they might be in time to stop the attacker from leaving.
It was a slick, tightly coordinated operation that had been rehearsed numerous times. There were no rivalries, no competition between the departments. Everyone knew exactly what to do, and they did it with unflinching courage.
Graff and Molina had two jobs: to watch the coast to make sure this wasn’t a distraction created by smugglers, and to search for anyone who may have survived the explosion.
A quick circuit of the blast perimeter did not produce any survivors. It did produce body parts, however, limbs with charred skin and remarkably clean, unblemished white bone bobbing on the choppy river. There were pieces of clothing that did not sink with the rest of the ship and tangled mats of hair and fresh blood. Graff was not equipped to retrieve the evidence, but he did photograph it, along with the target itself.
The pictures, taken with a sat-link digital camera, were automatically sent to the CHP and to the FBI field division in Columbia and to Bureau headquarters in Washington, D.C. There, the images would be compared to a database of shipyard attacks to look for similarities. The remains and clothing would be studied to try to isolate distinctive national, cultural, or obvious blast characteristics. If this were a deliberate event, laboratory examination would determine the nature of the explosive used. If they found a fragment of the container used to house the explosive, scientists might be able to locate and read skin cells shed by the individual who had placed it. That would not tell them his identity, but it would tell them his ethnicity.
Graff documented the scene unemotionally. He did not know who these people were or what they were doing on the vessel or dock. He did not know which of them had families. Since terrorism had become a daily possibility on every American calendar, Graff’s default setting was to protect the harbor, the city, and the nation. He was emotionless about his work but passionate about his responsibility. He was also thinking back as he took pictures, running through the first two hours of his shift to make sure there was nothing he might have seen that did not seem suspicious at the time: a light on the water, an unusual sound from the hull of the freighter, movement somewhere along the dark wharf.
Molina informed him that the “scoop sloop” would be there within a quarter hour. That was the patrol boat with the nets and freezers required for evidence recovery. Graff acknowledged the update as he stood on the prow and continued to take pictures. He took each one twice, one through a night-vision lens and another with a flash. Comparing the two would help forensics experts construct a true-color image of the remains, something that would help them to pinpoint skin tone.
As they neared the hole in the vessel, Graff saw something that punched through the professional detachment. Something that put the nature of the vessel, if not the explosion, in context.
He saw a little bead bracelet floating on the choppy waters.
With a little girl’s hand still attached.
THREE
The call came as a surprise to Paul Hood. He was just sitting down with a cup of coffee and a power bar when his assistant put through Lorraine Sanders, chief of staff to President Dan Debenport. The forty-six-year-old director of Op-Center was being asked to breakfast in the Oval Office at the White House.
He ate the power bar anyway. The china at the White House was Jacksonian — old and delicate — and the less he used the happier he was.
This was obviously not a crisis. That was not something a new president discussed over bran muffins. Also, an official car usually arrived within moments of the call. It was also not a social visit, since those invitations typically came with more than ninety minutes’ advance notice. It was certainly not a get-to-know-you meeting, because Hood knew Debenport well. The senator had been chairman of the Congressional Intelligence Oversight Committee, the group that controlled the budget of Op-Center. The fact that it was being held in the Oval Office indicated that it was to be a working breakfast. Moreover, the timing could hardly be coincidental. The White House knew what was happening this morning.
As an intelligence officer, Hood knew when he was in what analysts called “the twilight zone.” He had enough information to stay engaged but not enough to tell him why or with what. Op-Center’s FBI liaison once described it as working on a crossword puzzle where you have scattered answers but not enough connective tissue to help solve the damn thing.
Maybe it was just as well Hood did not know what was going on. He would find out soon enough and, besides, he was too exhausted to think. Hood was not just sleepy but sapped of energy, of imagination. It had been a long and difficult nine months since an electromagnetic pulse explosion had all but destroyed the National Crisis Management Center. Hood and his staff had not only been working around the clock to repair the facility and protect national interests, they had been looking for ways to streamline and economize, to reinvent Op-Center in the wake of severe budget cuts.
Hood also had a personal mission. He needed to find a way to fall in love with his job again. Op-Center was not just a place but the beating heart of American crisis management. Hood had been present for its birth, when the mission was uncorrupted and clear, and opportunity was boundless. He was also there for death and loss in Korea, Russia, Spain. It was odd. Triumphs, of which there were many, were short-lived. That was what professionals were supposed to achieve. Failures, of which there were fewer, hit harder. These included the deaths in the disbanded military unit Striker and the assassination of political liaison Martha Mackall.
It also included the painful budget-induced firing of Hood’s number-two man, General Mike Rodgers, over a half year before.
Hood had done the best he could; he knew that. He had a shattered marriage to prove it. What he felt was that this place had somehow let him down. Like a child you love and raise and who falls short of what you expected or wanted or did not know you needed.
Hood had not seen the exhaustion coming. Rodgers had, though. Before he left, the general suggested Hood read about the British officers who had been hunting the German battleship
Those men knew the kinds of decisions, effort, loss, and attention that combined to flatten a man’s spirit. Rodgers had seen it coming better than Hood had, the work it would take to resuscitate Op-Center. The effort required to inspire the people doing two or three jobs instead of one, learning new equipment, being unable to turn to associates who were no longer there. But then, Mike Rodgers had been in bloody battlefield combat. He understood sudden, often debilitating loss. Hood had only been in politics, the kind of combat where injuries could be repaired or ignored.
Scholarship had been Rodgers’s way of putting the world in perspective, and it was valuable to Hood during the years they had been together. Op-Center’s intelligence chief Bob Herbert had a different way of seeing things. Herbert fired from the lip, which was hot-wired to the seat of his pants. Early in the rebuilding process, Herbert put Hood’s life and labors in sharp perspective as only the candid, politically insensitive Mississippian could.
“You know what a bombshell can do,” Herbert reminded him. “With just a look she can both fog your brain, clear your eyes, show you reality, and inspire a new one. But a bomb, Paul. That’s pure destruction. It will break your spirit and body and will resonate through your soul. You’ll hear the explosion and feel the shock wave every day for the rest of your life.”
Like Rodgers, Herbert knew what an explosion could do. The former CIA field operative had lost his wife and the use of his legs in the Beirut embassy blast of 1983. But Herbert was right about the damage the bombshell
