“Excellent.” Gil snatched a cigarette from Crosswhite as he was about to light it and stuck it between his own lips, bumming Crosswhite’s lighter at the same time. “Alpha, you’re the ranking petty officer after me, so you’ll play third fiddle.” He drew from the cigarette and exhaled through his nose. “I don’t anticipate a leprosy pandemic, so you should do just fine.”
The room broke up with laughter, and Alpha lowered his head, his face flushing. The joke was left over from Operation Bank Heist, during which the team had encountered an old woman infected with leprosy. She had lost most of her fingers to the disease, and her eyes had turned completely white due to an untreated trachoma infection. Upon seeing her up close and realizing with horror that he was in the company of a leper, Alpha had wigged out completely, forcing Trigg, his best friend on the team, to subdue him with a rear naked choke.
“Take heart, Alphabet,” Gil said with a smile. “We all have our weak spot — you just happen to be the only man among us to have found his.”
There was more laughter, and Alpha shook his head, crossing his arms and looking off across the room to see a tall, white-haired man he had never seen before standing in the doorway dressed in civilian clothes. He pointed at the man. “Gil.”
The laughter dropped off as Gil turned his head to see Bob Pope standing in the doorway with a red backpack over one shoulder.
“I hope I’m not interrupting,” Pope said, pushing his glasses up onto his nose.
“Not at all, Bob. This is your show. I’m just warming up the crowd.” Gil turned to the team. “Gentlemen, this is your boss, SAD director Robert Pope, whom you already know by reputation.”
All the team members had worked under Pope throughout their time as SOG operators, but this was the first time any of them had seen him.
“Hey, guys,” Pope said with a boyish smile, giving them a short wave. “How are you?”
None of the SEALs knew quite what to think. The man they saw standing before them in baggy khakis and a flannel shirt did not at all resemble the mysterious CIA spook they had previously imagined.
“Well, I suppose we’ll get to it,” he said, unzipping his pack and removing a stack of files, which he handed off to Gil. “If you’ll pass those around for me.”
Gil gave the stack to Crosswhite, who took one and passed the rest on.
“Okay,” Pope said, taking a seat on the edge of the table. “Open your files, and you will see a photo of a man named Muhammad Faisal. He’s the man you’re going to bring me. He is not only an American citizen but also a member of the House of Saud.” He went on to tell them the rest of what he knew about Faisal, ending with the disclosure of what little evidence there was linking him to the Chechen terrorist group RSMB.
The briefing took less than three minutes, and as Pope stood up and zipped his backpack closed, the SEALs sat looking at one another in open disappointment, scarcely able to believe the president had moved heaven and earth to bring them all together on such a paltry amount of actionable intel.
“Any questions?” Pope asked.
Trigg put up his hand. “Sir, if we know where to find this guy, why doesn’t the FBI just bring him in?”
“Because where’s the fun in that for us, Petty Officer Trigg?”
Pope smiled. “Kidding aside, the FBI has a list of rules they have to follow, and we can’t afford the risk of Mr. Faisal refusing to cooperate. If he’s detained and demands a lawyer — which he would be stupid not to do — the FBI will have to comply, and the time lost could cost us everything. We’re looking for a live nuclear weapon; that means all rules go out the window.”
Another SEAL named Speed, the team’s only black member, put up his hand. “What about NDAA?” This was the National Defense Authorization Act. “It doesn’t matter if you’re a citizen anymore. Anybody suspected of terrorism can be held without due process, right?”
Pope crossed his arms. “That’s a common argument these days, Petty Officer Hall, yes. One that many constitutional lawyers are still debating. But let us suppose for the sake of argument that it’s true; do you think the Saudi royal family would stand for us denying one of their own access to a family lawyer? And even if they did, suppose Faisal still chose not to talk. What then?”
“So you all see the dilemma,” Gil said. “Faisal is the one and only lead we have on the nuke, and that means we can’t afford to take any chances. This guy has to be taken and interrogated — by whatever means necessary — and nobody can know the US government had anything to do with it. We are going to make him vanish into thin air.
“And anyone who gets in our way is going wake up in the halls of Valhalla.”
“What kind of time do we have?” Crosswhite asked. “Couldn’t this nuke go off any minute?”
“It could,” Pope said. “However, September 11 is only two days away. I believe that’s our date. Now, flip to the last page.” He directed them to a photocopy of Iosif Hoxha’s cutaway sketch of the RA-115. “This is not an exact schematic, but it’s the closest approximation we have to a Soviet-made RA-115 two-kiloton suitcase nuke. As you can see, the weapon is of the gun-detonator design. Our most reliable intelligence indicates that it should weigh approximately one hundred pounds and fit snugly into a navy seabag.”
“That’s pretty small,” Tuckerman said.
“You begin to see what we’re up against,” Gil remarked.
“And no leads at all as to where it is?” asked Crosswhite.
“None,” Pope answered. “For all I know, it could be right here in this hangar — perhaps in one of your own seabags.”
Everyone glanced around, collectively focusing on Tuckerman seated at the back. They all knew him as the shadiest character on the team, and he hadn’t been given the nickname Conman without good reason.
“Don’t look at me,” he said with a smirk. “I don’t have the fuckin’ thing.”
Everyone laughed.
“Ah, yes,” Pope said. “Mr. Tuckerman, petty officer first class. It’s curious your teammates would choose to single you out at this moment. How are your poker skills these days, Mr. Tuckerman?”
Tuckerman sat up straight in the chair. “Just fine, sir. Why do you ask?”
Pope smiled. “Because why else would I liberate a pair of vigilantes from the brig if not to utilize the exceptional skills of one or the other? The renegade Captain Crosswhite here is talented, but he’s not exactly indispensable with that arthritic hip of his.”
Everyone faced the front again, looking wide eyed at Crosswhite; none of them knew anything about his and Tuckerman’s brief incarceration by the 82nd Airborne.
Crosswhite shrank a bit in his chair.
“Take good care of the company you keep, Captain.” Pope shouldered the pack to leave. “It seems to keep saving your life.”
26
Pope slipped into his hotel room to find Lijuan Chow asleep in bed. Her name meant “beautiful and graceful,” and she was definitely both, with a mind to match: a brilliant intelligence analyst and computer technician whom he’d recruited right out of MIT ten years earlier. She was thirty-four, exactly half his age, and over the past decade, he had come to love her with all of his soul, despite the folly of it. He stood watching her sleep — his peaceful Chinese princess — and was overcome by a profound sense of melancholia. Exactly when their relationship would come to an end, he did not know, but he knew that it must be soon.
He opened his laptop and went online to check in with the system back in Langley, making sure that all of his surveillance programs were still running nominally. Some of the programs were of his own design, and the intelligence they gathered went into his own personal database: everything from satellite photos to banking transactions. He was a very, very curious man about a great many goings-on around the globe, and he wanted to learn as much about the world as possible before he was finally forced into retirement. Some of his most secret programs would, of course, remain accessible to him even after his retirement, but he would have to be careful to limit his time in the cloud, because technology was constantly evolving, and his personal programs — many of which ran parallel to the CIA programs and accessed all of the same intelligence — wouldn’t likely remain secret forever.