finding and destroying the oil rig’s single sideband radio used for communications with the company before a Mayday could be transmitted. Sat phones would present another problem, as would the crew and communications equipment aboard the tug.
And it came to him that he’d missed something obvious, something beyond the possibility that the contractor would be coming aboard with the media; in fact the man might have no need to take such a risk, not if he’d already managed to place one of his operators aboard. Probably as a deckhand. Someone who had worked on an oil rig at some point in his career.
It was late by the time he got back to Washington and cabbed it to his apartment in Georgetown, and he would forever remember that at this point he’d become a man in a hurry, and in some ways a man worried that he had been forgetting something important that could get a lot of people killed.
Gail was in bed, but not asleep when he let himself in, and she got up, a shy expression in her eyes on her face, as if she was worried that he’d brought her bad news. She was wearing one of his shirts. “How’d it go?” she asked.
“I found out how they’re going to sink the platform, but we might have caught a break,” McGarvey said, putting down his bag. And he knew just by looking at her what she was thinking and why, but he didn’t want to go there, not yet. “We’re flying down tomorrow afternoon. Can you be ready by then?”
“I’m packed,” she said, and she seemed to relax a little. “Why don’t you take a shower while I fix you something to eat, and we can talk.”
And McGarvey hesitated, wondering for just that moment what he felt about her, or if in fact he’d redeveloped the ability to feel something about anyone after his wife’s assassination. Too soon, he wanted to say, and he wanted to turn around and walk out. But in the end he couldn’t.
He went to her and took her in his arms. “After tonight we’re going to become a couple of professionals with a job to do. Nothing more. Understood?”
Gail nodded.
“I’ll take a shower, but forget the kitchen. Deal?”
“Deal,” she said happily.
“We can talk in the morning on the way down to the Farm.”
John Nowak, the new commandant of the CIA’s training facility at Camp Peary on the York River near Williamsburg, Virginia, was expecting McGarvey and had an escort at the main gate waiting to bring him and Gail down to the office. His was a new face to McGarvey, but according to Otto, morale at the Farm, which had taken a dive when Todd Van Buren and his wife Elizabeth were assassinated, was recovering.
He was a short, rotund man in his late forties or early fifties, with a red jowly face and a broad smile; he was a man who obviously enjoyed what he was doing, and when McGarvey and Gail got out of the Porsche SUV he came out and dismissed the young officer in training escort, and shook their hands.
“This is a great pleasure finally getting to meet you, Mr. Director,” he said effusively. He was dressed in camos, his boots bloused, a Beretta holstered across his chest. And his boots looked scuffed, well worn. Otto had said that appearances to the contrary Nowak could easily keep up with the youngest trainees; he’d been a top sergeant with the army’s Delta Force. “Mr. Rencke told me what you folks were in need of and we have everything ready for you. It just wants your approval before we pack.”
“Transportation?” McGarvey asked. He wanted to like the man, but it was difficult. The only reason the Farm had a new commandant was because Todd and Liz were dead.
“One of our Gulfstreams is standing by to get you and your gear down to Biloxi. We’ll keep your car here for the duration, if that’s okay with you. Or I can have someone take it wherever you’d like.”
“Here is fine,” McGarvey said.
He and Gail followed Nowak across the commons to a low brick building that served as the Farm’s armory and primary inspection center for new weapons sent down from Langley for field evals as well as a repair depot for everything the recruits misused or destroyed. Everything from Knight Armament Company personal defense weapons to Wilson and Rohrbaugh sidearms, to Colt Commandos, Sterling silenced submachineguns, MAC-10s, Steyr AUG 9mm paras, and especially AK-47s in a variety of configurations, plus at any given time a number of exotic weapons, most of which didn’t stand up to field trials.
“Mr. Rencke was quite specific that you wanted only the simplest, most tested equipment, including a variety of flash-bang grenades — we’ll give you a half-dozen Haley and Weller E182s, old but proven — along with a few small bricks of Semtex with a variety of fuses, night-vision oculars for each of you, our new body armor — a lot lighter and more flexible than the standard Kevlar vests, yet capable of stopping most armor-penetrating projectiles fired from handheld weapons — a pair of thermal imagers, plus our new EQ high-frequency comms units, which should work well in the environment you’ll be operating in.”
“What about weapons?” Gail asked.
“We’ll leave that up to you, but for reliability I don’t think you can get too far off the mark with the standard Beretta 92F for a sidearm, and for a close-in balls-to-the-wall firefight, the Franchi SPAS-12 automatic shotgun.”
“Weight will be an issue,” Gail said.
“Can’t help with the ammunition, but we’ve managed to shave a considerable amount of weight from any weapon you might chose,” Nowak said. “But if you’ll pardon me saying, ma’am, I believe you can handle yourself. I know about your father. He was a good man in a bad situation.”
Gail asked how he knew.
“I do my research. Like to know something about the people I’m sending into the field.”
Jeane Davis, a petite woman with large brown eyes and long chestnut hair up in a bun, worked as the chief armorer for the camp, and she was ready for them. Like Nowak she was new since Todd and Liz, and like Nowak she had a ready smile and pleasant demeanor.
“I’m told that you’ve switched back to your Walther, in the nine millimeter version,” she told McGarvey. “Not much stopping power, but then I’ve learned that you prefer the head shot, so caliber isn’t so important. Will you be sticking with that weapon for this op?”
“Unless you have another suggestion.”
“No,” she said. “Ms. Newby, what’s your preference?”
“I’ll take the SIG P226,” Gail said. “I’ve used it before.”
“Not my choice, but it’s a fine weapon,” Jeane said. “All your equipment will be completely untraceable, so if the need arises you may safely drop your gear in place and run.”
“Sounds good.”
“Questions?”
“No,” McGarvey said, and his cell phone rang. It was Otto, and he stepped outside to take the call. “What do you have for me?”
“Twenty-one people in all for the news conference — four networks including Fox, their cameramen, actually one woman,
“Have you had time to check them out?”
“They’re all clean, Mac. I’m sending your sat phone a precis of their jackets along with photographs. A couple of them, especially Marcel Allain from
FORTY-NINE
By noon they were flying southwest toward Mississippi aboard one of the CIA’s Gulfstream G550s, with a crew of three including a young attendant named Melissa who served them Bloody Marys before a lunch of lobster
