And at the end of the table, isolated by his civilian clothes, was the suit from Langley. Brian Hadley didn't look like a spook small, rumpled, and nearsighted, with the frizzy white hair of a university professor but he was supposed to be one of the best analysts in the CIA's Intelligence Directorate, head Of the Office of Global Issues.
Hadley had arrived, Mason knew, only moments ago from the Executive Office Building, where the National Security Council staff had been meeting round the clock since this current crisis had broken loose.
Mason walked to the end of the long mahogany table, taking his place behind the podium there. The other men in the room, most of whom he knew well, watched him attentively.
"Very well, gentlemen," Mason said, gripping the sides of the podium. "You've all been following the situation, and you know why we're here. For the past twenty-four hours, the Japanese plutonium ship Yuduki Maru, with two tons of weapons-grade plutonium aboard, has been off course. She is out of radio contact and, until we can determine otherwise, we are assuming that this is a terrorist incident and are classifying it as a Broken Arrow."
The men around the table shifted uncomfortably. Broken Arrow was the code phrase for any accident with nuclear weapons specifically with U.S. weapons accidentally launched or jettisoned, such as had happened back in the sixties with the crash of a U.S. aircraft carrying nuclear weapons off the coast of Spain.
The provisions for calling a Broken Arrow alert, however, included the theft or loss of any nuclear weapon or radiological component, or any situation where there was a real or implied public hazard from that component. The fine points had been debated in both the Pentagon and the White House already; the plutonium aboard the Yuduki Maru belonged to Japan and was not the direct responsibility of the U.S. government. Still, the United States had assumed an indirect responsibility for the plutonium. American firms had sold the original uranium to Japan in the first place, and perhaps more to the point, two tons of radioactive plutonium represented a terrific danger, both to American interests and to America's allies. If terrorists had indeed hijacked the Yuduki Maru, they were not likely to be sympathetic to U.S. interests.
Reinforcing this, Mason went on to discuss the evidence that this was the act of terrorists. "The Shikishima," he said, "the freighter's Maritime Safety Agency escort, has been confirmed sunk. At about 1530 hours yesterday local time, the Greenpeace yacht Beluga encountered the oil slick and some floating bodies. Beluga and other vessels in the area have been alerted to keep an eye out for survivors, but at this point we are not hopeful.
"We were able to pinpoint Yuduki Maru immediately and confirm that she is now cruising almost due north at eighteen knots. As of 1300 hours our time today, she was two hundred miles off Pointe Itaperina that's the southeastern corner of Madagascar. Our intelligence on the situation so far is limited. There has been no communication from her crew, and attempts to contact her have been ignored. We have no idea who is in command now, what group, faction, or government is responsible, or what the freighter's new destination might be."
"How the hell was the escort sunk?" Captain Whittier, of SEAL Two, wanted to know. "Sabotage?"
"Possibly, though security was extraordinarily tight on both vessels before they left Yokohama. At the moment, we're operating on another, rather disturbing possibility." Mason opened his briefcase and removed a folder stamped Top Secret. Inside were two eight-by-ten-inch black-and-white photographs, which he passed around to the other men at the table.
"As you can see from the inscription," Mason continued, "both photographs are of the Iranian naval facility at Bandar Abbas, right on the Straight of Hormuz. The first one was taken on 4 May. Note the two submarines in the upper left."
"Kilos," Captain Harrison, the CO of SEAL Eight, said, "The Iranian Kilos."
In 1992, amid considerable international controversy, Russia had delivered to the Republic of Iran two conventional attack submarines of the type known in the West as Kilo. Displacing 2,900 tons submerged, with a top underwater speed of twenty knots, they'd been designed by the old Soviet Union primarily as a commodity for export. Algeria, Poland, Romania, and India all had Kilos in their fleets, and possibly CSCUBA and Libya as well. Each was armed with twelve 533mm torpedoes.
"The second photograph was taken by a KH-12 satellite two days later, on 6 May. One of the submarines, note, is gone. We have identified the missing boat as the Enghelab-i Eslami. That's Farsi for the Islamic Revolution."
"Let me get this straight, Captain," Admiral Bainbridge said. "You're saying that the goddamn Iranians could be behind this?"
Mason faced him squarely. "There is no hard evidence to that effect, Admiral. At least not yet. But one possibility we must consider is that an Iranian submarine torpedoed the Shikishima, and that at the same time, a terrorist component aboard the plutonium freighter seized the ship. The Yuduki Maru's new course is consistent with a port in Iran."
"And this Iranian boat has been missing all this time?" Bainbridge asked, "Almost two weeks?"
"You know it's never as easy as it looks in the movies, Tom," Admiral Kerrigan told him.
Bainbridge scowled. "I thought we had subs in the Gulf watching the sons of bitches?"
"We did," Kerrigan said. "We've had an attack boat stationed in Bahrain ever since the Iranians took delivery of those boats, a blanket warning to them not to get cute with shipping in the Gulf. But tracking a submarine in the open ocean's tough, especially a conventional boat. They're quieter than nukes. No cooling pumps for the reactors. Our sub, the Sturgeon-class attack boat Cavalla, headed out after the Revolution as soon as we realized the Iranian boat was gone. We also have other attack subs converging on that area, but, well, it's a big ocean. Remember the flap a few years back, when that North Korean freighter carrying missile parts to the Gulf just disappeared? And that was with subs searching for her, satellites, the whole nine yards."
"Yeah, but I have a sneaky suspicion you'll find the bastard if you concentrate on the area around that Japanese freighter," Captain Whittier observed.
"I must stress again that Iranian involvement at this point is strictly hypothetical," Mason said. "We did not see the actual sinking of the Shikishima and our tracking of the Yuduki Maru so far has been through strictly electronic means."
"Electronic means?" Captain Friedman, the helo squadron skipper, asked. "What, radar?"
"An electronic transponder built into her superstructure," Hadley said. His speech, the way he said "transpondah," had the nasal twang of upper-class Massachusetts. "We used the same trick back in the eighties, tracking a load of fifty-five-gallon drums of ether we thought might lead us to a secret cocaine cartel lab in the Colombian jungle. The transponder's small, the size of a book, but it puts out a steady signal that can be pinpointed by an ELINT satellite in orbit. It was the change in position registered by our satellite that first told us yesterday something was wrong."
"My God," Bainbridge said slowly. "Didn't we have any spy sats following that tub? We should have been watching that ship twenty-four hours a day!"
"Our technical assets are limited, Admiral," Hadley said. "More than most people realize. We never have been able to provide full twenty-four-hour coverage of any one potential target."
"But damn it, this is the Jap plutonium ship!"
"We can still only watch the thing when our satellites are above the horizon, Admiral, and frankly, there just aren't enough satellites to go around. For the past few days, most of our watch time had been allotted to southern Iraq, following up on the aftermath of Blue Sky.