Ross, squinting his eyes with pain, said, “So he’s in the box, is he?”
“Maybe. Maybe not. He’s smart, he’s probably got his depth-sounder alarm set to go off at maybe five, five and a half feet. He ain’t smart, we got him. You watch him. Boy hits a solid sandbank at sixty miles an hour, that’ll be something to see. Pitchpole city. Go cart-wheelin’ ’cross the water, yeah, ass over teakettle.”
But the Cigarette screamed ahead, trailing a deep roar in her wake, kept heading due east, racing across the flats for the open waters of the Atlantic.
Stoke couldn’t believe it. They must have, what, dredged out a new channel down here? Why do that? Nobody living round here but turtles and gators, lotsa skeets, sand fleas, and no-see-ums. He leaned harder on the throttles, even though there was nothing left. Seeing Vicky lying on the church steps, the memory of it like somebody kicking him in the back of his eyeballs. He could not lose this guy now, not this damn close.
He sucked it up, all his anxiety, and said to Ross, “Alarm on that big boat’s bound to go off any second now, beep, beep, beep. Then you see him turn, one way or the other, fast, ’else he runs hard aground, sticks his dick in the dirt, pitchpoles, and we snatch his ass right out of mid-air.”
Ross had the chart in his hand, studying lower Biscayne Bay. “Right. Well, at the moment it doesn’t look like he—”
The big Cigarette suddenly banked hard over to starboard, going on its side, throwing up a wall of white water as it carved a tight turn away from the mangrove swamp projecting from the northern end of the island.
Ross said, “Looks like we better pretend he’s smart.”
“Okay. Okay. We can deal with this. Next, he’s got to run southeast or southwest, inside or outside of what they call the Ragged Keys.”
“Which way is better for us?”
“The way he’s going right now, see? Boy turning inside. Yeah, going to try to shake us in all them mangroves. SEALs used to call that the ‘Deep Severe’ back in there.”
“Sounds like an ideal spot to lose us. Or, more likely, tuck in somewhere and wait. That’s the smart option,” Ross said.
“Maybe smart, maybe not. Mangrove swamp’s a lot like a marriage, Ross. Whole lot easier to stay out than get out.”
“We’re the last witnesses. He’s not going to let it go. All kinds of firepower undoubtedly prestashed aboard that thing, Stokely—he could be trying to set us up.”
“Of course he is, my brother! You right, as usual. One reason Alex Hawke holds you in such high esteem. Now. Look at him. See? What’d I tell you? He got to slow down in those shallows. Hold on to something Ross, we ’bout to make up a little time and distance on this nouveau cracker.”
Chapter Forty-One
London
“THIS DEVICE WAS DEVELOPED ON A CRASH BASIS BY THE Iraqis in the waning Saddam years,” Consuelo de los Reyes continued. All eyes in the room at No. 10 Downing were on her. She asked for another slide. A group of low buildings in the rocky desert.
“Designed and built right here, at the former Tikrit al-Fahd laboratories northwest of Baghdad. Slide. A brilliant former Cal Tech scientist born in Bombay named Dr. I.V. Soong is the prerequisite evil genius behind this and many other little nightmares. The poison gas formulas used against the Kurds in northern Iraq, for example —”
“Poison Ivy, himself,” the home secretary said, “In cahoots with Chemical Ali.”
Conch smiled grimly. “Yes. Poison Ivy. Soong is also the scientific mastermind behind the miniature smart bomb which killed Ambassador Stanfield in Venice. He’s behind the recent revival of the ancient Indian sect known as Thuggee, by the way. Practioners of ritual murder who view the wholesale taking of human life as a pious act. CIA and NSA sources have linked this group to al-Qaeda. So far, Soong has successfully eluded extreme prejudice.”
“This bloody Thug renaissance,” a mustachioed officer said. “I thought we’d seen the last of them at the end of the Raj, and now they are in league with these bloody terrorists—”
“Afraid you’re correct, General,” Conch interrupted, “Dr. Soong’s Pigskin is one of the primary weapons of mass destruction our troops went looking for but never found. The perfect little Doomsday machine. Hard evidence at State indicates unknown numbers of these small bombs were smuggled into Syria. The labs were long gone, but I saw troops playing touch football with mock-ups just like the general’s holding.”
“Sorry, Madame Secretary,” Sir Anthony Hayden, the home secretary said. “This football design. Just to put us all in the picture. Is it meant to be some kind of inside joke? Like the president’s ‘nuclear football?’ ” Is this Dr. Soong some kind of homicidal practical joker? Or, does the design have some actual basis in science?”
“Let’s ask Dr. Bissinger.”
“The latter,” he said. “In plain English, the weapon’s football form is purely coincidental. A function of physics. Pinch the ends of a tube and you exponentially increase the destructive power of what were formerly known as suitcase nukes. Soong’s football nukes were flown out of Iraq by Saddam’s son Uday six days before the fall of Baghdad.”
“Christ in a goddamn wheelbarrow,” a shiny domed American Air Force general said. “How many of those bastards got out?”
“Over a hundred of them, General. Flown out of Saddam International on a Russian Antonov cargo plane. Landed here. Emirate of Sharjah. That’s the bad news. The good news is they were all purchased by one particular individual. In the last month, that individual got careless. All it took was one time. NSA zeroed in on digital cellphone intercepts, matched voiceprints, and we got close. Now, the work of a lone MI6 agent has confirmed who that individual is. Jack?”
Patterson looked over at Hawke, then got to his feet and took the laser pointer. “Thanks, Madame Secretary. Slide?”
On all three monitors, a photograph of a rugged looking middle-aged man in khakis, shielding his eyes from the glaring sun.
“This is Owen Nash,” Texas Patterson said, moving the laser point across the screen. “Or was. British MI6 operative working western Indonesia. Covered as a nature photographer for National Geographic out of Sydney. Australian national. Missing, presumed dead. His last transmission was forty-eight hours ago. He was on the remote Indonesian island of Suva, slide please, located just here, due west of Timor. These recons were shot by U-2 and dedicated birds in the last twenty-four hours. Questions?”
There weren’t any.
“Nash’s recent signals had him checked into a Hotel Bambah, the sole structure on the island. Slide. Sorry, there is another structure here on the island, as the next slide will show. Thank you. Airstrip here. Ten thousand feet, believe it or not. Used by jumbos ferrying Arab tourists in the eighties. And, here, a very large airplane hangar, newly built, with an older adjoining corrugated tin structure. An equipment shed; barracks possibly. According to Nash’s last transmission, travel agents from throughout Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines, numbering approximately 400, were due to start arriving at the Bambah the next day.”
“Christ,” the home secretary said. “Travel agents. Clean passports. Visas. Immunization. Ideal cover stories.”
Patterson said, “Exactly. Agent Nash was wondering why four hundred Arab travel agents were suddenly getting together for a hullabaloo in the middle of nowhere. Suva’s not exactly Honolulu.”
“Let me guess,” the sardonic British prime minister’s principal secretary said, rubbing his chin. “Encourage more Arab air travel to America?”
“You got it, sir. Exactly our thinking. Anyway, your man Nash promised to confirm or refute prior intelligence at 0800 GMT yesterday. He never made that call. All efforts to contact him have failed. Questions?”
“Yes,” General Sir Oswald Pray said, “When were those photos taken? The Suva Island surveillance?”
“1800 hours yesterday, General. I think most everyone here knows Commander Hawke. I’d like to turn it over to him. Alex?”
