Fox eyed him coldly. “Personally, I have no intention of sitting idly by waiting for that to happen. Do you?”
“No, I don’t,” Flynn shot back, slightly nettled by the suggestion that he might have been thinking about giving up. Yes, he was incredibly jetlagged and very short on sleep. Truth be told, right now he was essentially running on fumes — a mix of adrenaline and endless cups of crummy airline coffee. To make matters worse, the assortment of bruises and strained muscles he’d collected when his helicopter ditched in the sea made even this SUV’s comfortable seats feel akin to a medieval instrument of torture, something like a rack or a spike-lined iron maiden. But he’d be damned if he’d quit that easily.
He offered the older man a rueful smile. “Sorry, Br’er Fox. It’s just that I haven’t been able to figure out yet how in God’s name we’re going to put a helicopter- or ship-borne boarding party onto that oil tanker without getting cut to pieces. And I admit that’s pissing me off some.”
“So I gathered,” Fox said with a hint of mild amusement. His expression darkened a bit. “For what it’s worth, Nick, I’m drawing a blank there, too. So far, at least.” He shrugged. “Which is why I want you and Laura Van Horn and a few others with equally devious and violent minds to begin formulating alternate plans. I know it’s a difficult nut to crack, but I have a great deal of confidence in your tactical skills. And in your respective talents for thinking well outside the box.” He took off his glasses, stared through them for a moment, and then put them back on with a frown. “In the meantime, however, I’m afraid there are still more challenges we need to address.”
Flynn settled back to listen while they continued on toward Avalon House. If nothing else, being asked to focus on different problems would help him ignore his fatigue and aches and pains for a little while longer. At some point soon, he knew, he was going to come crashing down. When the time came, he was going to need some strong painkillers and a lot of sleep, in that order. For now, he’d be happy just to stave off that inevitable collapse until he could get a little more privacy.
First, Fox pointed out somberly, even finding the converted Iranian oil tanker again was going to be enormously tricky. In the days since the failed Shayatet 13 assault, the Gulf Venture had disappeared into the enormous expanses of the open ocean. Already, their potential search area had expanded to cover several million square miles of sea. Every new day that passed without anyone picking up the ship’s trail would add hundreds of thousands more square miles to that already daunting total.
Flynn saw what the other man meant. Even if the Quartet Directorate could afford to spend huge sums chartering civilian aircraft to patrol the most likely sea routes, it would still take incredible luck to spot the missing ship somewhere in all that vastness. And Four’s luck had been in awfully short supply lately. Of course, even assuming they did come up with some way to orchestrate such a massive air search effort, it would be virtually impossible to hide what was going on from the authorities. Or from their enemies.
“So we’re playing a game of hide-and-seek, except we’ve got to do it while stumbling around in the dark with only a tiny pinhole to look through,” he commented. “And if we bump into anybody else, even by accident, the game’s over.”
Fox nodded. “A colorful but reasonably accurate summary of our current situation,” he agreed.
“Just terrific,” Flynn said wryly. He looked at the older man. “Put simply, we need to find a ship that’s armed to the teeth and probably can’t be found… and then somehow figure out how to capture it. Sounds like a walk in the park.” He grinned crookedly. “Do I even want to know what else you think we’ve got on our plate at the moment?”
“The other issue might seem more abstract,” Fox told him quietly. “But I believe it’s just as critical. We need to work out what the Iranians — and through them, Voronin and Zhdanov — are really planning.”
“It doesn’t seem like much of a mystery to me,” Flynn said carefully. “Not since we know that tanker is carrying a missile armed with a nuclear warhead. A nuke may not exactly be a subtle or elegant weapon, but it’s sure as hell likely to blow the crap out of whatever it hits.”
Fox shook his head. “Somehow, somewhere, we’re missing something,” he insisted. “There’s no doubt that this missile being smuggled aboard the Gulf Venture can be used to destroy a city. Or to wipe out an important military installation, I guess. But how would that really advance Iran’s strategic goals, let alone those of Russia? Hitting a single strategic target, no matter how vital it may be, won’t inflict irreversible damage on any of Tehran or Moscow’s different enemies. Even Israel, as small as it is, can withstand a single nuclear strike and still be in a position to hit back hard. Our own country is even more resilient — as are our other, larger allies in Europe and Asia.”
Flynn saw what he was driving at. While on some grim level the Russians might be satisfied to see an American or European city wiped out, as long as Iran took the heat and bore all the damage from any resulting counterstrike, what could Tehran’s own motivation possibly be? Not even the most radical mullah could see any real value in killing a million Americans, if, at the end of the day, the result would be the destruction of their Islamic state — with the United States, the Great Satan, left largely intact. Nor did he really believe Zhdanov and his inner circle would want to take that sort of gamble… not without something more to gain. For more than seventy years, the cold, brutal calculus of deterrence had kept ICBMs in their silos, strategic bombers on the ground, and submarine-launched missiles in their tubes. Why would Moscow risk crossing the nuclear threshold for so small a prospective victory? And, after all, what guarantee did the Russians have that the Iranians would stay silent about their involvement once an angry and vengeful America unleashed its fury?
No, Flynn thought darkly, Fox was right. There had to be some key element of their enemies’ plans that they did not yet understand. He sat back, wrapped in worried silence through the rest of the short drive to Avalon House. It was becoming increasingly clear that what had already seemed to be an extraordinarily dangerous situation might actually be something even more catastrophic.
This was beginning to resemble a stereotypical nightmare, he realized — the one where you were the only person who saw a great danger and tried desperately to alert everyone around you… to no avail. No one in the U.S. government could even acknowledge the existence of the Quartet Directorate — let alone pay any attention to its warnings.
They were entirely on their own. And racing to make sure this particular nightmare didn’t come true.
Twenty-Seven
Russian Navy Captain First Rank Mikhail Nakhimov leaned forward over the shoulder of one of his junior officers. Under the control room’s blue-tinged lights, the depth gauge still showed them at three hundred and twenty meters. Apart from minor quivers whenever the eighteen-thousand-ton nuclear submarine encountered some new underwater current, the gauge hadn’t budged for hundreds of hours — ever since Podmoskovye had successfully broken away from the shallower confines of the Barents Sea naval exercise area. For that entire time, they had been creeping onward at ten knots through a world of stygian darkness and near-absolute silence. To escape detection by Western hunter-killer submarines and passive sonar arrays, reducing their acoustic signature — all the noise made by their reactor pumps, propulsion screws, and other machinery — to the bare minimum had been vital.