“CYA?”
“Cover your ass. Or arse, as you Brits might say. As long as the people reading the document as it makes its way up the ladder can truthfully say, ‘This looked as though it was done according to proper procedure, and I handled it according to proper procedure,’ they never have to actually think about the damned thing. Somewhere up the line, someone will have enough weight to really read the thing and say, ‘Hub?’ By then, though, they’ll have to go along with it. What are they going to do, call up the bad guys and say, ‘Uh, excuse me but have you seen our SEAL Team?’ ”
Wentworth laughed.“ ‘Won’t you please send them home?’ ”
“‘They’ve been very bad boys. I’m sorry if they bothered you.’ ”
“Assuming your own people don’t shoot you,” Wentworth said after a moment, “we do still have a problem. Have you thought through the implications of what might happen if we fail?”
Murdock looked up sharply. “ ‘We’? I don’t remember inviting you.”
“Be reasonable, Leftenant. You’re going to need help to deploy, right? A boat. Or a helicopter. And you’ll need backup. Extraction cover and transport. Maybe special weapons and ammo. Reinforcements. Radio net coverage. Am I right?”
“Well…”
“Besides, we need that intel too, and if the Defense Ministry makes up its mind to launch an assault, it would be nice to have our team already in place. So First Troop is in too. Now, answer my question. What if we fail? Can we risk failure?”
“You’re asking whether we can afford the possibility of the bad guys setting off their bomb.” Wentworth nodded, and Murdock pressed ahead. He began ticking off points on his fingers. “Okay. First, we don’t know they have a bomb. That has got to be the number-one question Washington and London are both asking right now, and we can answer it for them.”
“Maybe. If we get close enough.”
“Two. Assume they do have a bomb.”
“We have to, damn it. If nothing else, there’s the radioactivity on that Korean woman’s clothing.”
“Agreed. And they’re not going to touch the thing off at the first sight of combat swimmers.”
“You seem awfully sure of yourself about that.”
“Stands to reason. Push the button and…” Murdock shaped a mushroom cloud with his hands. “Boom. And that leads to some very serious consequences.”
Wentworth laughed, a dry, forced bark. “No! Now pull my other one.”
“No, I mean it. Serious consequences for them, for their cause. Remember how Saddam’s eco-terrorism backfired on him?”
“Yes.” Wentworth hesitated, then his eyes widened. “Yes! You think this PRR is going to be concerned about world opinion.”
“Hell, they have to. Saddam threatened to blow up all the oil wells in Kuwait if the forces leaning on him didn’t back off. He also threatened to set loose an enormous oil slick in the Persian Gulf. When Desert Storm kept storming, he did both. All he managed to do was convince the rest of the world that he was as crazy, as vicious crazy, as we’d been saying all along.”
“That was war, of course.”
“And terrorism isn’t? In fact, my impression always was that the terrorism of the seventies and eighties was designed to convince nice, soft, comfortable people in the West that they were now in a war zone, potential targets. Americans… hey. Wars between Arabs and Israelis, that didn’t bother them, right? Didn’t strike home. But when an airliner blows up and some of the passengers are from your home state, when suddenly it takes a couple of hours longer to check aboard your flight because of the security precautions, when laws are being passed that take away some of the freedoms you’d taken for granted up until then… when suddenly you’re fucking inconvenienced, you’ve become part of the war. And that’s exactly what those groups were after.
“Well, after a while, most of the terror groups learned that they were sending the wrong message. Westerners started thinking of all Arabs as barbarians or worse, as crazed fanatics. Elite units that fought terrorists — the SAS, the SEALs, Delta Force — well, they were the heroes. It hurt the tangos’ cause, drove a damned stake through it. After a while, terror groups like the PLO that needed legitimacy started talking about diplomacy and peace instead of car bombs. The only ones left tossing bombs around are the ones who really do think they’re at war with the West, or who do it for revenge.”
“Or for the thrill of seeing the write-up in the London Times.”
“Maybe. Better example… when the Provos started getting bloody in the seventies, the IRA’s funding in the States started drying up. A lot of their money originally came from Irish-Americans, especially in Boston and New York, but Americans wouldn’t bankroll terrorists.”
“Most Americans, anyway. But I take your point. Setting off a nuclear device in the North Sea, ruining the economics of the five or six countries that depend on North Sea oil and fishing productivity, causing massive unemployment, spreading radioactive fallout across a quarter of the continent and blackening the beaches with radioactive sludge… bad show, really. And a very bad press.”
“I think it was Mao who said a guerrilla has to swim with all the other fish in the sea. He can’t alienate the people he’s trying to liberate. And that nuke, believe me, would alienate a lot of people.”
“You don’t think the general population will respond to this idea of a nation without boundaries? If it means membership in the nuclear club?”
“Look at the hits in world opinion that the U.S. has taken for being the only nation in history to use atomic bombs in war. These people know that if they touch off a nuke, they’re going to be remembered the same way.”
“Some of those people out there,” Wentworth said. He stopped, then shook his head. “They might like the publicity.”
“Not these people. They’re looking for political power. And they won’t rock the boat, won’t want to rock the boat, I mean, with the North Koreans bankrolling them and providing them with noisy toys. My guess is that they’ll be damned careful about setting off their device, if only because they need Pyongyang to supply them with more bombs, and the North Koreans don’t need to find themselves at the receiving end of an antinuke crusade any more than the tangos do.”
“So, what’s your point? That the terrorists won’t set off the bomb? Assuming they have one, of course.”
“No. That they’re not going to be so itchy-twitchy to set it off that they’ll push the button the moment they catch sight of one of us. My guess is they won’t push the button until they have absolutely no other choice. As long as the bomb hasn’t gone off yet, they still have a hold on us, a way to manipulate us. If they set it off, they’ve got to know that the whole world is going to brand them as monsters, as outcasts, and at least a dozen governments aren’t going to rest until every last one of them is hunted down. Where’s their political power then?”
“You know,” Wentworth said with a faraway look in his eyes. “That actually makes a crazy kind of sense.”
“There’s one more reason nothing will happen,” Murdock said.
“And what is that, then?”
“The crazy sons of bitches aren’t going to see us, that’s why. In and out, sneak and peek. SEALs are good.”
“Not to mention modest.”
“And truthful. At least while operating UNODIR.”
“Okay. Let’s say I buy into all this. What’s your idea?”
Murdock had been thinking about such an operation for some time now, ever since the communication had arrived from Washington. He began sketching the outline for Wentworth, and the SAS colonel, listening carefully, began to smile.