The Last Line (44 page)

One of the sets of routes Teller had plugged into his laptop had generated a red field that covered everything from the Indian River Inlet north through Newark, then southwest toward the Susquehanna. One tentacle of blue extended just past the bridge at Conowingo and down Route 1 toward Baltimore.

“If they've been driving steadily for two and a half hours, no stops, no delays, they could have covered about a hundred twenty miles by now. That puts them here, about five miles southwest of the dam and maybe eight or ten miles northeast of Bel Air.”

“Unless they've been breaking speed limits,” Walthers pointed out.

“True … but if you were carrying a small nuke in your trunk and there was even a remote chance that the opposition knew about it, would you risk a traffic stop?”

“No. I suppose I wouldn't. But what if they're headed for New York City?”

“A possibility, but not a likely one. The NEST units up there will be covering the approaches to Manhattan. They're setting up a muon detector on I-95, too.”

“What the hell is a muon detector?” Dominique asked.

“
Big
unit,” Walthers explained. “A transmitter and a detector. It sends a stream of muons—a kind of subatomic particle—between the two. Muons pass through everything without slowing down—everything except for those elements that are
really
dense. Plutonium and uranium, specifically. Set it up at a bridge or a toll booth, transmitter on one side and detector on the other, and it sounds an alert if something passing between them reflects the muons instead of letting them through. It's the best tool we have for sniffing out nuclear weapons.”

“So we don't have a portable system for that yet.”

“Not for muons, no. If you want portable, you need the mobile Z-backscatter units, vans and helicopters. We've had backscatter vans patrolling the streets for a while now. Helicopter units are a bit more recent.” Walthers studied Teller's display for a moment longer. “So you're suggesting we go to the dam and then work our way southwest on 1?”

“Right. I understand other NEST units are covering D.C. farther south. But if we can tag this character before he gets close to a major city, I'll be a lot happier.”

“You're thinking a dead man's switch?”

“It's a possibility.”

“So, when we find him … what then?”

“I don't know,” Teller replied. “I'm still working on that part.”

 

Chapter Twenty-Three

INSCOM HQ

FORT BELVOIR, VIRGINIA

0201 HOURS, EDT

22 APRIL

“There they go,” Procario said.

The INSCOM Ops Center was crowded now with personnel, including CIA, DIA, and NEST officers. General Granger, Haupt, and Devendorf all were present, along with Wentworth from the CIA and the WINPAC officer, Larson, both looking haggard after being woken by late-night phone calls. One woman—Diane Cosgrove—had arrived from the White House, dispatched to INSCOM HQ by the national security adviser himself, Randolph Edgar Preston. The ANSA, she'd informed the group, was unavoidably in California that night, but she was there to observe the op and to advise the president in his place.

The president, she'd just informed the group, was on board
Marine One;
on his way out of the city.

Just in case.

It was a surreal scene. Formerly the Information Dominance Center, a cyber warfare facility, the INSCOM Ops Center was an exact replica of the bridge of the USS
Enterprise
out of
Star Trek: The Next Generation.
The place had actually been designed by the guy who'd created the
Enterprise
set. Any outside observer walking in would have thought he'd walked into
Star Trek.

The big display on the wall was showing a dizzying drop into a chaotic blur of night, glaring light, and spray. The image was being transmitted real-time from a camera mounted on the helmet of a U.S. Navy SEAL as he dangled fifty feet above the deck of a Kilo class submarine nine miles off the coast of New Jersey. The deck of the submarine swung and rolled alarmingly; two more SEALs hung suspended below the one with the camera, bulky with tactical vests, weapons, and equipment. The surface of the black water was lashed to white froth by the helicopter's rotor blast. Two faces, tiny and pale, looked up toward the camera from the submarine's sail.

“Now we find out if they're going to let us come aboard,” Colonel Devendorf said.

“Garret said they'd agreed to surrender,” George Haupt pointed out. “If they don't go through with it, he'll put a torpedo up their ass.”

“That may not be a good idea,” Granger said. “We don't want to detonate a nuke that close to our shoreline—or sink that Kilo and have it leaking radiation onto our continental shelf.”

“Then we'd better hope the bastards decide to play nice,” Procario observed.

“Do our people know there's a nuke on board that sub?” MacDonald asked.

“Of course they do,” Procario said. “They have to know what they're looking for, right?”

The USS
Pittsburgh
was still submerged out there somewhere, but with her radio mast and periscope above water. Garret had radioed a situation report shortly after the Russian submarine had surfaced, and INSCOM had immediately dispatched a platoon from SEAL Team Two out of Little Creek, Virginia, on board an HH-60H Seahawk Naval Special Warfare helicopter.

The VBSS team was fast-roping onto the Kilo's forward deck now, an extremely dangerous evolution to carry out in the middle of the night in a rough swell. The winds had been picking up, and there'd been some rain squalls passing through the area.

The SEALs, trained for operations in all weather, day or night, had gone in anyway. They were armed with H&K submachine guns and clad in black combat armored vests, night-vision devices, and tactical harnesses, which gave them a nightmarish look as they descended on the wallowing surfaced submarine.

The first two men on the line hit the deck and moved toward the open forward hatch; the camera view slid precipitously down, hit with a jar, and then began moving toward the hatch as well. The camera view swerved, jiggled, and swooped, and for a moment the watchers at INSCOM were treated to an up-close look at the rungs of a metal ladder as the SEAL descended through the forward hatch. The voices of the team members called back and forth to one another over the tactical net.

“Arc Five! Moving to the control room!”

“Arc Three! Going down one deck … entering torpedo room…”

“
Nazahd! Nazahd!
Move back!” A number of the SEALs spoke fluent Russian.
“Rukee v'vayrh!”

The scenes on the display showed cramped spaces, harsh lighting, men in blue jumpsuits backing out of the way of the VBSS boarders, putting up their hands in response to the harsh, shouted orders. It looked, Procario thought, eerily like one of those first-person shooter computer games, where you could see a gloved hand holding a weapon as the virtual soldier wound through a maze of passageways and rooms.

There was a small difference with this version, however. “Game over” did not mean a chance to start a new round of play.

“G'deh Kapetahn?”
one of the SEALs demanded.

“I am Captain Second Rank Basargin,” one of the blue-clad men replied in good English, stepping forward. “I
do
apologize. We appear to have suffered a failure of our navigational equipment, and have accidentally strayed into your waters.”

“So
that's
how they're going to play it,” Granger said.

NEST 2/2

ABOVE BEL AIR BYPASS

BEL AIR, MARYLAND

0210 HOURS, EDT

“I've got something!” Kaminsky yelled. “I've got a package!”

Teller looked up from his laptop and studied the gray-scale image on the big display.

The vehicle was a Jumbo SUV of some sort, too heavily transparent for him to guess the make and model. Two males were riding up front; the faint outlines of an AK-47 floated on the backseat. Brick-sized packages glowed with silvery-gray opacity everywhere—under the seats, tucked up inside the wheel wells, and massed in a sizable pile in the cargo space at the vehicle's back.

“I don't know,” Walthers said. “Does that look like a bomb?”

“It's low-Z material,” Kaminsky replied. “RTD is negative. No radiation.”

“It could also be shielded in lead. What do you think, Mr. Teller?”

Teller studied the image a moment. “I think what you have there is a drug shipment—cocaine, maybe heroin. Stashing it inside the wheel wells is an old, old trick.”

“So, do we nail 'em?”

Teller thought about it. They were probably looking at several tens of millions of dollars of cocaine packed into that car … and at addiction and misery for thousands of people.

What, he wondered, was the right thing to do? If they stopped to deal with that car and it turned out to be just drugs, they might miss the vehicle with the D.C.-bound nuclear weapon. If they just let the drug van go …

“Can we call the police?”

“Not a good idea, sir,” Walthers said. “They wouldn't have probable cause for a search, and we don't really want to admit that we're flying around up here peeking inside people's trunks, do we?”

“Very funny.”

“I'm not getting through to the county police,” Dominique said, her cell phone pressed to her ear. “They may have been called out to throw up roadblocks farther south.”

Teller called up another program. Sure enough, when he opened Cellmap, a cluster of blue icons turned up on the Bel Air Bypass: two on the highway, one—his own cell phone—showing just to one side. Might the handoff of the weapons have been made to some known East Coast dealers? He sighed. “Okay. We'll have to deal with it ourselves. They
might
have the weapon hidden under all of that low-Z stuff in the trunk, and we simply can't take the chance that it's not them.”

“Right.” Walthers picked up an intercom handset. “Okay … Skipper? We need to stop that SUV.”

REYSHAHRI

BUSINESS ROUTE 1

BEL AIR, MARYLAND

0214 HOURS, EDT

“What is going on over there?” Moslehi asked.

“Sounds like a helicopter,” Hamadi added.

Reyshahri had left the Bel Air Bypass moments before, in search of a twenty-four-hour gas station. He wanted to fill the rental's tank before beginning the run past Baltimore and down into Washington, and they all needed to stretch their legs and use the facilities. A convenience store with the unlikely name of Wawa offered gas, rest rooms, and food.

They'd just stepped out of the store when their attention had been grabbed by the low-voiced growl and
whup-whup-whup
sound of a helicopter, a big one. It sounded like it was coming from the bypass, only a kilometer or so to the west. A bright light came on, a glare in the sky behind the Saturn car dealership across the street from the Wawa.

“I don't know,” Reyshahri said. “But I think it wise if we go another way.”

They might be searching the major highways.

The four of them climbed into the car, Moslehi, this time, at the wheel. “Which way, then?”

Reyshahri pulled out a road map, studying it around his sandwich. He ate with some diffidence, taking small bites; he wasn't entirely sure he trusted this thing they called a “sub.” He'd specified something called “buffalo chicken,” avoiding ham, pork, bacon, anything prohibited by Islamic law, but the sauce was so spicy he wasn't sure what was in the thing.

“We need to get around Baltimore,” he said after a moment. “And that means to the west, so we don't have to go across the Key Bridge or take the Harbor Tunnel. Here.” His finger came down on a road. “We go a few more blocks down this street, then right onto Hartford Road. Single lane. We'll take that southwest until we find something that will get us around Baltimore.”

“Wonderful,” Moslehi said. “
More
small, backcountry roads.”

The strange sandwich, actually, was quite good. He took another bite, a larger one this time.

“Just drive,” he said around a mouthful.

NEST 2/2

BEL AIR BYPASS

BEL AIR, MARYLAND

0220 HOURS, EDT

The helicopter had come down in front of the SUV, forcing the vehicle to swerve onto the grassy center median. As the Super Stallion hovered, Teller, Dominique, and Walthers had descended the aft ramp, the two intelligence officers with pistols drawn, Walthers packing an M-4 carbine. The two men in the SUV had tumbled out, one of them waving the AK, but Teller had fired two quick shots into the man and knocked him down. The other had stepped back from the car, hands raised. “Don't shoot, man!
Don't shoot!
”

“Let's see what you've got in the car,” Dominique said. She went to the driver's side and popped the rear hatch.

“Hey … you guys DEA?” their prisoner demanded as Teller moved him well back from the car. “You
feds
? You need a warrant, man! We know our rights!”

“Why don't you talk to your friend here about your
rights,
” Walthers told him, stooping to pick up the AK. The wounded man, clutching his chest, was bleeding heavily.

Teller pulled an automatic pistol from the prisoner's waistband, handed it to Walthers, then spun him around, tripped him, and put him facedown on the grass. “Anything?” he asked Dominique, who was looking through the back of the car.

She emerged from under the open rear hatch with a plastic-wrapped brick in each hand. “No bombs. Just these.”

“
Bombs?
Shit, man, we ain't got no bombs!”

“Shut up.”

Dominique tossed the bricks back inside. “Looks like … I don't know. Three, four hundred kilos of cocaine.”