Crocker was less interested in which restaurant they ate at than in getting his team ready for the grueling Marathon des Sables next week. As the team’s lead trainer, it was his job to keep them in shape and prepare them to deal with any contingency-arctic mountains, rough seas, jungles. He was concerned because, compared to their competition, he figured they were behind in training, mileage, and long-distance desert runs.
He had led his team on climbs in the Rockies, on Mount Washington, the Devil’s Tower, Grand Teton, the Himalayas, K2. They had done parachute drops from thirty thousand feet in Germany, winter training outside Juneau, jungle training in the Philippines and Borneo.
Now it was time to beat them to shit in the desert. His motto was “Blood from any orifice,” and he lived it over and over.
When they returned to the barracks, a civilian aide stood waiting beside a black SUV.
“Chief Warrant Officer Crocker?”
“Who wants to know?”
“The embassy political counselor. He wants to see you.”
That likely meant CIA.
Ten minutes later, showered and dressed in black cotton pants and a black polo, he entered an air-conditioned room in a utilitarian four-story building. The local CIA chief, Ed Wolfson, a medium-height, sandy-haired man with gray eyes, rose to greet him. Judging by his paunch and stooped shoulders, Crocker pegged him as an analyst type.
Sitting at the table behind him was Crocker’s old nemesis, Lou Donaldson.
The last time he’d seen Donaldson, he was serving as the CIA deputy in Pakistan. He had since been promoted to an important job with CTC, the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center.
“Congratulations, Lou,” Crocker said, extending a hand. “I heard you were promoted. What brings you to Bahrain?”
Donaldson ignored his hand and responded with a curt “Sit down.”
His manner hadn’t changed. Still an asshole.
They were joined by Donaldson’s broad-shouldered deputy, Jim Anders, carrying plastic-wrapped sandwiches and Diet Cokes. Anders explained that they’d driven five hours from Saudi Arabia and were delayed because of repairs to the sixteen-mile King Fahd Causeway, which linked the two countries and also happened to be one of the longest bridges in the world. They hadn’t had time to stop for dinner.
Instead of enjoying chicken masala, Crocker bit into a stale turkey sandwich. And he hated Diet Coke.
Donaldson spoke as he chewed. “That launch was completely destroyed, and with it a trove of potentially valuable intel. Were you aware of that, Crocker?”
“No, sir.”
“Blew up and sank to the bottom of the bay.”
“I suspected that might happen.”
“You couldn’t put out the fire?”
“No time, sir, and nothing to do it with.”
“Fucking shame. The White House is disappointed. Could have bolstered their case at the UN.”
“What case is that?”
Donaldson had dripped some mustard on the front of his blue shirt. Instead of answering Crocker’s question, he used a handkerchief and water from a plastic bottle to blot it. This only seemed to make a bigger mess.
“The salvage team recovered some scraps, pieces of documents, one man’s body.”
“Have you been able to ID him?” Crocker asked.
“You interview the crew?” Donaldson asked back, sidestepping Crocker’s question.
“The crew of the Contessa?”
“No, the crew of the fucking Starship Enterprise.”
Crocker clenched his jaw, fighting back an urge to reach across the table and punch him in the mouth. “Didn’t have time, sir.”
“How many of them were there?”
“We recovered six dead. There were another five men injured, plus the captain.”
“For a grand total of twelve, including the captain.”
“And the captain’s wife. That’s correct.”
Donaldson slapped the table. “Wrong.”
“Sir?”
“Captain McCullum says he set sail from Melbourne with a crew of twelve, which means thirteen, including him.”
“He sure of that?”
“Yes, he is. One of them apparently got away.”
“Got away?”
“Yes, goddammit. Escaped.”
“Maybe he fell overboard and drowned.”
“Wrong again, Crocker. I suppose you weren’t aware that one of the Contessa’s lifeboats was missing, too.”
“No, I wasn’t.”
“Then there’s your answer.”
What answer? Crocker asked himself. Why is this important? He was going to explain that he and his men had been under attack and that the action aboard and around the Contessa was unrelenting, but he realized there was no point.
“Where did this crewman go?” he asked instead.
“Unclear.”
“Then why is his disappearance such a big deal?”
“It is, Crocker. That’s all you need to know.”
Trying to understand what had been going on with the Contessa, Crocker asked, “Were you able to ascertain the nationality of the men on the launch?”
Donaldson nodded at Anders, who reached for a folder. “You ever hear of the Qods Force, Crocker?”
Of course he had. The Qods Force was the external intelligence apparatus of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards of Iran-essentially state-sponsored terrorists linked to assassinations and bombings in countries all over the world, including Lebanon, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Argentina, Thailand, and France.
Crocker nodded. “They’re only the nastiest motherfuckers on the planet.”
“Among the cleverest, too.” Donaldson grunted and turned to Anders. “Show him the photo.”
The image was of a middle-aged man with intense black eyes, a broken nose, and acne-scarred skin partially covered by a short black beard.
“Recognize him?”
The eyes looked familiar. He thought they belonged to the third man in the launch cabin, the one who had slipped away while he was grappling on the floor with the two others.
“Maybe.”
“His name is Colonel Farhed Alizadeh, also known as Colonel D, member of the Iranian Revolutionary Corps and an engineer linked to Iran’s nuclear program.”
Crocker had never heard of him. “Did the divers find his body?”
“Not yet.”
“I hope they find him.”
“That would be a huge relief.”
Back at the barracks, Crocker tossed and turned throughout the night. He kept waking up and thinking about a museum he had visited in Nagasaki when he was a young navy corpsman stationed with the marines, and about the horrors of nuclear weapons.
On the morning of August 9, 1945, a U.S. B-29 bomber veered away from its intended target-Kokura-because of thick cloud cover and instead dropped a 10,200-pound nuclear bomb, known as Fat Man, on Nagasaki. The resulting 21-kiloton explosion-the equivalent of 75 million sticks of dynamite-destroyed almost all of the city’s buildings and killed roughly 39,000 people. Another 25,000 were horribly burned. Over the following weeks and months another 40,000 residents died from radiation exposure and other injuries.
According to one observer, “A huge fireball formed in the sky…Together with the flash came the heat rays and the blast, which destroyed everything on earth. When the fire itself burned out, there appeared a completely changed, vast, colorless world that made you think it was the end of life on earth. The whole city became extinct.”
It was the pictures of the burn victims, and the deformed children born to survivors from outside the city who were exposed to radiation, that gave Crocker the chills. He knew that the Fat Man plutonium bomb dropped on Nagasaki was primitive and limited in firepower compared to some of the bombs built today, ten kilotons compared to as high as ten megatons-approximately a thousand times bigger.
As the WMD officer at ST-6, he also understood the dangers of nuclear proliferation and on more than one occasion had risked his life to stop it. After the fall of the Soviet Union, when approximately two hundred nuclear warheads were either sold or stolen, he had launched spectacular missions into Belarus, Uzbekistan, and caves in North Korea to recover them.