“Rupert?” Norton asked. “You have something?”
“I am hearing,” Hollingshead said, rising creakily to his feet, “a lot of sabers being rattled just now. A lot of people who wish to go and find and lynch every known terrorist just in case one of them was responsible.”
He smiled. It was his warmest, most genial smile, and Chapel knew it was one hundred percent fake. “Understandable, of course.”
“Clearly you disagree with that plan,” Norton said.
Hollingshead gave a contrite shrug. “I think it may be presumptive. A tad.” He walked across the room, over to the screen that still showed dust billowing around cargo containers, as if he’d noticed something there. He blinked through his spectacles at the image. “Since, after all, this was not a terrorist attack.”
The CIA director actually started laughing.
“What are you talking about?” the NSA director shouted. “Of course it is! Somebody hit us, some cowardly bastard who—”
Hollingshead lifted his hands in the air as if in surrender. Chapel knew his boss was just getting started, though. “Please. Just hear me out. We few, gathered here today, have been preparing for something like this ever since 2001. We have lost a great deal of collective sleep over the possibility of a dirty bomb attack. In all our scenarios and projections we imagined this as the worst possible way for terrorists to strike at us. And so we built up our defenses against such a thing. We organized all our efforts toward preventing any terrorist group getting their hands on nuclear material. But that’s just it, isn’t it? When one is in possession of a, um, hammer, well, every threat looks exactly like a nail.”
Norton’s brow furrowed. “Rupert, if you could get to the point soon, I’d appreciate it.”
Hollingshead smiled and even elicited a few sympathetic chuckles from the crowd. They weren’t quite enough to balance the glares he was getting from the CIA and NSA directors.
“Very well. I’ll give you three points, in fact. One. A terrorist attacks a public target. A visible target. Ms. Foster,” he said, turning to the woman who’d given the initial briefing, “have the gentlemen of the press been allowed into the port facility since the attack?”
Foster looked terrified at being called on. “No,” she said, “not… not as such. There have been some reporters out there — they saw the plume of dust — but they don’t know any details. The port’s security people told them it was a hazardous materials situation, but that was all. No specific facts.”
Hollingshead nodded. “Very well done. Best we don’t bring this to the public just yet. The port facility is off-limits to the public. Point one. Terrorists wish to gain media attention, to get the world to see what they’ve done. A terrorist attack is a statement, a message everyone has to listen to. At the moment, the net result of this attack is likely to be a two-minute segment on the local news broadcast in Louisiana. Not much of a coup.
“Point two: they always take credit. We’ve already heard there was no chatter about this. But that must also mean no one is crowing about their success. What terrorist group would be so tight-lipped?”
Norton looked like he was half convinced. “What’s your third point?”
Hollingshead nodded. “Subtlety. And intentionality. This attack wasn’t just meant to scare us. It was meant to quietly, but quite effectively, cripple us. Mister Secretary,” he said, blinking at a man who sat very close to the SecDef. Chapel realized after a second that he recognized the man — he was the secretary of transportation. Not somebody who would normally sit in on a top-level intelligence briefing. “You are here today because your office administers and oversees our port facilities, yes? Perhaps you can tell me what I need to know. How vital to American commerce is the Port of New Orleans?”
The secretary nodded, clearly excited to be included. “It’s one of our top priorities. Our only deepwater port with access to six railways, the highway system, cargo planes. Half of all our food travels through that port, every year.”
“I imagine that closing the port is going to cost us a great deal of money, even in the short term,” Hollingshead pointed out.
The secretary nodded and grinned. Then he seemed to realize this wasn’t a time for showing off and his face fell into a more serious cast. “It’ll cost a fortune just to reroute all the ships that were supposed to offload there in the next month. And the public is going to feel that cost. We’re talking about a rise in food prices, maybe as much as ten percent. And all kinds of goods go through that port, everything from luxury cars to medical equipment, all of that’s going to get more expensive, and—”
Hollingshead lifted one hand to cut the man off. “That’s a serious return on investment. One Predator drone in exchange for a massive disruption of American commerce. Mr. Norton, I’d like to suggest that this is far too subtle for any ham-handed terrorist to be responsible. I’d venture this was the act of a power that wished to hurt us economically. I will go so far as to claim this was an act of soft war.”
That got people murmuring, though many of the whispered comments were just people asking what soft war was. Chapel knew the answer. Soft war, or anti-infrastructure warfare, was going after an enemy’s supply routes rather than attacking their soldiers. You blew up their roads or cut their power grid, making it impossible for them to carry out an effective military strategy.
The CIA director jumped to his feet. “Of course you would suggest this,” he said, his face bright red. “You’re military intelligence. You want this to be the opening shot in some big theater conflict — you want—”
Hollingshead cut him off simply by standing up straight and setting his mouth in a hard line. The genial professor act was gone. Suddenly he looked more like an Old Testament prophet. “The last thing any soldier wants is another war. But when one comes along, he does not shirk his duty. Mr. Norton, if this was the work of Iran or North Korea or, God forbid, China—”
“You’re jumping to conclusions,” one of the civilian directors shouted.
“You have no evidence,” the CIA director insisted.
Hollingshead said nothing. He just looked at Norton, waiting for a reply.
For a while, as directors and generals bickered back and forth across the room, the SecDef simply folded his hands in front of him, almost as if he were praying. Then he drew in a very long breath.
“Give me a plan,” he said.
Hollingshead didn’t hesitate. “I have two operatives with me right now. I can get them to work immediately, investigating who did this. Give them twenty-four hours to dig. By all means let our analyst friends look into the terrorism angle — if someone claims responsibility or we hear any chatter, then, well, problem solved. If I’m right, however, we need to act decisively, right from the start.”
“Okay,” Norton said. “Do it. Whatever you need.”
Hollingshead moved through the room putting a hand on a shoulder here, whispering a word in an ear there, marshaling what support he could. Then he headed back out into the hallway, nodding for Wilkes and Chapel to follow. Once the door was closed behind them, he looked at his two men and then let out a long, chuckling sigh. “We have our work cut out for us, boys.”
“Yes, sir,” Chapel said.
The three of them headed toward the exit. Along the way Wilkes said, “Sir, you think it’s true? You think this is the start of a war?”
“Not for a moment,” Hollingshead confided. He stopped and glanced around, looking to see if anyone else was listening. “It’s possible, of course. When you spin a line of nonsense like that, you need to have plausibility on your side. But I just don’t see what quarter such an attack could come from. This was a technological attack — all of it done with computers. Neither Iran nor North Korea have the encryption know-how to do this. Russia and China might, but why would either of them want to start a war? Russia couldn’t win, and China would stand to gain nothing but losing their biggest market.” He shook his head. “No, this wasn’t state-sponsored. That much I feel sure of.”