He wasn’t sure yet what kind of advantage this gave him, but it was an advantage, to be sure. He felt new hope… and a flash of bravery.
“Before we make that radio broadcast, however,” Adler continued, “there is an important unloading operation that must be completed. Mr. Brayson, who is the best crane operator you have aboard?”
“You can go to hell!” Brayson said. He felt Alicia’s gaze on him, and it hurried his words along. “You can hold us all hostage, but you aren’t going to make us work for you. You’re not paying us enough for that!”
“Your lives are your payment, Mister Brayson! You are the man charged with the safety of the lives of three hundred twelve men and women aboard this facility! If you wish to preserve those lives, you will do what I say!” Adler’s hard gaze sweep across the crowded room. Then, with a swift, smooth motion, he slid the automatic pistol out from under his belt, and half a dozen of the platform workers shrieked as Adler brought the weapon up and aimed it directly into the crowd.
He’s going to kill someone, Brayson thought with an inward cry of despair and horror. He’s going to kill someone just to show his power over us! And for a horrible, irrational moment, Brayson thought the man was going to shoot Alicia.
Then Adler shifted his aim suddenly to the left and held it, arm extended straight out from his body, the pistol’s barrel aimed directly at James Dulaney’s head.
“I told you, Mr. Brayson,” he said with a voice as cold as the North Sea’s bottom currents. “Any act of disobedience will result in the immediate execution of five of your people. I will start with that one.”
“No!” Brayson shouted. He started forward, but one of Adler’s men grabbed his arms and held him back. “No,” he said again, more softly, all trace of rebellion or defiance gone in that one brief flash of horror. “I’ll… I’ll tell you anything you want to know. Please!”
Adler continued to stand with his arm and the pistol extended. Though the others sitting near Dulaney had pulled back, the young plant manager had remained where he was. His eyes were closed, his face ghost-white, and he seemed to be muttering something under his breath. Adler remained motionless… then finally seemed to make up his mind. He relaxed, raising the muzzle of the weapon and snicking the safety up with his thumb.
“Your best crane operator?”
“That’s me,” another voice said from the crowd. Jeff Nolby stood slowly, an immense giant of a man, with powerful hands and arms, and with a bushy red moustache that somehow complemented his completely bald head.
Adler looked to Brayson for confirmation, and he nodded. “That’s him.”
“Name?”
“Nolby,” the giant growled.
“Well, Mr. Nolby. Within a few more hours, another vessel is going to arrive, a German fishing trawler named Rosa. She is carrying some very special cargo aboard. I will expect you to use all of your no-doubt-considerable skill to hoist that cargo out of the Rosa’s hold.”
“What is it?” Brayson said softly, his voice close to shaking. “A bomb?”
“Insurance, Mr. Brayson. Insurance to guarantee the success of my mission.”
15
“The announcement was put out over the BBC on their noon news,” Phillip Buchalter said. He looked down at his Rolex, tugging back the cuff of his Saville Row jacket to reveal its face. “That was just over two hours ago. There have been no further communications from this Adler person since.”
“He can’t be serious,” Frank Clayton said, shaking his head. “God, he can’t be fucking serious!”
Gloom and worry permeated the room, as heavy as the ornate, nineteenth-century decor so carefully restored over the past decade. Nine men sat at one end of a long, polished oak table large enough for sixty. Together, they were facing a nightmare long expected.
Each had hoped it would be a nightmare deferred. With the BBC broadcast of two hours before, that hope had just been dashed. After years of being the stuff of fiction, spy thrillers and the like, nuclear blackmail by terrorists had just become reality.
Buchalter was the current President’s advisor on national security, and as such was responsible for the day-to-day operation of the National Security Council. Most of the men present were members of the NSC Principals Committee, one of the three subgroups of the Council formed during President Bush’s reorganization of the group in 1989. Among them were Frank Clayton, the new White House Chief of Staff; Secretary of State James A. Schellenberg; General Amos C. Caldwell, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; Secretary of Defense Ronald Hemminger; and, rumpled as always in his tweed jacket, Victor Marlowe, Director of the Central Intelligence Agency.
Normally, each of these singularly powerful men was attended by a small army of aides and staff members, but this afternoon the foot soldiers were restricted to a half-dozen or so men and women who waited, standing, at the far end of the room until they might be needed. This meeting of the Principals Committee was both secret and urgent. A special brief was being prepared for the President, a man not known either for his expert grasp of foreign affairs or for his patience, and there was no time to be lost on preliminary meetings or group discussions.
Three of the men at the table were not members of the NSC but had been brought in to assist with the brief’s preparation. The white-haired, professorial-looking man at Marlowe’s side was a second spook, Brian Hadley, the head of the CIA’s Office of Global Issues. Next to him, dapper and trim as always, was Sir George Mallory, the British ambassador to the United States.
The ninth man at the table wore one of the two military uniforms in the room, but his was the blue and gold of a Navy rear admiral, as opposed to the khaki of General Caldwell’s Army uniform. Admiral Bainbridge was the commanding officer of Navy Special Warfare Group Two, a simple enough name that was generally reduced in true Navy acronymic fashion to the jawbreaking mouthful NAVSPECWARGRU-2. The unit included the East-Coast based SEAL teams: Two, Four, Seven, and Eight, plus Helicopter Attack Squadron Light Four. He’d been in Washington attending a series of meetings at the Pentagon when an NSC driver had appeared, with orders for him to report to the Situation Room Support Facility at once.
Bainbridge was no stranger to this room. He’d been here many times before during his career, as advisor during other crises, though it certainly didn’t look like the popular view of such a place — all computers and consoles and wall-sized monitors and screens. The room, once known as the Crisis Management Center, had been carefully restored so that there was no hint that the nineteenth-century decor hid twenty-first-century electronics and telecommunications equipment. For eighty years, in fact, Room 208 of the Executive Office Building had been the office of the Secretary of State, starting with Hamilton Fish during the Administration of President Ulysses S. Grant, and ending with George Marshall in 1948. Cordell Hull had ejected Ambassador Kichisaburo Nomura and Special Envoy Saburo Kurusu from this very room early on a certain Sunday afternoon in December 1941. Forty years later, the Reagan White House, seeking to expand the hopelessly cramped and inadequate facilities of the Carter Crisis Management Center in the White House basement, had taken over this room for the purpose. Sometimes the President himself met here, though more often, as today, it was used by members of the National Security Council to make their decisions and prepare their recommendations, which one or several of them would submit to the Oval Office later.