Joint Task Force #2: America (8 page)

James rubbed the top of his head. “That baldness was from making fast turns under the sheets.”

Holman nodded. “I’ve heard those fast turns were searching for your bifocals.”

“Save the stogy.” James glanced at his watch. “The Joint Staff Cigar Club is meeting in the center of the Pentagon around fifteen hundred. We’ll sneak off and see what the gossip is in the Joint Staff, and you can impress them about how you get such a great smoke from a cheap cigar.”

“I’ll have you know these cigars cost . . .”

Tucker’s mind wandered back to two days after he passed her. It was a Friday night, after a few drinks at this Irish bar in Pentagon City. She had grabbed his arm
and insisted he come back to her place for coffee. He did, and stayed for breakfast. He recalled with a smile how the next morning the sheets wove over and under both of them, tangling their bodies between the linen. It was as if the bed had seen a massive fight and taken mystical actions to entrap them with the sheets. Moments later, when her eyes had opened, the sheets soon lost their entrapment. He grinned and surreptitiously glanced at the clock. While these two flags were pandering to some sort of Joint Staff cigar club, he would meet Sam.

“Commander, it’s not good protocol to laugh when your superiors are duking it out.”

Tucker’s thoughts raced back to the room. “Sorry, Admiral. I don’t know what I was thinking,” he lied.

“He was probably imaging how a man with such bad knees and old age could rub his hair off making fast turns anywhere, much less under the sheets.”

Admiral James held his hand up, palm out, and laughed. “This is fun, Dick. It’s always good to have you come up,” he said seriously as he stood. “Unfortunately, we only have a couple of hours before these two officers have to join you on the helicopter back to Little Creek Naval Base.”

Two hours!
Tucker’s mind reeled.
Two hours!
He hoped they didn’t mean today.

James reached over and flipped the intercom. “Chief, please ask Captain St. Cyr to join us.”

First impressions are always lasting impressions, Tucker’s father always told him. The Frenchman was immaculately dressed in his Navy whites with the familiar four stripes across his epaulets familiar to most every navy in the world. The face drew his attention. The French officer had his hard cover tucked under his left arm as he shook hands with Admiral James and Admiral Holman, his heels touching at a forty-five degree angle and him bowing slightly each time. The mustache—that was it. The dark mustache ran a thin line directly above the lip, with bare skin separating it between the upper lip and the nose. Shit! If he were going to have a mustache that tiny,
it’d be just as easy to draw it on. Tucker had had his own experiments with a mustache years ago. The French officer had to spend time nightly to keep a mustache that thin peeked and marked.

He reached forward and shook the man’s hand as Admiral James introduced them. Tucker was pleased to discover a firm grip. His father said you could always tell the caliber of a man by the firmness of his grip.
“Always give a firm grip—don’t try to break the other guy’s arm, but let him know you are glad to meet him. Don’t give him one of these dishrag shakes that make you want to run to the bathroom and wash your hands. Christ! I hate men who shake like that.”

TUCKER GLANCED AT HIS WATCH AS THEY ENTERED THE
Intelligence Briefing Room. Nearly an hour. The good news was the Navy had moved him to Crystal City across Interstate 395 from the Pentagon. The bad news was the Navy had moved him to Crystal City directly across Interstate 395 from the Pentagon. Seemed whenever anyone wanted to speak to him, he had to fight his way to the Pentagon, through increased security, diverted traffic, and humongous crowds of others trying the same thing. Then it took another hour to find where he was supposed to be in this five-sided wheel of national security.

“Admirals,” the tall, thin Navy Intelligence officer greeted as he extended his hand. “I’m Captain Lawford, sirs. I will be the briefer today. The briefing room is down the passageway to your right, second door on the left.” He glanced at his watch. “Sir, Admiral Marker will be here shortly.”

“Quite all right, Captain,” Admiral James said. “We’re a little early.”

The door opened behind them and in stepped a short brunette. Her brown eyes lit up as she saw James. “Duncan, good to see you.”

“Grace Marker, late again, I see.”

She shook his hand. “Seems to me you’re early.” She
turned to Dick Holman. “And, Dick Holman, what Christly twit convinced you to leave the sight of sea to travel inland to the Pentagon? Must be something really good.”

“Or something really bad,” Holman answered.

She turned to Tucker. “You must be Commander Raleigh,” she said, shaking his hand with both of hers.

“Yes, ma’am, I am.”

“Admiral James has told me you’ve fully recovered from your wounds and are ready to get back into the fight.”

“I feel much better.”

“You should. You couldn’t have felt much worse.”

Admiral Marker turned to Captain St. Cyr. Her smile broadened. “Captain St. Cyr, welcome to the Pentagon. I have established a traffic drop for you to exchange messages with DGSE, French Intelligence. You have several already there.”

With a slight accent, he replied, “Thank you, Admiral. You are most kind.” Shaking hands with her, he leaned forward, bowing slightly.

Admiral Marker jerked her hand back so fast she left the Frenchman’s hand extended in the air. Tucker grinned. She must have thought the Frenchman was going to kiss her hand. That would have been a story Sam would have appreciated.

“That’s good,” she said, her cheeks turning red with a slight blush. She turned to Admirals James and Holman. Grins spread from ear to ear on their faces. She waved her hand at them. “Don’t say a word, either of you.”

“Captain Lawford, the briefing ready?”

Five minutes later, a Senior Chief Intelligence Specialist stood at the front of the room, flipping through the Microsoft PowerPoint slides as Admiral Marker and Captain Lawford took turns exchanging comments on them. During this time, an Intelligence Specialist had delivered a sealed legal-sized envelope to the French Captain, who had been going through the messages inside of it.

“This is where it gets murky,” she said, nodding at the
French Navy officer. “And Captain St. Cyr may be able to help a little.”

St. Cyr pushed the messages back into the envelope.

She motioned the Senior Chief to go to the next slide. “This is the chart of the small inlet where the unidentified ship departed four days ago. As you can see, it is south of Abidjan, Ivory Coast. French Intelligence arrived on the scene within twenty-four hours of the ship’s departure. What they found were a lot of dead Africans and one barely alive. He passed a warning about loading a rusty steamship—at least that’s what he called it—and that a bunch of Arabs sailed it out to sea after they loaded it. Captain St. Cyr, does French Intelligence know anything more than what they’ve shared so far?”

The Frenchman straightened in his seat, nodding at the three Admirals before addressing his comments to Admiral James. “Admiral, I have been reviewing the recent reports from DGSE. To summarize and add what little new has been recovered, we received words of an explosion near this inlet called Inlet del Rouge, which translates to Red Inlet. It is seldom used, we thought, because the waters are heavily polluted with human waste. Nothing lives in this small body of water except bacteria. The next day was what we would call a slow day in Africa, so the duty officer decided to send a patrol to the inlet to check the story of the Africans.”

St. Cyr leaned forward, placing his elbows on the table and interlocking his fingers. “The entrance to this pier was open, and the smoldering shell of a truck was discovered. All around the truck, just inside the front gate, and along the sides of a nearby hill, were over fifty Africans—all but one was dead. The patrol thought at first that the truck had blown up on its own, killing the Africans. Africans sometimes overload transportation. What they discovered as they searched for survivors were some of the dead with single bullet holes to their heads. There would be no reason to put a bullet into the heads of people who are expected to die in an explosion, only to dispose of those who should survive one.” His hands parted as he held up
his index finger for a second. “One African was alive, but he died before an ambulance could get to him, but not before the patrol managed to interrogate him.”

Tucker watched the movement of the French officer as he spoke. The motions revealed taught muscles; biceps stretched the openings of the short sleeves belying a first impression of a thin, lanky, Frenchman. As he watched, Tucker casually observed sinewy muscles creating faint ripples beneath the white uniform. This was no normal Admiral’s aide-de-camp. What was his real job, he wondered?

“Based on what the man told before he died—about a huge square van so large a man could walk inside it—the patrol passed a code word to our military control center in Abidjan. Seems the van or container or whatever we call it suffered some damage, and the ones who had killed the Africans had waved a magic wand around it to check the damage. We dispatched a complete chemical-biological warfare team along with armed escorts to the inlet.” He paused for a moment, slowly raised his hands from the table, leaving the elbows on it, and spread his fingers, palm outward, toward the listeners. “Just before sundown, one of the team decided to run a Geiger counter along the pier.” He dropped his hands back on the table. “Nothing. Not a thing. He walked the pier, checked the few remaining boxes—of which nothing but rags were found—and still no detection. Unexplainable and against regulations, the sergeant forgot to turn off the Geiger counter when he had completed his check.”

St. Cyr cocked his head to the side. “This is because the machine—how do you say it—eats up batteries,
n’est pas?
” Without waiting for an answer, he nodded again to Admiral James. “As he walked past the hulk of the truck, the machine clicked. Startled, the noncommissioned officer waved it around the area, and as he approached the bed of the truck, the needle went off the scale.”

“What does that mean?” Admiral Holman asked.

“It means, Dick, that whatever they loaded from that
truck on board that ship is nuclear,” Admiral Marker added.

“That is true,” St. Cyr acknowledged. “The dead African said a heavy, dark van—probably black—was transported to the pier by the truck and loaded onto the ship. He did not say whether they loaded it into the hold or whether it was too big to fit. We think it could be tied topside on one of the weather decks. I would think the helicopter deck would be the better option. The other complication is that we do not know what type of ship it is. It could be a freighter; a collier; a cruise ship; a sailing vessel—though the size of the truck indicates it would be a large ship. A large enough ship to cross the ocean.”

“You see where we’re going with this, Commander Raleigh?” Admiral James asked.

Tucker shook his head. “Sorry, sir, I really don’t.”

“This ship that Captain St. Cyr has been telling us about is somewhere out there in the Atlantic Ocean. What we don’t know is where it’s going, and we don’t know for sure that it has a nuclear weapon on board.”

“Our analysis is very accurate,” St. Cyr objected.

“Most likely it would be a dirty bomb,” Admiral Marker interjected.

“That may be, Grace, but if that dirty bomb explodes in the Potomac, out there”—James pointed north—“near the Pentagon, it would contaminate everything within five to six miles.”

“But Duncan, we don’t know the size of it yet.”

“Grace, prepare for the worst and you’ll never be disappointed.”

“We know it’s loaded other supplies, but we’re assuming it’s the normal complement of food, water, and medicine for the voyage.”

“Since we’re unsure where the ship is headed, we have identified three possible destinations, using your concept of
worst case,
Duncan,” Admiral Marker said, drawing out the last words. “We believe the ship is heading to the east coast or gulf coast of the United States. British Intelligence believes the ship may be heading toward
Britain. The link between the Jihadists and the New IRA convinces them that since the New IRA did them a favor by going after you, Commander Raleigh, that the Jihadists owe a return favor. This theory complements the warnings to the British government that their unwavering support of America’s war on terrorism would be punished someday, and this day has been identified.” She nodded at St. Cyr. “The French, on the other hand, have ruled out Italy and any other country inside the Mediterranean Sea, because the choke points at Gibraltar and the Suez Canal are too guarded for a rogue vessel to successfully transit. Not to say one couldn’t get through, but it would be very hard at this level of heightened security. Conversely, the French coast along the Atlantic and Channel are vulnerable.”

“That is true, Admiral,” Captain St. Cyr interrupted, holding up a message in his hand. “But, as of a few hours ago, DGSE believes the target will be Rotterdam.”

“Rotterdam?” Tucker asked.

St. Cyr turned and looked Tucker directly in the eyes. “Yes, Rotterdam. Few people know that most of Europe’s sea trade uses containers; ergo, container ships are the primary means by which commerce enters Europe. The superlarge container ships that travel the seas have only three seaports in Europe in which they can safely dock. Rotterdam, Netherlands; Algeciras, Spain; and, Livorno, Italy. Algeciras is on the Atlantic side of the Strait of Gibraltar, but we can safely seal it away because Gibraltar itself stands guard over this strategic city.”

St. Cyr stopped and looked back at Admiral James, his eyes shifting as he talked between James and Holman. “Traffic into and near Rotterdam is thick. It would be quite impossible to inspect thoroughly every ship approaching this vital port. The Dutch Navy is aware and is increasing patrols. But if Rotterdam were shut down, then the economic fate of Europe would depend on how quickly another port could handle the merchant traffic or how quickly Rotterdam could return to service. Even a dirty bomb, as you call it, would effectively shut down
the only city on this side of Europe to handle our imports and exports.”