“Mr. President, chances are we have them in custody right now, sir, along with all those other people we grabbed from the ships, right?” Attorney General McQueeney said.
McQueeney was unsure where the president was heading with this meeting. She’d learned that he’d met for hours with his own counsel, Carol Cabot. What worried McQueeney more, however, was that she’d also learned that her deputy, Wilson Harrison, had met privately with the president too. That troubled her the most. At a minimum, it was a breach of White House etiquette.
“Well, dammit, Queen, we don’t know that, now do we?” the president retorted. “We don’t know who we have in custody, and we don’t know who is on the loose from those ships. And we certainly don’t know if any of the people we have in custody are the military people who sank our Coast Guard boats.
“All we know is that at least twenty members of a foreign military snuck into this country, armed to the teeth, it appears, and killed Americans and attacked our military vessels. And we’ve done squat to either retaliate or protect ourselves. Now doesn’t that make us look like a fine collection of horses’asses? Anybody disagree with that analysis?”
There was no comment from around the table.
“Well, gentlemen and ladies, that isn’t the half of it. General, give everybody the bad news.”
Paterson, head of the Department of Homeland Security, stood and reached into his pocket and removed a single gold-colored object and tossed it on the table.
“That is one more IDF dog tag, identical to the ones recovered from Boston Harbor,” he said.
“Tell everybody where that came from, General. But let me tell you, folks, as scary as the first set of dog tags is, this one is going to make you wet your pants,” Quaid said. “Go ahead, tell them everything. That’s what we’re here for.”
“This dog tag was recovered from a sailboat in Maine—a sailboat that somebody intentionally scuttled in the middle of Penobscot Bay. Whoever sank the boat bungled the job. A life raft inflated automatically and provided enough buoyancy to float the boat. A couple of lobstermen spotted it and called the Coast Guard.”
“So we’ve got twenty-one Israelis rather than twenty running around,” McQueeney said. “What’s so significant about that?”
“What is so significant is that the Coast Guard found that the top of a water tank on the sailboat was cut open so something inside the water tank could be removed. Somebody rigged up the water tank to hide something.
“Now, what is so scary about all this is that whatever was inside that water tank, whatever was recently removed from that water tank was a strong emitter of U-235, a radioactive isotope of uranium. There is only one use for U-235, which is damned near impossible to manufacture. It is the primary ingredient in atomic bombs, right from the bomb dropped on Hiroshima up to many of our present bombs. We don’t know whether what was in that boat was a functional bomb or enough U-235 to make a bomb. Either way, this is a serious problem.
“If it is only the U-235, then it could make a dirty bomb using conventional explosives to spread radioactive material for miles in some city center. If it is an operational bomb, all bets are off. For the first time, we have confirmed evidence that an enemy of this country has managed to smuggle nuclear material across our borders. We’ve dreaded this day coming. Well, it’s here.”
The Situation Room was silent.
Air Force general Ricardo Cruz, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, nodded to his adjutant, who sat with an open notebook computer in his lap. A greatly enlarged photograph of the IDF dog tag appeared on a screen covering one wall.
“The dog tag recovered from the sailboat belongs to an Israeli Navy lieutenant named Chaim Levi,” Gen. Cruz said. “We know absolutely nothing about his military service or training. The Israeli military is, or was, exceptionally secure about identifying individual soldiers. They had to be careful, considering that their enemies’families could have been living down the block from their soldiers’families. We do know that when he wasn’t in the navy, he worked at a beach resort. He was a sailing instructor, among other things.”
“How in the hell did you learn that?” Quaid huffed. “You can’t tell me whether this guy was a nuclear spy, but you know he taught sailing,”
Cruz whispered with his aide.
“Evidently, sir, we googled him.”
President Quaid slammed his hand on the table.
“Well fuck me to high heaven,” he said. “How many trillions of dollars have we spent on intelligence gathering and all we can do is the same thing a twelve-year-old would do. Let’s keep this bit of information to ourselves. Is that understood?”
“Uh, Mr. President, we do have a photo of Levi,” Gen. Cruz said. “The hotel was affiliated with a Swiss hotel chain and they never removed it from their website.” It showed Levi on the beach, sailboats visible over his shoulder. He was smiling and tanned, and wearing the skimpiest of bathing suits. The photo caption identified him by name.
“That is our nuclear terrorist?” Quaid said. “He looks like he’d be happier on a surfboard than a warship. Okay, we know the guy’s name. We know what he looks like. Let’s find him and question him. Gen. Paterson, I take it you are about to take this man into custody.”
“Actually, Mr. President, if he is on US soil, jurisdiction belongs to the FBI, not Homeland Security. We’ll fully brief them.”
“Okay, Mr. President,” McQueeney said. The FBI fell under the Department of Justice. “We’ll get started immediately. It will be massive, Mr. President. Unprecedented.”
“Good. What about the rest of the Israelis, the ones we’re holding?” Quaid asked.
Gen. Paterson spoke. “We’ve located a facility, Camp Edwards on Cape Cod. Just cleared out the last hurricane refugees. It’s a fully secure facility. Otis Air Force Base there used to stock nuclear weapons. It’s tight, sir, triple razor wire circling the entire installation. Just waiting for your go ahead.”
“You’ve got it. Is there any indication the military from the two ships hooked up with this Levi guy or with the bomb?” Quaid asked.
“No proof, sir,” Gen. Paterson said. “Actually, we don’t know one way or the other since we don’t know who they are or even if we are holding them. I can tell you that nobody we have in custody matches any of the names on the dog tags we recovered from the harbor.”
“With all due respect,” Gen. Cruz interrupted, “is there some rule that says spies have to give their real names when they are captured? Of course these people won’t voluntarily tell us who they are, especially if they’re involved with a nuclear bomb being smuggled into the country. We’re going to have to get it from them through interrogation, which is one more reason to have them in military rather than civilian custody.”
“That brings me to my next point,” Quaid said. “I’ve received legal guidance from people I trust on this point.”
The attorney generaland Carol Cabot glared at each other, each suspecting the other. Both were wrong.
“Immediately after this meeting I will be issuing a presidential finding and directive that the people taken from those two freighters are declared to be, uh, enemy combatants. Every one of those people joined an operation that included taking up arms against the United States and killing US military personnel. They are each to be considered enemy combatants and to have only the rights of enemy combatants. They are now under military jurisdiction. Not the immigration service. Not the Justice Department. Is that clear?
“And one more point,” the president added. “Based on the legal advice I’ve received, I will be submitting a request to Congress tomorrow for legislation affirming the revocation of federal court jurisdiction for all claims brought by enemy combatants, confirming that the law that brought to an end all those lawsuits by Guantanamo detainees years ago applies to present enemy combatants, too.”