For once Turbee was at work before anyone else, but the circumstances greatly displeased Dan. The youth had found his answer by 6AM, and once he had accomplished his task, he was overwhelmed by fatigue. He had a larger workstation than anyone else, and thought he could probably just fit on the working surface of his desk. He pushed aside the many empty Styrofoam coffee cups, the candy wrappers, and the half-empty containers of Chinese food, lay down, and closed his eyes. Just for a few minutes, he thought. Just a short nap.
Eight AM came quickly. This was the hour Dan had scheduled to collectively review the PDB, an exercise that Turbee almost never attended. It was the official start of the workday, although most of the TTIC staff were “keeners,” and it was a badge of honor to be early; the earlier, the better. No one woke Turbee when they came in. The scene was too comical. There were a few sniggers. Someone had a digital camera, and most had camera phones, so a few photographs were taken. The cartons, cups, and wrappers were brought in a little closer to the sleeping Turbee to add to the effect.
“Aww Jesus Christ,” cursed Dan when he arrived. “Will someone please whack the poor bastard a few times and clean up that sorry mess? Why we keep him I don’t know.”
One of the Army captains on staff, never known for subtlety, walked to within a foot of Turbee, and yelled directly into his ear. “It’s ROLL CALL, Turbee!” he howled. “Wakee WAKEE!”
Turbee stirred. The man had no sense whatsoever of Turbee’s condition, or even that he had a condition. It was a simple matter of discipline, he thought. Hell, nothing Army Basic Training wouldn’t fix. “YO, BOY! Up and at ’em! NOW!”
“Go away,” was all Turbee could manage. A wake-up call of this sort would leave most people disoriented, but it made Turbee physically ill. Abrupt, loud noises never went well with his particular brand of autism. He fought the urge to vomit and covered his ears with his hands. The captain persisted, much to Dan’s glee, and Turbee slumped down from his desk and looked around, perplexed and confused, from the floor.
“Oh God, Turbee. Major-league raccoon eyes,” Dan exclaimed sarcastically. “You’d better have been doing some productive work to justify this.”
“Umm. Yeah. Sort of. If you give me a sec, I’ll tell you. I know who organized the Semtex heist, and how to find it,” Turbee responded through his teeth.
“What was that?” exclaimed Dan. “What did he say?”
“Look, I’m sorry for the mess and all, and I’m sorry I fell asleep on my desk, but Blue Gene and I worked all night on this. I think I’ve got it figured out.”
“OK, Turbee,” Dan said in a softer tone. “That might make this worthwhile. What’ve you got?”
Turbee took a deep breath, pressed his thumbs to his eyelids, and gathered himself. “It’s a company called the Karachi Star Line. They started with an inland ferry service, shipping people and cargo up and down the Indus. About 15 years ago they bought a few tramp ships, and converted them into small container ships. They expanded rapidly, and now own about 30 oceangoing ships, some container, some dry cargo, and 50 large ferries, running between Islamabad and Hyderabad, and up the Indus River, mostly.”
“How do you get from there to terrorist drug smuggler?” prompted Dan.
“OK. OK. They started as a cash business. They paid all their employees in cash, usually American dollars, for the first few years of their existence.”
“How do you know that?”
“There were a few newspaper articles about it 12 or 15 years ago. Also, payment for cargos went through unusual offshore banks, first in the Caymans, and more recently, St. Vincent, in the Caribbean. The transactions are very complex — unnecessarily so, if you ask me. In the last couple of years, they used obscure banks in Russia, and a couple of financial institutions in, of all places, Nigeria.”
“And?”
“Those precursor chemicals that we’ve talked about. This company buys a significant quantity of them. Those transactions are also cloaked, but some of the same financial institutions are involved. And they’re in the transportation business.”
“Why would that be important?” asked Dan.
“Well, I don’t know much about the heroin business,” said Turbee, somewhat tentatively. “But Lance explained some of it to me yesterday. He said that in the heroin trade, and the illicit drug trade generally, the unique thing is that you add all the value to it by transporting it from one point to another around the globe. So I ranked transportation companies higher than non-transportation companies in my search parameters.”
“That’s it?”
“No, that’s not it,” Turbee responded. “Their rate of growth is absolutely astounding.”
“So?”
“They’ve grown from nothing to become a very large shipping firm. In record time,” said Turbee.
Now Rhodes broke in. “He’s got a point there, Dan.” He turned back to Turbee. “How certain are you that they’re the ones we’re looking for?”
“Positive. I have some really strong evidence.”
“Do you know which ships may be involved in the smuggling?”
“Yes,” said Turbee. “The private yacht of the owner of the company, some guy by the name of Jhananda. It’s a yacht called the Mankial Star. She’s large — 80 feet, perhaps a bit more. She was anchored off the eastern coast of a small island called Socotra, where Yemen has jurisdiction. There are several pictures; here, I’ll flip them on the 101’s for you. There they are. Note the times. There were repeat helicopter visits to the yacht. These are from one day after the Semtex was stolen. There’s a small runway on the island, just to the west of what appears to be a huge estate overlooking the Gulf of Arabia.”
Everyone was paying attention now. The pictures on the 101’s showed exactly what Turbee said they would. He had the floor. “I am positive that the Semtex is on that ship, Dan. It’s headed east, toward us.”
“How did it get from Darfur to a ship off the coast of Socotra, of all places?” asked Rhodes. “That’s a long distance to travel.”
“Well,” said Turbee, “look at the runway. There’s a plane there, and I’m told by Kingston at the NSA that it’s a DC-3. Look at the next set of pictures. You can clearly see the helicopter that’s landed beside the DC-3. You can also see it, an hour later, sitting on the rear deck of the Mankial Star. That helicopter was ferrying cargo of some sort from the DC-3 on the runway to the ship.”
“It’s all kind of circumstantial, isn’t it?” asked Dan. “In any event, how do you know that ship is the Mankial Star?”
“Simple,” responded Turbee. “The Office of Naval Intelligence has a database for every ship larger than 70 feet in length. The database has measurements for the length, width, and shape of any hull, along with other distinguishing features. I ran that particular photograph through the database, and it spit out the name of the ship, its owners, its beam size, and so on. It’s the Mankial Star.”
“Dan, I’m not sure what you mean by circumstantial, but it gives us enough reason to have a closer look at least,” said Rahlson. “We should check it out.”
“I think I’ll call the DDCI,” said Dan, motioning to Johnson to get the Deputy Director on the line. “He should hear this, although I’m sure the heavies are more concerned about nuclear weapons gone astray than a few tons of high explosive. I mean any large construction company in the States could probably acquire this if they wanted to.”