time, before he finally nodded, the gesture so slight it was almost unnoticeable.
A thrill coursed through Graham like a hit of cocaine to a desperate man. All of his training had been for one purpose, and one purpose alone; to command an underwater warship. To train a crew and lead his men into battle. All other considerations were secondary: pain, fear, conscience, ego. Even love.
“Until the mission preparation fully develops you will remain here at my side.”
“I should be involved in the planning,” Graham said. “For God’s sake, I’m a trained sub driver. I have the knowledge.”
“Yes, which is exactly why you will not be allowed to leave this place until the time is correct,” bin Laden said. “You are too valuable an asset to risk.”
“Then why was I sent on the canal strike?” Graham demanded.
“Because I wasn’t sure that we could get a boat,” bin Laden said.
“My God, you’ve done it? You’ve got a sub?”
“In due time,” bin Laden said. “Now leave me, I wish to be alone. Salaam will show you to your quarters.”
Graham got up, retrieved his bag and shoes, and left the room without another word. His mind was alive with the possibilities that another command would give him. The entire world would be his, and he meant to take it.
By the time he was finished, the damage would be incalculable.
TWENTY-SIX
Across the bay from Leeward Point Field, which served as Gitmo’s airport, the U.S. Navy Station senior personnel were housed in base headquarters, which was also home to the U.S. Army’s senior Detainee Ops personnel.
The navy ran the station, but the army was in charge of the prisoners — mostly al-Quaida and Taliban, and the mujahideen who fought for them.
The navy’s ONI handled most of the prisoner interrogations after the backlash against the army’s methods at Abu Ghraib, but Army MPs were still in charge of security at all six camps.
It was an odd melding of the services, but it seemed to work, despite pressures from Amnesty International, the ACLU, and the international media to close the place.
This morning McGarvey and Gloria Ibenez had flown down aboard a Navy C-20D, which was a Gulfstream III used to transport VIPs. They were seated at a conference table at base headquarters across from Brigadier General Lazlo Maddox, who was the CO of detainee operations, his chief of intelligence operations, Lieutenant Colonel Daniel Higgins, and Lieutenant Commander T. Thomas Weiss, the one Gloria had warned McGarvey about. He was the senior ONI officer at Delta.
“I was asked by the secretary of defense to cooperate with you,” General Maddox said. “And that’s what we’ll do. But I don’t like it.” He was a tall, rangy man in his early fifties, with salt-and-pepper hair cut short in the Depression-era style with no sideburns. He was dressed in camouflage BDUs.
“We appreciate it, General,” McGarvey said pleasantly, and he glanced over at Weiss, who had an angry scowl on his face. “We’ll try to cause as little disruption as possible, and get out of here as soon as we can.”
“There will not be a repeat of last week’s incident in which three of my people were KIA, do I make myself clear?”
Gloria stepped in before McGarvey could speak. “Excuse me, General, but my partner and I did not start it.” She was hot, but on the way down she’d promised to control herself. “Your three people were already dead by the time we stumbled onto the prison break.”
McGarvey sat back. They had not made a decision to play bad-cop, good-cop, and it wouldn’t work with Maddox anyway. He’d seen the general’s jacket. As a young captain during the first Gulf War he had been awarded every decoration except the Medal of Honor. His nickname was “Icewater.” But with Weiss it could be different. The man was in love with himself.
“If you had stayed out of it, your partner wouldn’t have been shot to death,” Weiss jumped in angrily. He was in crisp summer undress whites. “And most likely the Coast Guard would have recovered all five prisoners, and the strike force that hit us, before they got five miles offshore.”
“They could have been halfway back to Iran before anybody knew they were gone,” Gloria shot back. “Bob was just doing his job, something you apparently don’t understand.”
McGarvey held up a hand. “Can we get back on track here?”
Weiss started to say something, but Maddox held him off. “Amnesty International will be here in two days to make sure we’re no longer using Biscuit teams.” Psychiatrist M.D.s had been used in units called Behavioral Sciences Consultation Teams, Biscuit teams for short, to help interrogators increase the stress levels of prisoners. It made questioning of them a lot easier. But there had been ethical issues and the White House had ordered the practice be stopped. “You will be gone from this base before they arrive. Is that also clear?”
“I expect we’ll be done by then,” McGarvey said.
Maddox turned to Weiss and then Gloria. “And the fireworks between you two will cease and desist right now.”
Weiss wanted to protest, but he nodded darkly.
Gloria smiled. “Sorry, General, just trying to do my job.”
“Very well,” Maddox said. “What brings a former CIA director here, or is your mission so secret we can’t be told?”
“Not at all,” McGarvey replied pleasantly. He watched Weiss’s eyes. “Al-Quaida has hired an ex — British Royal Navy submarine captain, and we think the organization is trying to raise a crew for him. The five men who were broken out last week were all ex — Iranian navy.”
Weiss didn’t blink.
“We didn’t know that,” Lieutenant Colonel Higgins said. He was a West Point graduate who had never seen battle. He’d gotten his law degree and had spent a large portion of his career at the Pentagon. He was a mild-mannered — looking man, with thin brown hair and wire-rimmed glasses. Like Maddox, he was dressed in BDUs.
“Not ex-navy,” Weiss put in. “We think they were on active duty when they were rounded up on the Iranian border. We were working on confirming it, in which case they would have been released.”
“Why wasn’t I told?” Higgins demanded.
“Dan, we just weren’t sure,” Weiss said. “And we still aren’t.” He glanced at Gloria. “If we could have recaptured them alive we might have found out.”
“There’ve been no IDs on the bodies of the strike force they sent against us,” Higgins told McGarvey. “We think they were al-Quaida, but in light of this they could just as likely have been Iranian special forces here to rescue their people.”
“With the cooperation of the Cubans—” Gloria said, but McGarvey held her off with a gesture.
“That’s purely speculation,” Higgins replied calmly. Unlike Weiss, who was posturing, he was in control; a lawyer discussing the dry facts of a civil case. “They probe our perimeter at least once a week, and that’s been going on for months now.”
Gloria wanted to protest, but McGarvey held her off again. “Our people are working on that aspect.”
“I’m sure they are,” Maddox said. “Which brings us back to the question at hand. What are you doing here?”
“We have the names of four additional prisoners we believe might have navy backgrounds. We’d like to interview them. If al-Quaida is trying to raise a crew the word will have gotten out. They may have heard something.”
“There’ve been no unauthorized communications to or from this camp,” Weiss said, and he looked to Higgins for confirmation, but the colonel merely cocked his head as he looked at McGarvey.
“Right,” McGarvey replied dryly. “They’ve got themselves a sub captain, now if they can come up with a crew they could hit us harder than 9/11.”