Haynes was dressed in jeans and an open-collar shirt, which meant he’d already had dinner with his wife and daughter. Berndt was still dressed in a suit and tie. He’d been getting ready to leave for the night when Adkins called. He and the president seemed concerned.
“Would you like a cup of coffee, Dick?” the president asked. He was having a Bud Light. “Or a beer?”
“No, sir. I’m not going to take up much of your time tonight, but there have been some interesting developments that you need to know about,” Adkins said.
“Concerning Graham and the Panama Canal incident?” Berndt asked.
“Graham was spotted in Mexico City two days ago, heading to Pakistan.”
The president grinned. “That’s good news—” he said, but then stopped, realizing what Adkins had just told him. “He’s on his way to bin Laden?”
“Yes, sir. But we got the news too late to be waiting for him when he got to Karachi. By now he could be just about anywhere.”
“I see,” the president said. He exchanged a look with Berndt. “You didn’t come here this evening merely to tell me that the CIA lost track of this man.”
“No, sir. But we believe that the attack on the Panama Canal was a separate operation from one al-Quaida has been gearing up for possibly more than a year.”
“Allah’s Scorpion?” Berndt asked.
Adkins nodded. “We’ve since learned that Graham was trained by the British navy to be a submarine commander. Top of his class in their Perisher school.”
“Good Lord,” the president said softly.
“He’s more dangerous than we first believed.”
“Do the crazy bastards actually have a submarine?” Berndt asked.
“We don’t know yet,” Adkins admitted. “But they have a top-flight submarine captain, and they’ve been trying to recruit a crew, so we think it’s a safe bet that they’ve already got a sub, or they’ll try to get one. Otto Rencke thinks they’ll try for a Russian-built Kilo Class boat. It’s diesel-electric, so on batteries alone it’s ultra-quiet. I’m told that it’s extremely reliable, easy to operate with a minimum crew, and almost as common as the Russian Kalashnikov rifle. Half the navies in the world own one or more. Iran has three.”
“Okay, assuming bin Laden recruited Graham to come at us with a submarine, why’d he take the risk trying to destroy the Panama Canal?” the president asked.
“I’ll tell you why, Mr. President,” Berndt broke in. “If he’d been successful we would have had our hands full, just like after 9/11. We would have been looking the other way. Which means that whatever they’re planning next will have the potential of hurting us even worse than the canal.”
Haynes had been standing, leaning against his desk. He put his beer down, a set expression in his eyes. “What next?”
“McGarvey went down to Guantanamo Bay to question a number of prisoners who might have navy backgrounds, on the chance they may know something,” Adkins said. “His primary mission is still to find Graham and bin Laden and take them out.”
“Does he know that Graham went to Pakistan?”
“Not yet, Mr. President,” Adkins said. “He’ll be informed when he gets back. In the meantime we’d like to ask the navy for some help tracking down the Kilo boats our satellites will probably miss.”
The president nodded. “I’ll call Charlie Taggart tonight.” Taggart was the secretary of defense and a longtime friend of the president’s.
“Thank you, sir, but there’s more,” Adkins said.
“There always is,” Haynes said, and he nodded impatiently for Adkins to get on with it.
“A lot of the Kilo boats out there have been modified so that they can fire cruise missiles from their torpedo tubes while submerged.”
“Yes?”
“Before the British navy taught Graham to command submarines, they sent him to Dounreay, where he got his degree in nuclear engineering.”
Both the president and his national security adviser were struck dumb for a moment. Berndt was the first to recover.
“I would think that buying or stealing a cruise missile might be even harder than getting a submarine,” Berndt said.
“Yes, it would,” Adkins agreed. “We think they’ll probably try for a nuclear-tipped cruise missile. Graham would certainly know how to handle such a weapon.”
“He could park his boat within a few miles anywhere along our coast and fire the damn thing,” Berndt said. “We would have virtually no warning whatsoever.”
“If we knew where, we could intercept him and destroy his boat,” the president said. “Have you told any of this to Hamel?”
“No, sir.”
“Don’t,” Haynes said. “There’re too many politicians over there. We can’t let one word of this get out. It’d create a panic worse than last year’s suicide bombing scare.”
“No matter what happens this will be the end of them,” Berndt said. “We didn’t collapse after 9/11, and we toppled the Taliban in Afghanistan and Saddam Hussein in Iraq. They’ve got nowhere to go.”
“That’s what we figure, Dennis,” Adkins said. “From their perspective they’ve got to hit us. We’ve left them no other choice.”
THIRTY-ONE
A few minutes before two in the morning Gloria drove McGarvey across the quiet base up the hill to the prison’s main gate.
They’d tossed their overnight bags in the Humvee and roused the Gulfstream’s crew to get the aircraft ready for an immediate departure for Washington, because after this morning McGarvey figured they’d have to get out of Dodge as soon as possible, or they might be held until Adkins could pull some strings either at the Pentagon or the White House.
“They’re going to want to know what we’re doing here at this hour of the morning,” Gloria said as they approached the gate. “What do you want me to say?”
“I’ll handle it,” McGarvey told her. Last night they had spread the word that they were heading home first thing in the morning, and then had turned in early to get a few hours’ sleep at the BOQ. He had no doubt that Weiss had been informed, and would have let his guard down, thinking he had won.
Gloria glanced at him. “This isn’t going to work if you’re wrong about bin Ramdi understanding English. There’s no way in hell Deyhim will cooperate.”
“I know,” McGarvey said. “But we’re going to call him anyway.”
“Why?”
“Someone is going to notify Weiss that we’ve showed up, and I want him to think that he’s got plenty of time because without a translator it won’t matter what we do.”
Gloria grinned. “Sneaky. I like it. I just hope you’re right, otherwise our trip was a waste of time.”
She pulled up at the main gate. The MP who came out remembered her from last week. His M8 was slung over his shoulder, muzzle down.
“Good morning, ma’am,” he said. His name tag read ROBERTS. He looked past her at McGarvey. “Sir, may I help you?”
McGarvey held up his CIA identification card. “We need to ask one of the guys we interviewed just before dinner a couple of questions.”
“Yes, sir. I’ll call Commander Weiss for authorization.”
“He’s on his way,” McGarvey said. “But you can get our translator out of bed. He didn’t answer when we tried to call just twenty minutes ago.”
“Yes, sir. If you’ll just stand by—”
“Look, everybody’s tired, and nobody wants to be here at this hour of the morning, not us, and especially not Weiss. So go ahead and call Deyhim, but in the meantime we want to get to the interrogation center and have the prisoner brought over. It’ll save us some time, and’ll probably make Weiss a little less pissed off than he already is.”