“Let’s hope he does, but don’t count on it,” McGarvey said. “He spent thirty million to get the bomb, and he means to use it. Which means he has a carefully worked out plan and a timetable. Neither of which we know.”
“We’ll have to keep this from the public to avoid a panic,” the State Department representative said.
“I agree,” Rudolph said. “But if we’re going to have any chance of heading this off before it gets here we’re going to have to pool our resources. All our resources.”
“Agreed,” McGarvey said.
The door at the rear of the auditorium opened and Rencke came in. He was pushing an aluminum case loaded onto a handcart. Elizabeth came in right behind him and took a seat in the back row as he started to the front.
McGarvey turned up the lights. “Dick Adkins will coordinate the operation from our crisis center. Besides the usual computer links we’ll maintain a twenty-four per-day hotline, and I would like each of your departments to do the same.”
“This has to be a two-way street in more than name only,” Rudolph said.
“You have my word on it,” McGarvey promised. “Are there any questions?”
Rencke had reached the stage. He lifted the aluminum case off the cart with some difficulty, and brought it up on the stage where he set it down on the table to the left of the podium.
“I have a question,” Rudolph said. “Is that what I think it is?”
“Yes, it is,” McGarvey said.
Rencke keyed the five-digit combinations on the two locks, released the latches and opened the lid of the case, which was about the size of a large suitcase. Next he activated the keypad and entered an eleven-digit code. Immediately an LED counter across the top of the keypad began to count down by the hundredth of a second from ten minutes.
“This is one of our nuclear demolition weapons,” McGarvey said. “But it’s almost identical in design and operation with the Russian version. Before you leave this morning I’d like you to come up and take a look at what you’re going to be dealing with.”
Rudolph was the first on the stage, and he looked up nervously from the keypad. “This thing is running,” he said. “The physics package in this one is a dummy,” McGarvey said.
“What does it do when it hits zero?” Don Marsden, from the State Department’s special unit on counterterrorism asked.
“I don’t know,” McGarvey admitted. He turned to Rencke.
“I don’t have a clue either,” Rencke said. “But it might be interesting to stick around and find out.”
Marsden grinned nervously. “I’d like to, but I have to get back to my office.”
“Me too,” Rudolph said.
McGarvey stayed to answer a few more questions, but everyone went with Adkins to get their briefing diskettes by the time the counter on the dummy bomb hit zero. McGarvey was staring at it, but nothing happened. It hit zero and the keypad went blank.
Rencke relocked the case and loaded it on the handcart. “The army wasn’t happy about admitting they had this, let alone letting us use it,” he said. “But it impressed the hell out of everybody.”
“I hope so,” McGarvey said tiredly. He just couldn’t seem to get his act together. It was as if he was a couple of paces behind himself, and couldn’t catch up, and he found himself being distracted by stray, disconnected thoughts that had nothing to do with the present moment.
Elizabeth came from the back of the auditorium and gave her father a critical look. “Are you okay, Daddy?” she asked. “Maybe you should go over to Bethesda after all and let the doctors look at you. Then go home, at least until morning.”
“I’m making an early night of it, I promised your mother. But I still have work to do, and the general and I are briefing the President this afternoon.”
“My search engines are all in gear. If there’s anything out there we’ll find it,” Rencke said. “In the meantime if you’re up to it I want to run some eyes and voices past you. I might be able to come up with an IdentiKit portrait of bin Laden’s chief of staff from what Alien was able to tell me, and what you can come up with. At least it might narrow down the search.”
“Run a parallel search with my background plugged in,” McGarvey said.
“Do you think that you’ve met this guy before?” Rencke asked excitedly.
“Maybe, but I just can’t put my finger on where, or in what context. He sounded English, but I don’t think he was.”
“What makes you think that?” Elizabeth asked.
“I don’t know, sweetheart, just something in my gut.” He was feeling disconnected again, and he looked up to make sure that the room lights hadn’t gone out because his vision was starting to get dark. He followed Rencke and Elizabeth up the aisle and out of the auditorium, his left hand trailing on the seat backs for balance. Bits and pieces of Voltaire were running around in a jumble in his head, but they made no sense. For the first time since he could remember he truly felt afraid.
CHAPTER TWENTy-TWO
The M/V Margo smashed directly into the increasing waves. By the time the crew had finished checking the cargo integrity in the seven holds the storm had fully developed. The weather report from Karachi was wrong. By now the winds had passed the predicted maximum of forty-five knots and were gusting at times to more than seventy knots. Almost a category-one typhoon. Captain Panagiotopolous was confident that his ship could handle the storm, but he wasn’t so sure about some of his crew, many of whom were inexperienced, or about the two hundred-plus containers chained to the cargo deck, some of which had already started to come loose.
He stood on the bridge looking down at the floodlit deck. Rain swept horizontally, and each time the bows came crashing down, seawater inundated the ship back to the superstructure, carrying away anything that wasn’t tied down. Schumatz and three of his deck crew were down there now re rigging the chains holding a stack of forty-foot containers, six high and four wide. The captain had thought about turning the Margo downwind to give the crewmen a dry deck, but the roll would be worse and the chances for an accident sharply increased. If one of the truck-sized containers came loose it could start a chain reaction that could sweep every container off the deck and possibly even cause enough damage to the ship to disable or sink her.
The irony would be superb, he kept telling himself. One third of the deck cargo consisted of Chinese-made life rafts packed into fiberglass containers bound for San Francisco. His walkie-talkie squawked.
He keyed it. “This is the captain.”
“We got the bastard,” Schumatz shouted over the shrieking wind.
“This blow is likely to last another twenty-four hours.”
“A link in one of the chains shattered. I’m telling you that it was a one-in-a-million chance. There must have been a void or a crack in the sonofabitch bar stock.” “Check all the others.” “That’ll take half the goddamn night.”
“All the chain came from the same chandler. You know what it means if a container comes loose.”
A white-faced First Officer Green was looking at him. Panagiotopolous gave him a reassuring nod.
He keyed the walkie-talkie. “Do you copy that?” “I hear you,” Schumatz shouted. “Do you want some more help?”
“No, goddammit. Just keep this bastard as steady as you can.”
“The conditions will probably get worse so check the inner stacks first.”
“Run the bridge, Panagiotopolous, and let me do my job,” Schumatz shouted.
The captain bit back an angry retort because his deck officer was correct. He looked out the window as Schumatz appeared from behind one of the stacks. Schumatz had to brace himself against one of the containers to keep his footing as he looked up at the bridge. He stood like that for a moment to make the point that the decks were his territory, and then disappeared again.
The crew’s comfort and happiness were always second to the safety of the ship. Always. And Captain
